Hanoi Jane Picks A Candidate

Jane Fonda has endorsed - or at least said that she is voting for, Barack Obama. 

Less examined is whether some celebrity endorsements may actually cost a candidate votes. This could be one of those less desirable votes for part of the country, especially if Obama was hoping to attract some crossover Republicans if he's the Democratic candidate come fall.

Obama, who was recently named the most liberal member of the Senate by the nonpartisan National Journal, has sought to portray himself as the earliest anti-Iraq war opponent and tagged his sole remaining opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, with voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

The problem for those of a certain generation that endured the Vietnam War and the sometimes violent domestic conflict that accompanied it at home is that during Fonda's controversial wartime visit to North Vietnam, she was photographed at a Communist anti-aircraft gun battery.

According to the photo caption distributed at the time, she joined North Vietnamese soldiers there in singing an antiwar song while preparing to shoot at attacking Americans.

Fonda, of course, did so much more than just sit at the battery. She was also part and parcel of the North Vietnamese propaganda machine - a willing participant to that. More importantly, after the POWs began returning, she denied they had been tortured:

During this visit she also visited American prisoners of war (POWs), and brought back messages from them to their families. When cases of torture began to emerge among POWs returning to the United States, Fonda called the returning POWs "hypocrites and liars."[14] She added, "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." On the subject of torture in general, Fonda told The New York Times in 1973, "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture… but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie." Several American POWs and other eyewitnesses, including former POW, and future US Senator and Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, disagree with this sentiment.

Yes, I imagine John McCain does disagree with her assessment. He bears the scars to this day of the torture Hanoi Jane denied. Do I think this will be a huge blow to Obama? No, of course not. Do I believe it will make even a few people more likely not to vote for him? Probably. There are some of us who do remember Hanoi Jane's antics during the war. And we still do not forgive her.  

Today’s Historical Note

On this day in 1513, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. This is the first recorded instance of what has come to be called "Spring Break" or "The Fountain of Youths."

Oldest Recording?

I'll let readers judge for themselves here. A recently-formed group claims it has found a recording of a human voice that was made before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph by some 17 years. The recording was reportedly made by a Frenchman but could not be replayed until scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  could scan the recording and make it work.

The recording was discovered in February at the archives of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris by First Sounds, an informal association of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists and others who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.

The group was established in 2007 by David Giovannoni, who is a member of the ARSC.

"It's a very haunting song," Giovannoni said of "Au Clair de la Lune," the melody that Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded on a "phonautograph," a device that engraved sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

The scientific breakthrough occurred on April 9, 1860, or 17 years before Thomas Edison invented his phonograph.

It is, however, necessary to give Edison his due. At the time, the French were unable to come up with a device that would allow reproduction of his musical recording.

As many as 148 years would pass before scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory converted these scans into sound using technology developed to preserve and create access to a wide variety of early recordings on mechanical carriers, such as phonograph discs and cylinders.

For Patrick Feaster, a historian with First Sounds, that was a significant discovery for many reasons.

"We already knew that Leon Scott had invented sound recording but he just had never got to the stage of playing back his recordings," Feaster told AFP.

"But we have made a number of discoveries here. First of all we have now heard one of his recordings, something he never dreamed of happening, but it does push the history of recording sound quite a step back. Up until this point you could listen back to something as early as 1888. That was about as far as you could go.

"Secondly," the historian continued, "People tended to present Scott's phonautograph as a dry scientific instrument but Leon Scott was really hoping to record interesting stuff: he wanted to preserve great music, great speeches."

You can listen to the decoded recording over at this website. For me, this is pretty thin. If the recording is actually the oldest recording, the inventor never figured out how to actually do anything with what he captured. Even if this is an actual recording, as opposed to creative decoding (and I am not saying the people involved did anything untoward here) one has to ask, who cares? The recording had no way of being recovered until massive technology was deployed to do so. 

At most, a historical oddity.  

Closing In On Cooper?

Children playing in southwest Washington state found what appears to be a parachute buried in the ground in an area that the FBI once considered a likely area for hijacker "Dan Cooper" to have jumped near. The FBI has recovered the parachute and is asking the public for help in determining whether it is of the same type as Cooper is known to have been using when he jumped from the hijacked aircraft.

SEATTLE - The FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found buried by children in southwest Washington to determine whether it might have been used by famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, the agency said.
 
