It should be clear to even the dullest social observer that human software has well and truly outstripped our hardware. We’re not built for the world we’ve built. This has been happening for a long time, of course, but it has really taken off recently. Note how hard it is not to watch tv, for instance. Even if you don’t have one in your home, go to a bar, an airport, hell, go to the grocery store — there are blinking screens everywhere, and it takes serious effort not to watch them. Our hardware interprets bright flashing things as a threat — can’t be helped. If you’ve been away from civilization for a few days, like I was recently, you’ll experience fatigue, even nausea when you first come back into town. The low-level-but-constant effort it takes to override your hardware when surrounded by blinking screens wears you out.
If you don’t feel like going all Thoreau, you can test the effect by simply writing your comments to this post out longhand, and then waiting an hour before typing them up. I bet you’ll find it mildly annoying no matter what, but if you’ve really got some thoughts on this matter, by then end of the hour you’ll be something close to furious. You’ve been rewired, comrade. You’re homo electronicus. We all are.
This stuff is recent — really recent. There was a limit to how screen-addled even the infamous “latchkey kids” of the 1980s could be. I had “latchkey kid” buddies, and although we had everything we needed to veg out in front of the tube in the very best Gen Z style — video games, sugary snacks, cable — we couldn’t sit and play Atari all day. I don’t mean that we didn’t; we were no smarter than any other boys; we sure as hell didn’t do anything for our health. I mean we couldn’t. Playing video games gave us ants in the pants — my Mom always knew when I’d been over at Steve’s — and eventually it got to the point where we had to put the joystick down and go throw around a football or something.
These days, the inability to play Nintendo for hours on end means you’ve got ADHD. Pass the Ritalin.
Three things made homo electronicus:
- modern medicine
- instant communications
- permanent caloric surplus.
Ritalin is actually one of the more benign examples. Back in the days when we were allowed to notice such things, a certain kind of social critic pointed out that falling murder rates have very little to do with crime reduction. Instead, it’s almost all attributable to advances in emergency medicine. It’s much tougher for Shitavious to kill D’L’eondrae over a pair of sneakers these days. The ER docs patch the victim up, and so what would’ve been murder one is now mere ADW, which means — Soros-funded DAs being what they are — both victim and perp are soon back on the streets, ready for round two. This idiot rapper, for instance, survived being shot nine times. That’s not nine separate shootings, mind you, that’s nine slugs in one incident. Granted the slipshod motherfuckers who capped him need to work on their aim, but surviving even nine flesh wounds from modern firearms is one hell of a testimony to the power of modern medicine …
… a power that does not, I suggest, conduce to positive eugenic outcomes.
Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.
February 16, 2021
QotD: Homo electronicus and the falling murder rate
October 31, 2020
Modern Halloween costumes show us how wealthy we have become
Richard Lorenc looks back at the “costumes” for Halloween from the 1970s and 1980s to help illustrate how much our general economic picture has improved since those dark days:
While my husband and I were recently struggling to figure out our costumes for this Halloween (and we still don’t have any idea), he pulled up some old commercials on YouTube. The off-the-shelf options that trick or treaters had were, in a word, pitiful.
Basically, costume makers thought it was ok to make a front-only plastic mask (in any color, really) of a character and top it off with a plastic smock featuring an illustration of said character with either its name or the name of the show or movie it comes from. There was no attempt to dress in the character’s actual attire. If you wanted that, you’d either have to know a professional costumer or cobble together something from your closet.
Take a look for yourself at just how costume-poor we used to be:
Obviously, every costume is an opportunity to generate interest in a brand or franchise, and slapping on a logo is an easy way to get a name out there, but these costumes truly heralded a dark time for Halloween. Some may even argue that it demonstrated crass consumerism at its worst, with cynical companies taking the easiest route to grabbing a couple of bucks from desperate parents.
The truth of the tragedy of terrible old Halloween costumes has to do with a simple idea: specialization.
[…]
The next time you compare our screen-accurate store-bought costumes of Darth Vader and Mr. Incredible to those of yesteryear, remember that we enjoy them today not because previous generations didn’t care for accurate costuming, but because growing trade across the globe has generated so much wealth for each of us that we can now demand things we may have only imagined previously.
I only realized as I got ready to schedule this post that it was an article I’d blogged a couple of years back, but the point of the story is still relevant even in our pandemic-wracked economy of 2020.
July 28, 2020
How Matt Ridley stopped being an “Enviro-Pessimist”
It was human ingenuity that did it for him:
Spiti Valley in the Great Himalayan National Park. (The little blue speck in the middle of the photo is a truck, for scale.)
