Personal Submarine

I want one! As shown on uptodatedesign.com, this Russian fellow has built his own personal one-man submarine, and it looks splendid.

Naturally, I'd like to have mine a little more tricked out with a Jules Verne sort of vibe, though. And with internet access, in-dash radio and mp3 player, and a fully stocked miniature bar so I can drink Blue Leaders and listen to Lud Gluskin records beneath the sea.


According to the site:

This small submarine can go as fast as four knots and can make a nonstop underwater trip from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland and back again. The owner had made this personal underwater vehicle officially registered as a boat by Russian boat registry to get its personal name and number. It’s the smallest submarine in Russia, or perhaps in the globe.

The article doesn't say to what depths the mini-sub can descend, but even if it can't withstand much pressure, it would still be very useful to take a bunch of these out on an expedition to survey the situation at the current BP oil leak disaster.

The Cog is Dead

My new favorite Steampunk band - The Cog Is Dead.

According to their own bio:

The Cog is Dead is a time traveling band with a bit of a musical identity crisis. Formed in Grimsby, England in 1893, the Cog is Dead have traveled to various points of time in an effort to save clockwork mechanics and steam power! Along the way they have discovered several types of marvelous music which has helped to inspire their own.

Hear their delightful anti-digital waltz anthem "Death of the Cog" on their YouTube here and check out more songs on their MySpace here.

The Mysterious Marion Harris

For decades now, the generally accepted history of Jazz considers the first Jazz record to have been "Dixie Jass Band One Step"/"Livery Stable Blues", a 78rpm by The Original Dixieland Jass Band. It was released in May 1917 on the Victor label.

And the myth has been perpetuated that the earliest Blues (whatever that really means) recordings were those of Mamie Smith, circa 1920. As conventional historical wisdom used to have it, Mamie's pioneering recordings made way for more successful followers like Bessie Smith.

So it's a real anomaly, then, to find out that a white singer named Marion Harris was recording as early as 1916, doing Jazz-Blues standards such as "I Ain't Got Nobody" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find". By comparison, most other female vocalists making records at that time sounded more like Alma Gluck, with dry and dreadful pomposity conjuring up images of prim "society ladies" like Aunt Bee or Mrs. Drysdale.

The real lesson to be learned here is one which Nick Tosches so wisely pointed out long ago in his landmark book Country: that the line between genres like country, jazz, blues have always been nebulous and blurred, and have never known set-in-stone racial boundaries. It seems that for every instance of a historical 'first' in music one identifies, an earlier progenitor can always be found if you look hard enough.

Blues singer Ma Rainey, whose recording career began in 1923, was actually performing music in that same style as early as the late 19th century on the Vaudeville circuit, and for a time led a band called "The Assassinators of the Blues" - before the Blues supposedly existed!

Henry Thomas made Blues recordings in 1927, but he was old enough to be the grandfather of other musicians of the day - which therefore gives us a rare glimpse at what Proto-Blues music was like in the 19th century, before the genre became codified by the recording industry and mass popularization. (And years later, Canned Heat would rip off Henry Thomas' Bull Doze Blues for their hit "Going Up The Country".)


And then there's bizarre recordings like "The Ghost of the Terrible Blues" by the Peerless Quartet in 1915, whose peg doesn't logically fit into any historical hole. Before Dixieland, before Jazz and/or Jass, before the Blues as we came to know it, there many droves of Fox-trot bands like Prince's Orchestra who played everything from opera to marches to uncategorizable weirdnesses. Much of this obscure material was clearly jazz and blues before there was supposed to have been a jazz and blues.

Oh, to have lived in a time when no one felt a need to rigorously define musical genres, or assign non-musical baggage to it!


But back to Harris: not only has her contribution to musical history been largely forgotten and buried by the sands of time, so have the details of her biography.

She was said for most of the 20th century to have been born in Henderson, KY but scholars can't agree whether she was actually from there, or from over the river in Indiana. Her birthdate is presumed to be 1897, but her gravestone says 1906. The gravestone cannot be correct, as we know she was not ten years old when making her first records in 1916.


