Help I've fallen and I can't get out!

[rthstewart]

Thank to those who weighed in on AW 13 and 14 and Happy New Year.  I've now thrown myself into in the Big Bang (oh god, what have I done?  A War story.  WAR, I tell you.  From she who has never fired a gun and flinches from first person shooting games).  Work proceeds.  I'm currently writing about Peter not vomiting.

Not thirty minutes into the training flight and the deck of the Waco they were trapped in was awash in the vomit of hardened men.  He was, quietly, proud that he’d retched on only four of the twelve training flights.  That was eight better than his CO.  Major Howard had gotten sick every time they went aloft in the Waco.

For his fortitude, Peter won win twenty schillings and 9 cigarettes in the Company-wide betting pool.

But this lead me to the realization that it was all exposition and so I should write, you know, real time vomiting and why Peter was pretty much inured to the smell of it being accustomed as he was to the stench of giants, wet sheep, and stewing offal meats.  Which meant he had something to fix his gaze on which meant I needed to know what was inside a Waco CG-4 glider.  (Yes, I will explain why everyone is sick in the first place).  15 minutes of google-fu later and I hit the jackpot.
138 years of Popular Science available on line.  For free.  This is from the February 1944 issue.  On page 94 is the article about the gliders. Also on page 104, Daily Workouts Guard Your Health is the 1944 version of softcore porn in a science magazine.  What is cool is that these are the actual scanned magazines so you get the ads and diagrams and it's a wonderful slice of history.  And science!  [edit -- RAWRR it won't let me link to the pages directly so you'll have to go to the table of contents and link to pages 94 and 104 or scroll through it or search "glider" and "workout."]

An hour later, I've been skimming science articles about Darwin from 1894 and a long discussion about kangaroo like dinosaurs  from the 1920s and the history of how mental illness was assumed to be the result of demonic possession.  It's time to shut the browser. 

Comments

[adaese.livejournal.com]

Erm, did you mean schillings, or is that a typo for shillings?

The break in the hadrosaur's tail isn't at all obvious. Knowing it was there, I went to look for it, saw an obvious disjoint, then read the attached blurb and realised I was looking at something else completely, and the infamous break was further down. So much for extreme personal cleverness :-)

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

That was a typo, which I saw after already editing the post once and decide to just leave there rather than annoy people with my re-edits. I had been so busy researching how much an average ORs weekly pay would be and what would be a reasonable, company-wide wager, and where the door was on a Waco glider that basic spelling defeated me. This happens a lot -- forest, trees, tripping over a branch, and getting lost in the woods. This was how I also ended up reading old Popular Science magazine articles and ended up back at the Oceans of Kansas website looking at pretty pictures of mosasaurs.

As for the poor kangaroo Iguanadon, there's no way I'd ever find that tail break. I don't have an eye for that at all. I knew it was there from the research but I'd never be able to spot it on my own unless someone drew a big circle around it.