Scale

Posted: March 19, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Sometimes I’m struck by how jarring a transition in scale has occurred in human life in the last few hundred years. Sure, there’ve been all kinds of massive changes in information speed, travel speed, etc. But don’t ignore simple scale of size. What was considered a big, grand, monumental building in 1776 is now dwarfed by even a mundane office building. Or take the Rainier Club in Seattle:

A good list to review:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_built_before_the_20th_century

New Podcast

Posted: March 16, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: bible | Leave a comment

We’ve discussed the book of Mark in the past. Probably (?) the oldest gospel, it’s not very long, about 11,000 words. It was written in Greek, which was a second language to many of the people encountering it. So the language is simple. It tells the story of the life, teachings, and death of Jesus. A sort of afterward that was possibly tacked on later adds a bit about the resurrection.

Much to consider, in short. I teamed up with my pal Brett Vanderzee, pastor of The Springs church in Edmond, Oklahoma to discuss this book chapter by chapter in a new podcast. I try to take a look at the book as a narrative/story, and figure out why this story keeps getting told 2,000 years later. Brett comes at it from a deep background in Bible study. Along the way we have a number of interesting guests from the worlds of both Hollywood and Bible scholarship. Join us won’t you?

Available on Apple podcasts and should be up wherever you get podcasts (some listeners report they can’t find it on Spotify, looking into it).

And do rate and review if you enjoy!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-1-mark-1/id1734809962?i=1000648968238

Texas

Posted: March 12, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Can you name these major rivers of Texas? from this excellent book my wife got at the thrift store:

I’ve been reading it to my daughter (she finds it somnolent).

Pretty map:

S

Posted: March 11, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: business | Leave a comment

In the book’s preface, Smil writes that most growth processes—“of organisms, artifacts, or complex systems”—can be plotted on a so-called S-shaped, or sigmoid, growth curve, meaning that the rate of change increases slowly at first, then increases rapidly, then levels off. An error that humans make with similarly predictable regularity is to assume that the nearly vertical middle segment of an S-shaped curve can continue at that angle indefinitely (the price of Dutch tulips in the seventeenth century, the price of bitcoin in the twenty-first). One of his conclusions is that the steady, unceasing economic expansion that economists and politicians dream of is not sustainable, and that the relentless pursuit of growth is environmentally disastrous. Smil has often said that he doesn’t make forecasts—“a pathetically and inexorably ever-failing endeavor on any level,” he told me—but predictions of a kind are implicit in much of his work. In “Growth” ’s coda, he writes, “Continuous material growth, based on ever greater extraction of the Earth’s inorganic and organic resources and on increased degradation of the biosphere’s finite stocks and services, is impossible”—a principle that, in various forms, animates almost all his work, beginning with his undergraduate thesis.

from The New Yorker’s profile of Vaclav Smil. I got much value from his book on natural gas, still working on How The World Really Works.

Tribute to railroads

Posted: February 25, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: railroads | Leave a comment

In his annual letter Warren Buffett waxes about Burlington Northern and Santa Fe:

Rail is essential to America’s economic future. It is clearly the most efficient way – measured by cost, fuel usage and carbon intensity – of moving heavy materials to distant destinations. Trucking wins for short hauls, but many goods that Americans need must travel to customers many hundreds or even several thousands of miles away. The country can’t run without rail, and the industry’s capital needs will always be huge. Indeed, compared to most American businesses, railroads eat capital.BNSF is the largest of six major rail systems that blanket North America. Our railroad carries its 23,759 miles of main track, 99 tunnels, 13,495 bridges, 7,521 locomotives and assorted other fixed assets at $70 billion on its balance sheet. But my guess is that it would cost at least$500 billion to replicate those assets and decades to complete the job.

…

North America’s rail system moves huge quantities of coal, grain, autos, imported and exported goods, etc. one-way for long distances and those trips often create a revenue problem for back-hauls. Weather conditions are extreme and frequently hamper or even stymie the utilization of track, bridges and equipment. Flooding can be a nightmare. None of this is a surprise. While I sit in an always-comfortable office, railroading is an outdoor activity with many employees working under trying and sometimes dangerous conditions.An evolving problem is that a growing percentage of Americans are not looking for the difficult, and often lonely, employment conditions inherent in some rail operations. Engineers must deal with the fact that among an American population of 335 million, some forlorn or mentally-disturbed Americans are going to elect suicide by lying in front of a 100-car, extraordinarily heavy train that can’t be stopped in less than a mile or more. Would you like to be the helpless engineer? This trauma happens about once a day in North America; it is far more common in Europe and will always be with us.


Wage negotiations in the rail industry can end up in the hands of the President andCongress. Additionally, American railroads arer equired to carry many dangerous products everyday that the industry would much rather avoid. The words “common carrier” define railroad responsibilities.

…

I believe that our vast service territory is second to none and that therefore our margin comparisons can and should improve.I am particularly proud of both BNSF’s contribution to the country and the people who work in sub-zero outdoor jobs in North Dakota and Montana winters to keep America’s commercial arteries open. Railroads don’t get much attention when they are working but, were they unavailable, the void would be noticed immediately throughout America. A century from now, BNSF will continue to be a major asset of the country and ofBerkshire. You can count on that.

love it. The boy from Omaha now owns the railroad.

