Von Braun a Magician

 Von Braun Was Also . . .

a Magician!

           

 Historians have finally found the key to the enigmatic photograph above depicting Wernher Von Braun’s capture/surrender[1]—it’s hard to say which—taken when he fled from the Russians and raced toward the advancing Americans to give himself up before the end of World War II and before he could be shot by the Gestapo for cowardice, desertion, funny arm, a totally camp hairdo, crappy missile production methods, and theft of a military vehicle driven with one arm while saluting.

For decades war buffs have been dumbfounded by the question of why the squad of GIs in the above photograph could so charmed and amused by a high-ranking Nazi SS prisoner disguised in civilian clothes at the end of a global conflagration that destroyed a conservatively estimated fifty million people, all to please a strutting buffoon. In fact the contrasting photo to the right shows an American GI of the very squad that captured Von Braun in a different and likely more common mood while guarding captured Nazi officers in uniform. Men like the GI in this picture had just had an engaging tour of a couple of concentration camps. Well, we now have the key to the conundrum of the funny first picture:  A magic coin trick!

Investigative reporters for Rocket City Blues have tracked down Corporal Eddie Pilzer, probably shown second from the right in the top photograph, now still hearty in his 92^nd year and living Las Vegas, Nevada. Pilzer reports that immediately upon capture Von Braun began asking the squad of GIs for a deck of playing cards so he could show them some tricks.  When the corporal flatly refused—“Go fuck yourself,” the Yank somewhat bluntly remarked-- the Nazi major never stopped smiling. From the moment he appeared riding in the stolen car he was smiling and he smiled right through Pilzer’s recommendation that he perform an act that the cast would make somewhat more awkward than it would usually be. And without a blink or a frown, Von Braun boldly claimed to be an itinerant magician, produced a shiny coin, and performed a magic trick.  He flipped the coin between his fingers so quickly and smoothly that no one in Pilzer’s squad could tell which side of the coin was up!  

“The guys were kind of dazzled,” recalls Pilzer. “No sleep in three days, lots of dead, lots of friends shot up, the stinking camps, no food, and here was this weird Kraut with his big hair and his smile and his arm get-up, and before we know what’s happened, it’s like a party, right on the spot. Gave us some gum and a cigarette to share. Usually we had the gum and the cigarettes. Usually toward the end they had shit.”

Pilzer was uneasy, he recalls, and “the party just stopped for a bit when this squad of British SOE military intelligence agents arrived, took stock of the situation and decided to pour gasoline on the captured major and set him on fire. I didn’t say anything,” recalls Pilzer, “but the rest of my squad objected that their captive was a magician.” Taking that claim with a bit of impatience, “those Brits drove off pissed, some of them laughing at us, and shouting ‘Yer mums weren’t in London! Get stuffed Yanks yah fooking poofs!’”  Finally, Pilzer remembers, Von Braun “made the party go again in a snap” and told the GI squad he had “still more tricks than they could imagine.”  

Magic Roman Coin

Certainly Von Braun was as right about this as about so many other things to come.  In fact, his coin trick charmed no less than an entire city in Alabama, the American military Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even US presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, although the latter was known to spit out his chew, as they say, after meetings with the amazing rocketeer.  Admittedly the coin trick failed to catch the fancy of Elie Wiesel or the investigators for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, who were, to be sure, distracted in the latter 1940s by what they then thought were somewhat bigger tricks.

Our favorite immigrant, scientific smarty, Father of the ICBM, prophet of stuff to come including some big ticket items, and now . . . a magician. How many different ways will this man dazzle us?

"History is not memory." -- Michel Foucault           

---

[1] Von Braun was himself somewhat unclear in his account of what he was doing in civilian clothes (a capital crime) and a stolen German truck. Some years into his life in Alabama, he referred to his action as Die Verwandlung, or, in English, “the metamorphosis.” However, perhaps because he wished to avoid any implied parallel with Franz Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung, in which the protagonist reports his transformation from a man into a cockroach, the rocketeer later referred to the episode as "Die Ubertragung” a somewhat less loaded term for “transfer”, as in a bus ticket that enables one to go from one place to another or to any place he pleases without paying the price.

Governor Bentley Defends Womanhood!

Governor Bentley Defends Womanhood!

