Here's something you may not know:
— Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI) December 31, 2019
The U.S. nuclear industry is recognized as one of the safest industrial working environments in the nation.https://t.co/tOJEGMnU6g
The Netflix movie 6 Underground is Michael Bay in default feverish overload. If Bay possessed something like restraint, his films would improve exponentially.
There’s no question that Bay knows how to compose kinetic, visually stimulating sequences. Critics have called this style is Bayhem: wildly kinetic images with an overloaded frame and spinning camera spinning. This Bayhem overload is taken to the Nth degree in his Transformer movies where robots reconfigure their physical structure as they’re falling, flying and rolling at high speed and smashing through skyscrapers, bridges or other urban ephemera. The prolonged effect of Bay turning it up to 11 produces boredom, not excitement.
6 Underground has an opening car chase in the streets of Florence that’s 30% longer than it needs to be. But with $150 million budget, black Suburbans need smashing and Bay is happy to step up. A fellow film nerd noted that Bay has his car driving through the Uffizi gallery and smashing art. A wry bit of self commentary by Bay. He knows where he stands and revels in it.
A signature use of the Bay style was in his retelling of the Japanese attack on Hawaii in 1941: Pearl Harbor. Here, the Bayhem not only turns the events into a chaotic visual mess, they also change the historical nature of the event. Bay shoots the air attack as if it carried out by thousands of aircraft. In Bay’s images we see Japanese planes at low altitude, medium altitude and up high. The sky is filled with planes. This might be considered more visually interesting, but it’s not close to what actually happened. The Japanese attacked with only 354 aircraft. and those were in two waves: 183 in the first wave and 171 in the second. Not the massive numbers Bay shows us.
Hey, it’s just a dramatic movie, not a documentary. It doesn’t have to be historically accurate, right? No. There’s never been an accuracy law in Hollywood. But Bay’s vision is unfortunate for two reasons: 1) it makes it seem that there was no stopping the massive Japanese onslaught, yet, in fact, if U.S. forces had been more competent and had gotten their aircraft airborne, they could have greatly blunted the attack; 2) it belittles the incredibly effective military operation carried out by only 354 planes. You don’t have to agree with the Japanese war aims to be impressed with what they accomplished via excellent planning and operational skill.
My eerie story “Shell Hole” is included in the new surreal and fantasy A Land Without Mirrors. And of all of the stories, mine leads the pack at page 1. Thanks to editor Cara Flannery for putting my World War I tale first.
In the story, a British soldier gets lost on a night patrol and runs across someone he thinks he knows in the blasted waste of No Man’s Land.
Charlotte Bronte as a detective?
(Still from the 1943 film Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine in the title role.)
From private eyes to police detectives to determined amateurs like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, there are many great women detectives in mystery fiction. A clever twist on the literary detective is turning a real historical figure into a sleuth. The meta value of seeing them as a detective increases the story’s appeal.
Elliot Roosevelt picked a well-known woman — his mother, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt — and re-invented her as a sleuth (write about what you know, right?). His series of books with Eleanor solving crimes ran from 1985 to 2005. The real Eleanor was courageously outspoken and tirelessly interested in people, plus she had what you’d call “great access” — excellent attributes for an amateur detective.
Some authors have been even more inventive by converting famous authors into detectives. Writer Laura Joh Rowland has Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, running down clues on the moors of Yorkshire in The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë. Stephanie Barron takes a similar tack by giving Jane Austen the task of not only writing a slew of great novels, but solving crimes, too. Barron has written 13 Jane Austen mystery novels, starting with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor. Poor Jane must have been dead on her feet.
And then Carrie A. Bebris takes this trend and wraps around a famous fictional character of Austen’s. Bebris has Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy (nee Bennet) teaming with her husband in a seven novel series that debuted in 2004 with Pride and Prescience.
What other historical figures or famous authors would make an intriguing model for a sleuth?
Was doing some reading on clavichords and harpsichords today (a friend is building a clavichord from a kit!). This led me to thinking about how finely humans can slice a subject (like that prison garlic in Scorsese’s Goodfellas) and name the smallest variations of a thing.
The practice of slicing, sorting and classifying things is called taxonomy. From the Greek taxis meaning order or arrangement and nomos, law or science. In mathematics it is also called a “containment hierarchy.” And that name might be the best in describing how people think about categories. Categories and sub-categories are useful in describing different types of butterflies or music or movies or novels. But the highly specialized categorization also tends to limit or contain people’s thinking. Sometimes the containment hierarchy becomes almost more important than the thing it’s attempting to describe
Take the mystery genre. While you can call a book a mystery and leave it at that, there’s a universe of mystery sub genres extending beyond that simple label. Common mystery genres are: cozy mystery, amateur sleuth, professional sleuth, police procedural, legal, medical, suspense, historical, private eye, noir, caper, whodunits, hard-boiled, etc. And that’s only the top level of sub genres — they go far deeper than that, with various permutations. It’s fascinating that we as a species have a absolute mania for containment hierarchies.