Did Paul Harvey ever do a tribute to the railroad man the way he did to a farmer? (was Paul Harvey a poet?) (did Dodge’s God Made A Farmer ad work?)

The railroad man gets a tough rap in song and tale.

Are Shocking Blue the best band ever from Den Haag?

Wendy’s

Posted: February 19, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: food | Leave a comment

reading the Wendy’s Q4 earnings call transcript as a way to enter kenshō and approach sartori.

Bundles served in death as in life

Posted: February 19, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Wonder Trail | Leave a comment

Went looking into the idea that even after death Inka nobles clung to power:

People in Andean societies viewed themselves as belonging to family lineages. (Europeans did, too, but lineages were more important in the Andes; the pop-cultural comparison might be The Lord of the Rings, in which characters introduce themselves as “X, son of Y” or “A, of B’s line.”) Royal lineages, called panaqa, were special. Each new emperor was born in one panaqa but created a new one when he took the fringe. To the new panaqa belonged the Inka and his wives and children, along with his retainers and advisers. When the Inka died his panaqa mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive.” Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panaqa retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils, fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under the control of the dead.” The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale that would have delighted the Medici. Emblematically, Wayna Qhapaq could not construct his own villa on Awkaypata—his undead ancestors had used up all the available space. Inka society had a serious mummy problem. After smallpox wiped out much of the political elite, each panaqa tried to move into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different times backed different claimants to the Inka throne. After Atawallpa’s victory, his panaqa took the mummy of Thupa Inka from its palace and burned it outside Qosqo—burned it alive, so to speak. And later Atawallpa instructed his men to seize the gold for his ransom as much as possible from the possessions of another enemy panaqa, that of Pachacuti’s mummy.

so says Charles Mann in 1491, required reading. He cites as his sources:

Screenshot

so that’s a weekend sorted.

These Lords had the law and custom of taking that one of their Lords who died and embalming
him, wrapping him up in many fine clothes, and to these Lords they allotted all the service which they had had in life, in order that these bundles [mummies] might be served in death as well as they had been in life. Their service of gold and silver was not touched, nor was anything else which they had, nor were those who served them [removed from] the house without being replaced, and provinces were set aside to give them support. The Lord who entered upon a new reign had to take new servants. His vessels had to be of wood and pottery until there was time to make them of gold and silver, and always those who began to reign carried out all this, and it was for this reason that there was so much treasme in this land, because, as I have said, he who succeeded to the kingdom always hastened to make better vessels and houses [than his predecessors]. And as the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses and vices were under the control of the dead, each dead man had allotted to him an important Indian, and likewise an Indian woman, and whatever these wanted they declared it to be the will of the dead one. Whenever they wished to eat, to drink, they said that the dead ones wished to do that same thing. If they wished to go and divert themselves in the houses of other dead folk, they said the same, for it was customary for the dead to visit one another, and they held great dances and orgies, and sometimes they went to the house of the living, and sometimes the living came to their. At the same time as the dead people, many [living], as well men as women came, saying that they wished to serve, and this was not forbidden them by the living, because all were at liberty to serve these [the dead], each one serving the dead person he desired to serve. These dead folk had great number of the chief people [in their service], as well men as women, because they lived very licentiously, the men having the women as concubines, and drinking and eating very lavishly.

Pedro Pizarro goes on to describe a summit with a mummy:

The Marquis sent me [with orders to] go with Don Martin, the interpreter, to speak to this dead man and ask on his [Pizarro’s] behalf that the Indian woman be given to this captain. Then I, who believed that I was going to speak to some living Indian, was taken to a bundle, [like] those of these dead folk, which was seated in a litter, which held him and on one side was the Indian spokesman who spoke for him, and on the other was the Indian woman, both sitting close to the dead man. Then, when we were arrived before the dead one, the interpreter gave the message, and being thus for a short while in suspense and in silence, the Indian man looked at the Indian woman (as I understand it, to find out her wish). Then, after having been thus as I relate it for some time, both the Indians replied to me that it was the will of the Lord the dead one that she go, and so the captain already mentioned carried off the Indian woman, since the Apoo, for thus they called the Marquis, wished it.

Is it not possible they were playing a prank on Pedro Pizarro here? Five hundred years later who can say. It can be agreed the Inca had weird death stuff going on, but you don’t think they were doing weird death stuff in Extremadura, Spain in 1532? The place is littered with pieces of the true cross and the robe Jesus wore at the Last Supper and black Madonnas and churches called like The Holy Blood. They’d been fighting a religious war, the Reconquista, for 700 years.

The Spanish conquest of “Peru” wasn’t an encounter of a normal culture with a weird culture. It was very weird culture x very weird culture. (Weird here defined as strange, difficult to comprehend to us. Not like we’re normal.)

Every fragment of this encounter shatters off in a million weird directions. The truth can never be known. We can only contemplate the few primary sources that survive with awe and wonder.

Consider for example Guaman Poma, Falcon Puma’s book.

