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Little known, but read every day, Al Taliaferro's daily Donald Duck newspaper strips were published daily in hundreds of newspapers all over the world. Al drew a brilliantly crafted strip every day from 1938 until his death in 1969. That's a full 30 plus years of strips, day in and day out, and yet I'll bet most of you have never heard of him. That's because like all Disney print artists, he had to sign Walt Disney's name on each strip even though Walt had little influence on the design and characters of the strips.

Each of these little strips is like a beautiful jewel with unerring perspective, brilliantly crafted characters, and each one was a self-standing gag. The continuing adventures typical to that era were left to Mickey Mouse. Al had to come up with a funny gag every day.

Those facts and much, much more are why I love Al, and I suggest all of you look him up on that Interweave thing. Today's blog is about something Al and I shared. You see, Al spent most of his youth in a tiny Colorado town called Montrose. Guess what? That's the exact town I grew up in. We both left the little berg when we were about 13, so I can reflect on some of the aspects of that typical American small town that probably shaped Al's attitudes.

I think I can call him Al, too, since we practically grew up together -- well almost anyway. Al lived there from 1905 until 1938. I lived there from about 1953 until 1959. These were different eras, true, but little Montrose didn't really change that much during the first half of the 20th century. Let's take a look at the little berg circa 1905.

Yep, that's the old Main street I remember, minus the horses. It would have been very familiar to Al. Below is the way the little town looked from the air. Corse' it was a few years after Al was born that they had airplanes. My guess is this was taken right around when Al graduated from the 7th grade.

Oh, yea, before I forget, here's a shot of Al as an adult. Handsome, wasn't he? Must have been a real lady killer.

This is where Al and I could be found every Saturday afternoon (not at the same time, of course). It's still there, but sadly reconfigured as a three-plex. One thing for sure back then, it was the coolest place in town during the summer.

I don't know what neighborhood Al lived it, but this is a very rare aerial of my neighborhood. My house is on the left, just behind the church. Notice the DC3. It flew over every day at noon. Good, ole' Emerson Grammar School can barely be seen in the top left -- just part of the playground shows, but that was the best part anyway, wasn't it?

There wasn't much to do in Montrose except have parades for the high school homecoming. The few Indians who still lived there would come out. It must have been somewhat daunting for them to be totally surrounded by us palefaces. Everyone was always friendly, though. I loved seeing the Indians. I'll bet Al did, too.

Well, that's about it from me and Al. Check out his book on Amazon. It's the coolest thing out this fall.

Your friend,

W.H. Matlack

Little jewels that have fallen into the dark past

There are some things I have purchased in the past that are just too cool for me to give or throw away - even though today's technology has rendered them useless (sigh). I came across one of them the other day when doing an inventory of cool-things-that-are-now-worthless in my top drawer. It seems that my top drawer is full of little items like that, and I hadn't gotten too deeply into it when I came across one of the last of the Sony Walkman(s). (Walkmen?)

This little jewel probably dates back to the mid nineties or so. I couldn't find any real information on it, but I suspect it was one of the last models to be introduced before digital music completely rendered it useless. The engineers at Sony must have been given the mandate to produce a Walkman cassette player that would be barely bigger than the tape cassette itself. After what must have cost those engineers a lot of late nights in the Sony development lab, they completely succeeded. The "Radio Cassette Player WM-F701C" that I pulled out of the depths of my top drawer is almost a miracle of miniaturization. I'd actually call it a miracle except that the MP3 players that came along a few years later were truly miraculous. They could pack every album I ever owned into something the size of half a graham cracker. That's what killed off the WM-F701C. It could only play those small audio cassettes one at a time. You still had to carry a pocket full of them with you on a trip.

In spite of that, the WM-F701C was and is a miniature wonder. Just take a look at the photograph below. Look at how beautifully they crammed all those rollers, guides and springs into that exceedingly small space. It's all the more remarkable when you consider that the vast majority of space inside the WM-F701C had to be reserved for the tape reels of the cassette. To my eyes, it's a piece of engineering beauty, and mine is in perfect shape. Just one very small dent on the back where I must have dropped it one day on my way to work.

