An Irishman is feeling unwell. His long-suffering wife demands that he go to the doctor and get himself sorted out once and for all. So he goes. The doctor gives him a good going over. He’s a bit of a mess. The doctors says, “Your liver is like a sandbag, Michael, and your kidneys are on holiday somewhere. Your eyesight is failing, and your heart skips more beats than a scratched record. Your skin is sallow, and your hair is limp. You’re a sorry sight overall, and if changes aren’t made, you’re a gone gosling.”
So Michael thinks about his predicament a bit, and rubs his nubbly chin, and says, “What’s the cause of all these maladies, doctor?”
“Michael, it’s alcohol, and alcohol alone that’s the root of all your troubles.”
“Thank Jayzuz, doctor. Now I can go home and tell my wife she’s been wrong all these years. She always claims it’s my fault.”
I was always interested in architecture. Building stuff. I liked small “a” architecture best. Little pink houses, for you and me. Vernacular housing for regular people is durn interesting in many parts of the world.
However, when you study architecture in a formal setting, they don’t give a fig for little houses for regler people. They like public buildings, big apartment buildings, office towers, and other big, honking structures. I’ve seen lots of examples of every sort of architecturally important structures from all over the world. Forever and a day, I’ve always assumed that the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris, France, was, and would always be, the most outrageous polychrome building in the world. Boy was I wrong. More on that later.
First, let’s look at Sainte-Chapelle, shall we? Here’s a picture of the interior of the nave from their own website. See what I mean?
Ste. Chapelle is Gothic, of course, but the term “Gothic” covers a lot of ground. In France, there were four different eras of Gothic architecture. This is the best example of Rayonnant architecture I know of. Rayonnant is the third of four Gothic styles, and was superseded by the Flamboyant style, which is less flamboyant than the Rayonnant style, if you ask me. Flamboyant stuff was fascinated with intricate tracery and lots of weird ribwork on the ceilings. But laying on all the tracery kind of smothered the buildings. They begin to look more like coral reefs than architecture to my eye. Rayonnant minimized the structural stuff, loaded up with outrageous stained glass, opened up the interiors, and generally looked like you were standing in a kaleidoscope. Great stuff. Here’s another look at the interior:
I’ve never been there, but even in photos, it’s kinda staggering. When I was a kid, I thought I’d go there someday and stagger around in it, but it was not to be. I’ll never darken France’s doorstep, or their hotel towels. But I’ll assuage my disappointment with the knowledge that they’ve come in second in the outrageous polychrome dustcatcher sweepstakes. I’ve discovered the Meenakshi Temple in India, and it’s a doozy:
It’s a whole neighborhood of these polychrome whathaveyous. If you go over to the Wikiup, they’ve got hi-res images you can really zoom in on. That’s handy, if you don’t have any magic mushrooms and want to get transcendental anyway.
I dare you to got through the links and zoom in on the pictures. Here’s one. Monty Python’s animator has got nothing on these guys:
The interior of these shrines are another kind of outrageous:
Well, if I ain’t going to Paris, I’m certainly not going to Madurai, India, so they can rest easy. I will, however, scratch my head and wonder why anyone wants to see the Taj Mahal for its architecture when this place is (figuratively) right down the street. It makes the Taj Mahal look like the Garage Mahal, doesn’t it?
You know, you can just wander over to NASA and see about a zillion photos from the moon mission. I was just a little kid at the time, but I remember gathering around the teevee set to watch… to see… well, I’m not sure what we were looking at. It was a blurry black and white video of a guy in a white deep-sea-diver-looking space suit climbing down a ladder. I think. On a tiny teevee screen, it was essentially a Rorschach blot for each viewer to puzzle over.
The still photos, however, are very detailed, and wonderful to look at. According to NASA, this is the most popular image they’ve got:
That’s Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. You can see the first man, Neil Armstrong, reflected in Buzz’s visor. Buzz’s real name is Edwin Eugene, so I’m not surprised he wanted to be called Buzz. Buzz is like a lot of the first astronauts. He went to West Point and got a degree in mechanical engineering. Then he became a fighter pilot during the Korean War. He flew 66 missions and shot down a couple of MiGs. After that, he got a doctorate in astronautics from MIT and became an astronaut. If you’re wondering who used to be astronauts, imagine if the captain of the football team was also the Valedictorian and a combat jet pilot.
