Hooray for History Fans!

And I mean fans in the fangirl/fangent/otakuish sense. Hmm. I just realized something. I used "fangent" to mean a tangent indulged in by fans (a more random and less canonical relative of the fan theory) but when paired with fangirl, it could also be a gentleman who is a fan. This all makes me very happy.

BUT!

Not as happy as this web comic, which I stumbled across by way of Twitter (because random steampunk tidbits soothe my fevered brow better than actual sleep {my brow is fevered because I recently became a computer teacher, while keeping my part-time job at Barnes and Noble.})

It reminds me in a way of Five Fists of Science, but, dare I say(?) better. I feel that there should be a question mark in the previous sentence, so I put one in. And I do dare say it, because FFoS is pretty entertaining, but kind of meh. Any hoo, "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" is about Charles Babbage, creator of the first computer, and Ada Lovelace, creator of the first computer program. Apparently they fight crime? It's fantastic.

Even more fantastic (but actually less fantastic inasmuch as it's actually true) are all the links to Primary Source Documents by about the protagonists. I dare not start clicking on any more of them tonight or I really won't get any sleep. And then I won't be able to set up the computers for next week's classes. Maybe I should give the middle school kids a project later to research the history of computers on the interwebz. Whoever can go back the farthest gets a prize.

Of course, depending on how broadly one defines computers, there were even earlier examples of machines that used basic logic, but not to do math. So, since a computer ought to compute, the Difference Engine was the first one.

Monuments and Poetry

Mischievous, laughing boys, who grew

To quick manhood to be 'The Few'

Who flew above all human call

Through Summer's height to Autumn's fall,

Infring'd the sanctity of space

In freedom's name-and died in grace;

Falling like leaves upon the Weald

To russet-spot on English field,

Their brief, gay, valiant season spent

For us. Our task, their monument,

Nature herself has taken o'er

And has decreed for evermore,

'The Few' shall be remembered by

White chalk marks in a summer sky

That's one of my favorite poems. It's about the Battle of Britain but I don't know who wrote it. Nature may provide a fitting monument with vapor trails, but people have also built an amazing memorial to the battle. It's in London. I actually saw this at night, but it was not lit up and I didn't know what it was - just some walls with bronze statues. I wish I had seen the whole thing:

The story about is happening in each panel is awesome too. Monuments should be representational and realistic. It tells the story better, and the story is what people remember.
Here's another good poem:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew -

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee

No 412 squadron, RCAF

Killed 11 December 1941

He wrote that after flying a Spitfire for the first time. Awesome, huh? Here's a whole bunch of poems about flying.

I like this one:

An airman is always quite free, sir.
To land with a bump or a greaser.
Any old clunk,
can land with a thump,
But pro's go for smoothie crowd pleasers.

— Anon.

And this one:

The Co-pilot
By Keith Murray (Capt Colonial Airlines).
Written in 1941 and first published in October 1942 in
"The Airline Pilot" the monthly magazine of US ALPA.

I am the co-pilot, I sit on the right,


It’s up to me to be quick and bright;


I never talk back for I have regrets,


But I have to remember what the Captain forgets.

I make out the flight plan and study the weather,


Pull up the gear, stand by to feather;


Make out the mail forms and do the reporting;


And fly the old crate while the Captain is courting.

I take the readings, adjust the power,


Put on the heaters when we’re in a shower;


Tell him where we are on the darkest of night,


And do all the bookwork without any light.

I call for my Captain and buy him cokes;


I always laugh at his corney jokes;


And once in a while when his landings are rusty,


I always come through with, "By gosh it’s gusty".

All in all I’m a general stooge,


As I sit on the right of the man I call "Scrooge";


I guess you think this is past understanding,


But maybe some day he will give me a landing.

I have an mp3 of a different version that I think flows a little better, but this apparently is the original.

Diesel Punk. Meh.

I really don't know how I feel about diesel punk. I suppose all on it's own I like it. It's the future that steampunk becomes, followed by raygun gothic. I love the Rocketeer, and Tale Spin. I love heavier-than-air flying machines as much or more than aerostats. But something about it leaves me cold.