Governor Robert Bentley, seen here with his curiously preoccupied wife Syntyche, has announced the formation of the Alabama Commission for the Defense of Womanhood and Christian Family Values, delivering as their first assignment the abolition of what he described in a press release as “the so-called c _ _ _ _ _ _ s, a lie, a damnable lie, and so long as I have breath it will no longer exist in Alabama.”

On the day of his Inauguration as Governor, Bentley, an ordained Babdist minister, famously delivered a sermon in which he said that those who have not accepted his Jesus as their personal savior “are not my brothers and sisters.” At first it was thought that the Governor was simply making a distinction between his actual or putative brothers and sisters and most everybody else. But the Governor tried to correct this impression the next day when he said a bit grumpily that he intended “to be everybody’s governor” but “not everybody’s brother,” to the relief of quite a few Alabamians.

The elimination of the clitoris from Alabama may be a tough field to plow, since there are a lot of them around, quietly going about what clitorises do, although now some of them may be startled to learn they soon will not exist. But the banning of the clitoris in Alabama will be feasible, the Governor hopes, if it is done by stages. First, “l“- “i”- “t” –“o”-“r”- and-“i” will be eliminated, just leaving “c” at the bow, so to speak, and “s” at the stern. Then the boat will simply sink, and along with it the little man.

The Governor’s project has caused a buzz among national political leaders, and Carl Rove has expressed his interest, although he has advised caution, since he says the clitoris is—or rather has been—less well known in Alabama than anywhere else in the nation except in his own state of Texas or maybe in the city of Colorado Springs, and so it would be easy to get rid of it here in Alabama but not in, say, California, where it was discovered in 1964.  

In any case, the disappearing of the clitoris in Alabama may become a hot button issue in this election year, and if as seems certain it rings the bell among the Republican base, three or four independents from, say, North Dakota, may take an interest and rise to the occasion as well.

If “clitoris” becomes “c _ _ _ _ _ _ s” and then “_  _ _ _ _ _ _ “ and finally just silence does that mean it’s gone, totally?

It makes you think.

Hospital Authority Announces New Baggage Policy

Rocket City Hospital Authority

Announces New Baggage Policy

       The Rocket City Hospital Authority has announced that effective September 1 it is putting in place a baggage fee policy for travelers on its now iconic Hospital Shuttle Train shown here traveling to one of its four terminals. Thomas “Tom” Thomas, Authority spokesperson, says that travelers should expect to pay a $25. per bag fee “to bring our customers’ travel plans in line with what they can expect at the airport.”

The Hospital Shuttle has not been without controversy since it was disclosed that the little train had to run back and forth without passengers for one calendar year in order to meet the requirements of the hospital complex’s insurers. “We didn’t want anyone crushed under the wheels or carried crashing down onto Governor’s Drive if the bugger didn’t work,” said Mr. Thomas, adding that such a mishap would be less than optimal at a hospital facility.

The year-long trial without passengers drew some tart remarks from some staff and patients, who for example called the shuttle “The Little Train that Might” or “Mystery Train of the Dead,” but most were at least inclined to find the little vehicle amusing. During the last election cycle, one wag suggested the train should be named the “Dr. Parker Griffith Shuffle,” because “you get on it thinking you are going one way but then it goes the other way and in the end it is just terminal.”

The train, or infelicitously named “people mover,” was produced by the Otis Elevator company, a fact which Mr. Thomas wants to underscore, since patients and visitors to the hospital “should find confidence in Otis and in knowing their shuttle is a kind of elevator that goes sideways.” And it has, he added, provision for “Local” and “Express” speeds, the latter useful for staff in pursuit of patients with unusual reactions to anesthesia or less than desirable lab reports. The train also has a caboose with tastefully consistent colors that is hooked up once a day for the coroner’s run.

Mr. Thomas wished to press upon our readers that the baggage fee system is flexible. “Children’s bags will be free if the children are riding on their parents’ laps, and terminal patients can arrange for next of kin to pick up their bags in a timely way. Bags left at the terminal terminal will be available for repurchase in Scottsboro.”

This is technology. It saves us from being run over at the hospital.

Porterhouse Experiment

ROCKET CITY BLUES

SPACE NEWS!

 “You could do something Joey. You could die.”     
 --Richie to his brother Joey in A History of Violence

Our Rocket City Blues Science Team once again gets the scoop and dumps it right in your lap, fresh from SPACE!

