Saturday, June 29, 2013
Churches of the West: Hawai'i?
Churches of the West: Hawai'i?: I've already heard the complaint. Hawai'i? That's not part of the West. I thought that this blog was about churches of the Wes...
Friday, June 28, 2013
Some Gave All: National Park Service USS Arizona (Pearl Harbor) M...
Some Gave All: National Park Service USS Arizona (Pearl Harbor) M...: The National Park Service administered a park dedicated to the history of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 as ...
Some Gave All: The USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor Hawaii
Some Gave All: The USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor Hawaii: The raised anchor of the USS Arizona. The memorial wall on the USS Arizona memorial listing the crew-members who l...
Some Gave All: USS Oklahoma Memorial, Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, ...
Some Gave All: USS Oklahoma Memorial, Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, ...: 429 crewmen of the USS Oklahoma were killed on December 7, 1941, when the ship capsized from battle damage sustained during the...
Some Gave All: Pearl Harbor Marine Corps Memorial, Pearl Harbor H...
Some Gave All: Pearl Harbor Marine Corps Memorial, Pearl Harbor H...: This monument commemorates the Marines who lost their lives in the December 7, 1941 attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. The mo...
World War Two Pillbox, Baldwin Beach, Maui Hawaii
Some photographs from Baldwin Beach, Maui, Hawaii, where World War Two era pillboxes remain.
Holscher's Hub: The Hana Highway, Maui, Hawaii
Holscher's Hub: The Hana Highway, Maui, Hawaii: Regarded as one of the ten greatest drives in the world, these are scenes from the Han...
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Military Preparation on College Campuses.
Today In Wyoming's History: February 25: 1919 Photographs were taken of the Student Army Training Corps at the University of Wyoming. The SATC was the predecessor of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. The students here are depicted using the Krag rifle, which was obsolete at the time, but which was apparently seeing at least some training applications of this type.
This certainly shows an interesting cultural difference between 1919 and 2013. In 1919, a huge war had just ended. In 2013, of course, we find ourselves at war, but a war, which no matter how horrible it may be, is small by historical standards. The population is generally supportive of the soldiers, while support for the war at large is waning. It's hard to imagine a thing like this occurring today, however.
Of course, this wouldn't last. A forgotten fact about World War One is that the war was not popular in recollection by the 1920s, that being part of the atmosphere of the Jazz Age. People looked back on it as a mistake. World War Two, which of course was fought against the same major European foe, changed that view, and military training in the form of ROTC would become popular on college campuses once again.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urban Life or The Co...
I mentioned the late Henry Fairlie's essay The Idiocy of Urban Life in a post here the other day, and found that when I'd earlier linked it in, I'd done so another one of my blogs.
The way I work the blogs now days has changed a bit. Originally, this blog was strictly limited to historical topics, with a focus on the turn of the prior century and changes that have occurred from them to now. It still is, but it's also where I generally post any other topic that I want to babble about. That wasn't the case at first. Now, I would have posted Fairlie's comments here, so I will do so. Above is a like to my earlier Holscher's Hub post. Here's a direct link to Fairlie's Essay:
Fairlie was a British-born author who wrote for The New Republic. He had a brilliant satiric whit. This article was actually a reply to an article that had appeared only shortly before in The New Republic and which took for its title a phrase used by Karl Marx about rural life, in which Marx complained about "the idiocy of rural life." No matter how you feel about cities, Fairlie's essay is simply too good to be ignored and raises many thought-provoking points.
As for Marx, Marx seems to have lumped, in a juvenile fashion, anything that cut against his views as dumb, deluded or dangerous, a rather juvenile approach to thought, and not worthy of intellectual endeavors. It's amazing, in that context, that anyone ever took him seriously.
Friday, June 21, 2013
How long is your work commute, door to door? - ABA Journal
How long is your work commute, door to door? - ABA Journal
I meant to post this item awhile back, but it is an interesting query.