Photo by Sudhanshu Gupta via Wikimedia Commons.
If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.
Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.
This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died — and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” — and was given a genius award for it — proved to be very badly wrong.
Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food — averaged for all crops — was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.
Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown — not in the European Union — there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.
One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.
June 19, 2020
“Hill 3234” – The Soviet-Afghan War – Sabaton History 072 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 18 Jun 2020It happened during the last stage of the Soviet-Afghan War.
Already withdrawing its forces, Soviet High Command needed to display its might one last time by recapturing the vital Satukandav Pass. But to achieve that goal, the commanding heights surrounding the pass had to be held against continuous Mujahideen attacks.
In the Battle for Hill 3234, an outnumbered force of Soviet paratroopers held their own against relentless attacks from the Afghan rebels.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Listen to “Hill 3234” on the album The Last Stand here:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Xkp…Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastoryArchive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.Sources:
– Abramov Andrey, ALDOR46, Fdutil, P.Fisxo; from Wikimedia
– E.Kuvakin
– Erwin Franzen
– Archive of S.V. Rozhkova
– Photos of 350th airborne regiment, courtesy of the 5th airborne company trooper Sergey Novikov
– Archive of the 345th airborne parachute regiment
– Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
From the comments:
Sabaton History
1 day ago
They were only 39
They were told to hold the line…I’m sure most of you know the rest of those lyrics. And after watching this episode of Sabaton History, you also know the real historical events behind those words.
What some of you might not know though, is the story of the guitar solo in Hill 3234. As usual when Joakim had written the song, he sent it out to the rest of the band. Much to his surprise though, this time Thobbe Englund – lead guitarist at the time – sent a file back within the hour. Thobbe had just plugged his guitar in and hit play. He was literally listening to Hill 3234 for the first time when the solo spontaneously popped into his head, and he recorded it on the spot. And to make this solo even more special: it is that very first recording Thobbe made that ended up on the album!
Not one single re-take.
Talk about a blessing from the Muses…
May 2, 2020
After The Berlin Wall: Making Germany’s Armed Forces (Bundeswehr 1991 Documentary)
Forces TV
Published 5 Jan 2018It’s more than 27 years since German reunification, when East and West Germany came together again after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This documentary looks at the challenges facing the West German Army as they took over the East German National People’s Army.
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How things change … back in 1991, the Bundeswehr had a vast over-supply of military vehicles between the mass of Soviet-era equipment inherited from the DDR and the excess due to planned down-sizing of Germany’s overall military expenditure (the “peace dividend”). Earlier this year, Bild reported that German soldiers are being advised to take personal vehicles during military training exercises, due to a lack of infantry fighting vehicles and other military transport.
January 25, 2020
QotD: The post-oil-crisis evolution of modern cars
The computer changed everything. Not only in engine tuning and performance, but in design and modeling.
I had an example of a classic late Dark Ages car, an ’84 Trans Am with the LG4 305c.i. Rochester Quadrabog motor. A hunnert and fifty horsepower and nearly every engine function powered by enough dry-rotting vacuum tubing to reach to the moon and back…
Only a few years later and exotic computer-designed and controlled long-runner port fuel injection systems were common on domestic performance cars and HP numbers were on the right side of 200 for the first time in a decade.
It was coming out of an awful time. Like a friend wrote: When he went into seminary you could buy a Mustang with a nearly 400bhp engine option. When he left seminary, the Mustang was a Pinto.
Being a car enthusiast in America in the latter half of the 70s/first half of the ’80s was like being a dirt farmer in Fifth Century Britain, marveling at the weed-grown roads and disused aqueducts left by a race of giants and building your pig shed with stones looted from a burned library.
Tamara Keel, “Cars of the future from the past…”, View From The Porch, 2017-12-26.
January 15, 2020
“Subdivisions”
Colby Cosh on the way Rush responded to the “New Wave” on their 1982 album Signals:
Every Rush fan is presenting his own list of essential tracks this week: unexpectedly I found myself returning over and over again to “Subdivisions,” the opener from Signals (1982). No Rush song ever had a more portentous dividing effect: there are still fans who haven’t forgiven. Moving Pictures had come out in February of 1981, and its sales set up the band for life and beyond. But it was a consciously backward-looking record — the cover is a big clue — and a culmination of Rush’s original identity. Moving Pictures is an affectionate farewell to 11-minute track lengths and science-fiction song lyrics (mostly).
