“Love” poet’s call for ethnic cleansing in Ireland

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The Elizabethan poet Sir Edmund Spenser

On January 13, 1599 the poet Edmund Spenser died in London. Spenser, who was famous for his poem “The Faerie Queen” that celebrated the Elizabethan era and for frequent poetic subjects of love and beauty, had a less beautiful side. He served in Ireland and was said to have been present at the massacre of Italian and Spanish soldiers who had surrendered to the English following the Siege of Smerwick in 1580. Sir Walter Raleigh, who led the beheadings, was later charged with the crime when he fell out of favor with Queen Elizabeth. For that and other charges Raleigh himself was beheaded in 1618.

An 1860s illustration imagining the beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618.

Later, in 1596, Spenser later wrote a controversial treatise on English rule in Ireland that called for the eradication of all Irish laws, customs and the Irish language to pacify the island and forestall further Irish rebellions. Spenser called for a scorched earth policy to deprive “carrion-eating” rebels of sustenance and their ability to live off the land. The tract was never published in Spenser’s lifetime.

It was ultimately printed in 1633 by Anglo-Irish historian James Ware. In 1936 British writer C.S. Lewis, who was born and spent his early boyhood in Northern Ireland, harshly criticized the poet, writing that Spenser was corrupted by the “wickedness” of the Elizabeth policy in Ireland.

#SirEdmundSpenser #Elizabeth I #ElizabethanEra #SirWalterRaleigh #England #Ireland #SmerwickMassacre #IrishRebellion #EthnicCleansing #massacre #SecondDesmondRebellion

Jean Pierre Tosses His Trousers to Deliver the First Air Mail Letter

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OTD in 1785 the first airmail letter was delivered – by gas balloon. Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American Dr. John Jeffries climbed aboard the gondola of their balloon and ascended from Dover Castle before heading out over the English Channel. Unlike hot air balloons, this balloon was filled with lighter than air hydrogen as the method for providing lift.

First hydrogen balloon flight in Paris December 1783

The balloon was weighted down with what proved to be useless items like a hand-operated propeller and even silk-covered oars for rowing the balloon forward. Losing altitude over the water, they were forced to throw all of it overboard – including Blanchard’s trousers – to stay aloft. They managed to cross the beach at Calais to mark the first air crossing of the Channel.

And when over French soil Jeffries dropped a letter to the ground below, marking the first delivery of mail by an airborne vehicle. Air mail! A monument to Blanchard & Jeffries’ achievement was put up at Guines where they safely landed.

Column at Guines put up by order of Louis XVI to commemorate the first Channel crossing via balloon.

Her designs propelled the fastest ocean liner 

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Every day more than 1,000 jet airliners cross the Atlantic on scheduled flights. Before the advent of this air bridge, however, the usual way to travel across the sea was via ocean liner. These swift passenger ships vied for the Blue Riband honor, which was accorded to the ship making the fastest average speed while crossing between Europe and North America. The ship that still holds the Blue Riband is SS United States which captured the honor in 1952 driven by the work of a naval engineer named Elaine Kaplan who designed the ship’s four propellers.

Naval engineer Elaine Kaplan at a luncheon with Frederic H. Gibbs aboard United States. Image courtesy SS United States Conservancy.

Kaplan was an undergraduate mathematics major at Hunter College in Manhattan when she began working for Gibbs & Cox naval architects in New York City. The Second World War was underway and Kaplan with her meticulous math ability was involved in the design of USN battleships and aircraft carriers. After graduation she worked at the naval architecture firm full time and her responsibilities rose quickly due to her excellent skills in designing naval propulsion systems. When Gibbs & Cox was awarded the contract to design the fast new ocean liner that was to became SS United States, Kaplan was tasked with a major role in devising propulsion for the ship.

One of the problems that naval architects must solve with high-speed propellers is the phenomenon of cavitation. As propellor blades move through the water, if they are not designed properly, they can cause pressure differences that lead to the formation of bubbles. These bubbles reduce the efficiency of the propellor, produce harmful vibration and can actually damage the metal prop blades when the bubbles collapse. Since United States was planned as a fast ship with four big props, Kaplan had to design around this issue.

