Shout Out To Weinberger's In Grapevine, Texas -- September 12, 2024

Locator: 48570TEXAS.

Apple: hearing aids. Link here.

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Back to the Good Stuff

Reddit is a national -- or global -- social media site.

The other day some subject came up that involved Texas politics.

Out of the blue, this post, off-topic:

Probably the best deli restaurant anywhere in the continental US.  

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The Book Page

For the summer reading program, two new books today:

The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, Timothy C. Winegard, c. 2024.

Geniuses At War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age, David A. Price, c. 2021.

The prologue from Geniuses At War:

Prologue

V-1, V-2, Wernher von Braun.

Bletchley Park: 55 miles northeast of London.

Germans never learned of Bletchley Park during the war.

Bletchley Park (BP): home of the British signals intelligence agency, cover name, Government Code and Cypher School, or GC&CS. Main task: reading intercepted radio messages of the Third Reich's military.

WWII: a cryptographic war like none before.

German U-boats drove the need for radio signals.

About 1/3rd of the way through the war: Enigma code broken.

Hut 8: team led by British chess champion Hugh Alexander and 27-y/o Cambridge-trained mathematician, Ala Turing. BP able to read naval Enigma traffic temporarily in 1941 and permanently starting in late 1942 -- Turing's invention, the Bombe.

The conquest of Enigma was only a warm-up. A different section of BP, known as the Newmanry, would become the site of the greatest decryption achievements of the war and the launch of the digital age.

I was part of the US intel network at the turn of the millennium and assigned to northern England.  

Reading this prologue made me incredibly "lonesome" for that period in my life. Unfortunately I can't talk about it much, but it was incredible period for me, a life-altering event that lasted several years, and still affects me today.  A first look at the book suggests it's pretty "light" reading but I anticipate a very, very interesting read.