According to The Idiocy of Urban Life, the classic essay by The New Republic's Henrie Fairlie, the average 19th Century industrial worker had a seven mile, walking, commute to work. At that time, and up until at least the 1920s, people who lived in the center of cities were more well to do than those who lived on the city's margins, with some extremely notable exceptions, as that allowed the richer to walk to their offices and to city services more readily, while the poorer had to hike. Now, of course, the reverse is true.
I think my commute is about three miles long, and in the summer I do it by bicycle, weather and schedule allowing. I've known, however, friends of mine who had very long urban commutes indeed. And even here I've known people who drove 30 miles one way every day to go to work, something that would have been inconceivable before widespread ownership of the automobile.
I meant to post this item awhile back, but it is an interesting query.
According to The Idiocy of Urban Life, the classic essay by The New Republic's Henrie Fairlie, the average 19th Century industrial worker had a seven mile, walking, commute to work. At that time, and up until at least the 1920s, people who lived in the center of cities were more well to do than those who lived on the city's margins, with some extremely notable exceptions, as that allowed the richer to walk to their offices and to city services more readily, while the poorer had to hike. Now, of course, the reverse is true.
I think my commute is about three miles long, and in the summer I do it by bicycle, weather and schedule allowing. I've known, however, friends of mine who had very long urban commutes indeed. And even here I've known people who drove 30 miles one way every day to go to work, something that would have been inconceivable before widespread ownership of the automobile.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
World War II Law and Lawyers by Thomas J. Shaw.
This book advertisement recently arrived in my email. Anyone familiar with this book? If so, let me know what you thought of it. Good, bad,, indifferent?
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Monday, June 17, 2013
Credit where credit is due, and L. L. Bean
One of the things, of course, that this blog is supposed to do is to track changes in things over time. And one of the things I've touched on, from time to time, is clothing. Indeed, I have a thread pending now on blue jeans. It's months old actually. One thing that isn't obvious to readers is that some of the thread are actually pretty old, or perhaps long in the making, by the time I post them.
Anyhow, in clothing themes, it's easy to lament a decline in quality, and I was going to do that on dress clothing recently, but instead I'm just got to diss Lands End a bit, and praise L. L. Bean.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really like buying true dress clothing, but I do have to have some because of one of my occupations. For courtroom work, or even just lawyerly office work, a person needs dress clothing.
Some time ago, in getting ready for a trial, I determined that some of my older wool dress pants were in need of replacement. The old ones were worn out, and frankly I'd added an inch to my waste-line. The trousers that needed replacement were some Lands End wool dress trousers.
Frankly, I hadn't been super impressed with them in the first place, as they seemed rather thin, which I do not like, but I chalked that up to modern times, in which wool stuff is expensive. I replaced them with a new set of the same trousers.
Well, the new Lands End wool trousers wore out extremely rapidly. It was disappointing and a bit aggravating as well. I nearly posted at that time about the decline in such things, but I chose not to, or just didn't get around to it. In the meantime, I was getting ready for another trial, and the fact that all of my thin, thin, nearly new, Lands End wool trousers had developed holes in the crotch meant that they had to be replaced. I nearly ordered from Lands End again, but didn't.
Instead, I went back to L. L. Bean, where I had ordered such trousers many years ago.
And man, what a difference. The L. L. Bean trousers are nice stout wool. I noted when I ordered them that their weight was heavier, and man, are they much nicer. Guess it shows I shouldn't have gone cheap in the first place. Yes, they're a bit more expensive, but in real terms, given the decline in the value of the dollar over time, I guess not unreasonably so. Indeed, I suspect that with trousers, what I've been doing is basing the pricing off of what things costs 20 years ago, when I first started practicing law. Obviously, a person can't do that.
I'll further note that, at the same time, I ordered some Oxford cloth button down shirts from L. L. Bean. Again., much better than others I've recently seen. Nice stuff.
Well, thumbs up L. L. Bean, and boo hiss Lands End. .
Friday, June 14, 2013
Television?