We actually know very little about her childhood, and her life. It's been rumored that she was related to President Benjamin Harrison and was persuaded to change her name from Harrison to Harris to avoid shaming the family name with her Vaudeville hi-jinks. We do know she married her agent, Leonard Urry, at some point and then died on April 23, 1944 at the Hotel Le Marquis in New York. She had fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette, igniting a fire that took the life of the pioneering "Jazz Vampire".

Still More Unanswered Questions in LOST

58. Why was Locke alone at the Lamp Post Church in the finale? Where was Helen?

59. Are the mysterious "rules" between Jacob and MIB the same as those between Ben and Widmore?


60. If the Sonar Fence was meant to keep out the MIB smoke monster, what prevents the smoke monster from flying over it?

61. At what point does the Sonar Fence's vertical boundary stop?

62. If the MIB smoke monster cannot leave the Island, at what point is he unable to fly any further when he flies straight up?

63. And what happens to him if he tries it?

64. When the Freighter was very near the Island and had Minkowski's dead body on it, why didn't the MIB smoke monster fly over there and take on his form?


65. When the first hatch was discovered, why didn't more of the castaways want to go down there and take advantage of its air conditioning and other comforts?

66. How do the Barracks and all the DHARMA stations maintain electricity and running water?

67. How has the enormous amount of electricity needed to power the Sonar Fence been maintained for so many years?


68. The vast plumbing system that exists at the Barracks and in the DHARMA stations must lead to some sort of waste treatment plant. Where is it? Who operates it?

69. How is garbage disposed of at the Barracks? The amount of people that populate the Barracks would generate a staggering amount of solid waste in just months, let alone decades.

70. Why is there no sign of electric power lines or poles around the Barracks?


71. What was the significance of Locke handing Ben a copy of Philip K. Dick's Valis and suggesting there may be things in it that Ben has missed?

72. Why does Kate repeatedly see an apparition of a black horse, even before she ends up on the Island?

73. Why do Chang's pseudonyms all contain references to candles? ("Candle," "Wickmund", "Halliwax")

74. What was the significance of Locke's dream about Horace?


75. If pregnancies cannot occur on the Island without ending in death, how was it that Ethan was born there successfully?

76. How did Hurley and Sayid pick up a 1940s radio broadcast on the transmitter?


77. Was the project to keep people pushing the button a DHARMA hoax or not?

78.If it was, why did Desmond need to turn the key to prevent system failure?

79. And if it wasn't, why did all the reports that personnel thought they were submitting to HQ via pneumatic tube end up dumped in a field?

More Unanswered Questions in LOST

31. How can Jack just suddenly be told, "You don't have a son"? What happens to Jack's son from his own POV from that point on?

32. What did MIB mean by "You're too late" just before he dies?

33. Was it just a coincidence that Locke's words "It worked" echo that of Juliet's upon shunting everyone to the sideways world? Apparently not, since Juliet herself says it again in the finale.


34. What happened to the once-major subplot about the Hanso Foundation?

35. How necessary is the water-drinking ritual to anoint/appoint someone the island's protector?

36. Why was the "Magic Box" that produced Anthony Cooper never explained?


37. Ben says he has "some things I need to work out" at the end of the series. What are they?

38. How does the Sonic Fence keep out the smoke monster?

39. How was Sayid resurrected from the dead at The Temple? And why?


40. Who built the Watchtower/lighthouse, and how does it work?

41. Why did Kate change clothes at the Lamp Post church in the finale?


42. Why did Kelvin Inman draw the blast door map?

43. Why did Claire leave baby Aaron behind?

44. Why did Jin choose to die with Sun and leave their child fatherless?

45. What the heck was Ben's breakfast on the beach with Kate all about?


46. What was the significance of Jacob and the red herring?

47. What was the significance of Jacob reading "Everything That Rises Must Converge"?

48. Why does the statue, said to be Tawaret, not look as much like Tawaret as it does Sobek?


49. Will the whispering ghosts be stuck on the island forever? Is MIB one of them now?

50. Why is Hydra Island seemingly sometimes visible and sometimes not?


51. If Ben was originally working for Jacob, why did Jacob allow him to do all the reprehensible things he did?

52. Why did being a parent exclude Kate from being a candidate but not others like Sun and Jin?

53. If Ben was working for Jacob, shouldn't he have known that Oceanic 815 would break up over the island, and not been surprised about it?


