Lawnmower Boy

Dinner at the Admiral's table sucks. The soup dish was brought in cold!

Postblogging Technology, December 19443: I'll Be Home For Christmas Happy Christmas from Santa Clara! I apologise for including snapshots of the neighbours, but the pictures that I include are a great deal easier to parse than the family writing! My Dearest Reggie: I know that it is my invariable practice to wrap up the family news with an overlong restatement of my investment strategy, buttressed with the last month's news in scientific progress ("research and development" as we are saying now) and such economic, military and political news as seems relevant. You will find, as far as precendent goes, that this is a somewhat truncated entry due to my having left my copies of Fortune, Aviation and the month's run of The Economist in a certain library just to our north in a state of high dudgeon a week ago, but there is more than enough material for the boring parts, as you will see. As for habits, they are made to be broken. After a long and difficult month, I am finally in the Christmas spirit this holiday eve, and with a variegated feathered flock a-roast in the back under the supervision of your wife (Bill and David are most grateful for their Christmas gift), I shall endeavour to share the celebrations with you. All of this was inspired in part by Mrs. J. C.'s blessed news, in part by potentially more dispiriting war news, which I think I will reserve a few weeks in the hopes that it will blow over. The long and the short of it is that we will have the Captain and Mrs. here with us on the West Coast for an indefinite extension, as the Engineer Vice-Admiral has conceived a lively concern about his newest pets that will only be assuaged by investigations on the ground. I am torn between rejoicing and trepidations, but I repeat myself, and I really should finish this letter. The indomitable mother-to-be has led the youngsters on a hike up the mountain. I have begged off with the excuse of fearing a recurrence of gout. But it is only an excuse, as you will have realised by my mention of that certain library, it being you who forwarded the Earl's instructions to seek the Engineer's guidance concerning Cousin H. C.'s persistent requests for investment in his steel plant. See how I nickname him so respectfully? You, who knows me so well, will seek out the irony and realise supsect that I imply that this honour is as empty as every other "achievement" of the life of his (real) father's son. The Earl, of course, thinks that the son of the man whose oh-so-successful American life we helped launch will owe us dispassionate advice. I dissent on two grounds. First, gratitude is an odd thing, and in the Engineer's father's heart, I suspect that events in Batavia came long ago to be seen not as Great-Great-Grandfather sweeping a hanging crime under the rug, but rather as an excuse for Great-Grandfather's imposture: that the Engineer has aligned himself with our cousins across the divide of 1823. So much for the incestuous concerns of our house, because, much more importantly, the Engineer is certainly bitter about this Administration, and dear Cousin H. C. owes virtually everything to it. This, at least, is my excuse for maintaining my side in our difficult interview, in which he did his best to encourage me to invest in the steel enterprise before dismissing me on the grounds that he was "busy/" With his memoirs, or with coupon clipping, or some other vital enterprise having to do with his legacy, I do not know. In any case, Wong Lee, whom I took as my driver on some mad impulse, had to lead me to the car by the shoulder, or I think that I should have burst back into the Engineer's study with some "wisdom of the staircase" that might have descended into fisticuffs. In many ways, Wong Lee is a wiser man than I, hard as it is to tell when one's eyes go first to that kris scar. A more unlikely male nurse it is harder to imagine: but that is why Grandfather kept him around, I suspect, back when Grandfather was still making decisions. And his boy, who accompanied him, is smart as a whip, always with a "Number One Son" quip on his lips, as big as his father and as fair of face as his mother. (You remember Chang Wei, do you not? I believe that we had to make her a Peruvian to get her into the country. . . .) I suspect that I am meant to conceive a desire to do a favour for the young man, which will be vouchsafed to me at the right moment. I shall not require much persuading. Enough of this, then, especially as I owe you a month's worth of the "big" magazines yet. I shall even be able to cover the end of the month, in the unlikely event that major war news troubles the week between Christmas and New Years. Flight, 2 December 1943 This splendidly modern building is the new “Shakespeare Memorial Theatre” in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Amongst aviation firms, not only Boulton & Paul, but apparently Parnall and Sons have reason to be proud. Leader: Roy Chadwick, Avro, postwar airliners will all be pressurised, but most will cruise at less than 200mph. “Flying wings” and jets are still ten years out, Chadwick says, but Frederick Handley-Page disagreed. Jet propulsion is closer, he pointed out. There was argument about Edward Warner’s recent Wright Memorial Lecture which suggested that the advantages of high flying are overrated. This will not be true with jets. If fuel-efficient compressors can be developed. Which Chardwick thinks they will be . . . in 10 years. War in the Air The Battle of Berlin continues. Twelve thousand tons have been dropped so far this year. Berlin’s Gauleiter estimates that 8 to 10,000 have been killed. The paper splits the difference on the "morality question" between those who have suffered at German hands not having much sympathy; and those of a more sympathetic bent accepting the grim necessity. Pathfinders find their way to the target in spite of overcast by “some method.” A secret weapon, in other words. I suppose that I shall have to turn to the funny pages to discover radar and radio beacons. Or secret weapons are in the air, notably the ones that the Germans threaten to unleash on Britain. (A strategic bombardment rocket, it is supposed, and page over there is a surprisingly detailed drawing of a hypothetical rocket weapon presumably based, the text below suggests, on the basis of Fritz Opel’s “rocket-assisted cars," which, we are told, led to a rocket-powered aircraft experiment. Meanwhile, “U.S. Fighter-bombers” strike at air bases in Holland and northern France. As do Whirlwinds escorted by Spitfires, while “Mediterranean Command” attacked Toulon and Sofia, while RAF Wellingtons attacked Turin. In the Pacific, the attack on the Gilberts went unbelievably well. Yes, Reggie, that is just what we are hearing down on the Bay. That's the brand new Lexington aircraft carrier, 27,000 tons on fire and steaming out-of-control within machine gun range of a fortunately not-machine-gun-equipped atoll. That's my candid shot from a page of the After Action report, which is classified, but not not severely, since the Navy was shopping it around the West Coast yards. The Captain of the Lexington has blood in his eyes, on the grounds that the ship was only saved from the consequences of a single aerial torpedo hit by an improvised manual steering gear introduced into the system by his crew. I suspect that there is more to the story than that, but, in any case, if you are wondering what is taking your son up to Seattle over the next few weeks.... Well, actually, I do. It is hard to imagine Nimitz or King seeking out a British engineer's opinion, even one with experience of the analogous problems suffered by Illustrious. I have warned your son that this is probably politics, and that he is being sent off to show someone up by being all plummy and British --the path is still open to lay the blame off on poor Captain Stumpf!-- but he just smiled and told me that he had, after all, been educated by the Poor Clares. So was I, I said, and they never smoothed my rough edges. He answered that, after all, they had had him for an additional four years, to which I had no answer. Here and There Blue Star Lines is the latest shipping company with liner interests to change its corporate charter to authorise itself to run an airliner. It is quite the trend! Articles: “Rocket Research.” British amateurs did experiments with rockets in the 1930s, and we can tell you about them. Unlike any work that might or might not have been done in any other countries for any other reasons! They can be automatically controlled with clockwork mechanisms! The “Aircraft Types” series covers two Lockheed transports, the C-56 and C-57 covered by the Lockheed Lodestar nickname. Also, an Avro Lancaster transport variant, the York. “Microgram Service: How Airgraph Letters are Handled” Using the new microprinter, great masses of documents are turned into miniatiurised pictures and sent by air mail. This is an ad for the Williamson Cameras’ micro-printer by the way. It’s even perfect for blueprints! Which is exactly what American machinists say when they see these things. Better than nothing, I suppose. “Keeping Them Warm: Anti-Icing System Uses Engine Exhaust Heat.” The system installed on several Consolidated types is shown. The actual circulating fluid is atmospheric air and the amount of heating is automatically controlled, as are so many things these days. “Native Weapon:” Australia’s new, indigenous fighter, the Boomerang, is too secret to be revealed in any detail, but here are pictures that make its secrets perfectly obvious! “Russian Aircraft Materials:” a translation of a highly complimentary German report. The quality of Russian compressed-wood and phenol-formaldehyde glued plywoods is impressive and improving rapidly. I am sure that this is something that you are paying close attention to, Reggie, given your plywood interests in Port Alberni. Letters “Technical Training: Purely A Matter of Finance” “Thirty Year Old” writes to comment on the recent comments of Mr. Biles of Blackburn Aircraft, Ltd, to the effect that the industry will need many more theoretically-trained aeronautical engineers after the war. The writer points out that after the last war, the market was flooded with B.Scs who could not find work appropriate to their direct and indirect investment in their education. What father is going to finance this? If it is in the public or industry interest, the public or industry bloody well better finance it. Time, 6 December 1943 “Manpower: The Last Shortage.” The “manpower shortage” has actually been critical for some time, but trends are towards relief. The paper says, anyway. The all-time employment peak was actually hit last winter, and the trend has been downwards ever since. There are 2 million fewer non-farm workers now than when the “crisis” was discovered. The government and services have acted. Small weapons factories have been closed in the Mid-West, saving 30,000 jobs, while the navy pulled a major contract out of West Coast yards. Now Boeing has a surplus of labour. B-17 production is up 10%, all war production up 4%. With victory on all fronts in the news, employers are beginning to think not of meeting contracts, but of the cost of severance pay on D-Day. Fat cheques and good-bye to Oakland, the workers are saying, very loudly, below my office windows. “Inflation: Report From the Front:” The railway workers get an 8 cents an hour increase over stabilisation commissioner Vinson’s veto. The OPA’s power to regulate oil prices has been taken away by Congress, which has also ignored most of Morgenthau’s tax increases. But a compromise has been wangled over farm subsidies explicitly tying them to wage increases. “Report on Tarawa: The Marines’ Show.” The fighting spirit of the Guadalcanal veterans of the 1st Division fought its way through the hell of Betio, which was made worse by the fact that the water was too shallow for the LCAs to beach. Many a man expressed a wish for more than his service standard $25 life insurance policy. Some people say the fighting at Betio (on Tarawa) was "hell." Others that it was a cakewalk. The operative question being just how many Marines have to be killed before a cakewalk turns into Hell. Rather a lot, it seems. “The Admirals.” The average age of United States admirals is 57, and he is an Annaopolis graduate, whereas the average age of generals is 51, and only 45% are West Point graduates. The Navy has 202 flag officers. There are 6 full admirals (King, Nimitz, Halsey, Stark, Ingersoll, and Reeve. There are 21 Vice-Admirals, average age 58, including one Engineering Duty Only, five aviators, 1 aviation observer. There are 153 Rear Admirals, not counting staff corps (supply, medical, dental, engineering). Twenty five are EDOs, 33 are aviators, 2 are aviation observers. There are 23 comodores, including 1 EDO, 6 aviators. The USN has superannuated admirals that include many aviators, albeit all qualifying through postwar flying training, unlike our own Admirals Portal and Bell-Davies, and they have a rather dismissive title for Engineering Branch admirals. “World Battlefronts: Balance Sheet:” The Gilberts have fallen at what the paper calls a light price of American lives, giving an airfield suitable for heavy bombers. We go on to clarify: “Of 2000 to 3000 men who stormed the Tarawa Beach, only a few hundred came through the hail of Jap lead without dead or injury. No ship losses were announced (Rear Admiral Henry Maston Mullinix was reported [MIA].) Unless Mullinix took a wrong turn on his morning constitutional we can assume that a flagship was lost. Or instead of assuming, you can ask a dockyard man and be told that the Navy is looking at underwater protection for the "jeep" carriers. The appropriate underwater protection, I told them, was to keep torpedoes and mines away from those tinder boxes.. Science: “Light on the Future” General Electric's famedPhysicist-Chemist Irving Langmuir recently predicted that man would some day speed up to 5,000 miles an hour in a vacuum tube. “General Electric’s famed Physicist-Chemist recently predicted that man would some day speed up to 5000 miles an hour in a vacuum tube. Meanwile, Westinghouse did a thing for the press the other week where it showed fluorescent lamps lit by “a high-frequency radio beam generated by a physicians’ ordinary diathermy set. Westinghouse admitted that this was a stunt and that wireless electric power “might” not be commercially viable for years. But the FCC is reserving a part of the postwar radio spectrum for wireless heating and cooking." A heat lamp was shown. Also sterilising lamps, a shatterproof lightbulb, a compact new sun lamp for easy tanning, and a 10,000 watt mercury vapor lamp. More business for electrical engineers! I am not sure how electric cookers are an improvement over electric ranges, and I cannot see the use of "wireless lamps" but a device for home tanning has pretty profound implications for the American colour bar. Not that I expectTime to notice that. The Press: “In the Windy City,” where the Tribune has been abusing workers at Chicago’s Studebaker aircraft-engine plant as loafers, malingerers, gamblers and Communist-led,the Sun went out and found that it was actually Colonel McCormick who is a very bad person! Whatever sells papers, I suppose. “Postwar: Frozen Future.” Time advertises the Fortune story (which I will get to in a few weeks) about how manufacturers “expect to put electric refrigeration into practically every one of the nation’s 40,000,000 housing units. Or two, with one a “home freezer.” More on ready-cooked frozen foods of the future. “Fiscal: Mr. White’s White Paper.” There is to be a World Bank to finance the world’s postwar reconstruction. I will believe it when I see it. “Retail Trade: Record November.” This will surely not come as news, although the extent of of the record –201% above the 1935—39 average, up 21% over last year, is still astonishing. “But we are still below the last-gasp before-Christmas rush a year ago.” A few weeks on, I can report that while it has been a busy month for the men folk, and the expectant mother, we have been able to lean heavily on Wong Lee, surely one of the oddest of persons seen loaded down with parcels in the queue at Magnin’s. . . . "Production: “Navy Bean Soup” is the Navy’s obscure nickname for carbon dioxide fire extinguisher cartridges, which have buoyed National Foam from a gross of $500,000 in 1942 to $6 million this year. Music: “Record Shortage.” Last year, U.S. record manufacturers hit an all-time production record with 136,000,000 discs. This year, production is down “at least 50%.” Causes include lack of manpower, rationing of shellac (which comes from India); wear and tear on nonreplaceable machinery, and lack of transportation and packing facilities. Meanwhile, orders are up to three times their 1942 rate. I am skeptical that this reflects more than retailers ordering everything in the catalogue so that something will be delivered, but I am heartened by the thought of re-equipping the industry. Electrical engineering products go into record manufacturing, too, you know! Radio: “Cousin Emmy;” at CBS station KMOX in St. Louis is famous! (Mountain music is big in Oakland, and not just in the places reached by this 50,000 watt station with 2.5 million steady listeners. The appeal of acts such as Cousin Emmy and Her Kin Folks may elude you and me (she apparently gives people a taste of “the natural twang of real mountaineer goings on” every morning at 5:25. She plays the banjo, “gui-tar,” French harp, and sings, all at the same time. Also, she yodels and dances and sings gospel songs, and sells cough drops and hair dye. Which is how she takes in $850/week. Sneer at her, but not her money! Flight, 9 December 1943 Leaders “Harrissing” Berlin: It’s a deliciously subtle play on words, dear cousin. We are indirectly told that there have been doubts expressed about the merits of the current Berlin offensive by way of quotes of Archibald Sinclair’s defence of it in the House. “3-in Guns in Aircraft.” B-25s carry 3" guns. Cousin Emmy would make a joke about critter-hunting now. "Those are big critters," she'd say. That fly. Or something . “Aeronautical Science School:” Sir Roy Fedden has “seen too much of the lavish way in which training and research are treated in the United States of America.” He wants something big and impressive. But is there money for it? Will it be a school for practical engineering or an “academic hot-house?” Opinions differ! War in the Air Sinclair’s statement in the house: from 1 January 1943 to 6am on 30/11, 2,189 British bombers operating from this country have been lost over Europe, while US 8th Air Force has lost 829. This news is simultaneous with that of news of von Papen’s visit to the Pope to invite an intervention in favour of a bombing armistice. Many raids have been made, and Bomber Command’s diversionary tactics were quite successful in protecting a raid on Leipzig the other day. A major German U-boat offensive was just broken, in the course of which a B-24 captained by a son of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore was lost. The Japanese made a daylight raid on Calcutta. “There were some casualties among the civilians in the crowded city.” Article: “Lancaster I and II: Interchangeability of Power Eggs Applied to One of Our Four-Engined Bomber Types.” Not terribly relevant, but I took a plan-view picture showing “the way that the bomb load is supported by a beam built into the structure.” This is old news to you, Reggie, but let me pause for a moment and meditate on the existence of a girder, in an airplane which flies, that can take a 12,000lb load in suspension. Here and There The paper has a vacancy for a junior artist with drawing office or art school experience. The Canadian Director-General of Aircraft Production is back in Ottawa, where he forecast a “20 percent bigger Lancaster in 1945.” Fairey has a new chairman, in the absence abroad of Sir Richard Fairey. “Another U.S. Record;” American ‘warplane’ production set a new record in November by topping the 9000 mark, it has been reported. (More on that. . . .) Another day, another prediction of postwar trans-Atlantic commercial flying. Behind the Lines A Swiss paper reports the details of new German secret weapons, rocket shells with a range of 200km weighting from 2 to 20 tons, the average weight being 12. The