![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Navigation
Jun. 19th, 2011 12:17 amONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO roughly this past week or so –
Lieutenant E.R.G.R. "Teddy" Evans gave his installment of the wintertime lecture series, on the basics of surveying. When I read Scott's journal entry on it I thought it must have been Edgar Evans, because he's described as "shy and slow, but very painstaking", which doesn't sound like Teddy "Let Me Show You My Party Trick" Evans at all. But the Director's Cut of the journals assures me that yes, Teddy it was. Upon reflection I came to the realisation that more may have been at play than stage fright: Scott had something less than a high opinion of his second-in-command and seems not to have been very good at hiding his feelings about people. There's a famous drawing of Walt Disney giving someone 'the eyebrow' (evidently not famous enough to turn up on Google Image Search, though) and I thought, if Grumpyface Scott was sitting in the front row appraising him like that, that could put anyone off their game.
After the lecture, Scott made a list of Basic Things About Navigation which All Officers Should Know, including how to find a meridian altitude – the measurement of a celestial object through a sextant which, after looking up the object and date in a big table of numbers and doing some calculations, tells you your latitude. ( Cherry, though ... )
Anyway, one early morning, as I was reading my email before coffee (always a dangerous thing), I read VanDee's correspondence on the Teddy/Cherry episode, and my half-conscious brain leapt in to say "Wa-hey! But for a matter of spelling that could be a really dreadful pun! Maybe Cherry just didn't get it!" So, of course, this happened: ( A Comeek. )
Lieutenant E.R.G.R. "Teddy" Evans gave his installment of the wintertime lecture series, on the basics of surveying. When I read Scott's journal entry on it I thought it must have been Edgar Evans, because he's described as "shy and slow, but very painstaking", which doesn't sound like Teddy "Let Me Show You My Party Trick" Evans at all. But the Director's Cut of the journals assures me that yes, Teddy it was. Upon reflection I came to the realisation that more may have been at play than stage fright: Scott had something less than a high opinion of his second-in-command and seems not to have been very good at hiding his feelings about people. There's a famous drawing of Walt Disney giving someone 'the eyebrow' (evidently not famous enough to turn up on Google Image Search, though) and I thought, if Grumpyface Scott was sitting in the front row appraising him like that, that could put anyone off their game.After the lecture, Scott made a list of Basic Things About Navigation which All Officers Should Know, including how to find a meridian altitude – the measurement of a celestial object through a sextant which, after looking up the object and date in a big table of numbers and doing some calculations, tells you your latitude. ( Cherry, though ... )
Anyway, one early morning, as I was reading my email before coffee (always a dangerous thing), I read VanDee's correspondence on the Teddy/Cherry episode, and my half-conscious brain leapt in to say "Wa-hey! But for a matter of spelling that could be a really dreadful pun! Maybe Cherry just didn't get it!" So, of course, this happened: ( A Comeek. )
