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Flint And Steel Make A Spark

February 11, 2012 9 Comments

SPANNERS
by: Sippican Cottage

Sun’s beaming in the window,
There’s rumbling from the floor,
We’re swinging while we’re swaying
Boxes dancing out the door.

Oh how our muscles ripple,
We’re making twenty knots,
We’re alternating; current —
We’re glowing with the watts.

Pounding down the corridors,
With Bill of Lading piles;
Our output’s put the boss on ice
We’re blowing out the dials.

They count the beans but can’t keep up,
We’re cooking with the gas;
Our arms are made from tempered steel,
Our heart is made of brass.

That brass is rolled to make a tube,
The tube is bent just so;
And if we blow that trumpet, Jack,
The girls get all aglow.

The whistle blows at five o’clock,
It’s twenty-three skidoo;
The guys and gals that made that stuff,
Go out for dancing too.

They box the compass of the steps
Then swing from chandeliers;
They leave the clerks there in the lurch
Then kick it up a gear.

They pound the floor into the ground,
They swing and then they sway;
They’d drink to all their troubles,
But they’ve long since gone away.

They close the places late at night,
And walk home ‘neath the stars;
Arm in arm, exchanging charms
One’s Venus, one is Mars.

Mighty children spring from them,
To keep the flame alight;
They nurse them with acetylene,
And ultra-violet light.

They grow some whiskers when they’re old,
And sit down for a spell;
Their Ercoles will take their place,
And raise a little hell.

Martin D-18. Some Assembly Required, But Supplied. It’s Up To You To Shake The Notes Out Of It

November 6, 2011 5 Comments

Oh man. High ceiling. Banks of big windows with the sill at bench height. Steam heat. I could make things in that shop.

D-18

In a pawn shop in Odessa in the fall of ’64
The pawn shop man was leavin’ he was lockin’ up the door
I ran up just in time and I hollered through the screen
Hey, man, you got any good guitars in here,
he said “I got this D-18”

So I gave him a hundred dollars and I took that sucker home
I cleaned it up and strung it hit a chord and heard that tone
It was crisp and clean, rich and full, all a guitar ought to be
I said Thank you, Mr, Martin, you made this D-18 for me

I Said Thank you, Mr. Martin, I’m alright
‘Cause once again this old guitar helped me through the night
I’m mighty grateful to you, you know how to make ’em right
I said Thank you, Mr. Martin, I’m alright

If I’m feelin’ down and worthless and I haven’t got a dime
Wonderin’ if I spent my life just wastin’ my time
I pick up that old guitar, some paper and a pen
I say Thank you, Mr. Martin, you saved my life again.

I’ve written songs about my lovers, my family and my friends
My wife, my child, the old home place and the road that never ends
Heroes hobos rock n’ roll and a honky tonk queen
I wrote ’em all without exception on my Martin D-18

Now It was made way back In ’43 when I was just a kid
I believe it’s about the best thing Mr. Martin ever did
It plays real good, it stays in tune, and never treats me mean
Thank God for Mr. Martin and that fine old D-18.

Well there’s your Gallagher, your Gibson, your Goya, Gretsch, and Guild
I’ve played every kind of guitar that them guitar makers build
I’ picked on a lot of axes but the best I’ve ever seen
Is my funky beat up wonderful old Martin D-18

They still make the very thing: C.F.Martin D-18

Martin D-18P Dreadnought Acoustic Guitar at Amazon

Chicks Dig Guys With Skills. You Know, Like Nunchuck Skills; Bowstaff Skills; Computer Hacking Skills; Pinstriping Skills…

June 23, 2011 16 Comments



They’re building Royal Enfield motorcycles:
 

That’s a very cool bike. The company was founded in England in the 1850s; they originally made sewing needles. Then came boneshakers, springs for seats for “safety bicycles,” and then bicycles themselves. Then rifle parts –that’s where the “Enfield” moniker came from, and their slogan for all their stuff: Made like a gun. Then came motorcycle precursors: tricycles and quadricycles with small engines. They tried making cars around the turn of the twentieth century. They looked like lightly armored personnel carriers and had eight-horsepower engines, not considered enough to mow your lawn while sitting down nowadays. They got over that urge and started making true motorcycles, and sold a bunch to the army for World War I. They had a neato one with a stretcher sidecar.

The company was a pioneer in using the saddle tank (a fuel tank that sits atop and straddles the frame) which you see the fellow in the video striping so ably. In the late forties, the company opened up a shop in Madras, India, to supply motorcycles to the Indian army.  At first they just assembled parts sent from England; they eventually made the whole thing themselves. They made one design, unchanged, for thirty straight years. England gave up manufacturing pretty much anything in the second half of the twentieth century, and started importing the bikes from India.

Hand skills like that fellow in the video displays are always show-stoppers in any manufactory.

We’re All Auger Handles Now

May 19, 2011 8 Comments



If you have a half-hour to spend, the movie returns a dividend on your investment.

