Quotulatiousness

December 23, 2025

Vagabond by Tim Curry

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle reviews Tim Curry’s new autobiography Vagabond:

Tim Curry, Nell Campbell, Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Tim Curry is a shapeshifter. I have a childhood memory of the moment I learned that the demon in Legend (1985), the villain in Annie (1982), the butler in Clue (1985) and the cross-dressing alien scientist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were all played by the same man. It was quite the revelation.

Curry’s protean talents have meant that as a personality he has forever remained mysterious. He rarely gives interviews – only grudgingly whenever there is a movie to promote – and fans have therefore tended to project onto this reclusive figure the persona that best fits their expectations or desires. When more insistent fans have formed an emotional bond with the Tim Curry of their imaginations, he has on occasion been forced to put them right. “I’m just a person,” he says, “and I’m not your person”.

Fans will therefore be delighted at the publication of Curry’s memoir, Vagabond, which offers fascinating snapshots from his life. The approach is episodic, with chapters devoted to particular projects in his career. As such, Curry offers us morsels in lieu of a meal. Those who are hoping for salacious anecdotes about his love life will be disappointed, because – as he rightly points out – “specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are – respectfully – none of your fucking business”. Instead, we have a wonderfully compelling account of Curry’s origins and how his philosophy of life has informed his craft.

Tim Curry as Wadsworth in Clue and King Arthur in Spamalot

His vagabond status has been well earned. As the child of a military father, he was forever on the move, and it is easy to see how these early experiences shaped his capacity to embody such a wide breadth of humanity. His first accolade came early when he was awarded the prize for the “Most Beautiful Baby in Hong Kong”. His family relocated roughly every eighteen months for the first eleven years of his life, which is why he tells us that “mutability felt like a part of my DNA”. It was the ideal apprenticeship for his future vocation.

Writing in 1817, William Hazlitt called actors the “motley representatives of human nature” who “show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be”. For his part, Curry sees the actor as the vagabond of his book’s title. “How can you trust somebody, or truly know somebody, who appears as a king one day and a jester the next? What does it mean when neither role is the true identity of the person, and when that very person might be gone the next day?” In this, he could be paraphrasing Hazlitt’s description of actors as “today kings, tomorrow beggars”, and how “it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing”.

September 21, 2025

From Eat Pray Love to plotting a murder

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Elizabeth Nickson charts the career of Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love and more recently a memoir of her life up to the point where she planned to murder her “once in a million year” partner:

Gilbert, you certainly know, wrote Eat Pray Love which was a massive international bestseller made into a film with Julia Roberts, which was also very successful. During the Pray portion, Gilbert retreated to an ashram in India to worship a living sub-deity called The Mother. At the time I was still tangentially aware of life in the world of moderately successful upscale arty women from the mega-cities and I’d heard of the Mother and her clinging clanging worship sessions — Siddha Yoga — going round the Pilates and yoga studios and the upscale self-help programs. The Mother’s satsangs were guaranteed to put you into an ecstatic state where you fused with the divine. And then you’d heal. From the abuse of the Patriarchy.

During the Pray section, Gilbert had a series of intense moments, which &mddash; coupled with an earlier session on the bathroom floor where God told her to wash her face and go to bed — meant, to her, a great deal. Her “God” gave her direction and purpose, where before she was caught in an unhappy marriage, being apparently the breadwinner in that marriage with a husband who a) didn’t work, b) wanted her to buy more and more stuff and c) have a child.

This seems a poor choice for a husband, but never mind. Gilbert was successful in the New York world of publishing and magazines and much occupied with that pursuit, a business which I now suspect is financed by the drug trade and used to launder money. In that world where success is one in ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and where Gilbert experienced perhaps the biggest literary success of her generation. She became universally, ridiculously, excessively loved.

And embrace it she did. For the past 15 years, Gilbert has traveled the world, usually with a woman companion to keep her on the rails, dishing out nostrums and platitudes with relish meant to show you how to “find yourself” and “live your truth” to women searching for purpose. “Creativity” or “art” is now substituted for what women in the before times used to call service to their communities and families, which is now called slavery to the patriarchy.

The following is the progression of “evolving” for modern left-of-center women, for whom finding a meaningful work is the number one priority, children being the last, as the below illustrates.

When the recognition of slim to no talent or at least un-sellable talent, is made and a future of grinding for multinationals is revealed, and spiritual enlightenment or Kundalini awakening seems out of reach, the desperation moves onto Democrat politics, and ends in middle-aged and elderly woman on the streets, face contorted in rage. Those women, a full 40% of whom are childless and family-less, spend their lives slogging away in some corporate or health or educational structure, becoming semi-insane. As an aside note, in my years-long investigation of voter fraud, many of the operators are women just like these below: middle-aged, put together, well dressed, polite, fully criminal.

In searching for your creativity — the highest good — you have to become fully aligned with your child self, your spiritual self, and that self becomes the most cherished part of you. Your intelligence, your executive function is demoted. Your creativity, your spirituality, then becomes fused to others whom you perceive being as weak as that child self you have elevated as spiritually superior. Women, it seems hardwired, must have people to care about. In the absence of family, it is the helpless to whom you assign your life.

Gilbert’s once-in-a-million-years love was a gay Syrian immigrant hairdresser with a history of heroin addiction and incarceration. No more victimish victim can be found.