I'll be the first to confess that perhaps my opinions various television programming is suspect, as I don't really follow television much. It's not that I'm in the category of a television protester, like some folks are, and have tossed out TV out the window. No, we have a TV. Two actually, which seems to be an increasingly small number for many houses. I guess, in thinking about it, we have three actually, as I have one out in my shed as well. Our used travel trailer came with one, but we never watched it and I wiped it out taking the trailer up the Big Horns in 2012. As nobody ever watched that TV, nobody ever expressed the desire to replace it, and I always thought it a bit odd that it had one. It isn't the fanciest trailer in the world and, for that matter, you have to fire up the generator to use it, which would seem to be a pain.
My association with television began to decline when I entered the University of Wyoming, which is now some 30 years ago. For most of the time I was an undergraduate I didn't have a television, and I didn't miss it. When I was a law student, I lacked a television for two out of the three years I was in law school. I didn't have space for one, and I just didn't miss it. Electronic stuff wise, at that time, I had a compact stereo/record player. I didn't have a computer, which was something most of us lacked, and I just didn't bother much with TV until my last year at law school, when I brought a very small television down to Laramie that my father had. At any rate, since 1983 I haven't really followed very much television regularly, with some exceptions. There's a few TV series I've followed over that thirty year period, but just a few. That doesn't say anything wonderful about me, it's just a fact.
After law school, and before I was married, I did renew my acquittance with older movies. While I hardly ever go to the movies, I do like movies, and I like classic movies a great deal. In the several years I was away at university the movie channels developed and when I started watching television again, that's what I tended to watch. I still do, although after getting married, and more particularly having children, I've just basically lost control of TV in general. I know what's on TV, and I know what I really dislike about TV, but I don't watch much TV.
Maybe this was true for some in the radio era also, but there are some syndicated things on the TV which I just don't get. This is beyond that which I don't like, I just don't get it. Those things inspired this post.
The cooking shows.
I realize that there's always been cooking shows on television. Always. All a person has to do is look back to Julia Childs, who remains a well respected and well remembered early television figure, to realize that. But since there are now a zillion television channels, it seems to have gone completely out of control. Nothing demonstrates this more fully than The Food Channel.
Food Channel? How bizarre. An entire channel devoted to nothing but cooking shows. It's one of the weird ironies of modern life that at the same time that the UN comes out with one of its typical overblown panicky warnings (see Holscher's Eighth Law of Human Behavior) that in the future we'll all have to eat bugs that the evidence is that that food abundance has reach the ridiculous level that we can now play games with food. There are food competitions based on such things as cakes that are designed to illustrate fables or cupcakes made out of the improbable. Cupcakes, in particular, have enjoyed an absurd level of televised attention. Cupcakes are cupcakes, they don't deserve a television show. None the less, there are cupcake competitions which will even involve such unlikely things as a team of radical sugar free vegans who have to make cupcakes out of nothing other than wallpaper paste and flax seed, and make it taste like pastrami.
There was even a series, and may still be, featuring two women who lived in the D. C. area and who ran a cupcake shop. They had a lot of infighting on a modern level, and called their mother "mommy" even though they're in their 30s. That alone sort of bothered me.
One that really bothers is me is Cake Boss. Cake Boss? Cake Boss involves some big city bakery that bakes cakes, and it seems everyone who works in it is related. They spend a lot of time sort of arguing with each other, and the show is sort of a stereotype of Italians. I'm surprised that Italians aren't offended actually.
One that really bothers is me is Cake Boss. Cake Boss? Cake Boss involves some big city bakery that bakes cakes, and it seems everyone who works in it is related. They spend a lot of time sort of arguing with each other, and the show is sort of a stereotype of Italians. I'm surprised that Italians aren't offended actually.
Anyhow, neither of the shows mentioned above bother me as much as cooking shows do. Does anyone actually cook any of these recipes. I highly doubt it. But the number of the shows is endless. I think people are watching them, and then they go and fix a bowl of cheerios for dinner.