54. Since part of Jacob's entire opposition to his brother was based in the conviction that there was nothing outside of the island, at what point did he realize differently? And why did that not change the way he treated his brother?

55. What's the story behind Michael Abaddon?

56. Why did one of Hurley's fellow mental patients start spouting "the numbers"?

57. How did Jacob get off the island to stalk, manipulate, and touch all the candidates?

Unanswered Questions in LOST

These questions may in fact be answered, but may have gone over my head or gotten lost in the shuffle. Feel free to refresh my memory.

1. What happened to Mr. Eko? Why did his spirit not reappear to Hurley or anyone else?

2. What will Richard Alpert do when he gets to America? Since he's originally from 1867, how is it that he has an legit legal identity in present time? (And we know that he does, because he appeared in modern-day America to interact with Juliet representing "Mittelos Bioscience", and to young John Locke to give him some sort of other-life-memory aptitude test.)


3. Will the truth come out about the Oceanic 815 wreckage on the ocean floor being faked?

4. How did Hurley and Ben get back to America?


5. Since Hurley left with everyone else inside the Lamp Post church, who's guarding the island now? Surely not Ben, because Hurley acted as if he had expected Ben to join them.

6. What happened to the whole subplot about Jack and the tattoo he received from the Asian prostitute?

7. What cured Locke's paralysis in the pilot episode, and why?

8. Why does Smoke Monster/Fake Locke/Man In Black keep saying Locke-like things, like "don't tell me what I can't do", even after he no longer needs to pass himself off as Locke?


9. What was so special about Walt, and why did the Others want him?

10. Why do Locke and Shannon see apparitions of Walt? He wasn't dead and thus could not have been a ghost nor a smoke-monster impersonation.

11. What was the significance of the real Henry Gale?

12. How does Mr. Friendly manage to go back and forth from the island to America?

13. Why was Smoke Monster/Fake Locke/Man In Black carving a staff similar to Mr. Eko's?


14. Why did Widmore have a huge painting of Jacob's scale with black and white rocks hanging in his office?

15. Whatever became of Faraday making a note to himself to remember that Desmond was his "constant"?

16. How and why is Eloise able to move in and out of different time-tracks and realities to keep tabs on Desmond?

17. Was Jacob responsible for Hurley's years of torment over the synchronicities about "the numbers" and his belief that they represented a curse?


18. Why does the show seem to state that, despite early appearances, neither Jacob nor his brother are particularly "good guys", despite having ostensibly noble motives? (Jacob is wants to save the island, but ruins a lot of lives in the process, and MIB simply wants to cease being held prisoner on the island, but ruins a lot of lives in the process of trying to get off it)

19. How did Eloise come to oversee the Lamp Post church, and why wasn't she present when the cast members congregated there in the finale?

20. Does sideways-world Widmore already know what will happen by sending Desmond to go talk to Eloise in person about her party?


21. Who was the "clever fellow" Eloise makes an oblique reference to, that installed the pendulum at the Lamp Post that allows tracking of the Island?

22. Who was still drop-shipping Dharma supplies to the Island, and how?

23. Why Tawaret?

24. Why has so much of the backstory of the Dharma Initiative and the Hanso Foundation been left unexplained?


25. How much time elapsed between Hurley and Ben talking on the Island about Hurley being the new No.1, and their subsequent conversation outside the lamp post?

26. When Christian Shephard appeared to Locke at the frozen wheel, was it really Christian, or MIB impersonating him?

27. Why was MIB's name never given?

28. Since Jacob said that the Island was literally like a cork that was holding back forces of evil beneath it, does that mean that the light energy uncorked from the cave is inherently evil? Or does it simply indicate further that Jacob, despite his powers, is actually wrong about many things?


29. Why was the whole subplot about Dogen abandoned? What power did he possess that kept MIB out of the Temple?

30. If the apparitions of Yemi were MIB impersonating him, how then to explain the times that Yemi came to Eko and Locke in their dreams?