It was discovered in the Royal Danish Library of Copenhagen in 1908. It’s 1,189 pages long and handwritten and illustrated. Richard Pieschman, the scholar who found it, knew it was a big deal but he soon died. It was not available in English until I believe 1980? The 2006 translation selected, translated and annotated by David Frye has a wild introduction. The 2009 University of Texas edition by the late Roland Hamilton is also good, and free to look at here. Frye:

underlinings from the previous owner. Latin American literature began as something strange and stayed that way.

So, you can see how I’ve only gotten as far as John Hemming. That’s a whole other project. Hemming’s bona fides are that he was on the last expedition in which a British person was killed by an uncontacted tribe.

(The Panará) had had no knowledge of clothes and the swish-swish of Mason’s jeans as he walked had unnerved them.

Still true?

Posted: February 3, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: the California Condition | 1 Comment

What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works. The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work (a visit to, say, the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, elevates grocery shopping to a form of zazen), the beaches work. The 1984 Olympics were not supposed to work, but they did (daily warnings of gridlock and urban misery gave way during the first week to a county-wide block party, with pink and aquamarine flags fluttering over empty streets, and with parking spaces available, for once, even in Westwood)—not only worked but turned a profit, of almost two hundred and twenty-three million dollars, about which there was no scandal.

Saint Joan talking about LA in the August 28, 1988 New Yorker. Will the 2028 Olympics work out the same? I hope so.

My own observation is Los Angeles works less well in 2024 than it did when I arrived in 2004. Maybe that’s the sweetening filter of nostalgia for youth. There are more people living in tents now than there were then. That seems bad. A dreadful indicator. Does tent-living increase result from prices going insane? The economists might tell us there’s increased demand for housing with insufficient supply making prices go up. The supply (of housing) should go up but that’s hard.

Too bad, LA used to be a leader in experimental affordable housing projects:

source.

Slow lanes

Posted: January 30, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: business | Leave a comment

Ed Catmull, when president of Pixar, the animation studio, built good friction into the process of developing films such as Toy Story. “The goal isn’t efficiency, it is to make something good, or even great,” he explained to Sutton and Rao about the way his team worked through multiple versions of the original idea, improving it as the movie developed. Colette Cloosterman-van Eerd of Jumbo, a Dutch grocery store chain, saw the need to offset the drive for more efficiency with good friction. She instituted “slow lanes” that would allow checkout staff to chat to shoppers, particularly senior citizens who valued social interaction more than speed.

from a piece on Stanford BS professors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton in Financial Times.

I also loved this idea for a column:

Southern California town origin stories

Posted: January 20, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: the California Condition | Leave a comment

In 1851 a group of 300 Mormons from southern Utah purchased a 35,509-acre tract in the San Bernardino Valley, laid out a town, planted trees, and built fine homes which they smothered in rose bushes and clinging plants. In a cooperative venture which became the model for all such efforts in the semi-arid Far West, they brought 4000 acres under irrigation. In 1857 a group of German immigrants gathered in San Francisco and incorporated themselves as the Los Angeles Vineyard Society. Purchasing a tract in Southern California which had once been part of the Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana, the Germans founded the colony of Anaheim, irrigating the soil and planting the vines of California and the Moselle. “We drove through the clean and well-kept avenues or streets, scenting Rhineland on every side,” wrote a visitor in the 1870’s, “and, indeed, this Anaheim itself is nothing but a bit of Germany dropped down on the Pacific Coast.” At Pasadena he might have scented Indiana and high-seriousness of the American Protestant variety. The excessively severe winter of 1873-74 convinced a number of middle class residents of Indianapolis, many of whom suffered from chronic ailments, that they had better emigrate to Southern California as agriculturalists. Incorporating themselves as the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association, they purchased and subdivided part of the Rancho San Pascual at the western head of the San Gabriel Valley: a superb spot, sheltered by the Sierra Madre and Verdugo Mountains, sunny, fertile, and conveniently near Los Angeles. Cottages were built and vines and fruit trees planted. In 1875, when the community acquired a post office, it called itself Pasadena.

Pasadena really does have the vibe/taste of solid Midwesterners from 1875. Who else would have a Rose Parade where they brag about how much tedious work each float takes?

I assumed that Pasadena was from the Spanish but according to About Pasadena on the city’s website:

The word Pasadena literally means “valley” in the Ojibwa (Chippewa) Indian language, but it has been interpreted to mean “Crown of the Valley” and “Key of the Valley,” hence the adoption of both the crown and the key in the official city seal.

More on San Bernardino.

More on Kevin Starr, a hero of mine.

jackasses like Dykstra

Posted: January 19, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: America Since 1945 | Leave a comment

At the town dump recycled magazines were piled in a converted shipping container (is that what it was?) and I’d go through them looking for Sports Illustrateds.

The phrase “jackasses like Dykstra” stuck with me so much I think of it almost every time I consider the dress code at a nice restaurant. With ease I was able to recover the original, from February 1994.

Boorish Behavior
Your jocular tone in SCORECARD about Lenny Dykstra’s oafish antics in a restaurant (Jan. 17) calls for a response. Wearing a hat in any restaurant is a statement of social ignorance or, more likely, appalling ego, and the loud swearing in the establishment in suburban Philadelphia reinforces my impression of this lout. Your flip conclusion, in which his $24.9 million contract is mentioned, was inappropriate. There is still such a thing as class, just as there is a lack of it.
JOHN KELLEY, Winthrop, Mass.

