Musical Wanderer

I, as well as many other folk, have watched Ken Burns' latest work, The American Revolution .  As is frequently the case with his documentaries, the new series did not disappoint.  Between stirring stories, moving readings by A-list and B-list actors, and striking imagery, both contemporary cinematography and "Ken Burns' Effect" images, the history of our nation's war of independence from the British was well told.  The balloons of some myths were burst, while others were further burnished in gold, with moving rhetoric and music. The education of many of us about the war did not emphasize the bloodthirsty aspect of civil war in the struggle, where sometimes no quarter was given on either side, particularly between the revolutionary forces and the loyalist and native American forces.* How the interests of wealthy Americans (like George Washington) in the lands beyond the Appalachians as a significant cause was likewise understated in our education.  Most of the ico...

Twenty-first century equivalent of unrestricted submarine warfare? A little over a century ago, the United States joined Britain and France in their war against Germany.  Many Americans in and out of government had sympathized with the Allies in their grinding war and were outraged by the murder of civilians in Belgium and Northern France by occupying German forces.  What finally encouraged those recalcitrant to enter the war were the revelations that Germany was encouraging Mexico to join in the war against the US and the German decision to allow unrestricted submarine warfare against ships at sea.  Contemporary laws of war codified in treaties in the late nineteenth century stipulated that civilian ships could not by sunk without warning.  Germany's adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare unleashed submarines (U-boats) to sink any ship at sea without regard to combatant status or cargo. German WWI Submarine and sinking merchant ship Fast forward to the present d...

T his was a mighty and adaptable little toy.  Monogram models offered this model of a jeep and 37 mm gun together in 1957, during the early years of plastic model building.  By the 1960s one could buy plastic model kits of cars, planes, ships, and tanks in hobby stores, department stores, even drug stores.  The jeep was a famous vehicle of the Second World War and the gun was an early American weapon to combat tanks.  The two together perhaps gained mutual fame from this photo taken before the US entered the war. It’s a nifty photo from the period the US was rearming before Pearl Harbor.  Readers would find it exciting that the jeep was so speedy that they were airborne, but guns this light were found to be wanting in actual war and were replaced by bigger, heavier guns.  Even the helmets the soldiers wear, leftover from the First World War, were replaced in 1942 with helmets that covered more of the soldiers' heads. I got the model about a dozen years late...

Eighty years.  Today.  The B-29 named by its pilot "Enola Gay" dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.  In seconds, thousands died. Over the ensuing days and decades, thousands more would die from the radiation the bomb produced.  Many in the world will pause and contemplate the anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb and, with wars of varying intensity yet still killing thousands in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, Congo, Cambodia, consider current events rather than the past.  The bomb and the plane which dropped the bomb, the "Enola Gay", will likely disappear from the news. Earlier this year the "Enola Gay" became the subject of news reports when moronic Republicans purged photographs of the plane from Department of Defense websites because it's name contained the word "gay" as part their efforts to eliminate all non-white, masculine, heterosexual images from American history.  Thus another chapter was added to the plane's sym...

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...