For Gilbert’s millions of acolytes, spiritual worth, meaning,creative power is found in allyship with the weak, with whom they fully identify. And meaning is also found in hysterical advocacy and fury on behalf of the weak. There is no thinking attached to any of this, no analysis, no study. Just intense emotionality.

September 6, 2025

New Evidence on the loss of HMS Hood!

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Drachinifel
Published 5 Sept 2025

Today we take a look at a heretofore unpublished account from a sailor who saw the destruction of HMS Hood, and take a look at what this might tell us about the incident.
(more…)

August 25, 2025

George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

Filed under: Books, Britain, France — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Down and Out was one of the first Orwell works I read as an adult, having encountered Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as school texts. I would not say that I enjoyed the book so much as it gave me a very different view of both cities between the wars and encouraged me to seek out more of Orwell’s work. On his Substack, Rob Henderson considers the book and its author:

I was in high school the first time I read Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell. A memoir about his time in the slums of France and England.1 Orwell, while in Paris, worked as a plongeur — a person employed to wash dishes and carry out other menial tasks in a restaurant or hotel. Plongeur sounds much better than “bus boy”.

Because, at the time, I was also working as a busboy and dishwasher, I enjoyed Orwell’s description of employment in a busy restaurant. He wrote that the work itself was simple, like sorting a deck of cards, but when done against the clock it became exhausting. That captured exactly how I felt on my Friday and Saturday evening shifts.

Later I was disappointed to learn that Orwell had come from privilege. The guy went to Eton, a prestigious all-boys school. The book recounted his experiences with slum tourism. When he was penniless during the periods described in Down and Out, particularly during his return to London, his well-to-do family could and did take him back in for temporary periods so he could eat well and shower. At first this made the story feel less authentic.

Over time, though, I came to see it differently. It took someone like Orwell to write about life in the slums in a way that other educated people would pay attention to. I had to go through something similar. Only after spending time around the upper middle class did I understand how to describe my life in a way that would actually make them pay attention.

[…]

In the second half of Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell describes living rough in London’s East End, staying in lodging houses and casual wards. He worked alongside the city’s laborers to understand poverty from the inside.

Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first published book, written when he was in his mid-twenties. It is striking is how little he romanticized the idea of being an impoverished bohemian in world-class cities, the way so many others of his background might have done. Instead, he treated his immersion in the Parisian and London underworlds as an attempt to strip away the prejudices he had inherited as an upper-middle-class Etonian.

The book is restrained in its politics. Orwell rarely pauses for commentary, preferring to tell the story as it happened and saving his more general conclusions for a couple of chapters at the end. This is more or less the same approach I took with Troubled; describe the world as it was, or at least as I remember it, and let the meaning emerge on its own.

One of the strongest features of Down and Out is its focus on the psychological effects of petty humiliations. Orwell describes kitchens where people from every corner of Europe are screaming at each other in different languages, frantically trying to keep pace with the chaos. If you have ever watched one of those Gordon Ramsay shows, you have some idea. He admired the strange order that somehow emerged from the chaos.

This voyeuristic quality is part of the book’s appeal. We all go to restaurants and see only the polished surface, knowing almost nothing about what happens behind the doors. Likewise, we all encounter homeless people in daily life and know little about how they live. Back in the 1930s, you didn’t have to make many mistakes to find yourself in a tough spot. My guess is that because society today is wealthier, there are more social services available, and powerful recreational drugs more accessible, the typical homeless person (he uses the word “tramp”, which was a prevailing term at the time) Orwell encountered nearly a century ago is very different from those we see today.

During his year and a half working menial jobs in Paris, Orwell wrote a few books, all rejected by publishers in London. None of this appears in Down and Out. He never dwells on his literary ambitions or his many failures. He does not even treat “writing” as a subject worth mentioning. For him, sleeping on a bench along the Embankment was a detail that mattered more than discussing proofs with an editor. Struggle is more interesting to read about than success. Sometimes people ask me if I’ll write a follow up to Troubled. No way. No one wants to read a whole book about a guy who went to elite universities and then blathers on about his subsequent prosperity. The thought of it induces a feeling in me of both amusement and nausea. Even if I focused on the unexpected struggles and costs of upward mobility, the stakes are so low that I can’t bring myself to take it seriously.

  1. It just occurred to me that this was in 2005. Around once a week I’d stop by my high school library after class and browse the shelves. By 2006 and 2007, I noticed fewer and fewer students actually reading in the library and more and more of them on the desktop computers, watching videos on a new website called “YouTube”. Can’t help but wonder how much streaming videos have reduced interest in reading among young people.

January 13, 2024

Troubled by Rob Henderson

Filed under: Books, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Stephanos Bibas reviews Rob Henderson’s autobiography Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class for the University of Chicago Law Review:

Life at the bottom is troubled. Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and many others have long shown us that. To understand criminal justice, education, and family law, we lawyers typically look to social scientists, and their external expertise does teach us much. But we often neglect lived experience. Occasionally, we should toggle from the dry regressions and clinical detachment of social science to the internal perspective and expertise of those who live through family breakup, foster care, disrupted schooling, drugs, and crime. And that is what Rob Henderson’s breakout memoir, Troubled, gives us: a window on troubled youth.1

