In 1950, Popular Science issued a cutaway drawing of the most exciting object to grace the skies to that point: Convair’s B-36 Bomber. At that time, it was the world’s biggest bomber.
Its 13 man crew could ride at altitudes as high as 50,000 feet, the magazine noted.
Here is a closeup of the cockpit area:
My favorite part of the B-36 is its pressurized 87 foot-long tunnel that allowed crew members to shuttled from one end of the craft to the other. They laid on a four-wheeled cart and pulled themselves along by cable.
I saw this picture yesterday at Seattle’s MOHAI (Museum of History and Industry). The caption said that the monorail was constructed in 1911 of wood and ran through the “tidal flats” of Seattle. Not much is known of it, though Lyle Zapato dredges up a bit in “Carpetbagging Monorailists: A Cascadian Tradition.”
The past always seems to be so…old. Previous styles, mores, customs seem to have vanished, replaced wholesale with an entirely new set of styles, mores, and customs.
That’s why we can snicker at ridiculous stuff like men with handlebar mustaches riding crazy bicycles and corpulent women vamping it up as if they were sex goddesses.
In thinking about the past, I still can’t decide if we’re basically the same as our ancestors or if we are completely different. The easier thought is that we are different; that they inhabited a different nation than us, a nation called 1913, 1945, 1864, or whenever.
We see a series of women, most of them looking very 1922. But the one who really bridges the gap between the ages is the woman at 1:11, in the green. Her clip lasts only ten seconds, but in that short time we see an awkward girl of perhaps 20 years old begin with a shy smile, turn her head, turn back to the camera with just a wisp of a sexy glower, and then smile again.
Ten seconds.
Unlike the other women, who were actresses and who knew how to act very silent movie-like, she didn’t know how. Who was she? Whoever, she was probably born around 1900 and died by 1980.
So, turn off the sound, hit Play, advance to around 1:11, and go back in the past.
This isn’t about coffee or penises, but of course that’s what all you dirty-minded people care about.
It’s about: stray advice from the ancient past that lingers in your mind, for no apparent reason.
Why do we remember things? Why do we forget?
We accept the forgetting part with age; it’s commonplace. The remembering part is eerie because, even as our brains age and begin to perforate like Swiss cheese, certain memories stick with us. The following advice will be with me on my dying bed:
Coffee makes your pecker harder.
A friend told me this when we were high school freshmen. We were running on a high school practice field. It was a weekend day; school was not in session.
He told me that his uncle had said this–in those exact words.
I still remember the light of the day. I even know that we were running west.
This wasn’t information that I was hungering for, either. As a freshman, I had no need for pecker-hardening elixirs. It had no personal significance.
I’ll go on a limb and theorize that a recess of my brain seized the information because it would be needed much later in life. Our minds do the same thing when it comes to slipping on ice or getting shocked at an outlet. Our minds store valuable information that will protect us. Since we are animals that want to procreate, a primal part of the brain wants to protect those procreative abilities.
The uncle was right. Caffeine temporarily improves vascular functioning. You need good vascularity to help blood pour into the penis and erect it. Or to put it more simply:
Coffee makes your pecker harder!
There’s well-known a scene in Citizen Kane called “The Bernstein Scene.” The reporter who is trying to track down the mystery of deceased Charles Foster Kane’s past speaks with Mr. Bernstein, who had been Kane’s guardian. Bernstein talks about memory and the past, but then breaks off into this startling reverie about a memory of his own which included a girl with a parasol:
In 1970, President Richard Nixon changed the White House Secret Service’s uniforms most dramatically.
According to Richard Reeves’ President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Nixon felt that the present uniforms were “too slovenly.” An upcoming visit by Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Great Britain was a good excuse to upgrade the uniforms.
The uniforms, inspired by ones that Nixon had seen on honor guards in Europe, featured “double-breasted white tunics, starred epaulets, gold piping, draped braid, and high plastic hats decorated with a large White House crest.”
The uniforms were roundly criticized in the press. One columnist said that they looked like old-time movie ushers’ uniforms. Another noted that the uniforms borrowed their style from “decadent European monarchies.”
In an AP January 28, 1970 article in the Colorado Spring Gazette, it was noted that each uniform cost $95 and were distributed to about 100 Secrete Service men.
Some critical comments from bystanders who caught a first public glimpse of the uniforms ranged from “Late Weimar Republic” to “They look like extras from a Lithuania movie” to “Nazi uniforms.”
The uniforms lasted 2 weeks.
What I find most striking is that one of the Secret Service guards, the one closest to the camera, is a dead-ringer for Elvis Presley. After all, Elvis did make that infamous nearly-unannounced trip to visit Nixon.
But the two dates are far apart. Prime Minister Wilson visited on January 29, 1970. Elvis visited on December 21, 1970.