The solution was brilliant in its simplicity. Instead of trying to make all four props the same configuration, she realized that the ship could use four-bladed props for the two outboard propellors and employ five-bladed props for the two closest to the ship’s centerline where the waterflow was more turbulent and bubble formation more likely. Kaplan also worked hard to design the pitch angle of the blades to further reduce cavitation. Kaplan’s efforts allowed United States to secure the Blue Riband honor establishing a record never broken by another liner.       

Dystopia (but with aliens)

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The Great Depression could be described in many ways and one of those is surely dystopian. In the prairie states, for example, drought added to the economic woes in a great ecological disaster called The Dust Bowl. Many farmers were forced to abandon their land and move somewhere else, a few famously to California (see Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for a look at that immigration situation).

Jeff Nichols, the director of two films with dark fantasy elements, Take Shelter and Midnight Special, is slated to make a film in spring 2025 about a new depression that he claimed in a recent interview will involve not only economic upheaval and ecological problems — but also aliens.

“It says everything I want to say about humanity and the universe. It’s a big film. It’s got a big scope to it and a big heart to it. Believe it or not, it’s a film with aliens in it. But it takes place in Arkansas, and it feels like a movie made by the guy who made Mud, and it just happens to have aliens in it.” 

The current title of the film is Land of Opportunity and early reports are that it will be  a “‘dystopian story’ set in Arkansas, about a new Great Depression where oil has run out and the dollar has collapsed.” 

No more oil and worthless dollars is a setup for some sort of dystopia. I especially enjoyed Nichols’ Take Shelter, which had a wigged-out Michael Shannon not knowing if he is really seeing signs of the apocalypse or is just losing his mind. So perhaps Nichols will produce another paranoid masterpiece. 

The role of of the aliens isn’t highlighted, but perhaps with the dollar going down the drain they will swoop into Little Rock for yard sale bargains on tricked-out F-150s and Barrett 50 cals.   

Everything is chemistry – including the pyramids?

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Courtesy Geopolymer Institute

One of the great things about writing a nonfiction book is doing the research. You pick up all sorts of intriguing bits and pieces. And one of the not-so-great things about writing a nonfiction book is that you never have enough space to use everything you’ve uncovered.

Maybe that’s a good thing for the reader!

My upcoming nonfiction book is called Rope — How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization, to be published by St. Martin’s Press in spring 2025. Rope explores the history, present uses and possible future applications of rope. It’s great story, you’ll love it.

One of the major uses for rope in ancient times was for hauling stuff around. And one of the biggest examples of hauling stuff around was the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt. We tend to assume (for good reason!) that the pyramids were built by piling up limestone blocks.

But what if they weren’t?  

There’s the idea that building the monument was not mechanical but chemical — that the blocks were not hewn from limestone but were cast from a manmade concrete-type mixture. Professor Michel W. Barsoum from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, an expert in ceramics, is a proponent of this theory, which is based on earlier work by French materials science professor Joseph Davidovits, who headed the Geopolymer Institute in San Quentin, France. Barsoum and Davidovits claim that the stones are not natural limestone but a form of concrete made of limestone, clay, lime and water. The mixture was made on the ground and then slopped into molds up on the pyramid.

According to this theory, there was no need to drag bulky stones up a ramp, straight or spiral, since the blocks were cast in place. Although the mixture still needed to be carried up, it could have been done in small containers without the problem of maneuvering stone blocks into place on the increasingly smaller working area of the pyramid’s upper levels. Prof. Davidovits and a crew of workers dressed in traditional Fourth Dynasty garb, including head scarves (see image above), made videos of them mixing and forming several blocks of this material in 2003 at the Geopolymer Institute.

Could the pyramids have been built this way? What’s your theory on how those manmade mountains rose? 

More info: Geopolymer Institute “Are Pyramids Made Out of Concrete?” April 9, 2006 https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/are-pyramids-made-out-of-concrete-1/ 

Did Kubrick fail with his Barry Lyndon ending?

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In a recent post, a film blogger took issue with the performance of Marisa Berenson as Lady Honoria Lyndon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon. He opined that Berenson was stiff and lifeless and Kubrick should never have put up with such a performance from her but should have brought in another actor.