Henderson, a brilliant young psychologist, illumines how harmful childhood instability is by reflecting on his own experience. He never knew his father, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, and bounced around foster care. After squandering much of his early education and drowning his rage in alcohol, drugs, fights, and vandalism, he managed to make his way through the Air Force to Yale and now Cambridge. But few of his friends escaped the wounds from their childhoods; many wound up unemployed, in prison, or dead. His eye is as keen as his intellect, recalling and reporting how adults in his life kept abandoning him and his fellow foster children and how they in turn acted out. As an outsider to the elites who dominate the Ivies, he also turns his critical eye on the groupthink and victimhood culture that is strongest among the most privileged. And building on literary historian Paul Fussell’s work, Henderson develops his own critique of the shibboleths that educated American elites use to set themselves—ourselves—apart while ignoring the harm to the rest of society.2

Henderson has much to teach us lawyers and legal scholars. He shows us how much we miss by focusing public policy on educational attainment and cost-benefit analysis, overlooking what is priceless: love and emotional attachment. The most important things in life can’t be quantified; at best, outcomes are mere proxies for them. We are more than our résumés! His account undermines our persistent habit of viewing humans as fully informed rational actors — a habit that makes much more sense in corporate law than in criminal law and the like. He showcases how poorly used adult autonomy harms children, leading to broken homes, drug addiction, numbness, and rage.

Lastly, Henderson critiques “luxury beliefs”, the term he coins for sociological opinions that are popular only among those who need not worry about their own survival. These beliefs are status signals to the educated elite who are not harmed by the fallout from any cultural shifts they might cause. But these beliefs corrode the social structures that children need to develop. (He could do more to develop the causal nexus to social harm, but his claims are still powerful.)

In short, Henderson’s memoir powerfully challenges prevalent views of education, family policy, and class. It shows how we hyperfocus on educational outcomes and other quantifiable goals at the expense of softer emotional goods. And it does it all in a plainspoken, understated voice that illustrates his points from his own lived experience and that of his buddies. Many will disagree with Henderson’s conclusions, of course, but scholars should grapple with his challenge.

Part I of this Review summarizes Henderson’s long journey from foster care to Yale. Part II canvasses his argument that adult instability breeds chaotic childhoods, leaving neglected kids to raise themselves in Hobbesian competition, impulsive indulgence, or reckless rage. Part III then develops Henderson’s signature concept of luxury beliefs and how nonjudgmentalism backfires on those at the bottom. Though one can quibble with some of his causal claims, his thrust is compelling. Finally, Part IV considers how Henderson’s account suggests reorienting some criminal justice, education, and family law reforms toward children’s need for stable structures to guide them.

    1. Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (forthcoming 2024) (on file with publisher). All further citations to this work are by page number in parentheticals in the text.

    2. See generally Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983).

January 9, 2024

Matt Gurney on what he learned from Geddy Lee

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Line went into holiday mode during the Christmas season and into the first week of the new year. To fill in, the editors invited contributions on things the contributors were grateful for. Matt Gurney included his own piece, encouraged by Geddy Lee’s recent book My Effin’ Life (which I haven’t read, but hope to at some point):

Most Line readers probably know that I am an unrepentant Trekkie. Many of you will not know, but will not be surprised to discover, that I’m also a huge fan of Canadian rock band Rush. (These two things do often seem to go together, I’ve noted.) Last year, Rush bassist and lead singer Geddy Lee published a memoir, playfully titled My Effin’ Life.

Lee began to work on the memoir during the pandemic lockdowns, when we all suddenly found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. Lee has been very open, both in his memoir and in his public comments, about the sad series of life events that led him to decide to begin writing his memoir in the first place.

The first, of course, was the effective end of Rush, back in 2015. Lee was eager to continue making music and touring. Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart, afflicted with some health issues and worried he could no longer perform at the standard he expected of himself, was eager to retire and spend more time with his new, young family. (Rush fans will know the awful story of what happened to Peart’s first family; it’s not necessary to recap it here, but I have absolutely kept it in mind when counting my own blessings.) Lee has been honest about being frustrated and even bitter about the end of Rush’s active career, but the news got worse, when, early in what was supposed to be the second act of Peart’s family life, the drummer was diagnosed with a cruel, terminal cancer. He died in 2020, almost four years ago to this day, after a long, private struggle, a struggle that Lee did his part to keep private. As if that wasn’t enough, not long after the death of his long-time friend and bandmate, Lee lost his mother, Mary Weinrib, a Holocaust survivor and a huge and active presence in Lee’s life until the very end. Weinrib died in 2021.

That’s a lot of loss packed into a short period, and the timing was awful. As COVID hit North America and began to rack up its victims, Lee, like so many of us, retreated inside his own home. While there, he had many ghosts and sorrows to keep him company, and it clearly weighed on him. So he began writing.

And what resulted was, perhaps to the surprise of even Lee, a happy memoir. A story of gratitude and laughter. A memoir full of funny stories, jokes, and things for which he was thankful.

As 2023 was drawing to a close, my father gifted me a ticket to a book reading at Toronto’s Massey Hall, featuring none other than Geddy Lee. The special surprise interviewer and cohost for the evening — though not really that much of a surprise — was Lee’s surviving Rush bandmate and friend of decades, guitarist Alex Lifeson. The two men, both now 70, sat down on the stage and spent the next couple of hours swapping stories, jokes and memories, happy and sad. They strongly hinted, but did not promise, that some version of Rush may reunite and perform again.

And that would be great. I would spend an unwise amount of money to go see that. But it wasn’t my excitement about possible opportunities to see some version of my favourite band perform again that began changing my perspective on 2023. It was just seeing the two of them on that stage. I’m sure these guys have had to deal with all the creeping aches and pains and a need for new contact lens prescriptions that I catalogued above. And I can guarantee you that they’ve both endured more personal loss than I have. But what I saw that evening was simply two old buddies, with 30 years on me, sitting on a stage and having a blast. And I realized that to these guys, something that happened when they were 40 would have seemed like a long time ago. Because they’d lived a lot since then.