Mandrake the Magician

One of the best comic strips to straddle the style boundaries and timeline between Steampunk and Dieselpunk is Mandrake the Magician, which began June 11, 1934 and still runs to this very day.

Depending on how you define the term, Mandrake was the first superhero comic, arriving four years prior to Superman. He certainly has mental super-powers, and he wears a costume with a cape. (The same could be said for The Shadow, who debuted in 1930, but he was a radio serial character first, then a pulp-fiction hero, and not a comic strip until 1940.)


If you're not familiar with Mandrake, here's the Jeff's Notes version:

A man in a tuxedo and top hat runs around fighting crime and solving mysteries with his girlfriend Narda (a Princess from Cockaigne) and his African muscleman Lothar. Lothar, probably the first black crimefighting superhero in comics, was a Prince of "The Seven Nations", a federation of tribes. Mandrake's father Theron is the headmaster of the Collegium Magikos (College of Magic) in a remote Shambala-like kingdom hidden deep in the Himalayan mountains. Mandrake lives in a stately home called Xanadu. His enemies include The Cobra (whose face was scarred and disfigured in battle with Mandrake), The Deleter (an extraterrestrial hit man), and The Clay Camel (who leaves a small camel made of clay at each of his crime scenes.)

Professor X's Wheelchair, Steampunk Style

Just rambled across this here YouTube video of a Steampunked-up antique wheelchair by Smeeon, with all sorts of fascinating bells n' whistles - most notably, a series of tubes containing vodka-cranberry martini kept constantly filtered thru an icepack and connected to a dispenser on the side.

Seriously.

Now that's my kind of ride. In the future when no one walks anymore and we all lose use of our limbs and scoot around in machines operating computers hard-wired to our brains - like, say, in about six years - this is what I want my transport module to be.


See more of this mighty throne on Smeeon's Flickr.

The Road to Shambala

Shambala (or Shambhala) is a mythical land that, depending on one's interpretation:

A. Literally existed in ancient Tibet

B. Literally exists on another plane of existence that can only be reached by humans with sufficient spiritual advancement

C. Metaphorically exists in one's mind and heart.

Although commonly associated with Tibetan Buddhism, the concept of Shambala predates it, having been mentioned in prior texts of the ancient Zhangzhung culture and Bön religion. In Sanskrit, the word literally means "self powered" or "self determined".

In 1791, George Washington, Andrew Ellicott, and Pierre L'Enfant set about designing the new capital city of the United States, which would ultimately become Washington, DC. Elizabeth Clare Prophet, cofounder of the New Age organization Summit Lighthouse claimed that George Washington and the others were influenced by higher-dimensional beings to model their design plan for the city layout of Washington, DC after that of Shambala. (But since it's well documented that Washington inserted Masonic symbolism into that design plan, wouldn't that mean that Shambala is therefore a Masonic city?)

The concept of Shambala was seized upon in the 19th century by Theosophists like H.P. Blavatsky and Alice A. Bailey in the course of their controversial teachings. In two expeditions in 1926 and 1928, Soviet secret agent Yakov Blumkin attempted to discover Shambhala's physical location but (reportedly) failed. And then the Nazis sent three expeditions to the mountains of Tibet - first in 1930, and then in 1934-35, and then again in 1938-39. In each, the search for Shambala was a significant part of their mission.

During the same time period as the Nazi expeditions, rumors of the cryptozoological Yeti in this exact same region were also coming to a peak (no pun intended). Though many believe the Yeti to be an apelike humanoid, others maintain it's actually a Tibetan Blue Bear. If true, however, this is makes it no less fascinating, because the Tibetan Blue Bear is said by some to possess a much higher intelligence than the average bear. Perhaps this is why the animal is so secretive that it's considered one of the most elusive creatures on Earth today.

In 1957, a book entitled From the Subterranean World to the Sky: Flying Saucers was published by O.C. Hugenin, who suggested that the real Shambhala was not on a Tibetan mountain top, but rather underground as part of a "Hollow Earth" theory.

