Lawnmower Boy

Just watched Woola of Mars by rental. i) I get that it's hard to find the magic place between "princess" and "waif fu," and that the Princess of Mars title was taken. By Traci Lords, of all people. But Dejah Thoris and Hermione? Are different people. ii) I'm sure that they had PTSD in the Civil War, and that people as young as Taylor Kitsch suffered from it. But that doesn't mean that Kitsch can carry it off. iii) The plot? Something about White Martians? Like environmental degradation? Which is related to war? So they don't do anything? Yeah. Meanwhile, in Chinatown, Mr. Roper realises that Ross slept with his cowboy partner who was a Concentration Camp mute pianist who was dead all along! No, wait. That last sentence was a CGI-induced hallucination, and it still makes more sense than the actual plot. iv) Costumes.If you're going to make Kitsch look scrawny in some scenes, you need to decide that this movie is for tweens and make it for tweens. v) Sixty-eleven hours might or might not be long enough for a movie that has one plot all the way through, but by the time you're up to three, you have to be thinking about the whole "budget" thing. vi) Speaking of gigantic numbers, once your budget is north of 200 million Kronkheits, think about using two different outdoor settings. Or go crazy! Three, even! (Maybe cut the Avatar ​ending that isn't actually an ending? The movie can probably get by with two.)

Speaking of blue pills, has anyone seen the cackling mastermind who was threatening to force me to take the blue pill, leaving me stuck in a normal life in a 9 to 5 job with a normal family in a normal suburb in a "ticky tacky house" with all the other doctors and lawyers and business ex-ec-utives? Because now that I think of it, I haven't seen him since 1982, and I want to tell him that I've changed my mind.

Sir Richard Bartington-Barton, Bt.: "What are the drums saying, boy?" Mkzabiziz[click]bi: "They are saying.. They are saying that Marcia was seen at school wearing Rick's varsity sweater, even though Rick is taking Debbie to the prom." Sir Richard: "That two-timing rat! What else are the drums saying?" Mkzabiziz[click]bi: "From the south, a reply: OMG! And did you see Debbie's hair? She's gone blonde!" Sir Richard: "That's so tacky. Continue, boy." Mkzabiziz[click]bi: "Bwana, From the north, urgent news: POS!" Sir Richard: "Parent over shoulder! I hope that Dad doesn't need to use the drum!" Mkzabiziz[click]bi: "Sadly, yes." Sir Richard sighs audibly. Looking for the Mountains of the Moon was, like, totally boring.

Nothing that some charisma, persuasive fast talking, and KS (Religion) can't fix!

It's been said many times, but bares repeating in regards Battle of New Orleans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOFUbrQWK_A

The client has no comment at this time.

Charlemagne don't play that game.

Technically, they developed an artillery weapon capable of delivering the smallest feasible atomic weapon, with the idea that it would make a good tactical area denial weapon. Godless commie hordes like to rush about without bridging columns to slow them down, so you shoot a big explosive into a defile like the Fulda Gap, and, boom, there you, go, big crater, how much good are all those T-54s doing you now, you insensate Bolsheviks? Now you just need a means of shooting the darn things. so first you get the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle, which can be carried around on a jeep at the expense of being one of those danger-zones-is-greater-than-weapon-range things. Then you get a 280mm siege mortar, running into the objection that railway artillery isn't usually deemed tactical. (Although who knows? Maybe American Cold War-era railway troops laid track really fast.) Then you get the W48, which can be fired out of a standard 155mm (although probably not to any great range), using twice as much plutonium (which is super expensive) as in a regular "tactical" nuclear bomb to produce a 72 ton explosive, which is just dumb for anything other than, as I say, crater-making. Finally, you get the W33, which could be fired from the regular 203mm gun-howitzer and may have been a deliverable micro-hydrogen bomb. You will notice that we know a lot about everything prior to the W33. That's because the US Army was basically building for the greater good of nerd humour at that point. ("Hey? What if, in the distant future, Jon Stewart runs out of things to make fun of?" And then the guys at the Livermore labs say, "Don't worry, we've got it." And then people look at them funny, and the Lab guys realise they probably shouldn't let it out that they have a time machine that gets Internet from 2010.) Anyway, with the W33 you finally get a weapon that really can tear a useful hole in the Fulda Gap with a single shot. So they deployed it, let it be known that it was deployed, and forced the mindless revolutionary myrmidons to bring lots of bridging parts along with them in their rush to the Rhine. And since, as we know, atheists are only allowed to play with little "Giorgy" dolls and never get their hands on capitalistic Lego or Mechano sets, they never learn how to assemble Bailey Bridges. And that, kids, is how Freedom was saved.

The east coast of the United States faces the Atlantic Rift, and is therefore subject to compressive stresses. This produces a "syncline-anticline" form, which you can see inland in the "hill and valley" province of the Adirondack-Appalachian system. At a certain point, however, the syncline slumps below sea level, and has been infilled with erosion outflow. This the "fall line," basically, a line of rapids ("falls") some miles inland of the coast along the entire East Coast of the United States. Above the fall line, basement crystalline rock is readily accessible. Below it, it's sediment or, as Cancer says, glacial morane all the way down to the bottom of the syncline. Result: the coast is swampy or fertile and hard to mine due to a high water table. On the other hand, it has rich water power resources and lots of trees. (Important if you're thinking about establishing fishing plantations there.) The hill-and-valley country has significant mineral wealth, but I think the only significant potential mineral play below the fall line is deep oil. Pearls or fossil amber are the only thing I can think of, off hand unless you really want to vary the geology of the area and have a craton embedded in the North American plate somewhere in Georgia.

And for dessert, you can have a deep-fried Ferrero Rocher. Or five or six, because I can't imagine one would fill you up.

