a point when one thing turns into another, or tries to embody explain or pass for said idea

First of all you've got the concept of a Tipping Point, when one thing tips everything over, sort of casting the deciding vote and catalyst of a mass wave of change. What the final straw does to a camel's back.

Tipping Point could refer to the point of a propogation of memes, which are ideas from simple concepts to behaviors to religions, that humans are triggered to replicate. Charles Dawkins came up with the Memes concept, which is itself a Meme, and it's an idea that I'm propogating. Albeit lazily.

Its been used to refer to white flight when a certain number of black families moved in, in urban areas in the 1960s. Morton Grodzins was a pofessor of Political Science of the University of Chicago, and he wrote about the Tipping Point in The metropolitan area as a racial problem, which was explaining the sudden creation of the racial problem of poverty, isolation and desperation of America's inner cities.

just another instrument of the reign of terror

Francois Louis Bourdon was a lawyer/representative of the Oise in Northern France, and one of the first radicals in history, taking part in the insurrections and intrigues of the French Revolution from its inception in 1792 until it's it's last phase before the rise Napoleon ("The Directory"), when he became one of its many victims.

In 1792, as a member of the National Assembly (a legislative body of the government in those earlier years of the Revolution) he voted with the majority to gillotine King Louis XVI. in 1796 this body was succeeded by The Directory, an arrangement when all executive power was shared by five regicides. One of those five Directors was Paul Barras, the debauched Aristocrat and opportunistic adventurer. A couple of years earlier he'd supported Maximilien Robespierre through the Reign of Terror(1792-1794), of which Robespierre was the bloody architect. Our man Bourdon de l'Oise also supported Robie, but in 1794 Barras and Bourdon turned on Robespierre (in the Thermadorian Reaction), and as the government forces under General Napoleon came for his arrest Robie jumped out a window, but they were still able to bring him alive to the guillotine (though with his jaw shot off), and beheaded (it was said, face-up, a first in French history) in 1794.

When in 1796 Paul Barras became one of the five members of The Directory, he and two of the others ordered the suppression of Bourdon and others considered Royalists, this despite Bourdon's earlier vote to kill King Loius XVI ("Louis the Last") and Marie Antoinette. Loyalties and even ideologies switched very quickly in those years of this revolutionary republic, and practically every day numerous people were killed in the name of Revolutionary principles.

They shipped Bourdon de l'Oise off to the Penal Colony of French Guiana, where he died shortly after arrival in 1797.

Its pretty remarkable how complex the French Revolution is, if you try to follow the play by play of warring ideological forces during a period when France was also at war with half of Europe. But "The revolution eats its children" as it is said, and this is the prime historical example.

Napoleon, a General taking his orders from the Director who ordered the downfall of Bourdon, took absolute power for himself in 1799. He didn't bring stability but was hugely successful for a time in conquering Europe. It's impossible to know what he would have been like in peacetime. But we can think of dicators like bacteria -- in terms of survival and reproduction, it's still a 'successful' form of government -- more prevalent throughout the world than democracies and republics (in all but name.)

One hell of a Tier II Provincial Junior A Hockey team

The Brampton Capitals are based in the city of Brampton, a city of 400,000, in the Brampton district of Toronto, Ontario.
If you came across my January posting about Box Lacrosse, you might have been reminded that when the summer's over, there's going to be ice on that Box Lacrosse court, and people are going to play Ice Hockey there.

The Hockey Leagues of Canada and their histories, you might imagine, would be one of the most Byzantine and banal of palimpsests. But you would be underestimating the extremity of it. There's Provincial vs. National, Tier I and II, Regional league subheadings, Junior A, Junior B, and on and on, divisions of leagues of regions, etc.

If it pleases you, the Brampton Capitals are seeded first in the West Division, and are playing in the second round of championship playoffs tomorrow night, after defeating the Ice Hawks last Friday. As recounted from the Brampton Capitals website, "Several games saw numerous players drop the gloves in the heat of the battle."
It must be said, this team needs a new mascot. They haven't even picked a single capital letter, like 'B' ... maybe they mean 'B' and 'C', but that's so self referential, not to mention abstract.