In 1959, a song called "Shombalor" was released by Sheriff and the Ravels. (The band was managed and produced by Hollywood actor Aki Aleong, whose screen credits include a 1964 episode of The Outer Limits called "The Expanding Human" with James Doohan, and also the original V television series.) The singer seems to be actually saying "Shambala" rather than "Shombalor" most of the time in the chorus. The lyrics are a staccato litany of gibberish phrases delivered at rapid-fire speed throughout the song, which contains references to Frankenstein, Albinos, Chickens, Nazis, and Bears. There's one significant exception: both the nonsense gibberish of the lyrics and the hypnotic loop of the melody stop abruptly to underscore one, and only one, lucid couplet:

Of all the animals in the world
I'd rather be a bear
Climb the highest mountain
Just because it's there.

In 1973, country-rock singer B.W. Stevenson had a minor hit (#66 on Billboard charts) with a very peculiar song called "Shambala". Click here to hear it.

Just one week later, the same song was released by rock band Three Dog Night and it became a smash hit, muscling out Stevenson's original version.

Three Dog Night's cover of the song was playing on an 8-track tape in the Dharma Initiative Volkswagen bus that Hurley and Charlie jumpstart in a significant moment on the ABC TV series LOST. Watch it here.

"Victory or Death", as Charlie says in that video clip, indeed. "Victory or Death" was George Washington's rallying cry at the Battle of Trenton, and also the password code among his men at the crossing of the Delaware River. Washington borrowed the slogan from the Scots, and years later it would in turn be borrowed by Adolf Hitler.

The Thistle Killer

Further forwarding a Hulu that was forwarded by Tome Wilson on Dieselpunks: one of the great Ronald Howard installments of Sherlock Holmes. Devotees of the Johnny Depp Jack the Ripper film From Hell will doubtlessly find more than a few parallels with The Case of the Thistle Killer, originally broadcast on February 14, 1955.



Click here to watch!

I Get 1918's Papers Today

Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and an all-around swell guy, was vehemently opposed to the passage of time. He wrote a very compelling essay entitled "What's New?" in which he opined that most people actually die from newness:

"Contrary to the accepted premise of staying young by keeping up on things, newness is a devastating, death-dealing state. The only way you can get old is by exposure to the new. If there is no present to involuntarily match the past against, the past remains the present. And you remain in the past present, or, like a vampire, the way you were in your prime."

As he grew older, LaVey began to employ emissaries and liaisons to go forth into the outside world for him, to obtain supplies and handle business duties. Not because he was feeble or infirm - far from it, he was as robust and energetic as ever in his final years. Rather, at that advanced age, he had endured about as much modernity as he could stomach.

He listened solely to antiquated cylinders and 78s by artists like Rudy Vallée, and books and magazines from the 20s and 30s were his preferred reading material. "Keep up on the news," he wrote, "The news, that is, of the time frame you exist within. Keep periodicals on hand to reinforce what's happening in the world. This may entail acquiring a collection of vintage newspapers and magazines."

Even before I was familiar with LaVey and his philosophy, I was already attuning myself to the same principle. I've always studied pre-1966 materials as a monk would study illuminated manuscripts in a monastery, and I increasingly spend a significant chunk of my time dwelling on other segments of the time track than the one in which you are living now.


There once was a time, in the late 1980s and early 90s, where I tried hard to keep only pre-1966 coins in my pocket. At whatever job I worked, I painstakingly parsed out the older coins from the register and swapped them out for the unworthy modern ones. Older coins turned up with far greater frequency back then, but unfortunately, for some unknown reason, they are rarely circulating in common currency these days.

I posit a conspiracy to keep us from maintaining contact with the past via the morphogenic residue of old money, and quantum connectedness with the old dead people who once handled them. The way they keep messing with the appearance of paper money in recent years is further evidence that my theory may not be altogether off-base.


One of the few good things about the internet is that it makes old newspapers and periodicals available to a degenerate past-huffer like myself.

When people come up to me and say "hey, have you seen the latest picks from the Oprah book club?" I can top them by replying "No, but have you been following Sophronia Currier's splendid new serialized novella in the latest issue of Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion?

When people tell me about some current political issue in the news today, I can respond "I'm more concerned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, have you heard about that?"

No, they say, when did that happen?

"1911", I reply.