Postblogging Technology, April 1944, I: Ancestral Voices My Dearest Reggie: Grandfather has pneumonia again. The breath of life is slipping away, and as sad, even morbid as it is to say, I doubt that there is anything within that withered body that needs to see the banks of the Pearl again. As a burial in British Columbia might attract unwelcome attention, I am having grounds prepared at under Ch'i Wei Tao Wan. As one life prepares to journey on, two more come in. I have taken the liberty of enclosing some photographs of your grandchildren. I am not sure what an old rake such as yourself does with such unbearable sweetness, but, after a moment entertaining dark thoughts of your passing them to some comely barmaid as an icebreaker, I retreat to the obvious position. You will have them framed and proudly displayed on your desk. You will have to have them enlarged, but that, of all things, should present you with no difficulties! I regret the cropping, but, as you will see from my review of the last two weeks, this is not a time when we can risk attention. Better any stray load found on an aircraft in, say, Basra, not be traceable to us this month! Your daughter-out-of-law is in good spirits. We have had her confinement in the ranch house, as the coach house is not ready, and we have seen much of each other in the last few weeks. Some friction --she is so much changed from the sweet girl of 1939, who even then had a not-always-very-feminine hard core to her. Your son arrived two days after the birth. "Lieutenant A." was kind enough to drive him straight down from Hunter's Point as soon as his ship was docked, delivering an exhausted, rumpled engineer to an exhausted, rumpled new mother. At least it made a change from the young man's service duties, which seem to consist of couriering notes around the Bay to the effect that the only American admiral to have ever won an air-sea battle ought to be replaced by the super-annuated rival who is the only American admiral ever to have lost two, on the grounds that he did not win his victory enough, whilst his rival was somehow not responsible for his subordinates' actions, except when they turned out well. I grouse, but that is because I report the complaints of the newly-minted Admiral Stump, who attended the christening and had long, fruitful talks with your son and Bill and David, with "Mrs. G.C." sitting in as hostess, on subjects of which I know not what. Antennas need to be a certain distance from each other? Mutual interference? These electrical matters will be the death of me, especially with the lawyers bogging me down with doleful talk about our friend's contract renewal. Rather a matter of attention given that we intend to break it! The baleful instrument has been revised, although not in any serious way --just an expansion of the "morals clause," no doubt inspired by his young associate's public behaviour. I grouse, but that is because I report the complaints of the newly-minted Admiral Stump, who attended the christening and had long, fruitful talks with your son and Bill and David, with "Mrs. G.C." sitting in as hostess, on subjects of which I know not what. Antennas need to be a certain distance from each other? Mutual interference? These electrical matters will be the death of me, especially with the lawyers bogging me down with doleful talk about our friend's contract renewal. Rather a matter of attention given that we intend to break it! The baleful instrument has been revised, although not in any serious way --just an expansion of the "morals clause," which you can understand under the circumstances. I am grateful to the Earl for his allowance of time. Unfortunately, he is mistaken. Taxes are filed at the middle of April, here, not the end, and so we are in another tax year. I know that he will be angry, thinking me to be temporising, but let me put it another way. We are less than a month away from the invasion. The fifteenth of May is the low tide, and the Allies need to allow themselves a solid month and time to spare to win the war by Christmas, even if the campaign in France goes as quickly as the "Hundred Days." Afterthat, we shall be outfitting the invasion fleet against Japan, and only after that will it be time for the boys on the Bay to think about incorporation and the issuing of stocks. This will happen. And it will happen this tax year, unless the war drags on. We will probably not be able to put the greater part of our investments into a proper, legal form --Bill and David talk as though their incorporation is a decade away!-- But it will happen. 1955 will be the tail end of it. The world will be back in the doldrums of the 1930s, so I am told, but, in the meantime, we will have reaped the profits of the growth of a new American electrical engineering industry. Profits that are likely to be greater than real estate, much less clapped-out "traditional" businesses such as steel. As a final note vaguely related to news of the Bay, Wong Lee's son graduated. I took photographs of him in his pressed now-official uniform for his father's sake. One cannot be too cautious where Hoover's lads are concerned, after all. We threw a party for the boy at the ranch house, and many were the tired old jokes about Chinese laundry when a sprit of Hoisin Sauce was detected on the nape of his bright new Naval whites. There is the usual note of sadness at the realisation that he is off to war, with a stop somewhere in the deep Midwest to pick up his vessel, and a private warning that he ought to pack blues as well as whites. Parsing the time, I imagine there is to be a follow-up to the main cross-Channel assault. The Economist, 1 April 1944 Leaders “Permanent Defence Policy” Lord Chatfield wants the Lords to talk about postwar defence organisation. Oh, putanother inch of armour plate on it, and it’ll be fine, Milord. The paper offers its insights: the maximum likely professional force is that of summer 1939; 600,000 men. To that can be added the annual conscript class of around 300,000 after exemptions. With recruiting shortfalls, say 750,000 to 800,000 to be shared between three services. Since the armed forces are to be maintained for effect, and not for “social education or processional elegance,” they must be used as effectively as possible: planes, ships, and mechanised troops, providing that “they are not so mobile that they cannot move.” Weapons should be made and stored for war mobilisation, ships built and strategic supplies stored in national reserves, which would also serve to stabilise boom-and-bust commodity cycles. The paper namechecks Lord Keynes. “Deadlock in Palestine?” I am absolutely confident that there will be peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine this spring. The Foreign Office is on the case! “Civil Aviation” How will international civil aviation be organised? And how will this lead tous getting all the sales? Burning questions indeed. “Notes for the Week” “Eastern Sedan?” Events in the East this week might go down as an eastern Sedan, the paper posits. Or they might not. Let’s go with “not,” for the moment. Rumania is not surrendering this week. “Equal Pay” The Government was defeated in the Commons on an amendment to the Government bill on education calling for equal pay for male and female teachers, with strong support from the Liberals, Independent Labour, and the Tory Reform Committee. It seems unnatural to me pay fathers and spinsters on the same rate, but I had the misfortune of putting my opinion to your daughter-out-of-law, and my ears were soundly boxed, so I hold my peace. In any event, the paper sees a chance of this policy being carried through the civil service! It is hard to see how this could be afforded, were stenographers, never mind nurses, included. “Another Coal Crisis”It appears that three coal districts out of five will reject the Government’s latest pay scheme, which the paper thinks is absolutely wonderful. Some coal miners will “break their bond” and strike illegally, although not as many as could. “Ex-Service Industries” Demobilisation and conversion will be very hard. “Plainly Speaking” Americans are horrid about Lend-Lease. Britain is being made a scapegoat in the American election campaign! Oh, Tom Dewey, can’t you understand how the paper loves you? (That is, Leader loves you. American Survey still longs for the touch of Wendell Wilkie's lips, for his sweet promise of happy ever after. ) “Salute the Soldier” The paper objects to savings bonds drives because they make the banks’ lives more difficult, when tightening rationing would have the same effect of reducing consumption without making bankers’ lives harder at all! “Germany’s Balkan Losses” As Roumania is going, going… It is time to take stock. Roumania produces 5.5 million tons of petroleum a year, about a third of that available to Germany from all continental sources; and not nearly as much food as it could, as its war harvests have been poor. Therefore, the loss of Roumania may mean less than is sometimes supposed. When it happens at some imminent date. “Second Thoughts on Trade” Political and Economic Planning has, after much cogitation, finally produced the statistical appendices of the report it filed in 1937. The paper’s main takeaway point is that in 1937, the PEP supposed that the main barriers to international trade were regulations, including tariffs. Now it supposes that it is national employment. Tariffs are symptoms, not the disease. “Rights of Asylum” 243 Bulgarian Jewish refugees have arrived in Istanbul on Milka, and have requested to be resettled in Palestine. The paper says, that this will not be difficult if they have permits, but since they do not, it is impossible as it stands, a horrible outcome for Jews escaping the death camps of Eastern Europe. Therefore, the paper proposes a compromise. Milka will proceed, and others, likely to be numerous with a new pogrom developing in Hungary, will follow. Just so long as the 30,000 vacant places in Palestine under the current plan have not been filled. Are there more than 30,000 Jews in Hungary? Oh, dear. American Survey “American Zionism” Not all American Jews are Zionists, although some are. non-Zionist American Jews hold that Zionists present Jews as an unassimilable foreign race from other Americans, causing anti-Semitismto rise in America. Sensible American Jews ask themselves whether America could offer asylum to more Jews without provoking more anti-Semitism. Of course not, say those sensible Jews. Only Palestine is left as a refuge from Nazi persecution, and so it follows that non-Zionist American Jews are also Zionist. However, as most American Jews are not Zionists, but only Zionists, a sensible British compromise solution in Palestine will go over smoothly and without fuss in America. “Front in the Orient” Our Correspondent in Oregon says that they make and ship things in the Pacific Northwest, including things that will be used in the “Big Push” against Japan. They also make paper, like the paper wasted here. “Destitute Greece” Rationing has not been effective, there is price inflation, with massive increases in the number of bills in circulation, and there are difficulties trading with Germany. “Feeding Switzerland” Is hard, but the value of Swiss agricultural production has risen steadily, and the addition of potato flour to bread has stretched the strategic grain reserve. Germany at War Germany is a totalitarian dictatorship not just so far as basic liberties are concerned, but financially as well! Oh, the humanity! The Business World “Steel Shares” If you have invested in steel shares, you have to be concerned about rises in wages and coal costs, as the dominant postwar question will be how to reduce the selling price of steel to help in the export drive. Business Notes The Prime Minister’s statement last week touched on housing. Will the initial stage of expansion be possible without a state policy and planning, as he said? It seems unlikely. Will there be factory made houses? Mr. R. Coppock, secretary of the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, says that the PM has solved a problem with a word, “fabrication,” with no bearing on reality. The half-million home target can be met by normal methods. The paper is not convinced. “Gold Price Raised’ In India. That is, the Bank of India’s selling price was raised from R. 71 to R. 72. As this was still well below the market rate, for some curious reason, the Bank’s favoured buyers were able to reap a tidy profit until the end of the week, when the price was further raised to the New York/London clearing rate, which makes more sense, anyway, given that the point of the gold sales is to hold down price inflation and the growth in sterling debt to India. “Persian Silver Sale” The price rise in silver in India is even more marked than that for gold, as it is the preferred peasant hoarding medium, but also because the Bank of India has not been selling silver. But now comes news that the Bank of Persia has sold the Bank of India 500 tons, and that it is on its way to Bombay, where it will be sold. Curiously, the paper finds no problem at all with the silver price in Bombay being 3 times greater than the London parity, because of inflation fighting. Certainly no-one would descend to something so ungentlemanly as currency smuggling, and no aircraft whatsoever will be flying from London or San Francisco to Bombay with a few hundredweight of bullion tucked under a burlap wrap. “Vickers Limited” Appears to have had a good year, although it is difficult to parse its returns due to the number of subsidiaries reporting independently. Overall, the company’s future seems brighter than it did 25 years ago. “Shipbuilders Wages” Are going up, as the workers want to make hay while the sun shines. “Whaling Agreement” An international agreement to hold the harvest at “16,000 blue whale units” has been signed. But given the shortage of ships, the total is not likely to be reached. “U.S. National Income” The paper notices that the total income available for spending in the United States has risen from $67.7 billion in 1939 to 124.1 in 1943. It is a wonder, the paper says, that there has not been much more inflation in the United States than has yet become apparent. But soon! As for labour, this has increased by 2 million from the normal growth of population, and by 5 million from persons not normally employed. In spite of this, there are still about 3.5 million housewives under 45 without children who could be employed, and who would be, in Britain. 44.5% of the population is working in America, compared with 47% in Britain. Flight, 6 April 1944 Leaders The paper is pleased by “Bomber Command’s surprise attack on Essen” on the night of the 26th. It is a compliment, in its way, to German resilience. German industry recovers rapidly when bombing relents. Will the invasion not require a massive diversion of bombing sorties? “Imperial Defence” The dusky races of the Empire may have their freedom, as long as they listen to the Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff at all times about everything. Also, the peacetime air force should be incredibly huge, so that it can be all things to all men. Speaking of enormous efforts, the hundred-thousandth Rolls-Royce Merlin has just been made. Most are, I suppose, too clapped out already to ever be used for anything, but at least every cottage beside a country lane now has its own personal bucket of spare washers. War in the Air The medium bombers of 9th Air Force and TAAF have been joined by the 8th Air Force’s daylight bombers in attacks on targets in the Pas de Calais. Air fields and training stations seem to be particular targets in spite of long standing doubts about the efficacy of airfield attacks. Although German attacks on London have fallen off. The paper is now cold on the idea of an air attack on Casino Abbey. A little late, I think? On the other hand, the mountain-fighting New Zealanders and Gurkhas are now being resupplied from the air as they seize the commanding heights. Airplanes are involved! Likewise on the Japanese front, where matters are confused, mainly by the fact that no-one has any clear idea where exactly the fighting is going on. "Imphal?" How did the Japanese get to Africa, precisely? The Russians are advancing! Aircraft, etc. The paper notices that it is official policy not to state the results of the Calais bombing, but the Germans have not yet fulfilled their promise to rain rocket shells of vengeance upon Britain. The two must be related. At least, this week. Next week, who knows? Rocket shells, like radio direction finding, might not exist again. I am sure that they would do this to jets, too, if the manly jaw of G. Geoffrey Smith were not set against it. Here and There “Jet Development” C. D. Howe, Canada’s Munitions Minister (pardon me for a moment, dear cousin, as I must go and turn over some salt pork rendering by the fire) is quoted as saying that jet development has been transferred from Britain to Canada. Or misquoted, the paper suggests. Which seems like a sound interpretation, so why does this bit lead the column? “Help from de Havilland” de Havilland chairman Mr. A. S. Butler, has offered the Herts Education Committee a 90 acre site for the building of a proposed technical college. Rather nice of him, I think. We could offer the same to the Kent Education Committee. If by “offer” is understood a nice profit on so much bog land. The Earl must be cursing himself for holding most of his real estate in the remotest Midlands, where no-one would ever want to study aeronautical engineering. Perhaps he should build a college for training cotton engineers instead? Mr. Wright was at Buckingham Palace to show off an American-made constitutional monarch. It is just like a British one,but cheaply made, too expensive, unreliable, and far too thick. “Blue Riband” (not the actual title, which is “Fine Performance”) An Avro York has made the flight from New Delhi to London in 42 hours and 30 minutes, actual flying time being 31 hours 54 minutes. With a fortnight’s leave in London, even the Guards might be tempted to do some trooping out East of Suez! “Ford’s Glider Contract” Ford has a $17 million contract to make CG-13 Waco gliders. The work consists of welding steel tubes and assembling canvas, plywood and timber parts, rather closer to the firm’s trade than the Willow Run madness, and good practice for “conversion.” “Compulsorily Amphibian” F/O G. O. Singleton, an RAAF pilot, has managed to land his Sunderland on an airfield after sustaining a 7ft hole in the hull in an ill-advised takeoff in rough waters. “Nice work, Aussie,” the paper condescends. In fairness to the Diggers, it seems to be going around. “Ironical Fate” Celebrated Aussie pilot, F/O L. G. Fuller, has met his death in Melbourne in a cycling accident. I suppose that the fact that he was still F/O rank tells the sad tale, but I note the story because of the callous header. “His Journey Was Necessary” Mr. D. McVey, director of Australian civil aviation, has just arrived in London for a conference. Last year, he led Australian delegations to South Africa and Washington. The paper seems to be very upset at Australians this week. It seems surprising that Canada has got off so lightly, after trying to steal tall and smouldering G. Geoffrey Smith’s jet and jet-related thunder. “U.S. Calls for Women Pilots.” More women pilots would release more male pilots for the war. G. Geoffrey Smith, “Turbine-Compressor Unites: Problems of Small-Sized Units: Fuel Consumption Factors: Heat Exchangers” Those baby-blue eyes! That manly chest! The most eligible bachelor in all of engineeringdom explains Swedish and Swiss experiences with said problems, etc. It is nice of the neutrals to publish their work. L. G. Fairhurst, “Jets versus Airscrews.” Someone who is not G. Geoffrey Smith (I have it on good authority that he is knock-kneed, hairless, and 5’3”) says that putting propellers on turbine engines could be a fine idea! Someone who is chief engineer at Rotol, to be precise. Behind the Lines The collaborationist government of Yugoslavia is training several new pilots. (160, to be precise.) The Germans are building three new airfields in Denmark, which are reported by the clandestine paper Frit Danmark to have dispersal areas for aircraft. I suppose the news here is that Denmark’s premier freedom-fighting paper is named after a fried treat? It certainly cannot be worth the paper otherwise. A Helsinki paper accuses the Germans of building airfields sited to support German bombing raids on Sweden? Are these stories related? Even the paper finds the idea a little ridiculous. A new anti-knock fuel is distributed with warnings that its lead content makes it poisonous, and that it should not be allowed to contact skin. The paper finds this amusing; I say, if you are distributing wood alcohol, however dressed, as fuel, good luck in persuading alcoholics not to drink it by allowing that it is poisonous and irritating. News of a larger version of the He177, suitable for Atlantic missions, and of the new Arado Ar 240. Studies in Aircraft Recognition The Fairchild Argus and Cornet, Bucker Bestmann, Percival Proctor IV. Sub-200hp trainers all look very similar, and someone, somewhere, might actually have cause to need to tell them apart, until the day that he learns about girls. “Continental Air Transport” Happened before the war, will happen again after it. “Siebel Si 204” A new Axis aircraft is a cheap, light transport/advanced trainer. “Mr. Burden is Optimistic” The US Assistant Secretary of Commerce believes that the first postwar civil air transport generation, which will come into service in about 1954, will be up to 30% cheaper than Pullman railway service. That is optimistic, as it will basically capture all business and tourist traffic, I should think, leaving rail to the kind of daft old lady who insists on the store keeping a credit book for her, as she is unwilling to learn how to use a chequing account. (And, yes, I had to stand in line behind one of those earlier today. In the new America, we do our own errands. Frankly, I am a little pleased to recede into the background of Wong Lee’s life this month. He has every right to be proud of, and frightened for, his son.) P. W. Nicholas, “Plywood and Plastics” The paper notices the use of high-frequency electrical heating on phenol-formaldehyde resin plywood panels. The much-delayed point of the article is that the “Gallay” process is much more economical of electrical power in achieving the desired effect, for various technical reasons. It seems like there is something to be said for it, and you should probably look at this number yourself. The real question, of course, is feasibility of production on a home-construction scale, and for that I am no guide. Correspondence Only one highly technical article under a serving officer’s pseudonym this week, and relatively little of the joyous boyishness of which “Mrs. J.C.” so approves. Perhaps the pace of work has picked up in the service? Why do I even speculate to you, Reggie, when you have the gen? Although the whole matter of British versus American planes carries on. More hair-raising, a letter over a proudly-signed name (“V. H. Izard,”) calling for Bomber Command to shift to day bombing. Although couched in terms of improving accuracy, this strikes me as a bit of a stalking horse. In clear weather, both kinds of bombers find their targets, do they not? So what is the real issue? This is where I fret. The alternative is that casualties are beginning to raise concerns. Service Aviation Men are promoted, decorated, die. Award citations take up more pages than the list of the dead. I notice also a striking picture of a Vought Corsair with folded wings on a Royal Navy carrier. It is nice that the plane finally reaches the place that it was designed to be. Is it too much to be hoped that the Marines will now get some Hellcats, so that the Grumman plan can catch up to the Vought in the aces derby? The Economist, 8 April 1944 Leaders “The Prime Minister” The Commons was whipped, and the Prime Minister got his vote of confidence on the issue of equal pay for woman teachers. The paper is perplexed that Mr. Churchill felt the need to make the withdrawal of Mrs. Cazalet Keir’s amendment to the Education Bill a matter of confidence. The paper is beginning to have doubts that the Prime Minister will be able to win the next General Election. “Russia in the Far East” Will Russia enter the Far Eastern War after victory in Europe? Probably. It has already won a considerable victory by compelling the Japanese to withdraw from their oil and concessions on Northern Sakhalin in return for ludicrously small compensation and the promise of 50,000 tons of oil annually after the end of the Pacific War. As Japan was relying on Sakhalin for almost a quarter of its domestic oil supply, this is a sharp blow, administered diplomatically. But what after that? TASS’s recent statement that the Chinese are driving the Kazakhs out of Sinkiang Province and aggressing into Outer Mongolia in the process is seen as evidence of friction. Chungking, communists, possible return of Russia to its Northeastern Concessions after it enters the land war and takes the necessarily predominant role in defeating the Japanese Army that this implies. The Budget, accurately reported this year, is surprisingly good. Expenditures have been lower than expected, revenues higher, the increase in National Debt therefore, although high, within the range expected. The paper is pleasantly surprised. Notes of the Week “Warning to Strikers” Mr. Bevin says: strikers, no striking! “Into Roumania” Russians invade, Roumania surrendering more. Latins are excitable. “Best Foot Forward” The late Director-General of the BBC, Robert Foot, has gone to be President of the Mineowner’s Association, which is occasion for the paper to remember that it hates the coalowners as well as the coal miners. “Thunder on the Right” The Tory Reform Committee has a plan for reorganising the coal industry, too! “Feeding India” Now that the famine is over, it is over. And it might not happen next year, at least if the effects of the “small” Japanese advance into India are not excessive. “Battle of Communications” The paper is disquieted by news of the evacuation of Tiddim and the use of RAF fitters and clerks as airfield defence detachments. With the death of Wingate possibly putting a check on the development of airborne operations, the Allies can no longer put pressure on the Japanese offensive, which seems to be developing in a worrying way. Just how worrying is unclear to readers of the paper thanks to one of the more impenetrable maps of the region that I have seen. “On Air” Civil aviators are excitable, as are Argentines. And Caribbeanites. Not that anyone cares, although it is a little disgraceful that British subjects be at risk of starvation on their little islands. And the Welsh. American Survey “Bulwark of the Farm Bloc” The Farm Bureau (if somehow you have not heard of it, Reggie, it is a farmer’s lobby in the United States) is increasingly at odds with the Farm Security Administration over the Administration’s subsidy policy. American Survey dedicates almost two full pages to refuting the ludicrous idea that the Bureau lobbies for the interests of rich farmers over poor farmers, with the effect of endangering the New Deal –that is of depriving the Democrats of farm votes. Of course, that’s what the Bureau intends, it’s just that this is precisely what all the poor farmers want! The paper says so. American Notes “The Right to Vote” Is at issue with the continuing controversy over the soldier’s vote, and the Supreme Courts’ finding that the Sixteenth Amendment protects Americans’ right to participate in party primaries without respect to race. In other election news, the paper has a good feeling about Mr. Wilkie’s prospects in Wisconsin. “Conscripting the Barrel” It is suggested that the 3.5 million 4-F men be conscripted anyway, and put into labour units. It seems very unlikely that this will happen. Meanwhile, the Army is calling up more men over 26, there is evidence of people drifting away from war work to positions in industries with more promise of peacetime permanence, leading to labour shortages in war work. Latin (Americans) are excitable, and possibly Communist. “Mineral Poverty in Eire” Our Dublin Correspondent takes aim at the ill-advised myth that there is plenty of mineral wealth to be extracted in Eire if only it could be put to work. Good to have that cleared up, I say. Russia At War “Plan for Farming” Last year’s harvest was poor; lack of tractors, drought, other reasons are indicated. This year’s harvest, thanks to the vigorous planning and directives of the Council of People’s Commissars will be better. Hopefully. Actually, the paper is not that hopeful. The losses of war are not to be made up that easily, and schemes like last year’s plan to interplant rice with cotton in the fields of Turkestan do not encourage confidence in the competence of the Council. Perhaps more Mouziks will rise on the Kolkhozs. Business Notes The France rate needs to be set with an eye to the errors made in setting the lire rate; new building methods are to be embraced, not disparaged, and Sir Malcom Stewart, of the London Brick Company, has a much more progressive attitude than Mr. Coppock in regards to prefabrication. However, even his views may fall short of the innovativeness needed. What of alternatives to brick such as cement, plaster board, timber, and, possibly, metal and asbestos board? The future is bright with possibilities. Sorry, for a moment there I thought that I was reading Fortune rather than The Economist. What I meant to say is that the future is full of uncertainties. “Coal Dust Abatement” The paper greets new schemes, then offers tempered skepticism about the value of putting even more sprinkled water into the collieries before moving on to the problem of “black lung” and the difficulty of finding employment for miners so afflicted. “South Africa and Free Gold” and “Bombay Bullion Prices” both concern the recent rise in prices on the Bombay Exchange. South Africa is eager to have its share, even as the price of gold and silver began to fall there. Although they have risen at the end of the week. General Auchinleck’s soothing statements about Imphal do seem to have caused some abatement in the price rise, however. On the strategic metals front, China has announced that it has found additional reserves of tungsten and antimony to introduce into the world market once they can be exported again. The paper applauds the prospect of a fall in the price of these useful metals, which would encourage greater use of them. Flight, 13 April How boring can high-speed, heavily-armed “hot ships” be? Very, when your front cover advertisement is for Cellon’s new Cerrux dope paint. Leaders “Putting the Jet on the M.A.P.” The paper was disappointed when MAP took over Short Brothers, believing that less drastic measures might have sufficed. The paper hopes that the case is different with the now-announced MAP takeover of Power Jets, Ltd. The paper’s hopeful formulation is that the vast national effort required to bring the Jet Age on is now to be backed by the whole nation, rather than the limited resources of a private company, which could hardly bear the burden of such an enterprise, unless its name were Boulton & Watt, Parsons, Brown Boveri, Vickers-Armstrong, Rolls-Royce, Nuffield…. Actually, this sounds like exactly the same case as Short Brothers. “The Satellite Capitals” Rumania is surrendering some more, and aircraft were involved! Specifically, 15th Air Force attacked the Bucharest railyards on 4 April as the Russians crossed the Pruth. “The Barracuda’s Bow” The Fairey Barracuda now officially exists, thanks to publicity over the carrier-borne attack on Tirpitz. The paper intimates that special bombs were used, perhaps glider bombs. A striking picture shows the Barracuda with its enormous flaps extended for landing. War in the Air The loss of 94 bombers in the BomberCommand night attack on Nuremberg in clear air under a full moon shows that casualties in air raids can be heavy, the paper concludes. Actually, I suggest that you can conclude more than that. The Germans have pretty clearly won this round of the long