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 "But every boy knows the Chums of Chance," declared Lindsay Noseworth perplexedly. "What could you've been reading, as a youth?"

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Either Lew is pretty near the same age as the Chums of Chance or Lindsay has just declared the Chums of Chance are either a long standing club with rotating members or the Chums of Chance have always been the current roster, for years and years, because they're either ghosts or angels. You know which one I believe! Although maybe you don't if you haven't been reading my hundreds of blog posts on this book. I believe they're angels! And not just any angels! Randolph St. Cosmo, the captain, is the embodiment of Orc from William Blake's America a Prophecy.

I guess we're also learning that the Chums of Chance books were huge nationwide hits that every American boy proudly read (and every American girl secretly). And that means Lew Basnight isn't American! Or if he is American, he isn't cool and if he's not cool, he isn't American! Or he's from a different dimension which is my favorite theory which I'll definitely have you believing once we get to the Lew Basnight section.

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 Lew Basnight seemed a sociable enough young man, though it soon became obvious that he had not, until now, so much as heard of the Chums of Chance.

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If you're hanging out with the Chums of Chance and they realize you don't know who they are, the best they can describe you as is "sociable enough." That's more forgiving than how I'd think of him if he hadn't heard of Grunion Guy. I mean, how can you not have heard of Grunion Guy? The author of "A Really Scary Story" which was once read, by Daniel Justice, before a large crowd of science fiction nerds that included Connie Willis?

Speaking of Daniel, I'll be playing in a Zoom D&D campaign that he's Dungeon Mastering soon (if it doesn't all fall apart). I'm going to be playing my Dryad Paladin named Preterite Chastain. I'm super nervous since I haven't played D&D for years and I've never played in a game that wasn't just all of my long time high school friends! What if I embarrass myself by making Preterite too sexy?!

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 "Broke these in on the Ferris wheel," he said, "but couldn't figure out how to compensate for the movement. Gets blurry and so forth."

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"Ferris wheel"
The Ferris wheel was introduced at the Chicago World's Fair. Apparently it wasn't the first "sit on a wheel and go up in the air" amusement ride. But it was inarguably something completely different based on the size and scale.

The Chicago World's Fair Ferris wheel was 264 feet high. Each compartment could hold up to sixty people. And the ride took 10-20 minutes. I don't know why there's such a huge difference in the estimated time for a ride! Did the wheel have different settings to speed it up or slow it down depending on how many people were waiting to spend their fifty cents on it? Apparently, according to Lew here (the "spotter"), it moved fast enough so that his telescope constantly lost focus of the area he was observing. It's sort of the same principle as to why you can't write an accurate book about the entire 19th century. You have to focus on a smaller area and then spend 1000 pages detailing what you see. Because the movement of history makes things blurry and so forth.

"couldn't figure out how to compensate for the movement"
Imagine all the people who read this line and just move quickly past it. Imagine how blurry the entire text becomes when the reader moves past every line at the same speed. How do you compensate for that as an author?! You probably begin your novel with the line, "Now single up all lines!"
    That wasn't what I was going to say about this. I really wanted to talk about movement and telescopes. I had a backyard telescope that I used often in my late teens and early twenties. It was powerful enough to see some of the moons of Jupiter (as dots and shadows on the planet! Not in great detail!). I wasn't on a Ferris wheel but I, too, had to compensate for movement of the Earth (but not for focus, of course. You know how Lew could have compensated for movement that wouldn't have caused what he was looking at to go blurry? Look out of the side window of the Ferris wheel and not the window that aligns with the wheel's movement!). The telescope had a flexible tube sticking out of it with a dial on it that you would twist as you were observing some far off celestial object so that it wouldn't disappear from your view as the Earth rotated. It's hard to keep something so far away in such a small frame!
    The difficulty of observation in these cases is that both the observer and the observed are in constant motion. History can be viewed in the same way if we realize that our beliefs and attitudes, ethics and moralities, change drastically across time. So a historian of the 1890s writing in the 1940s would come to drastically different conclusions because their focus would be completely different. And the further we get away from the 1890s in time, the less detail we can make out. But we're also observing it with totally different instruments (i.e. our modern perceptions).

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 The "spotter" from White City Investigations showed up at dawn, packing a small observatory's worth of telescopic gear.

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"White City Investigations"
The detective agency named after the Fair but also named to invoke the idea of the imperialist mentality of the 18th century. It's the whites who control the norm and thus must investigate everybody who isn't acting like white people think they should be acting (in other words: non-white people).

"a small observatory's worth of telescopic gear"
This is it! This is Pynchon saying, "We're about to really begin examining late 19th century America and, by extension, the world! Let's really get into the weeds by focusing this telescope on them weeds over there where some ants are unionizing and some other ants are busting the pickets and some other ants are blowing up anthills and some other ants are busy manipulating the entire system. Oh yeah. Those are some good weeds!"

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 The boys began regular surveillance runs the next day.

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They're now working for The Man. They were probably previously working for The Man as well. But now they're on assignment and can't just hang out at the Fair all day. Maybe this is Pynchon's indication that the book is about to get serious. "We've had our fun on 'ground-leave' but now it's time to get to work. Let's observe America, shall we?"