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OK, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, my idea for today’s blog post did not work out. I was going to write about Gothic mascots—a perfectly serviceable mashup of two favorite Ferrebeekeeper tags—but, when I got home from work and started researching gothic mascots the pickings turned out to be exceedingly slim—a Simpsons gag (the Montreal vampire), a bunch of troubling Lolita cartoons, and those godawful “Capital One” barbarians who are trying to sell you some sort of credit card (are they even Visigoths? Is “Capital One” even really a real credit card?). Apparently nobody wants any sort of gothic mascots except for predatory lenders.
Oh no!–what if Capital One destroys my credit rating for making fun of them? [collapses laughing]
So I ended up looking with increasing desperation at past mascots for anything of any interest and this line of inquiry lead me back to that Simpson’s joke about the Montreal vampire. Montreal is a francophone city—beautiful and evocative—yet prone to making choices which are different from the market-driven choices of other places. What was the mascot of the 1976 Montreal Olympics? And, Bingo! suddenly I had today’s blog post.
This is Amik the beaver. Amik means beaver in Algonquin—so this character (which looks like it was designed by somebody who just spilled an entire bottle of India ink) is really named “Beaver the beaver.” Anik appears with a red stripe with the Montreal Games logo on it or sometimes with a pre (?) pride rainbow strip.
I am making fun of poor Anik because I don’t think beavers lack faces. Nor are they the unsettling pure black of absolute oblivion. Maybe I found my Gothic mascot after all—in the most unlikely of places—Montreal, 1976! I will write a better post tomorrow. In the meantime enjoy the strange juxtaposition of nihilism and naivete which was seventies design.
NASA has recently released plans for a new ion thruster capable of propelling spacecraft to the astonishing speed of 90,000 miles per hour (the thruster is named NEXT–an unnecessarily clever acronym which is short for “NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster”). Reading about the thruster’s blazing speed made me wonder: what exactly is the fastest human-made item ever? The answer was not what I expected—or rather it was exactly what I expected, but it happened a long time ago.
NASA’s Helios 2 spaceprobe
To escape Earth’s gravitational pull, an object must already be traveling around 25,000 mph, so ICBMs and orbital space craft are fairly speedy anyway. Interplanetary probes are the fastest objects we humans have crafted, although they tend to obtain their velocity by means of using the gravity wells of planets or the sun to “sling” off at a higher velocity. In 1976, NASA launched the solar probe Helios 2 to measure electromagnetic radiation emanating from the sun and to calculate solar magnetic fields. The eccentric orbit of Helios 2 resulted in the craft reaching a top speed of 157,078 miles per hour. If the probe were running along the equator, it could whip around the Earth six and a third times during an episode of “The Bionic Woman” (or whatever other hour-long show was playing in 1976).
We’re probing the sun and voting for Carter: apparently that’s what’s happening…
Helios 2 has held the record for being the fastest man-made object since I was a toddler, but NASA has finally decided to rise to the challenge (since nobody else apparently has the know-how or the desire to push mankind forward). Solar Probe Plus is a NASA mission planned for launch in 2018 which features a robot space probe which will travel to the outer corona of the sun (assuming feckless American lawmakers don’t scrap the mission). When the probe is closest to the sun it will be a mere 5.9 million kilometers (3.67 million miles) from the photosphere of the star and it will be traveling at a blistering 432,000 miles per hour. The insane temperature and radiation which Solar Probe Plus will face at such proximity to the sun will necessitate that the speed demon robot must take shelter behind a carbon fiber reinforced carbon shield as it blasts through the outer corona at a fifteen hundredths the speed of light (it turns out light is still incomprehensibly fast compared to our very fastest things).
An artist’s conception of Solar Probe Plus (Credit: JHU/APL)
(Coincidentally, long time readers might wonder why I have abandoned my usual convention of citing measurement values in metric and then following them with U.S. customary measurements in parenthesis. The answer, alas, is laziness. All of the sources about really fast things use miles per hour and I didn’t feel like converting. If you are so inclined, you can easily convert to kilometers per hour (or parsecs per second, or whatever) using the internet. Alternatively, you could write me an angry letter in French.)
The Korean Demilitarized Zone and Joint Security Area at Panmunjom
On August 21, 1976, the joint military forces of the United States and South Korea launched Operation Paul Bunyan, a mission which involved 813 fighting men on the ground (including a platoon of South Korean martial arts experts wired with Claymore mines), 27 military helicopters, a number of B-52 high altitude bombers with their jet fighter escorts, and the aircraft carrier Midway along with its attack group of missile cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. At the heart of the mission was a team of eight soldiers armed with chainsaws! The rest of the forces were providing support for this small team of men whose mission was…to cut down a single poplar tree.
This requires some explaining.
On July 27, 1953 an armistice agreement effectively ended the Korean War by creating a buffer zone 4 km (2.5 mi) wide which runs 250 kilometers (160 miles) across the entire Korean peninsula. Although huge armies wait on either side, the Demilitarized Zone itself remains a no-man’s land, deadly for humans to tread upon (and, consequently, one of the most pristine temperate forests on Earth). Only a tiny portion of the DMZ is designated as a Joint Security Area (JSA) where people can go. Located near what used to be the village of Panmunjon, the JSA serves as a sort of neutral meeting place, where North Korean forces meet face to face with forces from the United Nations Command. Numerous military and diplomatic negotiations have taken place at the JSA (although the North Koreans abandoned all meetings in 1991 over a perceived slight), however, in the years since the armistice, the area has also been the sight of many kidnappings, assaults, and killings as the hermit kingdom repeatedly tests its boundaries like a dangerous animal behind an electric fence.
A photograph of the actual confrontation–well, that certainly clears everything up!
In the mid-seventies, American and South Korean forces near the JSA had a problem: a leafy poplar tree blocked the view from one guardhouse to another. North Korean commandos exploited this weakness to attack the isolated guardhouse more than once. On August 18, 1976, a team of American and South Korean soldiers was duly dispatched to trim the tree. Unfortunately a bellicose team of North Korean soldiers intercepted the landscaping team and precipitated a fight. The North Korean officer stated that the poplar had been planted and nourished by Kim Il-Sung and was therefore sacrosanct. In the ensuing melee, two American officers were killed with axes and clubs. The perfidious North Koreans rushed to the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations, and presented the incident as an American attack. With support from Cuba, the members of the conference passed a resolution condemning the provocation and demanding a withdrawal of US and UN forces from the Korean peninsula.
Carrier USS Midway (CVA 41) is flanked by destroyer USS Picking (DD 685) on the left, and guided missile destroyer USS Preble (DLG 15) (from the US Navy Museum website)
Gerald Ford decided the incident had to be answered in a way which asserted overwhelming force yet precluded further escalation. Hence, Operation Paul Bunyan was put together to chop down the tree under the rubric of massive armed force. Heavily armed infantry, artillery, and air assault forces were moved into supporting positions as was the Midway carrier group. The armed convoy cut down the tree (in 42 minutes) and left the 6 meter (20 foot) stump remaining. They also cleared away two North Korean barricades.
A section of the poplar stump, saved for posterity
Response to Operation Paul Bunyan was swift an unexpected: Kim Il-sung sent a message to United Nations Command expressing regret at the incident. North Korea’s provocative actions along the border were subsequently muted down (although, obviously, not forever). In 1987, the stump was cut down, but a stone monument to the fallen American officers was erected in its place.
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