December 19, 2023

QotD: The art of the Millennial celebrity memoir

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Who Am I?” asks Danny’s book, knowing full well who he is. To feign humility, the title does that Millennial thing: asks a question to which it knows the answer.

I have a cactus-like indifference to celebrity, to Danny Cipriani, to anyone over whom the kaffeeklatsch gushes. Danny was a gifted athlete who drained his Superman abilities in pursuit of celebrity. Little is more tragic than wasted talent.

The Romans thought celebrities were mentally deranged, and to be avoided. To this day, we’re yet to discover the secret behind their vastly superior self-healing concrete. The Romans had a point.

Anyway, Danny’s sex life, as documented in his book, would blush the cheeks of a Roman senator.

Danny has bedded scores of beautiful women. This happens when one is Hollywood handsome, rugged, cocky, and a known shagger. At the height of his bedhopping campaign, Danny featured permanently in the tabloid press, each week a new beauty attached to his arm.

In short, Danny could indulge himself senselessly and did so with the atomic energy of a nymphomaniac in the waiting room at Dignitas.

Reader, that’s it. That’s the story. A young man blessed with opportunities to shag beautiful women indulged those opportunities to shag beautiful women.

[…]

This book could have been a tweet.

Christopher Gage, “Spare a Thought: The inexorable rise of pitybragging”, Oxford Sour, 2023-09-12.

November 28, 2023

“This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture”

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest addition to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, John Psmith reviews The Man Who Rode the Thunder, by William H. Rankin:

Like many little boys, I loved learning lists of things. One day it was clouds. How could I not love them? The names were fluffy and Latinate, delicate little words like “cumulus” and “cirrus” that sounded like they might float away on a puff of wind. But there was also a structure to the words, intimations and hints of taxonomy. Was the relationship of an altocumulus to an altostratus the same as that of a cirrocumulus to a cirrostratus? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely! So here I had not just a heap of words, but something more like a map to making sense of a new part of the world.

So I learned the names of all the clouds, but I quickly got bored of most of them. Only one of them held my attention, but it made up for the rest by becoming an obsession. Yes, it was the mighty cumulonimbus, the towering, violent monster that heralds the approach of a thunderstorm. By then I had already met plenty of them — one of my earliest memories is of huddling with my mother in the room of our house that was farthest from any exterior walls, while lightning struck again and again and again, the echoes of the previous thunderclap still reverberating off the landscape when the next one began. What, I wondered, would it be like to be inside one?

There’s one man who knows. His name is Colonel William H. Rankin, and he fell through a thunderstorm and lived to tell the tale. After his ordeal Rankin published a memoir that was a bestseller in the early ’60s, but is out of print today. If you click the Amazon link at the top of this page, you will see that secondhand copies of the paperback edition go for about $150. If that’s too steep for you, I’m told that Good Samaritans communists have uploaded high-quality scans of the book to various nefarious and America-hating websites, but this is a patriotic Substack and we would never condone that sort of behavior. Be warned!

I sought out and read Rankin’s memoir for the part where he falls through a cloud, so I was planning on skimming and/or skipping the hundred or so pages where he narrates his life and career up to that point. When I actually cracked open the pdf legally-purchased paperback, though, I found that I couldn’t. Somehow an artifact from an alien world had fallen into my hands. This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture.

They say you should read books to broaden yourself, to learn about foreign peoples and about cultures not your own. I was unprepared for late 1950s America being as foreign as it turned out to be. There’s a whole genre comprised of parodying the supposed mid-century American combo of sunny faith in scientific progress, squeaky-clean public morality, and blithe indifference to the horrors of industrial warfare. In my own reading and watching, I had only ever encountered the parodies, never the genuine article, until I read this book. Rankin’s memoir exudes gee-whiz enthusiasm from every pore. He is patriotic without a trace of irony, giddy as a schoolboy about advances in jet propulsion, and then uses a totally unchanged tone of giddiness and enthusiasm to describe melting hundreds of Korean peasants with napalm.

Reading this stuff fills me with the same feeling of vertigo that I get reading about Bronze Age Greek warriors — here is a human being just like me, but inhabiting a cultural, spiritual, and memetic universe so different from mine. Are we the same species? If we were to meet each other would we even be able to communicate? Or perhaps every age has had people like him and people like me, and all that’s changed is that the dominant mode of social interaction shifted from favoring one of us to the other. After all, I know people today who are incapable of irony or reflection. For instance, TSA agents. Was 1950s America an entire society of TSA agents? And if so, what am I to make of the fact that in so many ways it seems to have been more functional than America today?

November 11, 2023

QotD: Diary entry, 11 November, 1979

Filed under: Cancon, History, Personal, Quotations, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I hope you’ll forgive my self-insert here, but watching the video on the Mississauga train derailment prompted me to dig up a bit of personal history related to this thankfully non-tragic event in Canadian history. This is what I wrote about the events of that week not at the time (I was far too busy living it to record anything) but a couple of months after the fact. Samuel Pepys I wasn’t. I note in passing that my memories today don’t exactly match what I wrote in early 1980, which does bring home to me the fallibility of “eyewitness” reports after the fact.