smaller types have been satisfactorily trialled, but the larger ones are giving difficulties. Jean-Herold Paquis, a military commentator on Paris radio, reports that the Germans have doubled their fighter force since January and put three new types of aircraft into service, of which two are fighter-bombers, whose speed reaches 434mph. The third is a giant machine capable of transporting lorries. AGotha 244 is pictured. A neutral source says that several towns in southern Fance and in the Balkans have been evacuated. Japan is pushing to increase aircraft production. The Germans now have a centralised Air Defence Command (Fluko), staffed by the best of the best of the Luftwaffe’s signalling units, and from the women’s auxiliary services. “They must have iron nerves,” German radio reports. No flighty dames here! Aircraft Types Curtiss AT-9 “Jeep;” Beechcraft AT-10 “Wichita”. Unimpressive small trainers. Articles “Pitch Panic” the story of how De Havilland Co. raced to change both Spitfires and Hurricanes from two-pitch to constant-speed airscrews in time for the Battle of Britain. Tw-speed props could be delivered faster, so were specified for Blenheims, Spits, Defiants, Hurricanes, while other aircraft, such as the Welllington, Beaufort, Stirling and Whirlwind got constant-speed units. D.H. was asked to do its first experimental on-site conversion on 9 June, and was ready four days later. By 20 June the plane had been put through its paces and on 22 June DH got verbal direction to convert in the field all modern SE fighters on first priority. The conversion was easy, because the airscrews had been designed with constant speed in mind, but pipes and engine reservoirs and cockpit controls all had to be installed, and the screws did have to be dismantled to move the index pins. DH made the qull shafts for driving the cs units per Rolls-Royce drawings at the Gipsy engine factory. Outside contractors such as M.R.C. Ltd, which did pilot controls, did a fine job. The actual work was done by picked teams of fitters at each station, initially under DH instruction. DH engineers worked 105 to 110 hours a week to get this done. And then, mysteriously, a few years later, all the engineers in Britain died of heart attacks. I am an old and cynical man, Reggie. “Blind Landing in Mid-Atlantic” S/Lt (A) R. A. Singleton and observer Lt. Cdr J. Palmer (A) managed to land on board in 50 yard visibility with lighted paddles. Something strange is going on here, as Palmer is by now long past active flying, and in fact seems to be commanding HMS Eglington.One wonders just why this story gets press, and what we are to infer of Lt. Cdr. Palmer. “Atlantic Record” of 11h 35 minutes set by B-24 piloted by Captain Richard Allen. Do I smell a “Blue Riband” coming on? Time 13 December 1943 “Foreign News: The Known and Unknown” Have you heard that there was a big powers conference at Teheran? That “unconditional surrender” was agreed upon, and that there are various uncertainties about the postwar world? You have? Well, then, you shall have very light reading in the fields of politics and foreign affairs for the rest of this month! For my part, I notice that Fat Chow is in Herat, suddenly trying to negotiate passage to Erzerum through great masses of NKVD and Indian Police. “India: While the Paddy Ripens:” the Bengal famine will not end until the rice harvest, and there is not the manpower to harvest the paddy, and the Bengal Provincial Government reportedly refuses to ask the army to help. “Foreign News: Raw and Unrestrained:” British womenfolk are complaining because of a critical shortage of wearable underwear. The title of the piece has a clever double meaning, if you will pardon me for reusing a joke until it is well past wearing out and can no longer support its own weight. Other Foreign News: Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Argentines and Icelanders(!) are excitable. “Foreign Trade:” American heavy industry, haunted by the nightmare of being overbuilt and underdemanded in peacetime, are ecstatic about a proposed 3-year Russian $10 billion order to rebuild their heavy industry, perhaps paying for it with Russian petroleum. America is so far reluctant to buy Spain’s record olive oil harvest in spite of the edible fats shortage. “Fiscal: Compensatory and Mr. Chase:” Will the national debt of $300 billion bankrupt the United States? Where will the money to finance postwar full employment come from?Stuart Chase has a brilliantly written answer (the paper says) to these questions in the form of his new book, Where’s the Money Coming From? “Stripped to its bones, the Chase compensatory economy is nothing but old-fashioned pump-priming on a vast scale, through self-liquidating public works and expanded social security,” with high taxes in boom times to cover spending in the lean. The concern is that it will be hard to keep taxes high in good times. I cannot help but notice that someone is optimistic about the postwar economic scene. Guardedly. “Aluminum: The Boy Grew Older:” a war-boosted industry is getting bigger. H.C.’s play in Columbia Metals, however, is unlikely to play a big part in this unless the war goes into 1946. “Government: Permission Or Else:” Parkland Sportswear Co. of Dallas has been fined for raising the pay of its 47 employees in disregard of the regional War Labor Board. And this is national news because the WLB is actually enforcing the regulation, I suppose. “Timely Figure:” A condensed English version of the Four Classics occasions the paper to discover that Confucius was a great man. Not great enough to warrant studying the actual texts, but a great man. . . Flight, 16 December 1943 Thackery is to diesel engines as oranges are to movie stars! Leaders “Close Air Support:” The Allies have air superiority in Italy, but are not blitzkrieging. Does that mean that Allied CAS is much less efficient than German in the old days? Why, no, the paper says. “Allied Air Supremacy:” fighter pilot wastage has been less than expected, says C. G. Power, Canadian Minister of National Defence. So resources are being redirected to training bomber pilots. War in the Air Wintry weather in Italy has cut down on air operations in support of the troops there, while the Germans have pulled out in the air. In the Pacific, more on the American carrier attack on the Gilberts, although it is also noted here that first production priority has been shifted from aircraft to landing craft. A joint statement by Roosevelt and Churchill notices that the quantity of shipping sunk by the enemy has fallen to the lowest level this last month since May of 1940. Here and There There is now a US-India air freight service; six new airfields have been added in East Anglia; the US industry will deliver its 150,000th aircraft in time for the anniversary of Pearl Harbour. “Microgram” is not the same as “Airgraph,” which exclusively denotes the service which Kodak provides for the GPO. The paper regrets the error. Microgram or Aerograph, it is very Research and Development! Articles C. A. H. Pollitt, “Will There Be a Place for the Flying Boat: A Critical Revierw of the Saro Report.” No, there won’t. They’re boats. Get over it, paper. Time for pastures new. “Fortress Evolution:” the new B-17G, with a chin turret, represents the latest stage in the evolution of this venerable ship. It is noted that the “10 ton load” can be achieved by hanging 4000lb bombs off each wing rack, but this is well beyond a safe takeoff limit. Take that, American cousins! “More Rotating Wings:” Greyhound has applied to run 78 helicopter routes covering 49,000 air miles. And they even brought Igor Sikorsky in to testify that it was actually possible! In two-an-a-half years or so. The paper finds this to be optimistic. Behind the Lines The German press wants you to know that the Luftwaffe is still active in Italy, attacking partisans. Up around Bergamo. It is apparently presumed that maps of Italy are hard to come by. A Swedish newspaper reports that the courier plane carrying diplomatic mail forthe Hungarian legation in Stockholm is now mysteriously five days overdue. (Last week’s number also noticed this.) Hungary has a “satellite industry” now in service of German war production. Aircraft Types: The MiG-3.; and Mitsubishi KB-98 ‘Karigane.’ “High Command Changes:” ACM Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferte has retired as Inspector General of the Air Force, and AVM Sir Christopher Brand. Joubert has agreed to be employed by the air force at the lower rank of Air Marshal, perhaps in India. Articles “Russian Land” The Russians have an air force, too! “Engine Cowlings:” a précis of the MAP report on German practice. Time, 20 December 1943 International News: There as an international conference! In Teheran! And another in Cairo, for which the President of Turkey was present, adroitly doing the stay-out-of-World-War-II-mazurka! Fat Chow writes that he is pretending to be a Kirghiz princeling to play on the sympathies of Turkish nationalist . . The Furhrer is a second rate fellow. Brazil is having inflation. “Foreign News: Coal: A Dilemma” The paper notices that the mines are still a problem, emphasising low morale in the mines and mentions, by-the-by, what The Economistwon’t, that conscription for mine labour will fall heavily on mining families and that families that aspire to get their sons out of coal mining are upset that coal-owners get something out of it, too. “The Hate Debate:” Civil war amongst the Democrats, it is proposed, is occurring! It is suggested that southern Democrats would like to see a Republican Presidential/Senate/House victory in 1944, giving the party four years to purge the New Dealers, who have excessively "coddled" Coloureds, labor and the poor. Now, I am a squire, and you are -well, apparently the phrase for inherited wealth her in the New World is "self-made man," but whatever. But we --I think-- still remember that in a democracy, you have to get most people to vote for you to win an election, and that most people are not rich. Oh, true, one of the things that these New Dealers do is to“attack” the poll tax, and one might place one's hopes on lifting the poll tax high enough so that only the rich can vote. Now we shall look at the Democratic record in the last 80 years of national elections and find that, yes, this is a strategy. A terrible, terrible strategy, but a strategy. The paper goes on to add that this rush to political suicide is inspired by the “group tactlessness” of the White House inner circle. Theat is to say, the President’s aides werecutting, and this is a perfectly sound reason to plan to lose every election from now on forever. One suspects that, when push comes to shove, a more practical spirit will flourish in Democratic circles. Flight, 23 December 1943 Leaders “The Shape of Things to Come” aviation folk working 16 hour days have to take a breather sometime, and when they do, they talk about postwar aviation. Some even say that the flying boat has had its day, but they are mad. Sigh. There is also much of interest in theMiles “X” type, which only seemed mad five years ago, but now looks like an acceptable compromise between the conventional types envisioned for the next ten years by Chadwick (which Handley-Page said no-one would buy), and the unconventional types thereafter, perhaps including the all-wing type. War in the Air In the Battle of Cherkassy, the Russians made “effective use of airborne forces.” Unless some spectacular news breaks in the next few days, I suggest that this is a generous use of the word "effective." Also, there was bombing and close support on the Eastern Front, unlike in Italy, where the weather sucked. In the Mediterranean there were air attacks on the Brenner Pass and Innsbruck to further isolate the Itality theatre. MacArthur has invaded New Britain, and the Americans acknowledge heavy casualties in the German air raid on two ammunition ships unloading at Bari. “More jet propulsion” is the caption of a picture of German Nebelwurfers firing in Russia. Articles “Teaching Air Photography” the paper visits “the R.A.F.’s oldest photographic training establishment.” (Historic pictures.) Number 1 School of Photography got its start in 1915, with Moore-Brabazon as its motivating spirit. Stereograms are a big deal, and so are multi-printers. “Jet Propulsion:” A Swiss expert speaks. “The Miles ‘X’”. It doesn’t exist. But if it did exist, it would be amazing, a sentiment from which I cannot dissent. You know what else would be amazing if it only existed? Father Christmas's sleigh. Imagine the ratio of loaded to unloaded weight it must have. At least Miles is not proposing to build it. That sounds more like a Sikorsky job. Behind the Lines Japanese ramping up production and trying to do a better job of building combat effective aircraft to offset the American numerical superiority. Germans have the Me 323 . Aircraft Types Boeing 314 and Sea Ranger. Service Aviation has a picture of F.O. S. E., Sukthanker receiving his DFC. A member of the Pathfinder Force. Time, 27 December 1943 (Yes, I received proofs of this a little early. The publisher has yet to drop me from the advance circulation list after I was added over the "Kaiser expose" matter in the fall.) China: Nine Tings of Yü “A well-informed traveler from Chungking” tells the press of a story suppressed in China, of Marshal Chiang being presented with a set of nine bronze tings, the familiar symbolic precursor to . . . well, I hardly need to explain it to you. The Marshal rejected them angrily, the paper reports, imagining that this is to the credit of the Marshal. Why, one wonders, do Westerners never imagine that wu jen are capable of ironic comment? “India: Death in Bloom:” Bengal now has ample food, but the privation-related disease of cholera, dysentery and dropsy are on the march. “Foreign News; One More Close Call:” The paper notices, and is concerned about, the Prime Minister’s recent bout of pneumonia. That will happen when old men are tasked with such arduous travels. Which is not to say that dread does not grip me, too. “Tristan da Cunha: The Lily Maiden:” the main title will allow the future archivist to group this with all the other Tristan da Cunha-datelined stories. But I should not joke, because the lily maiden in question is the figurehead of the Admiral Kampfanger of the Holland-America Line, reported overdue In New Zealand five years ago, with a crew of 16 and 44 boy cadets aboard, all lost to the world for five years, and now forever, a price demanded by the sea that pales only because of the war that has come since. How many have been swallowed by the sea? And how many of them, spit forth from a sea-change, made wondrous strange? Family history always makes me pensive. “FEPC vs the Railroads:” First on the returned President’s agenda is the Federal attempt to desegregate the Southern railroads. The Southern railroads made the expected response, but the head of the FEPC pointed out a national shortage of 850 locomotive firemen, even though Coloured firemen were unemployed. Also on the rails, the strike question. In spite of the pay increase, 145 million railway employees are ready to walk off the job at Christmas time, and the country is not happy, especially with Bing Crosby crooning his latest crime against sentiment from every radio. “Ban Facts:” London and Washington’s unwillingness to be straight about the devastating German air raid on Bari harbour is not reassuring. Surely the people can “take it?” So how did the explosion of two ammunition ships kill more than a thousand service men without sinking any more ships? A puzzler. To those who have already forgotten the last war, and more than suggesting why this is being so carefully concealed. Shall we see gas used on the Italian front soon? “Catastrophe: Why?” A railway accident at Buies, N.C. kills 72 Christmas travellers in a gruesome scene. It was a failure of signals to alert the Tamiami East Coast Champion of a derailment ahead. The paper is not impressed. The Engineer would be even less so. The signals just have to work. “Wartime Living: Minimum Comfort:” There is not enough coal to go around, due to John L. Lewis’s strikes and shipments to Europe. Say some. Plus a shortage of labour and machinery. Others suggest that it is because of distribution problems. Coal is shipped by rail, and the rails are slow in winter, when coal is wanted. Which is why coal is often short in the winter. Solid Fuels Administrator Ickes, however, is gloomy, because this shortage is unusually severe. He says that while Britain has become used to ‘no coal for comfort,” America enters 1944 on a ‘minimum comfort’ standard. Fair enough in California. But in Michigan? “U.S. At War: The Bobbie Pin Front:” people miss these. And many other “indispensable doodads.” “U.S. At War: You Can Get Something:” At this point, Christmas shoppers are basically buying anything they can get, since everything they want is out of stock. “Decent lingerie –in both senses—is especially in demand.” I am a little perplexed about what this sentence seems to imply about indecent lingerie. Wong Lee did not set out to buy lingerie, but given the way the stores were picked clean, I may be receiving some, if only because I put my foot down on giving any from the glum pickings-over of his expeditions. Ah, well, at least by measure of money spent, this will be a generous Christmas, and I did manage to find tyres for your namesake son's car, bringing it that much closer to "roadability." “Food: Meat Moratorium:” appears to mean the opposite of the strict reading, as the fall slaughter was “near-record,” and the OPA may be forced to temporarily lift the rationing of pork. Battlefronts” Amphibious assault takes location on New Britain, carrier task force raids Rabaul and Truk, USAAF Liberators raid the Marshal Islands in preparation for operations there. “Battle of Russia: The Push?” The question marks says it all. “Army And Navy: In This Total War:” Recruiting for the WACs and WAVES has been very disappointing. Possible things to blame include male chauvinism; female careerism The New York Daily News. The British had to go for conscription. Should we? This is an interesting question. Where are the lady volunteers? “Army and Navy: Shining Planes” Henceforth, US planes will not be painted except where tactical considerations require. Tis, it is suggested, is partly for weight saving. A bomber might save 70 to 80lbs. Excuse a shipyard man, but isn’t there another reason why one might skip painting? To save labor? “Transport: Failure in ‘43”: Truman Committee warns that only a generous quantity of new equipment and replacement parts can prevent a critical transportation breakdown in 1944.” There is mention of rails, tyres and airliners, but not what the Rennert accident reveals as essential, more and better signals equipment. Well, the less attention it gets, the more room there is for first moving investors? In fact, I broached this to Bill and David. And while they rolled their eyes and explained that they cannot be into everything, they did offer me the name of an acquaintance made down on the water with a bug in his brain aboutimproving rail traffic control that he works on when he is not fitting radar to ships. Or we could just drop some money into Westinghouse, although I am skeptical, as we certainly could not mobilise the capital to have a place on the board of so colossal an enterprise. “The High Cost of Ceilings:” Ceilings on textile prices have squeezed out low-cost producers of cheap socks, work clothes, aprons, dresses. Secret inflation! As the paper sees it. “No Time on Their Hands:” the national radio networks have basically sold their entire time table, and profits are up 20%. Notice that the paper has already complained about paper shortages. No relief for advertisers there. ..And I hear adolescent feet stamping below. The sojourners have returned, and I suspect that Christmas Dinner is imminent, with hopefully enough food to keep even young bodies abed to a reasonable hour. Wishing, in this happy moment, for one of Mr. Wells' time machines so that you can read this as I write it, looking forward to the unwrapping of gifts on Christmas morning. Unless with the time shift that is actually happening in England? Or is it the other way around.. You know that I could look this up. Or I could descend to greet my family. Ah, well, it may be too late to say Happy Christmas, but best of the New Year, Reggie!

