Finished reading: One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs 📚

Signal Station Pressure Mount

“That which you do not know, the doing will quickly teach you.”

— Master Po, “Kung Fu”

Advice from The Signal Station

Signal Station Main Dispatch

Signal Station Telegraphicker

Finished listening to: The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting by Ben Lewis. Read by Peter Noble. 🎧 📚 (Audible) Fascinating. Amazing.

Hemingway said, “… stop while you are going good.” I understand this. Thelonius Monk said, “When you’re swinging, swing some more!” I understand this too. 📝

New boxes from Musgrave Pencil. These pencils used to be packaged in plastic bags. ✏ Shiny.

Local store low on spices. Whatever happened to “the spice must flow”?

Radio Free Signal Station

“Fear is the enemy…. Do what must be done with a docile heart.”

– Master Po, “Kung Fu” TV series

“Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.”

— John Steinbeck

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 30: Red

Discovered while trying to find screenshot of planet Meta signal: Big Finish is now making audio dramas for “Space: 1999”? Yes please thank you. 🚀

In the premiere episode of “Space: 1999” (1974), a probe has been sent to the rogue planet Meta. At the end of the episode they receive a transmission from the planet, represented as a computer-generated waveform. Looks familiar in recent press. Cosmic coincidence (or not).

“There are no lines in the real world, so don’t paint them.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 28: Underneath

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 27: Chaos. Perhaps more chaos theory.

Finished reading: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels 📚

Poe Country

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 25: Gravity. The Moon’s gravity is one-sixth that of Earth.

Ephemerama
A prolonged display or exhibition of things that last only a short time.

Richard II

The Lionheart and the Peach

Finished reading: King Richard: Nixon and Watergate–An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs 📚 Incredible. Fascinating. Hard to put down.

(The fact that I went directly from an audiobook about King Richard I, by Marc Morris, to a book about Richard M. Nixon called King Richard is entirely coincidental. 👀 So is the fact that, according to this book, Nixon was named after Richard I, “Lionheart,” though that is a different Richard than Richard I, known as “Longshanks,” son of Henry III. Morris’ book explains the discrepency in numbering, having to do with the Norman Invasion. He didn’t refer to Richard the Lionheart as Richard I, though. Interesting too that the Morris book has “Great and Terrible” in its title, a point, though maybe not in those exact words, Dobbs makes about this “King” Richard, a dualism. [Though “terrible” in the 13th century probably meant “inspires terror.”] So the two books combined lead to the title of this post.)

I remember seeing on TV, when this was going on, a news report about protesters calling for the impeachment of the president. The camera panned down a line of people holding up signs. One after the other, the signs read “Impeach Nixon,” “Impeach Nixon.” At the end of the line was a little old lady holding up a sign that read: “Nixon Is a Peach.”

[Slight spoiler ahead about the book’s content]

I was disappointed that Dobbs wanted to structure the book a certain way that only covered the 100 days following Nixon’s second inauguration. It stops when the fight over the tapes begins. It’s an abrupt ending and I wanted to read about the rest. It’s otherwise an amazing book that draws extensively from the tapes themselves.

📷 October Photo Challenge Day 24: Connection. There are many connections behind the engine of a train. And on it. And if you miss your connection, there’ll be another one shortly.