On the night of November 10, 1979, a 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train derailed at Mavis Road, north of Dundas Street. As a result of the subsequent explosion, when one of the tank cars carrying propane exploded, and because other tank cars were carrying chlorine, the decision was made to evacuate nearby residents in one of the largest peace time evacuations in history. This photo shows flames from the wreckage, with hoses pouring water on it.
Photo from the Mississauga Library System website, Identifier M466. Full gallery here.

In November of ’79, on the 11th actually, a chemical train derailed just northwest of [our apartment near Dundas and Hurontario Streets]. It spilled 16 tank cars full of propane and one full of chlorine all over the Mavis Road crossing.

I was driving back to Hamilton on Saturday night to drop off [my girlfriend]. Rockney was inexplicably along with us that night. Around midnight, I noticed the road all around us light up as though dawn had come early. Also noticed a pronounced mushroom-type cloud and lots of incident light at its base. Right there, my mind kicked into Hyperdrive and I analyzed the data, assumed the worst, and nearly swung off the highway to protect us behind an embankment. [The others] saw that it wasn’t an H- or A-type of explosion, and so we didn’t worry too much. Flames [on the eastern horizon] were easily visible from Hamilton.

I went back [to Mississauga], dropped Rockney off [and] noticed a police car blocking the intersection of Dundas and Hurontario with its lights going. Talked to Mum, who was still up, and went to bed at 3:00am.

We were woken up at 10:00am by police evacuating the building. I called Rockney and we all trooped over to his place. I stayed for 1/2 an hour, and decided to go back to the house, change into [my army reserve] uniform, and go up to Brampton for our Remembrance Day parade. On the way, I was stopped by the police and directed to go to Square One, where an evacuation centre had been set up. As I arrived there, the last bus-load of evacuees left headed for Streetsville Secondary School. I arrived there in time [to be given responsibility for security] with 15 assorted army and navy cadets [who were in uniform for their respective Remembrance Day services] who had no officer handy. We cleared the halls [at the direction of police and school authorities] and tried to maintain calm among the evacuated throng.

By 8 that evening, my force had shrunk to seven cadets led by Petty Officer Linda P. An officer cadet of the Air Reserve and five air cadets with him refused to assist me or the police. [I was angry at the time, but he was probably worried about the legal side of providing “aid to the civil power” while in uniform without permission from his chain of command. I was a junior NCO, so that thought never crossed my mind until much later.]

By this time, I had attached Chris P. [a friend of Rockney’s who was evacuated to Streetsville] and several other husky teenagers to my “security force” and we were able to keep things fairly quiet.

As people [started to realize] that they would be there all night, most of them settled down very nicely. [My team of cadets] issued blankets we’d received on a truck from CFB Downsview and shared out the available gym mats [as makeshift mattresses].

A local McDonalds sent in a “breakfast” of cold Big Macs [I’m sure they were hot going out the door, but they took a long time to get to us] — [the non-cadet members of] my security force got more than their fair share, but that was expected. Most of the media had disappeared by this time so we soon got involved in minor disputes with some irate citizens.

Sometime during Monday afternoon a Master Corporal from CFB Downsview called me to arrange a coffee run down to the [emergency crews working to contain] the fire. Nothing came of it in the end [I have no idea why they thought I’d be a useful participant, as I had no transportation other than my own car … maybe I was the only member of the military in the immediate vicinity].

Tried calling Rockney’s place [to see how my family were doing] but got no answer, same at Bill & Clive’s apartment [several miles further east of Rockney’s]. No idea where my parents have gone. [After being evacuated a second time, they’d ended up at the International Centre with the family cat and stayed there until later in the week, as I found out later. My sister hadn’t been at home so she was evacuated elsewhere with her boyfriend’s family. I have no idea where she spent the week.]

Monday night wasn’t too bad, except for [media reports] that there were 3 escaped cons in the area so i couldn’t send girls out alone on security sweeps [outside the school building]. Me, Chris P., Jordan L., and John D. were the only [ones available to do exterior security] now, getting VERY tired. Got an hour’s sleep.

On Tuesday a bunch of students from Humber College showed up. They were all taking the Law Enforcement course and wanted to help me with security. [The] only problem was that the course was 9/10ths female [so] I couldn’t use them [for exterior patrols, which is where we needed help the most].

Also showing up [later on Tuesday] was a local CB radio group who tried to take over from me and my team. It took two hours [of argument] before they gave up and went off to try to take over some other evacuation centre. [Around this time,] vandalism started on the back side of the school and in the portable classrooms. No one was caught at it, unfortunately. [I didn’t note it here, but I strongly suspected that one or more of my volunteers had done some of the damage out of boredom, but I had no proof.]

The biggest problem, however, was racial. A large group of black teenagers had taken over one of the Home Economics classrooms and had 2 competing ghetto blasters to make mucho noise. 2 fights had to be broken up in there and we had to call the police in to cope with the second fight.

[Tuesday] night was uneventful for a change. Wednesday wasn’t, as rumours of being able to go home kept hitting the people in the evacuation centre and nearly overwhelming the security teams at the doors. One asshole, a guy about 20-25 years old, kept buttonholing me and other members of my team and demanding shampoo, of all things. Eventually, someone got him some and he “went to the showers”. [In hindsight, he probably had just come down from whatever drugs he’d been on for the previous few days.]