night bombing war over Europe. In other unfortunate news,General Wingate has died in an air crash. The paper describes General Wingate as a soldier of an original cast of mind., and notes that he was “probably” unable to avail himself of current meterological reports that would have led him to postpone his trip. The “probably,” I think, says much. The paper has its sources. “Mrs. J. C.’s” father was able to pull his familiar little game of feigning a lack of English. The general, I gather, was moon-touched. At this point, may I digress and suggest that if the social costs of opium were so great as to occasion its banning, that the same might be contemplated for Benzedrine. But not until after the war, of course. You lads need not fear being deprived just yet? (Or, conversely, that we just be frank about the dangers of both, and give over puritanical prohibition of both?) In other Burma news, it is mentioned that the men of the RAF Regiment have been posted around the airfields at Imphal as a possible last-ditch defensive line. Which is, I think, the first that I have heard of the Regiment in this paper. In the Pacific, carrier attacks on the Palau group at the western end of the Caroline Islands. Unless the Japanese fleet comes out, the hundred thousand men in their garrisons in the Pacific will be isolated and left to starve, the paper points out. What a senseless and predictable outcome, it says. Well, yes, but Britain’s loss in France in 1940 was not far short of a hundred thousand men “cut off” uselessly. Do we now say that this was a senseless undertaking and an easily predicted defeat? The railyard attacks at Bucharest are noted again. This must have cheered up the Russian troops, the paper speculates, then notes that they are already flushed by their own victories. Which seem rather more consequential, even if attacks on the railways make their jobs easier. The Tirpitz attack is summarised again. The paper notes here that the Barracuda has been in service for “about” a year, and that the number of squadrons equipped with it has “steadily increased.” Given how much the taxpayer has spent on planes in the last year, I should hope so! The week’s box score shows 145 bombers lost over Europe this week. The Nuremberg casualties are thus about two third of Combined Bombing Offensive losses and not that far short of half of all (232) Allied air losses in service flying this week. Here and There The total American aircraft supply to Russia now stands at 8800. General Oliver P. Echolsof USAAF Materiel Command says that new long-range fighters are being developed to escort B-29s. Have we not heard this already? Major General J. F. Miller, AVM T. W. Williams, and AM Sir William Welch all have new jobs. A Transport Lancaster has set a 12 hour 59 minute record for Scotland-Montreal, beating the old record by 17 minutes. It carried 3,611lb mail, 425lb freight, and four passengers. B-25 Mitchells are now being used as advanced trainers. Another warplane surplus to requirements? A new Mid-Air Safety Device is announced by the “Square D Co., of Detroit,” which sounds exactly like C. G. Grey’s old “Radioaura.” The important part is when someone pays everyone who has patented this contraption so that they can actually use it. Very important people are going to Washington to talk about petroleum. A Navy school has been opened to train 300 Ceylonese as engine fitters, so that they can relieve 70% of Fleet Air Arm personnel on the island for carrier duties. Catalinas searching 200,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean from Ceylon take four days to find 42 survivors of a sunken ship and directing a tanker to them. Americans want free competition by private airlines on international routes, while other countries prefer “international control.” “Flying the Typhoon” It’s remarkably nimble for such a large plane, and the engine, with its high rpm, gives a gentle hum. (While it is subtly shaking you to pieces.) The very thick wing gives good handling at the stall, and “lineal descendants” of the Typhoon and Sabre will be very impressive. Pictures of the Hawker Tornado, the failed Vulture-powered rival to the Typhoon, appear next page. The Vulture, it will be recalled, was not taken up, as it was so much more complicated than the Sabre. Studies in Aircraft Recognition Today we learn to tell gliders apart. There is the Hotspur, a dashing northerner, the Horsa, always trying to invade Britain, the Hadrian building a wall to keep the Horsa out, and the DFS 230, which ..also tries to invade England. “Indicator” must be grounded, as his column this week is a “Literary Interlude.” He has read some novels about aviation, and is not impressed. Books that tell us what war flying was actually like will be written, and read, but not until some time after the war is over. Who wants to remember the frightening and uncomfortable parts now? “Mobile School Unit” The US Air Transport Command has a group visiting schools with the M.T.U. 96, which is kind of a mockup/model/display of the C-54 Skymaster. It does not appear that it is a Link Trainer-type setup to give the students the feel of flying the plane, but then it is mainly for instructing ground crew. “Interchange of Technical Information” The eligible heiresses of Old England will be devastated to hear that the dashing G. Geoffrey Smith of this paper (and Aircraft Production, as well) is off to America in connection with the sharing of technical press information. “A Novel U.S. Suggestion” The Civil Aeronautics Administration has proposed installing a recorder in the pilot’s compartment to preserve every word spoken, so as to learn the cause of crashes in which both pilot and co-pilot are killed. (The actual device would be secreted in the tail and wrapped in an asbestos blanket.) I just wonder how much the pilots’ conversation would add to the chatter with ground control. Speak, oh ancestral voices... Behind the Lines “An Axis newspaper” reports that rumours circulated that Bratislava would be raided by British, or Russian, or, failing them, German bombers. The intent would be to force the inhabitants of the city to evacuate, at which point the Germans would move their entire governmental apparatus into the abandoned buildings. It is rumoured that certain war profiteers actually fled the city on that date, showing that they had conduits of information to Moscow or London, says the paper. They should be exposed, says the paper, and punished. It has been said that, thanks to Bismarck and the threat of Social Democracy, Germany has quite good provisions for the handicapped. Paranoid maniacs, for example, are employed in the provincial press. All German able-bodied men of the classes of 1884—1893 have been asked to register for conscription. “The Wild Sow” technique of directing single-engined fighters onto night raids is described, presumably indicating that it is now obsolete. Correspondence J. R. Gould (Major, late RAF), writes to say that he thinks the Sabre much too complicated and vulnerable, and that it is a pity that the company did not instead further develop its licensefor the two-crankshaft Jumo diesel aircraft engine. He goes on to explain the advantages of diesel powertrains for the tens of Flight readers who might be unaware of them. As usual with diesel enthusiasts, he is less forthcoming on the subject of compression stresses, vibrations, and exhaust work loss. Not that he’s necessarily wrong. In many applications, the future does belong to diesel cycle engines. The problem isthat the various complications inserted to deal with these difficulties ratherundermine the appeal to simplicity! N. V. Brittain, on the other hand, is convinced that the Sabre’s sleeve valves score by saving work on regular maintenance, and imagines the chagrin of German engineers analysing the Sabre. As well they should. If the British have so much design talent to waste on that contraption, imagine what their service jet engines will be like! G. W. Stanley takes issue with the “Projet’s” opinion that some jet engines are impractical. In fact, other jet or perhaps turbosupercharged engines are impractical. If I am reading him correctly, and I will allow that it is quite likely that I am, arrangements much more advanced than in any jet engine are used in oil injection turbines and for a combustion/steam turbine without a boiler. Whichsounds as though he is describing a ground installation? Michael Annand says that the proposed “Wyvern” would be too heavy, too lightly armed, and would ask too much of the lone pilot. He proposes that the carrier arm might be pared down to a single fighter (/dive-bomber) and torpedo (heavy dive-) bomber, for example the Seafire and Avenger. R. E. Gregory, thinking on similar lines, narrows the role of the fighter down to only fighting, and suggests a carrier torpedo-bomber large enough to carry the torpedo internally! Surely that would imply a twin-engined aircraft. Have such proposals not been vetoed before on the score of weight and size? I am beginning to doubt my rash speculation that the “Wyvern” has taken such concrete life on these correspondence pages because it is an actual aircraft under development. My logic is that there would also be a twin-engine torpedo bomber under development, and that would imply aircraft carriers to match. Or has the Director of Naval Construction not been telling us everything? W. H. Hambrook, Assistant Chief Designer for Short & Harland, objects to another correspondent objecting to flying boats. “Optimist” thinks that the only problem with the “drift” (that is, castering) undercarriages discussed in an article in an earlier number of the paper is that they are not complicated enough. Throw in a gyro-controlled powered servo to keep the castered wheels turned in the right direction, and you would have a miracle machine. I shall propose the idea to your eldest when I see him next. It is always amusing to see him wince in pain and put his hand to his forehead. D. A. Brice thinks that “Indicator” is wrong to say that the proposed 100 ton mammoth airliners might be a bit much for existing manpower. He also thinks that “Indicator” was insulting him personally as an airline pilot. And not only him but all air marshals, aviation pioneers, and, in general, everyone. Not to harp too much, but someone needs to cut back on the Benzedrine. “Russian Ground Crews” Are much like ours, but wear those unflattering, shapeless, Russian-style forage caps. I hope that the engines aren’t offended. R. D. Leakey, “Where Battles Are Won.” In the future, in anticipation of future wars, aircraft factories will have to be secret underground complexes where unidentified top scientists and engineers work on top secret new aircraft with all the advances made possible by top secret research and development. Also, the designers will have codenames, like “the Shadow,” “Dr. Syn” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” I’ll bet you can’t tell what part of that I made up, Reggie. The Economist, 15 April 1944 Leader “The Governor” The paper is sad that Mr. Montagu Norman has withdrawn his name from the election for Governor of the Bank of England after a quarter century in office. Oddly, the paper’s main complaint is about the Bank’s industrial policy of encouraging cartels under the guise of “industry self-government.” “Freedom for France” Within a few weeks, we will be invading. Should we not sort out franc convertability, and the administration of the occupied zone? Maybe we shall get rid of that annoying De Gaulle fellow, too. The French will thank us for it when they come to their senses. And it will help the French try out this democracy arrangement. Sometimes I think it would do Britain good to lose a war once. It might help the paper gain some empathy for defeated. “Article Seven” The paper hopes that Lend-Lease is not ended too quickly on account of difficulties over tariffs and such. This would undermine trade and employment. It is hard, the paper says, to feel happy about the prospects for full employment in the United States after the war, and only a rash man would prophesy with complete assurance that it will be attained in Great Britain. With American production vastly above prewar levels, and no plan in prospect for organising and administering transition, there is a very real risk of a postwar American depression. (Emphasis mine.) Notes of the Week “Odessa and the Carpathians” Roumania still being invaded, still surrendering. Latins are excitable. Eden-Stettinus talks will continue, given that Mr. Eden is not resigning the Foreign Office after all. Miner’s delegation visits London and puts their case against the Portal Reward with some success. It turns out that “rippers, roadmen, machine minders and some classes of enginemen” do require higher wages! The paper lugubriously points out that the rate of strikes was even higher in 1919 than during the war years, so we may face even more work stoppages soon. Finland is still surrendering; the Polish Resistance may cooperate with their Russian liberators, after all; after the contretemps over equal pay, it is now possible to again notice that education reforms are being held back by a shortage of teachers. I certainly hope that this, like the shortages of nurses and coal miners, does not turn out to have anything to do with wages, because then trying to hold teachers' wages down might prove to be a mistake! “Responsibility for Industrial Progress” The paper is pleased that it is now generally recognised that the improvement of British industrial prospects depends on improving productivity, and not mysterious magic and tricks. Yet many in industry suppose that Government support for research and development will be enough. It will not. Everyone must put on white lab coats and splash goggles and take long, insightful glances at test tubes held aloft. There must also be more technical education. In that area, Britain is apparently a backward country. Its old edge in industry led it to lazy ways of rules of thumb and practicality. Now there must be technical education. And, of course, there must be opportunity and status to the young people who “have been through this mill.” Unless they work in the Lancashire textile trades, in which case we shall wipe our feet of them and move on to wondering why no young people enroll for aeronautical engineering training. “Defending Assam” The paper notices that if the Japanese take Kohima, they can advance on Dimapur, which is still the only rail nexus between Bengal and Assam, just as it was when we toured the area with Grandfather in ’27. “Front Line Province” The Governor of Bengal promises that there will be no recrudescence of famine this year. The wheat and millet crops were poor, but the rice was good enough to make up the lack. Providing that loss of confidence in the food supply does not lead to hoarding, mind. Meanwhile, the Statesman of Calcutta is now running a series that was suppressed during the famine on the utter ineptitude of the Government of Bengal’s response to the famine. The paper finds it disheartening, and suggests that continuing concealment of vital statistics can only raise doubts about whether these have been remedied. “Absent Workers” It is not just miners who have absence problems. A look at industry in general shows a 5% absent rate in peacetime for men, 6-8% in wartime, 10-15% for women. These are for various reasons, but the reporting Industrial Health Board singles out fatigue as something that can be remedied by steps such as holding the work week to 60 hours for men and 55 for women. “The City President” Herr Goebbels, who is, of course, already the President of BerlinGau, is now made President of the city. The paper hopefully supposes that this is because of the extent of damage and chaos caused by the night area bombing offensive. American Survey “Wilkie’s Wake” Mr. Wilkie’s defeat in the Wisconsin Primaries, predicted only by everyone, has led him to withdraw from the race for the GOP nomination. The paper thinks that that was premature, and dreams of him going on to greater and grander things. Governor Dewey, who did not even contest the primaries, won over half the vote, suggesting that, as only predicted by everyone, he is the front-runner! But what of MacArthur, Stassen, Bricker, Warren, Taft, or the paper’s pet parakeet? Surely someone other than Dewey could win. It’s not over yet, surely? Governor Bricker? Commander Stassen? Anyone? American Notes “Holding the Line” Incredibly, there has been no increase in the cost of living, or in wages, over the last year. Price controls have been very successful, which is why they might be doomed. They’re digging their own grave, you see. Successful prince controls will lead to runaway inflation. How many papers does Mr. Janeway write for, anyway? Shorter Notes Some Texans are appalled that Coloureds are now by Supreme Court decision allowed to vote in the Democratic Primaries. Or the Republican primaries, should such a thing happen, and the organisers choose to exclude Coloureds in the first place. Or new measures will be found to exclude them, just as, when the “grandfather clause” was found unconstitutional, literacy and poll tax tests were substituted. The Census reports that the American population was 134.9 million on 1 July 1942, compared with 133.9 in 1941 and 132.8 in 1940. There are now more American women than men, ending the old American demographic exception. The World Overseas Latin Americans are excitable about communism, part 2. The British have stepped up their sisal buying in East Africa. It is thought that production of hard fibre will have risen during the war, and hoped that new uses have been found to absorb this production. “The Discount Market” I am not going to adventure comment; the Earl is the expert. Business Notes Canadian Pacific has had a good year; there is talk about oil, or talk about talks about petroleum; South African bonds are doing well; the Government is criticised for whitholding statistics, and answers that it is not going to change its policy on the eve of the Second Front; it looks like revisions in GRT measuring methods might finally come this year. And now.. the monthlies! Aviation, April 1944 Down the Years in Aviation’s Log 25 years ago, New Zealand announced plans for air mail, a variable-pitch propeller was tested and declared “eminently practical,” and the Post Office bought twelve DH-4s for the proposed New York-Chicago route. Fifteen years ago, the Air Corps adopts ethylene glycol coolant, Keystone Patrician flies 10,200ft carrying 36, Guatemala buys six all-metal Crawford planes, Chicago grocery firm equips a Ford trimotor as a “flying store.” Ten years ago, Congress ended the Air Mail experiment, the first S-42 flies, Sodium lights are used at Schipphol, Army request for 4000 planes put off by Congress, United makes a $2 million buy, including 6 12-seat sleepers. Line Editorial Junior is on about the disposal of Government war plants and equipment. In the last four years, the Federal Government has spent 15 billion dollars on plant, two-and-a-half-times private spending. One third has gone to aircraft and shipyards. A third to ordnance, a third to chemical plants and miscellaneous. About a third are suitable for peacetime commercial use and will be disposed without difficulty, and, with ingenuity, this might rise to half or even more. But the rest present difficulties. Fortunately, there are encouraging signs (George Committee Report, Truman Committee Report, appointment of Baruch) that this will be handled in a way that promotes freedom of action towards a competitive society. But more argle bargle.. Planning, inventory, sober second thought! Wherever possible, plant should be auctioned off at the best price. That would be fair! Where not, it should be leased at attractive rates to put it into effective use. Plant needed abroad can be exported. Plant needed by legitimate government enterprises such as the services and the TVA should be kept. Anything that does not fall into these categories should be liquidated, lest it lead to government or private monopolies. "Cousin H.C.", who dreams of a Lower Californian monopoly on steel, does not seem frightened by Junion, however. Editorial Neville thinks we need a powerful postwar air force. Just like Flight! It is a grand coincidence. Captain C. H. Schildhauer, USNR, “Global Air Transport and the Flying Boat’s Role.” Perhaps this is the fellow who is interchanging technical press secrets with that heartbreaker, G. Geoffrey Smith of Flight. Flying boats will be large and comfortable, with smoking lounges and dance floors and indoor swimming pools, just like the trans-Atlantic dirigibles that now ply our skies. E. H. Cargen, Sales Research Engineer, and L. J. Stosik, Market Analyst, Write Aeronautical Corp,” “A Three-Way ‘Fix’ On Aircraft Markets.” I) The Military market: scientific technical analysis shows that military spending fell after the War of 1812, Civil War, and WWI. Therefore, science says that the postwar military market will be small, about 5000-5500 aircraft/year. Four alternative levelling curves are shown, with the best forecast showing renewed international tensions requiring continued high armament spending, and the worst flowing from renewed isolationism, in which case it will be closer to 3500. Commercial demand is established as 298 a/c in Victory +5. (1949, based on defeating Germany by Christmas and Japan a year later.) This is scientific! Though even the authors have no way of estimating the private postwar market, though Raymond Hoadley, “Hope for the Aircraft Investor,” is apparently not the prompt launching of the world onto the road leading to World War III at the stroke of 1957 (ie, not waiting until 1967), but rather the orderly readjustment of the industry, which will take aviation stocks out of the “orphan” status that has kept them at low valuations. “Ernest G. Stout, “Experimental Determination of Hull Displacement.” Say you do not know precisely how much water the flying boat that you are designing will draw in practice. Good question! It’s hard to calculate, and it might be helpful to know before you sit down behind the controls for that first takeoff run! Well, here is an easy experimental method involving pressing your hull model underwater with gradually increasing weights. Words fail. But, on the other hand, one gets a sense of how the Mars and Lerwick got the way that they did. David B. Thurston, “Key Considerations in Pressurized Cabin Design” Uncredited, “Metal PLUS Plastic Makes New Aircraft Flooring.” This miracle flooring sells itself! And if it doesn’t, we can always buy space in Aviation. Commander Harry J. Marx, “Production-Line Remedies For Hydraulic Headaches.” In summary, you can do everything with aircraft hydraulics except make them work. A very dirty mechanic demonstrates how to pack clean parts. Articles on forming sheet aluminum and “near infrared” baking of engine parts at Jacobs follows, at which point we get to... J. S. Nielson and C. B. Mitchell, “Stretch Bend Unit Simplifies Metal Work,” which is a feature length advertisement for the new Goodyear Roto-Stretcher, developed by the Experimental Tool and Machine Design Division of Goodyear Aircraft. The one built in house for Goodyear is doing excellent work, and these two Goodyear-associated engineers want you to know that a Roto-Stretcher is right for you! “The A to Z of Servicing Cuno Filters” is helpful in case a Cuno filter has arrived in your shop and you have no idea how to get at the filter and service it. It turns out that “auto-clean” Cuno filters are very complicated. It frankly astonishes me that all of this has been designed and put into service in the last five years or so. “Field Maintenance of Bosch Magnetos” is helpful in case a Bosch magnetor has arrived… “Two Metalwork Units Do Work of Twenty. The proud inventors, both tradesmen at Northrop’s metal-forming shop, are shown smiling. My snap impression is that I would enjoy working with RalphFroelich in particular. He is, however, only a tradesman who has made something workaday to improve metalworking, not some transcendent mystery machine like a real inventor, such as Nikolai Tesla! “Bull’s-Eye Aim Makes Bombardiers” Bombardiers need training! Honest, Reggie, it is true. (Given your position, you might have noticed at one point.) The Norden Bombsight is the best thing ever, which would fall under the heading of things that your eldest tells me is not true, and the USAAF has established a vast apparatus to train new bombardiers, which is true. More interesting is the fact that while even the USAAF can only give them 85 hours in the air, trainee bombardiers do 450 hours on the ground, learning theory and reading maps, but also practicing in a special Link trainer! The point here, I suppose, is that the Trainer sounds fairly simplistic compared to schemes that I have seen elsewhere, with a simple “ bug” projected on the floor, similar to a battleship seen from 10,000 feet. Where is the scrolling countryside lit by faked Flak? Perhaps someone could sell something like that to the air force? Involving “television?” The paper reports on the “new” Albemarle, Sabre, and “Tony.” Side Slips We begin with an amusing anecdote about a silly girl riveter, young pilots who joke about how many hours it takes a freighter to cross the Atlantic, about pilots who lose their hearing after a few hundred hours in the air and turn it to their advantage by pretending that people are offering them a beer, and amusing doggerel about Goebbels and Goering. I mock heavily and without humour, because imitation…. Made-up people love Bonney Tools! Aviation News “Improved Planes at Lower Prices Seen Postwar,” says somebody. Why do fighters now go further? They have drop tanks, the latest brand new technology that has been around forever. Wright Field has two new wind tunnels ready to go. “Private flying is coming out of the superman class andn down to the common man via a drastic revision of air traffic rules…” The AAF is exploring the possibility of having a garden sale. Flyers posted on hitching posts is my suggestion. Telephone poles good too, if you’ve got them. Blaine Stubblefield thinks that everyone in Washington should be fired for being lazy and not doing anything. Other bits of news in his column include the fact that some in Washington want a postwar Air Force, and that others want there to be airports around the country and that despite rationing, you can still get a decent blended American whiskey in this town. And that’s Stubblefield, signing off until next month! America At War …Reports nothing that I couldn’t get from …I was going to say Time, but that’s too kind. Honestly, the news in the Montgomery-Ward catalogue is fresher. Aviation Manufacturing “February Production: Record 350 planes in one day for 8,760; Weight up 4%.” Four pages into the news insert comes the news that aircraft production is down 29 units over the January numbers. But the month was short, or we would have hit the 9000 a/c/month new minimum target required to hit the 100,000 vice 120,000 unit target for the year! Also, weight is up and we built a record number of aircraft on one particular day! No guilty consciences here, sir. Plant investment is projected at only $500 million this year as the effort winds down. The P-47 now has a four-blade Hydromatic propeller. Glenn L. Martin promises that the new model of “Mars” will be even better! B-24s made at San Diego are also now better, because they are a pleasing metallic silver rather than drab camouflage, adding an estimated 6 to 8mph top speed. At least Aero Digest is honest enough to admit that the lack of paint is labour saving. Aviation Abroad The Swedish air service is back in operation. The Tudor and Brabazon I are under construction. The “Boomerang” is in action. The paper picks up the Flight story about how German pilots are being kept away from flowers with distressing scents and adds its own unique touch: “A bouquet to the Japanazis!” Aviation Finance In brief, lots of aviation companies made lots of money during the war, but the stocks are not highly valued because the end of the war is likely to crimp demands for new warplanes. Wellwood Beall, looking in photo like the son of one of our clients (by the way, thank you for Mr. Johnston's file. I was being facetious in suggesting that we would lean on him for his father's unpaid passage, but am amused to note that my instinct was correct), has received some kind of award over something related to being another aviation figure who landed in the honey pot thanks to our pal Hitler. “Footprints Halt!’ An ad for some kind of adhesive doormat that cleans the soles of shoes of people entering a very clean room at a ballbearing plant is illustrated with a picture of a child’s bare feet. That is, the technology of 1944 is projected to 1955 again! Page over finds Kinnear missing the opportunity to suggest that its technology could have a domestic use in ten years. “Building Railroad Tracks for Electrons” is an ad celebrating Astatic’s “coaxial conductors.” Gives me a better sense of where the conversation is turning whenever the lads from the day turn up to visit your eldest and his wife. “For More War Work With Fewer Workers” What will our future be, when devices like this have done away with manual labour in 1955? Though I could write 1855 for all the inherent plausibility of it. Fortune, April 1945 This should be a quick read, as the entire number is devoted to Japan, and I cannot even begin to guess when we might be called upon to invest in the lands of the barbarians of Wa. I pick it up mainly in anticipation of that special outrage to which only Mr. Janeway can move me. For lack of any actual reportage, the number has been turned over toHerrymon Maurer, who has spent whole weeks in Japan in pursuit of his in-depth study of Eastern cultures. Known as the author of an “imaginative” account of Lao T’se, he is… He is One of Those. Enough said. Although Claude Buss and Shelly Mydans both recently repatriated from Japanese internment, are also represented. Neither, astonishingly, have a high opinion of the Japanese. Apparently, they, unlike other armies, select military police from the lower sort of recruits. “Issei, Nissei, Kibbei” The paper is upset about the internment of American Japanese, even though it’s not as bad as all that, and it is really all the Hearst Paper’s fault. Not that that nasty gossip Hedda Hopper has helped, with her allegations that released evacuees have been committing sabotage. “How Many Japanese?” It is supposed that the population of Japanese might rise by 1970 to 95 million, which is obviously too high for their land. This is the result of demographic transition. In the previous hundred years, Japan’s population moved from only 28 to 33 million. Industrialisation has had the effect of reducing birth rates. The point of the graphical comparison is that Japan’s curve lags that of England and Wales by 60 years. Before the war, Japan’s increase of a million a year exceeded that of America and also all new inhabitants of western Europe! To feed them with imports, Japan has customarily depended on imports paid for with consumer goods. Emigration has been difficult, and there was the hold Manchuria thing. What is left? The Japanese are big on commercial fishing, and greater agricultural productivity would help. Though not relevant, it is disconcerting to see the curve of population for England and Wales turn downwards in 1950. We did well to sell as much land as we did, when we did. I know that there is no direct relationship between population and real estate prices, but the one does tend to drive the other. It also illustrates just how tricky it is going to be to balance demand for housing against the future of the industry. No point in overinvesting in a sector that is going to be ebbing in the same way as the Lancashire cotton mills. Or steel. Do I repeat myself? I do! Unfortunately, it turns out that Mr. Janeway has no opinions worth printing on the subject of Japan and the Japanese, and I am deprived of my eagerly anticipated moment of righteous outrage. Until next time, Reggie, I remain your beloved Cousin. PS: I hope that you find time for this missive and do not spend it all looking at those wonderful baby faces. I see Grandfather in the boy. Do you?