Dom Chiti, as Middle America as you can get

Dom Chiti's dad was the major league catcher Harry Chiti, who will forever be remembered not for his catching knuckleballs, but for being the only player ever traded for himself -- from the Cleveland Indians to the New York Mets, in 1962. Chiti, stuck working for the same club that had just traded him away, hung up his glove that same year.
Two decades later Harry's son, Dom, became a left handed pitcher for the Atlanta Braves in 1976, then the Baltimore Orioles in 1981. And then he retired, at the age of 23, perhaps because of injury, but details are scarce -- only the skeleton of his five years of pitching and running stats remain.
But he became a scout, then other functions within the infrastructure of the Texas Rangers. Now he is their bullpen coach, one of six under-coaches beneath the head coatch. He's the guy in the dugout who's job it is to psych up the relief pitchers. "I wan't you to pitch their asses off!", for instance.
Dom was born on the western border of Missouri, in Independence -- a holy city for Mormons. Harry was born in a bare patch of South Central Illinois, population is currently just over 1,000 beings. How more middle of America could one possibly get?

the strength of moderation, in opposition to the extremes of our time

Daniel S. Nevins was born 1966 in River Vale, New Jersey. There are some fairly well off white folk who live in those parts. Mostly fiscal conservatives, Republicans, yet comedian Bill Maher grew up there too.
Nevins went to the Frisch school, also located in Bergen county, a post-high school Orthodox Yeshiva. Then he went to an Orthodox Yeshiva outside of Jerusalem, Efrat, settled since the Bronze Age about four thousand years ago.
Then he became a rabbi in Farmington Hills, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. He'll shortly be moving to back east to be the new Dean of the Rabbinical School of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a major institution in Conservative Judaism.
Conservative Judaism differs from Orthodox in that Conservative Judaism (or some prefer Masorti meaning 'tradiltional' Judaism) allows for change with the times, if need be, a little flexibility. They have organisations -- like the Jewish Theological Seminary, that make up the practice, kind of like lawyers building a case for a Judge. You know who the Judge is -- God, or the Messiah, in some mixture. It was just a couple of years ago that Nevins, along with two other Rabbis, wrote a paper that espoused a more open understanding of homosexuality and homosexuals, that didnt condemn them. The paper narrowly won a majority of supporters from the JST, and became part of their law. But it was a divisive issue, and almost fifty perfect of people were opposed -- and no doubt upset about it. And everyone should remember that when 'the center will not hold', then there's danger of wars among tribes. I note that those that the majority of Jews were Masorti fifteen years ago; Reform Judaism has been diminishing quickly. Now the Orthodox have come in the lead. We know that the Orthodox are the most inflexible by definition. Not to condemn, just to say, I think if Daniel were in charge there'd be more middle ground. He's been educated in all Orthodoxy, he knows it -- but check out the rest of the world, he's saying, sometimes if the shit don't work, change it.

media subversion vs. self delusion: a nuanced view

The Most Royal Candidate Theory is the idea that in US presidential elections, the candidate with the most royal connections is the one that always wins. As the author of the wikipedia article points out, this theory is obviously false, for the simple fact that there were four cases of US history when two candidates vied for the presidency and one would be defeated, only to win four years later.

And then the anonymous author points to the late Harold Brooks-Baker as a proponent of this theory, and how world press outlets would listen to his pronouncements despite there not really being any basis to how he came about these judgements of whether someone was more or less royal. There's a link to an obit in the Daily Telegraph, which is really nasty to Brooks-Baker, saying he wasn't really the publisher of Burke's Peerage but made himself seem like he was, and slights to his character.

I had dinner with Brookie, as he called himself, in London, as he was a friend of my wife's family. He was very charming and affable and fun to be with. I was very saddened to hear when he succumbed to polio a couple of years ago. Maybe he did make pronouncements to get media coverage, and maybe what he said didn't always have a basis in fact, but I don't really know or care that much. Because I think the whole business of trying to find who is related to Charlemagne is really pointless at best, and at worst indicitive of someone's ability to delude themselves into thinking they are more special than someone else without even trying to actually achieve anything.

I didn't have that kind of feeling about Brookie, and I guess I never knew that much about his work with the Burke's publications. But as he said himself, many British people had a problem with an American -- though one that had lived in England for decades -- to follow this subject, and this seems like anti-American snobbery, even as they were sniffing at his interest in royal lineages. And if Brookie did make things up, then I can understand that a bit better (wanting publicity for financial reasons or attention) than the types that follow this to justify a self-aggrandizing idea of blood and history (and I know this was not how Brookie was or what motivated him). Those latter types are fools to think there's any there there to be distorted by Brookie.

