Picto Diary - 1, 2 November 2015 - Shelby
Above: Sunrise. Park City, UT. 01 November 2015.
First day of daylight savings provides a new vista at 6:45 AM.
Above: Sunrise. Park City, UT. 01 November 2015.
First day of daylight savings provides a new vista at 6:45 AM.
Above: Grand kids. Post dinner messing around. 01 November 2015.
Above: Commodore drives the Shelby to LSDM. On right, Dentist. 02 October 2015.
Addendum:
thanks Steve.
Brand,
Venice, CA
Steve- Just wanted to say thanks for keeping me on your Picto Diary list. I’ve always enjoyed seeing your motorcycle travel exploits and have particularly enjoyed hearing about your WWI history tour. I’ve been a WWII geek since I was a kid and even as an adult cannot get enough. To understand WWII you certainly have to go deep into WWI, which I never really appreciated until relatively recently. Thanks for sharing your insights! Very informative. Hope to do a World War Tour in Europe someday as well. Same for the Pacific, but that is another story.
Thanks again!
Cress
I'm with you, Mwah. I'll eat steak until I die of old age. And maybe thereafter, if I get lucky.
Interesting stuff about the Tsarnaev brothers. Our best to you and TIMGT.
Dennis,
Pensacola, FL
Try reading Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August.” There is the terrifying possibility you might actually learn something. You might even be motivated to read her book, “The Proud Tower.”
http://www.loa.org/tuchman?gclid=Cj0KEQjwqsyxBRCIxtminsmwkMABEiQAzL34PT_1DFBXtSfvVreN36IKvQXaUXvFRXcRwL3zM2XuiRwaAnCe8P8HAQ
Jack Aroon, Mahwah, NJ
12 ounce steak is somewhat tiny for normal sized folks I am having a 1.5 pound porterhouse tonight ,although part of that weight is the bone. I am not an Aierdale so I do not eat bones.
Basketball,
Pelham, NY
Nicely done.
Frotz,
Park City, UT
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Jack Aroon, Mahway, NJ
Steve,
I don’t often write to make a comment on politics - since doing so usually pisses off half the people who take the time to read it, but I do follow your posts and most especially your ones of historical interest and especially the WWI and II narratives.
On this topic I have not heard you mention the book which I find the most interested (narrative) i have ever read. There is little in the way of political opinion here (either way), but it takes place (in significant part) in the areas of the world where you have just been during the 30’s and 40’s. (McClean believes that many of the people he saw in Samarkand and Tashkent had never seen a western person before). When i tell you that he entered WWII as a private and ended as a General, you may assume that there was very good reason for that rapid rise. It really is almost too amazing to be true, but it is. (I met a lord in Scotland who was McLean’s neighbor and found that their fathers were friends - another story).
We recently had lunch (long story) with the former British Ambassador to Kazakstan and Uzbekistan (now ambassador in Switzerland) and he also had high praise for McClean’s book.
The book is now available in Kindle (though i have read it only in the original soft copy )
The other book, of much more recent vintage is one which you may decline to read if you know the author. I remember you saying that you refuse to read certain authors because they are too liberal. I have no idea if Kinzer is liberal, but i’m pretty sure that he doesn’t think a lot of the US policies during the cold war era were appropriate, but he doesn’t say that. Even if you ignore any judgmental comments in the book (and there aren’t many), i defy you disagree with a lot of the facts which he has uncovered, many of which were relatively newly uncovered (CIA etc). I did not know, e.g. that J. Foster Dulles was very involved in the drafting of the Versailles treaty – especially in an area that has been hotly disputed after Hitler’s rise etc., though this fact was no secret from the beginning.
It gives you a new perspective on things, from whichever way you view the world. I’m not trying to sell books or politics here, just share common interests.
Bill,
Salem, OR
(following are excerpts from Amazon reviews and none of my making - just took the 1st one).
Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy McLean (out of print, but available on Amazon)
In the mid-thirties Fitzroy Maclean was a junior diplomat at the British embassy in Paris. Bored with the pleasant but undemanding routine, he requested a posting to Moscow, and "Eastern Approaches" opens with Maclean on a train, pulling out of Paris. Most of this first section of the book covers his repeated attempts to explore Soviet central Asia. He reached Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and many other places, and though there are sadly few pictures it is a riveting story -- fighting Soviet bureaucracy; being trailed by the NKVD; negotiating with locals for food and a place to sleep. At one point he manages with difficulty to persuade the Soviets to let him cross into Afghanistan: communicating primarily in sign language he manages to obtain an escort to Mazar-i-Sharif, through a lawless area with a cholera outbreak.
Maclean was in Moscow until late 1939, and so was present during the great Stalinist purges. One long chapter is devoted to one of the largest of these, in which Bukharin, Yagoda and other stalwarts of the Stalinist regime were accused (and of course convicted) of heinous crimes. The details of the trial, and the responses of the accused, are utterly fascinating; Maclean's analysis equally so.
When war broke out, Maclean was prevented from enlisting at first because of his position as a diplomat. He eventually managed to sign up by a subterfuge, and in North Africa Maclean distinguished himself in the early actions of the newly formed SAS. He rose from private to officer rank, and Churchill personally chose him to lead a liaison mission to central Yugoslavia, where Tito and his partisans were emerging as a major irritant to the German control of the Balkans. The last third of the book recounts how over eighteen months Maclean built Allied/Partisan cooperation from nothing to a key element in the last phases of the war. By the end, Maclean was a Major-General, and a friend of Tito's.
Maclean is a fine writer, with the British gift for understatement and wry humour. His exploits are said to have formed the basis for the character of James Bond, though Maclean would never confirm or deny this. The sequence when he personally kidnaps a Persian general who is collaborating with the Germans is certainly straight out of a Bond film. The book is spectacularly entertaining: if you have any taste for history, adventure, travel writing or war-time memoirs, this is as good as it gets.
The Brothers Dulles, Stephen Kinzer
Quote from a review (typical)
You know those reviews clips, headlines or ads that say "Must Read" or, "...if you only read one book this year..."
I have to say, with all the books I've read before and am reading currently, this one is absolutely the most eye-opening, informative and provocative one I've come across in many years.
And--after all I've read about American politics and culture--after all the experts I've interviewed on my radio show... I shouldn't be shocked any more. But the scope of insanity, corruption and hypocrisy revealed in this history of the Dulles brothers is, in fact, truly shocking.
Just when you thought you knew just how bad the United States has been in the world, you come across a history like this and you suddenly become aware of the real depths to which "our" government has sunk in subverting decency, freedom and democracy all over the world.
George W. Bush asked the question after 9/11-- "Why do they hate us?" The answer he came up with was, "Because of our Freedoms." When you read this book, you come face to face for the real reasons THEY (most of the rest of the world) hate us. It's because these Bush's "freedoms" are only for the United States, no other non-white, non-Christian, non-corporate cultures need apply.
The missionary Christian, Corporatism of the Dulles Brothers--John, the former head of the largest corporate law firm in the world, then Secretary of State, and his brother Allen, the head of the CIA all the way from Korea through Vietnam--constitutes the true behavioral DNA of America-in-the-world. It's enough to make you weep for the billions of people this country has deprived of freedom and security for the last sixty years.