Saturday, April 17, 2021
in 1972 Phil Stevenson had a worn out 55 Bel Air wagon, so, he hopped it up and went racing with it!
He put a 390" Cadillac in it, along with a Jet-Away Hydramatic and was racing it at El Mirage. He drive it up there and take the mufflers off and run it. It ran 120s
He decided to go to Bonneville to run the 150 he wanted. He bought a 6-pot manifold for $15 at a swap meet and installed four 97s to put on it.
Somewhere he picked up a pair of 4-1/2"x18 Halibrands and the wagon ran a best of 149. He won the SCTA award for the top speed of a car driven there.
Friday, April 16, 2021
Zeppo Marx owned this 67 Mustang, in his Palm Springs home, where he was Frank Sinatra's next door neighbor
The National Hot Rod Association only issued one professional driver’s license without a picture, to Floyd Lippencott Jr. There was no Floyd Lippencott Jr. drag racing though, it was a fake name used for 5 years
by a guy who didn't want his dad to worry about him crashing or dying in the risky world of high speed dragsters between 1962-1967
Both Bob Muravez and his alias Lippencott were inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame. And Muravez scribbles down two names whenever he’s asked to sign his autograph.
When he was 19, Muravez joined fellow Road Kings member and future drag-racing star Tommy Ivo in a teenage prank to spite the dreaded policeman. Muravez snuck beneath Stanley’s patrol car and tied a rope around the rear axle, affixing the other end to a nearby pole.
Thursday, April 15, 2021
the artist Adolph Treidler (1886-1981)
ever heard of a Spangler? Me neither, until reading about fire engines today. There's a reason why no one's heard of Spanglers, only 2 were made.
Studebaker touring cars on the Rubicon Trail in the 1920s.
Some of the photos of the Studebakers show that they are lettered for the Auburn Chamber of Commerce.
The Rubicon Trail was “promoted as the best route from Georgetown to Lake Tahoe.” Interestingly, the county also says that the first automobile to visit Rubicon Springs did so in 1908, a woman from Lake Tahoe driving a Mitchell touring.
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
What could possibly connect the legendarily famous Michelangelo to something related to cars? He had a road made!
I bet you never knew that there was a road made by/for/because Michelangelo needed one made.
He wrote that the marble there was “of compact grain, homogeneous, crystalline, reminiscent of sugar”. He deemed it perhaps even more precious than that from nearby Carrara, where he had obtained marble for some of his most famous statues.
With the blessing of Pope Leo X, Michelangelo designed a path that could get blocks of the white marble down from the mountain to be transported to Florence to be used to decorate the facade of the church of San Lorenzo.
In exchange for getting a quarry operation going, Florentine authorities granted Michelangelo the right to take as much marble as he wanted from Altissimo
After several years of work to carve out a road, Pope Leo, who was of Florence’s Medici family, relieved Michelangelo of his commission and the project was abandoned. The church of San Lorenzo still has no facade.
In moving stone, Michelangelo, and for that matter all movers of masses, had a simple goal, resist the pull of gravity. Any time gravity led a block astray catastrophe struck. A block could slide too quickly down a slope and maim or kill. A heavily laden cart could sink into a road built across a swamp. A block could drop from a hoist and turn a boat into driftwood.
To counter the adverse and untimely affects of gravity, Michelangelo relied on rope and men. Neither came easily. He wrote his brother that if the Carrarese “are not fools, they are knaves and rascals.”
A crew walked off the job taking the 100 ducats he had paid them and the ropes, one of which weighed 566 pounds for a 422-foot length.
Michelangelo’s detailed records show that rope accounted for 18 percent of the total transportation costs. He also had to borrow pulleys, buy wood for sleds, and order custom-made turnbuckles and iron rings.
https://geologywriter.com/blog/stories-in-stone-blog/michelangelo-moving-marble-part-1/
All that has come down to us of the proposed façade of San Lorenzo are a few faded drawings in black and red chalk, and a late model in wood kept at the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.
This façade reminds us of an antique scena wall whose triple doors admitted and swallowed up gods and heroes
It comprises three horizontal zones divided by a cornice: first, the lower world; above it, the noumenal world with delicate pilasters, pure circles and rectangles, niches and a remote window. On the summit rests the gentle tympanum of the Trinity, infusing the whole composition with spirituality.