NASA acknowledged today after about a month and a half of dicking around that the Porterhouse Deep Space Mars Expedition has returned to earth from its eleven-year journey. The capsule was rushed to Rocket City’s Marshall Space Flight Center where it was cracked open to the murmurs and then to the uneasy silence of hundreds of engineers in lab coats. You have to wear a lab coat if you are doing this sort of thing, watching scrolling data for like 100 months with just hour-and-a-half piss breaks and some Mr. Coffee and maybe takeout.

Initially NASA spokespersons had little to say about the implications of the mission, which was to see what effects protracted deep-space travel will have on human spacepersons like you and me. After some pressure and even some provocative goading, a reticent Marshall Space Flight Chief Col. David ‘Dutch’ Stewart said,

“The team are at this point somewhat less than elated, in fact they are a little troubled, some of them totally bummed, by the implications of what we found in the capsule vis-a-vis a manned or rather personed expedition to Mars at least maybe for now.”

Following his remarks, Col. Stewart presented a slide show that included a shot of the mission capsule being rocketed into space in 2001, and two ‘before and after’ shots of the capsule payload.

Exhibit A below shows the 1.9 kilogram Porterhouse steak sent speeding toward Mars at the outset of the expedition. Exhibit B on the bottom shows the Porterhouse or what might be the Porterhouse after its eleven-year journey to the Red Planet and back.

Asked about the transformation of the robust Porterhouse into a kind of carbonized shit smudge Col. Stewart said that,

“For now we’re thinking cosmic rays. For a human crewperson we now think a voyage to Mars and back would be the radiation equivalent of maybe standing four blocks from ground zero in Hiroshima on a sort of Lazy Susan and spinning around for roughly, say, five or maybe six hundred consecutive thermonuclear explosions.” Or “for the ladies,” he added, “this trip to Mars will be like passing out in a tanning bed for 17,000 years.”

Sexy long missions like the Porterhouse Deep Space Mars Expedition always end with a touch of dismay. A couple of guys drop dead at the consoles, the monkey comes back a total asshole, a crewperson or two they move to Taos and start taking hallucinogens, another one she grows a beard.

This mission is no different.

Col. Stewart ended his remarks on a personal note:

“The cosmic rays. We were thinking last year maybe one of those lead aprons they put over your nuts when you get your chest x-rayed. But fuck it I’m not going. Are you going? I’m not going. We could probably scratch up some psycho around here to go but I’m not going. Not a chance.”

This is outer space. It is very very big but a great deal less than almost everything.

House Repubs to Abolish Death Benefit

DC Doodling

House Republicans Vote to Abolish

Social Security Death and Burial Benefit

In a vote deemed “largely symbolic” like virtually every House vote since 2008 and neither more nor less imbecilic than the rest of them, House Republicans have unanimously voted to eliminate the $255 Death and Burial Benefit established in 1936. The action was spurred by Rep. Darell Issa (R Ca), a former car thief and Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who only last week became aware of the benefit when his wife died.

The move was hailed as “revolutionary” and “forward looking” by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R Va) who had done his math. “This decision will save each American taxpayer up to $11.43 over the next eighty four years, reduce the deficit, and stimulate small businesses. This “so called ‘death tip’ paid for by hardworking men and women is actually a free ‘life tip’ for the dead people “without regard for quality of the service”, he added.

The American Association of Funeral Parlor Operators was somewhat dismayed but, doing the K street shuffle, characterized the House vote as “monumental”. Their spokesman has said,

“We have long been supporters of Rep. Issa, whose family, like ours, has been dedicated to repositionings for modest profit, in his case not of the dead or the apparently dead, but of misplaced cars. We also support Rep. Cantor, although with that name he is probably a Jew. We’ve had some problems with the Jews, we get squeezed with the quick burials, 24 hours, what’s the big hurry.”

Rocket City Blues has not had quite enough time to respond thoughtfully to this modification of Your Social Security Benefits, which will be announced through a mailing titled “A Modification of Your Social Security Benefits” in one of those envelopes where you fold over and tear one strip off on your left, then one on your right, then maybe the top or the bottom, you’re not sure, so you put your finger in the bottom, something rips, your mailing is fucked, you toss it. I know you do. And then you get it back out of the trash because it could be a check for one of those group action law suits about exploding cars or for some piece of crap that broke and they are hoping that with the odd envelope you will just throw the check out. But no.

Try to stay positive. Soon you won’t have to deal with these envelopes. Your kids, no way.