A logging river is in sight from my kitchen window. They haven’t allowed the logs to float down the Androscoggin for half a century, so the trucks rattle by day and night on Route 2 instead, hard by the river. Some call this progress.

A long time ago, a  man with vision and verve tramped into the wilderness here, and decided to build a whole city out in the wilderness based on nothing but logs and the river. There is a big, granite shrine at the foot of the big falls — the falls that caught his eye in the first place.

The shrine is to a politician famous for crying, not the founder of the town.

Partway through the film, they show the hobnailed boots used by the river drivers. I’ve been in the factory they refer to that made them. The factory itself is converted into shabby cubes filled with holistic healing mountebanks and tax accountants. Next door there’s a moth-eaten museum dedicated to the work that used to happen there. You have to have a museum dedicated to work now so people won’t confuse it with dinosaurs or pharoahs or cuneiform writing. We were the only people interested in the museum that day, and I know all about work.

There’s a mordant tidbit of humor at 12:45

The green men — which we sometimes call “auger handles” — will work on the shore, while experts like the man with the vest on, Mr. Everett Scott of Bering, will work on the outside next to the stream.

“Auger handles.” Oh, how Twain or Bierce would have loved that. Some auger handles at a university compiled this video from the original 1930 film, and read a script that was written to accompany it. Another bunch of auger handles watch it in some other shabby museum dedicated to work, I expect.

It occurs to me that we’re pretty much all auger handles now. Standing on the shore, clueless and timid, waiting for someone –someone else, mind you — to risk his hide out in the torrent while we stand on the shore and pretend to work, wait for lunch, and tell them they’re doing it wrong once they’re done and we’ve picked them clean.

The pretending to work isn’t working so well anymore, is it? I’ll pretend to work and you pretend to pay me never does. The Mr. Everett Scotts of the world are thin on the ground right now. They seem to have grown weary of dragging along dozens behind them like some undeserved Marley’s chains; of being depended upon and excoriated and cheated at the same time; of being milked and kicked like a barnyard animal with a cruel master; and so have given up even trying to cadge anything useful from the mob of hands full of gimme and mouths full of much obliged lolling on the shore.

So we’re all standing on the shore looking at the logs (a little) and each other (a lot) and wondering if maybe we should pass another law, or cadge another exaction from Mr. Scott — dig up his corpse and go through his pockets one last time if we have to — or just pass a law forbidding logs from public assembly to break up the log jams.

The meek didn’t inherit the earth. The cowardly did.

Paris, Texas, The Movie. Sorta

May 6, 2011 12 Comments

My son and I watched a movie last night. I hardly ever watch movies, so I thought I’d multi-task and review this one. Flyboys.

A guy that looks vaguely like that other guy that was The Joker in the Batman movie –no, not that Batman movie, the other one. No, not that “the other one.” The other, other one. Anyway, he died –no, not this guy, he didn’t die, the other, Joker guy, died — at any rate, our hero was a jolly rancher for a while in Texas, but for some reason the Depression showed up early, like twenty years early, and he lost the farm and took to hanging around in a movie theater like Lee Harvey Oswald, and the sheriff comes in and tells him to join the French air force or go to jail for punching Mr. Potter at the bank.

So he goes to France to smoke Newports and fly Nieuports, and I suppose World War One isn’t interesting enough, so his new best friend, who he doesn’t like much, has a pet lion instead of a dog, and they are, like, pilots and guys and depressed together about stuff. Then someone decided the movie needed Jack Johnson, the boxer, in it, only his name is different, I think — I don’t know; I was still wondering if guys like the guy that looks vaguely like the Joker actor would have highlights dyed into his hair in 1917 in the Lafayette Escadrille — so I didn’t get to wonder why they needed a poor man’s Jack Johnson in the Lafayette Escadrille. I guess French people and guys that keep lions aren’t exotic enough.

Anyway, the Jack Johnson-ish dude shoots a German dude right straight down in the top of his head using only an airplane and CGI, and that’s hard, and thereby saves a rich, overweight dude with Daddy Warbucks issues who previously didn’t care for the black dude because he’s black and all, but now he does you betcha. So the fat guy buys the black guy a drink, only he doesn’t buy it, he stole the booze from his father like Ferris Bueller would, and the fat guy says my father is rich, how about yours?  And even though the black guy is noble enough already for five movies if you ask me,  they double down and make his father a slave even though it’s 1917 and slavery was outlawed in 1865 and that seems like a long time between jobs, but who’s counting in this movie.

Then the Hindenburg was bombing the Eiffel Tower and the guy with the lion gets all shot up and whatnot defending it, and decides to become a kamikaze pilot and blows up the Hindenburg, and instead of bombing Paris I guess it sets Paris on fire when it crashes full of flaming bombs instead of just dropping them, but that happens out of the frame so he’s still a hero if you ask me.

Then yet another guy who is a brave guy acts like a coward a lot, because we all know brave guys are all cowardly in real life, and that guy hangs out a bit with another guy that reads the Bible all the time so you know he’s a weirdo and not a regular person in 1917 in America — everyone was reading Chomsky back then no matter what Ted Nugent says.