I’m currently working on a mystery series that is something of a hybrid of a historical and a private eye mystery. More on that soon.
Image courtesy Daniel E. Johnson
USCGC Morgenthau in New York Harbor 1970
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]istory is rich with the odd and ironic. One small example is the U.S. Coast Guard recently transferring ownership of the 378-foot high endurance cutter Morgenthau to Vietnam. Morgenthau has what you could call a “complicated” history with its new homeland.
Nothing unusual in transferring an old ship — U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels nearing the end of their service lives are often given to other nations. It’s an easy way to curry favor. “Hey, instead of turning Morgenthau into razor blades, let’s give it to the Vietnamese. Maybe they’ll like us.”
What makes this transfer intriguing is that the former cutter Morgenthau once vigorously attacked Vietnam. Morgenthau was equipped with a 5-inch naval cannon in a forward turret. This is the same size and type of gun that U.S. Navy destroyers would carry. Guns that were used in World War II, for example, in firing on Japanese and German positions during amphibious landings like Iwo Jima, Normandy and many others. Called naval gunfire support, it assists troops ashore.
The cutter Morgenthau was deployed to South Vietnam in 1970-71 during the Vietnam War. The ship carried out a variety of missions. Once of which was naval gunfire support: blowing up stuff ashore with its 5-inch gun. Attacking the country under whose flag it would later serve.
Maybe this transfer is more than just an historical irony, perhaps it’s also a hopeful example of people putting the past aside and moving on.
The FBI may have finally given up on finding famous hijacker D.B. Cooper, but he’ll always remain one of history’s worst skydivers. After hijacking a Northwest Airlines flight in 1971 and receiving a demanded $200,000 and several parachutes (was he planning to take someone with him or just shopping for fit?), the Coop doffed his clip-on tie, lowered the rear stairs of the Northwest Boeing 727 and jumped into the night.
Weather conditions were miserable that night (the Pacific Northwest, and all) and Cooper only wore a suit and loafers. Perhaps worst of all, jumping from a jet airliner isn’t like stepping out of a pokey Cessna 172. The 727 was flying at 200 mph and at an altitude where the air temperature was -70° F. Coop had no protection against the cold and no helmet and probably landed in a pitch dark forest. There was even a drawback to the parachutes he failed to notice:
“No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat,” Special Agent Larry Carr said. Carr was leader of the investigative team from 2006 until its dissolution in 2016. “It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve ‘chute was only for training, and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”
So, either Coop was some daredevil genius who had it all figured out — or one lousy skydiver whose ‘chute incompetence likely caught up with him.
Click on GIF below for photorealistic simulation of Coop’s jump (thanks to Anybody on Wikipedia for GIF).
A few years ago it seemed ebooks were going to overwhelm printed books. Big bookstores like Borders, and many small bookstores too, were closing and Amazon’s Kindle E-reader was a breakout product. After the initial surge, though, print books made a comeback. Some readers were never going to give them up.
Now my humorous historical novel George in London is getting with the times and is available in a print, softcover version. It’s a George in London you can hold in your hands, spill coffee on, break the spine of (if you must!), use to swat a fly, impress your friends with, and generally show your superior taste in secret histories of young George Washington set in London in 1751 yet still wildly funny and entertaining. Get yours today!
Nike Hercules missiles
“The flight of 16 Soviet Bear bombers is detected more than 100 miles out. The big four-engine aircraft, with their contra-rotating props and swept-back wings, rumble at high altitude toward the northern California coast. Each carries thermonuclear bombs destined for targets in the San Francisco Bay area.
“Atop Hill 88 in the Marin Headlands near the Golden Gate, search, targeting and tracking radars of the Army’s SF-88 air defense artillery installation at Ft. Barry pick up the incoming Bears. The duty crew at the Integrated Fire Control buildings on Hill 88 work out the intercept solution. Meanwhile, and the ready flight of Nike Hercules missiles is warmed up at the blacktopped launch area in Rodeo Valley below.
“The first missile is raised on its launcher. The Nike booster ignites and the missile streaks away to the northwest, into the blue dome of the Pacific sky, its smoke trail quickly shredded by the strong onshore wind.
Tupolev Tu-95 Bear
“The Bear flight crews 75 miles away never see the nuclear-tipped Hercules second stage closing in on them at Mach 3.65. The 20-kiloton W31 warhead of the Hercules detonates when it reaches the bomber formation. Most of the 16 Bears are obliterated, or knocked into flaming pieces. Perhaps one or two of the trail aircraft survive the blast only to lose their crews to the massive dose of X-rays. The big aircraft fly on, obediently carrying the bodies of their dead masters.
