Williams Street

Franklin Park

Sylacauga, Alabama

Chandler Springs, Alabama

Heflin, Alabama

Election Day

Arboretum Road

My Life in Graph Form

By Jennifer Hagy: Needles and haystacks and such.

Caretaker's Gate

Book Review: The Hours Before Dawn

Celia Fremlin
1958
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ☆☆☆☆ –

This was an unexpectedly enjoyable and well-crafted book. It was scary and suspenseful but also funny. And it did not disappoint at the end. Many of the award winners I have read recently start out strong, with a great and original idea, but then falter. This one does not have a super-original plot, but it was engrossing and satisfying right up to the very last sentence.

The book takes place in 1950s London. The main character is Louise, a harried housewife and mother with a new baby who can never get enough sleep so she is constantly tired and making mistakes and losing things (including her baby). To earn some extra money, she and her husband take in a boarder who appears to be a mild-mannered schoolmistress but who becomes more and more sinister throughout the story.

I love the way Fremlin writes, very matter-of-fact-ly; she is sympathetic to Louise and her family but also shows their faults. She has surrounded Louise with neighbors and "friends" who constantly gossip and criticize and offer advice, but who never are actually any help. Among the "friends" are some "progressive" mothers who advocate the latest in child care, which in the '50s apparently means being as uninvolved as possible and leaving it up to your neighbors to feed and entertain your children.

Buy from Amazon:
The Hours Before Dawn

Carolina Street

Tower Street

Alveston Street

The Wonder Talkie

Bussey Brook Meadow

Cars of the 1970s: 1972 Ford Pinto

My parents bought this car new in 1972, I think.  Three-door hatchback, yellow, with a black interior, just like the one in the photo. List price $2,303.

This was my mom's car for getting around town. I remember noticing as a kid that the automatic transmission gear selector was on the "floor" (actually it was on the transmission hump) instead of on the steering column. Same with the parking brake, a hand-operated lever between the two front seats instead of a foot pedal.

According to How Stuff Works, our 1972 Pinto would have come with a 2.0-liter single-overhead-cam four-cylinder engine and a three-speed Cruise-o-Matic transmission.

The alternator failed once, just after we had left town on the way to Grandma's house. Other than that I think my parents were pretty happy with this car.

Fortunately, we never got rear-ended.

Book Review: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

James M. McPherson
1988
Awards: Pulitzer Prize
Rating: ☆☆☆☆ –

I first heard about this single-volume history of the Civil War, part of the Oxford History of the United States series, from Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. I was primed to plunge in because I had just finished Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, which was given to me years ago by loyal commenter Alex and which I only recently got around to reading.

Some things I learned from Battle Cry of Freedom:

• The idea that some high-minded defense of "States' Rights" was the cause of the Civil War is laughable. The issue was slavery: the right to expand slavery to the territories so as to preserve the power of slave states in the Congress and Electoral College. For instance, in the case of the Fugitive Slave Law, the South all of a sudden didn't care so much about states' rights: it wanted the federal government to overrule state laws and enforce property rights on slaves who had made it to the North.
• Prior to the Civil War, women were not seen as fit to serve as battlefield nurses. Clara Barton and others made believers out of the generals.
• There were several abortive efforts by southerners to invade Mexico,  Central America, and Cuba in order to add more Slave States to the union.
• Diplomacy. Lincoln absolutely had to keep Britain and France out of the war. His Secretary of State, Charles Francis Adams, played a key role here, along with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory at Antietam.
  

The best part of the book is the first 300 pages, which feature an extensive discussion of the domestic politics of the 1850s, and the role of westward expansion in fueling the sectional conflict. Once the war started, I found the discussion of military tactics deadly boring. I understand that this is a moral failing on my part.

Buy from Amazon:
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States)
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Forest Hills Cemetery

Cheeze Blog + 7 Years = Time Magazine

A recent issue of Time details "Why it's Time to Retire the 401(k):"

The ugly truth, though, is that the 401(k) is a lousy idea, a financial flop, a rotten repository for our retirement reserves.

Takes me back...

Book Review: Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1993
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

This is super-great hardest-of-the-hard science fiction about the first colonists on Mars. Everything is totally realistic from the lichens they develop to start oxygenating the atmosphere to the heated pressure suits they wear and the different kinds of structures they build as homes and the machines that extract ores and elements from the air and rock. Every little detail is believable. This is the first installment of a trilogy and it focuses on the first 100 colonists, which are an exclusively selected group of brilliant scientists. The longer they stay on Mars, the more they start to divide into those who want to terraform Mars to make it livable for humans, and the "reds" who want to keep Mars as it is.

Buy from Amazon: Red Mars (Mars Trilogy)

Where Would a Do-Gooder Do the Most Good if a Do-Gooder Could Do Good?

This is a question that I have been asking myself on and off for my entire adult life. Alex Tabarrok asks the question (originally posed by one of his readers) on his blog. The answers from the various commenters are interesting and for the most part refreshingly free of cant.

This strikes me as the right kind of question do-gooders and would-be do-gooders should be asking themselves, even if it is impossible to come up with the correct answer in a reasonable amount of time.

Mitigating the Tragedy of the Commons

Vernon Smith explains on Forbes.com how Elinor Ostrom, one of the two Nobel Economics Prize winners, focuses on the surprising success that various groups of people over the years have had in avoiding the "tragedy of the commons." She indicates there may be a way around this age-old resource management problem which involves neither pure privatization nor pure socialization.

Missing Manny

It's pretty clear to me that the departure of Manny Ramirez in July of 2008 is the one change that, more than any other, turned the Red Sox from a World Series champion into an also-ran.

In addition to his ungodly hitting ability, Manny provided a type of playful attitude that I think is sorely missing from the current squad. I do love the intense players, like Pedroia, Youkilis, and Beckett; and the quiet players, like Lowell. I am less enamored of the automatons like Bay and Drew. Papelbon does have his cut-up moments, but they tend toward the the out-of-control frat guy mode, which gets old quickly.

I maintain that 2004 doesn't happen without the inanity of former St. Paul Saint Kevin Millar. And Manny's "whatever" attitude after the Sox were down to Cleveland three games to one in 2007 was also a welcome relief from the gray-sky New England scowl that was on everybody else's face around here.

I do understand that Manny's off-field behavior was getting to be intolerable, and that it was beginning to ooze onto the field (refusing to play, claiming injury), and that he didn't really want to be here. I guess we have to assume that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein did everything humanly possible to get him to shape up. But I have to say that I miss the guy. I will be rooting for him to get a chance to beat the Yankees in the World Series.

Cool New Travel/History Blog

Here Is Where: The little-known places where different historical things really happened.

Toys of the 1970s: Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle

Received this for Christmas, 1974 or 1975. Place Evel on the cycle, and the cycle in the red launching apparatus. Turn a crank (hidden from view in this picture) to get the rear wheel on the cycle spinning, then release the bike, which zooms across the floor. Note that Evel comes complete with his regal cane.

Some Super-8 footage of the toy in action, shot by the Vasquez family:



This toy, in mint condition, now sells for $350.