Children playing outside their home near Amboy found the chute's fabric sticking up from the ground in an area where their father had been grading a road, agent Larry Carr said Tuesday. They pulled it out as far as they could, then cut the parachute's ropes with scissors.

The children had seen recent media coverage of the case — the FBI launched a publicity campaign last fall, hoping to generate tips to solve the 36-year-old mystery — and they urged their dad to call the agency.

"When we went to the public, the whole idea was that the public is going to bring the answers to us," Carr said. "This is exactly what we were hoping for."

It seemed a bit odd when the FBI reopened the old case, dating from 1971, but this is an unusual find. One cannot think of too many reasons why a parachute would be buried for legitimate reasons. This may be important or just another dead end. But something has turned up after all these years. Interesting.

The Tunnels Of Arras

An almost forgotten bit of history from the First World War has been rediscovered under the streets of the French city of Arras. A huge tunnel complex built by the British to allow their troops to attack the German Army by surprise has been partially unearthed and is now open to the public. A reporter for the Daily Mail went to see the complex.

Here, beneath the northern French town of Arras, years of careful excavation have finally unveiled the secret city where 25,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers lived just yards beneath an unsuspecting enemy.

Canteens, chapels, power stations, a light railway and even a fully functioning hospital were all established in this chilly labyrinth where I am standing with freezing water dripping on my head.

Scarred by the devastating losses on the Somme in 1916, British generals came up with a new strategy ahead of their next major offensive at Arras in 1917.

A series of subterranean medieval quarries on the edge of the town would be linked by tunnels to create the most extensive underground network in British military history.

These were not narrow shafts for men on all fours to crawl along. Tunnels had to be wide enough for soldiers to march in one direction and pass stretcher parties coming the other way. The larger routes had to accommodate a supply railway as well. 

It proved to be a mighty feat of engineering but, in the chaotic aftermath of war, it was simply forgotten and covered up. But that neglect is our gain.

Today, much of it remains exactly as it was on that extraordinary morning in 1917 when, at the given signal, several British divisions burst forth under the noses of the enemy.

By the end of one day, they had advanced further into enemy territory than the entire British Army had advanced in years.

And yet the subsequent Battle of Arras would still see the worst bloodshed of the war.

As far as the Great War is concerned, the Arras discovery is on a par with the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. 

The French have built a museum and an elevator to the opened sections of the huge complex. Much of the network is damaged, collapsed or extremely dangerous. Arras has grown in the years since the tunnels were dug and the city now sits squarely on top of the engineering feat. But at least they have now saved a part of it and people can see where some of the 25,000 men huddled for days waiting for the order to emerge and attack. More on the Battle of Arras here.  

Working In Their Memory

I've posted twice before on the search for the wreck of the World War Two submarine Grunion (here and here). But for a lot of people, it is not about the hunt for the sub itself. It is about closing old wounds and about a family they were not born with but grew into.

BETHESDA, Md. — Mary Bentz is sitting at her kitchen table, poring over old photographs of World War II sailors.

She has never met any of the men, but she calls them "my kids." "Look at these faces," she says. "They're frozen in time."

The 70 men she now calls family all died when the USS Grunion, a submarine on its maiden voyage, went down in waters off the coast of Alaska in late July 1942. Her uncle, Carmine Parziale of Weedville, Pa., was on board.

For 65 years, the Grunion and its crew were missing. The ship finally was found last August, thanks to the submarine commander's three sons, who financed an expedition to the site near the Aleutian island of Kiska where it was believed the sub had disappeared.

A mini-sub equipped with cameras and video equipment spotted the remains on a slope 3,000 feet down in the Bering Sea.

The story is part mystery (Why did the sub go down?), part genealogical search (Who were these rakish-looking men?), but mostly it's a love story. A labor-of-love story.

The Grunion's tale will be retold May 1 in a seminar at Boston's Museum of Science.

"I guess in a sense it's a good excuse to bring everything we've collected into one spot," says John Abele, whose father, Mannert (Jim), was the commander of the Grunion and disappeared with the sub when John was 5.

"Part of the day will be a presentation of what we have learned, and part of it will be a display of the letters, thousands of e-mails, photos. And we have about three hours of high-definition video."

The Grunion project (ussgrunion.com) "has taken on a life of its own," he says.