After just a few months came the first 51 seconds of “Subdivisions” — Rush’s own astonishing riposte to the New Wave. A lone synthesizer pulses (in 7/8) for a few seconds and then Neil comes in: no further description is possible or necessary. The passage would make a career calling card for any drummer, but what was novel was the upside-down structure of the song, with Alex Lifeson’s guitar showing up late and then carrying the rhythm (beautifully, if you take the trouble to pick him out) while the drums truly lead the way. This is rare, outside of a drum-solo setting, for any rock drummer not named Moon or Bonham.
It was as if Rush, until then a very loud group fuelled by metaphors of battle, had made a conscious decision to cool down and give the spotlight to its ultimate weapon. Very well, the start of Signals announced, this is the age of the synthesizer and we’re going along with it — but let’s see you S.O.B.s synthesize Neil Peart.
Not coincidentally, Peart’s lyrics for “Subdivisions” also took an artistic step: they shake free of the SF/fantasy tropes and the 1930s poetic conceits he had mostly hidden behind until then. Heard in 2020, the song drags the mind of the listener helplessly back to the moment when “Subdivisions” was on the radio, yet seems to have been written for us to hear now. “Some will sell their dreams for small desires,” Peart warned in a mood of cranky prophecy, “or lose the race to rats …”.
Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons
December 18, 2019
Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song
Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why — to this day — I can barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:
Seasonal Melodies
James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:
This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.
It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”
This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.
Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.
Note that singular. “Tape”.
Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …
So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.
We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.
To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.
Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.
And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s been over 20 years 30 years now, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two three decades.
December 6, 2019
Mikhail Gorbachev and the “third generation”
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was doomed to fail:
US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland during the Reyjavik Summit in 1986.
Official US government photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
Perestroika‘s what happens when you turn the reins over to the third generation — the generation that didn’t come up hard, and thus wasn’t forced to deal with objective reality. For all his faults, and for all the debate over whether Stalin was “really” a Communist (hint: he was), the Boss knew what it takes to hold onto power in a one-party state. He learned his craft in the hardest school — maneuvering against Lenin and Trotsky, two of the coldest, most ruthless sons-of-bitches ever to draw breath. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, survived both the Great Purge and the Great Patriotic War for the Motherland — an achievement, as you can imagine, that pretty much no one else of consequence could boast.
Mikhail Gorbachev, by contrast, was born in 1931. His childhood was affected by the war — as was every Russian child’s — but his grandfather was a kolkhoznik from way back; Mikhail was wired in to the Party from birth. Stalin died in 1953. Gorbachev was 22 — in an earlier generation he could’ve been a serious player at that age, but the postwar generation didn’t start rising until their 30s, or more usually their 40s. He was still at university when the Boss kicked the bucket; he didn’t start his official political career until 1955, and wasn’t recognized as a bona-fide comer until the late 1960s.
What this meant was that Gorbachev grew up in the kinder, gentler Soviet Union — the one where Khrushchev released a whole bunch of folks from the Gulag and denounced cults of personality. This is not to say that Gorbachev wasn’t a sincere Communist; he was. In fact, that was his problem — he was too sincere. The earlier generations faced the stark choice between hewing to orthodox Marxism, or hanging on to power. They chose the latter, of course, and that’s why Trotsky had to go — he kept on claiming to be the only true Marxist of the bunch (which he was, of course, but that’s a story for another day). Gorbachev, though, got to see Communism “working,” and from this he deduced — not unreasonably for someone who didn’t come up hard — that Communism’s manifest failures were due to not following Marx and Lenin more exactly. Marx and Lenin talked a great game about “openness” (glasnost), “democracy,” and all that “improving the lot of the People” jazz.
So he did all that, the fool, not realizing that Communism “worked,” such as it did, only through repression. Take your foot off The People’s neck enough to let them breathe, by all means — that was Comrade Khrushchev’s great insight — but if you ease off any further, they’ll try to wriggle out … and eventually kill you, their tormentor. Having never seen The People at close range — as everyone in the previous generations had — he couldn’t understand this, and so crashed the system.
December 5, 2019
Tippman’s Half-Scale .22 Rimfire Browning 1917 Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Dec 2019https://www.instagram.com/rockislanda…
https://www.youtube.com/user/RockIsla…
This is Lot 1578 in the upcoming RIA December 2019 Premier auction.
In 1983, Dennis Tippman formed a company to manufacture half-scale functional replicas of Browning machine guns — the 1919 and 1917 specifically. He built these as both fully automatic and semiautomatic (the semiauto design being approved by ATF in 1984) as new machine guns could still be registered in 1983. They were chambered for .22 LR rimfire ammunition, making then cheap and easy to shoot. In 1985, he added an M2HB replica, also in half scale, chambered for the .22 Magnum cartridge.