Honestly, the gods have put, like, thirty seconds of serious attention into the world. Allfather: "There you go, freehanded this globe for ya'. Tots original." God of Mischief: "Da-a-ad. That's a straight screencap of The Only Fantasy Map You'll Ever Need." Allfather: Eh, my bad. Look, Big Brother Multiverse is on in, like, five minutes. Just go with it." God With Unpronounceable Five Syllable Name: "Does it have elves in it? Elves are awesome. Only my elves are called "aelves."" Goddess of Hotsy-Totsy Times: "Because they're different from other elves?" God With Unpronounceable Five Syllable Name: "Yeah. Their name starts with an 'A.' Varsuuvius is going to have to change his email sig line." God Who Wears All Black Clothes and Sneaks Around A Lot: "So you're officially saying as God of the Elves that Varsuuvius is a guy?" God With Unpronounceable Five Syllable Name: "Aelves, No. I don't know. I'm waiting to see how Order of the Stick turns out, just like everyone else. It's just that the aelves are going to be totally like the elves in OOTS. And Exalted. And Warhammer 40K. And Forgotten Realms. And maybe those creepy Scott Bakker books. And Gamma World." Goddess of Hotsy-Totsy Times: "Hunh? How would that even work? Oh, hey, God Who Wears All Black Clothes And Sneaks Around A Lot, what are you doing down on that island continent?" God Who Wears All Black Clothes and Sneaks Around A Lot: "Er, nothing. Certainly not creating a Dark Empire led by an Immortal Witch King. Because I'm not evil for sure, and it's completely okay to have me do a corner of the map. Also, done now, gonna go check Reddit." Goddess of Hotsy-Totsy Times: "Yeah, watevs, dude. I'd check it out, but I've gotta go down a fifth of Rockaberry-Flavour Vodka, fall out of my clothes, and do an RPG photo shot." God With Unpronounceable Five Syllable Name: "Are we done here? Anyone? Um, God of Miischief?" God of Mischief: "Don't look at me. I got more important things to do. My brother's passed out on the couch, and those eyebrows won't shave themselves!" ... And so the scene sets in Elysium, with a lonely God With Unpronounceable Five Syllable Name sulking, because no-one really gets him, logging on to World of Warcraft for some serious R/P. (He plays a girl elf alt. I mean ngirl aelf.)