It turns out that when you ride a bike naked down 11th Avenue, you have to take special care of the saddle. Though I could probably do a Top Ten list of the important lessons I learned that day.

I like Part One, but have my doubts about Part Two, because all of that has been published already, and tends to drive the page count up without giving casual readers much to invest themselves in. My thought is that instead of Part Two, you have appendices. Why? Well, what made TSR? In the first place, timing. Those first boxed sets came out when there was nothing else like it on the market, and the market is big and growing. Forget doing that. The '70s aren't coming back. In the second place, there was the creative ascendancy it achieved in the 1980s with products that grabbed mind share. And what were those products? The Adventurer's Guides that introduced non-weapon proficiencies? No. Those may have changed the game mechanics fundamentally, but hardly anyone cared about that. The 2nd Edition rewrite with its new Monster Manual? No. People grumbled, then they moved on. Evocative new settings like Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape or Spelljammer? No. Just no. I would argue that the one stroke of imagination that pushed TSR to the next level was the Underearth, and, specifically, the Drow. Why? Because the Drow were cool, which is hard to replicated, and because they were totally broken. It's that last that is so hard to replicate, and it is at the heart of Gygax's genius-that-looked-like-stupidity. Bad rules that you can drive a truck through go, at some point, to the next level, where they attract a horde of players who want to drive trucks. That's what the appendices and additional material of first edition did, in general, and the brand was the stronger for it, even if hardly anyone ever used the psionics rules or the bard class as originally written. So the appendices need to replicate the Against the Drow. Here's my proposal on how to do it: Appendix 1: A continuation of the adventure path from 5, introducing the "real" enemy and leading the PCs on through an evocative adventuring environment. And, no, I'm not smart enough to suggest what that should be, except that it should be exotic and familiar at the same time. A cityscape, maybe? Appendix 2: an enemy. Of course, the point with putting all of this in an appendix is, he says (butter not melting in his mouth) that these enemies "break" the rules as given. By using the full flexibility of the Hero Toolkitting system, they are made to be too-powerful for their points by comparison with PCs built in 1) and 2). Appendix 3: More pregen characters with interesting powersets appropriate to fight the enemies introduced in 2, perhaps drawing from other Hero settings. (Space Marine, superhero, Doc Savage clone, Punisher clone, different flavour of magic user.) Appendix 4: coupon for a discount on the PDF download of the big rule book.