As soon as I found it, I rushed out to my sun room where I keep my extensive collection of vinyl records to see if I could dig up a cassette. I found a good one, plugged in a fresh battery, and snapped in my cassette. The result -- nothing. For as beautiful a piece of engineering the WM-F701C is, it has one major weakness: all the moving parts are powered by a little belt, and the little belt had spent all those years in my top drawer slowly deteriorating.

I thought about trying to take it apart and searching for a belt on the Internet, but really. All my cassettes are available as digital files, and with my new smart phone containing nearly every song I would ever want to listen to, I don't even carry around a dedicated MP3 player any longer. So, the little WM-F701C has been relegated to a pile of other past electronic miracles that don't actually work either. There's a small (for its day) Kodak Instamatic camera, one of the very first transistor radios that is in unused condition and even contains a nice little schematic. But, I do take them down and look at them once in a while.

Casting the leather jacket in movies, working man or trouble?

There are two main leather jackets worn by actors in Hollywood movies - the military-issued, aviator style A2, and the motorcycle style Schott One-star. Like every piece of costuming, the leather jacket is chosen to help establish the actor's character. Each jacket and its variants has a parallel history. Let's look at the A2 first.

Manufactured for pilots during WWII, this jacket came to symbolize the adventurous, daredevil attitudes of the combat aviator. After the war, great quantities of this jacket were available as war surplus items for less than ten dollars each, so  millions were sold. It seemed to be the perfect leather jacket for the working man. It was rugged, comfortable, and in Hollywood movies it became a symbol for the blue-collar man of action.

The Schott has a history that's even considerably longer than the A2, but instead of being associated with the wild blue yonder, it became a necessary motorcycle accessory. It's been around as long as motorcycles, and like motorcycles in Hollywood films it can either represent the good or the bad.

The A2 seems to get cast whenever a director feels the need to express a little intensity for a particular character. He calls up to the costume department and asks for a "leather jacket" to be sent down. This request always seems to be interpreted as an A2. If he wants much more intensity, or even a downright "outlaw" vibe, he'll ask for a "motorcycle jacket." He still might get an A2, but if he understands the formula, he'll send it right back and demand an actual motorcycle jacket.

Here's the formula:

An A2 is a leather jacket, It equals solid working man or at the very least, man of action. Once in a while a female will wear one, but the jackets are usually too big make the woman look cute. A good example of the man of action is Bob Cummings in Hitchcock's immortal "Saboteur."

The Schott motorcycle jacket means either "outlaw" or "cop." It has a sinister vibe. Put one on a woman, and you add an element of sinister sexuality. Like it's hot and she can hardly wait for somebody to take it off her. It's a great prop, but there should be at least one motorcycle in the scene. Motorcycle jackets in a movie without motorcycles is just wrong. In so many ways.

Marlon Brando literally made the Schott a motorcycle icon with the movie, "The Wild One." In that famous scene of Brando sitting on his bike, holding his purloined trophy, the Schott seems to melt into the bike making the bike, Brando and the Schott one-star seem as one.

Here's where things can go wrong, or right depending on the director, and probably the actor. Schott motorcycle jackets are almost always used the right way in movies, but the A2 often fills the role of the anonymous "leather jacket."

Take the Fonz from the simpering "Happy Days" TV show. He's supposed to be tough. He rides a motorcycle. He actually did jump the shark. He wears a leather jacket. But it's an A2. Not a motorcycle jacket. He looks anything but tough. Put him in a Schott, and he might have actually been taken for tough in spite of the fact that he never got into a pool cue fight.

So, the Fonz was a bad choice. What was a good choice? I think the Ramons were an excellent choice - all wearing Schotts, all with the same last name, all tough and troubled just the way motorcycle jacket wearing people should be.

 Brando! Ride, baby, ride.

 Don't worry, folks. He's got his A2 on. The Nazis. That's who should worry.

 What was he always saying? Aaaaaaaaey. Never cool. Thumbs up, baby, but where is your super-cool motorcycle jacket? You think you look like a tough guy? You don't. You look like the carny who set up the Tilt-A-Wheel and is now heading for some "shave ice."

