9 Chickweed Lane

For a number of years one of my favorite comic strips has been 9 Chickweed Lane, drawn by Brooke McEldowney. It's the story of a woman named Juliette Burber, a biochemistry professor and dairy farmer, her mother Edna, her daughter Edda, a ballet dancer, and their various friends and relations. McEldowney doesn't write down to his audience --- he assumes some knowledge of music, he casually dropped a riff on Rupert Brooke into a strip a while back, he doesn't bother to translate German word bubbles. He's also willing to take the time to actually tell long stories: In 2009, over the course of several months, Edda's boyfriend Amos (a cellist at Julliard) was travelling to a competition in Europe and Edda came along as his accompanying pianist. Complications ensued, but Amos won on merit. Chickweed Lane is part of my daily reading, and I wouldn't miss it.

     The quality of storytelling reached what I thought was an apogee at the end of September 2010 when we finished eleven months of learning what Edna did in the war --- she was a spy for the USO, which is how she met her husband and Juliette's father. It was a wonderful story, with amazing subtlety and detail, and every morning for 271 weekdays and Saturdays (and frustration on Sundays) I woke up wanting to know what happened and was annoyed that I'd have to wait 24 hours to find out more.  That story was collected by McEldowney in a stand-alone volume Edie Ernst, USO Singer -- Allied Spy.

     What causes this reverie, though, is that we are now about a year into the parallel story of Edna's first husband, Bill, lost behind enemy lines between D-Day and the liberation of France.  He's been shot, hit on the head, shacked up with a French resistance operative, outrun retreating Germans, and is suffering from amnesia.  I have no idea how this is going to end, but it should be interesting, particularly given what we know about Edna's journey back in England and (after the war) in the States.

A Spy Among Friends

Cambridge, the 1930s. Young men dabble in Communism, with some of them taking it more seriously than others. Some of the serious ones ended up in high government posts, to wit, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and of course, Kim Philby. Philby's life and times are covered in the new volume A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre. Macintyre covers the whole of Philby's life, particularly his relationship with his life-long friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliot (about whom John leCarré provides an interesting afterword), and his CIA colleague James Angleton. That Philby was able to get away with his perfidity for so long, spying for the Soviets under the nose of MI6 is (according to Macintyre) a tribute to the British class system: his colleagues in MI6 did not believe that someone of good breeding, who had gone to the right schools, was a member of the right clubs, could possibly be a traitor. The divide was that members of MI5 (roughly, in Britain, the FBI, to MI6's CIA), who were largely from less-prestigious backgrounds, had no problem believing the evidence that Philby was a double-agent. They were able to put together the trail of broken operations, murdered spies, leaked secrets, and hints from defectors, and see Philby. His drinking buddies and old school chums were not. And thus, Philby was finally fired by MI6 in 1951 when Burgess and Maclean defected --- after having been warned by Philby. But he was rehired in 1956 and sent to Beirut, where, as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, he also worked for MI6. In 1962, a Soviet defector was finally able to finger Philby, and in early 1963, he was interrogated by his old friend Elliot. After several rounds of questioning, and Philby's confession, the KGB managed to spirit him out of Lebanon and on to Moscow, where he lived out his days. It is the real history of the fictional wilderness of mirrors leCarré captures in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and as a vital part of cold war history, it's worth a read.

Taking Chance

By interesting contrast to The Hurt Locker and made in the same timeframe, we have Taking Chance (2009), a little movie starring Kevin Bacon for which he got a best actor award from the Screen Actors. Bacon is on screen for the whole thing playing a Marine colonel who volunteers to escort the body of Chance Phelps, a lance corporal killed in Iraq, home to Wyoming. He takes on the job in the mistaken belief that the kid was from his hometown in Colorado, except that's just where he enlisted. Bacon starts the trip not quite sure what to expect, but is met by respect and caring at every turn, from the airline clerk who upgrades his flight to first class, to the baggage agent who brings him a sleeping bag when he insists on keeping watch overnight, to the pilot who asks a planeful of people to wait so that the colonel and lance corporal can get off first, to the men of the VFW in the small town in Wyoming. Quite a nice, and very moving, little movie, speaking about the direct cost of war and respect for those who pay it.

The King of Sports

As an Atlantic Monthly contributing editor and columnist for ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook has the credentials to write The King of Sports, which, as its subtitle claims, analyzes "Football's Impact on America." He wanted to write about a college football program he could profile that had a reputation for being honest and graduating its players at a rate roughly equal to the general student body. He had a hard time finding one, finally resorting to Virginia Tech. He then compared the program at VT to other big money colleges, and examined the way in which the NFL treats it customers and players. To summarize his conclusions: The NFL exists as a monopoly organization to funnel money from television networks to the team owners. The teams are a way to funnel public money, in the form of stadium bonds, tax abatements, and free rent, into private hands. Lucrative money from cable television is further encouraging already-bad practices. College football exists in a region outside normal college life, where very few universities are actually interested in seeing that students playing big-money sports actually graduate, and the universities are happy to play along, paying their coaches more than their presidents, to keep the money rolling in. Except that the money doesn't benefit the universities as a whole, they only benefit the athletic programs. And the NCAA is a co-conspirator in this. The NFL teams and big money colleges regard their players as essentially disposable commodities. None of the football programs at any level are interested in making clear to starry-eyed players how unlikely it is that they'll get to the next level --- one in two thousand high school players eventually get to the NFL, and of those, very few play the four years required to vest their benefits.