But for those that just didn't like the how the media would publish or broadcast what he said, because what the royals are doing or who they are related to isn't really news at all...well for that I have sympathy. But I'm suspicious of anyone who feels too strongly about it, because lets face it, that's unfortunately the kind of media we have these days, and you can't blame that on Brooks-Baker. You can't applaud him either. But look closely into it if someone is too vehement... then they are secret haters, with overt reasonable arguments, and covert dislike of someone because of nastier reasons and bigotries.

where volunteering for the British army Leeds you

The West Riding Artillery have for most of the century or so of their existence consited of a couple of regiments of volunteers. If anyone should attack Yorkshire, they have to look out for these guys. One of these regiments, the 101st, is based in Leeds, one of the eight 'core cities', or largest cities in England apart from London. They have people in Iraq right now, since 2004. They've got five of their people in Basrah.
Until recently they had been training in the use of anti-aircraft guns, but now their main focus is on finding batteries of enemy mortars or artillery, primarily using the COBRA system, which is a big box of radar equipment mounted on a rack that gets trucked around.
You can check on the British Army's website all the equipment that they have, and even how much they pay and terms of service. http://www.army.mod.uk/ Or visit the West Riding 101st regiment site (http://www.army.mod.uk/269bty/), if you want to live in Leeds, and visit the Royal Armory museum there.

the education of a little place in Arkansas

If you live in this school district you are proud to be a Hillbilly. You are almost certainly white, there are hardly any minorities here at all. The biggest town in the district is Ozark -- its population was 3,504 by the last census taken, in 2000. It's got a certain outsize media notoriety, as follows.

Elizabeth Gracen was Miss America in 1982, appeared nude in Playboy magazine. In the 1990s someone she knew said then governer Bill Clinton raped Gracen in 1983. Gracen said no, it was just rough sex.

Dr. Rebecca Johnson was a doctor with a private practice and maybe the most successful physician in Arkansas, who dominated and collected money from the regions hospitals and medical institutions. In 1992 she he was found strangled by her secretary's husband in a hotel room in 1992. The story goes that he convinced he was connected to 'the southern mafia' and to give him 1.5 million in cash, and he would use it for laundering and double her money in days. She brought him the bag of cash and he killed her.

the good old days of hackerdom

"Eternity" was the name of a BBS program active from 1994-1996. BBS, if you don't know because you're not a hacker or coder active during the 1990s, was a kind of precursor to the web discussion groups we have today. Someone would moderate a group using his (maybe her) computer -- which could have been and often was something like an Amiga or Commodore 64 type ancient computing device with a modem, over which others could dial in to download updates to and participate in the discussion, or share some limited packs of information. Modems were so slow back then, it was mostly text.
BBS's for some harken to a great time before the world wide web became complicated, commercialized, what have you. Someone has even created a five and a half hour documentary about the phenomenon in 2005 (http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/)-- it's pretty good too, according to Film Threat and Wired magazine.
We are in the age of ever more articulated subcultures!

Aussie against pollution, except noise

Jim Longley is an Australian accountant, born 1958, member of the New South Wales Legislative assembly from 1986 until 1996, affiliated with the Liberal party. He is also a lay Anglican minister.
On the national stage, a politician of note is Peter Garrett, born 1953, an MP with the Australian Labor Party -- the other major party of Australia. Peter Garrett used to be the vocalist and frontman of the band Midnight Oil, a rock band that had highly politically charged lyrics advocating environmentalism and Aboriginal rights.
These two people may not have a whole lot to do with each other, but when I think of an Australian government person, I think of Peter Garrett, because it is interesting to me that a rock star would become an MP. In the US, the nearest we had to that was Sonny Bono. He was republican house representative from California who would never escape his having become the cliche of what it was to be a soft-rock-70s AM mustachioed and later died skiing husband of Cher.
I saw Midnight Oil play in 1988 at the campus of the University of Illinois. The auditorium was of an octagonal shape, and I was all the way at the front and to the right side, a speaker twice my size on stage in front of me. This was probably the worst design for an auditorium ever, as the parallel walls ensured endless bouncing back and forth of the sound, and I couldn't actually hear the music because of the reverberation off the walls. I remember only Peter Garrett's bald pate now and then emerging from beyond the back of peoples heads, and that after a while, much too long, I was clutching my head in pain as I escaped the auditorium. My right ear was ringing for the next two days.