I was going to go for the "cloned WWII superteam" option here, mainly because I wasn't feeling it. Then Hermit made his pitch for the "government-sponsored" superteam, and I'm in. With one condition: no spies, no soldiers, no Special Forces, Treasury agents, Secret Service, FBI. Heck, no NSA. Make them posties and FDA inspectors, janitors and teachers from the Rez. Regular people with regular jobs who happen to work for the Federal Government. Who can suddenly lift tanks, run at Mach 1, and draw forcefields in the air with their noses. (The last is a civil engineer at a Department of the Interior office in Billings who spends most of his time inspecting and approving logging road bridges. Because.)

-Swept away by a sudden flood while trying to cross a ford, the PCs must deal with a water spirit's enigmatic challenge and gain a magic item if they succeed. -Gathering fodder for their horses, the PCs run into a invasive range weed with a mind, and a malice, of its own. - One of the evil shamans visits their bivouac late at night in his skinchanged form (owl, raccoon, coyote...) with sinister intent. -Trapped by a snowstorm, the PCs find an ancient tunnel that might bypass the heights, but with a locked door, etc, etc. -More locks, more snow: the PCs take refuge in an ancient stone barn. But when they try to leave, the door slams shut and locks them in. The ghosts are lonely.... --A majestic animal (I'm defaulting to a mastodon) is found, in deep distress. Perhaps it is mired, or down a ravine. If the PCs rescue it, they gain a powerful ally. If the kill it for XPs, well, at least it's dinner --The PCs lose their way, and must pick their way back to the road through a tangled and overgrown forest. But when one character gets down on hands and knees, they realise that their are runs through the brambles --just before a mighty boar tries to disembowel one from below.

We lost a new cashier this week. Hard working, lively, fun, eager to please, a real good girl. Studying hard, in a choir, nice boyfriend. I quite liked her. Can you tell? Oh, and she was unbelievably light fingered. Usually, we find thieves by stochastic analysis of till contents because they have the sense to try to hide their activities, but this girl was setting off every alarm you can imagine, and then some. Phones missing, bottles of pop and water drunk and stashed for the janitors to find... You can get away with that kind of stuff for a while, but we've got cameras, and they're not just for show. At some point, you've got to think that it was thrill-seeking as much as anything else. (Although if she knew fences for the phones, then she's at least a bit into the unsavoury side of life.) And then you think about the behaviour and realise that you were looking at what makes maniacs (in the technical sense) so popular. They're fun to be around, in a watching-someone-self-destruct-kind-of-way. I wish we were better at spotting people whose apparently positive personality features were, in fact, so dangerous. From narcissists to sociopaths to borderline personality "good time girls,"* they can do a lot of damage in the process of slowly destroying themselves. *There's a feminist critique of the borderline personality disorder that says that it is basically the psychiatric profession medicalising female behaviour. Maybe. I think that it's more likely that our ability to recognise personality disorders skews by gender, so that it is hard to tell BPD from "ideal" female behaviour, and, perhaps, sociopathy from "ideal" manliness.

Well, that sucks.

If you read ship's manifests from the early days of fighting sail, you'll have no idea who is supposed to do what, because the titles tend to be archaic trade jargon and/or reflect ancient sensibilities. "General-at-Sea" does not mean what you think it means (except that it does), and the "Cooper's Mate" is not some alternate world future version of Archie. So take that into space. "Aye and begorrah. That be above my paygrade as a mere Assistant 'Shopper. The fella you want to be jarrin' to is the ship's Sysadmin. Just go and see his editor for an appointment."

They're pirates. The descendants of Henry Morgan and Blackbeard, Barbarossa, Simon the Dancer, Jans Janszoon, Koxinga. Never able to marry before church/ulama/the proper rites, they passed their inheritances down as treasure maps given to the illegitimate brood of their mistresses. At every turn, they sought their fortunes at the margins: opium to China, guns to Ethiopia, seal blubber from the Antarctic. Then they reinvested it --into insider trading and stock bubbles and real estate held through untraceable shell companies. With their money, the corrupted politicians and the laws to protect their wealth. And the treasure maps got fuller and more yellow. Today, half of the gold mined since history began is buried, from the elephant seal skerries of farthest south to the longest-abandoned palmaries of the deep Sahara. All to back up fortunes that know neither law nor nation. And if you cross them, you will discover that in their hearts, they are pirates still.