I think there are two things about it. The first one is that's it's 20th Century. Sometimes steampunk depresses me a little, because those people in their shiny goggles and lovely clothes and expressions of wonderment are going to have to get to the 20th Century eventually, with its WWI, and its International Style architecture. The 70s happen.... I'm not a fan of alternate history, so there's no help for it.

Still, I find WWI fascinating, and not just because of the aviators. Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series is a really cool fictionalization/steam/dieselpunkification of it. It has a bunch of the bad stuff in it, but it still retains a sense of worth-whileness and optimism and honor that most WWI stories don't manage. It was a human endeavor, fought with new machines and on a huge scale (although, honestly, hasn't anyone ever heard of the Seven-Years-War? That was really the first World War). Poetry came out of WWI.

Then there were the 20s and 30s. The golden age of aviation, an amazing era of exploration and prosperity (well, the 20s) and just a pretty cool time in general, unless you lived in the Weimar Republic... Strangely, there's not a lot of diesel punk in this era (Talespin and Rocketeer being notable exceptions, although the Rocketeer edges into WWII)

Freaking WWII. Now, I also, find WWII terribly interesting, but overdone. The History Channel, back when they showed history programs, knew of no other wars, and neither do game designers. Or diesel punk fans. My other problem with diesel punk is the fans. They are far more nitpicky than your typical steampunk, going on and on about this and that uniform and tank and gun and whatever. That's all well and good (I will geek out about military hardware all day long) but they ought to be nice about it, like steampunks. Where a steampunk will say "Ooh! What's that? That's awesome! Did you make it up? It's REAL? To wikipedia!" a diesel punk will be more like "They didn't have that yet."



That's the whole point of whatever punk! You cram cool shiny things together and try to figure out how they would work. It's supposed to be fun.

With some very well-done exceptions (most of which are not WWII settings), it seems like a lot of diesel punk is just WWII with more metal, a darker setting O_O and less human spirit. Where steampunk magnifies the heroic and creative person in an era that stood a chance of overshadowing people, diesel punk grinds and mechanizes the individual, rather than telling their stories.

It's all this:



and none of this.

No climbing Pointe du Hoc, no Audie Murphy, no Battle of Britain. Just CG models of extra big tanks, guys in gas masks, and hot SS dominatrices. Now, I know the SS had the snazziest uniforms in the war, and we all know how I feel about jodhpurs, but come on! Poetry came out of WWII too, but I'll save that for later.

Here's the example of nitpicking that prompted this post, a comment on my Talespin AMV, which I had described offhandedly as "baby's first steampunk". The comment was this (caps in the original):

Talespin is DIESEL PUNK as its defined using 30s era equivalent technology, clothing, and terminology. Most notable are Internal Combustion engines and Vacuum tube based electronic technology.

Sure, technically that's true. But who cares? Apparently I do, since I was annoyed enough to write a whole post about it. Anyway, "baby's first diesel punk" doesn't sound as good, and is not as understandable to most people. Maybe that's why diesel punk fans have a chip on their shoulder. They want to get out from under a genre that is all mushy and vague and anything-goes.

While we're over analyzing a cartoon, I might point out that Don Karnage's airship is like the one in Master of the World, which is Jules Verne. At 0:18 in the video you can see the steam engines on the side propellers, and they never specify what powers the upward-pointing rotors. I always figured it was either a later edition he added using piston engines, or else they run off the steam engines too, either using an electric turbine, or a simple belt drive. In the show, the Iron Vulture doesn't even make a typical airship noise (droning propellers) but rather the chugging of a steam engine. Many of his crew also wear older clothes - top hats, for example. He's a bit of a throwback in the setting of the story. The awesome level of detail Disney put into the show means you actually can tell how the tech works, and the pirates, at least, are still a little steampunk.

Is that the point of my video? No. the point is that Talespin is awesome, and Abney Park is awesome.

How cool was this guy?!?

Super cool! Felix Nadar, aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was pioneering photographer, baloonist, and all-around geek. He was friends with Jules Verne, and he liked heavier-than-air flying machines.

That is all.

Architectural Abomination!!!!!!

or, the planned Eisenhower Memorial, or, a perfect illustration of what I was on about in my last post.