the short but benevolent life of a submarine

the USS Stickelback was commissioned at the end of March 1945, and began tests shortly afterwards in Guam. She departed for the Sea of Japan on August 6, 1945 -- the day the atomic bomb 'little boy' was dropped on Hiroshima. three days after that, a second atomic bomb 'fat man' was dropped on Nagasaki. When Stickelback reached her patrol waters, a cease fire had been declared --the war was over. When two bamboo rafts of Japanese sailors were discovered by the Stickelback, survivors of a sunken Frigate, they were taken aboard, given food and medical treatment, and set afloat again right next to Japanese shores.
In 1952, the Stickelback was converted to a snorkel type submarine. But it never saw any combat. in 1958, during an exercise with a couple of ships, the submarine lost power while submurged, and surfaced right in front of a ship that was unable to swerve away in time to avoid a collision with the Stickelback.
The submarine crew were rescued, but the Stickelback went down 1000 feet to the bottom of the Pacific, near Hawaii.
"On Eternal Patrol" (http://www.oneternalpatrol.com/uss-stickleback-415.htm) is a website that honors all those sailors that died in US submarines, and the submarines themselves that sunk. It's somehow comforting to see this, probably because dying in a submarine seems like a very lonely way to go, like an astronaut dying in space. Usually the crew of a submarine die with the craft, for it's just a little tin can protecting them against the vastness of the ocean. In this fortunate case, only the Stickelback went to the bottom.

a play that I went to but mostly lost to memory

Brian Friel, born in 1929, in Omagh in northern Ireland, is a reknowned playright and director. His first plays were produced in the late 1950s. Probably his most successful play he's made is Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a production of which I saw on stage in New York, somewhere in the early 1990s. I've mostly forgotten what happened, but I remember that there were five women that seemed really unhappy, and that this seemed to have to do with they're being oppressed by catholocism and the suppression of the Irish language and pagan practices, like dancing. Suddenly some music comes on from somewhere, and a couple of the women are suddenly propelled into a kind of violent jig or dance, freeing themselves from the repression of dogma.
Looking back on it they were poor Irish folk so maybe the lack of work would make them sad as well, not just the church. But this is just how I remember the play, and may or may not be accurate.

central europe rocks in the summertime

The Czech Republic is a great place to be in the summertime, especially if you're just out of college. I was there for almost a year, 94-95. It got pretty dreary sometimes in the fall and winter, and most of the spring actually, but the summer had amazing weather, great times and music festivals. Hip Hop Kemp is one of two Hip Hop festivals that have been taking place in the Czech Republic in recent years. The tickets are cheap - something like $40 for three days of music, and very cheap camping. Almost 20,000 people have shown up to see some fairly major names in Hip Hop from the US, the UK, and elsewhere.
My music festival and concert experiences were especially memorable, of my times in C.R. and in Hungary, I wish I'd seen more. Now I'd be annoyed by the crowds, and the accursed youths having too much fun. But, I still got my memories of summertime in Europe.

A nice South Australian town where it rains like you were in London

Ah, Sterling, a nice small town, adjacent from South Australia's little capital, Adelaide. Because it's so close to Mount Lofty, it's the wettest place in South Australia. Which granted consists mostly of some of the most arid places you can find anywhere. But for those accustomed to the British climate, it's a great place to live in Australia, because of the Lofty Mountain range, for the precipitation in Sterling is comparable to London. I hope nothing happens to screw up the wind that blows up from the Great Australian Bight (Sea) into old Mount Lofty and keeps the areas that side of the mountain wet.
Mild weather is something that needs to be preserved, and is in short supply in Australia. The continent as a whole has terrible problems with soil erosion and salinification from bad farming practices. Even before the British Empire started to settle it as a big Penal colony, very little topsoil or good land existed, and moisture was in short supply. It was the ancestors of the Bushmen themselves who it seems were the cause of an ecological collapse, probably many milennia earlier. Read Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's important to know how industry and human activity affect our world by seeing how ecological collapse has been the cause of the destruction of societies in the past, so that we can appreciate what is happening today.