Isn’t SI the publication that ran Karl Malone’s June 14 POINT AFTER saying Charles Barkley should recognize that he is a role model whether he wants to be or not? So why doesn’t this pious injunction apply to Lenny Dykstra, six million bucks a year or not? One reason that people go to nice restaurants is to get away from jackasses like Dykstra.
ROBERT H. PASCHALL, Bishop, Calif.

Is “writing about sports” as a moneymaking prospect dead now? Talking about sports, videos about sports, bigger than ever maybe, but is writing about it over? What does that say about writing?

The importance of bird hunting in American politics

Posted: January 14, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: America Since 1945, birds, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
a killdeer

JAB III used to turkey hunt with Lawton Chiles despite being in opposing parties. According to JAB that paid off during the 2000 Florida recount:

BAKER:

Jeb ran against Lawton Chiles in a very divisive and semidirty race. I had become a good friend of Lawton because I was Treasury Secretary and he was Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. We did a lot of work together. He was an adversarial Democrat and I was an adversarial Republican, but we both liked to turkey hunt. He would invite me to Florida to hunt turkeys and I would invite him to Texas to hunt turkeys. I would call the turkeys for him and he would shoot them, and he would call them for me and I would shoot them.

One thing that really paid dividends with respect to the Florida recount—I know I’m jumping ahead of you here—Before I’d gotten over there, but it was reinforced after I’d gotten over there, I remembered the types of people that Lawton had appointed to the Florida Supreme Court. I’d probably met some of them. There was a guy named Dexter Douglass—You may remember who that was.

RILEY

He shows up in your book.

BAKER

In my book, yes. He was an advisor to Lawton. He was the guy who told Lawton whom to put on the Florida Supreme Court. He gave him advice about which lawyers to put on. They were all liberal trial lawyers. So when I got to Florida I was of the view, pretty much right off the bat, that if we weren’t able to get this into federal court we had a really tough row to hoe. As it turned out, that was very true. The Florida Supreme Court pulled us out twice, once in the face of a direct order from the United States Supreme Court to review their opinion—They reversed an earlier opinion. So that relationship I had with Lawton Chiles really paid dividends when it was time to go to do the recount.

There was a significant moment in George W. Bush’s governor campaign in Texas that turned on how he handled accidentally killing a killdeer, the wrong kind of bird, during a publicity event on the first day of bird hunting season. Here’s Karl Rove:

Then also, the famous killdeer incident had a big impact, because it showed—Her attitude toward good old boys was condescending. She felt she needed to placate “Bubba” by every September first going dove hunting in East Texas, outside of Dallas. Of course, she was not a hunter, she could care less, but it was a nice show and she’d get a nice picture for the newspapers. Bush went dove hunting and shot a protected bird, a killdeer, and when he discovered that he had done so, after a sharp-eyed television sports reporter noticed that the white markings on the bird meant that it was a killdeer, Bush’s response was not to deny it, but to dispatch a young aide to the game warden’s office to pay the fine immediately.

Then there was the incident where Cheney shot his buddy in the face by accident. Rove:

Rove

On my lease, and that was my lawyer. I was shocked that fact never came out. If you go back to incorporation papers of Rove and Company in 1981, my lawyer, the secretary/treasurer of my corporation, and my landlord is Harry M. Whittington Jr., and that’s the guy Cheney shot. The press corps never figured it out, but could you imagine the headline in the Washington Post? “Cheney Shoots Rove’s Lawyer in Sign of West Wing Tension.”

Riley

Did you get a funny feeling in your stomach when you got that news?

Rove

We could not get Cheney to make it public, and we needed to. It took until the next morning, before Cheney allowed Katharine Armstrong to feed the news to a reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The White House press corps was furious with us for having hid this fact from the afternoon and to the next morning.

Why did Cheney’s team bungle releasing that news? Dan Bartlett, W. communications director, explains:

The second one is when he shot Harry Whittington and he shut down all internal communication. We couldn’t get hold of him, couldn’t get hold of his staff. Only learned later that there were some back channel communications with Karl, but they decided that no one in the world would understand or have context for him accidentally shooting somebody while hunting except for one reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times who they couldn’t find because she was on a drunk bender for 12 hours. It took that long to find her.

Eckersley

Posted: January 7, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: baseball, the California Condition | 1 Comment

in 2023 we happened to watch a Dodger Channel / Spectrum Sportsnet LA documentary about the 1988 World Series home run by Kirk Gibson. Probably the most famous moment in post-Brooklyn Dodger history. What impressed though was what Dennis Eckersley had to say. Eckersley threw the pitch Gibson cleared over the right field fence. Here’s what he said about how he handled the postgame interviews:

Scraps of time

Posted: January 1, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: advice, writing | Leave a comment

Douglas Southall Freeman is out of fashion these days. He was a great perpetuator the Robert E. Lee myth, simply by writing so damn much about him. His biography of Lee takes up four volumes:

and Lee’s Lieutenants (that is to say his generals) get three!:

Then again Lee already had a statue in Richmond, which Freeman saluted every day on the way to work:

Freeman’s work ethic was legendary. Throughout his life, he kept a demanding schedule that allowed him to accomplish a great deal in his two full-time careers, as a journalist and as a historian. When at home, he rose at three every morning and drove to his newspaper office, saluting Robert E. Lee’s monument on Monument Avenue as he passed. Twice daily, he walked to a nearby radio studio, where he gave news broadcasts and discussed the day’s news. After his second broadcast, he would drive home for a short nap and lunch and then worked another five or six hours on his current historical project, with classical music, frequently the work of Joseph Haydn, playing in the background.

from the intro to this book of Freeman’s speeches:

Freeman later remarked that a statement made by [Prof. S. C. Mitchell] during a lecture on Martin Luther meant a great deal to him:

Young gentlemen, the man who wins is the man who hangs on for five minutes longer than the man who quits.