The problem with Fires of Heaven is pretty typical of SF roleplaying. You have a big setting, lots of adventure hooks (Hey! Here's Orphan of the Galaxy, wouldn't that be cool?) and no clear adventure path for the players to track. So you end up with a bunch of mercenaries sitting in a bar waiting to be sent to shoot somebody, only they hijack the spaceship and go to the frontier planet and have a wilderness adventure that ends up being a dungeon crawl though the Lost Dread Space Cavern of the Ancient Elves until everybody loses interest because the rogue can't do a proper backstab with his his Very Big Gun and the GM is as happy as everyone else because it's getting tiring coming up with excuses as to why the Space Patrol doesn't come and arrest everybody. The alternative to this kind of setting tends to be equally directed. It's the Space Crusade and the DNA-Larceny Aelphs are loose in their space hulk! Go kill them, or the Dread Speaker of the House will kill you from a galaxy away with his Magico-Psionics! Terracide fixes that pretty neatly with a Space Apocalypse. Postapocalyptic roleplaing's main problem is that after three sessions immature players are finding turbolasers in abandoned USAF facilities, while mature ones are rolling dice to see if they can build a windmill. Space apocalypses are different, because you can make building a space-windmill into a pretty cool hard SF roleplaying adventure. Or so it seems to me. Ahem. Cheque, Grady?