mid-70s fusion rocker attempts comeback without ever having been there

George Tickner was the rhythm guitarist for Journey when they first formed, as a non-vocal progressive jazz-rock fusion band. He toured made one album with them. Then he got tired of the touring and went into medical school. It's unclear whether he completed medical school, but he kept in touch with the band as the members changed and they became huge, with songs like... I'm going to spare you because you probably know the songs and you might have them in your head all day, as I have (the sacrifices I make for my art, sigh).
Flash forward, 2005 -- Tickner appears with past and 'current' members (about a dozen people) of Journey to see the band receive a star on the walk of fame.
Tickner, basking in the glory for the first time (they weren't widely known for their first three albums/incarnations), that year cuts an album with two of his former bandmates, which may still be available on one of their websites.
George got a slick website, lean on information, but not on web features. Of special interest is Josh's Journal, where a young fan named Josh details two days of his life in late 2005 -- how he's 'gotten really close to Lori :)', how he's practiced some guitar licks and ' and have gotten and in my friend Scott's opinion, really good.'.
Please don't go George Tickner's myspace page, you will regret it.

end-timers are ignorant haters, part 2

In the best-selling 2005 novel The Ezekiel Option, Joel C. Rosenberg postulated a near-future scenario wherein most of the world's powers, led by Russia and Iran, gang up against Israel and the U.S. to bring about Armageddon. Israel is close to using 'The Samson Option', in which it will launch hundreds of nuclear missles against various powers arrayed against it. But an American envoy manages to convince them that they should instead use 'The Ezekiel Option', which would entail taking no action, trusting in the prophesy of Ezekiel which says that God will smite the enemies of Israel, so that they won't have to. Right as the forces of evil are swarmed on the borders of Israel and Russia is ready to launch its missles, balls of fire fly in from space and destroy all the major enemy cities, their arms and armies, thus saving Israel and the world.
A lot of people in the US really believe this sort of scenario WILL happen. They really want and want to believe it will happen. This is especially frightening because people with this mindset have a great deal of influence in the US government these days. As hard as it is for a normal, non-life hating person to fathom, many people of the armageddon seeking ilk actually seek the destruction of our natural environment because it shores up their belief that the end-times are near. And books like The Ezekiel Option are the expression of these fantasies, couched in a realistic-seeming scenario, by someone well versed in world politics and current events, and able to creatively shape possible scenarios to a worst-possible scenario, before the deux ex machina fulfills the prophesy as the author sees it.
But the way Joel C. Rosenberg, a Jew, reads Ezekiel is not the way other end-timers might read it. For Rosenberg sees the evil forces of Gog and Magog as Iran and Russia, and backs this up with little hints to this effect, even if some of these may be based on sources that lived well after Ezekiel and presumably would not have had any better idea about what he meant than we do today.
Compare his scenario with that of an anti-Semitic end-timer, who would have it that the Jews themselves are 'Gog and Magog', and also bases this belief on sources that are old but are dated milennia after Ezekiel's time. In particular he bases this claim on the belief that most Jews are really descendants of the Turkic Black Sea kingdom of Khazaria, whose leaders adopted Judaism in the 8th Century. Ultimately he argues this makes the Jews not really Semitic, but a wiley barbian people, and Ezekiel's Gog and Magog. I use this as a counter example of how a great deal of fragmentary evidence can be accumulated to support whatever end-timer's chosen position, a justification of their hatred, fear and hope that a celestial hand will rid them of those they despise.
I would argue additionally, though I won't get into it this time, this usually comes from self-hatred -- but Nietzsche says this better than anyone.
Incidentally about the Khazars, I read Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe years ago and found it fascinating, but recent genetic research has I believe pretty much vanquished the idea that Ashkenazic Jews are not what most people think they are, and there isn't that big connection to Turkish peoples that (Jewish) Koestler or that apocalyptic Christian hater wishes they were.
And as a final digression, which will muddy the waters a bit but I can't resist, one of my favorite books of fiction is The Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavić. This is in spite of the facts that I later discovered about the author, who is Serbian. Pavić, it turns out, supported the Nationalists during their genocidal push to create a Greater Serbia in the early 90s, led by Slobodan Milosivic and his gang. Pavić apparently thought of the Serbs as the real Jews, the victims and not the perpetrators, maligned and misunderstood by the world. But tell that to the Croats, Bosniaks, or those massacred as Srebrenica.
Yeah, some Israelis do that kind of thing too I suppose, small scale but fairly regularly. I don't think an avenging God would have an easy time figuring out who NOT to smite these days.

