Travel

On Saturday morning drove to Fresno on business and took the whole family with me: round trip over 400 miles. Purely by coincidence, today, Sunday, is my birthday, and yesterday I visited my birth place, Fresno, CA.  Odd, no? 

By far the most astonishing geographic part of the trip was climbing the "Grapevine" en route to Fresno, and driving back down the Grapevine on the way home. Going and coming, going up and going down, the speed limit for trucks is different from, and frequently posted, the speed for automobiles. Also, trucks must stay on the right hand side where there is provided in several places, going up and coming down, a truck safety ramp to act as a brake. Brake testing provisions are available for trucks. In other words the mountain(s) are very steep.  Cars are forbidden to go over 70 mph up or down. Coming down, on the way home, I did something I'd never done before except on a motorcycle, and that was using the engine as a brake. That is, clicking off the Overdrive button, which then lights up on the dashboard as "O/D Off",  and slows you down without having to use the brake. (Mazda transmissions are good.) At 70 the RPM goes up to 3,000 when ordinarily it would be at only 2,500 RPM or lower. Just as on a motorcyle changing down, coming down a steep hill acts as a brake.

The Grapevine is on the news every winter when it snows. Passage is often blocked for hours/days every winter. What the news doesn't convey at all is the breathtaking beauty of the mountains even in Autumn when there is no snow at all. (Nestled in between the mountains is Lake Castaic, site of some events, such as sculling, in the 1984 Olympic Games.) Son Vincent, 12, took some photos through the windshield. I hope I'll be able to post them here.  The months long snow coverage seems to have permanently prevented plants from growing successfully, so in Autumn the higher parts of the mountains almost look like stationary light brown clouds going off in many different directions.

Going North, toward Fresno, after traversing the Grapevine, the land is very flat home to orchards, vineyards and fields of corn. At one vinyard one can purchase one's own brand of wine, with your own label.  Too rich for my blood. Besides I don't drink. I'm a drunk.

The six of us had a grand time. But, frankly, it'll take me a day or so to recover. In spite of the beauty of the surroundings I couldn't successfully forget the possibility of crashing and, God help me, dying.

Happy Sunday!

Barry

http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

 

 

The Mutiny

CVS Pharmacy is selling THE BOUNTY "The true story,"new from Viking, for $4.99. That's almost one cent per page: it's 491 pages long. It's also one dollar per pound: the beautifully bound book weighs 5 lbs.

I can't leave this subject alone. A History professor at Melbourne U, Victoria, Aust., wrote a book on that subject. His surprise at the end was that Fletcher Christian, and the rest of the island survivors of the mutiny were murdered on Pitcaine by the South Sea Island mutineers. They wanted the women for themselves.

Another aspect: The bounty was taking breadfruit (there's a picture in the book) to Jamaica in support of the slave trade. Soon after the mutiny England banned slave trading. America followed some years later but England was first. Jamaica today is an English Protectorate. One year the Queen was there on her birthday.

It's hard to believe in the face of Charles Laughton's truly great Oscar performance, but the History prof. says that Bligh was the Admiralty's hero and he commanded many another ship. After the trial of Bligh there was another mutiny, and this time 36 mutineers were hung before the fleet. England feared the French Revolution might leak over to England and undermine the Monarchy.

MGM, I learned from another source, almost cancelled their production of the 1935 Mutiny movie for fear it might exacerbate labor agitations in Culver City: LA Times for 1935 reported that blood ran in the streets of Hollywood, labor negotiations stymied by the woosening Great Depression that had finally caught up with CA. (My family was inveigled by my rich grandmother to return to Australia.)

Both books, the profs, and this one by Caroline Alexander, are not history, nor are they fiction. They are fictionalized history. Shoot, they are fiction. We'll never know what happened.

Barry

http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

No subject

Ever seen a rainbow that touched ground at both ends? I doubt that I have until the other day while driving half the length of the San Fernando Valley going East. My wife took photographs thru' the windshield. Later, I discovered that the gorgeous rainbow pictures had been taken with my tiny digital camera, the size of a pack of cigarettes, with the lens setting on macro and not normal focal length. Oddly the photos on the screen thingum at the back of the camera, tiny, makes some of the pictures look normal, but I've got my doubts. Oh well, it was the experience of seeing the rainbow that matters. Right?

Barry

Vick, his dogs, his broken career, his looming 40 years in jail, etc.

Isn't this Vick dog fighting thing a bit overboard?! Before this case made indignation so popular, among pet owners especially, I would have guessed that if one staged a dog fight the neighbors could get seriously PO'd, and even bring about a 'Disturbing the peace' conviction, but 40 years in jail, and the ruination of a promising NFL career and universal shame?! Before this is over Vick is gonna get dragged by a pickup till his eyeballs drop out, and then given a public flogging.

In short it's over-kill, false piety, and racist.

What say you America!

Barry

 http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

After Thought #1

I've since writing this entry received an email giving details of the killing of dogs.  Butchering (my word) dogs cannot be tolerated, that's for sure. So I must back off from my former position. Added to that the high stakes gambling element and you have a sticky wicket. What climate allows that to happen?