The architectural forms are all of very ancient origin. Michelangelo, more than any of his contemporaries absorbed and made them his own, treating them in a way which was copied by many who came after him, as can still be seen on any fairly conventional building.
He amassed the parts and unified them in a style far removed from the architectural conceptions of the Renaissance which had treated windows, doors, traverses, sculptured details, storys, and so on as independent but coordinated units, whereas Michelangelo and his followers subordinated them to the whole.
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/m/michelan/5archite/early/1lorenzo.html
Yes, I really do geek out over stuff like this. Roads, highways, freeways, bridges, etc etc and history, and the geniuses like Michelangelo who were not only the legends that were artists in paint, but also in sculpture, architecture, and poetry. To learn today that he had a road made? Made it worth staying up an hour later than I ought to get to sleep, merely to post about it.
Nellie Bly, you might have heard of her, but until today I hadn't heard about her 'Around the World in 72 Days' book in 1890, inspired by the 1873 book Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, and her newspaper owner, Joseph Pulitzer, needing a publicity stunt for his tabloid newspaper, the New York World.
Pulitzer, whose name now means excellence in journalism, via the prize that is awarded to the writers who do an exceptional job in journalism (I don't think bloggers get any chance, sadly) was the owner of a tabloid, and would run whatever could get sales of his paper.
He was going to send a man to challenge the 80 days story, as nearly 3 months of daily reports, from a grand adventure, would be sure to boost sales. When Nellie Bly heard of this, she insisted that she be sent instead, and threatened to do the stunt for the competition, faster than any man Pulitzer would send, if she weren't chosen.
“I approached my editor [at The World newspaper] rather timidly on the subject,” Bly said. “I was afraid that he would think the idea too wild and visionary.”
Nevertheless, she pitched traveling around the world to beat Fogg’s 80-day world record, and she hoped The World would host her. Cockerill informed her the idea had already been bandied around the newsroom and said the assignment was best suited for a male reporter who wouldn’t need to be chaperoned and wouldn’t drag along loads of suitcases.
She made such a convincing argument, what else could he do? but realize she was more motivated to succeed than anyone else that could be sent.
For 72 days, as she jumped cargo ships, trains, tugboats, and rickshaws, newspaper readers had been following her progress in one of the most highly publicized journeys of all time.
On November 14, 1889, she boarded a steam ship and began her 24,899-mile journey. She only had the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.
To hype the story, the newspaper organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Nellie Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.
On her travels around the world by train, steamship, rickshaw, horse and donkey, Nellie Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Verne wished her luck, saying, "If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands."
When she'd traveled nearly all the way around the world, and arrived on the California coast, in San Francisco, she was greeted with a single-car train to speed her across the country, express, all the way, without the drag of all the extra cars slowing down the locomotive and wasting coal.
When The World newspaper did not give her a raise or even a bonus for her work after she returned, she resigned from her position at the newspaper. If she was to be a product, she would ensure that nobody else was making money off her.
At the time, Bly was 26 years old, single, and one of the most famous women in the world.
She launched a paid speaking tour to promote a memoir describing her experiences during the trip. When the World acquired new owners a few years later, they wooed her back with the salary and prestige she knew she deserved.
https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/western-pennsylvania-history/nellie-bly-a-race-against-time
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/brand-new-world-nelly-bly%27s-record-defying-travels
That's just one example of how cool she was, another is that during the strike at Pullman, Bly was the only writer to report on it, and she did so from the workers perspective.
there's a B17 documentary on HBO max that looks good, called Cold Blue
see what I mean? And that wasn't even the proper trailer for the film, that just goes to show how much they improved on the 35mm version, to make watching it much more satisfying
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a27442948/cold-blue-b17-documentary/
there are an estimated 60,000 orphans in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, and there is an orphanage that set up a skate park to give the kids something fun to do
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Sorry there's nothing posted today, but I had to take advantage of the cold weather after work to install insulation in the crawlspace in the attic so the heat the summer wont be baking me, the attic had about 1" of fluff blown in. Useless.
But I did spot this cool photo and had to post it for the panel delivery with TWA markings
Monday, April 12, 2021
the team that would have won the 1968 Plymouth Troubleshooting Contest nationals at Indy, out of 53 entries, got disqualified because they smoked the tires on the way to get the trophy