On Wednesday night, the evacuation centre in Streetsville was shut down and everyone was moved to other facilities on Mississauga Transit buses. Most were taken to the Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto, but my remaining team members were sent to a Holiday Inn in Scarborough. [I was in rough shape by then and someone got me to hospital to get checked out. I was there for about 10 hours before they discharged me with advice to “get plenty of rest”.]

Thursday we spent in the hotel, charging everything to CP Rail. They must have hit the roof when the bill arrived — especially the bar bill! We threw an “exhaustion party” in our room on Thursday night and on Friday we were finally allowed to go home (most of us, anyway).

When I went back to school the following week, I was given the third degree by the vice principal because the Red Cross didn’t have me listed as an evacuee. I had to get the hospital records to show that I had actually taken part before I was allowed back into class. [A similar thing happened the next unit parade night, as I’d been on TV several times in my uniform during the event and my commanding officer was quite upset about it, thinking I’d been pretending to act in some sort of official capacity, which I hadn’t been.]

August 4, 2023

Vivek Ramaswamy as “Trump 2.0”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Bari Weiss considers Vivek Ramaswamy as an improved version of Donald Trump, appealing to a similar audience but with less obvious baggage. Here are some excerpts from her recent interview with Ramaswamy:

Vivek Ramaswamy and his family.
Detail of a photo from his campaign website, https://www.vivekramaswamy.com/

BW: Politics is all about storytelling, and the winning candidate — or the candidate that catches fire — is almost always the one with the best story. What is your story, and why is it the story that Americans are craving right now?

VR: Whether Americans are craving it or not, that’ll be for them to decide. But I’ll tell you what my story is. I’m the embodiment of the American dream. My parents came to this country over 40 years ago with almost no money. I’ve gone on to found multibillion-dollar companies that created value by doing valuable things for other people, developing five medicines that are FDA approved today. One of them is a life-saving therapy for kids, another one for prostate cancer. I did it while getting married, while bringing two sons into this world, while following my faith in God, while growing up with the ultimate privilege in this country. And I think the thing that’s extraordinary about that story is that it isn’t extraordinary. It is the story of this country. And I don’t think we’re in decline. I think we are still a nation in our ascent, in the early stages of our ascent actually, a nation whose best days are still ahead. I think it takes someone in my shoes to see our nation that way, too. That’s truly what pulled me into the race.

BW: There’s a lot of people running on a reformist platform. You’re running on a radical or a revolutionary one. You say America needs a second revolution. Many people hear revolution, and they think bloodshed and violence. What do you mean by that, and what does that revolution look like?

VR: To me, it does not mean bloodshed and violence, but it means a revival of the ideals that set this nation into motion in 1776. I do think we live in a 1776 moment. I think that the American bargain was built on the idea that we, the people, determine how we settle our political differences through free speech and open debate in the public square where every person’s voice and vote counts equally. That is self-governance. And I think that there is the Old World vision now rearing its head in multiple forms that says, no, we the people cannot be trusted. The citizens of a nation cannot be trusted to determine what’s actually good for them — so we, the intelligentsia, must make that determination centrally at large. I stand on the side of the American Revolution, the ideals that birthed this nation. I think we live in a moment where we have to confront those radical ideals. I think that the American ideals are very fundamentally radical ideals: self-governance, free speech, like absolute free speech, the idea that you get ahead through unbridled meritocracy, the unbridled pursuit of excellence, the steadfast commitment to the rule of law rather than the whims of men. These are radical ideals, because for most of human history, it was done the other way. I think it is the radicalism of the American Revolution and those ideals that are our last best chance for national unity, because that is what actually binds us together across our diverse attributes. And without embracing that radicalism, I think we’re nothing.

BW: You’re incredibly entertaining. You have a view on everything. You’re a phenomenal talker, which will take you far. And remarkably, as of the latest polls, you’re third behind Trump and DeSantis. But many commentators say that ultimately, you have no shot at the nomination. Why is that conventional wisdom wrong about you?

VR: Everyone seems to be shocked where I am right now. I’m not surprised. This is exactly where we expected to be. The reality is, I think people are hungry for the unfiltered truth. I would rather speak the truth about my own beliefs at every step and lose the election than to play some political Snakes and Ladders. And I believe that our voters across this country have a good sixth sense for being able to tell the difference for somebody who’s actually sharing their true beliefs versus somebody who’s giving them carefully constructed, poll-tested slogans. And that is the competitive advantage. My gut instinct is we’re going to win this election. We’re going to win it in a landslide of a margin similar to what Reagan delivered in 1980.

BW: So you’re going to be the Obama of this race, not the Andrew Yang?

VR: I’m going to be the Vivek Ramaswamy of this race, and that’s what I’m committed to being.

At 7% in the polls at the moment, Ramaswamy is a long-shot to win the Republican nomination, but you’ll know if his chances are improving when the media slow-walks the Bad Orange Man stories and starts criticizing Ramaswamy (or “Bad Curry Man” as some online wits have dubbed him).

July 18, 2023

Life lessons from Thomas Sowell’s memoir

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rob Henderson took a lot away from his recent reading of Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey, including some fascinating lessons from Sowell’s time in the US Marine Corps:

Trust people who value being honest more than being nice.

As the Korean War intensified, Sowell was drafted into the Marine Corps. He notes that color did not matter, as all new recruits were treated with equal disdain. Sowell describes his life in the Marine barracks in Pensacola. There were two non-commissioned officers permanently stationed to oversee the young marines. One was Sergeant Gordon, “a genial, wisecracking guy who took a somewhat relaxed view of life”. The other was Sergeant Pachuki, “a disciplinarian who spoke in a cutting and ominous way” and was always “impeccably dressed”.