Postblogging Technology, November, 1943: Caesar's New Clothes Santaclararesearch.net My Dearest Wing Commander: I have received your last, and will try to reply to your questions in --well, I was about to write something grandiloquent about "in the order of their importance," but that is beyond my garrulous nature. I leave the most important to last, let us say. First, it looks like we will be a houseful for some time. As might have been expected, the Admiralty's decision to build some of the later freighter-aircraft ships as "assault carriers"has evolved in the typical way from the stage at which we cared when naval architects talked about ship stability to the point at which the specialisms have had each their say. Now there are vast amounts of new equipment to be procured and installed, and the vessels are expected to float vaguely upright, and so your eldest has been cut new orders that will keep him on the "West Coast Shuffle" at least through the New Year. At least I can look forward to sharing a berth on the Seattle and Los Angeles trains! Second, the Santa Clara estate is surprisingly little touched by the ravages of war and old age. There is even a boy's crashing tread shivering the old timbers. Although your youngest is, of course, rather older than when we left for Greenwich! The western verandah has come out to make way for an outdoor carport, a long overdue "improvement" brought on by your son's attempts on an invalid Lincoln that he inherited from a friend of mine, a minor movie star gone to war. (I draw a curtain over the trip up from Los Angeles, whose details would hasten your graying.) Once again I salute my wisdom of four years ago in taking the master suite instead of my old bedroom. Not only does it seem so much smaller now, but little could I imagine in 1939 that we would end up hiring out the cabin to no less than three dockyard workers' families! You can imagine the bedlam in the back yard. The long and the short of it is that the outdoor kitchen is running by shifts and the ranch hands take their meals on the back verandah. Michael and Joan have elected for the back bedroom, keeping the hands alittle quieter knowing that their boss is overhead and that he speaks Spanish. Joan by the way, is seeing to her mother and the house in Pasadena, where they are to retire to be closer to their grandchildren. Of Shiwa Ta-Wan you will have heard from your wife and daughter, and I say no more of the ruinous old pile overlooking us. Your son, and daughter-out-of-law will be staying there. This rather avoided a bit of a scrape for we three bachelors, who received many a stern look on "Mrs. J. C.'s" (if I remember my coy little code from 1939, she was "Miss G. C." then). She seems to have been shocked as much by the amount of food lying around as by the mess. She also took a dim view of the effort put in by the local girl who is acting as our after-school housekeeper. What can I say? Good domestic help is impossible to find, and she is well-mannered and attractive, in that blonde Californian way. "Mrs. J. C." has taken it upon herself to organise Grandfather's papers. Thank God. I was not looking forward to trying to find a lawyer in San Francisco who could be trained to read the oldHakka pirate writing! (Not to mention that he would then be equipped to read this correspondence.) This brings me to two final and more sensitive matters. First, Grandfather was apparently roused to a rare moment of coherence upon hearing your letter read. (Congratulations on receiving the RAF "contract" by the way!) Bill and David were summoned up to the big house to give a seminar. Grandfather had lapsed by the time they arrived, of course. Fortunately, they are well-used to their patron's eccentricities, and took in stride receiving instructions from his "translator." It does not hurt that she was looking very fetching indeed in a beige linen dress! They recommended --but enough of that for now. Second, or, as I think in this rambling pile of digressions I have quite lost the thread, most importantly, there are the Earl's rather pointed questions about my dissent from our cousin-in-law's business plans. I understand his anxiety. As much as you have disabused him about "H. C.'s" legendary (alleged) business genius, he still speaks very much the received West Coast wisdom. Given our inherited real estate profile, the future of a very large share of the family's fortune is linked to the prosperity of the Pacific Slope. So why do I dissent? Ordinarily, I would give my answer in the financial newsletter appended. However, I did not feel comfortable rendering Bill and David's recommendations even in Hakka characters, so have hauled out the family one-time pad, and given that I was transcribing anyway, this month's newsletter brings England up-to-date on the sordid side of our real estate business. That being said, just because I was "feeling like" transcribing does not mean that I was feeling like waxing eloquent, so I have appended my argument with "H.C" to the end of my news roundup. Knowing my tendency to wax on, I take the liberty of bolding those bits of news and comment of special relevance. Flight, 4 November 1943 Leader: Wingate’s force in Burma was very romantic, but the point was the striking example of modern science and progress, since transport aircraft can supply troops now. “War in the Air” German bombers attacking Russian rail-, and bridgeheads in strengths of 50 or more, trying to hold up Russian advance. Our correspondent is not fooled by Middle East Command’s attempt to paper over the fiasco in the Dodecanese, of which I shall say no more. Unlike the press. “The Rotol AGP,” which is a petrol generator set for auxiliary power generation aboard aircraft. My eyes pop at hearing 3,750rpm, 37 kW output. This is most impressive detailed mechanical engineering, and it uses a sleeve valve, perhaps the first time I have heard of this technology being put to meaningful work. One wonders why an aeroplane would need 37kW. “Drop Tanks;” Carefully faired metal, paper and wood tanks extend fighter ranges. A picture of a Lockheed Lightning with two 150 gallon drop tanks is captioned with the information that an additional 300 gallons “approximately doubles” its range. Err. Assuming three hours in the air (at a cruising speed of over 300 mph, that is a lot of range!), the engines absorb 50 gallons/hour. The author adds that with drop tanks, the Spitfires of the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit have flown over Koenigsberg, while another made a ferry trip to Tunis to photograph Italian targets, while Mosquitoes have flown from Scotland to Russia and then back between lunch and “early evening.” Apparently, the Russians, letting Allied solidarity take precedence over class solidarity, do not serve PRU pilots dinner. The Economist, 6 November 1943 Leaders “The Moscow Conference” happened. “Restitution:” We cannot do without some war reparations, but they will be in the form of German goods and services to Russia, not money. “The North East Coast:” Remember the tragedy of unemployment in Sunderland, Jarrow, Bishop Auckland and Durham? It’s hard to think back that far, but what if it happens again? Things should be done. Agricultural and mining machinery? Also, and perhaps you will point this out for me to the Earl, “Electrical engineering, which is flourishing on Tyneside, could be expanded.” More housing is the greatest need. Notes of the Week Pay-as-you-earn income tax is here. The paper is pleased. “The Secretary and the Viceroy.” The White Paper on the famine previewed in Parliament by Amery, the SoS India to the effect that the famine is due to the incompetence of the government of Bengal. The paper is not pleased. Food must be found for India. Latins are excitable. Some in Labour think that coal must be nationalised to secure the supply for the winter. As for the miners, they want a 6 pound/week minimum wage (notice that Mr. Lewis has won an increase of $1.50/day), the release of miners from the Forces, and the abolition of dual control. Meanwhile, the threat of a winter coal shortage is being met by “expedients.” Output will be 5% lower than last year, 190 million tons vice 200. At best it will be an uncomfortable winter. At worst, if the Coal Board in Washington was correct in warning that the coal needs of the Mediterranean cannot be met from American supply, it will be more serious than that. “Strikes and Arbitration:” The London dockers’ strike, which lasted a week, was over the pay of danger money for handling some classes of goods. How circumspect in this month of official commitment to the Second Front. Are munitions meant? The London docks will be loading a very great deal of it, I imagine. In the West of Scotland engineering industry, it was over “rate for the job” for women (allegedly) hired to do men’s work. “Sugar and Jam:” From the next ration period, the two coupons will be interchangeable with the thought that sugar will be favoured in the summer to promote preservation, and fruit in the winter, to make allow people to eat more jam. Remember turnip jam? “The Billion:” This week for the first time, notes in circulation exceed 1000 million, an American billion. It’s a milestone. The paper will use the American version of "billion" from now on. American Survey The GOP is ahead in all local elections. Mr. Dewey is now well positioned for "other things." “Coal Must be Mined;” a temporary solution to the strikes has been found, with a compromise wage increase of $1.50/day and temporary Government control of the mines; but some abatement in the cost of living is needed if there is to be wage stabilisation. “The Civilian Slice:” Is to be increased. “Early in October, the President of the Society of Tool Engineers revealed that many shell factories have been ordered to return to civilian production.” Production of trucks, tank trucks and repair parts has been stepped up, and the Atlantic coast petrol ration increased. Quotas on butter and cocoa have been increased, and coffee has come off the ration. Just in time to save the war effort! The first signs of let-up in the meat shortage have been met by requests from the packers to increase the ration, good news for readers of Aviation, some of whom, by which I mean, "me," are getting a little tired of relentless salivation over vanished beefsteak. Do Americans know how to cook anything else? Some parts of the war production effort, notably munitions, are said to have overrun the their target. Yes, I remember them digging up 1913 quotes to that effect in 1915. “The Food Position:" The current $800 million price support programme could be usefully increased next year by Congress, the President suggests, and Readers’ Digest recently published an article by Louis Bromfield with the ‘haunting’ title, “We Aren’t Going to Have Enough to Eat.” This is not true, the paper says. Food production has risen steadily, from a basis of 100 in 1936 to 126 in 1942 and 132 in 1943, with hopefully a still larger increase next year as 380 million acres are ploughed vice 364 this year. It is, however, true that food consumption has fallen 5% below the fat year of 1941, and with Service men eating more, and food aid exports, there is a sense of shortage. The farm lobby’s campaign against subsidies, controls and food aid export is pernicious and ought not be indulged. Senator Wheeler’s bill for the drafting of fathers has been delayed 90 days to allow all the single men to be taken. The paper decries the Senator’s unsavoury accusation that Government work is a refuge for draft dodgers is indignantly decried. The President presents a bill to provide for the educational needs of returning veterans. Small saver participation inthe Third War Loan drive has proven disappointing, with only $2 billion of $17billion of bonds in the E and F series designed to appeal to them taken up. Germany at War “Air-War Economy” more than half of Germany’s big towns have been bombed in 1942 and 1943. A very speculative estimate of a million killed and missing and 6 million evacuated comes from a neutral source. The paper is cautiously optimistic about the impact on German war production. Business Notes Equities down for the first time since early 1942; ‘rally in rails’; Australia repays its sterling debt; there has been excess profits and waste in the munitions industry. Is there to be cooperation or competition in international rubber? Will the excess profits tax finance reconstruction? Durham coal production has failed to meet its targets in every week this year and output per man-shift has declined from 22.82 cwts to 19.21. The men are older and more tired, and the strain of the war is beginning to tell. There is a shortage of young men, and now they are being “directed” into the mines at the rate of 150/week. Housing in miners’ villages is inadequate for this influx, and many “necessitous” and marginal mines are being worked. Voluntary absenteeism is lowest in the country at below 2.5%, but involuntary has ballooned to over 7%. Flight, 11 November 1943 Leader: “Administrative Innovation.” The Air Ministry pretends that it is of no great account that two observer officers have been advanced to the command of bomber squadrons. But how unthinkable this would have been in the last war! Or recall how “some RAF circles” reacted to the Admiralty’s 1937 announcement that observers were eligible for the command of flights or squadrons, and that in multi-seat aircraft the senior officer was in command of the aircraft. “War in the Air” Pays tribute to the Pathfinders, who blazed the trail for the recent successful raid on Dusseldorf. Which is to say, we now admit that there are Pathfinders. See below. Here and There A two-speed, two-stage Merlin has been in quantity production at Packard Motors and is being installed in new production P-51s being built in Burbank and Texas. Articles Frank Murphy, “Victory Through Air Power: Mastery of the Air by 'Air Battleships:' Jet Propulsion Favoured: Some Thoughts Evoked by the Film.” This appears to be the title of the piece, which is a reflection on Mr. Disney's recent film version of Seversky’s Victory Through Air Power. Mr. Murphy's thoughts are as unimpressive as title and author's fame suggests, but "jet propulsion" pricked up my ears. Again, see below. “Hercules Progress:” I might be skeptical about the practical value of the sleeve valve, but there is no doubt that Bristol has put a great deal of work into its potential for making the action of an internal combustion engine even more head-scratchingly complex. “Aircraft Types: Invader (A-26). The paper really is shameless in borrowing material fromAviation. “The Bf109G:” This is news, at least somewhat. Apparently the first examples were recovered in Tunis. The salient point is that Daimler-Benz has a new engine, the DB605, which gives 1350hp for takeoff vice the old DB601’s 1200. This strikes me as a rather small increment after the boggling increase from the c. 550hp of a decade ago! “Behind the Lines” reports that the Germans are exploring a ‘sonic altimeter” based on the depth locator principle. Which sounds preposterous. Ha! "Sounds." “Blazing the Trail:” Air CommodoreD. C. T. Bennett, CBE, DSO, is now noticed as having been wearing the Pathfinder Force Badge in a June 17th visit to a Bomber Command station in Yorkshire. Air Commodore Bennett was born the youngest son of a grazier in Toowoomba, Australia and is 33. I am feeling old, and inadequate. Again, it is official. There is a Pathfinder Force. Ad: “Planning for Power.” I shan’t include the uninspiring artwork, I only draw your attention to the fact that some flea-bitten firm called “Herbert Terry and Sons” is representing its research office as an empyrean realm of men in white laboratory coats and benches in the pages of Flight. Bristol may talk of tax breaks for research, or Hiduminium. That I can take in stride. When a spring maker is on about its research efforts,"research and development" is officially a "fad." Flight’s publishing office advertises the availability of a second edition of G. Geoffrey Smith, Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion for Aircraft. This has been advertised in Flight for some weeks now. Giving authorial creditor to the line editor rather strongly suggests that the actual prose originates in a Government shop. Given that we are to hear nothing of "jets" officially, I imagine that I have stumbled across some vast state secret, and I hope that the Gestapo's foreign press section is particularly dense. The Economist, 13 November 1943 Leaders “Unscrambling Politics;” Mr. Churchill has given a masterful speech that is the preview of the next King’s Speech, probably the last before Germany is beaten and quite possibly the last before a general election. This seems hopeful. “The American Temper:" The Moscow Agreement has American internationalists in full flood; but don’t count the isolationists out, either! On the one hand this, on the other that, Mr. Wilkie this, American anti-English sentiment that. Notes of the Week “Three Voices;” Stalin, Hitler and Churchill have all given big speeches this week. They mirror the war in their way, says the paper. “Russia, triumphant, warlike, national but Socialist still; Germany in retreat, gloomy, and mystically frenzied; Britain resolved, confident, and half aware of the morning after victory, now assured.” “The Air Front;” Stalin said nice things about the bombers. Churchill laid stress on its effects. And Air Marshal Harris gave a talk. “Climax in the East,” the fall of Kiev. “Reciprocal Aid;” the President recently said that Lend-Lease makes up 12% of the American war effort, and British reciprocal aid 10% of its. Well, a few numbers shall certainly lance all inter-Allied acrimony! “Domestic Service in Hospitals” the campaign to recruit nurses is ongoing, and the shortage is made worse by the need to do non-nursing duties. More ‘domestic staff’ is needed. Also, who is to fetch my coffee? (For I am Californian, now.) “Rewards for Service” given the predicted shortage of teachers, might not service personnel be invited to train for it? And shouldn't we try paying them? A new compensation scheme is needed. American Survey “Thunder of a Distant Boom” is another boom in agriculture in its incipient stages, asks Our Correspondent in Iowa? It could be! Booms are bad, as they threaten ownership by the men who work the farms. Farmland price appreciates. Speculators and rich people somehow intrude themselves between farmers who sell to relatives. “Thousands of Iowa farmers sold out at boom prices last time . . . and retired to live in southern California on their incomes from mortgages, even though it made hard the lot of the next generation of farmers, thus burdened with the debt for grossly overcapitalised farms.” But wait. The "men who work the farms" pay a mortgage that by itself supports their parents in retirement? That is quite a farm! And does