Yeah, baby

Further to earlier pining, my copy of Red Sails in the Sunset finally got here today.

Yeah, baby.

Bought journalism, circa 1945

From the history file, a little reminder that seeing reporters being used by those in power to attack folks and stories they don't like is nothing new. Amy and David Goodman are petitioning the Pulitzer board to revoke William L. Laurence's prize over just such shenanigans, at the end of World War II.

Laurence covered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disputing the accounts of the entirely ballsy independent reporter Wilfred Burchett out of Hiroshima on the horrors of radiation poisoning. Burchett, who rode a train for 30 hours, and then walked into what remained of the city, published in the London Daily Express.:

In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

Laurence, in the pages of the New York Times, disputed this, dismissing it as Japanese propaganda. It later emerged Laurence was on the pay of the war department.

There is nothing controversial about the notion of radiation poisoning today, for the record.

Phew

I suppose everybody in the world's probably commenting on this, right now, but I can't help myself.

Good to see. And I'm ever so happy to be proved wrong. Think it must have been Saturday morning I heard a radio report to the effect that they were still down there, and it was going to be a while before help got to them, and thinking damn, that's it then, and what a way to die—aren't a lot of actually good ways to go, but suffocating in a cold, dark sealed chamber on the bottom of the ocean, that's definitely way down my list.

Nice from the international cooperation angle, too. Downright warms the heart of this Cold war baby.

(One minor quibble: is it just me, or are those 'Last gasp' headlines jes' a little tasteless?)

Prince Edward County

Spent yestereve in a cottage on the shore of Prince Edward County—a sizeable island (though only by virtue of the canal cut across the narrow strip of land joining it to the mainland) on the North shore of Lake Ontario.

The area's unique in Ontario in climate, vegetation, and bird life—not sure if it's all or entirely a very big sandbar piled up in the lake—but it's heavy on the rolling dunes, anyway, hence the odd vegetation. And then, thanks to this, the fact that it's a fair way south, and the fact that it's a good place to stop after crossing Lake Ontario, the bird life tends to be unusual. Found myself wishing I'd brought some field guides—could identify neither the big, pretty compound leaved monstrosity towering over the cottage on one side nor the jay-like bird scampering about in it and its neighbours.

Nice. Wished I coulda stayed longer (as my wife is now doing). Having to work sucks.