Sowell and his peers preferred Sergeant Gordon, as he was more easygoing. Sowell had to go into town to pick up a package. Sowell asked his Chief Petty Officer if he could leave the base to retrieve his package. Sowell received permission.

Later, while Sowell was not on base, he was marked as absent and was accused of being AWOL (absent without leave), a serious offense. Sowell knew Sergeant Gordon, the nice one, had overheard him asking for permission to leave the base. Gordon denied having heard anything, and told Sowell, “You’re just going to have to take your punishment like a man”. Gordon fretted that if he crossed the higher-ups, he would be reassigned to fight in Korea.

But unasked, Sergeant Pachuki came forward and spoke with the colonel, explaining the situation. As a result, Sowell was exonerated and returned back to his duties.

Referring to Gordon, the “nice” sergeant who betrayed him, Sowell writes, “People who are everybody’s friend usually means they are nobody’s friend”.

A “free good” is a costless good that is not scarce, and is available without limit.

Sowell would regularly needle Sergeant Grover, another member who outranked him.

Here’s the excerpt:

    Some were surprised that I dared to give Sergeant Grover a hard time, on this and other occasions, especially since he was a nasty character to deal with. Unfortunately for him, I knew that he was going to give me as hard a time as he could, regardless of what I did. That meant it didn’t really cost me anything to give him as hard a time as I could. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was already thinking like an economist. Giving Sergeant Grover a hard time was, in effect, a free good and at a zero price my demand for it was considerable.

Sowell learned he could receive something he enjoyed (pleasure at provoking Grover) in exchange for nothing.

    Much of what you see has been carefully curated with an agenda in mind.

One of Sowell’s assignments in the Marine Corps was as a Duty Photographer on base. One day after submitting some of his photos, Sowell had the following exchange with the public information office sergeant:

    “They are good pictures, he said. “But they do not convey the image that the public information office wants conveyed.”

    “What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

    “Well, take that picture of the reservists walking across the little wooden bridge carrying their duffle bags.”

    “Yeah. What’s wrong with it?”

    “The men in that picture are perspiring. You can see the damp spots on their uniforms.”

    “Well, if you carry a duffle bag on a 90-degree day, you are going to sweat.”

    “Marines do not sweat in public information photographs.”

    “Okay, what was wrong with the picture of the reservists picking up shell casings after they had finished firing? That was one of my favorites.”

    “Marines do not perform menial chores like that, in our public relations image.”

    “But all these photos showed a very true picture of the reservists’ summer here.”

    “We’re not here to tell the truth, Sowell,” he said impatiently. “We are here to perpetuate the big lie. Now, the sooner you understand that, the better it will be for all of us.”

When I visited the Air Force recruiter in high school, I saw the brochures with images of well-groomed airmen in their dress blues graduating from basic training. I had no knowledge that much of that training would involve mind-numbing minutia. I suppose this is true for other career fields too. You see radiant coverage of academic research in legacy media outlets, or fun twitter threads outlining interesting research findings. You see the brand new hardcover book with all the glowing blurbs and reviews. You don’t see all the drudgery of research or writing behind the scenes.

Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to have too big a reputation.

Sowell and his fellow marines would sometimes have impromptu boxing matches around the barracks on base. One day Sowell was up against another guy and threw a sloppy right hand. The guy stumbled back, tripped, and fell to the ground. Although Sowell had swung and missed, witnesses thought he had knocked the other guy out.

Later, Sowell went up against another guy named Douglas. Douglas relentlessly came at Sowell and gave him a serious beating. Douglas told Sowell afterwards that the reason he was so aggressive was that he feared Sowell’s “one punch” could turn the fight around at any time. “Sometimes,” Sowell writes, “it doesn’t pay to have too big a reputation.”

June 28, 2023

Ted Gioia’s confession – he’s a Dan stan

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While I’ve never been much of a musicologist — and definitely not any kind of musician — I admit I had a very similar evolution of feeling toward the music of Steely Dan as Ted Gioia, who charts his progress from Never Dan to Dan stan:

I often make jokes about Steely Dan fans.

They’re bros and geeks and sad wannabes. But the painful truth is that I’m one of them now.

And if you don’t watch out, it could happen to you too.

At least I can laugh at myself. That’s good, because fans like me are the real target of the jokes.

And it’s true — we are a trifle obsessed.

If you’re a Dan stan, you see the band’s influence everywhere. Random patterns take on new Dan-esque shapes. For you it’s just rush hour traffic, but for us it’s a message from the cosmos.

But I wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I was a Steely Dan skeptic, a real Dan-o-phobe. I thought I was safe from their pernicious influence, but I was wrong.

This is my story.