the "boom" not meant that they will now be able to sell their farms at 'inflated' prices and retire to the palm trees in their turn? Our Iowa Correspondent seems a bit wet to me. “The Omens for 1944:” The GOP sweep was even more complete than first thought. The Republicans are convinced that this is predictive. Wilkie says that the country is tired of the Administration. The GOP now controls the majority of state governorships, with all the rewards that will bring them. The surrender to Mr. Lewis will reward Republican challengers in farm states. The Economist certainly gives Wilkie a great deal of press. “The High Price of Coal” To get the miners back to work, the reward was $1.50/day. The concession that lunches will be cut to 15 minutes, with the miners paid at time-and-a-half for the quarter hour, is but a fig leaf. The Administration’s failure to sustain the War Labour Board is folly, and the way is open for a CIO-led assault on the wage structure, starting with the steel industry. “Lend Lease Debt” The Truman Committee turns its attention to lend lease. More inter-Allied trouble, in particular over rubber? Or is the committee to be moderate and sane? “Eire’s Wheat Supplies” are threatened in spite of an increase in ploughed acreage. A guaranteed and increased price for wheat will promote its growing. Yes, we have seenthis play before. Government's view of what counts as an adequate price of wheat (or, in Bengal, rice) so rarely coincides with the farmer's. Business Notes .. . Of which I note only “Fruit Production.” The Ministry is stepping in, because too much orchard land has been lost. Although the details suggest that in practice more will be lost. But ministry direction means science! Unproductive orchard land is to be grubbed, and all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Turnip jam. The mouth fails to water. Flight, 18 November 1943 Ad: Republic: “Our Backyard is the Stratosphere.” The P-47 operates above 40,000 feet. Reggie, my 17-year-old day scholar litters the house with "pulps" dedicated to daring far future adventures in the blackness of space. But we are already halfway there! Leader: “Crippling Japan:” while the Japanese cope with MacArthur’s attacks on Rabaul, rushing aircraft and cruisers there, and cripples back, the Americans have commenced work on two35,000 ton aircraft carriers, with another to follow next year. “And the Americans build fast.” Well. Remember the last intended 35,000 ton capital ship laid down the midst of a war and how that turned out? “War in the Air” Allied fighters and light bombers conducted 500 daylight sorties on a recent day over Northwest Europe on a recent day without seeing a German fighter. The Germans are conserving their forces against heavy bomber raids and the coming invasion. As to whether the sweeps are worth interception, I can only notice (yet another) picture of a “cannon attack on a railway engine in Belgium.” The recent attack on Wake involved the largest concentration of aircraft carriers ever assembled, the United States Secretary of the Navy reported, and give the lie to the idea that carriers must operate out of range of land bases. This inter alia of a notice that the U-boat war will be taken over by land-based Navy squadrons, which I read as mainly salient for confirming that United States naval aviators will have access to squadron command berths. Worth knowing for the youngest's sake, if his ambitions remain firm. As to the mighty concentration, I note that United States Navy appropriations are not really secret. Three fleet carriers survived the first year of the war, Ranger because she is not deemed suitable for Pacific operations. The Naval Expansion Act of 17 May 1938 authorised two new aircraft carriers, with a third appended later, and the July 1940 Two-Ocean Navy Act ultimately authorised ten more to the same design and 8 to be converted from 10,000 ton cruiser hulls under construction. While I suppose that an East Coast miracle (I can tell you that no miracle workers stalk the shipyards of this coas) might have rushed the Two-Ocean Navy order into service, I think it more likely that it is the three Naval Expansion carriers and some or other of the light carriers, with perhaps some glorified freighters. In which case, while I congratulate their courage in steaming into harm’s way, I suggest doing so with a weather eye to just how many land airfields they might choose to tangle with. “Here and There” notes the American announcement that deliveries exceeded 8000 aircraft last month, and that, with Allied totals added, makes the United Nations 3-1 winners on the production front. Lord Brabazon promises that the British aviation industry has nothing to fear from American production after the war. This seems optimistic to me. There is a reason that the American industry has flocked to Los Angeles, and it is much the same reason that the film industry flocks to Hollywood, with hardly any time to even come up to San Francisco and “make time with our girls,” as your son puts it. “And him a married man!” Also ‘Here and There’ is news that Sir George Thomson, FRS, has been appointed chief scientific advisor to the Air Ministry. It is noted that “he will work in consultation with Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the RDF maven. Excuse me? How did an atomic scientist pip W-W out of the post? One assumes that it is a matter of being his (grand)father’s son. “Luftwaffe’s ‘Most Surprising Discovery,’” speaking of carriers of great names, Carl Zeppelin writes that German investigators have discovered that only the lead American bombers carry their famed bombsight, and that the bomb load of Fortress-type bombers is slight, “as nearly a third of their weight-carrying capacity is used in armour,” which I assume is some winsome rendering out of the German of “arms and armour.” Behind the Lines Notices that the Rumanians have announced a parachute corps. Candidates must be physically fit, of Rumanian “ethnical origin,” and, if possible, proficient in at least one foreign language. As someone of pure and unblemished English origin myself, I parse this as “Handsome, swell, and a good liar.” Look for the next generation of Rumanian leaders to be former paratroopers, in short. The first German pictures of the “havoc caused by theattack of Lancasters on the Mohne and Eder dams on May 17th” is included. Finland is starting a new lubricants industry to make industrial grease out of animal fats due to the curtailment of German deliveries. Due to acute shortage of housing, the Reichs Commissioner for Housing declares 17, including Berlin and Vienna, “closed,” preventing relocation there. The Economist, 20 November 1943. Leaders “Lord Woolton’s Task;” Lord Woolton’s appointment to the Cabinet as Minister for Reconstruction is a positive move. His record as Ministry of Food follows him, and a more difficult task lies ahead! “Mutual Aid:" Is mutual. Notes of the Week “Labour and the Nation” Labour is trying to set up its position for the eventual general election. French and Italians continue to be excitable Latins.“Retreat and Counter-Stroke” the battle around Kiev is ongoing, with a German counter-attack perhaps even aiming at retaking Kiev. God, I hope not. American Survey “The South and the World” The South is isolationist. Before 1941, it led the states in percentage of volunteers. Now it does not, despite the South's natural martial valour. Perhaps we might question our premise? But no. The South has views on tariffs. And Mr. Wallace. The South is moving right. The country is moving to the right. The President is moving to the right…. American Notes “Coal and the Little Steel Formula” The Administration’s position is that the wage reward was within the terms of the “little steel formula,” because all of the increase in pay is compensated by increased production. The paper is not convinced; and now the railway operators’ union has “revolted” and asked Congress to overrule the Stabilisation Director’s ruling that they can’t have more money. “A Drop in the Bucket” is an increase of $2 billion on the revenue side of the new budget. There are increases in excess profits tax, effective income tax rates, and in excise and some other special taxes, but the paper scowls over Congress's unwillingness to tax in proportion to the nation's need. “Hey Diddle Dilling,” Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling has crashed, Anti-Saloon League style, a Chicago talk on Lend-Lease given by assorted usual suspects of the British Commission and the paper. (One does not have to agree with Mrs. Dilling to take her point, here.) The Sun blames the Tribune for fostering a “Black Network” of crypto-fascists. It sounds like Chicago has a vigorous press rivalry to which the paper pays far too much attention. Gogo and Gopo” Mr. Baruch has been put in as head of a new unit of the Office of War Mobilisation which is in charge of “war and postwar problems of adjustment.” That is, of disposing of Government-owned war plant., whether Government Owned and Government Operated or Government Owned and Privately Operated. After WWI, much was sold at fire sale prices and scrapped with enormous waste. The Chamber of Commerce recommends that this experience not be repeated. The World Overseas “Roumanian Anxieties:” are understandable given that Kiev is only 150 miles from the Bessasrabian frontier, “From Kherson to Odessa it is 100 miles, and to the mouth of the Danube 250 miles," but a good harvest has relieved some pressure on the government. Letter to the Editor: “Marine Insurance;” Basically an answer to what all we shipowners have been hearing about windfall profits from casualty insurance. The Business World “the Durham Coalfield” with 100,000 workers, the field has produced 1/7th of Britain’s needs. The decline has already been noted elsewhere. I keep coming back to this, because apparently there is a real possibility that the poor will freeze this winter. It seems distant here, save when caught in a Bay fog, but it is rather alarming nonetheless. Business Notes Mr.Montagu Norman is to be recommended for election as Governor of the Bank of England this year, as he has been since 1919. “Coal Output” has increased by 88,600 tons for the last four week period, but is still 216,000 tons under the weekly average of this time last year. “Larger Clothing Sales” follow the release of more clothing ration coupons, remarkably enough. “Wages in the Cotton Industry” in more amazing news, there is upward pressure on wages. “Home Flax” this encouragement scheme has not gone well/ Flight, 25 November 1943 Leader: “Thorny Questions:” Are we to have commercial flying boats or not? (There is an article later. “Gigantic flying boats are structurally efficient,” I say. “Efficient!” The last man to make a house with a stone axe must have felt much the same way as he vainly made his arguments. ) “The Fall of Leros:" I break my embargo because the paper asks where might be the carriers which took part in the Salerno landing? “They may be reserved for another landing behind Kesselring’s lines.” Secrecy! Is another glorious victory on order? And by that I mean, will Eighth Army somehow be able to break free of its trenches and advance to the relief of the beachhead again? War in the Air Bombing of the mountain routes into Italy, with many striking pictures of martial supplies, including whole aeroplanes, shattered and scattered about ruined trains. “Gatwick Airport” is being built. Here and There reports that Mr. W. H. Eisenman, national secretary of the American Society of Metals, is reported to have told a luncheon in Winnipeg that “After the war, people will buy helicopters for $1500, learn to fly them in five to ten minutes, and be home for dinner at the rate of 130 mph.” “What a swell lunch that must have been." Behind the Lines reports that the Japanese have begun parachute instruction at the kindergarten level. The Japanese are an odd people. On a more serious note, the Romanian Ministry of Air declares the confiscation of all stocks of butyric acid and butyl acetate. Householders must be queuing up now to render theirs to the Ministry. “Fluid Drive:” modern aircraft hydraulic systems are very complex, and in many remarkable ways quite similar to electrical systems. I imagine that a great deal of math is involved. Ad: mistreating an SKF roller bearing is much like smoking in a powder store. For some reason. Ad: The Timken Tapered Bearing is one of many roller bearings that come in many highly machined and varied forms. Cf. "Schweinfurt." The Economist, 27 November 1943 Leaders “Great Illusions” Cordell Hull says that the UN will be kind of like the League of Nations. The paper thinks that collective security under such a scheme is an illusion. Notes of the Week “State Assets” HMG has accumulated lots of stuff, and net, it is easier to say that the war has led to a distortion of the nation’s domestic capital than a decline. Overseas is another matter. See my precis of Fortune, below. “The Future of Exports” America needs to import more stuff. “World Needs” More productivity per unit labour, above all so that people can pay for, and consume more. See Mr. McGraw, below. “Slow Motion in the East” the German counterattack continues. “The Gilbert Islands:" Admiral Nimitz announces the fall of the islands after a short and remarkably successful American combined operation. The paper points to a threat to the Caroline and Marshall Islands and to Nauru as well as to Truk, and notes Radio Tokyo discussing nervously the upcoming “battle of fleets.” The paper sees a pre-emptive spiking of the guns of the Pacific Firsters complaining about the diversion of American efforts to Europe. Can we also look forward to a "decisive fleet battle" involving aircraft carriers to test the controversy between Mahan and Richmond? American Survey “War Plans in the Far West:" With the index of production at 200% of the 1935—39 average, the development of American war production is a matter of pride. But what happens during readjustment? Will communities have to give up their war plants? Provo, Utah does not want to give up its steel plant, which cost $200 million in public money. Dreams of post-war industrial development in the West face obstacles, the paper admits, but the thought is that it is only political folderol holds them back. The paper adds that there is the dream of an unleashed torrent of consumer demand.Individual holdings in saving banks have now reached $31 billion, with another $19.5 billion in war bonds. The pent-up demand for consumer goods might support plants in areas where they are right now marginal. American Notes “Favourite Sons” A tortuous tour through the likely course of the GOP primaries end with the observation that it will be Dewey, of course. “Freedom to be Fascist:" it would do the paper good to just not read the Chicago press. Good God. General MacArthur really is the best that the conservative wing of the GOP can field. “Inflation Front:” The anti-subsidy bloc in Congress cavalierly votes to end this main bulwark against inflation by 278-118. This comes up against Presidential veto, at which point the question is whether the bloc can find a two-thirds majority. “As Raymond Cooper points out, the fight against subsidies is really a fight against price control as a whole." Translation: Congress will make a great show of voting against subsidies for the sake of the rubes, and slink away when there is a serious question of putting more pressure on the feeble anti-inflationary barriers is felt. The Paper tries to scare us (all numbers in American billions): Second Quarter 1942 1943 Total Income 27.4 34.5 Total Personal Taxes 1.5 3.5 Investment 19.8 22.3 Total Disposal 25.7 31.9 Quarterly Addition to Inflationary Pressure 1.7 2.6 "Quarterly Addition to Inflationary Pressure" is the paper's coy way of saying that there is money burning holes in American pockets. Which, I have to admit, is true. This American Christmas is going to be something! . But with two pregnancies well-advanced in the back yard, I have to wonder just how much more the old town will be painted, at least from these quarters, next year. The Business World “The Dollar Problem –I” the high value of the dollar reflects the steady influx of foreign-owned investment into the United States, as shown by the Department of Commerce’s enormous new study. Gold kept flowing into the States because it didn’t want to stay in Europe, and this is more a cause of the trade imbalance in the 30s than American tariffs, perhaps. Perhaps. Business Notes “Coal Consumption” these late November days are foggy and damp, and it is not surprising that people are using more fuel. Compared with the corresponding period in 1942, 13% more gas, 12% more electricity. The Minister of Fuel pleads for conservation. Will fuel be rationed this winter? “EMI Reserves” Close reading of the new format that Electrical and Musical Industries has chosen for its financials suggests that there is a healthy profit margin for their products, one that will continue through the postwar period of eager replacement. “Light Metals” In his monthly munitions production report for July, Donald Nelson of the US War Production Board state that the production problem for magnesium and aluminum has been overcome. Mg production is at 35 million lb/mo compared with 500,000 before the war, while annual production of Al is at 1.7m tons, with production of both set to further increase. And now I turn to the monthlies. Aviation, November 1943 Front cover: A Pratt & up to ten tons each." I am reminded of your complaints about American bragging, Reggie. Although, of course, the B-24 does carry 10 tons, all disposable lift taken together. Just not 10 tons of bombs, unlike the Halifaxes and, now, Lancasters to which your unit attends. Will the "Mossies" be offended if I do not mention them? Wood they? I am sorry. I shall stop now. Whitney ad celebrates the B-24. “From July 1 to October 1, 1940, the enemy dropped 18,900 tons of bombs on England. In July 1943 alone, allied bombers dropped 26,000 tons on Germany. Consolidated B-24 Liberators, carrying Line editorial: James H. McGraw II asks: “Free Enterprise: How Does it Work?” Which is not a rhetorical question addressed to a particularly starry-eyed Fabian, but rather an opportunity for Mr. McGraw to explain that while America was founded by daring entrrepeneurs on the basis of freedom, private property and progress. ("The Second," mind you.) But here he takes an unexpected turn. Waste and unemployment are sobering proof that our economic mechanism is still far from perfect. Now, on to substance: Our production per man hour has been increasing at the rate of 2.5% per year. Improved machines and greater efficiency have more than tripled output per hour of work since 1900. Looking to the future, this annual rise indicates that our production per hour of work will double in the course of he next 25 to 30 years. This means that we can have twice our present volume of goods and services per capita or an equivalent of more production and more leisure. But only with free enterprise. In a compelling demonstration of efficiency of free market capitalists, the full editorial is repeated on the next page. Over to “America at War: Aviation’s War Communique No.23.” We head off this month’s communique with a complaint about modification centres. “Difference between the totals of delivered planes since the first American models, and the total now in use on all fronts, is amazingly high.” And I quote. …"Army and Navy are begging for more planes, faster. It is doubtful they will have enough even on Hitler’s judgment day.. . . “ More must be done to get production up to the 10,000/month target. “The Army called a conference in Washington of war industry bosses, labor and the press. The Navy has just set in motion a new incentive program by which it will try to jack up the fighting spirit of management and workers on the home front. Behind closed doors, during the Army’s conference, war goods producers were told some very disturbing facts about our losses of materials and the punishment our soldiers are taking. The story of our airmen’s battles is notwhat it sounds like in the newspapers. The whole truth cannot be told becausethe facts would be useful to the enemy. . . . Other military observers from overseas say the Germans have a fighting chance of stopping the Allied bombing attack. . . . At home, the industry is at a production plateau of 7600/month. Manpower and design changes are the same old bottlenecks. Labor needs to be found in other sectors." America's war effort requires very choppy prose, too. Lou Leavitt, “Let’s Be Calm about Helicopters.” John Foster, Jr. (associate editor), “Design for Survival;” and Raymond L. Hoadley, “Cancellation Demands Action –And Quick.” Twin articles on the theme of how mismanaged contract cancellations spell D-o-o-o-m to the industry unless Congress Acts Quickly. William J. Morrison (Chief Field Engineer, Simmonds Aerocessories), “Engine Control Achieves Simpler Piloting.” It does, you know. E. C. Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Head Cracks on 24ST Rivets,” Rivets of this type are used for highly stressed parts because they are the strongest of commercial aluminum alloys, but they present special difficulties. Rivets of this type age-harden rapidly at room temperature and consequently become more difficult to drive as the interval of room temperature between heat treatment and use increases. Therefore, they should be either driven immediately after heat treatment or refrigerated. In spite of these best practices being normally employed, head cracks will often show up in rivets driven when too far age-hardened. Cracked rivets are often drilled out and replaced on detection during inspections. This is of dubious value. What is needed is a better standard for condemning rivets on head crack grounds. Our tests were limited to a single batch of commercial rivets and not all that comprehensive, but we conclude that head cracks are nothing to get too upset about. I So, in sum, more head-cracked rivets should pass inspection. I was going to add a clipping here telling inspectors to stop rejecting Alclad sheets for nicks, but I seem to have misplaced it, and so confidence in the squadrons soars! More usefully, there are recommendations on reheat treatment. Factories must better organise workflows, and provide ample refrigeration space. We have an electric icebox now. It is quite nice, and our housekeeper frequently announcers her parents' intention of buying one after the war. E. V. Gustavson, “Engineers Made to Order.” Vega has established special courses to adapt the inexperienced and unskilled to specific production jobs. In cooperation with California Institute of Technology, Warren G. Furry, Vega staff engineer, is giving a 52 week course on aircraft engineering fundamentals to forty engineering employees. All subject matter is “college level,” and includes mathematics, including calculus, (your eldest rolls his eyes at this), aerodynamics, and structures, plus shop work. All students attend classes at CIT for 9 weeks full time on payroll, alternating with 9 weeks in the shop. All candidates selected from applications were women, and were chosen for “personality, adaptability and leadership” as well as other qualifications. Of 130 initially successful applicants, 75 had college math through trig, “some two dozen” through calculus. Of the 20 initially selected, six had college degrees, 2 had 3 years of college, 3 2 years, four 1 year, while 4 had finished high school and 1 had 7(!) years at an art college. Age range was 18 to 49, 14 were single, 5 were married. The longest any had worked at Vega was 18 mos. It is broadly implied that laboratory and office employees were favoured over line workers. Incidentally, this program follows on an earlier one that increased Vega’s engineering staff from 60 to 300 in a few short months by employing persons from other industries who had been trained as civil, mechanical and electrical engineers. One wonders what civil, mechanical, and electrical firms are doing for engineers. “Side Slips” has a story about a pilot who self-administered first aid from his “Doc’s kit” while bailing out and on his survival dinghy, about a “hand written note” in a Washington elevator that said that the odor was from the elevator just being oiled, a relief on a day when temperature and humidity were both pushing 100. Which apparently means that Washington is a fetid swamp. A “route application to end all route applications” has been filed with the CAB that will allow the lucky recipient to fly from anywhere to anywhere in the country. That would be Cousin "H. C.," I imagine. Side Slip makes an extended joke about Globe Aircraft leasing the grounds of the Fort Worth Exhibition, and its relation to the steak that Side Slip no longer eats because of the meat shortage. “Make Your Reservations Early,” United Air Lines has an incredibly complex and efficient system for dealing with reservation requests. They have “two-way telemeter” equipment, so that all the branch offices can communicate with each other simultaneously. There’s a picture of a women putting a sheet of paper into a gigantic contraption that leaves me none the wiser of the details, which manage to make booking a seat on a plane seem complicated.. “Piloting Big Bombers is Big Business”. Nine weeks in cockpits, classes and mechanic’s overalls aren’t enough to make you a four-engine pilot. You need executive ability. A four-engine pilot is a business-man of the air! Someone protests too much. Aviation News From the front we have news that the Germans are losing more aircraft than they produce, and they are also getting more fighters up than ever. Salerno would not have been taken without planes. “War Department Gives out Uncomfortable Facts,” is another summary of the big Army press conference. The manufacturers are sure that it is labor’s fault! “Manpower, Design Changes Slow Production, But Efficiency Pushes Plane Rate Near 8000.” So. Is the industry hoarding labour? Donald. W. Douglas points out that with a mere 4.4% increase in manpower, we are putting out 44% more aircraft over the first 7 months of the year. We’re not hoarding, says the industry. It only looks that way due to design modifications. Blaine Stubblefield, Washington Windsock, reports that people are asking where the Navy liquid-cooled engine, promised months ago, might be. Never mind that one! There’s another one coming that is even better! The Maritime Commission is making auxiliary aircraft carriers because it has the berths. Boeing Vancouver is giving a retroactive pay increase of 6-7 cents/hour. In unrelated news, the company has found only 60 women to fill the 600 berth dorm it built in hopes of employing that many women. I have seen that dorm, which is at the Vancouver Airport, and and the sooner it is levelled to make way for something that people will live in, the better. Aviation Manufacturing News: Interchangeability of parts still has a long way to go says SAE, on American aircraft, world’s best. I thought I’d throw that in, as it has gone unmentioned for pages on end. Douglas is hiring Chinese students who can’t speak English to work on the assembly lines, by using labor brokers in San Francisco. In Long Beach, it is putting high school students on the assembly lines. (They will attend class at the factory half days.) the Navy scheme for incentivising labor, alluded to above, involves tracking the serial numbers of aircraft involved in famous victories so that the people who made them can celebrate their work. I am not sure that this will actually prove much of an incentive. Aviation Abroad: It is officially noted that British warplanes are cheaper than American. British aircraft production is going so high that they’re running out of test pilots! Fortune, November 1943 “About Agriculture,” are farm prices reaching their peak, notwithstanding consumer fears of runaway inflation ahead? The author thinks that what is really happening is that people are buying tax writeoffs, both in terms of livestock and in land. That is bidding up prices, and, ironically, attempts to inflation hedge are driving inflation. Also, refrigeration will allow us to eat all sorts of exotic stuff, such as rijstaffel. Yeah, I don't think so. I suspect the next bit, about frozen, ready-to-eat dinners is a more prescient forecast of postwar American dining. What about the beef shortage? Currently, we have 38 million head. This is up from the 1930s, but in 1890 we had 45 million head to a population of 62 million. 38 million for a population of 133 million is a huge drop. Also down, lamb crop, mainly for lack of good shepherds. Ad: “Gluing Wood with Radio Waves.” Radio waves excite vibrations in water molecules, producing heating that sets glue down in the middle of thick sheets of plywood. Eliot Janeway, “Trials and Error: The West Looks West, and finds foreign policy no abstract subject.” Or proper capitalisation. There are two possible foreign policies in view from San Francisco, as the author writes "this 1 October, 1943." One is of an alliance with Britain, the other with "the progressive forces of Asia." T. V. Soong and Marshal Chiang count as progressives, Reggie! Dewey’s declaration for a British alliance hurt him out here in the West. Wilkie, on the other hand, is popular because WWII is thought of in the west as a Pacific war, thus a war of color, “Wilkie’s Negro policy hasn’t hurt him in spite of alarming growth of conditions that are making this area a new racial danger zone.” (That's code for eastern trash are flocking to the "the shipyards.") People in the West, Janeway hastens to add, think of the Negroes as our own India, an obstacle in the way of prestige in Asia. In order for the Pacific century to be achieved, however, we need more than civil rights, in places far away from northern California. In fact, we need heavy industry out west. Now that's quite a jump, and this is what I had in mind when I talked about the conventional wisdom out here. Janeway thinks California needs steel, aluminum, magnesium, alloys and double tracked transcontinental railways must be double-tracked. Finally, he concedes that there must be new housing. The paper has sent a correspondent to Britain, who makes his first report: “Britain’s Balance Sheet: 1.” To create siege economy, Britain has produced more, consumed less, sacrificed her domestic capital and devoured her assets abroad. Here is a fascinating counterblast to The Economist's stout denial that the war has cost Britain domestic investment. The Cost of War to Britain (millions of pounds 1938 purchasing power) Year 1938 1939 1941 1942 Government Expenditure 845 2660 3355 3545 Consumption 4035 3551 3408 3408 Maintenance and increase of domestic capital 762 395 220 232 Overseas disinvestment 55 658 638 485 GNP 5587 5948 6345 6700 In brief, in 1938, the gross national income was about $22 billion, of which the government spent $3.4. In the last year, of a gross national income of $27, the government spent 14. We note that all of this production has been done under the difficult conditions of blackout, bombing and manpower shortage. People talk about the production of American yards, but British yards are actually more efficient. La! The sacrifice has been made in areas like imports, in the cessation of housing development, “the backbone of the recovery in the 30s,” and pushing beyond allowable cut on timber lands to save on timber, while old iron mines are reactivated. Labour has increased its productivity, but also its working hours. Treasury control has been good, more of the war has been paid for with tax receipts than in the United States, although the nation will be left with a debt of, so far, $1450/head, compared with 1030 for the United States to this point. The question, motivated by the table above, is how Britian will cope with the huge capital investment deficit in everything besides manufacturing plant, and the loss of foreign revenues? Sherry Mangan, “State of the Nation: Minority Report." I am informed that Mr. Mangan is another literary heavy hitter, a translator of no mean repute, a recent reverse emigre from Paris, and a Trotskyite, whereas Janeway only flirted with regular communism back in the thirties. Fortune certainly commissions interesting people to write for it! Mangan thinks that since prices and taxes are rising, the middle class is getting it in the neck. Labor has been spared by the boon of overtime. But with the no strike pledge holding back pay increases, there must come a time when purchasing power begins to decline. Meanwhile, constant efforts to introduce piece rates, disguised as “incentive pay,” disgust labor that is coming to believe that “inflation is doing fine for itself without any wage increases.” Labor militancy is on the rise, as the UAW convention shows, independent labor parties will soon revive and separate from the Democrats as people realise that the old American social contract (that although depressions follow booms, production rises ever higher and each boom is higher than the last) wfails. A total lack of faith in the future will lead the workers to the barricades! “A Yaleman and a Communist:” Emerson Electrics has the best labor record in St. Louis even though its union leader is a communist! It’s because Yale man Stuart Symington is a great manager, and the shop steward, notwithstanding being a communist, is a great labour organiser. Emerson, by the way, builds ball turrets for B-17s. So, now, as promised, my dissent from "H.C." The substance, of course, is that we have refused to invest in his Fontana steel plant, which Mr. Janeway thinks has bright prospects, and that we are only committing a fraction of our orchard land to his "$5000 homes for veterans" schemes. Here are my concerns: the whole objection to investing in heavy steel vice electrical engineering is an old one. Surely the Earl does not want me to go over this again? But, of course, it is more complicated than that. "H.C." thinks that demand for domestic steel will continue high into the postwar era because American will take a share of the postwar shipping boom. There is absolutely no chance of that. Now, I may be dyspeptic, as I am still tired from last week's whirlaround. Men my age should not be asked to make flying trips to the Aleutians, and even my disingenuous soul rebels at being tasked with laying off the loss of ten men to bad welding when the role of poor steel is obvious at a glance. Yet even if the Richmond and Portland yards prove to have a postwar future, my objection to the Fontana plant remains the same. The steel industry is globally overcapacity already, and the West Coast lacks inland water transportation, without which it is handicapped on cost control. The second concern is housing. Of course there will be a housing boom in the United States after the war. The extent of it will depend on whether the professional pessimists are right in deeming Amerca to be a "mature," low-growth nation, or not. I am personally inclined to the pessimistic side right now, although hearing that the Russians have defended Kiev, or that Berlin has been levelled, or even that the Second Front has gone off may well cure that. You see how I have shifted there? It is not the prospects of the American economy that are the cause of this pessimism. It is a contagion from the war news --or, more likely, this miasma of fatigue that settles over people too-old for the work that they are doing. So let us set the crystal ball aside for the moment as clouded by too many fears and not enough hopes and ask ourselves what the boom will look like. Well, the minimum that we can say, with Our Iowa Correspondent, is that Americans look at houses as capital investments to fund their retirement. (I have even had a pretentious real estate hustler quote de Tocqueville to me on this theme!) The scale of the investment is in proportion to the income to be saved; and when coal miners are getting $1.50/day wage increases, a $5000 house is setting sights too low to be worthwhile. Oh, sure, there will be those in the family way who urgently need a house in 1946, and there are those who say that all of those wage increases will be eaten up by inflation. To that I point to Mr. McGraw's figures about labour productivity gains. The money has to go somewhere, and as long as labour is short, we squires will have to earn our share. By, I suggest, holding land off the market, taking its pulse, and releasing it in small quantities to match demand. Again, though, as in all my conversations, I circle back. Houses mean roads and sewers. Roads and sewers mean low-grade steel --especially if America decides to build "autobahns" with "cloverleafs." Now, I grant that there will be American autobahns in some places, notably Los Angeles, and the Fontana plant is well situated to serve them. Yet remember that much of our real estate portfolio was built up in service of the old droving trails. The needs of sheep headed from "the Oregon country" to Chicago, or of tallow-and-hide on the hoof headed for old Monterey and the Bay are not the needs of the modern automobile commuter. Is America seriously to be expected to build "autobahns" all the way along the great old transcontinental trails? Well, fine, then. We have made most of our real estate money with "H.C" from roadwork to this point. We can continue to do it on an increasing scale if this mad vision of a national autobahn network is ever more than a pipedream. The last thing we need to do is to rush it by flooding the Spokane market, say, with house lots now. Will Fontana provide the steel to make cloverleafs in Spokane? I doubt it. Whereas the one thing that I am sure that Americans will buy in the postwar is musical entertainment. If you see my point.