Mary Bentz and the other "Sub Ladies" have made sure that the obituaries or stories about 30 of the 70 men have run in their hometown newspapers. There are forty to go. Some local newspapers have refused to run the stories, a fact that Bentz cannot understand - nor do I. Yes, it is a long time ago now, but they were still men who did their duty at a time that their nation needed them. The least those papers could do is acknowledge them.

A Cheesebox On A Raft

U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor, described as a 'cheesebox on a raft', met the CSS Virginia in the first naval battle between two ironclad warships. The hard fought battle was a draw, but a new era had begun. Designed by John Ericsson, a Swedish engineer, the Monitor had all of her vital machinery located below the waterline with only her turret, pilothouse, smokestack and a few fittings exposed to enemy gunfire. Two 11-inch Dahlgren guns - the most powerful weapons in the Naval inventory - were housed in the rotating turret. 

The USS Monitor sank in rough seas on December 31, 1862 carrying 16 members of her crew to the bottom. The turret and a number of other artifacts have been recovered from the wreck and are on display in Newport News, Virginia. The resting place of the USS Monitor is designated as a National Marine Sanctuary.

“I Show You At 1,742 Knots On The Ground”

Maggie's Farm has a wonderful appreciation of the SR-71 Blackbird written by Major Brian Shul, one of the few men to fly the 'sled', as she was known to those who loved her.

Mastah Preddi

When 27-year-old Army lieutenant Fred Hargesheimer's P-38 Lightning was shot down on June 5, 1943 over New Britain he had no idea whether he would live or die. Below him was a forbidding jungle, reputedly filled with headhunters. Instead he found a people who would risk their very lives to save his. And save him they did. Fred Hargesheimer and his late wife Dorothy spent decades paying back the people who risked so much for him back duriing the war. 

BIALLA, Papua New Guinea — The Japanese fighter caught the American pilot from behind, riddling his plane with machine-gun rounds. The left engine burst into flames. It was time to bail out.

He yanked on the release lever but the cockpit canopy only half-opened. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose to shake the canopy loose and was instantly sucked out.

Swinging beneath his opened parachute, he plunged toward a Pacific island jungle of thick, towering eucalyptus trees, of crocodile rivers and headhunters, into enemy territory, and into an unimagined future as a hero, "Suara Auru," Chief Warrior, to generations of islanders yet unborn.

'Mastah Preddi'

Fred Hargesheimer was shot down in the southwest Pacific on June 5, 1943. A lifetime later, he sits in his quiet California ranch house amid the snow and soaring sugar pines of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The light blue eyes, at age 91, can't see as well as they once did. But when he looks back over 65 years, the smiling Minnesotan sees it all clearly — the struggle to survive, the native rescuers, the Japanese patrols and narrow escapes, the mother's milk that saved him. He remembers well his return to New Britain, the people's embrace, the fundraising and building, the children taught, the adults cured, the happy years beside the Bismarck Sea with Dorothy, his wife.

"I'm so grateful for getting shot out of the sky," he says.

Fred Hargesheimer has raised funds for and built schools, libraries and a clinic for the people who saved his life. He and Dorothy even went there to teach in the schools they built. Hargesheimer was not a rich man, he held a sales position for Sperry Rand. But he did all this, nonetheless. 

Go read the whole thing. Mastah Preddi's story is worth reading.

When The Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead

WE therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, (when the Sea shall give up her dead,) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.
The Book of Common Prayer, Church of England

The Royal Navy floated a wreath over the wreck of HMS Hunter today. The destroyer was sunk with 110 members of its crew in 1940 off the Norwegian port of Narvik. The wreck was discovered by a Norwegian minesweeper a few days ago. The BBC talked with one of the 35 men who survived the sinking.

On the morning of 10 April 1940, 110 people on board HMS Hunter died when the Royal Navy ship was sunk by German forces during World War II's first Battle of Narvik, in Norway.

John Hague, now 87, but then a 19-year-old able seaman, was one of just 35 survivors.

"It was early morning, around four-thirty or five o'clock and I was down, below deck, in the ammunition room feeding munitions from the shell room to the gun room," he said.

He and the other men on duty felt "a jolt" and realised HMS Hunter had been hit, but they did not know the extent of that damage.

He recalled there was no evacuation siren, no orders to abandon ship.

Climbing the steps to the outside world, the men were struck by the chilling winds of the blizzard and an eerie absence of people.
   
I tried not to think about the cold and I tried to keep moving to keep warm

"The first we knew it was bad was when we started to tilt, we went up to the deck and saw that there was no-one around - those that could leave had gone," said Mr Hague.