His doctoral thesis was titled: Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous. I don’t have any inside information here, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it wasn’t plagiarized from Wikipedia. Well, that’s a pretty safe bet, as it was maybe the late 50s, but he didn’t copy it out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, either. People used to have to do something original to get a doctorate. And if you have a skeptical soul, and wonder if maybe some MiG kills are just tall stories from fighter pilots, remember that even back then, they put cameras on the guns in Sabre jets:
Buzz got featured in Life magazine with that one.
You can do a lot of interesting things with images now that weren’t possible just a few years ago. A fellow decided that he’d remove the gold tint from the image of Aldrin’s visor, and see what he could see in the visor. This is what he discovered.
Let’s zoom in a bit:
Yup. That little blue dot was me, watching on the teevee. Littel Known Fact: I’m the first person to photobomb a moon mission image. Although, for some inexplicable reason, the Guinness Book still disputes my claim. I guess I’ll have to eat 66 grapes in three minutes using my feet. Again. I did it before, but I didn’t know there was a contest.
Man the fifties were exuberant. The 1930s and 40s seem pretty (olive) drab in comparison. People were optimistic. When they tried to picture the future, they didn’t default to Mad Max back then. They thought the future would be technically advanced, but they also thought it would be kinda fun. There’s a heaping helping of frivolity in their worldview.
By 1962, they figured they’d be flying, too:
I love the term “space age.” It’s like calling a boxy, plain house “modern.” Both terms are at least 75 years old, but still sound kinda up-to-date to modern ears. Of course space has turned into a humdrum place. In some ways, it always was. The Apollo missions to the moon used rockets that didn’t look very much like Flash Gordon would ride in one. They were the Chevy Citation of space travel. And now it’s just a bunch of nondescript satellites in an untidy mesh, beaming down TikTok videos of people trying to eat cinnamon by the teaspoon.
So the Astra-Gnome, the 1956 car of the future, is plenty fun to look at. But they really only got one thing right on the money about the future, and they got it right completely by accident. There was no way to get any air into the car with the bubble top down. You’d roast and smother in there, because people didn’t think the concept all the way through. The interviewer describes it as the “perfect covid car.”
That’s some real hustle on display, backed up by long experience, I’ll bet. There are at least four men visible on that crew, and they all know what they’re about at all times. I believe that the unofficial word for their jobs is roughneck, but everyone on a rig like that is not all doing the same job. There are derrick hands, and drillers, and floorhands, and motormen, and roustabout jobs on rigs like these. I don’t think any of these guys is technically a roughneck. I think these guys would be called floor hands. Maybe one of them is a derrick hand. One might be a motorman.
Cruising around the intertunnel, I find that the salaries these guys make don’t vary a lot with their different job descriptions.
You can work offshore if you want to bump up your salary some.
The fellows in the video might lose a finger if they’re a little slow getting out of the bight of the chain, but at least they’re not likely to drown in the bargain. It’s a nice, sunny day on the rig in the video, but I imagine their game doesn’t get called on account of rain, or snow. They’re all smiles, and working super-efficiently, but I’ll bet they grimace and tough it out on plenty of bad weather days, too.
There is only one way to earn the respect of men like this. Pull your weight. That’s it. Don’t show up late, or drunk, or high, or fiddle with a phone, or daydream. Know your role, and stick to it. Don’t clown around, except maybe at lunch. Hustle, especially when it really matters. Prepare for the next thing as soon as the last thing is finished.
No one’s getting rich here, except whoever owns the hole in the ground. It would be vanishingly easy to get hurt, or even killed, if you took your eye off the ball, or the guy next to you did. They are useful people, and worthy of our admiration.
The world pays guys who torture a little Python code into a phone app $350k a year, and these guys 1/7 of that, because the world didn’t ask me beforehand.
Month: March 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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