“Back at Ft. Barry in the Marin Headlands, the missile crews of Battery A , 2nd Battalion, 51st Artillery bring more weapons up from the underground magazine, slide them into launchers and raise those toward the sky. They are ready to fire again. The first round of thermonuclear war has begun. The nervous soldiers at Ft. Barry have no idea what round two will bring.”
The scenario above thankfully never happened. The concept of shooting down flights of Soviet bombers with nuclear warheads was, however, very real. A recent visit to Marin Headlands in the Golden Gate National Recreation area brought home the reality of this particular slice of Cold War crazy.
Located just north of San Francisco the SF 88 installation, maintained by volunteers under the auspices of the National Parks Service, is the only remaining Nike Hercules launch site in the world. The rest of the more than 130 sites that once ringed U.S. cities at the height of the Cold War have been scrapped. A few of the sites are rusting into oblivion in private hands.
The evolution of the Nike Hercules started with the need for a guided missile to hit fast, high altitude enemy bombers. Gun-based antiaircraft weapons required vast numbers of rounds expended to get even a single hit. According to author Ian White, British AA gunners fired an average of 4,100 rounds for a single shootdown; And Eric Westerman writes that German gunners fired an estimated average of 2,800 rounds to kill a single B-17.
Nike Ajax
The original Nike guided missile model was a two-stage Bell Labs design called Nike Ajax, which carried a conventional warhead. Radar of the late 40s and early 50s, however, didn’t have sufficient resolution to differentiate between individual bombers in a multi-plane formation. Thus, the missile could find the group of attacking planes, but there was no way to ensure it could hit any one of them.
This was the atomic age, so naturally the solution was a bigger bang. A WX-9 nuclear warhead was fitted to the Nike Ajax models. With a nuclear warhead whole formations could be eliminated by one missile. One Nike unit motto grimly summed up the intended result: “If it flies, it dies.”
As the Soviets developed faster bombers, there was a worry that these aircraft could release their weapons up to 50 miles from their targets. This rendered the 30-mile range of Nike Ajax a distinct liability. Bell Labs was given the go ahead by the Army to develop a longer range antiaircraft missile called Nike Hercules. The Hercules second stage was wider than the Ajax second stage so it could carry implosion-type warheads like the W31, which were more efficient than the gun type WX-9 warhead.
To boost the heavier Hercules second stage, the first stage of Nike Hercules was built using four of the Ajax first stages strapped together into a four booster configuration. The Nike Hercules had a range of 90 miles and streaked to an altitude of 100,000 feet, allowing it to reach out and touch Soviet bombers before they released their bombs. The increased range also meant Nike Hercules could cover a larger area with fewer missiles and bases, saving money — always a plus when you have lots of cool Cold War gear you want to buy.
Nike Hercules sights in the lower 48
By 1960, many major U.S. cities were ringed by Nike Hercules sites, making for an effective Bear repellent. As the 60s progressed, however, the importance of bombers faded and ICBMs gained ascendancy. But Nike Hercules were useless against ICBM warheads plunging from space and soon the number of active deployments went into decline.
By 1974, Nike Hercules sites were closed nationwide. Almost all of them were torn up. Interestingly some of the sites (shorn of their electronics and missiles!) were bought as surplus by private individuals. At least one site in Caribou. Maine, which once guarded the B-52s at Loring AFB, is still there, its missile hatches rusting and overgrown.
When the Army turned over the Nike site SF-88 in the Marin Headlands to the National Park Service, a combination of good luck, forward thinking and the work of many former Nike Hercules missile crewmen volunteers resulted in the site being saved and restored.
The SF-88 site in the Marin Headlands
The Army had neglected the maintenance of the site and the leaky seals on the doors covering the launch elevator allowed thousands of gallons of rainwater to fill the underground missile magazine.
Volunteers put in many hours of work pumping out the magazine and restoring the missile lift and the magazine interior. Four Nike Hercules missiles were procured from various sources and those are now part of the exhibit (the National Park Service has presumably removed the W31 warheads).
When my son Jack and I visited the site recently, we were unlucky and missed the tour. But we got to talking to Park Service
Park Ranger Michael Morales and Jack Queeney in the underground missile magazine.
ranger Michael Morales, who was happy to answer my endless questions. Finally I asked him if Jack and I could get a quick tour of the missile magazine. He responded with an enthusiastic, “Sure!” We descended the yellow and black painted steps into the lair of the missiles. And there they lay, a patient group of five Nike Hercules. Just as they had laid in wait for Soviet Bears 50 years ago.
The ultimate atomic fly swatter.
There’s a plague on the loose. It’s the next story in the Perry Helion saga, The Ceres Plague. Ceres is live on Amazon and you can catch it here.
This is one plague you want to catch — well, the book anyway! Perry will lead you on an adventure from the Bering Strait to Washington D.C. to Alaska and Siberia, chasing down Dr. Taylor Crandee and his crew from the deep state and the mysterious Paracelsus as they concoct an airborne bio weapon that can be targeted to kill even the President.