In February of 1944, Fortune published a story about the demographic future of the human race. In a nutshell, due to cultural change, improvements in modern health and various other hand-wavy things, population growth had come to an end. Oh, sure, India was likely to grow from 350 to 550 million people by 1970, and China from perhaps 450 to who knew, depending on politics; but that was because they still had "old regime" demographics. As progress spread, so would slowing population growth, one would think. (Or maybe famine and floods would do the trick.) Elsewhere, America's population would stall out at 140 million, while Europe's populations were either already declining (France) or would eventually (Germany and Italy), with Britain in the middle. Its population decline would set in in the next decade. The upshot, as American economists had been warning since the late 1930s, was "secular stagnation:" the end to economic growth, and a slow immiseration of the population. The only reason that it would not end in Malthusian disaster was that population had stopped growing, too. In more concrete terms, in 1944, most people predicted a depression for the immediate postwar period. Some of the people who appointed themselves as spokesmen for the common man in America (syndicated columnists have always had their heads stuck up their rears, it turns out) diagnosed hope for the future --in the short term. People were eager to buy houses, cars, radios, clothes, fur coats. And they would. Others saw this as naivete. Unemployed people did not buy luxuries, and a weak manufacturing sector meant low employment. Manufacturing could hardly flourish when everyone basically had everything they needed. Once everyone had their new car, only "billboard engineering" could persuade anyone to replace it before the mid-1950s, and there would be mass layoffs in the automotive industry soon. And then.... In Britain, the story is even sadder. The interest rate had fallen well below the rise in the cost of living, implying that saving money was a bad idea. Meanwhile, it seemed that the only way of checking rises in the cost of living was through massive wage repression. The leading (and liberal, in the old sense) business daily, The Economist, was all but waging war on coal miners, the key sector whose output determined the production of all of British industry. Coal miners militantly demanded wage raises, even as coal production was flat or declining. Yet the flip side of those demands was that young people had been refusing to go into coal mining for over a decade. One of the more important reasons for poor returns in coal was that the labour force was aging and becoming ever more less productive. How could the miners be replaced if no-one wanted to be a miner? In the war crisis, the British Government had turned to diverting some conscripts into the mines; compelling them, in other words, to become coal miners. And although that was a "war emergency," British society of the era was hugely patrimonial. It tended to assume that young men (never mind young girls!) would be directed into work by their fathers, or by society in loco parentis, and stay there, reasoning that years of experience put into one field could not be thrown aside by changing careers in your mid-20s, when you were supposed to be well on your way ot establishing a family and a home for them. Conscript miners, at the end of their terms, were under huge pressure to stay in the coal mining villages and make the best of it, whether or not they wanted to be coal miners. Slavery, in short. It wasn't a particularly harsh slavery, and it wasn't going to be extended in peace. You would think. But how else was "wage repression" going to be achieved? And if it wasn't, what were the economic prospects of the "rentier class," who would see their fortunes slowly eaten away by price inflation? So that's the picture in 1944. We now know that it was wrong. We know that an era of unprecedented prosperity, and First World population growth, was on its way. Even in Britain, which would suffer a particularly long and harsh period of postwar austerity. But, if we turn to the papers in 1947, we find not the slightest acknowledgement that this was going on . Britain was importing coal from America. IN fact, all of Europe was! Right across the continent, miners were aging and becoming less productive, and there was a deficit of new entrants into the mining workforce. All the while, The Economist shook its head over the miner's crazed demands for more money to do the work. Nothing could be done. Nothing at all. And without coal, Britain could not make things, and if it could not make things, it could not export them and earn foreign exchange to pay for imports with which to make things! The entire global economy was grinding to a halt. You might as well buy ammunition, diesel and survival rations with your pound notes right now. In America, the papers (well, The Economist, again), lugubriously shook their head over poor housing start numbers as June turned into July. Late 1945, 1946, and early 1947 had, indeed, shown the predicted, depression-level numbers for economic decline. The silly and wooly-headed, The Economist said, thought that was all transitional pain from the changeover from war to peace production. But look at the housing start numbers! So depressing. Of course, there's such a thing as winter... By August, the numbers had been updated to show the largest homebuilding boom in American history that summer. The Economist shook its head. It can't last, the leading editorial said in the first week of August, confidently predicting a return to recession in the next few weeks. The moral? There has never been a more complete turnaround in economic trends and activities than occurred in 1944--47. Ever. Objectively, July of 1947 saw the American economy clear the gantry of "conversion" and start its climb to the Moon. And business writers, right in the middle of it, could not even see it happening. The reason, I think, is pretty clear from The Economist's war on the coal miners. The enemy, the ultimate enemy, was wage growth. The employer would rather live in a postapocalyptic hellhole, fighting for the last drop of "go juice" then pay another cent to the working classes, the paper assumed. Or, rather, told people to think. Because only wage repression could keep investment income growing faster than inflation, and so keep the kind of people who read The Economist happy.

I can bring a jello salad!

Violence. The cause, and cure, of all life's problems.

Arise, etc. This exercise in Bubbamancy brought to you in the name of Muenstercheese.

They respawn at start of level? I was kidding my nephew the other day that I'm going to write a new adventure game with a radical new setting where the castles are built on the ground, and not mid-air.

I've always taken the paladin as a warrior who gains special benefits from his spiritual excellence. They are saints, whatever the spiritual tradition you, or the game universe, follows, means by that word. The tricky part is defining "spiritual excellence." If holiness exists in an enchanted universe, a paladin can work miracles, especially of healing. If spirituality is a practice, than spiritual excellence means excellent practice, and your kung fu is strong. The modern default makes "faith" something that the believer must hold onto in the face of rampant secularism, and the paladin becomes a person whose immovable convictions somehow make them a better warrior. (I think that this is best modelled by the old "protection from evil" aura, and immunity to fear magic sometimes seen in paladin packages. If you don't want to get into that, assume the default setting and give the paladin some Limitations to go with a Deadly Strike, and Hands of a Healer. My understanding is that this is a default to the "enchanted universe" model, and paladins, being saints, have the power to work miracles. Clerics, on the other hand, are authorised practitioners of cult, and not necessarily spiritually excellent practitioners of cult. (That is, clerics, unlike paladins, do not have to be saints.) Their ability to perform divine magic flows from this role as practitioners of cult. If they can "cast" marriage, surely they can perform exorcisms. If they carry out sacrifices, surely they can read the omens and foretell or influence the future. There are numerous spells that we are in general agreement that clerics should be able to cast, such as Control Weather, Holy Word and Cure Light Wounds, so it is not much of a stretch to extend their spell list to get, say, Flight and Alter Reality into it. Should paladins be able to cast clerical spells? Does your paladin have the power to perform marriages? This, it strikes me, is what multiclassing is for.

There were a couple of movies about this. Not that I've seen them. Or know anything about them. Or have heard of them.