Then yet another guy, who is wanted in Wisconsin for armed robbery with a toy pistol (to pay the bookie in The Sting, I think) lands his plane in No-Mans Land between the trenches, which is hard to do indeed, but his hand is caught and he can’t run away, which normally would seem easier than landing a plane in No-Man’s Land. Just his hand is caught, mind you, and he looks like OJ trying on a glove when he’s trying to pull his hand out, not like a normal person would under shelling and machine gun fire; so the brave guy — not the guy with the lion, he’s dead; and not the brave guy that’s a coward all over the place — the brave guy with the highlights and the ranch near Dealey Plaza who doesn’t have it anymore. Anyhow, he lands his plane in No-Man’s Land between the trenches and parks it next to the guy trying on OJ’s glove and chops the guy’s hand off with a shovel he borrows from a dead French dude who was lying around handy, even though the airplane wing is just made of canvas and a little pine. I guess it’s just easier to chop the guy’s hand off; don’t ask me. So now that guy can only be a one-armed armed robber, not a regular armed robber with a toy gun, and he gets a hook instead, like in Peter Pan, and that improves his flying because he sucked before.

Later the guy with the hook and the cowardly brave guy save the regular brave guy, for a while, anyway; at least until he can find the German guy who sneers and waves a lot and kills guys and leaves orphan lions all over the landscape willy-nilly like a really bad guy would. This happens when the brave guy’s machine guns don’t work because a bullet hit them and they busted open like a pinata and spilled the wrong kind of bullets for that kind of gun all over the place like Jolly Ranchers, and then the brave guy…

No, not the brave guy with the lion; he’s dead, I told you! The guy with the highlights who’s now stepdad to a fatherless lion; the one that’s been stealing planes to go see a French woman all the time, and at first thinks the French woman is a prostitute — which I gather is normal for Americans sizing up French women for the first time — but she’s just the cleaning lady or something at the cathouse (which strikes me as a much less desirable job than being a prostitute, but maybe that’s just me) where the first guy that had the lion liked to hang around and act like Vince Vaughn would at a French cathouse, but he’s not even in this movie which is a shame because he couldn’t have done any worse, really.

Anyway, the brave guy that steals airplanes goes to save the one French girl that isn’t a prostitute because she’s hiding from the Germans in her attic quietly like Helen Keller…

… now they’ve got me doing it. Like Anne Frank, not Helen Keller. Anyway, at first he flies the stolen plane at night for a while, and then he flies it at night with the motor turned off for a good long while, and then lands it like a ninja next door to Anne Frank’s house and the Germans don’t notice, even though they’re in her living room drinkin’ wine spo-dee-o-dee; but after a while they decide to notice and shoot Anne Frank in the shoulder. But just so you know, I’m swapping back to calling her Helen Keller right now because she gets a Mauser bullet through the chest and says nothing, I shit you not.

Anyway, he saves her and gets a medal, not a hook or anything, for stealing the plane; and later he steals a motorcycle instead of the plane for once, and goes to another place all bombed out and full of Germans and finds her again and they decide to meet in Paris later — or at least the part of Paris that survived having a flaming Hindenburg dropped on it —  because she’s going to England with some kids that aren’t his, or even hers, now that I think about it, and he’s got a lion to take care of.

So the brave guy with the highlights and the second-hand lion is saved for a while by the cowardly lion and Captain Hook…

(Dammit, I mean the cowardly brave guy, not the cowardly lion; the lion seems legit, if strung out on barbiturates a little bit; and I don’t think Captain Hook is a captain, really, prolly just a corporal or a lieutenant or something, or whatever the French word for lieutenant is, I don’t know)

.. but he gets all shot up by the Red Baron, who inexplicably seems to be the only German not flying a red Fokker triplane in this movie, but that’s got to be him, he’s so evil; but anywho, this German guy shoots more bullets into our hero than a carnival attraction with ducks for some reason, and then stops shooting him for some other reason, shits and giggles I expect, and then Rolf or Heinz or Manfred or whatever his name is just pulls up next to our beauty parlor hero like a guy at a red light in American Graffiti, just to wave and smirk. Then the shot-up  brave guy — the guy with the used lion and the only French girl that’s more interested in housecleaning than prostitution —  why, he pulls out a revolver of all things and shoots that German Snidely Whiplash right through the eye, which is pretty good shooting indeed, considering he’s all shot to pieces and flying a biplane that’s all shot to pieces that was made by French people in the first place.

Then they ran out of money or interest or film or something, and explained over the credits that the Jack Johnson guy gets a job at the Post Office, and the rancher with the highlights never meets the girl in Paris, but he gets his ranch in Texas back, only it’s another ranch, not that one, but it’s way better so never fear.

I guess it’s not his fault the stupid French chick, the one that’s not a prostitute, didn’t know he meant Paris, Texas.

The End.

Tag: 1930s

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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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