Musical Wanderer

For the past four years, I've infuriated friends when I've told them that, in the long run, Trump being elected in 2016 was the best result for liberals and America in general in the long term.  After my friends stopped screaming at me, I would describe four scenarios: 1.  Bernie Sanders elected president in 2016  With Republican House and Senate majorities, nothing Sanders would propose would have a chance of being enacted.  As Saunders would probably not have chosen Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General, Jones would not have been elected Alabama's junior senator in a special election, leaving the Republican majority in the Senate at 52.  In the midterms of 2018, with a Democrat in the White House, Democrats would probably have lost the red state Senators they managed to keep and would have lost even more seats in the House, so we're talking about Republicans holding 55-56 Senate seats and maybe 250 House seats after the midterms.  There was plentiful supp...

Fall, 1941.  A young draftee in the US Army meets a young woman in Los Angeles. They go dancing.  They write letters to each other.  He works in the headquarters of a fighter plane squadron.  He sends her a letter that he typed in the office. She wrote him a letter that she either never sent or rewrote.  Some is in shorthand, probably a connection they discovered, as he had gone to business college before being drafted and she was going to business college when they met. .  The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  He was subsequently sent overseas. He wrote her a letter in March, 1942 from his tent in India, of which he enclosed a photo with the letter (above).    She was excited to get it. The young man mentions a place in Los Angeles where they danced called the Palladium.  Here's a photo of the place from the time. They kept on writing in 1942 and 1943.  I can't stop looking at how he signed his name "Klyne."  ...

I wrote a couple weeks ago about naval ship models I built and included some photos of the ships. When I outed myself in having such a strange hobby, a couple old friends from college chimed in that they built similar models when they were kids, including a several who raved about models they built produced by a Japanese company called Tamiya.  Well I built some of them myself as well, both as a kid and as an adult, mostly about 10 years ago when I was working part-time while taking care of my folks.  Building models was a good distraction from watching them decline.  Here are some I built by Tamiya and other companies. A vehicle invented for the US Army during the Second World War was the Jeep, a vehicle which has endured in modified forms to this day.  It was used by all of the Allies of the US, including the United Kingdom.  During the campaign fought in the North African deserts of Libya and Egypt, a new British Army organization, the Special Air Service, us...

With all normal routines shot to hell of late by the virus this year, I, like many people, have found new or resuscitated old hobbies.  A dozen years ago, on a trip to Massachusetts for a wedding, we happened to drive past the WWII battleship USS Massachusetts  moored in Falls River, Massachusetts and ended up touring it.  On the way out of the museum shop, I bought a model of the ship on a whim, thinking I'd build it.  Buying and building it rekindled interest in a hobby I thought I put aside forty-something years ago.  I've built almost two dozen ships since, of varying difficulty and quality, the frequency of building depending on work and other commitments.  As much of my life outside of home has shut down during the pandemic, such as singing and volunteering, I've had time recently to build a couple more models. A model of anything is built to a specific scale, essentially the ratio between measurements on the model and measurements of the object bein...