Postblogging Technology, March 1944, II: A Pinch In Time Saves Nine Mother and babies resting comfortably. Actually, Mrs. Cook is flat out, with the twins by her, and the new Turkish nanny looking out for both. Funny how a Turkish girl looks Chinese and talks American with a Chinese accent. Hi. You probably never heard of me, but this is Vince Murphy here. The babies were on their way when I left for my double shift, and they came an hour after I got back. Not as long a delivery as my Mammy's first, but hard on everyone. Mrs. Judith put a brandy in the landlord and set him to bed before settling down herself. My Mammie has a little one of her own to look after, came last week, the Captain's on a slow cruise on some lame-duck carrier coming back from Hawaii, Larry's driving the doctor home, and that leaves me as the adult of the house. And now I have this here courier at the door to pick up your mail. I scraped up what's on the desk in the Landlord's study, but I remember how my Dad worried out a furrow on the floor, and figure I'd add my own touch, which, well, you see. I figure this is on the first page, not that I read Chinese any to know. P. Vincent Murphy. (That's me.) My Dearest Reggie: I am a little hurt that the Earl has so little faith in my judgement. I understand that he is inclined to be impatient when I make snide little comments in the face of the recommendation of the Economist itself that we invest in "Cousin H.C." I believe that The Economist is wrong about this, and surely their California correspondent's silly comments about water rights should underline his credibility? In my defence, I offer the events of the past few weeks. I refer to them cryptically, I admit, but you know my business of the last few weeks, and most of my trip's consequences are playing out in the news. If "Cousin H.C." and "E. F.," if you know who I mean, trust my judgement.... As for my little game with "Miss V.C.," whatever you have heard from her mother, that is all it is. She is very disappointed that her investigations at Sacramento turned up no further information about her "McKee" forebears, but, nothing daunted, brings me the Yerba Buena indenture book to point out a name with eyebrows cocked. I dissemble: "Chinese family names come first," I say. "It is a coincidence." "I know," she answers. Then she pulls out the popular biography and points to the alias that Bing Oh Mah took his Hudson's Bay Company indenture under. It is ironic that a half-caste guttersnape from old Canton could come out on top of his crew here in America; but, after all, he probably took after his EIC sailor father enough to be Black Irish in all but accent. "Coincidence," I repeat, but she only puts a dinner club napkin from my Chicago visit down on the desk without comment. I thought that I had left that lying out for nothing! A blank stare back is but a snare draws the young lady ever closer. One thing, though. Do you know from your sources if the old man left the country at some point? Because his grandson once told me over too many drinks that he first came to the Coast in Gold Rush days.... Time, 13 March 1944 International The Finns are surrendering more, and, for novelty’s sake, have sent a female ambassador to do it. Some Americans, rounded up in France when Vichy was occupied, are now returned from internment in Baden-Baden. Deep in the countryside, they have the impression that German public morale is still holding up, buoyed by brute statistics. Germany and her allies have 200 million people, 18 million soldiers, vast and increasing war production, massive fortifications against which the Allies must spend themselves. The Commons is agog over talk that the V-Cigaret tastes like horse dung. Or Indian tobacco, whichever is worse. There are automobiles in Bermuda, now. Koreans find Japanese arrogant and oppressive. Malaria is raging in Egypt. Egyptians cite malnutrition for the spike in deaths and blame the British, while the British (and the paper) blame the landlords. Whoever is to blame, malaria-carrying mosquitoes are certainly spreading northwards with the rising Nile. Vichy, in an unexpected turn of events, is turning anti-Semitic. Wait, did I say “unexpected,” Reggie? The casinos in Monaco are closed. The paper notices that things are not as they could be in Italy, and unloads an emergency supply of condescension in the liberated region. Also failing to develop to the paper’s satisfaction, Argentina. Brazil, on the other hand, is colourful, Latin, and cooperative. The paper asks whether the Second Front has been postponed, perhaps at the behest of the Air Marshals, whether there is something the matter in the Burma theatre, whether the Administration has a policy on Germany, Italy, Poland, de Gaulle, Finland? Answers are unclear. Hint: Perfidious Albion. Various clergy think that we should not be bombing German civilians. Blowing up various places around New Guinea, on the other hand, is fine, as only natives, and occasionally General MacArthur live there, and you can always tell the General by his (Philippine) Field-Marshal’s cap. 7th Cavalry is involved in fighting off frenzied Japanese night attacks on Los Negros Island. Words fail. The Russians are advancing. The “little Blitz” is driving Londoners back into the tube, although the paper cannot help quoting an anonymous expert criticising the quality of German bombs. Please do not taunt the German air force, anonymous expert. The paper notices that the “full scale” bombing attack against Germany has only been going on for two weeks now, and celebrates the heroes of the American infantry who have, over the last seventeen days, made and held a bridgehead across the Rapido. The Germans are attacking ships in the Anzio roads with rocket-assisted guided glide bombs. Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, RCN, notices that German submariners have high morale due to only doing three tours per year, high quality leaves, and good food. However, recent prisoners have been more polite and less arrogant, suggesting a change in the albeit still highly Nazi corps. Gigantic German five-engined planes have been seen in France. Among famous soldiers and sailors: Alfred and George Vanderbilt, both lieutenants and commanders of PT boats in the south Pacific. The paper has a picture of them greasy, from maintenance work. I do not, as my copy was dropped in a broken bottle of milk by the postman. I do, however, have this. * Paulette Goddard, who is not a soldier or sailor, but did fly “over the Hump” to entertain troops in China; Joseph Wright Alsop, Jr. who likes to flit through the war, is currently with Chennault’s staff. Jesse Stuart, “Kentucky’s hillbilly novelist-poet” has just passed his pre-induction physical. Alan Ladd, discharged as too brittle by the Army last fall, is rumoured to be about to be re-taken. Missing in Action this week: P-47 ace Major Walter Carl Beckham, and P-51 pilot Wau-Kau Kong, previously noticed. Domestic Five veterans’ organisations proposed that the prospective 11 million veterans of WWII get a bonus of $4500 each. The paper claims that “ober citizens blinked as if they had been slugged” at word of Trillions for Bonuses. Gentlemen, that is how much it is going to cost. There is no point deluding yourself on the subject, or you will just be slugged later. In the mean time, may I humbly suggest a compromise: a home loan guarantee to the value of, say, $5000? Think of it as an investment whose dividends will pay those trillions. The South Carolina legislature denounces all organisations seeking “the commingling of the (white and Negro) races upon any basis of equality as un-American.”The paper points out that the real issue is that Coloured teachers get $70/month in South Carolina, White teachers $90. I would take this a step further. The ostensible injustice is racial, but since men in war work can easily make $1/hour, the real injustice is the criminal underpayment of South Carolina teachers of both races. And Christians have the nerve to call Chinese heathens. Southern Senators, led by Tom Connally of Texas, might be using their influence on foreign policy to expert pressure on the President on racial and labour issues. Senators Wagner of New York and Taft of Ohio, thinking things much too peaceful and non-anti-American in the Middle East, introduce a resolution calling for a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. General Marshall came before the Senate to ask that they hold off inflaming Arab opinion until after the war, when we shan’t need them anymore. Republican William S. Bennet nearly beat Tammany’s James H. Torrens in New York’s 21st Congressional District, no doubt foretelling a massive Coloured swing against the New Deal. Mr. Janeway? Is that you? The new Governor of Louisiana celebrated with a victory lap in the hay wagon that brought him to town. Awful, rickety, improvised relief trains are pulling great loads of stranded Florida tourists home after the transportation infrastructure threatened to collapse under the load of would be escapees taking a spring break. Looking back in review as I prepare this packet for the courier, I can only say that there is more urgent news about transportation failures to Obligatory Canadian news includes a notice that, unexpectedly, Canadians have not flocked to butcher shops to exploit the (temporary) end of meat rationing with an orgy of buying, and that Canadian authorities are attempting to clamp down on over-telephone sales of dubious stocks by “wheedle-wackers,” or American con-men, and word thatTappan Adney is a Renaissance genius who knows the ways of the Miami Indians and makes his own pickles. And also has compromising photographs of the Luces. Local draft boards are having more and more difficulty in finding good men, with astonishing rates of rejection for neuropsychiatric illness. The question that I have, cynic that I am, is. . . Actually, I suppose I needn’t continue after esuggesting that one could approach such news cynically. The Civil Aviation Authority is now recruiting married couples to go up to Alaska to run “isolated communication stations along the country’s farthest north air routes.” Homes are provided with electrical refrigerators and all other modern conveniences. Right outside their doors, the paper helpfully notes for those who have not yet grasped the point, “is the Alaskan wilderness.” Better than inviting it in, I suppose. Science, Technology & Business The Army is trying out “portable” oil pipelines of 4 and 6” diameters. The steel pipe segments are spirally constructed, like soda straws (if that tells you anything), a mile of pipeline with auxiliary equipment weighs only 13 tons, average capacity is 5000bbls/day, and it all goes up like a Mechano set. Engineer Petroleum Distribution Units are trained by the Army Service Forces at Camp Claiborne, Louisana. It beats storming beaches, I should think. Navy fliers who have whispered behind waving hands of a dream plane that combines the best features of fighter and bomber, with the fire-power of a small battleship, as big a jump ahead of the pistol-hot Hellcat as that airplane was ahead of the Wildcat, finally have the Grumman F7F. The Truman Committee report on the Navy’s disastrous tank-lighter programme has been released, after being embargoed for a year. The shorter version is that the Higgins design was better but that the Navy resisted and persisted with its own. The longer includes a transcript of a phone conversation (source not revealed by the Committee) between Captain John Crecca of the Boston Navy Yard and Commander Edward E. Roth of BuShips. Senator Truman does not fool around. The paper reports that the New York Zoological Soceity has been able to keep “fish, guinea pigs and monkeys alive under completely germless conditions.” That is, a germ-free life is possible, with all that implies for health in the exciting age to come. An interesting science story revives the thinking of old William Gilpin. It turns out that, besides being an obnoxious old-fashioned confidence man, he was a scientist! For it was he who proposed that America would play a master role in the history of civilisation akin to that of Rome by virtue of being a bowl-shaped continent, unlike Europe and Asia, which are inverted bowls. Also, its population will rise to a billion. This is the first good I hear of Governor Gilpin, but I rather wonder about the abrupt insight of Bernard de Voto (Harper Monthly’s “Easy Chair Editor”) that he is some kind of forgotten prophet. Unless it may be of the easy money to be made from selling already-owned sagebrush to eastern investors. Though, to be fair, that is a prophecy on which De Voto seems to be making book. An 18-year old welder in Mobile was taken to the hospital with meningitis two weeks ago. Refused admission, the head of the sick girl’s rooming house also tried to refuse her until the driver forced his way in. Mobile. She died the next day. Mobile is one of the towns worst hit by the doctor shortage, and this makes the current meningitis outbreak --23 in February, with a death rate of 25%-- especially frightening. The Army and Navy have a 3% rate. Charles Sorensen has resigned as production boss of Ford Motors. Well, someone had to take the blame for Willow Run, and it was Sorensen's time to go. Not that I do not feel guilty. Speaking of sudden retirements of executives, Andrew Moffett, late of the Rockefeller oil empire, is on the war path against the Middle East oil plan. The American industry thinks that there is no shortage of American oil, and that American investment in the Middle East is a boondoggle, or against the Atlantic Charter, or something. Perhaps it is unconstitutional? surely a Southern Senator can be found. The Texas vegetable harvest in the Rio Grande is at risk because of the failure of trucks needed to get it to market –and labour to harvest it. Jahco’s Bill Jack came to Washington to throw a five course meal for 80 Congressmen and 180 guests, at which he gave a talk about the need for renegotiation to guarantee Jahco a 5% profit on gross war business, or $5 million, on top of his much publicised $891,000 salary. Mr. Jack seems astonishingly inept for a man of his estate. I hope that he does not try to manage his own fortune. Arthur D. Whiteside, President of Dunn & Bradstreet, is the latest to warn of postwar economic disaster, foreseeing a glut of postwar consumer production. His solution: production control on a 1939 basis. While this will certainly keep prices high and so prevent a glut, retailers think it rubbish, and propose the release of Federal control soonest, followed by manufacturers rushing into the market, with the Devil taking the hindmost. Says American Retail Federation Chairman Fred Lazarus, Jr., “We cannot get a $135 billion economy out of 1939 quotas set on an $80 billion economy.” The Truman committee seems to agree with Mr. Lazarus rather than with Mr. Whiteside, but the key thing here seems to me is that if we do not have a postwar depression on the merits, we could easily have one by following the wrong course, and it is hard to know whether the right course is to be set by Whiteside or by Lazarus. You can see why I would prefer to sidestep the whole matter and focus on products-and-markets-yet-to-be, however much the Earl scoffs at my utopian attempts to escape into the future. Education Small American colleges such as Kenyon may escape the worst effects of the curtailment of the Army Specialized Training Program by taking in an expanded new class of 18 year-olds through the Army Specialized Training Program Reserve. It sounds like a compromise to me, Reggie. It is suggested that there be United Nations inspectors in postwar Axis schools, so as to nip militarism in the bud. I certainly do not see any practical difficulties, Reggie. (It is a good thing that German and Japanese schools teach in English!) The paper quotes one critic who thinks that American schools will need such inspectors at least as much as German and Japanese. Due to backwardness, you see. Press and Entertainment Trini Barnes, Colonel McCormick’s niece, publishes a leftist monthly, which the paper finds amusing. The standard price of an American newspaper is up to 5 cents. Freddie Kuh is the best American foreign correspondent, and female reporters (“newshens”) demand access to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. MGM has spiked plans for a remake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the grounds that it would cause racial tensions. I am not sure that it counts as entertainment, but Robert Sherrod’s Tarawa: The Story ofa Battle is out in time to prepare Americans for “many other bigger and bloodier Tarawas . . .” Time, 20 March 1944 International The paper has its turn dilating about the coal situation in Britain. The paper sees it as being as much a fight between miners and their unions as it is between miners and the government. The paper finds the Prime Minister’s campaign for Basic English amusing. Latins are excitable. An amusing anecdote from Denmark, where crowds lingered after a visit by Field-Marshal Rommel passed by, when asked why, a wit replied that now they were waiting for Montgomery. The murder mystery of the Pajama Girl is solved in Melbourne. In an amusing incident, General Royce of the USAAF flew a DC-3 out into the Arabian desert to find King Ibn Saud’s hunting party and presented him with various princely gifts, courtesy of the American taxpayers, employees of the Rockefeller oil empire excepted. The larger gift, part of Lend-Lease (the better to assist the King in any future Axis-fighting endeavours) was a freighter load of 7 million silver coins valued at $1,250,000. If only a ship could reach Chungking. . . Argentina, apparently, dreams of uniting Latin America against the United States. Which sounds quite practical. The paper covers the syndicated columnists of America on the subject of foreign policy with even more irony and sarcasm than I am capable of. I would be surprised if Dorothy Thompson did not have words with Mr. Luce when next they cross paths. Other sarcastic asides are noted in the context of a meeting between former Vichy ambassador to America Henry-Haye and former American ambassador to Vichy, Douglas MacArthur II. (Nephew to the general and son-in-law to Senator Barkley.) Various people are concerned that the Nazis are trying to trick us into bombing Rome. Various apparently pro-Russian Americans think that Russia should be more pro-Polish. Summoned for induction this week in an ironic turn, the War Manpower Commission’sJulius Albert Krug, 6 foot 3, 36 year-old father of two. The paper cites unnamed sources who suggest, with no obvious irony, that the current Battle of Berlin is in the “wearing-out phase” that precedes the decisive cavalry charge.Field-Marshal Haig was unfortunately not available for comment. A story follows which is the first-person account of a B-17 ball turret gunner on the big raid to Berlin. He knows that 68 Fortresses and Liberators were lost, and I think it tells under his bravado. Interesting to note that he saw some Polish RAF pilots flying Mustangs over the city. Not an escort flight, exactly, but a greater guarantee of safety than our boys have, notwithstanding what you've told me about your higher unit command's adventures with night fighter escorts, Reggie. An amusing story about how, after Private First Class William Rozak wrote home to the effect that they could not come by eggs in Britain, his mother sent him a dozen, dipped in paraffin and packed in sawdust, which came out just fine. I think I shall go down and get myself a tea egg. Do I make you hungry, or jealous, or both? The paper admires the manliness of Nikolai Voronov, now raised to the title of Chief Marshal of Red Artillery. The cavalry gets the glory while the artillery does the work. Meanwhile, the Germans continue to retreat, and the Rumanians continue to surrender. HMS Penelope is lost. The paper posthumously promotes her to a 6” cruiser. The paper is impressed with General Stlwell’s campaign in northern Burma. Domestic Having killed the Zionist resolution in the Senate, the President invited Rabbis Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver to the White House in order to have it both ways. Lew Douglas has left the Administration again. Back in 1934, he resigned on principle, aghast at its spending. This March, he leaves the Shipping Administration with thanks for a job well done. The War Labour Board has ordered an end to the AFL no-recordingstrike against RCA, Columbia, and RCA-Victor. It has ruled that “canned” music is not a threat to musician employment, and that therefore no payment should be made out of these companies' profits into a union-run unemployment fund. The paper is skeptical about the fund, to which the other recording companies of course contribute, and hopes that the music-canning industry will not be burdened with this special fee any further. If the strike really is settled, which is unclear, it may have some implications for our friend. “Dimpled, 27 year old” Dorothy Vredenburgh, the selected convenor of the 1944 Democratic Convention, proposes that the 1944 election will go Democratic down the line.Silly, silly girl, says the paper, especially given the Republican win in Colorado this week and falling approval numbers for the President in Iowa. Baron Sempill was in Nova Scotia last week discussing plans to transplant Scots from his estates in Scotland (of course) to lands that he would procure in Nova Scotia. It was amusing to relate that he is successor to the lordship patent originally issued for Nova Scotia by James I, although the patent was extinguished by the transfer of the province to France by the peace of 1632. I should imagine that a few years of peace will make the first settlement mentioned about as relevant as the second. The Navy’s new depot at Hueneme has opened for business, as a new port with poor inland access is just what the coast needed. Senator Vandenberg has thrown a tantrum about the Army’s War College Library and General MacArthur that is amusing but rather much to get into. The Army has a new ace, P-47-flying Walker Mahurin, who shot down three Germans in the big Berlin raid. With Boyington MIA and Hanson dead in a crash, Mahurin is tied with Donald Aldrich and Kenneth Walsh, both Marine Corsair pilots. Navy Hellcat flyers just do not tangle with enemy aircraft often enough to be in the running, and P-38 pilots are falling behind, with Bong highest at 21. In related news, Colonel Karl L.Polifka, commander of the first specialised P-38 aerial photography squadron has been grounded, as too valuable to lose. Any gen, Reggie? Private Dale Maple, who recently deserted from Camp Hale in Colorado with two German priosners, has been caught,and now other servicemen might be implicated. 2ndLieutenant Beaufort Swancutt is to be arraigned on five charges of murder for a shooting spree at Camp Anza, near Riverside. The Army has now to explain how a man with a long civilian police blotter was allowed to first enlist, and then be commissioned. As well it should. It is not as though accounts of mania are lacking in this fallen world of ours. Science, Technology & Business News of the astonishing new miracle invention, “Stabinol,” which eliminates mud. That is, an addition of Stabinol to dry soil binds it in a water-resistant way, making it useful as a road bed. Well, I have heard that only miracles will push the Ledo Road through. Dr. Charles Greeley Abbot, grey, 72-year-old Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, has discovered a way of using solar radiation to predict the weather. And by “predict,” I mean that droughts in the (Old) Northwest will seriously lower the level of the Great Lakes in 1974 and 2020. AD. I, for one, predict that the Smithsonian will be found to have a crank working as its Secretary. This will happen sometime soon after late March of 1944. Doctors Herbert McLean Evans and Choh Hao Li of the [which?] University of California have extracted a pure human growth hormone from the pituitary glands of cadavers. I was going to make a joke about football and alumni boosters, but the story goes on to note that someone suggested making mass use of the hormone to rid the Japanese of their inferiority complex, and I yield the field The new Journal of Neurosurgery publishes claims of a new invention, Fibrin Foam, a, natural wound sealant. A new world record for the mile has been set by a short, bespectacled divinity student named Gilbert Dodds, who shaved a tenth of a second off the four minutes, 7.4 seconds time with an amazing burst of last-quarter speed. Dr. Alfred Koerner, a Manhattan gynecologist, has gloomily predicted that two out of every ten servicemen ill return from World War II sterile, leading to a postwar ratio of fertile men to women of 89-100, vice the normal peacetime ratio of 106-100. In past wars, the commonest causes of sterility in soldiers have been mumps, fevers, gastric poisoning and gland disorders. In this one, wounds and shock from mines, torpedoes and bombs may also increase the sterility rate. The good doctor therefore proposes that discharge papers list whether a serviceman is sterile, to avoid the lifelong unhappiness caused when sterile people marry fertile ones, and there is no baby-making. Well, there is baby-making, but you understand me, right, Reggie? What I am saying here is that there is something in the air in Manhattan that makes people crazy. Wall Street is up. Various reasons are proposed by dyed-in-the-wool pessimists who expect it to start plunging again soon. These include: Roosevelt bashing bringing spirits up, the Baruch report suggesting that Washington will throw money at reconversion, thinking that the end of the war is delayed by the slogging in Italy and the Second Front, a mysterious quality called the “character of the market/” Or, even, and this is a stretch, good profit numbers from 1943 from bellwether stocks General Motors and Du Pont. (I shall plump with “war to go on longer!” Of course, I do not really believe that, as it would involve conceding that Mr. Janeway is right about something, but I do hope that you press this point with the Earl, omitting my scandalous cynicism. In my own defence, I believe in my prognostications, but do not expect them to be convincing. I suppose that it is too late by 40 years to dissemble my arrant cynicism to the Earl, though. Not that the paper is helping.) The Truman Committee’s long awaited report on the magnesium industry is in. Dow did an excellent job, while the rest of the industry essentially just extracted money from the taxpayer. We are now well over any likely production needs for magnesium. Most of the nation’s half-billion-dollar investment will have to be written off as a war loss. Or we shall all be lounging about on lightweight magnesium lawn furniture soon, though perhaps with a cautious eye out for sparks drifting from the bonfire. Six Liberty Ships have now cracked open in Alaskan waters this winter. The Maritime Commission, in its defence, reports that serious structural failures have occurred in “only” 62 of the 1,917 Liberty Ships delivered up to 1 February, and the causes, have hitherto been mysterious. CIO National Maritime Union President Joseph Curran, invited to present testimony to the Truman Committee, accused not hazy, and technical factors but poor loading and handling. Captain Walter A. Brunnick, skipper of the Henry Ward Beecher,answered, “Flapdoodle.” For Curran, the blame lies on skippers. For Captain Brunnick, I assume it lies on builders. Common sense would suggest that building 2000 ships in three years in inexperienced yards with the product of over-worked steel mills is the cause. But who wants to hear common sense? Leather supplies are down 18% from the 1942 high and will continue to decline even as the Army and Navy take ever more of the supply. Therefore, the ration for shoes is down to 2 pairs/year, and the shortage will continue after the peace, as relief agencies have taken up prospective quotas. Incidentally, shoes are the third most sought after item in the recent rash of hijackings, after liquor and rayon. Arts, Entertainment, Press Printer’s Ink denounces the recent overuse of the word “yummy” in advertising, and blames the recent influx of female copywriters due to the male side of the industry being off billboarding Hitler to death. The paper quite liked With the Marines at Tarawa, a cinematic experience of real war. Congressman Robert Hale of Maine reports being pinched in the rear while chatting with Lord Halifax at a British Embassy tea. Turning gravely, he met the gaze of a woman who babbled apologetically that she had mistaken him for Justice Frankfurter. Now that’s astory, Reggie. Flight, 23 March 1944 Leaders “The Hard Nut of Cassino” Guilty consciences? Not a bit of it! There are to be “seven Brabazons.” These are to include a 100 tonner, a landplane of 100,000lbs all up weight (so a puny little thing) for trans-Atlantic flying, allowing a stop in Newfoundland, a slightly smaller 70,000lb cruising at 220mph and carrying twelve, when you have to be there slightly sooner, and are even richer than other trans-Atlantic passengers, a 40,000lb type, a jet liner, and then some odds and end of a little 8 seater of 8000lbs, for picnics in the Cotswolds. Or maybe a Halifax conversion? Something like that. Also, perhaps, a flying boat, at which the paper’s ears perk up. It all sounds up in the air to me, Reggie. War in the Air Russians win victories! Planes were involved! Marshal Stalin even admits it! Mussolini’s press secretary was killed in a recent air raid, no great loss, the paper thinks, though I am sure that Mr. Grey will send a wreath. This week’s box score shows 116 Allied bombers lost in the West. An airlanding operation in Burma involved planes! And Indian troops! Here and There Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Henry MacLeod Frazer has been appointed Director-General of Repair and Maintenance at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. wonder if those who inveigh against the air marshals understand that the air force is training lieutenant generals to run engine shops. Oh, well, I am sure that we can find some fustian admiral to claim that commanding a destroyer flotilla is good preparation for such work. The He219 is announced. A transport B-24 has made the 2100 mile flight from San Francisco to Honolulu in 9 hr 27 minutes, with a healthy tailwind. Twenty-eight air training schools in Canada will close this year. Group Captain MacIntyre of Scottish Aviation predicted that jets will make the flight from Canada to Britain in only 3-and-a-half hours at some vague point in the future. Unless “unnecessary conservatism” slows down aeronautical progress, which it probably will. Studies in Recognition We notice the Halifax, FW 200, Junkers 290, Heinkel 177 this week. Oddly for this feature, I had not even heard that some of these were going out of service! “Sir R. Fedden Reviews Anglo-American Efforts” The man who was sacked for failing to bring in the sleeve-valve engine in a timely way thinks that American aviation is much better run than British. Short notes allege that Americans are anxious to keep up with Britain in civil aviation (Time is, anyway), and point out that British bomb tonnage carted over and dumped on Germany has grown much more impressively than bomber sorties through December of 1943. “Napier Sabre II: Twenty-Four Cylinder, Sleeve-valve, Liquid-cooled Twin-crankshaft Engine Now in Full Production.” Were I not on tenterhooks waiting on your daughter-out-of-law, I would now amuse myself counting just how many times the paper has announced this sing-song apparatus. Behind the Lines Latins are excitable. The Belgian Fascist Youth League is recruiting for the Junkers works. “Engineer Rocca” is working on a high-altitude engine made up of two joined Hispano-Suiza 12Ys with a three stage supercharger with clutches on two of three impellers, two coaxial, electrically controllable, independently feathering airscrews, and two flexibly coupled extension shafts. Someone has some time on his hands. Perhaps the completed machine can go into the six-engined Latecoere flying boat, “Marshal Petain.” German Overseas Radio claims that the Allies, having found difficulties with the “relay” fighter escort method, are relying instead on massed escort by long range fighters, which make up for their inferiority to German interceptors with numbers, introducing the mass principle of combat to the air. So the Western air forces have joined the Red Army in wearing down German superiority with numbers. Well, the Axis actually outnumbers the Russians by population –by quite a bit during the decisive days, and I am no more convinced by the claims about air forces. “Seven Post-war Types” The House is in a fuss over the Brabazon Plan. It is all very well to plan a fleet of brand new airliners, but what about jets? On the Labour benches, concern over who benefits from civil aviation. Air Commodore Helmore answers that people will have to pay for speed, so that fast flying will be for the rich –at first. He hoped that, by general social improvements, the cost of flying will come within everyone’s reach, and the aircraft will be the omnibus of the future. Mr. Hore-Belisha, stewing on the backbenches since being removed as Secretary of State for War, intervenes to point out the need for a proper airport near London. Interesting, as the one thing Hore-Belisha has always been good for is pouring concrete. “Sir Stafford Cripps Surveys Output” Fedden is wrong. He notes that manpower per Lancaster has fallen 38% in the last 12 months, while for the Spitfire it has been a reduction of 27.5% over three years, impressive given that the Spitfire of 1943 is totally transformed from that of 1940. The amount of unskilled labour has risen by 500%, although the proportion is much less on new types. Some 40% of all new production is on spare parts. “Correspondence” This is “Mrs. J.C.s” favourite section, I have left it for last in my composition, for, as we came up a week past the due date, nameless fears clenched me every time I thought on her. I come back to it on this night of ages, as I try to distract myself, my heart clenching and fingers slipping as I draw those characters, Reggie. These will be the first twins in our line since 1779. Heaven is telling us something. Oh, when will this infernal night end? Patience, I tell myself. We have the best doctor in the valley, and Judith, who has seen more of these than she has summers, and now An Way. A serviceman, “Projet,” leads off, writes to explain the thermodynamics of jet propulsion. Clearly the limiting temperature of the blades is crucial, and, as always in engine design, materials science will lead the way. Then we have “correspondence” in the old style, with R. C. Abel writing to propose a “Jet-driven Plastic Flying Wing” flying boat. I would parse the letter, but my eyes will not focus on the print. A service correspondent and J. C. Land write on the “best aircraft in the world,” (they are British, remarkably enough!), and “I. M. Leach,” an odd pseudonym, I must say, writes on B. J. Hurren’s claim that a single-seat torpedo-bomber-fighter like the old Blackburn Dart would be useful in the fleet, while Peter Masefield delineates four main roles. “Leach” thinks that a hypothetical aircraft, called, say, the Wyvern, of Hurren’s type could fill all four roles. And so I am to infer that a Vickers, or possibly Westland, fleet multirole single-seater is in development. A student writes to say that future aeronautical engineers should have a generalist, not specialist training. J. Winston proposes an alternative layout for the proposed “Thames-side” airport. I hope that the matter of the London international airport is resolved soon. It feels like it is dragging out. Time, 27 March 1944 International The King of the Yugoslavs has married a Greek princess! When people look back at the great historic turning points of 1944, they will . . . skip right over this article. Rumania is surrendering more. President Benes has suggested that Russia might award “the bleak potato lands of northern Transylvania” to Rumania, causing Hungary to surrender less. ((Another story notes that Benes is the best cook amongst the exiled ministers of London, and specialising, “in risotto, stews, soups and powdered garlic.” Oh, Good Lord, paper. Remember that sandwich place we stopped at on our way up from the border when I visited in ’34? If the country cousins of Vancouver have seen a naked garlic clove, is it too much to ask of Manhattan?) Parisians are “under-fed and ill-clothed, declining into anemia,” says the paper’s “former Paris fashion correspondent,” recently arrived in Manhattan on “the rescue-shipGripsholm.” But they are still going to the opera and swanky balls, while “women defy restrictions with monumental hats that take six meters of fabric to erect…” Apparently losing no time in resuming her duties of filling out the paper, someone contributes a story about gruesome remains of mass murder found at No. 21 rue La Sueur, and one about Edouard Herriot being dead. Moscow has recognised the Badoglio government, causing anti-communists to be concerned that Moscow has not snubbed the Italian anti-communists causing fears that the anti-communists might not be not? I am having a little difficulty parsing it. The German ambassador to Vichy is forwarding the interests of “ultra-collaborationists.” In other news, the paper reports, Catholics and Protestants are squabbling in New York. . Captain “Chow Jockie” of the British merchant marine, and “U.S. Negro Bishop John Gregg” have both recently run afoul of the South African colour bar, too. On the other hand, Cape Town is scandalised by gangs of “skollies,” who roll American and British sailors. Such a crime has never been imagined before, and is well worth international coverage! Certainly the paper is above thinking that anyone would be pruriently interested in reading about young white men being “lured” by “young coloured girls,” only to be soundly thrashed by “young mulatto hoodlums.” And, yes, the “young” does repeat. General Montgomery, whose “worn brown face beneath . . . black beret” is universally recognised, visited Trinity College, saw a set of steps, claimed that his father, “militant Christian” Bishop Montgomery, had jumped them at one bound, causing Sergeant Charles Russell, USA, who claimed to have been quite a jumper at Waukesha High, to attempt the feat and fail, followed by “Vince Dunne of the Royal Canadian Navy,” who could get no more than five of seven steps. Then a “pink, diffident freshman” named Malcolm Dickson with “no jumping experience” tried, and cleared it easily. The intent of this story is to make Americans cringe at the thought of Wisconsinites being allowed to travel abroad? Quintuplets have born in Argentina! Probably Nazi quintuplets. Expect Cordell Hull to warn that American diapers will not be allowed into Buenos Aires until they repent their politics. Internationally-minded people also continue to talk about talking about civil aviation. The Red Army has crossed the Dniester. There are signs of demoralisation amongst the “retreat-adept Germans.” Lieutenant Adolph Kannel told his Russian captors that “The clock of the German army is now at five minutes to midnight.” Has Prisoner Kannel consented to being quoted by the paper? The paper covers the bombing of Monte Cassino, quoting General Eaker as claiming to have “fumigated it." Allied air attacks against Germany were heavy this past week, with the aim of breaking German war power and bleeding the enemy fighter arm. An amusing story of a Polish-crewed RAF bomber relentlessly harassed on its return flight from Berlin. On landing, the crew discovered that the navigator, meaning to turn on the heaters, had accidentally lit the navigation lights, too! Admiral Nimitz, commander of “the mightiest fleet and amphibious force in world history,” has left Washington for Honolulu, with, it is whispered, permission to go ahead with a major operation. A roundup of news from the Burma theater notes fighting around the Ledo Road, an air assault by Indian Army troops, and an “attack across the Chindwin River in force” that was “almost across the Indian border to Manipur.” I have a feeling that the paper is a little at sea with the geography of the area. It is noted that American glider troops and officers involved in the air assault included the model of “Terry”, the first husband of Betty Grable and Lieutenant John Lewis, “lanky, hard-hitting third baseman for the Washington Senators.” The paper, of course, manages to make something of the fact that Indian troops are flying through the air without giving way to superstitious terror! Two Army P-38 aces, Colonel Neel Kearby of Texas and Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas J. Lynch of Pennsylvania, are reported MIA in New Guinea. The paper covers an event at the University of Hawaii’s auditorium in “Honolouo” where sixteen “Japanese-Americans” were given Purple Hearts in virtue of their being “wife, sweetheart or next-of-kin of a Japanese-American boy killed in Italy.” It is almost as though the Luce papers are trying to make a point here, Reggie. Also MIA, Lieutenant Donal O’Brien, subject of a January 1942 profile by his father, a Chicago Daily News columnist, subsequently reprinted widely. Also MIA this week, the submarine-officer son of Georgia Representative Paul Brown. andBrigadier-General Russell A. Wilson, shot down over Berlin in the first “big U.S.” assault. Domestic The President received a delegation of Girl Scouts, wore green on Saint Patrick’s Day in his “annual curtsy to the Irish vote.” Notice that the story about P-38 pilots, featuring a Texan and an Irish-American from Pennsylvania, is headlined “Texas,” not “Sons of Eire.” (Although the paper’s retrospective on Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations does eventually get around to noting General Vandegrift’s observation that there are 220 men with the surname O’Reilly in the Corps.) ** The President still will not recognise De Gaulle, was unable to greet to new US Ambassador to Peru because of a “stiff neck,” and a breakdown of the elevator that normally carries him downstairs. Instead, the Ambassador ascended to the Presidential bedroom. The President’s two meetings with the press were not lively, even though fireworks were expected over a story by a “Hearstling." The President also pushed the “soldier’s vote” issue, met with Nelson and McNutt over the imminent announcement on drafting 18-to-25-year-old-indispensables,” and held a farewell party for Edward Stettinus, off to London to talk, perhaps about talks of a Big Three conference if the President can attend. The paper to people who can read: the President’s health is dire; the paper to people who can’t: Don’t worry, everything’s fine! Will the AFL allow the CIO to attend the ILO? People who care, care because of “isolationism.” Eric W. Johnston must have read Ladd Haystead’s column putting him forward as a presidential candidate in ’44, because he was in Boston giving one of twelve public speeches last week. It was, remarkably enough, on the theme of free enterprise. Apparently, long ago and in the distant past, American “management” made mistakes. Mistakes were made, no doubt about it, back in the old days of 1920—33. Ever since, labour has made mistakes! And, soon, things will even out, as the age of Labour comes to an end. Eric W. Johnston observes, in the friendliest way possible, that the mistakes of labour are born, understandably enough, out of fear of unemployment. So a better unemployment insurance scheme is needed before we get on with the business of putting Labour “in the dog house,” as eminent free enterpriser Mr. Johnston puts it. Johnston, the son of obscure parents from Spokane, showed remarkable fluency in Mandarin and other doings Chinese in his youth. Do you perhaps have a dossier, Reggie? Mr. Johnston smells like a natural friend to our family, who might be well served with a less dangerous outlet for his energies. In Twin Falls, Idaho, a county auction for a used tractor was won by a bid of $1050, above the OPA-set maximum of $750. Now the County and the OPA are fighting over jurisdiction. The paper is amused to call this a fight over State’s Rights, and even more amused to report that Farmer Hubert has put a “deposit” of $1050 down pending resolution of the court case, and is using the tractor for spring planting. The OPA is also the subject of the next story, which is about how Administrator “SalesmanBowles” of the OPA defended it to the Senate and argued for an extension to the act past June 30th this week. Bowles says that good administration and sound policy have held the rise in the cost of living to only 26%. This sounds suspiciously unapocalyptic to me. I was promised wheelbarrows of money to pay for a loaf of bread! Where are my wheelbarrows? Maybe after the war, when too much money is chasing too few goods. After all, what more could we possibly need? The paper’s version of the New Hampshire GOP primary is that it is bad news for Wilkie by virtue of his narrow margin of victory, good news for Dewey, who ran the slate in North Carolina without even (apparently) campaigning. Stassen’s lieutenants, meanwhile, are canvassing hard in Wisconsin, jumping obstacles, as it were. Democrats are canvassing hard to win the byelection in the Second District of Oklahoma, having found a candidate who is one-half Cherokee, fifty percent better than the GOP candidate, who is but one-quarter Indian. Amusingly irrelevant anecdote: the county seat is named for the Democratic candidate’s family! Even more amusingly irrelevant anecdote: the Democratic candidate is tipped to win. I am beginning to take the idea that the paper writes at two levels as more than a joke, Reggie. More news of the call-up required to make up a class of 1.16 million by 1 July, taking 1-As to 3-As. Since older fathers are to be protected after all, it seems that the call-up must go to deferred under-26s. Industry wants to protect men in steel and vital new war manufactures such as “radar.” (On this page of the paper, it is allowed to divulge that “radiolocation” has a name and is made in factories. On the next, who knows?) The paper notices that the War Department has been forced to admit that 20 US transport planes were shot down by U.S. guns by mistake during the Sicily air drop. Mistakes, to be sure, happen, but General Patton’s name is dropped. Commentator Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times has suggested that inexperienced Army commanders are giving poor leadership. Cat, pigeons, juxtapositions. Obligatory Canadian coverage includes Mr. Dionne finally getting custody of his daughters, a colliery in Nova Scotia being shut down, and the arrest of 22-year-old Indian Alex Prince at Fort George for the murder of two trappers, to hang, I suspect, on slim evidence because no-one dissents that it is best for all if he is done away with, and here are two bodies to be accounted for in the bargain. The wire story says that one of the trappers died from being shot in the back while the other froze after being immobilised by a a wound to the leg, which sounds like the sort of thing that happens to drunk men with rifles. The paper has it that “both had been shot in the back.” Friends of the US press note the drawbacks of press freedom include the “increasing sterility of editorial expression,” and “the taking over of editorial function by syndicated columnists.” A non-syndicated columnist (Charles Fisher of the Philadelphia Record) writes this week that of all them, he likes Wesbrook Pegler least, but he has dyspeptic things to say about many others, who are egotistical, conservative, know-it-alls. Now that the problem has been diagnosed, can a cure be far behind? Science, Technology and Business The paper has an amusing story about how brown, foreign people eat bugs. This sort of stuff never gets old, Reggie! The Army Corps of Engineers has completed an 8 million dollar flood abatement scheme at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_flood. The paper is at last permitted to reveal that the Dr. Alwyn Douglas Crow’s eight years of secret rocket experiments have culminated in the British being able to shoot rockets at German bombers. Hitting them is next on the agenda. A piece, strictly under business news, profiles youthful Detroit entrepreneur Tom Safady, inventor of an improved butter slicer. As far as I can find news in the story, it is that he is working out a way to share profit with his employees at Sav-Way Industries. I assume some big announcement is imminent. Thomas Mellon Evans, who prefers to go by “Thomas Evans,” just got an order for 1800 box cars for his start-up Mt. Vernon Corporation, having made his way first in the field of “fireless locomotives” for munitions plant yard switching made by a firm he picked up from bankruptcy distress at pennies on the dollar. Is he related to those Mellons? Why, yes, he is, the paper notes! Two levels, Reggie, two levels. Would it be too personal to brag that “Cousin H.C.” is letting his Buffalo aviation enterprise go? I think so, and therefore will only smirk and point you to “Again, Brewster,” in this number. Now if only he would listen to me over Detroit. At least, listen to me as much as Mr. Ford did. “Red Signals” Covers the overworked, overstrained and accident-prone American railways, who, as the story above notices, at least are getting some new rolling stock this year. Whether this will be sufficient to move Canadian grain and American steel, and the vast trans-Rockies cargoes of munitions is another question. The Office of Price Administration is relaxing controls on crude prices to keep marginal producers in business, promote wildcatting and put off the day when only a general increase in the price of crude will make up for declining production. The South wants higher cotton prices. Textile manufacturers do not. Meanwhile, the national cotton stockpile is at 7 million bales. Education After the war, Columbia’s Dean thinks that American universities like Columbia will be as prestigious as Cambridge and Berlin. The University of Illinois is buying an airfield, planned as the “No. 1 university-owned airfield in the U.S.”, to study aspects of aviation. Miss Elena Davila, winner of Columbia University’s twelfth annual medal for social architecture, studied at Chestnut Hill Academy, is an equestrian and stamp collector, and “an enthusiastic dancer in the Spanish manner.” In all, a most accomplished young lady, notwithstanding being Puerto Rican. No doubt, like most equestrian stamp collectors who study “social architecture” at Columbia, she climbed up from direst poverty. Speaking of, it seems as though Avon Old Farms’ School must close in June, notwithstanding the $1450 annual tuition parents have been willing to pay. There seems to be some difficulty with the founder, as well as finances. Nineteen members of the Iowa State College have quite in a huff over a disputed report on the economies or otherwise of oleomargarine. Entertainment Two true sons of the soil competed in the “One Man Band World Championship” on the Blue Network’s Breakfast Club. “Redheaded James Howard Nash” (also known as Panhandle Pete) defeated janitor Archie Sweet with his patent Wabash Cannonball. I am acutely reminded (especially at the thought of the noise produced by a ‘Wabash cannonball’) of my own redheaded nemesis. These lads sound straight out of the Ozarks, while my troubles begin with an admiral from Texas…. Flight, 30 March 1944 Leaders “Hammers and Tongs” We are bombing the Germans hammers and tongs. We hope they run out of fighters soon. Mosquitoes are now carrying 4000lb bombs. “Power for the Helicopter” Aircooled Motors of Syracuse, New York, is offering one. The paper thinks that this is ridiculously premature. “The Most Fearful Form of Warfare” was brought on the Germans by their own efforts. The paper is defensive. War in the Air Even though planes reduced Cassino Abbey to “heaps of rubble,” New Zealand troops have not been able to occupy it. The Japanese offensive in Burma has crossed the border into the princely state of Manipur. The Commander-in-Chief, India, Claude Auchinleck, thinks that this is not significant in any way, that it is but raiding parties and a token invasion. Well, if the Auk says so! “The Vickers Warwick” is like the Wellington, only larger and less practical. All up weight is 45,000lbs, and engines are American, because… People must feel strong urges when Mr. Fedden talks about the superiority of the American aeroengine, as demonstrated by the fact that American radials are going into British planes. At least the latest Pratt & Whitney finally has a two-speed blower. Here and There Leonard Brown, who erected Britain’s first barrage balloon for Dunlop, has died at 61, three years after retiring. Which would put his retirement at 58, immediately after the end of the Blitz. Am I being too romantic in sensing a story here. I hope that his last three years were spent with grandchildren playing at his feet. US Flying Ambulances have evacuated 173,000 casualties since the outbreak of war. Loudspeakers outside the paper’s offices remind everyone that it is “Salute the Soldier Week.” Portugal is to have an airline. A Mosquito has made the 377 mile flight from Toronto to New York in 55 minutes, an average speed of 411mph, with a 30mph tailwind. A 20ft airscrew has been built by Hamilton Standard of New York for experimental purposes. Although if the war dawdles on, we might see it in a less experimental venue, hard as it is to imagine a plane designed around it! G. Gordon Smith, a devilishly handsome managing editor of the paper, was heard to speak on the subject of turbine-driven airscrews on the radio the other night. Women, and not a few men, swooned. Messrs. H. Lazell and W. J. Shilcock have taken over the direction of Cellon, Ltd, after Mr. Wallace Barr was killed in a recent air raid. The paper is upset at Canadian Aviation for using writings on the subject of jet propulsion by the tall and dashing Mr. G. Gordon Smith of this paper without attribution. “Manpower for the Mammoths” Indicator criticises the Hundred-Ton Projects. They are “trying to run before we can walk.” The paper disagrees with the idea that we will not be able to find aircrew for such monstrosities any time soon. Or, I suspect without parsing the column, passengers likely to tolerate their expected imperfections. Whatever the paper says, “Indicator’s” enormous experience is a valuable counterweight to “Brabazon” enthusiasm. Paratroopers prepare for the invasion. “Wrens of the Fleet Air Arm” Female air mechanics are keeping the training aircraft of the FAA in action. I do not suppose that a girl would have any difficulty with such duties, at least so long as there is something pressing, like a war, to keep their attentions fixed. W. P. Kemp, “The Flying Boat: A Reply to Mr. Pollitt: Loading Freight Not Difficult with Proper Equipment: The Question of Lateral Stability.” Years from now, Mr. Kemp, you will look back on the time you wasted writing this, and contemplate that you could have been pitching woo, or tasting the new vintage, or tramping over some beautiful vista, and you will be melancholy. Short numbers include “Rocket or Racket?” Time’s story of the London rocket gun has been mocked by a Swiss expert, and the paper repeats the speculation that the actual weapon is a counter-invasion device. I hope that the paper does not feel foolish, when and if German rockets begin to fall in London. Studies in Recognition Notices the Taylorcraft Auster III and Miles M-28 Kestrel, aircraft so innocuous that one hardly needs to be able to tell them apart. “The Cameron Rotor Plane” Mr. Goldberg’s column is usually carried in another paper. Or, perhaps, the day when the “helicopter, gyroplane and orthodox aircraft” are combined with retractable rotor blades and variable incidence wings is nigh. Lieut. Commander B. S. McEwen, who was the first British pilot to score in this war, while flying a Blackburn Skua from Ark Royal, visited the Blackburn factory to “explore future possibilities for the Pacific.” These presumably do not include a refurbished Dart. Behind the Lines As from today, work lost due to air raids in Germany must be made up, and time so spent will not count as overtime. Says the paper. La Suisse reports a new German secret weapon: a high altitude bomber that flies at nine miles and drops a new type of incendiary bomb. Japan will have a complete Air Raids Precaution apparatus by the end of June. Germans wondering where the masses of planes claimed manufactured in recent months might be are reassured that they are in a massive strategic anti-invasion reserve. The Hungarian press notes a new German night fighter of unspecified type. Trees must die in occupied Europe, too. German bombers are developing new tactics such as the “Hairspring” to penetrate into London airspace. R. H. Bound, “Levered Suspension…: An Interesting Undercarriage Development Explained and Reviewed.” The author needs to buy a new dictionary, as his current one is defective, giving incorrect meanings for some words in the “Is.” In any case, this device seems better under side loads, and that is important, right, Reggie? Correspondence Judith has just gone by, revisions still— Aero Digest, 15 March 1944 "The Invasion Day Is Set" Stupendous Statistics! Reveal American Might! I think the paper is less interested in investigating how much of the Very Large Numbers (planes, destroyers, mechanics, whatever) will actually cross the beach on invasion day. The paper is upset about the Wagner Act, and thinks that the best way to fix it is by randomly insulting the Administration. It may be puerile, but it is easier reading than "Statistical Accounting Procedures in Aircraft Production," an article at the head of the engineering section offered by James R. Crawford of Lockheed. My mind wandering, I notice that, like Northrop, Lockheed uses punch cards to keep track of records. Perhaps these things will turn out to be more than the fashion of the day, after all. Another article proposes using a paper product of some kind to make aircraft parts. With some relief, it seems to be for the most part not critical parts, but things like flooring, which brings to mind this ad. Right now she is all workmanlike, but she is a proper lady, and her proper home will have lightweight plastic flooring, developed by Martin! Though probably not anywhere that guests can see. Aviation News Notices some training plane cancellations, announcement of the gigantic German "BY-222," and that 8760 planes were produced in the United States in February. I think we can safely write off the idea of America making 120,000 planes in 1944, although 100,000 is well within reach. 87%, we are told, are fighter and bomber types, and structure weight is up 4%. Company news notes that GE cleared 45 million in profits last year. See, Reggie? Electrical engineering! Du Pont admittedly made 69, but 20 of that was from its investment in GM. Aviation People Notes that Lieutenant Gertrude Dawson, a stewardess for United on military leave to serve with the USAAF, has returned to her home in Philadelphia after escaping from occupied Europe. There are three pages of "Aviation people," but otherwise they are all about salesmen moving around, with the occasional engineer to break up the monotony. Well, there you go, I have rather slighted this number of Aero Digest here, but that is because I have included a marked up version of an article on turbosuperchargers in this package. It is not that the magazine is unimportant. It is that the tedious technical details need space to bring out their real importance. As you will see, even if very little money is spent on stratospheric flying in the next few years,it seems likely that it will be spent on frozen food, and the two technologies are far more akin that one might realise. With this explanation, I shall now proceed backwards and begin to give you my usual precis of the news, various and technical, with some sense of why I think it is important for the future of our investments.