June 10, 2023

George MacDonald Fraser – Quartered Safe Out Here

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

We Have Ways of Making You Talk
Published 16 Jan 2023

Merry Christmas from “We Have Ways of Making You Talk”. Over the next 12 days Al and James are reading extracts from some of their favourite books about the Second World War. Today Al is reading from Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser.
(more…)

May 22, 2023

What Happened Behind a Photographer’s Lens on D-Day

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 May 2023

Robert Capa has gone down in history as one the most groundbreaking war correspondents in all of journalism. His account of what happened on D-Day was something we wanted to share with all of you.
(more…)

March 12, 2023

The young British officer’s attitude toward his men

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dr. Robert Lyman has been working on pulling together various newspaper and magazine articles written by Field Marshal William Slim before the Second World War, to be published later this year. I believe this will include everything he included (in shorter form in some cases) in his 1959 book Unofficial History plus many others. In this excerpt from “Private Richard Chuck, aka The Incorrigible Rogue”, Slim recounts taking command of a company of recent conscripts while recuperating from wounds received earlier in WW1:

“Light duty of a clerical nature,” announced the President of the Medical Board. Not too bad, I thought, as I struggled back into my shirt. “Light duty of a clerical nature” had a nice leisurely sound about it. I remembered a visit I had paid to a friend in one of the new government departments that were springing up all over London at the end of 1915. He had sat at a large desk dictating letters to an attractive young lady. When she got tired of taking down letters, she poured out tea for us. She did it very charmingly. Decidedly, light duty of a clerical nature might prove an agreeable change after a hectic year as a platoon commander and a rather grim six months in hospital. Alas, after a month in charge of the officers’ mess accounts of a reserve battalion, with no more assistant than an adenoidal “C” Class clerk, I had revised my opinion. My one idea was to escape from “light duty of a clerical nature” into something more active. Reserve battalions were like those reservoirs that haunted the arithmetic of our youth — the sort that were filled by two streams and emptied by one. Flowing in came the recovered men from hospitals and convalescent homes and the new enlistments; out went the drafts to battalions overseas. When the stream of voluntary recruits was reduced to a trickle the only way to restore the intake was by conscription, and this was my chance.

It had been decided to segregate the conscripts into a separate company as they arrived. I happened to be the senior subaltern at the moment and I applied for command of the new company. Rather to my surprise, for I was still nominally on light duty, I got it. The conscripts, about a hundred and twenty of them, duly arrived. They looked very much like any other civilians suddenly pushed into uniform, awkward, bewildered, and slightly sheepish, and I regarded them with some misgiving. After all, they were conscripts; I wondered if I should like them.

The young British officer commanding native troops is often asked if he likes his men. An absurd question, for there is only one answer. They are his men. Whether they are jet-black, brown, yellow, or café-au-lait, the young officer will tell you that his particular fellows possess a combination of military virtues denied to any other race. Good soldiers! He is prepared to back them against the Brigade of Guards itself! And not only does the young officer say this, but he most firmly believes it, and that is why, on a thousand battlefields, his men have justified his faith.

In a week I felt like that about my conscripts. I was a certain rise to any remark about one volunteer being worth three pressed men. Slackers? Not a bit of it! They all had good reasons for not joining up. How did I know? I would ask them. And I did. I had them, one by one, into the company office, without even an N.C.O. to see whether military etiquette was observed. They were quite frank. Most of them did have reasons — dependants who would suffer when they went, one-man businesses that would have to shut down. Underlying all the reasons of those who were husbands and fathers was the feeling that the young single men who had escaped into well-paid munitions jobs might have been combed out first.

[…]

We had now advanced far enough in our training to introduce the company to the mysteries of the Mills bomb. There is something about a bomb which is foreign to an Englishman’s nature. Some nations throw bombs as naturally as we kick footballs, but put a bomb into an unschooled Englishman’s hands and all his fingers become thumbs, an ague affects his limbs, and his wits desert him. If he does not fumble the beastly thing and drop it smoking at his — and your — feet, he will probably be so anxious to get rid of it that he will hurl it wildly into the shelter trench where his uneasy comrades cower for safety. It is therefore essential that the recruit should be led gently up to the nerve-racking ordeal of throwing his first live bomb; but as I demonstrated to squad after squad the bomb’s simple mechanism, I grew more and more tired with each until I could no longer resist the temptation to stage a little excitement. I fitted a dummy bomb, containing, of course, neither detonator nor explosive, with a live cap and fuse. Then for the twentieth time I began!

When you pull out the safety-pin you must keep your hand on the lever or it will fly off. If it does it will release the striker, which will hit the cap, which will set the fuse burning. Then in five seconds off goes your bomb. So when you pull out the pin don’t hold the bomb like this!’

I lifted my dummy, jerked out the pin, and let the lever fly off. There was a hiss, and a thin trail of smoke quavered upwards. For a second, until they realized its meaning, the squad blankly watched that tell-tale smoke. Then in a wild sauve qui peut they scattered, some into a nearby trench, others, too panic-stricken to remember this refuge, madly across country, I looked round, childishly pleased at my little joke, to find one figure still stolidly planted before me. Private Chuck alone held his ground, placidly regarding me, the smoking bomb, and his fleeing companions with equal nonchalance. This Casablanca act was, I felt, the final proof of mental deficiency — and yet the small eyes that for a moment met mine were perfectly sane and not a little amused.

“Well,” I said, rather piqued, “hy don’t you run with the others?” A slow grin passed over Chuck’s broad face.

“I reckon if it ‘ud been a real bomb you’d ‘ave got rid of it fast enough,” he said. Light dawned on me.

“After this, Chuck,” I answered, “you can give up pretending to be a fool; you won’t get your discharge that way!”

He looked at me rather startled, and then began to laugh. He laughed quietly, but his great shoulders shook, and when the squad came creeping back they found us both laughing. They found, too, although they may not have realized it at first, a new Chuck; not by any means the sergeant-major’s dream of a soldier, but one who accepted philosophically the irksome restrictions of army life and who even did a little more than the legal minimum.

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