I found some advice that I’m going to make my New Year’s Resolution, boldface mine.

Know your stuff. Now that means a lot in the way of the utilization
of your time. And it means a lot in the way of utilization of a navy
wife or an army wife. You boys think you have a hard life to lead. You
don’t have any tougher life to lead than the life of a navy wife. And
both the navy husband and the navy wife need to learn all they can,
when they can. I’d like to give you a little motto on that question. I
gave it to one of my historical secretaries. She happens to be the one
who came up with me this morning. She said it was the most useful
thing I’d ever told her. It came from Oliver Wendell Holmes, a justice
of the Supreme Court of the United States, who should have been chief
justice. Holmes would get a boy from Harvard Law School every year,
and that boy would have one year as Holmes’ law clerk, a magnificent
training, out of which in their generations have come some of the best
lawyers in public service in America. And one of the favorite things
that he would tell these boys was, “Young man, make the most of the
scraps of time.” Now believe me, if you want to know your swuff and
know it better than the other man, you’ve got to spend more time on
it; and if you are going to spend more time on it, you’ve got to make
the most of the scraps of time. The difference between mediocrity and
distinction in many a professional career is the organization of your
time. Do you organize it; do you make the most of the scraps of time?
Bless my soul, I don’t suppose that the admiral, with his dignity and
justice and regard for all the amenities, says no to you about playing
bridge; but there is many a man who would have three more stripes
on his sleeve if he gave to study the time that he gives to bridge. Don’t
say that you have to have the recreation. You have to have enough
recreation, but diversification of work is the surest recreation of the
mind.

(Note: the source of this advice is Union vet/Bostonian OWH Jr., not Confederate sympathizer DSF, so we’re clean.)

Most of the speeches in this book were given in the late 1930s and early 1940s at The Army War College and the Navy War College. Freeman was conveying lessons learned in the Civil War/War of the Rebellion to the generals and admirals who would end up fighting the Second World War. Freeman’s own father had been in the Army of Northern Virginia.

In the book Freeman tells a bunch of good stories, here’s one about Jubal Early (who Freeman met many times):

Early had about him a carping, singularly bitter manner that alienated nearly every man who was
under him. Lee, if there was a doubt whether a fault was his or a subordinate’s, would always assume it; Early, never. Sometimes his wit was good. You may not be familiar with his great exchange with John
C. Breckinridge. Breckinridge had been, as you remember, a candidate for the presidency in 1860. Before that time he had been a great political leader, standing on the principle of the right of slavery in the territories. He fought with Early through a part of the Valley campaign of 1864. Early never forgot that he was a politician, though Breckinridge was a very good soldier. In a very desperate hour-I think it was at
Winchester-when Rodes had been killed and the situation was very desperate, Breckinridge was in full retreat. Early met him in the road and said, “Well, General Breckinridge, what do you think about slavery
in the territories now?”

William Faulkner’s introduction to Sanctuary

Posted: December 31, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: memphis, Mississippi, writing, writing advice from other people | Leave a comment

The best character William Faulkner ever created was himself, William Faulkner. The flying injury, Rowan Oak, the photographs, the guest roles, the interviews, scraps of footage, the Nobel Prize speech. Perfect.

In 1929 William Faulkner, then age 31, wrote Sanctuary, which has one of the trashiest loglines ever: Ole Miss coed Temple Drake ends up the sex slave of a gangster named Popeye. Here at Helytimes we won’t go into detail of what exactly Popeye does, we leave that to lesser publications like The Washington Post:

what interested him chiefly about this horrific event was “how all this evil flowed off her like water off a duck’s back.” In his haste to make a best seller, he crammed in all he had seen and heard about whorehouses, rapes and kidnappings.

This was a ripped from the headlines story based on a true crime case. As a Mississippi crime book complete with courtroom scenes, it’s kind of a proto-Grisham.

Sanctuary was published by Jonathan Cape in 1931. Then in 1932 the Modern Library put out a new edition with a new introduction by Faulkner. Scholars since have apparently debunked everything Faulkner claimed in this introduction as fabulations and lies but so what? In a way that makes it even better. A work of autofiction.

We couldn’t find this introduction online so we got a used copy and scanned it in, it’s out of copyright (we believe?).

INTRODUCTION


THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN THREE YEARS AGO.
To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought. But that was all right. I
was young then and hard-bellied. I had never
lived among nor known people who wrote novels and stories and I suppose I did not know
that people got money for them. I was not very
much annoyed when publishers refused the mss.
now and then. Because I was hard-gutted then. I
could do a lot of things that could earn what
little money I needed, thanks to my father’s un-
failing kindness which supplied me with bread
at need despite the outrage to his principles at
having been of a bum progenitive.