They are planning to put a memorial to President Eisenhower in Washington DC, right in the middle of all the beautiful classical buildings and monuments, but the planned design is anything but beautiful. The design they chose was by postmodern "artist" Frank Gehry, and it consists of huge, 80 foot tall metal posts with screens stuck up on them. Right in the middle of DC. Blocking the view of the Capitol Building. The only image of Eisenhower will be a statue of him as a barefoot farmboy in Kansas. It says nothing about the great leader he became, nothing about the world he protected in WWII, and helped to forge in the early days of the Cold War. It erases the idea of virtue and the ideals that human beings should be inspired to when they see monuments to great men. Call your congressmen and senators today!

There is an alternative - the National Civic Art Society has hosted their own contest to design a better memorial, and they have stunning results. Any one of these monuments would be a wonderful addition to the scenery of Washington DC, and be a fitting tribute to a president who shaped America's greatness in the 20th Century perhaps more than any other until Reagan. So, again, call your congressmen, email them, do whatever it takes.



Now, there is more going on here than just an aesthetic abomination that should never get zoning approval in an historic location, and never would in a civilized part of America. There are ideas at play, and it must have Ike spinning in his grave. See, the style of the proposed monument is postmodern, and shows a lot of the international style (i.e. Marxism). It is not suitable for a Cold Warrior and should not be built.

Modern Architecture

So, I was asked to rant about "form follows function" on the comments on Bad Catholic, a superlative blog that I follow, and I did. Apologies to everyone who had to scroll past my unexpectedly long post. I wanted to include pictures, so I will write about it here, mostly from cutting and pasting my comment and embellishing it. It is, after all, in my time period of choice.

Form follows function.

The phrase was coined by Louis Sullivan, considered the father of modern architecture. Before you judge the man too harshly, know that he didn't design what we consider "modern" architecture, but rather, a new type of building based on the ability of steel beams to soar, with exterior decorations added to emphasize height, and the function of the building, rather than following the old style of stone courses for each story from when the bricks actually did the work of holding up the building.

He was quite the rebel in 1890s Chicago, and the most (in)famous student of his style is Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite his abrasive personality, he made some gorgeous buildings, far more ornately decorated than the traditional buildings he moved away from. It really looked like art deco and art nouveau, only forty years early. All the decorations framed functional aspects - receding arches and solar patterns around doors, marble everything on banks, vertical courses of stone zooming up between the windows of skyscrapers. My favorite thing he did was take classical elements, like a doric column, and used its form and proportions on the entire building, with a sturdy base, "fluted" sides, and a course of decorative stone on top.

Observe the vertical lines of this building, and the column design.


In this detail, you can really see the way the surface looks like a steel skyscraper frame, only carved. The lines draw the eyes upward.


And capping off the building, look at this cornice!


One of his most famous buildings was the Transportation Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. He refused to follow the beaux arts style that the architects agreed upon, and designed what basically looks like an art deco train station. Apparently it was painted with reds and golds radiating out from the arch - it must have been glorious.


Not that beaux arts isn't awesome as well. In fact, it is one of my favorite styles. An example of beaux arts construction from the fair was the Fine Arts Building, which happens to be the only building still standing today (in order to get insurance for all the art, they had to build a real building, not a temporary facade). It is now the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and words cannot express how much I want to go there! Note the classical proportions and features. Truly beautiful.


Speaking of which, beaux arts also has its skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building in NYC is a nice example. It looks like a blade of awesome thrust into the city. Note how the courses of stonework run horizontally under the windows. That is just a facade of stone, not part of the floor, but it is a holdover from Renaissance architecture. Sullivan thought leaving it on there stopped the eye in its upward journey, so he changed his stonework to vertical. Again, a facade, but one that follows the building's skeleton, and makes the skyscraper look taller. I like them both, but this clearly illustrates "form follows function".


Sullivan was very into using the Golden Ratio and form, unity, harmony (both within the design and with its surroundings), and decoration - all that stuff that architects forgot soon after that...

