Archives, Computers And The End of Histroy

Solzhenitsyn is one of the last major writers to leave behind a vast archives of handwritten manuscripts. (His successors will bequeath their hard drives if they dare.)

David Remnick,

 In the Archives: the Widow's Peak,

The New Yorker, June 18, 2012

Computers make it easy to duplicate, manipulate, search, relocate information. At the same time it makes it easier lose stuff down the memory hole either by action, inaction, error, or mechanical failure. But any simple filing cabinet has a solidity that makes it hard to chuck out the window. I have came across several different predictions about our future data storage needs from sci-fi witters and/or futurists.  There is the scenario that we must eventually need to go space so we can find new places to store our records. In Raj Whitehall's world everything was in computer databanks, when computers failed. So all records, history, knowledge is lost. I have read other futurists that suggest this is the likely outcome and that future history will note a "dark age" where there are scattered and fragmentary records in proprietary obsolete formats.

Computers are great for ephemera, but there needs to be hard copies for posterity.

True Stories about LA Organized Crime

LA is the birthplace of the hard boiled detective story. I never really understood the evolution of this genre and why it first appeared in LA rather than New York or Berlin or Paris or Cleveland. In this discussion on KRCW program, Politics of Culture, two true crime historians delve into the organized crime history of Los Angles. Instead of having working class gangs based in ethnic loyalties and/or working class work sites like the docks, trucking or waste management. The mob in LA was based in the mayor's office, the police department and the chamber of commerce. A ruling class mob.

As an aside in the movie Pleasantville the town isn't run by an elected civic government but by a self-selected Chamber of Commerce.

Mashup of The Watchmen and 1984

General Mung Beans on AH.com has a new thread that is a mashup of The Watchmen and 1984. If you are a fan of both or either classics check it out.

Update
For more reworkings of The Watchmen, Slate has a slide show of The Watchmen by different directors.

TV and Other Fiction Tropes

TV Tropes.com are compendium of a different wats and techniques of telling stories. In the words of TVTropes.com:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

Wander around in this site and recognize all the parts of your favorite stories you have loved and enjoyed.

Literacy Ad Targeted at People Who Read all the Credits at the Movies

Ego Googling

I spent some time googling for my Alias this morning. Besides things that I habe posted I also came across 3 odd stories.

Here is one from a comment in supposedly from Vice-Admiral Sir Lamington "Fruity" Stokes-Sodbury, KCVO, DSC* (Ret) that suggest that Baron von Feldspar is some sort of Kurtz like figure.

Solomon, you say?

Puts me mind, Olly old stick, of a tour of duty to the German Solomon Islands in the old days before the lights went out.

It couldn’t have been much after Kaiser Bill had sent out his Pacific Squadron to the take possession of the place from a doubtless rather bemused native populace. Called it “New Pomerania” or some such blithering nonsense. Just after the Australians had sailed into Papua I think. So there we all were invited to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday in Rubaul.

Ye Gods what a floor-show that was! Eagle standards! Acres of Prussian grey and cavalry boots all in the steamy tropics of the government station. Fritzes and Rudies dropping like flies or sinking into the soft clay of the makeshift parade ground. Fuzzy-wuzzies peering from the undergrowth in delight and wonderment. They didn’t mind a bit, of course. Truth to tell, I think they were rather impressed in their own endearing way. The colour of thing I expect. Colour and movement quite often stuns your slack-jawed islander folk.

That, and the sight of Herr Leutnant Baron von Feldspar. How could I forget him. Great,,strapping golden-haired, aristocratic Hun of blighter - straight from ruddy Valhalla. Handsome devil, too, I’m not afraid to say, but I fear young Feldspar was a bit of a deviant in ways romantic.

Well the fuzzy-wuzzies had never seen the like. Soon a band of the younger savages took to laying little offerings at his feet whenever he took the parade. Coconuts and shark’s teeth and the like, which Feldspar would accept graciously and then he’d visit them in their primaeval huts on the Sepic and they’d bring more, and of course, he started to give them trinkets in return - like cigar-cutters and spirit measures and cotton-reels. These items they would disport on they persons rather like love tokens - on their heads at first and, with increasing frequency, around their private parts.

Great big shiny smiles on the fellows whenever they arrived to take Baron Feldy away with them. And Feldspar too became rather uncommonly pleased with himself. Then one day, he just never came back. They say he ended up ruling them all - a breakaway tribe of young savages - who had no women folk, no food stores, no villages but lived on a form of schnapps distilled from mountain berries and raided for their provisions always very successfully because they carried spears tipped with silver cigar-cutters and wore nothing but bloody great bismarck-boots which scared the daylights out of the ordinary sort.

So there you are, Olly old chap, the most vicious nancies ever - a most fearsome professionally-trained band of German native spear-stickers. The New Pomeranian Lancers, the used to call them. None of ‘em left now I fear. But their old caves are still there up in the highlands of the Sepic valley.

And they say they’re just gorgeous.

Here is a Baron von Feldspar in the Flintstone world.

I have already noted here the future history of Baron von Feldspar and the Bowman Salvage & Trading corporation in a previous post. However I know the person who wrote the future bio but not the ones who wrote Feldspar as some 19th century imperialist or stone age inventor.

The Award for Shakespear, kinda

It is the award that they would have given to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had worked in local news.

Stephen Colbert on the Peabody Award

Surfing, Moby Dick, Horses and Guinness

Bush as Zaphod Beeblebrox

In a discussion about the effect of Douglas Adams not dying there is this tidbit of political comment on the appeal of charismatic morons.

alt_historian
...Although I can't see that he would ever make Zaphod such a total idiot as in the film. There's no way anyone who acts that stupid gets to be Galactic President, no matter how charming they might be...
...

Nietzsche
But Bush got to be President of the United States..

Barbarians at The Gates

Fjordman is Norwegian writer of jeremiads. Here is his reaction to book review in The New Yorker of God's Crucible, a book about a barbarian invasion. He is less sanguine about civilizing benefit of slavery. Below is except from his article.

Contrast this with modern times, when southeast Europe (the Balkans) is Europe's number one trouble spot. So is the original seat of the first Indian civilization, in Pakistan and Kashmir. The Greater Middle East thus went from being a global center of civilization to being a global center of anti-civilization. This change largely coincided with the Islamization of the region.

Execution Reporting

On The Media has a story, the Neverending Story, looking at death penalty on the wire service reporter who covers every execution in Texas. Listen to the story and then read Orwell reportage of A Hanging he was at as an Imperial policeman in Burma.