The Norwegians have named HMS Hunter as a war memorial. Rest in peace. 

Murderous Buffoons

The Daily Mail has an interesting article on the clownish yet deadly Baader-Meinhof gang. It is an ugly picture of a group that epitomized the worst of the late 1960s Western "revolutionaries". Partnered with the PLO and a lot of other very unsavory elements, they ran wild for a while, only to kill themselves in the end. They were incompetent in most of what they did, other than in killing.  I'll send readers over there to read it for themselves rather than try to excerpt it.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on the Red Army Faction. 

A Wise Guy, Eh?

The Washington Post has a fun article about the Stoogeum - the Three Stooges Museum in suburban Philadelphia, run by a man who is married to a niece of Larry Fine.

On their first date, back in 1978, Gary Lassin's future wife told him she was related to someone famous. But she wouldn't say whom.

"She was a little embarrassed," Lassin recalls. No guy would let such a challenge lie. He coaxed and cajoled and finally got it out of her: Robin was the niece of Larry Fine, one of the Three Stooges. (He's the one with the Bozo-like Brillo hair and what Lassin calls "the stupefied, google-eyed stare.")

"I knew I had to get this girl to marry me," Lassin says.

Soitenly.

Lassin managed to get the girl — and, more important to our story, he took on the fixation with all things Stooges that was somehow lacking in Robin's family. ("She was very afraid of the Stooges as a child because they hit each other and hurt each other," Lassin says. "So she was scared when Uncle Larry visited from the West Coast." Her family solved this simply by calling Larry "Uncle Max.")

Three decades later, Lassin is the proprietor, curator, designer, tour guide and publicist for the Stoogeum in suburban Philadelphia, the only museum in this galaxy devoted entirely to the history, lore, comedy and worship of a slapstick act that has shown remarkable staying power in a pop culture that has pretty well lost the very notion of a comedy team.

Tucked in the rear of a suburban office park behind a Wawa convenience store, the Stoogeum is a startlingly professional museum, with classy design, an endless array of Stooges documents, movie posters and tchotchkes, and a vault containing probably the world's most complete collection of the trio's movies and TV shows.

Lassin's wife still doesn't care for the Stooges. ("A wiseguy, huh?") Nor do most women. Maybe it's something about how the comedians were constantly conking each other on the skull (nyuk, nyuk). But to boys who grew up either with the original Three Stooges movie shorts or, far more likely, with the after-school TV show that recycled those shorts every day from 1958 well into the 1970s, the Stooges were the height of hilarity. 

The article points out that the current generation didn't grow up watching the Three Stooges shorts on television as did people of my generation. The Stooges were masters of slapstick comedy - which depends on absolutely perfect timing and is still around in various forms. Slapstick has a long, distinguished history. Personally, I'd enjoy seeing the Stoogeum.

Here's the website for the Stoogeum. There is no admission charge and the museum does not even have a shop. 

Strong Storms Dredge Up History

The long string of powerful winter storms that have been lashing the Pacific Northwest have done an incredible amount of damage. But they have also uncovered historical treasures and strange things as well.

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP)  — The storms that have lashed Oregon's scenic coast this winter have dredged up an unusual array of secrets: old shipwrecks, historic cannons, ghost forests — even strangely shaped iron deposits.

One of the first ships to emerge from the sands was recently identified as the George L. Olson, which ran aground at Coos Bay's North Jetty on June 23, 1944.

The shipwreck has become a tourist attraction on the southern Oregon coast. Interest became so great that authorities had to reroute traffic around the ship and post signs warning visitors to leave it alone because it is now an archaeological site.

The curiosities began showing up after December when Pacific storms pummeled the state, damaging thousands of homes and causing an estimated $60 million in damage to roads, bridges and public buildings.

Hardest hit was Vernonia, a Coast Range town of about 2,400 people, where floodwaters damaged about 300 homes, ruined schools and temporarily closed businesses.

The storms also brought high seas, which caused beach erosion. Although sands commonly shift in winter, this season appeared especially dramatic. There were reports that up to 17 feet of sand eroded away at Arch Cape.

"It's really an unusual event, the magnitude of it," said Chris Havel of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

Other shipwrecks have emerged recently — a wooden ship near Bandon, also on the southern coast, and another where the Siuslaw River flows into the ocean near Florence. Little is known about either ship, Havel said, and sands have reclaimed the Siuslaw wreck.