Then I began to get a little soft. I could still
paint houses and do carpenter work, but I got
soft. I began to think about making money by
writing. I began to be concerned when magazine editors turned down short stories, concerned enough to tell them that they would buy
these stories later anyway, and hence why not
now. Meanwhile, with one novel completed and
consistently refused for two years, I had just
written my guts into The Sound and the Fury
though I was not aware until the book was pub-
lished that I had done so, because I had done it
for pleasure. I believed then that I would never
be published again. I had stopped thinking of
myself in publishing terms.


But when the third mss., Sartoris, was taken
by a publisher and (he having refused The
Sound and the Fury) it was taken by still another publisher, who warned me at the time that
it would not sell, I began to think of myself
again as a printed object. I began to think of
books in terms of possible money. I decided I
might just as well make some of it myself. I
took a little time out, and speculated what a
person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right
answer and invented the most horrific tale I
could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks
and sent it to Smith, who had done The Sound
and the Fury and who wrote me immediately.
”Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be
in jail.” So I told Faulkner, “You’re damned.
You’ll have to work now and then for the rest
of your life.” That was in the summer of 1929.
I got a job in the power plant, on the night
shift, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., as a coal passer.
I shoveled coal from the bunker into a wheel-
barrow and wheeled it in and dumped it where
the fireman could put it into the boiler. About
11 o’clock the people wuuld be going to bed, and
so it did not take so much steam. Then we could
rest, the fireman and I. He would sit in a chair
and doze. I had invented a table out of a wheel-
barrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall
from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, constant humming noise. There was no more work
to do until about 4 A.M., when we would have
to clean the fires and get up steam again. On
these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote As I
Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a
word. I sent it to Smith and wrote him that by
it I would stand or fall.


I think I had forgotten about Sanctuary, just
as you might forget about anything made for an
immediate purpose, which did not come off. As
I Lay Dying was published and I didn’t remember the mss. of Sanctuary until Smith sent me
the galieys. Then I saw that it was so terrible
that there were but two things to do: tear it
up or rewrite it. I thought again, “It might sell;
maybe 10,000 of them will buy it.” So I tore
the galleys down and rewrote the book. It had
been already set up once, so I had to pay for the
privilege of rewriting it, trying to make out of
it something which would not shame The Sound
and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much
and I made a fair job and I hope you will buy
it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy
it too.


WILLIAM FAULKNER.
New York, 1932.


Happy New Year to all 6,722 of our loyal readers, all over the globe.

Nineteen (or so) things I learned in 2023

Posted: December 30, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: America Since 1945 | Leave a comment

I admire Tom Whitwell’s annual list of 52 things he learned in the year. Maybe most of what I learned this year were more emotional truths? I could only come up with twenty. You might know all these things, many of them have been known for some time, they’re just items that came across my transom and stuck with me this year.

  • one of many factors that hurt the Confederacy was their railroads had different gauges. It was President Abraham Lincoln who set the standard US railroad gauge (4 ft 8 1/2 in) when he made that standard for the Transcontinental Railroad. (do we buy the just-so story about Roman chariots?)
  • during the decade ending in 2021 the US Treasury took in $32.3 trillion in taxes and spent $43.9 trillion
  • Louis B. Mayer used to don diving equipment to collect scrap metal in Boston Harbor
  • the average Australian spends US $871 on horse racing a year. (Can this be true? My source is Harness Racing Update. It’s possible ADW computer teams are churning in ways that skew the figures. )

(that’s not a fact, just a memorable kind of statement I found on Brian Wilson’s Wikipedia page.)

  • Between 1640 and 1652, Ireland lost between 15% and 20% of her population due to war and war-related starvation. (Source.)
  • Los Angeles is home to more Native Americans and Alaskan Natives than any other county in the USA. (Source.)
  • Kenneth Adams 1934 murals for the University of New Mexico library are now covered because some find them offensive.
  • the price paid to a winkte among the Sioux for naming a child was a horse.

source.

  • Dopaminergic medications for Parkinson’s disease have been associated with extreme risk taking, and pathological gambling.
  • This is what Dick Cheney and his team thought they’d be working on when they went into work on 9/11/2001:

  • In 2022 the murder rate in New Orleans was about 7x what it was in Los Angeles. (Source. The murder rate in New Orleans is off the charts. There were 280 murders in New Orleans in 2022, that’s more than in all of Germany.)

see you next year!

the urge

Posted: December 28, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: the California Condition | Leave a comment

when looking at my 1969 UNP map I bought in a thrift store in Long Beach

to finally connect the line from Mina, NV to Laws, CA.

Can you imagine what that would do for the region??

Thad Cochran

Posted: December 17, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: America Since 1945, Kennedy-Nixon, Mississippi, New England | Leave a comment

Poking around the Edward Kennedy oral history project at The Miller Center I find this interview with former Mississippi senator Thad Cochran.

Cochran was a young Naval officer in Newport when he happened to get an invitation to the Kennedy compound from an Ole Miss coed friend who was working as cook there:

Heininger

What were your impressions of [Ted Kennedy] that very first time you met him in Hyannis Port?