i) The Liberty League is cool, and they're in Philadelphia; ii) Stupid, stuck-up private school gits. That is, I wanted a public school setting, with kids living at home, going to the mall, having part-time jobs at the Price Rite, that sort of stuff. iii) I wanted to create my own faculty. And, having done that in the first instance, ee-vil faculty, too. It's not like you can have the Board accidentally hire Professor Paradigm to teach drama, and then watch as your retired superhero principal tries to get him fired through union arbitration.

Thanks to Lord Liaden for really helping me bring this one into focus. These exercises are always so useful to me that I am going to push my luck with the patience of the board a little further and ask: What do you think Auralia (the sword that slew Takofanes at the end of the Turakian Age) has been doing for the last 70,000 years? (Bonus points for including Empyreans and the Drindrish, from Valdorian Age, in the scenario.)

It's just part of the vibe I'm going for. You know, these kids today with their baggy pants and their hippity-hop music.

When it gets Fast and Furious time, I don't want to distract the narrative with no Emerald City, but the point is good and clear, and human history and Babylon are big enough for magic vistas that are true to the moment when the pedal hits the metal. Hmm. Eiffel tower, and WTC, of course, mile-high skyscrapers go with multiple level parkways. What else works? The Berlin Wall? What would the Berlin Wall divide in Babylon?