Tippman’s guns were excellent replicas of the originals, including accessories like tripods and even a few .22 caliber belt-loading machines. However, when the machine gun registry was closed in 1986, he left the business, selling it to FJ Vollmer. Tippman would move into paintball markers, and the company name is much better know for those today outside of a small community of machine gun enthusiasts.
Vollmer would eventually sell the company in 2001 to Eric Graetz and Lakeside Machine, who continued production of the semiauto versions, as well as offering post-sample automatics ones. This example is one of Graetz’ production, serial number 001 from when the company moved to New Haven Indiana.
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October 4, 2019
“Metal Crüe” – The History of Metal – Sabaton History 035 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 3 Oct 2019This is a little different from our usual videos. We dive into the Sabaton song “Metal Crüe”, an ode to the Metal Legends that inspired Sabaton. Indy gives his subjective take on the musicians that defined a genre.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Listen to Attero Dominatus (where “Metal Crüe” is featured):
CD: http://bit.ly/AtteroDominatusStore
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Google Play: http://bit.ly/AtteroDominatusGooglePlayWatch the Official Lyric Video of “Metal Crüe” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hd1Q…
Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek KaminskiArchive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.Sources:
– The Song Remains The Same movie courtesy of Warner Bros.
– Nazareth photo by Ken Papai
– Thin Lizzy photo courtessy of Beeld En Geluid Wiki
– Thin Lizzy by Richard Marchewka
– Tony Iommy by Ronald Ali-Khan
– Deep Purple concert by Friedrich Magnussen
– Blue Cheer by Jac. de Nijs
– Led Zeppelin by Heinrich Klaffs
– Led Zeppelin in Apollo by Harry (Howard) Potts
– Judas Priest, Rob Halford by Fernando Catalina Landa
– Mike “Ozzy” Gibbens
– Kiss by Carl Lender
– Lee Kerslake and Uriah Heep photos by Heinrich KlaffsAn OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
June 11, 2019
“[I]t may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie”
I haven’t watched Chernobyl, but a lot of sensible people, including Colby Cosh, insist that it’s well-worth the watching:
It looks as though HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl will take the title as the prestige TV event of the first half of 2019. This is pretty remarkable, all things considered. The writer of the series, Craig Mazin, is still described on Wikipedia as “an American screenwriter and film director best known for writing Identity Thief, The Hangover Part II, The Hangover Part III, and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.” The director, Johan Renck, is a Swede who got his start as a Eurodance performer with the nom de guerre “Stakka Bo.” For the zillionth time, HBO has spread its patented secret sauce over unpromising ingredients and delivered superb television.
I am being something of a jerk about these people, of course. Screenwriters don’t have much control over which of their scripts get made and what happens to those scripts on the set, and Mazin is admired as a critic and teacher. (Unusual respect for writers is an obvious component of that HBO magic.) As for Renck, he got from trashy music to HBO through an apprenticeship in music video — the same kind of apprenticeship that brought us David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. He may, in this regard, be the last gasp of a noble tradition.
It is not that the Chernobyl series doesn’t have elements of hackiness. After spending a couple of hours watching Jared Harris’s austere scientist and Stellan Skarsgård’s smarter-than-he-looks apparatchik warm to each other while trying to save Eastern Europe from obliteration, it may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie. Set aside the wonderful visual poetry, the period detail and the fine soundtrack, and the spine you’re left holding is a whodunit. It’s the Case of the Exploding Reactor.
I think Mazin would probably admit this, if he hasn’t already, but if it’s not clear enough, the whole thing winds up in the last episode with a contrived courtroom drama, one which does not quite resemble anything that ever happened in connection with Chernobyl.
Here is the funny and admirable thing: the solution that Mazin’s “cops” work out is highly technical and involved, is explained in careful detail, and is more or less the real solution to the mystery of Chernobyl. Mazin, who is my age and was therefore a teenager when the reactor went kablooie, is not some Jordan Peterson-esque Soviet-history nerd or someone who wanted to turn Chernobyl into a metaphor. It just seems to have occurred to him one day, quite recently, that he knew the word “Chernobyl,” and remembered that Chernobyl was very bad, but wasn’t sure what exactly had happened. When he found out he realized there was a movie in it.
Between the accidents at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island (in 1979), the nuclear power industry was set back literally decades … despite being one of the best — and safest — answers to the problem of generating enough electricity to keep modern industrial countries humming along while also reducing production of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Maybe someone will produce a TV mini-series to de-mystify the American nuclear accident soon, and debunk the half-truths, quarter-truths, and outright lies that still bedevil any discussion of nuclear power in the western world.
