Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Happy birthday to David Hobbs! He started racing in 1959 in his mom's Morris Oxford. Within three years, he was at Daytona driving someone else's Jaguar and lending his own Lotus Elite to Jimmy Clark.
The career that followed touched every corner of motorsport.
Formula 1 for Honda, McLaren, and BRM.
Sports cars in the Ford GT40, the Mirage, the Ferrari 512M, and Porsche 917s and 956/962s.
IMSA Camel GT for BMW.
Fifth place at the Indianapolis 500 in a McLaren.
Championships in Formula 5000 and Trans-Am.
He even led the Daytona 500 in a NASCAR stock car.
A British driver leading the biggest stock car race in America. In the same career where he raced a Porsche 917 and a Ferrari 512M.
Twenty starts at Le Mans. Two third-place finishes.
Two decades of returning to the same race, in different cars, for different teams, across different eras of the sport.
After the driving Hobbs joined CBS in the early 1970s and became one of the most recognizable voices in American motorsport television, eventually working with SPEED.
Fire departments across the U.S. and Canada are waiting years — sometimes four and a half — for new fire trucks, and paying double or triple what those trucks cost five years ago. What is the cause?
just three manufacturers control more than 70% of the market
wait times that once ran about 18 months now stretch up to four and a half years.
The preservation of steam locomotives in Britain was largely due to a scrap yards decision to prioritize scrapping the railcars first... 213 locomotives were saved from scrapping at just one yard, Barry in South Wales (thank you Paul!)
At the end of steam in the 1960s, Dai Woodham bought hundreds of withdrawn steam engines from British railways for his scrap business at Barry Island. He intended to scrap them but delayed doing so while he focused on scrapping redundant railway wagons.
As a result, railway preservation societies flocked to Barry to select locomotives to restore to operate their lines. Out of almost 300 engines sent to Barry, almost three quarters were rescued from the graveyard, and over half lived to steam again.
The single act of not scrapping these engines helped create the Heritage Railway movement that exists in the UK today.
Today, let's remember that a bridge was measured in Smoots!
In 1958, as a freshman at MIT and Lambda Chi Alpha pledge, the fraternity pledgemaster hatched the idea to use the shortest — and most scientifically named pledge — to measure the bridge from Boston to Cambridge.
Little did they know, however, that their activity would make its way into MIT, Boston and even Google lore.
They also underestimated how difficult getting up and down 364.4 times (plus or minus an ear) would be. "I don't think any of us had the slightest idea how much work was involved with lying down, getting up," he said. "They had to help me a great way across the bridge. I started by doing a push-up, and then I couldn't even do that. It deteriorated from there."
In 1958, a group of MIT students measured the Massachusetts Ave. Bridge in “smoots,” a now accepted unit of measurement named for the 5-foot, 7-inch Oliver R. Smoot Jr. ’62, who famously laid down hundreds of times across the span one storied night as his peers painted markers across the bridge, totaling 364.4 smoots
On April 4, an MIT team set out on a similar journey across the Charles River to pull off a new “hack,” this time measuring the Longfellow Bridge in “kleins.” This new measurement is named after Smoot’s classmate Martin Klein ’62. One klein (4 feet, 9.5 inches) is equal to 0.85820896 smoots.
The expedition was undertaken in honor of both Smoot and the 85th birthday of Klein.
Known as the father of commercial side-scan sonar, Klein serves on the MIT Sea Grant Advisory Board and the MIT Museum Collections Committee. His sonar technology has been used worldwide to help locate countless famous shipwrecks, including the Titanic, the World War I ocean liner RMS Lusitania, and the treasure-laden Nuestra Señora de Atocha.
Appropriately, the MIT team used a “side-scan” method to survey the Longfellow Bridge.
Reclined on a custom-engineered wooden cart topped with a mission-specific chaise lounge pillow, Klein himself acted as the official observation device — by looking to the sides — as the team pulled him along the bridge.
this post brought to you because of bridges, humor, and the cart they thoughtfully used so 82 year old Martin Klein did not have to move and lay down and move 400 times...
We can all benefit from some light humor about bridges, goody characters, and carts
Monday, June 08, 2026
Did you see the preview for Supergirl, and that Jason Momoa is in the movie as a bounty hunter biker?
Of course, I had no idea who "Lobo" is, I had to look it up:
Lobo is a cosmic bounty hunter whose goals align with Supergirl's during her space-faring revenge quest.
the muscular little 0-4-0 steam locomotive known as “Standard Oil No. 1” that once chugged along the miles of rails at the Standard Oil Refinery starting in 1920 will soon be on display at the Fort Caspar Museum (Thanks George!)
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/06/07/standard-oil-no-1-steam-locomotive-coming-back-to-casper-after-64-years-away/
Dennis goes to an auction, and is the only bidder on this Econoline
Sunday, June 07, 2026
an 18-year-old kid who worked at a dealership ordered his first car, a 69 Corvette 427/435. His mom paid half of the cost of the car as a high school graduation gift.
The wrecked pics are from a telephone pole on a snowy winter day. soon after purchase.
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