Rambling -- Saturday Night Relaxation -- Watching, Reading, And Surfing -- Nothing About The Bakken -- Just Enjoying An Evening Off -- January 9, 2021

Breaking: Boeing 737, four minutes after take-off from Jakarta, just after reaching altitude, suddenly drops 10,000 feet in less than a minute, crashing into the Java Sea. "Witnesses said they had seen and heard at least one explosion." Sixty-two people on board.

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Back To The Blog

Watching: TCM: midnight film noir, The Glass Key, 1942. Wow, wow, wow -- costumes by Edith Head.

Prior to that, two Hitchcock movies, The Saboteur and North By Northwest. Hitchcock wanted Edith Head for the latter but she was not allowed to leave Paramount due to her contract.

Surfing: See "Clothes on Film" for "costume judgement, Robert Cummings and leather." For an enjoyable little read on Dorothy Parker, see Saboteur: Film by Hitchcock [1942], Britannica.

Parker's witty remarks are legendary. When told that the taciturn former US president Calvin Coolidge had died, she is said to have asked, "How can they tell?" Of Katherine Hepburn's performance in a 1934 play, Parker said she "rant the gamut of emotions from A to B." Parker was also responsible for the couplet, "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses."

Reading: The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build An Atomic Bomb, Robert Serber, edited with an introcution by Richard Rhodes, c. 1992. Incredibly concise writing and tight editing, this book is only 88 pages long, which includes an appendix; approximately the thickness of an iPad.

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Krypton

No matter how many times I read this, I forget it. One of the most interesting coincidences at the intersection of science and fiction: Superman was created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Schuster; the character first appeared in a comic book dated June, 1938. 

During the Christmas holiday 1938, that very same year, Lise Meitner -- key in development of the atomic bomb -- was pondering the mechanism that "created" barium following bombardment of uranium with low-energy neutrons. The other product, along with barium? Krypton.

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Caldera

Los Alamos: "the mesa, a high, pine-forested plateau that jutted from the collapsed cone of the largest extinct volcano in the world," p. x in The Los Alamos Primer, but probably not accurate. The "extinct volcano" is huge but other extinct volcanoes are larger. Perhaps it was the largest caldera known at the time? For more, Valles Caldera, Jemez Volcanic Field. The world's largest caldera is Apolaki Caldera but was only discovered in 2019, deep underwater.