Prison sign language, circa 1941

By Jack Brummet, Corrections Ed.

In the 1940's, there was no talking allowed in the mess hall at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. 

The prisoners came up with a workaround:  they developed a sign language that allowed them to get through their meals in silence. So the convicts developed a primitive sign language to communicate what food they wanted:

• Upheld hand: more bread
• Upraised fist: more potatoes
• Upheld knife, fork and spoon: more stew
• Washing motion with the hand: water
• Thumb up and index finger straight out: coffee or tea
• Open and close the hand as if milking a cow: milk
• Hand flat and passed back and forth across the plate: gravy
• Fork held up: meat
• Thumb thrust through the fingers: vinegar
• Two fingers thrust out: salt and pepper
• If the person at the end of the table taps the table with his spoon: dessert is on the way

From the Milwaukee Sentinel — Nov 16, 1941: 

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Happy National Poetry Month: Robert Hershon's "Ichabod"

Ichabod

By Robert Hershon

Everyone's first name means
Beloved of the Lord
or Bearer of Glad Tidings
or Valiant in Battle

except Ichabod
which means The Glory
has Departed

and must be considered
the name for the future
along with The Liar is Thriving
Unbearable Cruelty and
The Shitheads are Running the Show

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Compressorhead's robo-rock: Blitzkrieg Bop

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Edgar Allan Poe's poem Eldorado (happy national poetry month)

Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem about the city of gold.  The line from this poem "Ride, boldly ride," has been used as the title of several books, articles, and anthologies of country music, and the west in general.  /Jack B, Poetry Ed.

Eldorado


Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old,
This knight so bold,
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow;
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be,
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the mountains
Of the moon,
Down the valley of the shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,--
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

- Edgar Allan Poe


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Faces No. 385 - Four Beardos

By Jack Brummet 

click to enlarge

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Farewell to Ballard's The Viking

By Jack Brummet, Ballard/North Beach Ed.

A painter--Ethan Jack Harrington--captured The Viking Tavern, which is just down the road from my house. They are closing to make way for "Ballard Lofts," another midrise. Also coming down is 2 1/2 Happy Barbers, and the garage next door (which was designed by Fred Anhalt - who also designed a lot of the interesting apartment buildings on Capitol Hill).  I'm Going to miss the Vike.

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Inca Tern - The Hipster Bird

By Jack Brummet, Ornithology Editor

The mustached Inca Tern is found from northern Peru south to central Chile, on the Pacific.  He'd fit right in in Ballard, Silver Lake, or Brooklyn.

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Westboro Baptist Church to protest Boston Marathon bombing victims' funerals (along with Woody Allen's solution)

By Jack Brummet, Baptist Ed.

Yesterday, the Westboro Baptist Church tweeted:

As Woody Allen said in another connection:

"I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats." 

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Boston 4-15-2013

By Jack Brummet 

click to enlarge

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Sign: Due to a shortage of robots, workers here are human beings and may react unpredictably if abused.

By Jack Brummet

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A National Poetry Month surprise

By Jack Brummet

When I walked into Third Place Books yesterday, they were handing out a mimeographed/photocopied (?) copy of one of my favorite poems:  James Wright's "Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota."  How wonderful is that?

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life. 

- James Arlington Wright 

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The strange numbers station broadcasts

By Jack Brummet

Numbers stations are dedicated shortwave radio stations that mostly broadcast. . .numbers.

When I first got a short wave radio, the instruction book listed several number station frequencies. I have listened to several of them on the air. They broadcast a few spoken words often, but mainly numbers. There are both artificial voices and real voices--usually female. What makes them fascinating to listen to is that no one knows what these hundreds of stations actually do. But, naturally, there is plenty of speculation.

In the 1950s, Time magazine reported that the numbers stations first appeared shortly after World War II using a format that had been used to send weather data during that war. But, what mostly people believe is that the transmissions are used to send messages to spies. They do send out QSL cards (a tradition among ham radio people) if you send them a reception report. Who knows, maybe that's just part of their cover?

According to The Irdial Discs website, "Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad” is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is."

The U.S. has prosecuted several spies from Cuba (and some people living in the U.S.) for espionage, and charged they used Cuban numbers stations to communicate. 

 According to The Wikipedia:

"The one-way voice link (OWVL) described a covert communications system that transmitted messages to an agent's unmodified shortwave radio using the high-frequency shortwave bands between 3 and 30 MHz at a predetermined time, date, and frequency contained in their communications plan. The transmissions were contained in a series of repeated random number sequences and could only be deciphered using the agent's one-time pad. If proper tradecraft was practiced and instructions were precisely followed, an OWVL transmission was considered unbreakable. [...] As long as the agent's cover could justify possessing a shortwave radio and he was not under technical surveillance, high-frequency OWVL was a secure and preferred system for the CIA during the Cold War."

Also from The Wikipedia:

"The Conet Project has since become somewhat of a cult sensation and counts many musicians and filmmakers among its fans, including Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, Melvins collaborator David Scott Stone, Boards of Canada, Manu Chao The Besnard Lakes, Devendra Banhart, former Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton, and director Cameron Crowe. Samples from the collection have been used in numerous films and albums, including Crowe's film Vanilla Sky, Porcupine Tree's Stupid Dream album, We Were Promised Jetpacks' These Four Walls album, and Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, the last of which was an issue of legal dispute; Jeff Tweedy did not seek permission to use the Conet sample and Irdial sued forcopyright infringement. The incident sparked debate about who exactly owns copyright concerning recordings of numbers station transmissions, but Tweedy ultimately decided to avoid taking the matter to court, agreeing to pay Irdial royalties and reimburse its legal fees. The Besnard Lakeshave also used recordings from numbers stations throughout their album, The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse and frontman Jace Lasek is said to be a fan of The Conet Project. Kronos Quartet incorporated live reception of the Conet numbers into "4Cast Unpredictable", a performed sound sculpture in collaboration with Trimpin. Ten years in the making, the piece was performed once only, at Montclair State University Performing Arts Center, New Jersey, in 2007."

"In keeping with its 'Free Music Philosophy', the Irdial-Discs label has made the entire collection available for download in MP3 form (along with a PDF version of the included booklet) on its website completely free of charge and encourages fans to freely distribute it on file sharing networks." 

The Conet project collected four CDs worth of numbers broadcasts.   You can download them for free from the internet archive here:  http://archive.org/details/ird059

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