BB3
 

AFTER THOUGHT #2

I dunno, #1 was posted out of respect for the love of dogs expressed indirectly by the email sender. Dogs are grand, and I've always loved them, even a Bull Terrier named Tyson (ha ha ha) I still own, now in the care of my friend in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.

But dogs are not people. Killing a dog must have a lesser penalty than killing a human being. It is insane, in an age when second degree murder of a human being can bring only 15 years in jail, while Vick is having dangled before him endless penalties. It's racism RACISM clear and simple-minded.

Barry

http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

 

Wars One & Two

To get a handle on WW2 I think some knowledge of WW1 is necessary.  I know almost nothing about WW1. Ken Burns, are you listening? In my rah rah enthusiasm for accounts of WW2, some of which I actually remember; for example I remember my father telling me what Russia "sitting on the fence" [1939] meant; he told me his version of Hitler flirting with Russia in an attempt to prevent them from interferring with Germany's expansion plans, I forget that young people today would just as soon forget all about the embarrassing mess the whole thing turned out to be; embarrassing because of all the death and destruction. 

After WW1 Germany almost starved to death. It was that starvation and humiliation, brought on by Allied reparation demands, which brought on, or helped bring on, the incomprehensible enthroning, exhaltation, of the cunning little rat, Hitler. What fun the dopey corporal had stamping his feet. It isn't just a joke, he practiced his act in front of a mirror.

My prejudice and contempt is so conditioned by having been alive all through WW2 I could never in a million years agree to drive a BMW.  Ha ha ha ha ha. Toyota is the most popular automobile in California, but not with me!  Mazda I've forgiven, ha!

It's stunning and sobering to realize what a dwindling minority one joins in old age.  One has to steel oneself because young people know EVERYTHING!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha......

[TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH is the name of the Daryl Zanuch movie, released in 1949, which deals with training American bomber crews to be totally reckless with their lives: To the point of brain washing IMO.]

                          ...to be continued.....

Barry

 http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

 

More WW2 Chat

The first installment of Ken burns WAR (ww2) has come and gone. Now I know where Guadalcanal (sp?) is located. Not so far from Australia, just North of the equator. The Japs (allowable expression in talk about WW2; you know, Pearl Harbor n' stuff. Now, it's our honorable friend and ally Japan. You still haven't seen Sayonara? Japan helped us a great deal handle the war in Korea. I went on R&R to Japan from South Korea; that was background to a terrific, cross cultural love story with Marlon Brando making some fans and some money.)  Ken Burns lays it on the line about the WW2 sub-human, or, oh so human, Jap ferocity in the Pacific, and in China, and in the Philippines. I didn't know about the baking and eating babies, but I did know, from my Mother-In-Law, about the catching of Philippine babies with a bayonet. When a child she spied from cover terrified for her life. Thanks to America, The Japanese didn't set foot in Australia. They did enter Sydney Harbor in a mini-submarine; they sank a ferry in mothballs that had no engine.

The air war over Europe is a subject I look forward to hearing and seeing on the continuations of Ken Burns' documentary. I'm anxious to see if he takes a position on the brainwashing of American flyers to get them to enthusiastically fly into devastating attack over Germany. "Here's a new wrinkle," says the RAF dispacher to American bomber crews en route to Germany: "Their pilots are ordered to ram your aircraft if necessary." From: The Daryl Zanuch movie about "Daylight precision bombing."  

               to be continued..............

More moving pictures

Two strong dramas open this weekend. One has opened already, IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH from screenwriter/director Paul Haggis. The reviews have all been raves. Three Oscar winners are in the cast. The title refers to the place where David Slew Goliath. The subject of the movie is the Iraq War; but with some very odd exceptions none of the action takes place in Iraq; the power of the drama comes from "Indirection" (says The New Yorker.)

The other begins on TV tomorrow, Sunday. The Ken Burns documentary "WW2." The sum of the episodes is 14 hours.  I'll be interested to learn how it will go over with young people. That war was shorter than the Iraq war, and of course that still drags on and on.  WW2 required total mobilization and intense home front morale boosting. In view of the Iraq war being still in progress, groan, that rah rah spirit during WW2 might be presently off-putting, if in fact Ken Burns reports that war effort. It was amazing. A movie star was pleaded with to cut or hide her hair because American women in Defense plants were immitating her long hair and getting it stuck in machinery. At the end of the war a great movie opened foretelling the down side of the war, and dealt with the plight of returning soldiers out of step with the America they came home to.**** It'll be interesting to see how Burns deals with all the myriad facts about that dreadful war that killed hundreds of millions of people. Two million died in only one city: what is now St Petersberg, then called Stalingrad. Canibalism broke out. Soviet composer Dmitri Shostikovitch refused to leave the city so the Russians had him taken out by force. He was a National treasure. His work, called the Stalingrad Symphony is one hour and twenty minutes long. Incredibly stirring. At the end of one radio broadcast of that music the announcer, after a long pause, said, "Nothing puny about that work."

The Iraq War: how will it seem years from now when Ken Burns, God bless him, undertakes to document THAT fiasco.

**** The Best Years of Our Lives  [1946]

 

Luv,

Barry

 http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/