Like the gas gun that Golden Age Sandman used? Cool! Also, my analytic method smooths out intertemporal noise to eliminate the LOTR effect by balancing it against the Hobbit rebound.

Doomsday is cancelled? No-o-o! I bought popcorn!

Careful analysis has allowed me to determine the systemic error here. Let us start with a careful ranking of weapon effectiveness based on a largescale meta-analysis of online tactical experts: 1) OMG Katana! 2) A-10. It's got a gun that's big as a Volkswagen! 3) Panzer VI Tiger. I have a waterproof poster of a Nazi dude in full SS regalia in my shower. 4) Mongol compound bow. Mongols are awesome. 5) Rifle like Sharpe has. "Norfolk Sharpes?" "No, London Sharpes." He's awesome because he conforms to different antiquated class-based social norms! And the gun is cool. Vive le Empereur! Bang. 6) Minigun. It's a personal weapon. Like in that movie. You remember it. You don't? Stupid aging. 7) Model 1911 .45 automatic. It's got "stopping power!" And don't give me lip about the Desert Eagle. That's just trying too hard. 8) Relativistic rock. What the cool aliens use. ..... And so on down to.... 1,415,343) 155mm howitzer field artillery battery. Bo-o-oring. You can't even dual-wield 'em. After appropriate regressions were done on the meta-analytic rankings, it becomes clear that lethality is directly proportional to coolness. This is not in doubt. The fit is perfect, with the exception of an one anomalous data group ("actual effectiveness in combat") which departed from the other data sets by more than 1.4 million, and was therefore discarded as noise. (Observations such as, "Actual asteroids break up into dust when you try to accelerate them to that kind of speed, are really hard to aim, and, besides, you can see them coming" show the fundamental unseriousness of researchers working in this area.) Therefore, the key question in dealing with the quality of dwarven weapons is: "Are dwarves cool?" And the answer is: No. No, they are not. Drow are cool. Drow are awesome with the dual wielding and the animal companions and the lone chaotic good renegaded from... Excuse me. I have to go repaper my shower. Anyway, where were we? Oh, right. Dwarves not being cool. However, I notice a key out here. What if Dwarves made a katana? Everyone agrees that being lame and all, dwarves should be balanced in some way so that they will be usable PCs in case someone doesn't decide to play a drow ninja pirate, which ha ha ha ha ha. But, seriously, you should make their katanas totally badass. That's just fair. Unfortunately, dwarven katanas wielded by dwarves are, well, wielded by dwarves. Lame! Clearly, the solution is to have a drow ninja pirate dual-wielding dwarven katanas. Which would be badass to the power of awesome. Or, in game terms, you should probably give 'em a level or two of AP and a +1 OCV. Probably a couple more for dwarves, since that would balance things up, and it's not like anyone's going to play a dwarf, anyway.

Kelowna's not the frozen-in-aspic town it used to be, and you have to be almost as old as those days to joke about the old "full Nanaimo." So... what were you doing up in the Kootenays?

ttp://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/wartime-farm-can-you-beat-the-ministry

"My species may be dumber than yours," h/sh/t said, "But we're in charge, now." Slowly, he buttoned up the brand-new stain resistant dress white shirt, tucking the tails down into his pressed black slacks. Your eyes are drawn to his shiny brown loafers. The colour doesn't go, and you're a little dubious about the chances of there being steel toes under the slim points. Run those over with power machinery? That's got to smart, even if you are an alien. "And now that we're in charge," h/sh/t continued, "There are going to be some changes around here." H/sh/t unbuttoned the collars and folded them up, then examined the beaten-up shopping bag of actually quite nice thrift store ties. After some hesitation, h/sh/t pulled out one of those cheaters with a teflon join at the back, and settled it around h/sh/t's neck, then pulled the collars down. You notice that the break isn't on the fold on the right side. A teflon patch shows itself to the world in the gap between swatches of creamy, white fabric. You don't say anything. Serves h/sh/t for lobbing an asteroid at your home town. Crap as the hole was, you still hadn't got your comic collection out of your parent's basement, and now it's just ash contributing to the gloom of global winter. Also, you miss your parents. Plus that other couple billion. Point is, you won't be pointing out any fashion faux pas any time soon. "Now, our first priority is a protocol for dealing with Vegan invaders." You do not mention that a moment ago the number one priority was corporate profits. "Vegan forces are constantly looking for weaknesses in our defence systems, and positive reinforcement is the best way of dealing with internal weaknesses." H/sh/t pulls out what looks like an oversized pad of Post-It Notes. "These are observation forms. Any time that you or your co-workers observe anyone doing something pro-system defence, you will fill out an observation form noting it and providing postive feedback." H/sh/t hands the pad of forms to you. You look at it. There's a space for your name, co-worker name, department, and a square where you will make your observation. Presumably, in handwriting. It looks like you could fit in about fifty words if you really cram. How good were conquering aliens at reading handwriting? "Our first priority will be to make sure that enough observation forms are completed each work-cycle. Here is your quota." Three top priorities, now. "Well, what are you waiting for, you disgusting mammal?" Five. You have five to do now. You wander the facility floor. You spot Alice hiding something under a console. Might be a fifth, might be a gun. Might be both, actually. You pull out your pen. "Observed Alice checking under server for Vegan scoutship. Good job, Alice!" You change "console" to "server" in case anyone checks. If Alice got some cool incentive like extra oxygen, she might be persuaded to share the fifth. This is easy! IN the distance, you see the new boss explaining the new way of handing warheads to the Nuclear Decontamination crew. H/sh/t is leaning casually on a half-dissassembled apparatus. H/sh/t's bare hand rests on an exposed globe of semi-lustrous gray metal with small, precisely drilled hexagonal holes in it. It's a little hard to tell the details, but the globe might be hollow. H/sh/t is playing with a lighter. The Decon team keep throwing nervous glances over their shoulders, mentally measuring the distance to the nearest exit. You know what? Someone is probably doing something observation-worthy on the next asteroid over. You should go see.

I figured you were old enough to appreciate that the ride is the destination. What I'm saying is, put on your fedora, hunch over the steering wheel of your 58' Project Orion (the one with the tailfins!), and pull out into the starlanes for a trip down to Beta Ophuichi Palm Springs V. Unapologetically hog the fast lane all the way there, ignoring the blaring horns of the hyperdives, transmats, warpers, probability manipulators and electromagnetic jammers as they pile up behind you. For extra credit, manoeuvre so that the slow lane is filled with a sweating, yellow-jerseyed hobbyist peddling away on a chemical rocket, and slow down to the same speed.

Don't click on that link! Now. Where did I put that tube of Bactine?

First you have to be as cool as Kelowna. Now don't mind me. I'm a-gonna put on my panama hat over my white suit, white shoes and white belt, get into my late-50s American luxury car and drive down for the early bird special. (Starts at 5AM!) Got some people to explain to about these kids nowadays.

Thanks, man. I flashed on this when I was about to leave the store last night for my day off with the office keys still in my pocket. Thanks to the Cranky Thread, now I don't have to go into work!

Look, all I'm saying is that you can spend your time on silly things like travelling light years or beam message lasers at far away star system. Or you can curate the kind of sideboob slideshow that'll get people to click on the Ford ad. They're both great intellectual achievements, but only one will accumulate millions of human-years of open tabs open on every kiind of browser known. (Except Internet Explorer. Those people haven't figured out what a "tab" is yet.)

That's if this vision of the history of technology is, in fact, accurate. We know less than one might think about the evolution of gunpowder, and rotary atmospheric steam engines are a quite different use case from condensor-equipped crankshaft types.

I don't get it. And the link can't be that important. It didn't have any Kardashians.

From the Wikipedia Talk Page for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: hat the English king at whose court Bill and Ted meet the princesses is Henry VII is not OR, but supported by the two Bill & Ted movies. In Excellent Adventure, the monarch is named as 'King Henry'. In Bogus Journey, the princesses celebrate their 521st birthday. As they are physically in their early 20s, they have therefore travelled forward 500 years. The date of Excellent Adventure is given in the movie as 1988. Therefore the monarch can only have been Henry VII (1485-1509). Henry VI's brief readeption in 1470-71 is too far back for it to be him. Jess Cully 19:05, 7 August 2007 (UTC) That this was one of the King Henry's is supported by the movies and is not original research. However, doing the even the simple and obvious calculations that you have done does seem to be original research. I certainly won't have a problem with you putting this type of information in the article because I like this type of information, but there are many others who will remove it. When you put it in, be very careful in how you word it so that you give the factual information and let the readers draw their own conclusions, which should be obvious from the information that you've given above. Good luck. — Val42 03:05, 16 August 2007 (UTC) I also like this information, but since it wasn't explicitly stated in the movie, I believe the way you arrived at the conclusion is a form of synthesis described in the original research policy. I'm not going to remove your edit, but I think having it backed up by a citation is important. --GargoyleMT 12:53, 17 August 2007 (UTC) Can't find a citation, so I'll reword. Jess Cully 19:00, 17 August 2007 (UTC) Excellent analysis. But unless my research is lacking, there is a problem: Henry VII was born in 1457, and none of his 8 children and one illegitimate child were named either Joanna or Elizabeth. Who knows if he had more illegitimate children? But the fact that he was born in 1457 makes it impossible for both girls to have been born around 1469-70. He would have been a father at 12 or 13! Could Henry VII have fathered illegitimate children at this young an age? It's a possibility, but I doubt it. His only known illegitimate child on record (according to Wiki) was a son in 1474, while he was 16 or 17. That leaves only one probable explanation for the existence of these two girls, and it can be explained by the hostile disposition of the fictional Henry VII, and his insistence upon forcing those two girls into marriage to two older men: Most likely, they were either stepchildren or the equivalent of adopted children. That may explain why he was so anxious to marry these 2 girls off. If he did father these 2 girls at 13, that would perhaps make a bigger case. It is only by these scenarios that the fictional tale can be applied. But then again, if both girls were 17 or 18 in that scene when Bill and Ted arrived, then Henry VII had to be 31. The actor who played Henry VII in this movie (John Karlsen) looked to be in his late-50s or early-60s. Henry VI died at 49, and Henry VII died at 52. That brings me to another problem, which actually makes it easier for the inclusion of these fictional princesses: John Karlsen is actually listed in the credits as the "Evil Duke". My knowledge of the English monarchy isn't that sharp, but what's a duke doing with a crown? If this duke was actually a brother or cousin, or even an uncle, of Henry VII, that would certainly make sense for him to have 2 daughters he's trying to get off his hands. — Preceding unsigned comment added byCookyMonzta (talk • contribs) Or they could be daughters of Edward IV. Henry VII liked to boost his dynasty's claim to royal blood by emphasising the royal descent of his wife - a daughter of Edward IV. So he'd have been happy to have her sisters at his court and acknowledge them as princesses. Jess Cully (talk) 13:30, 26 May 2012 (UTC) I've removed the Henry VII mention from the article, because it had no citation. Honestly, I really doubt the filmmakers had a particular ruler in mind (although I wish they had). Theoldsparkle (talk) 15:56, 9 August 2011 (UTC)