The Ramones. Super cool, troubled, disenfranchised. I'm sure there are four motorcycles somewhere nearby. I say four because they would rather walk than ride tandem.

Uncle Albert and his crazy ideas

I wish Albert was still alive. I just know we would have been best friends. We'd be hanging out, eating nachos, drinking a little Diet Coke (to keep our wits about us), and discussing some of uncle Al's (I'm sure I would be allowed to call him that) formulas.

The thing about uncle Al and his formulas is that they were a lot simpler than some of those other guys' formulas. You go back about a hundred years, and you see blackboards all over the US and Europe covered in completely indecipherable formulas. Scientists would look at them, stroke their beards (since most of the scientists back then didn't shave -- too many formulas to write) and vigorously shake their heads while mumbling something in German, Hungarian, or even Russian. Sometimes shouting would erupt and many times chalk and erasers would fly through the air pelting any nearby observers with little chalk dust clouds.

There were a lot of arguments back then. Mostly about the speed of light. Some of those formulas indicated that the speed of light was a constant. It never changed. Here's one that illustrates it: 
Even if you don't understand the difference between permittivity and permeability, I think you would agree that the formula clearly shows the speed of light as a constant in our universe. I can't speak for other universes because I haven't yet figured out a way to visit them, although some ardent followers of the now defunct Grateful Dead band assure me with vigorous head shakes that they have indeed visited more than one other universe. However, when visiting those other universes, they didn't take time to perform even the basic experiments to determine if the speed of light is a constant. Or not.

So, along comes my BFF, Al. He says to all the other scientists that, yes, the speed of light is constant, and that we can begin using it in all our formulas. It seems that scientists love nothing better than shoving these constants into formulas. Because they never change. They're constant. And there are a lot of them, too.

Outside of the speed of light, pi is one of the favorites. It's a weird one, though, because you can never get it to stop giving you digits. Most people just resolve it out to 3.14159265359 and just give up. That means that no formula using pi will ever be completely 

accurate. Well, who cares. That's close enough, right? 

Al would just shrug his shoulders and say, "Ja, ja. Es ist glose enoughs." Then he'd light his pipe, 

blow out a cloud of smoke and stare at his chalk board. While stroking his hairless chin. Al didn't go in

for beards.

Al liked to simplify complex formulas. Take the one he is showing me in the photo above. "R = 0."

He looks pretty excited about, too. I didn't know that R equals 0. Did you? Did anybody? No. 

Nobody did until uncle Al drew it up there on his chalk board.

So right about that time I would ask Al about c, the constant speed of light. Al would shake 

his head, erase the R = 0 and scribble out e=mc2. He would turn to me and say, "zo, zat ees der 

speed limits vor ze whole universes. You can't go any vaster zan dat." Zee, der vormulas clearly

 shows dat time vould slowing down, und your mass would grow to take up ze whole universes."

That Al. He had some trippy ideas. Sometimes I wonder what he was smoking.

Another Look at Schrodinger’s Cat

In my novel, “Waiting to Run,” (http://goo.gl/6nm97N)  the protagonist accumulates quantum powers based on the theory that if an object in the ordinary world was infused with quantum states, many of the behaviors exhibited by sub-atomic particles could be passed along to a person who was handling it. This theory is further enhanced in the novel by presenting reality as manifested by the Holographic Universe theory.  

Of course the novel is a work of paranormal, science fiction intended to be thought provoking but most of all enjoyed. However, the big question that the novel avoids is what separates the Newtonian, gravity-dominated world from the bazaar, subatomic reality where particles can have zero mass, go in and out of existence, be in two places at the same time, and exist in multiple, different states at once. Is Schrodinger’s cat dead or alive? The answer to this in the quantum universe is “probably.” Is there some kind of barrier that keeps these two, vastly different parts of our universe separate? It turns out that there probably is.

This barrier is called gravitational time dilation. The theory is based on Einstein’s theory of gravity as the manifestation of space/time. In this theory, the flow of time is altered by mass. Massive objects cause the flow of time to slow down. The way this works is that as quantum-infused particles fuse together to form larger structures their quantum states are slowed down and eventually blocked by the dilation and begin to behave according to Newton’s orderly laws. This is where the barrier between the infinitely small and infinitely large occurs.