This isn't; to say that every single show on these channels is horrible. I sort of like the ones where the hosts travel around and sample restaurants. I've actually eaten at a couple of cafes that showed up on such shows, when I was in those cities, so those shows are a little useful. But I don't think a show on how to cook some odd Lithuanian dish in 25 minutes actually means that even one single person ever makes it, and I'm not sure why anyone wants to watch a show that shows you how to.
This isn't; to say that every single show on these channels is horrible. I sort of like the ones where the hosts travel around and sample restaurants. I've actually eaten at a couple of cafes that showed up on such shows, when I was in those cities, so those shows are a little useful. But I don't think a show on how to cook some odd Lithuanian dish in 25 minutes actually means that even one single person ever makes it, and I'm not sure why anyone wants to watch a show that shows you how to.
Wedding shows.
Even stranger than the cooking shows are the vast number of wedding shows.
A subset of this genera involves insanely expensive wedding dresses. I was married not quite 20 years ago and while we thought wedding dresses were generally expensive, they didn't cost anything like what television portrays. I suppose that's because the dresses that are portrayed in things like Say Yes to the Dress or Say No to the Schmo, or whatever they are, are being bought by the wealthy. I hope so, because a lot of the dresses actually exceed the median annual income for the middle class. No kidding. But as odd as that is, I don't grasp why it is interesting to watch a bunch of people you don't know buy a dress. Would a show based on buying a set of athletic shoes deserve weekly attention? I wonder.
While I find the dress shows strange, I find the competitive wedding shows appalling, and is at least one such show. In that show, four brides are pitted against each other and rate each others weddings. The weddings are rated on superficialities. My son happened to catch one (because my wife and daughter like these shows) in which the brides rated down a Greek Orthodox wedding because it was too traditional. Seriously? A person who would rate down a Greek Orthodox wedding as too traditional is ignorant beyond belief. Of course its traditional. It's a Greek Orthodox wedding and meant to be taken seriously, a sacrament in the Greek Orthodox faith with a form going back a thousand years or more.
But why would brides want to compete in the first place? Bizarre.
Pregnant again shows
It must be a sign of the cultural times that television audiences apparently find large families, or even just pregnancy, novel.
It wasn't all that long ago that large families were fairly common. I knew plenty of kids when I was a kid who came from families that had seven or so children. One person I was friendly with came from a family where she was one of twelve children. A graduate student I knew at UW was the youngest of fifteen children. What seemed odd, at the time, was to be an only child, which I was, or to be the only child in the household as the siblings were much older, which described the situation of at least one of my friends. What was really unusual was to meet a child whose parents were divorced. I don't think I knew anyone who was being raised by just one parent.
Now, this situation is so reversed that there are actually television shows devoted to the topic of big families. I just can't quite grasp why that's so novel, and it seems extremely voyeuristic to me. To follow somebody around with the "gee, shes pregnant again!" type of implication is a little perverse, but it would seem to describe such shows to an extent. Indeed, just this morning I overhead on the Today Show, which was on (but I wasn't watching, that married son of the Duggers, who have one such show, and his wife are going to have a (second?) child. Well, so what? Is that really that interesting? Congratulations to them, to be sure, but why is that newsworthy?
In some ways this seems to have gotten started with a couple of shows about families that had a large number of children at one time. So, for example, there was Jon and Kate plus Eight, the novelty being that the couple had all but one (I think) of their kids at one time, through fertility drugs. That this was the novelty, however, seems to have been quickly forgotten, and now it suffices just for a couple to have a lot of children.
This has even developed to the point where even people having smaller sized families is deemed noteworthy if the couple is a celebrity couple. There are a couple of television shows that have had this as a platform even though I can't grasp why that should be any more interesting to people than any other couple having children. Indeed in real terms, it isn't, as you don't know the couple.
