Wallpaper of the Week

[Jeff K1NSS]

Swapped a couple of books for a brown paper grocery bag of vintage DX QSLs at our local flea market. Shazam..Instant Dashtoons feature, Wallpaper of the Week for the next half decade or so.

No kidding, our kickoff card is from the second wife of SK JY1, King Hussein, an Englishwoman who gave him the current king of Jordan, Abdullah.

Stop by http://www.dashtoons.com and see the flip. Tip o' the iceberg fellow Misfits, stay tuned!

10984

[kb2vxa]

Ah, the privilege of royalty, having their own special Amateur callsigns. The only thing I can find as far as radio licenses go is the prefix block assigned by the ITU is JYA through JYZ and there are approximately 92 Amateurs in Jordan. Great kickoff Jeff, as always I'll check your website to see the rest of the iceberg for whatever ice cubes to put in my drinks.

[Jeff K1NSS]

TU GOB! Re Ice Cube, I can always count on you for the unexpected juxtaposition.

I wish I was more vintage DX savvy. If not Wicked Doozie, I think I've got some at least in the Wicked Goodie range, plus more usual Euro and some Asia/Oceana cards that are cool, quaint and funny in them 60s ways. Big bunch of SWL cards, including one lavish package sent by one very keen Pop Tronics Monitor.

Love the simplicity of this, looks like some hot hand knocked that off with the wave of a Sharpie. Sweet job.

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[Jeff K1NSS]

Mister Christian's QSL card!

More at http://www.dashtoons.com

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[w8nsi]

Swapped a couple of books for a brown paper grocery bag of vintage DX QSLs at our local flea market. Shazam..Instant Dashtoons feature, Wallpaper of the Week for the next half decade or so.

No kidding, our kickoff card is from the second wife of SK JY1, King Hussein, an Englishwoman who gave him the current king of Jordan, Abdullah.

Stop by http://www.dashtoons.com and see the flip. Tip o' the iceberg fellow Misfits, stay tuned!

10984

Wow... you got hold of some genuine HISTORIC material there! I can hardly wait to see who else pops out of that bag.

[kb2vxa]

To quote Mike Brescia quoting Trevor Howard; "Mister Christian, get that damn squid off the bow!" There's another piece of history there, who gnu Fletcher's great, great... grandson was a ham? Did you find Felix's magic bag???

[Jeff K1NSS]

Magic bag indeed, Warren. Since finding the VR6TC card, I found another! If I were a gambling man, I might risk it in a high stakes game of QSL Topsies, on the chance of picking up Cookie Lavagetto's Novice Rookie card or something of equal value, but I'm pretty risk averse after spending some fun, albeit sobering quality time as a lad with my Pops at race tracks, frontons and golf courses where nobody knew he was an amateur land shark who would play the duffer on the practice green, trolling for pickup matches, and left life a player with not a sou to spare, perhaps the best way after all.

Ain't life grandly, terribly strange?

Just so happened that when I mentioned Mr. Christian's QSL to my brother the casual book collector, he introduced me to this killer volume, the Wyeth Edition, no less. Yep, that's N.C. Wyeth, Andrew's father and Grand Old Brandywine School Master from the golden age of American Illustration in the early 20th century. If you're my kind of geezer, you know his work from a huge collection of young readers' editions of famous works published in our parents' day, titles like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, all those classics. By the 50s, when this book came out, his stuff now looks a bit off his game , but still evokes the stage of my personal theater of mind, because I consumed so much of his best stuff as a kid.


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Consider VR6TC, whose ancestor lost himself in 18th century South Pacific space and was reanimated in 1962 by apocryphal ham/actor Marlon Brando. Consider OM Tom as Pitcairn's Chief Radio Officer and Main Ham sending messages in electromagnetic bottles with benefactor supplied equipment, occasionally jetting off island to sign t-shirts and baseball caps. http://www.sfarc.org/tc.htm

Tom Christian died just this year and was remembered in a good sized obit in the New York Times.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/world/asia/tom-christian-descendant-of-bounty-mutineer-dies-at-77.html?_r=0 Adventure in Paradise? Not so fast. Incredible as the mutineers' story is, jettisoned Captain Bligh's willpowered escape by seemingly supernatural mariner's skills trumps all, the full strangeness of the complete saga found here, minus Tom's Christian's latter day radio epilogue.



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Here was Bounty's path to Pitcairn.


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Here was Bligh's escape route, in a "launch" from the Bounty, with a skeleton crew of officers.


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The things people do. The patience, the persistence, the intellect, the seat-of-the-pants orchestration of skill and luck and heart are fantastic to me as any saga of gods and Homeric heros. Perhaps most amazing of all is the way their exploits ripple through centuries and bloodlines, and find their way in their ways, to the ionosphere itself. Jeez H.

Said it all, Sophocles. Check it out. Maybe a little long, but damn. Damn!

Many the wonders but nothing walks stranger than man.
This thing crosses the sea in the winter’s storm,
making his path through the roaring waves.
And she, the greatest of the gods, the earth –
ageless she is, and unwearied — he wears her away
as the ploughs go up and down from year to year
and his mules turn up the soil.
Gay nations of birds he snares and leads,
wild beast tribes and the salty brood of the sea,
with the twisted mesh of his nets, this clever man.
He controls with craft the beasts of the open air,
walkers on hills. The horse with his shaggy mane
he holds and harnesses, yoked about the neck,
and the strong bull of the mountain.
Language, and thought like the wind
and the feelings that make the town,
he has taught himself, and shelter against the cold,
refuge from rain. He can always help himself.
He faces no future helpless. There’s only death
that he cannot find an escape from. He has contrived
refuge from illnesses one beyond all cure.
Clever beyond all dreams
the inventive craft that he has
which may drive him one time or another to well or ill.
When he honors the laws of the land and the gods’ sworn right,
high indeed is his city; but stateless the man
who dares to dwell with dishonor. Not by my fire,
never to share my thoughts, who does these things.
Sophocles, Antigone, c. 441 B.C. (332-369)
(translation by Elizabeth Wyckoff)

[Jeff K1NSS]

Wow... you got hold of some genuine HISTORIC material there! I can hardly wait to see who else pops out of that bag.

Tnx for your note Jim, did not see it until today, but I got your message via FB. 73 Jeff

[kb2vxa]

And after all that...