Enter communism. The internationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were trying to find a style of architecture with no national flavor. Many of Sullivan's students and adherents were into that too, so they started stripping off aesthetic elements to achieve some kind of stylistic unity. This nonsense reached its peak in the 1930-60s, with old buildings being demolished and replaced by monolithic cement and glass skyscrapers. They believed that form was secondary to function, that once you got a building to do what a building does (hold furniture and people, keep out the weather) you can stop, no matter how it looks. Decorating it was aspirational and terribly bourgeois. Some of them went so far as to leave all the "functional" elements, like ductwork, exposed, claiming that as an aesthetic. The really ironic thing is that exposed ductwork is hard to keep clean, huge glass walls bleed heat and rack up huge heating and cooling bills, and flat roofs leak. These buildings are not functional at all - their very banality actually hinders their function. So much for integrity. By any measure of beauty, these modern buildings failed, because the ideal behind them was to erase humanity, not to uplift it.

In this one, you can see how it resembles Sullivan skyscraper, only plain. It actually looks older, because it has the reek of dingy bureaucracy about it.


For a more egregious example, check this out:


Need that flavor out of your mouth? Here's an image search of Sullivan's work. And here's some beaux arts. And what the hey - a little art nouveau and art deco. Enjoy

It's D-day.

Here is President Reagan's speech at Point-du-Hoc.

More fun with youtube

So I made another video. It's not exactly steampunk, but it is from 1906 (apparently). Someone stood on the front of a streetcar going down Market Street in San Francisco, and they filmed everything that went by. It's pretty crazy, particularly the lack of traffic laws.

There are a lot of videos that use this film, and also this one, which I like a lot, that juxtaposes the same film with one taken perhaps two weeks later, after the devastating earthquake. The speed in these videos seems to be the speed at which the film was digitized, and I think it looks eerily slow.

Not mine though. I sped it up to the right speed - as we all know, people walked about 25 percent faster back then. It's how the West was won, people! Or it could have had something to do with undercranking the camera and then playing it back at normal speed. Anyway, it's way funnier if you speed it up, and of course, pair it Vernian Process's incomparable version of the Maple Leaf Rag. I picked an arbitrary speed for the video, which then ended up shorter than the song, so I added some remixy parts to fit the music better.

What you end up with is a Where's Waldo of chaos and insanity. As you watch, try to spot the following:

• 2, possibly 3, newspaper boys
• 1 newspaper man
  
• 2 men nearly getting run over
• 2 women nearly getting run over (at the same time)
• 2 horse-drawn wagons nearly getting run over
• a car driving the wrong way
• a horse galloping very fast
• a wagon going the wrong way
• 4 cars cutting off the streetcar
• a guy in an apron chasing another guy in an apron
• 2 guys hanging onto a car
• a wagon with a skinny horse cutting off a car, and a streetcar

Let me know if I have miscounted, or missed any other funny things.

Railroad Day!

Today I went to the Silver Spike Festival in Tucson, which commemorates the 130th anniversary of the railroad coming through Tucson, Arizona. The mayor, in proper mayor attire, seen here to the right of the lady in the white dress (just his top hat, really, but that's what I mean by "proper mayor attire"), proclaimed March 20th "Railroad Day" in Tucson, and there will be festivities every year from now on.

This is good news, because it was a really fun day. They put bunting on the train, which was restored and presented to the city in 1955, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the railroad. When I rule the world, all occasions of civic pride will have bunting.

The great grandson of Estevan Ochoa, an entrepreneur who presented the railroad with a silver spike in 1880, gave a speech, and it included part of Estevan's original words. He said "we must bend our shoulders to the oars of progress, and... become the shining star in the constellation of the United States". The actual silver spike is in the case in front of the train.

They read a lot of the speeches from back then, when people really had a way with words, remarking on how the iron horse, "with pounding, steel-flocked flanks" had linked Tucson with the civilized world, and how men "with their pluck, courage, and capital, brought the iron wheels of progress" etc etc. There were gunfights, and a cannon (fired quite unexpectedly by guys dressed like they were from the old Presidio in 1775), and tons of people in western outfits! Some of the dresses were really amazing, as were the hats:

There were a few steampunk people in the mix, as well - one of them gave me his card (I was dressed steampunk enough to stand out, I guess). Here are some more cool outfits, and a statue of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday, commemorating the time they killed Frank Stilwell in a gunfight at the train station in Tucson, in March of 1882. It was part of the Arizona War, which began with the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Stilwell may have killed Morgan Earp.