Cannons, ghost forests (fields of old stumps) and oddly shaped iron deposits are popping up all over the area. Speaking of things long since buried and forgotten, here's a site I found while poking around looking for something else. It catalogs many abandoned or disused subway stations in New York City. They linked to another site that catalogs Forgotten New York. Lots of unusual stuff on that site.

Fashion Week, 1,000 AD

Historical evidence has emerged that Viking women dressed like…..

Madonna!

A runway fashion show in Viking times would have spotlighted women cloaked in imported colored-silk gowns adorned with metallic breast coverings and long trains.

This surprising claim is the result of a new analysis of remnants from a woman's wardrobe discovered in a grave dating back to the 10th century in Russia, painting a picture of Viking panache before Christianity was established that runs counter to previous ideas about buttoned-up, prudish looking Norsewomen.

"Now we can say the pre-Christian dress code was very rich," textiles researcher Annika Larsson of Uppsala University in Sweden told LiveScience. "When Christianity came, the dress was more like that of nuns. There was a big difference."

The fashion findings go beyond apparel, revealing that the Viking Age from 750 A.D. to 1050 A.D. was not uniform and might even have been sort of sexy. (The findings here apply to the Swedish Vikings, who mostly traveled east into modern-day Russia and further on to Byzantium and beyond, rather than the Danish/Norwegian Vikings who went westward).

"Textile research can tell us more about the state of society than research into traditions. Old rituals can live on long after society has changed, but when trade routes are cut off, there's an immediate impact on clothing fashions," Larsson said.

Larsson discovered a blue silk dress and associated ornaments in a grave in the Russian region of Pskov, close to Novgorod and the eastern trade routes then plied by Vikings from Sweden. She said the dress was positioned in the grave as a gift likely to be worn in an afterlife.

Devil with a blue dress, blue dress on? One wonders why the Vikings would leave on raids, but we digress. Offhand, if the find by Larrson is a single data point, it may be an aberration rather than a real historical finding. So it is probably a bit silly to say this single find overturns all the other evidence. 

On the other hand, Aurthur Rackham wasn't far off if this is correct.  

End Of An Era

The last two passenger-carrying Douglas DC-3 aircraft in Britain are to be grounded due to European Union regulations. First flown in 1935, the 70-year old aircraft would require expensive new equipment to meet the new regulations and the owners cannot justify the expense. An era is ending.

'It groaned, it protested, it rattled, it ran hot, it ran cold, it ran rough, it staggered along on hot days and scared you half to death.

'Its wings flexed and twisted in a horrifying manner, it sank back to earth with a great sigh of relief. But it flew and it flew and it flew.'

This is the memorable description by Captain Len Morgan, a former pilot with Braniff Airways, of the unique challenge of flying a Douglas DC-3.

For more than 70 years, the aircraft known through a variety of nicknames - the Doug, the Dizzy, Old Methuselah, the Gooney Bird, the Grand Old Lady - but which to most of us is simply the Dakota has been the workhorse of the skies.

With its distinctive nose-up profile when on the ground and extraordinary capabilities in the air, it transformed passenger travel and served in just about every military conflict from World War II onwards.

Now the Douglas DC-3 - the most successful plane ever made, which first took to the skies just over 30 years after the Wright Brothers' historic first flight - is to carry passengers in Britain for the last time.

Romeo Alpha and Papa Yankee, the last two passenger-carrying Dakotas in the UK, are being forced into retirement because of - yes, you've guessed it - health and safety rules.

Their owner, Coventry-based Air Atlantique, has reluctantly decided it would be too expensive to fit the required emergency escape slides and weather radar systems required by new European rules for their 65-year-old planes, which served with the RAF during the war.

Mike Collett, the company's chairman, says: "We're very saddened."

The end of the passenger-carrying British Dakotas is a sad chapter in the story of the most remarkable aircraft ever built, surpassing all others in length of service, dependability and achievement.

It has been a luxury airliner, transport plane, bomber, fighter and flying hospital and introduced millions of people to the concept of air travel.

It has flown more miles, broken more records, carried more passengers and cargo, accumulated more flying time and performed more "impossible" feats than any other plane in history, even in these days of super-jumbos that can circle the world non-stop.

Indeed, at one point, 90 per cent of the world's air traffic was operated by DC-3s.

It's a rather good article about the old warhorse. The DC-3 is an amazing aircraft - I've posted about them before. There are some good links at the last linked post.