Cochran

Very casual, easy to be with, approachable, good sense of humor, big appetite. He liked chocolate-chip cookies, I know that. He stood there and ate a whole fistful of chocolate-chip cookies, which my friend would make on request. She was apparently good at that.

As a young naval officer here’s what Cochran thought of the buildup to Vietnam:

But then the Vietnam thing came along, and it started getting worse and worse. I didn’t get called back in the Navy to serve in Vietnam, but I was teaching one summer in Newport when the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. Just trying to figure that one out and reading about what had happened and looking at a couple of television things of the bombing of the port at—where was it, Haiphong, something like that? I thought, I cannot believe this. What the heck is President Johnson thinking? What is he doing? How are we going to back away from that now, responding to this attack against a merchant ship, as I recall? 

Anyway, I began worrying about it. I think, in one of my classes, I even asked the students, the officer candidates about to be officers in the U.S. Navy, would they like to go over to Vietnam and fight over this? Would they like to escalate this another notch? Is there something in our national interest? Of course they were scared to death of it. They didn’t want to say anything, but I think I expressed my view kind of gratuitously, and then later I worried that I was going to get reported for being a belligerent, anti-American Naval officer. I really became angry and frustrated and upset with the way this thing was going, and it just got worse, as everybody knows. 

How did he end up in elected office?:

So then I went back to practicing law and just working and enjoying it. I forgot about politics, and then our Congressman unexpectedly announced that he was not going to seek re-election. His wife had some malady, some illness, and the truth was, he was just tired of being up here and wanted to come home. It took everybody by surprise. I’m minding my own business again one day at the house and the phone rings, and it’s the local Young Republican county chairman, Mike Allred, who called and said, You know, you may laugh but I’m going to ask you a serious question. This is serious. Have you thought about running for Congress to take Charlie Griffin’s place? And I said, Well, and I laughed because I said, You know, I have thought about it. I was surprised to hear that he wasn’t going to run, but I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided that I’m not interested in running. I’ve got too much family obligation, financial opportunities, the law firm, etc. 

I think Congressmen were making about $35,000 a year or something like that. There was a rumor it might go up to $40,000. I thought, Well, I have a wife and two young children, and there’s no way in the world I can manage all that, and in Washington, traveling back and forth, etc. But it would be interesting. It’s going to be wide open. It was an interesting political situation. Then he said, Well, let me ask you this: have you thought about running as a Republican? I laughed again and I said, No, I surely haven’t thought about that. I was just thinking about the context of running as a Democrat, and so I was still thinking of myself as a Democrat in ’72. 

He said, Would you meet with the state finance chairman? We’ve been talking about who would be a good candidate for us to get behind and push, and we want to talk to you about it. We really think there’s an opportunity here for you and for our party and all this. I said, Well, Mike, I’ll be glad to meet and talk to you all, but look, don’t be encouraged that I’m going to do it. But I’m happy to listen to whatever you say. I’d like to know what you all are doing, as a matter of curiosity, how you got off under this and who your prospects are and that kind of thing. I’d like to know that.

So I met with them, and they started talking about the fact that they would clear the field. There would not be a chance for anybody to win the nomination if I said I would run. I thought, Golly, you all are really serious and think a lot of your own power. I started thinking about it some more, and I asked my wife what she would think about being married to a United States Congressman, and she said, I don’t know, which one? [laughs] And that is a true story. I said, Hello. Me. 

Anyway, a lot of people had that reaction: What? Are you seriously thinking about this? But everybody that I asked—I started just asking family and close friends, law partners; I just bounced it off of them—I said, What’s your reaction that the Republicans are going to talk to me about running for Congress? I was just amazed at how excited most people got over the idea that I might run for Congress and run as a Republican. That’s unique, and they wouldn’t have thought it because they knew I was not a typical Republican. The whole thing worked out, and I did run, and I did win.

That was ’72. Interesting dynamic in Mississippi that year:

Knott

Were you helped by the fact that [George] McGovern was running as the Democratic nominee that year?Cochran

Yes, indeed. There was no doubt about it. I was also helped by the fact that some of the African-American activists in the district were out to prove to the Democrats that they couldn’t win elections without their support. Charles Evers was one of the most outspoken leaders and had that view. He was the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, and that was in my Congressional district. He recruited a young minister from Vicksburg, which was the hometown of the Democratic nominee, to run as an Independent, and he ended up getting about 10,000 votes, just enough to deny the Democrat a majority. He had 46,000 or something like that, and I ended up with 48,000 or whatever. I’ve forgotten exactly what the numbers were. The Independent got the rest. 

So the whole point was, I was elected, in part—I had to get what I got, and a lot of people who voted for me were Democrats, and some were African Americans who were friends and who thought I would be fair and be a new, fresh face in politics for our state and not be tied to any previous political decisions. I’d be free to vote like I thought I should in the interest of this district. It was about 38 percent black in population, maybe 40 percent, and not only did I win that, but then the challenge was to get re-elected after you’ve made everybody in the Democratic hierarchy mad. I knew they were going to come out with all guns blazing, and they did, but they couldn’t get a candidate. They couldn’t recruit a good candidate. They finally got a candidate but—

Knott

Seventy-four was a rough year for Republicans.

