"Natural laws? There are none. We make them and then attribute them to nature."

The NYT tries to explain the physics of "Young Professor Heisenberg." Is there any truth? Apparently it's all mere probabilities:

Why, then, do engineers and chemists undertake to build bridges or make rayon, confident that their plans will be realized? Because lumps of matter are merely statistical effects. In their vast conglomerations of atoms and electrons conflicts and agreements combine to form a colossal average that seems to obey the "laws of nature."

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Lady Grace Drummond-Hay reports to the NYT that she has spoken with General Hermann Wilhelm Goering and he has assured her that Germany is producing "one fully equipped military plane every three days" and that it's absurd to think — as newspapers have reported — that Germany is adding several hundred military planes every week. Lady Grace surmises that the reason Germany "is evading disclosure of the size of her air fleet is not because it is larger than the world thinks but because it is smaller."

It's hard to know what's going on in this world.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1935.

"The ideal thing is to have a home near a small city where there are girls and movies."

Here's a report on the "rest homes" and service clubs in Australia for our servicemen on leave from battle. A Red Cross worker says our boys get along "awfully well" with the Australian girls — because they "speak the same language." I wish there was more in these meager reports! Do they get along well just because they speak the same language — and our boys are simply happy to be around any girls? Or is there something particular about Australians? Australians! I don't know anything about these girls. In my mind, they are just girls — speaking English. But they are making our boys happy. Thanks, Australian girls. I have a picture of them, those girls, with our boys. It's a vague picture, but it means something to me. Australian girls and American boys, going to the movies. What movies? What movies are playing in that small city in Australia? The article says the boys' favorite item on the rest home/service club menu is milk, and that they pick milk — and are healthier than the boys in the last war — because "health education has borne fruit." It's a wholesome image I'm getting from this tiny article: milk-drinking boys, going to the movies with English-speaking Australian girls. What movie are they seeing? I'm just going to go ahead and picture "Yankee Doodle Dandy."



THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1943.

"More news of the anti-Jewish campaign in Poland..."

"... picked up today from SWIT, the secret Polish radio station."

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1943.

"Record Bag of Japanese Is Captured by Chinese."

A headline.

More headlines today:

"JAPANESE KILLED AT RATE OF 14 TO 1; OWI Reports on Casualties of Enemy From Guadalcanal to Naha Outskirts."

"TOKYO DENIES TALK OF BID FOR PEACE; Washington Doubts Reports of 'Feelers' Because Army Still Controls Japan."

"What the GI Is Thinking About; He doesn't like the idea of going to the Pacific but knows the job must be done."

And finally, depressingly:

"'Kamikaze'; Japan Fights Fiercely." ("As the Allied ring drew tighter around the Japanese empire last week, as American air blows rained heavier on the home islands, Japan's strategy of defense was "kamikaze" — a suicidal resistance.")

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1945.

Now that the curfews are lifting and people are going to nightclubs again...

... let's ask a psychology professor: Why do people go to nightclubs?

Nightclubs evolved out of the speakeasies of the Prohibition Era, and these days they are mostly legal, but there is still a bit of a sense that they are sinful and risqué.

At the bar of the Stork Club... a coated matron raised her voice.

"I do as much for the war effort as anybody," she told her male civilian companion defiantly. If consuming liquor was aiding the war effort, she seemed to be in a fair way that night night of winning the Japanese conflict single-handedly....

People come to nightclubs just to congregate — to see and to be seen...

J. Edgar Hoover is to be found at the far part of the Cub Room with his aide, Clyde Tolson...

The debs com in for lunch, drink mostly coke (at 75 cents a bottle, nickel size) or milk....

"I wonder if they're going to be married," they say. "Isn't that a divine hat?" or a "fetching frock," or a "charming ensemble," or "Why isn't he in the Army?"...

Taking in a night club is a big event in small people's lives. Most people have always had the desire to go and now they feel they can satisfy that desire.

Do we really need an explanation? People want to enjoy life — and the enjoyment of life is within reach. It's not wrong to want to dress up and go out to eat and drink and have a little fun. It's a simple pleasure.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1945.

The U.S. is accused of "monstrous crimes" as the peace talks begin in Paris...

.. and we accuse the North Vietnamese of "aggression."

North Vietnam's Xuan Thuy spoke first, for an hour and a half. "World opinion and progressive American opinion" are against the United States, he said, in words that were translated into French and thence into English. That the U.S. is in "a quagmire" is an idea the New York Times attributed to Thuy. Who knows what Vietnamese word led via French, then English to that NYT paraphrase?

But we readers of the NYT — we of "progressive American opinion" — know: Vietnam is a quagmire. Thuy insists that we stop bombing North Vietnam, and we seek "most earnestly" — in the words of chief American delegate Averell Harriman — "South Vietnam's freedom from attack and its right to determine its own future."

THE YEAR BLOG FORGOT IS: 1968.