"There are no words strong enough to express how little the NCAA cares about whether the football or men's basketball players who generate economic returns also receive an education. To the NCAA, the barometric pressure on the planet Neptune matters more than whether football and men's basketball athletes receive educations."

     --- Gregg Easterbrook, The King of Sports

Captain Phillips

We watched Paul Greenglass's Captain Phillips last evening and it was excellent filmmaking with taut scripting and cinematography. This is the story of the hijacking, by Somali pirates, of the Maersk Alabama in 2009, and subsequent rescue of the Captain from the pirates by Navy Seals. There is a lot of drama, and quite a few harrowing moments. Indeed, the last forty minutes of the movie are just excruciating in their tension, even though we know how the story turns out. Tom Hanks gives a magnificent performance as the eponymous Captain. The last fifteen minutes of the movie are outstanding acting, and Hanks should have gotten an Oscar nomination for the work. [[How Leonardo DiCaprio keeps getting nominated for Oscars, I do not understand. Is this by the same mechanism as L Ron Hubbard's nominations for the Best Novel Hugo in the 1980s and 1990s?]] I'm sufficiently impressed that I will now have to see Greenglass's movie United 93, which I'd been avoiding because of the painful subject matter.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Given that yesterday was the forty-fifth anniversary of the events described, it seems appropriate to post this review today:

They're old men now. Gray or balding, wrinkled, with liver spots. Their voices are still crisp and animated, with the calm of test pilots, which they all were, as they explain what it was like to be In the Shadow of the Moon. We have interviews with ten of their tiny fraternity --- it was a fraternity which only ever had twenty-four members, six of whom were dead and one of whom didn't give interviews at the time the film was made.  The interviews are intercut with archival footage from their adventures on and around a world a quarter of a million miles away. Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins talk about the seat of the pants feelings as three hundred feet of rocket below them lights off and starts to propel them upwards. Charlie Duke explains that his father barely believed he traveled to the Moon, but his son thought it wasn't a big deal. Jim Lovell explains that the let down of not walking on the Moon didn't hit him until after he'd safely returned to earth after Apollo 13. Gene Cernan says baldly "I called the Moon my home for three days of my life... That's science fiction." It's material I know well, so there are no new facts here, but it is wonderful to hear the story of their adventure in their own words, to see the expressions on their faces as they pause to gather their thoughts and realize that, yes, they were at the Moon, to sample the awe they felt, to have them tell how they were transformed by the experience, how they now regard the Earth as a precious jewel. However, this has a very high wow! factor. Certainly, my sense of wonder was actively engaged through the whole three hours it took me to watch this hour-and-a-half long documentary: I kept backing up and watching passages a second time.

"When they opened up the fuel baffles we could hear the full rumble down these huge pipes. Then it dawned on me from an emotional point of view that we're gonna go to the Moon."

     --- Jim Lovell, In the Shadow of the Moon

The Challenger Disaster

A couple of years ago, I grabbed an audio book of Dick Feynman's The Meaning of It All, looking forward to listening to a familiar voice from my college days.  Alas it was read by a classically-trained voice actor, rather than someone with Feynman's dulcet Far Rockaway delivery. Right words, wrong voice. I couldn't continue. Thus it almost was with William Hurt in the BBC movie The Challenger Disaster, where he delivers Feynman in a cross between Brooklyn and Boston. That said he gets the mannerisms completely correct, down to the flyaway hair and rhythm of his speech, even if not the accent. Annoyingly, in the interests of drama, they collapse a number of details, waiting until the last 15 minutes for Feynman to discover the critical bit of data about temperature and O-ring integrity. The real story of Feynman going to Washington against his better judgment, even while he was critically ill, is of him working with Gen Donald Kutyna and drilling down at Marshall Space Flight Center to understand, systemically, what was going on at NASA, and building a case for the O-ring damage and organizational rot bit by bit. Nice TV movie, but too bad we escape from the historical record to get there.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons purports, from its subtitle, to be about "The Origins of the Internet." Which it is. Alas, eighty percent of the book is about the mechanics of setting up the ARPAnet --- the existence of ARPA, the history of Boston consulting house Bolt, Baranek and Newman, the exchange of talent between MIT, Lincoln Labs, and Digital Equipment Corporation, the personal histories of some of the folks involved, the development of the first Interface Message Processors, which made the ARPAnet possible. It's only in the last chapter that they cover Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn inventing TCP/IP, the protocol that made it possible to connect the various computer networks together, Bill Joy's implementation of TCP/IP for Berkeley Unix, and the true birth of the Internet. I was initially dismayed by this imbalance, until I realized that the development of the other networks --- CSnet, the regional academic networks, NEARnet, SATnet, Alohanet --- is much the same story. The connection of those networks together into the Internet is just the application of technology. The real story, the real history, is in the invention of packet switching and the visionaries who decided to put together the original ARPAnet.

The Monuments Men

On the weekend after D-Day, we watched The Monuments Men, written, directed, and produced by George Clooney from a book by Robert Edsel. It's the story of a bunch of art historians who both help the army figure out what buildings to be careful about bombing, and then helping find the art that the Nazis had plundered from the countries they'd overrun. Edsel's book details the whole unit of Monuments Men, even though the movie focusses on half-a-dozen of them. It was straight-forward, but arduous, detective work, but the guys doing it were heroes of western civilization. The movie should have been either longer or shorter. Longer would have given us more detail of their work and allowed us to get to know the team. Shorter could have cut through a lot of the long-winded setup, and gone straight to the detective work. Plus, it can't decide if it's a drama or a comedy. I'll report back on the book another day.  I also need to watch the documentary on the same topic, The Rape of Europa, available for streaming from Netflix.