The worst example of this show, in my view, is MTV's Sixteen and Pregnant. Defenders of the show argue that it shows the viewers that you don't want to be sixteen and pregnant, but what it really seems to do is follow around a fairly clueless set of male and female couples in an expertize of pathos. And it seems to me that its simply odd to be following around teenagers with a camera and pretend that the cameraman isn't there. Of course the camera is there. Who has a deep meaningful discussion on anything with a camera there?
Well, anyway, there's still the old movie channels.
It wasn't all that long ago that large families were fairly common. I knew plenty of kids when I was a kid who came from families that had seven or so children. One person I was friendly with came from a family where she was one of twelve children. A graduate student I knew at UW was the youngest of fifteen children. What seemed odd, at the time, was to be an only child, which I was, or to be the only child in the household as the siblings were much older, which described the situation of at least one of my friends. What was really unusual was to meet a child whose parents were divorced. I don't think I knew anyone who was being raised by just one parent.
Now, this situation is so reversed that there are actually television shows devoted to the topic of big families. I just can't quite grasp why that's so novel, and it seems extremely voyeuristic to me. To follow somebody around with the "gee, shes pregnant again!" type of implication is a little perverse, but it would seem to describe such shows to an extent. Indeed, just this morning I overhead on the Today Show, which was on (but I wasn't watching, that married son of the Duggers, who have one such show, and his wife are going to have a (second?) child. Well, so what? Is that really that interesting? Congratulations to them, to be sure, but why is that newsworthy?
In some ways this seems to have gotten started with a couple of shows about families that had a large number of children at one time. So, for example, there was Jon and Kate plus Eight, the novelty being that the couple had all but one (I think) of their kids at one time, through fertility drugs. That this was the novelty, however, seems to have been quickly forgotten, and now it suffices just for a couple to have a lot of children.
This has even developed to the point where even people having smaller sized families is deemed noteworthy if the couple is a celebrity couple. There are a couple of television shows that have had this as a platform even though I can't grasp why that should be any more interesting to people than any other couple having children. Indeed in real terms, it isn't, as you don't know the couple.
The worst example of this show, in my view, is MTV's Sixteen and Pregnant. Defenders of the show argue that it shows the viewers that you don't want to be sixteen and pregnant, but what it really seems to do is follow around a fairly clueless set of male and female couples in an expertize of pathos. And it seems to me that its simply odd to be following around teenagers with a camera and pretend that the cameraman isn't there. Of course the camera is there. Who has a deep meaningful discussion on anything with a camera there?
Well, anyway, there's still the old movie channels.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Pemco automatic reel
The action of this reel is rather odd, and I wouldn't buy one if it were offered now. It's an automatic reel. That is, the line retracts when the trigger is pressed. Having said that, I'm rather surprised by how well it works.
Anybody know anything about these?
Epilog
I had the occasion to take this apart the other day, as I had to add line to it. In the process, I stripped it down to clean it. Turns out it works much like a wind up clock.
Here's what keep the whole thing running. A long steel spring that is set to an axle, which is set by tightening the base.
Monday, June 10, 2013
SUVs before SUVs
A 1962 Dodge Power Giant Carryall. Not mine, I saw it for sale the other day while driving through town. It appears in nice shape, and still features bias ply tires. This is a D100 Carryall, which means its rated at 1/2 ton, although it has a two speed rear axle. Of course, I don't know anything about it or what is, or isn't original. It looks pretty original, however.
Anyhow, it's interesting how SUVs are supposed to be a modern concept, with the Chevrolet Suburban supposedly sort of ushering them in. But Suburban's themselves go way back, and before them were vehicles like this Dodge Carryall. Carryalls, in fact, go all the way back to World War Two.
Of course, these aren't easy to drive. It has a manual transmission and armstrong steering. And, of course, conventional hydraulic brakes. Not something a soccer mom, or dad, would probably drive. Still, it's interesting to note how far back the concept of a full sized 4x4, built on a truck frame, goes. About as far back as 4x4 trucks themselves.
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