In reality, of course, Berenson was giving exactly the performance that Stanley wanted. She is the ideal to which Barry aspired. Once he attained it, he finds that she, and his dream of wealth and power, are lacking. Barry has nothing like the earnest feelings he once had for his cousin back in Ireland. And, indeed, chasing his goal has left its mark on Barry, he is ultimately nearly as hollow as Lady Lyndon herself. His last authentic feelings are for his son Bryan and those are drained when the boy dies as the result of a riding accident.

Perhaps the one element of the story that doesn’t ring true is Barry’s final noble gesture of firing into the ground during his duel with Lord Bullingdon (superbly played by the late Leon Vitali). If Kubrick had stuck to his guns in showing a world where the true cost of climbing the ladder is complete moral decay (no matter how Thackeray plotted the original novel), he would have had Barry put his pistol shot through Bullingdon’s eye. Barry would have his success ratified, with no more young Bullingdon to challenge him for the estate. He would have complete victory but with the corpses of his son and Bullingdon as the companions of his triumph. The coldest possible end to Thackeray’s story.

Bowman comes alive

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The “Mars Face” image taken by the Viking I lander in 1976

The human penchant for seeing patterns is legendary. Recall the “human face on Mars.” For decades it was splashed across the covers of check-out line tabloids. When the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft arrived at Mars in the late 1990s with a much higher resolution camera than that carried by the Viking I mission in 1976 it was obvious that there was no face at all. Just human brains and reflexive pattern recognition. We can’t stop ourselves.  

A much higher resolution image from the Mars Global Surveyor shows that the “face” is just another Martian hill.

This poetry in patterns is the delight of art lovers and conspiracy theorists alike. Not to mention the analysts of cinema on YouTube. During a recent drift through YouTube, I watched a video commenting on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The video claimed that any object in the film that was remotely oblong was there to invoke the film’s famous black monolith. And that Stanley had obsessively planned this down to every last angle to underscore the importance of the monolith. The more prosaic explanation is that a rectangle is kinda the natural shape for lots of things and Stanley had a film to finish.

There was one interesting set of rectangles in the film, however, that I had never seen that way before. It’s when David Bowman (Keir Dullea) releases the memory elements of the HAL 9000 ship’s computer. And as he does so a family of monoliths rise one at a time to take their places in a tableau vivant. The sequence is visually striking, like all of 2001, and it’s emotionally wrenching too. Poor HAL’s memory is going and he can feel it. And we can’t help feel a little sad as well. HAL is a smug prick of a computer, but he does run a tight ship and he exhibits more piss and vinegar in the film than Bowman or his fellow astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood).

With his pride, paranoia and murderous disdain for his fellow crewmembers, HAL is actually the most human character on board the good spaceship Discovery One. Tightly wrapped Bowman and Poole are more akin to lifeless silicon simulations than the marvelously nutso HAL. They’re the robots. They were made to be so by the relentlessly scientific industrialization of modern society — as a popular meme from the late 60s would have it. That we would all become sons and daughters of the computer. Back then, of course, no one foresaw that instead of turning humans all into cold, calculating automatons the future would instead gift us TicToc, Twitter and YouTube, reducing humanity to emotional scrollers intent on sensation with rarely a thought to science.  

Anyway, when Bowman does zotz HAL’s memory and force the poor 9000 to devolve into a mindless machine that maintains the ship’s systems, Bowman regains a measure of his humanity. HAL, that epitome of restrictive scientism, is no longer Bowman’s jailer. He’s a free man, able to act on his impulses. So he can’t resist following his curiosity. He climbs into a pod — opening the pod bay doors himself, thank you very much — and flies off to the Stargate and his rendezvous with destiny in the green room where he will go from human to Star child.   

Sketchy birthday

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What to get your dad for his birthday? An annual problem for offspring everywhere. While I no longer face this vexing question — my dad passed in 2009 — my three sons still deal with the challenge. This year my youngest had a novel answer. Knowing my interest in sketching, he purchased a “visual journal” for me. 

There’s a space for a drawing each day for a year. 365 daily drawings. Great idea. Thoughtful and fun.

Although, I have to say, it has raised some new vexing questions. After a good start I’m already falling behind a bit. So I wonder: Is it cheating to do three drawings and backdate two of them? Or must the drawing be done on the date stated? What is ethical when it comes to sketching? Is there a higher law — an immutable code of conduct when pencil meets paper? Damn, I just wanted to make a little sketch, not grapple with morality.