Some awesome planes!

Does anyone else think this thing looks like something out of a Miyazaki movie? It's the fe2b, a pusher fighter from WWI, that, despite its looks, was apparently pretty deadly and sturdy. In fact, Max Immelmann may have been killed by one, and the Red Baron had to make a forced landing after being shot by Donald Cunnel from a fee. It may have looked like this - that's the kind of plane the Red Baron was flying that day:

That was in 1916 and 17, when they had synchronizer gears, and didn't even need pushers anymore. See, the idea was, you could fire backwards and forwards, without shooting through the propeller, since it was behind you.

There were hazards though - the gunner was not strapped in in any way, and actually had to stand on their seat and shoot the rear the gun! And if you crashed, you had the engine come down on top of you. Also, the tail section was very delicate, compared to a normal fuselage.

I think they're cool though. Here's one that I drew, but I moved the guns, just because. Actually, it was going to be part of a different illustration.

World War I Films, or, Why are they all Viet Nam films?

So I was trying to find some good World War I films that showed off the aircraft they used back then. Aside from the fact that there really weren't that many made, most of the ones I found were just so whiny! Now I should say that there are several very good WWI films, whiny or not, like Lawrence of Arabia, the Dawn Patrol, Galipoli, and Hell's Angels. And there are also a bunch of non-whiny ones that barely qualify as war films at all, focusing mainly on romance between girls and handsome pilots (not that I mind watching handsome WWI pilots).

I will not talk about the ultimate achievement in the art of whining and missing the point that is both versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, nor will I go into the WWII movies-disguised-as-WWI movies, like Sergeant York, which was a deliberate propaganda piece to get Americans to think about entering WWII (as well as being a great film). It's like how MASH was really about Viet Nam even though it's set in Korea, but with the opposite message.

I'm talking about the early 30s WWI films here, and unfortunately I must limit it to the ones that are available to rent (*sniff* I want to see Dirigible. . .) Once again heading to my favorite video store (the one that still rents tapes) I picked up The Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn. It's a very good movie, despite the fact that tension issues on this particular tape made it look as though the whole thing was filmed under water. It's got great characters and fine acting, and it's quite exciting. Flynn plays the leader of a squadron of British flyers in France. They are on their last legs, surviving only because they get new replacements every day for the men who are killed. Of course the replacements are basically cannon fodder for the far more battle-hardened German aces. During the film, Flynn's character makes the usual speech, looking off into the distance, about how they keep sending these boys up to die, and no one remembers what it's all for. Very "Bridge Too Far". I recall reading about another situation where it was all Britain could do to keep planes in the air, most of them piloted by young men who were lucky if they'd flown more than 10 hours. It's called the Battle of Britain, and of course their officers probably felt horrible sending them up knowing they had almost no chance of coming back. But they didn't pretend to have forgotten why they did it. Germany was trying to invade them.

So I took that tape back, after finally watching the whole thing, despite having to fast-forward it all the way to the end and then back to where I left off every time it got too hard to see. The guy at the store gave me a free rental. I was looking in the war films for 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (wrong war, but it's just so good, and Robert Mitchum is in it) when what should I see on the shelf but Hell's Angels!

Hell's Angels was directed and produced by Howard Hughes, and in 1930 was the the most expensive movie ever made. It's easy to see why. It has everything, including a long color sequence. It had the usual tinted blue-for-night, red-for-awesome-airship-crash bits, but this color sequence was actually in color. Other strains to the budget included a scene in an airship, which burns up and crashes spectacularly, much better than the one in the Rocketeer, and a dogfighting scene with countless planes on screen at once. When they filmed it they actually used something like 80 planes, which makes for some really really exciting dogfights, some of which are quite gruesome. The first time I saw it I was trying so hard to figure out how they could possibly have made it look so realistic, like did they use rear-projection? Did they use miniatures? Did they build cockpits and put them on moving stands? Turns out it was the obvious (and yet unbelievable) answer - they put a bunch of cameras on a bunch of planes and had themselves a dogfight! They reshot it a bunch and also had to wait around for months and months until they could get some clouds in the background. It has the Red Baron's Flying Circus (Jasta 11, which I was so impressed to see shown still using biplanes, the famous red triplane appearing only late in the war) and excellent special effects throughout. Basically Howard Hughes was one hell of a film-maker (it helps to be crazy).