Cochran

It was and, of course, Republicans were getting beat right and left. So when we came back up here to organize after that election in ’74, there weren’t enough Republicans to count. But I was one of them who was here and who was back. Senator Lott, he and I both made it back okay. He was from a more-Republican area: fewer blacks and more supportive of traditional Republican issues. 

His opinion on the state of affairs:

Serving in the Senate has gotten to be almost a contact sport, and that’s regrettable, in my view. I would like for it to be more like it was when I first came to the Senate. There was partisanship, right enough, and if you were in the majority, you got to be chairman of all the subcommittees, and none of the Republicans, in my first two years, were chairmen of anything, but that’s fine. That’s the way the House is operated. I’d seen that in the House, and that’s okay. Everybody understands it. But since it’s become so competitive—and the House has too—things are more sharply divided along partisan lines than they ever have been in my memory, and I think the process has suffered. The legislative work product has deteriorated to the point that legislation tends to serve the political interests of one party or the other, and that’s not the way it should be. 

Who does he blame?:

I’ve been disappointed in the partisanship that has deteriorated to the point of pure partisanship in court selections, in my opinion, in the last few years, and [Ted Kennedy’s] been a part of that. I’m not fussing at him or complaining about it. It’s just something that has evolved, but all the Democrats seem to line up in unison to badger and embarrass and beat up Republican nominees for the Supreme Court in particular. But it’s extended to other courts, the court of appeals. They all lined up and went after Charles Pickering from my state unfairly, unjustly, without any real reason why he shouldn’t be confirmed to serve on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. He had run against me when I ran for the Senate, Pickering had. I defeated him in the Republican primary in 1978. So we haven’t been political allies, but I could see through a lot of the things. 

I have a close personal friendship with Pat Leahy and Joe Biden, and I could probably name a few others. I’ve really been aggravated with them all for that reason, and I hope that we’ll see some modification of behavior patterns in the Judiciary Committee. Occasionally they’ll help me with somebody. I’m going to be presenting a candidate for a district court judgeship this afternoon in the committee, and yesterday Pat came up, put his arm around me, and said, I know you’re for this fellow, [Leslie] Southwick, who is going to be before the committee, and I want you to know you can count on me. Well, I’m glad to hear that. There’s nothing wrong with him. I mean, he’s a totally wonderful person in every way. He’ll be a wonderful district judge. 

I’m not saying that they make a habit of it, but they’ve picked out some really fine, outstanding people to go after here recently, and there are probably going to be others down the line that they’ll do that. Ted’s part of that, and I think all the Democrats do it. I think that’s unfortunate.

Knott

Are they responding to interest group pressure? Is that your assessment?

Cochran

I think that has something to do with it, but I’m not going to suggest what the motives are or why they’re doing it, but it’s just a fact. It’s pure partisan politics, and it’s brutal, mean-spirited, and I don’t like it.

Heininger

What do you attribute the change to?

Cochran

I don’t know. I guess one reason is we’re so closely divided now. You know, just a few states can swing control of the Senate from one party to the next, and we have been such a closely divided Senate now for the last ten years or so. Everybody understands the power that comes with being in the majority, and I’m sure both parties have taken advantage of the situation and have maybe been unfair in the treatment of members of the minority party, denying them privileges and keeping their amendments from being brought up or trying to manage the schedule to the benefit of one side or the other. 

Cochran died in 2019. In the Senate he used Jefferson Davis’s desk.

jet trucks for incinerating

Posted: December 10, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: America Since 1945, food | Leave a comment

a nice article in the Wall Street Journal about trucks rigged with jet engines to incinerate junk cars at racetrack shows:

A former Navy mechanic named Doug Rose helped to popularize meltdowns after he created a dragster using a jet engine from a scrapyard. According to his widow, Jeanne, he conducted his first fire show around 1968 with a car he named the Green Mamba. Over the years, he honed his craft until he could torch a half-dozen vehicles at once. “Doug’s objective was to please the people,” she said. 

WSJ also has a photographic review of how McDonald’s is revamping her burgers.

We’re not convinced. Yesterday stopped at the Yucaipa In-N-Out. Two cheeseburgers, fries, medium soda, side of pickles and free hot peppers for $12.50. Is there a better deal in America? Of course when you drive by Harris Ranch you get a tough look and smell of the system that makes that possible.

More coverage of burgers.

Abraham Lincoln: An Oral History

Posted: December 9, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: America, history, presidents | Leave a comment

T. Lyle Dickey said:

This is an interesting book. We’ve discussed how oral history as we know think of it didn’t seem to exist in the past, it didn’t occur to anyone (a search for “oral history” on Amazon reveals mostly books about music scenes and bands). John Nicolay, who’d been a secretary to Lincoln, worked with John Hay on a biography of Lincoln. They collected stories and reminiscences, but they concluded they couldn’t trust people’s memories. Prof. Burlingame dug through Nicolay’s notes and letters and put this book together.

One J. T. Stuart remembered that Lincoln was almost appointed territorial governor of Oregon during the Fillmore administration, but Mary Todd refused to go out there.

Robert Todd Lincoln remembers visiting his father after Gettsyburg, and finding him just after a cry:

how did he handle the dark days?:

Blondin, from Wikipedia:

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