So, Schrodinger’s cat would be either dead or alive, but not both because its mass is large enough to block the dilation. That’s either good news or bad news for Schrodinger and his cat, but not both.

What could possibly go wrong?

Today I'm filled with joy and the anticipation of wonderful things. Absolutely marvelous things.Why? Because I just reserved my free upgrade of Windows 10! What could possibly go wrong? A simple click on the icon that magically showed up on my computer, and I'm reserved. As though Microsoft somehow knows my every need. I'll let you know on July 29th. That's when the automatic upgrade will occur. Auomatic upgrade! Oh, I wish I didn't have to wait so long.

Of course there was that upgrade of one of my laptops to Windows 7. That didn't work out so well because my very good friends at Dell decided not to bother upgrading the video drivers for that particular unit. So is every vendor in the world scrambling to prepare for Win Ten? We'll see.

Researching the goofy assasin

For my book, "Waiting to Run," (http://goo.gl/jloZ8w) I decided to bring in elements of the JFK assassination, since it featured one of the most botched investigations in history. Although fiction, my novel does carry some factual elements, which required a fair amount of research on my part. As I looked into the lives of the central characters involved in this real event, I was captivated by how they all were living subterranean lives before that dramatic event which brought them all into the spotlight.

The most interesting character was Lee Harvey Oswald. No surprise there. Researchers are still unclear what truly motivated him to shoot Kennedy, if in fact he actually did it at all, or did it while acting alone. In writing the book, I decided not to attempt to change history or add yet another conspiracy to the pile. If you Google "JFK Assassination Theory" hundreds of them come up, many of which are current, so new theories are constantly being thought up. My goal was to turn the event into a kind of paranormal, science fiction "mashup" that would be an entertaining read.

However, I did uncover some interesting elements about the key character in this monumental story, good 'ole Lee Harvey himself. There has been a lot published about LH's life: his Russian citizenship, carrying his rifle to work wrapped in brown paper and telling the person he rode in with each morning that it was a package of curtain rods, his total lack of a getaway plan (although Ruby probably was to play a part in that), the theft and replacement of his headstone, and the exhumation and sale of his original coffin. All these true elements are fascinating and each are worthy of their own posts, but the one thing I thought was a peek into the confused and conflicting mind of LH was the famous photo taken by his wife before the assassination. That shot has been exhaustively analyzed by various people claiming it was a fake, or it was authentic, or even that it proves that LH was an alien (he does lean way to his right in the rifle photo). LH is smiling at the camera while holding up his rifle and a newspaper. His pistol is holstered, but clearly there. It is claimed that the newspaper is Russian or at least some sort of Communist publication, but it really can't be read in the photo.

We don't exactly know what stimulated LH's desire to be photographed with his new rifle and pistol before killing people with them, but I think there is a general assumption that LH wanted to show his dark side to the world. However, did you know there were other shots taken in that backyard session? The most telling of these in my mind is LH holding not a weapon, but a banjo. Did we even know LH played banjo? Did we even know he owned one? And why a banjo? It's one of the least aggressive of all instruments. Some sort of death-metal, flying Vee guitar would have been more in character, except they weren't invented just yet.

What was LH's thought process here? What was his conversation with his poor beleaguered wife during this session? We can only imagine.

"Hey Marina! Get one of me holding my rifle in my left hand, and -- wait. Where's that Commie newspaper? Did you throw that out? Wait. I'll get in out of the garbage. It should still be there. Our trash pickup isn't scheduled for two more days. Okay. Back. Do I look menacing enough. Hey! Wait! I got a great idea. I'll be back in a second. Where's my banjo? Have you seen it? Where? Right where I left it? At the back of the hall closet? You're the best, Marina! I'll be right back. Just one more shot. Me holding my banjo..."

And so it went. The most overlooked and bazaar photo ever taken of LH. With his precious banjo. Why? It's one of the greatest mysteries of the entire event. We can only shake our collective heads and wonder. Wonder what in the world motivated that guy to do anything.