The Social Security Death and Burial Benefit was put in place in 1936 when for no evident reason sharply increasing numbers of dead people appeared abandoned along the roads, dumped behind gas stations, or tossed in rivers, especially in the South and also in the Midwest but a little less there because the rivers were dried out. There is not much sense in dropping off somebody in a river who has died if there is no water to wash that person away or cover them.

Watch in these pages for a follow-up featurelette,

What To Do When You Are Dead:

Money Saving Tips for the New America.

This is history. This is how almost everything works.

Your Job Is Your Joke

The Rocket City Comedy Corner

Your Job IS Your Joke

      

Close but no cigar! Sigmund Freud, who famously connected jokes with salacious thoughts in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, got it somewhat wrong. Because if you think about it, jokes have much more to do with your job description than with things you may be thinking but maybe not. Who knows.  Anyway, we at Rocket City Blues don’t have this “unconscious,” no way.  We think

your job is your joke and your joke is your job.

For example, a neurosurgeon might say,

So this patient comes in with a brain tumor the size and consistency of a squash casserole. “Doctor doctor, she says, I need a  brain transplant or I will die!” You say, “Calm down. Step over here to my replacement brain display case. On the top shelves,” you tell her, “we have plenty of expensive brains, those are men’s brains. Down on the bottom shelf, those are women’s brains, they’re cheaper.”

“I’m shocked,” says this woman, very angry. “Why do the men’s brains get top price, and the women’s brains go cheap?”

“Calm down,” says the doc. “No offense,” he says. “This is easy. The women’s brains are used.”

By contrast, a nurse in cardiac surgery might say,

So, an hour and a half late and wearing tassel loafers and plaid golf shorts, in walks Doctor Dickhead. The first nurse he verbally abuses. The second he gropes. The third . . .

Well, you see where this is going.

Engineers, they generally go for knock knock jokes:

“Knock knock” says the engineering student.

“Whose (sic) there?”

“I Dare You.”

“I Dare You who?”

“I Dare You to make me take English.

Police persons generally go for jokes about violence and horror, which they live with every day and for which they are paid not enough:

So this guy is parked along I-65, he’s gut shot with 357 Magnum, and he has his license and his registration but you guessed it no proof of insurance.

Your soldier might say,

So this Haji, maybe he’s eight, nine, whatever, comes up pushing his bicycle and there is no chain on this bicycle and the rear tire is flat. He has a package, a basket. Charlie squad’s point man says “waste him”. But a cat jumps out of the basket. The boy drops the bike. He chases his cat. No joke. I’m too young for this shit. I’ve always been too young for this shit.

Your Rocket City space buff might say,

So Wernher von Braun, mum on the slave-labor rocket factory with hanged workers dangling from cranes and death rates higher than Auschwitz and mum also on the unmanned flying terrorism project, Wernher makes a mental note to freshen up his resume and then he says to the squad of GIs who have captured him,

“Hey, you got a job for me?”

This is comedy. This is what makes life sometimes almost bearable.

Rocket City Signage Mystery

Rocket City Signage Mystery

The appearance of the sign above in several yards, alongside a detour service road in the North Parkway Improvement Project, and—quite a few of them—in a ditch near the quarry has caused some confusion at Rocket City Blues.  As Bugs Bunny would say,  “What’s up?”

Either “Loretta Spencer Huntsville’s Mayor” has been cutting work way past the ‘personal day’ quota or she has been—to use a euphemism that had a little currency maybe ten years ago—‘working at home.’ Then again, it’s just possible “Loretta Spencer Huntsville’s Mayor” has tried to get into the Office of Mayor Tommy Battle one too many times and has been thrown out onto Fountain Circle by the staff. I think this would have been after warnings.  Tommy Battle Huntsville’s Mayor is, after all, a gentleman. Next time somebody should call the police.

Although it’s perfectly clear that ‘Impersonating a Clergyman’ is not a criminal offense in Rocket City or, for that matter, in any of the Gulf States, plus Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, part of West Virginia,  and probably all of Utah, Impersonating a Mayor might just be a crime. In any case, we need to work this out.

Some people have seen the signs “Loretta Spencer Huntsville’s Mayor” when driving, and, being perplexed and distracted, they have collided with pets, children and roadside trees. It’s worse than texting. At least when you are texting you know what you are intending to do. But with the “Loretta Spencer Huntsville’s Mayor” signs, you are just totally caught up in a what-the-fuck moment.  And then:

BAM!

There go your insurance rates. Call the lizard.