But what makes Hell's Angels the best movie about WWI? They are fighting because Germany was stealing other countries. Imagine that. The final dramatic bombing mission in the film is to take out a munitions factory and supply lines so that when the infantry goes over the top to advance the next day, they won't get quite so slaughtered. It's quite clear, the lives lost are not shown as wasted, and it actually felt like the war it was made about, not like Viet Nam, which in real life wasn't even like "Viet Nam" as it's shown in movies.

Adventures in Victorian Steampunkland (London)

Merry Christmas (it counts until tomorrow!) and Happy New Year, everyone. As my first post this year, I will relate something I did last year. Three weeks before Christmas I went with my aunt to England, and Paris, via the Chunnel. We ran all over and did touristy things, but explored a lot too. We became hopelessly lost on Hampstead Heath, in the rain, and I got trenchfoot because the soles of my old boots wore through. A tragedy - they will be missed. (My boots, not my feet). Going off the name (since changed) of a street in a book we both read and enjoyed (Ghost Map) we wandered the narrow streets behind Picadilly Circus until we found the site of a pump responsible for London's worst ever cholera epidemic. The pub far in the background is the John Snow, named for the man who used data collected from the incident to prove that cholera is a water-borne disease.

So I guess that's touristy. I'm sure I needn't tell you how thrilled I was to be in the middle of so much history, particularly Victorian history. Even the tube station near our hostel (Palmer's Lodge, a former Victorian mansion) was steampunk. It was built in 1863 as one of the the first underground

stations, and it looks just as it did then, but grungier and with new advertisements on the walls. Even the fire extinguishers are inside fancy wood and glass cabinets.

The station's entrance had this war monument with an artillery shell from the first World War. All over London, and Paris, there are war monuments, mostly from WWI, and also WWII. The ones in Paris really got to me, since you almost can't walk down a street without seeing a plaque telling about someone who died on that spot, and what they were doing for the war. I'll have more on war monuments later.

First, more about steampunk! The highlight of the scientific expedition portion of the trip for me was, of course, the London Science Museum. I wanted to go there because I knew they had a difference engine, Charles Babbage's amazing steam-powered clockwork calculation machine. I believe at one time they had an exhibit of a modern analytical engine based on his design, but not when I went. Here I am standing next to Babbage's Difference Engine no. 1.

And on the right is the engine itself. You can see the numbered gears and the columns of other gears that somehow perform calculations. Honestly, it might as well be magic. I only understand it a tiny bit, but this is the little guy that kicked off steampunk as a literary genre.

The difference engine was in a room called "The making of the modern world." It was a huge jumble of wonderful things like dynamos and cars, a penny farthing bike, lenses, telephone, an Avro (One of Britain's WWI biplanes) an AC motor built by Tesla himself, and a box containing cross sections of different kinds of undersea telegraph cables. The museum also had rooms and rooms devoted to history of flight, with some really old planes, and models of even more planes, and airships. They had a flight suit from 1909, and even a real autogyro!

NeoClassicicsm

I had a neo-classical dream. I dreamed there was a grove in the forest, with fruit hanging from trees. There were ladies in flowing Greek dresses picking the fruit. (I think this image came from the Mary Cassat mural in the Women's building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition here) In the middle of the grove was a bower of white flowers with a young man reclining on it. He was wearing a pale gray morning coat and top hat. (He looked kind of like Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club.) He said "These are the fruits of knowledge and science". I went into grove and watched them picking fruit, but I noticed that there was something moving among the undergrowth.

There were satyrs who kept trying to take the fruit.

Maybe this is about the misuse of science, or consumerism or something like that. Or maybe I read too much weird stuff before going to bed. . . .