May 7, 2019
Arthur Chrenkoff relates his own economic “a-ha!” moment
He says he’s never had a religious or spiritual revelation, but he did have one that was pure economics:
By way of background, you have to remember that I grew up under declining communism. As someone has once wryly remarked, in a planned economy everything is planned except for the economy. In Poland of my childhood and early teenage years virtually everyone was employed by the state and so virtually all the income was derived from the state, except, of course, for the rampant black market. Shops were few and generally poorly stocked. Some goods were unobtainable, others required queuing and a lot of luck (or connections) to get, and either way most were of inferior quality to that in the West. Even if you have managed to save enough money, you had to get onto a waiting list to acquire an apartment, car, or household goods. The wait could take decades. Life’s necessities were more widely available but quite haphazard in their distribution. During the crisis years of the 1980s, most food items required ration cards. People literally had to scheme and plot to get their hands on toilet paper. Sure, the Eastern European socialism for most part managed to provide everyone with a bare minimum of subsistence so that no one starved anymore, but beyond that the economic system was shambles, never managing to produce the sufficient quantity and quality of what people needed and wanted. We all knew that the West, by comparison, was a kingdom of plenty, thanks the workings of that scary capitalism, but as a kid I wouldn’t be able to explain to you how, by contracts to our socialism, it somehow managed to produce in abundance all those cars, toys and oranges and bananas. We were told by the authorities that it was all a sham, built on exploitation of workers and resulting in widespread poverty. But we knew enough to know that everything is relative. When the Jaruzelski regime in the early 80s trumpeted in the government-run media (there were no other legal ones) its charity initiative to send sleeping bags to the homeless of New York, an anonymous wag somehow managed to place and ad in one of the papers “Will swap a two bedroom apartment in Warsaw for a sleeping bag in New York”.
I was 15 when I left, unbeknownst to me two years before the fall of the Wall, and spent 16 months in Italy before finally arriving to start a new life in Australia. For a kid from Eastern Europe, Italy was a revelation; I didn’t know enough about anything then to realise that the country we thought was a paradise has always in reality been somewhat of a hot mess. Australia at the end of the decade of wide-ranging economic reforms, which really opened the country to the world and unleashed its creative potential, was even more of contrast to the drabness, shortages and absurdity of the “real socialism” I grew up under.
The story of my economic experience is very brief: one day, not long after settling in Australia, I was in a car, being driven somewhat off the beaten path, through what can be described as a light industrial area. Then, all of a sudden, among all the rather anonymous sheds and buildings I saw a large, free standing store. I can’t remember its name but I remember it was selling carpets. And that’s all. I grew up with few shops around, which, no doubt in part because European cities tend to be a lot more condensed, occupied the same space as the living. But here, here was a whole store, a very large store that specialised in one product only – floor coverings – and it was, relatively speaking, sitting in the middle of nowhere. That it was in business, that it somehow managed to operate, indicated to me that people, many people, actually drove over here, from some distances away, for no other purpose than just to buy one thing – a carpet. So strange. So peculiar. This was my revelation, my economic epiphany in a back seat: this whole capitalist system must truly be incredibly complex and magnificent – and superior to all the alternatives – if it means a shop like this can thrive selling one particular type of product to people who don’t live anywhere near it.
January 19, 2019
Stopper 37mm: A Simple South African Riot Control Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 29 Dec 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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The Stopper is a simple 37mm single shot riot control gun designed by Andries Piek in 1980. The South African police services were at that time using 37mm guns made by Federal Labs in the US, dating back to the 1930s, and the international embargo on South Africa made it impossible to get parts and do basic maintenance on those arms. So Piek (whose other work included the BXP carbine/SMG and design improvements to the LDP/Kommando) whipped out the Stopper in all of two weeks to provide a new domestic-production 37mm weapon for the police.
The Stopper is a simple break-action gun, with a manually cocked, single action, hammer-fired trigger mechanism. Two versions were made, one with the front grip and one without, and all were fitted with collapsing stocks. Production began in 1982 and ran until 1999, by Mitco Special Products under the Milkor name.
As an interesting postscript, Piek was inspired by seeing Christopher Walken using a Mannville 25mm revolving gas gun in the movie Dogs of War to make something similar in 37mm or 40mm. The gun he designed to this end became the Milkor MGL, adopted by South Africa in 1983 and by the US Marine Corps in 2005.
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December 18, 2018
Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song
Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:
Seasonal Melodies
James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:
This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.
It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”
This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.
Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.
Note that singular. “Tape”.
Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …
So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.
We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.
To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.
Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.
And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s been over 20 years 30 years now, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two three decades.
