Steve Hely's Blog, page 120

When ur in the Uber

Impressive thing about Manchester By The Sea

The entire film takes place in Massachusetts, yet no one is seen going to Dunkin Donuts or holding a Dunkin Donuts cup.

source

A short examination of New England and Massachusetts psychology is at the beginning of this book:

available at Amazon or your local indie bookstore.  You’ll enjoy it.

F Minus

I don’t like to give bad reviews to books on Helytimes.  Why call limited attention to bad books?  However I must condemn this book.

Let me admit that I didn’t read it.

I oppose it because:

1) I was not consulted on it and didn’t hear about it until it was published

2) I was not included in it

3) many geniuses were not included in it, and the selections don’t represent anything like a best of.   

Impossible in an anthology to please everyone.   But I suspect anyone familiar with the Lampoon will find the table of contents to be the funniest part.

(That’s the only part I read.)

4) No art?

The Lampoon is full of beautiful art that makes the words tolerable.

Example I happened to find here.

A mistake to print an all words anthology.

5)  the whole point of the Lampoon is you can write and “publish” dumb bad practice material that no one will ever see.

On the other hand: I was lucky and was given issues of the Lampoon by my cousin when I was a senior in high school.   That gift changed my life.  So maybe this book will do that for someone.

Still, I must grade it an F minus and recommend that you not purchase it on Amazon or your local indie bookstore.  For example The Harvard Book Store:

found on the website of Dr. Barbara Long

Here’s a funny review by one Helen Andrews of Sydney, Australia in the Weekly Standard.  (Shoutout to Chris McKenna who I guess reads The Weekly Standard?)

I think you’ll get more value for your book dollar in:

available at Amazon or your local indie bookstore.  You’ll enjoy it.

Pearl Harbor Day

“USS SHAW exploding during the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.” December 7, 1941. 80-G-16871. From the National Archives

This fact is so crazy:

There were 38 sets of brothers on the USS Arizona; 23 sets were lost.

found here.

Rusted parts of the Niihau Zero as displayed at the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor

How about this story, introduced to me by reader Bobby M.?  A Japanese plane crash landed on the remote Hawaiian island of Ni’ihau after the attack.  It was so isolated that the island’s residents didn’t realize what had happened.  When they did though, that was the end of the pilot.

Aerial view of Niihau Island in Hawaii, looking southwestward from the north. Taken by Christopher P. Becker (polihale.com) on 25 Sep 2007 from a helicopter. From Wiki

Irish language in Montserrat

found here

One thing leads to another and I’m reading about how there were black people on the Caribbean island of Montserrat who were said to speak Irish Gaelic:

Irish language in Montserrat

The Irish constituted the largest proportion of the white population from the founding of the colony in 1628. Many were indentured labourers; others were merchants or plantation owners. The geographer Thomas Jeffrey claimed in The West India Atlas (1780) that the majority of those on Montserrat were either Irish or of Irish descent, “so that the use of the Irish language is preserved on the island, even among the Negroes”.

African slaves and Irish colonists of all classes were in constant contact, with sexual relationships being common and a population of mixed descent appearing as a consequence.  The Irish were also prominent in Caribbean commerce, with their merchants importing Irish goods such as beef, pork, butter and herring, and also importing slaves.

There is indirect evidence that the use of the Irish language continued in Montserrat until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. The Kilkenny diarist and Irish scholar Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin noted in 1831 that he had heard that Irish was still spoken in Montserrat by both black and white inhabitants. A letter by W.F. Butler in The Atheneum (15 July 1905) quotes an account by a Cork civil servant, C. Cremen, of what he had heard from a retired sailor called John O’Donovan, a fluent Irish speaker:

He frequently told me that in the year 1852, when mate of the brig Kaloolah, he went ashore on the island of Montserrat which was then out of the usual track of shipping. He said he was much surprised to hear the negroes actually talking Irish among themselves, and that he joined in the conversation…

There is no evidence for the survival of the Irish language in Montserrat into the twentieth century.

The wiki page for Amhlaoibh has several interesting quotes:

“February 3, 1828 …There is a lonely path near Uisce Dun and Móinteán na Cisi which is called the MassBoreen. The name comes from the time when the Catholic Church was persecuted in Ireland, and Mass had to be said in woods and on moors, on wattled places in bogs, and in caves. But as the proverb says, It is better to look forward with one eye than to look backwards with two…“

Amhlaoibh lived out in Callan, in Kilkenny:

Photo taken from “The Bridge”, Bridge St, Callan Co Kilkenny 2004 by Barry Somers

Nearby was born James Hoban, who designed The White House:

Elevation of the north side of the White House, by James Hoban, c. 1793. Progress drawing after having won the competition for architect of the White House. Collection of the Maryland Historical Society.

On a trip to DC once I brought along this book, which I recommend to any DC visitor:

Applewhite might’ve been the first to put in my head the idea that the The White House is modeled on Irish country mansions:

source

The entire southern half of Montserrat got pretty messed up by volcanic eruptions and was abandoned in 1997:

The former capital, Plymouth

And is now an “exclusion zone”:

Montserrat’s national dish is Goat water, a thick goat meat stew served with crusty bread rolls.

found on the goat water facebook page

for more interesting oddities of Western Hemisphere geography and history, I recommend:

Available at Amazon or your local indie bookstore.

Ed Harris in Westworld, Ed Harris in Walker

source

If you enjoy Ed Harris in Westworld, as I do, you may be curious to just have a look at his role in Walker (1987) in which he plays a similarly attired character:

Harris plays the real life William Walker who went down to Nicaragua with some armed guys and declared himself president there from 1856-1857.

I went down to Nicaragua and visited some of the places Walker shot up.

I tell the story of Walker, and of Nicaragua, and of the troubled film

in my book, THE WONDER TRAIL: True Stories From Los Angeles To The End Of The World

available at Amazon or your local indie bookstore.  You’ll enjoy it.

 

 

Westworld semi-theory

SPOILER warning

Arnold

Bernard

Charlie

Dolores

Elsie

The order in which they were made?

A Visit To LACMA

This bro is from Egypt in the late 3rd-4th century

Very cool video installation by Brigitte Zieger called Shooting Wallpaper:

Here is No-Tin:

painted by Henry Inman around 1832.

Henry Inman

I’ve always thought this one is kind of cool:

Frans Post of the Netherlands painting Brazil in 1655.  The frame feels wrong.

Take a look at this one:

Then learn the story:

 

Sometimes, don’t you feel like this mammoth?

Learn more about California in:

Available at Amazon or your local indie bookstore.

The Canny Admirals

Found this picture of John McCain Sr. (the Senator’s grandfather) and William “Bull” Halsey on Wiki while looking up something or another.

Here’s McCain Sr and Junior (the Senator’s dad) at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.  McCain Sr. dropped dead four days later.

 

The writing process