Shakespeare as litmus test of cultural health

Wayne and Schuster were a famous Canadian comedy duo primarily active from the 40s through the 70s. Despite their great popularity at the time -- they had more appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show than any other act, 67 appearances in 11 years -- they are hardly known by anyone today who is not of an age old enough to have seen them. The reason for this is partly that humor does change over time. But if one looks at one of their classic routines (http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/a_baseball.cfm), in which baseball players speak in Shakespearean dialogue, it seems funnier and better to me than, say, Bob Hope. (whose fame for those under 50 now rests mostly with his movies, make of them what you will, and his appearances with Ronald Reagan or whoever, cracking semi-funny jokes).
The humor of the Shakespearian baseball sketch will continue to be funny so long as people continue to be familiar with the plays of Shakespeare. This is because the humor is sophisticated, and not just based on the sounds of Middle English but actually are based on a good knowledge of the material itself, as any good parody must be. (Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, greatly admired this sketch). But now that the American public education system has deteriorated so such a horrendous degree since the post-WWII period, the plays of Shakespeare are barely known or read by the general public who grew up in the 80s on and went to public schools. Therefore this kind of humor will be less appreciated, and this is not a reflection of the changing cultural mores or values, but rather of how bad things have gotten in US public education.
Disclaimer, I am not a Shakespeare expert nor have I read more than a handful of his plays, none recently. But that was a key part of our education back then, and it was enough to 'get' Shakespeare, and as time went on start to realize his centrality in Western literature and language. He's the foundation upon which most literature that followed rests. And forever ripe for parody, so long as we retain familiarity with his works.

cold war films: propaganda in reverse

Cold War films hit their peak shortly after the peak of the Cold War itself, which reached its apotheosis with the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) and the Cuban Missle Crisis (1962). The classic and best period of Cold War films would be 1962-5. Noteable Cold War films of this period include Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and The Bedford Incident.
This latter film starred Richard Widmark as a Captain Ahab-like US Navy Captain of the fictional USS Beford, leading a destroyer ship that stalks a Russian submarine, and Sydney Potier as a journalist who happens to be on board and who resists this course of action that could lead to a full war with the Soviet Union.
Cold War films are, like any dramatic films, a reflection of society's fears, but much more so. I like these classic Cold War films not only because they are good movies (well I don't care as much for Manchurian Candidate, really, but its a film of note), but because they are overt expressions of these fears, as opposed to most films that work on our fears covertly -- which is the essence of propaganda. Commercial films are typically steeped in a covert kind of propaganda, making it doubly concealed in the way it does our thinking for us, making assumptions for the viewer about how the world works, and what prejudices we have.
Some of the worst offenders in this regard were films of the 40s and early 50s, prior to the flowering of CW films but on the heels of WW2 and then McCarthy, when we were steeped in fear of the Cold War, coupled with studio control of filmmaking. But as the 50s progressed, the public became more critical of the implications of adherence to the policies of the paranoid extremes of the US right, and the fear became at least as intense that something THEY would do would cause WW3, and a nuclear holocaust. Plus, the studio system was breaking up, and would fall apart in the 60s.
'The enemy' of these classic Cold War films were not the Soviets, but the mindset of anyone that could do something that could lead to the end of the world as we know it. And this fear will be with us as long as we still have that world.
The Bedford Incident was fiction, but a few years before its production there was a real life incident chillingly close to the events described in the film, though it involved an American submarine on a spying mission in Soviet polar waters, and several Soviet ships that had discovered the sub through the use of sonar. The submarine could not flee the Soviet ships, for to move quickly away it would have to surface, and the Soviets detonated grenades above it to indicate what would happen if it did. After three days the submarine had just about run out of fuel, the Soviet ships had not budged, and so the submarine was forced to take its chances and come to the surface. When it did, the Soviets did not attack it, but let it pass unmolested to return to European waters. As it did so, on of the Soviet ships flashed its lights, signaling a message in code, "thanks for the sonar practice."