Posting something about prankster Alan Abel earlier today reminded me of a 1970s scam I’d heard about in which the wiseacre posed as a tennis-loving sheik. Playing off America’s fear and loathing of newly minted OPEC millionaires, Abel, decades before Sacha Baron Cohen turned dictator, created the character of Prince Emir Assad, who competed in a Pro-Am tourney.
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Jessie Earvin Dixon was a mid-century American inventor from Alabama who would appear to have designed a roadable helicopter. In the classic photo above, Dixon seems to be hovering above ground in his vehicle, though apart from this photo there are no test results extant. It’s hard to believe an invention of this magnitude wouldn’t have been a bigger deal if it truly worked, but perhaps it somehow fell through the cracks.
- From a 1941 Mechanix Illustrated article that was posted on Modern Mechanix:
“This Helicopter-Car Flies Over Traffic!
JESS DIXON, of Andalusia, Ala., got tired of being tied up in traffic jams, so he designed and built this novel flying vehicle. It is a combination of automobile, helicopter, autogiro, and motorcycle. It has two large lifting rotos in a single head, revolving in opposite directions. It is powered by a 40 h.p. motor which is air-cooled. He claims his machine is capable of speeds up to 100 miles an hour.”
- From Aerofiles:
“1936 = Roadable helicopter. 1pOH; 40hp air-cooled engine. Coaxial rotor system with cyclic and collective pitch control. ‘Foot pedals actuated a hinged vane on the tail, counting on rotor downwash for yaw control.’ In a photo the helicopter is seen hovering, but no test results were found.”
Tags: Jess Dixon
In 1972, hoaxer Alan Abel bandaged his head and pretended to be the reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes at a press conference he arranged at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. “Hughes” announced that he was going to freeze himself cryogenically and be thawed out when the stock market reached record highs. He was then rushed in a wheelchair to a waiting limo. A few days later during another press conference, Abel revealed the truth.
In the first clip (a French-language one) you can see footage from the initial press conference. The second video (in English) covers the bandage removal.
Tags: Alan Abel, Howard Hughes
I’ve always wondered if marathoners have lifespans different from the average. Do they live longer or shorter because of the extreme workout their hearts consistently get? It would seem, according to some new research, that at least those who jog moderately receive great benefit from the exercise. Though you have to assume people jogging regularly might be living healthier in other ways, too, so perhaps there’s some correlation to go along with the causation. From Counsel and Heal:
“Jogging can add more than five years to people’s lives, according to a recent Danish research.
According to Peter Schnohr, chief cardiologist of the Copenhagen City Heart Study, between one and two-and-a-half hours of jogging per week could add around 6.2 years to men and 5.6 years to women.
‘The results of our research allow us to definitively answer the question of whether jogging is good for your health,’ said Schnohr in a statement.
‘We can say with certainty that regular jogging increases longevity,’ Schnohr added.
Back in 1970s, few men died while running, raising speculations whether jogging had more harm than benefits. Some said jogging might be “too strenuous for ordinary middle aged people.’
However, the new study from Copenhagen City Heart suggests that jogging in fact is improving longevity, and it doesn’t have to be strenuous to receive the benefits. Just one hour per week could do the trick.”
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Enhanced running in a leisure suit:
The beginning of retinal implants being used in earnest. Will blindness, in our lifetimes, become fully curable?
"I want to live in the Big Apple to do my stand-up."
I have 300$ Can i live with you in nyc? (NYC)
Is that enough? Then i get a job or two and start rockin. Im a taper and a cook for now but i want to live in the big apple to do my stand-up and acting and music and blah blah i suck. But i do wanna try it. Let me know guys!!!
From the November 14, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Dallas, Tex.–C.B. Howard, late of California, who recently came to Dallas from Hot Springs, killed himself here by taking poison in a cup of coffee. He had spent all his money, except some small change, on a protracted spree at Fort Worth, and when he returned to Dallas his wife declined to live with him longer. He then drank the poison in a restaurant, walked into a saloon and drank down two big glasses of whisky, saying: ‘I am going to die and shall go off well-loaded.'”
Tags: C.B. Howard
I put up a post about B.F. Skinner’s daughter staunchly denying that she was raised as some sort of guinea pig in a behaviorist box. Here’s the psychologist himself refuting such claims.
The free market can be corrupted, but all-out socialism would be a horrible remedy to that. Almost as bad would be not repairing our increasingly rigged form of capitalism. The opening of Robert Reich’s blog post, “The Answer Isn’t Socialism,” written in the wake of France moving leftward:
“Francois Hollande’s victory doesn’t and shouldn’t mean a movement toward socialism in Europe or elsewhere. Socialism isn’t the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations.
The answer is to reform capitalism. The world’s productivity revolution is outpacing the political will of rich societies to fairly distribute its benefits. The result is widening inequality coupled with slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment.
In the United States, almost all the gains from productivity growth have been going to the top 1 percent, and the percent of the working-age population with jobs is now lower than it’s been in more than thirty years (before the vast majority of women moved into paid work).” (Thanks Browser.)
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“Oh Karl the world isn’t fair / It isn’t and never will be / They tried out your plan / It brought misery instead / If you’d seen how they worked it / you’d be glad you were dead.” (Thanks LRR.)
Tags: Francois Hollande, Karl Marx, Randy Newman, Robert Reich
In the wake of Christopher Hitchens’ death, I put up a post about his prose broadside against Mother Teresa. Here is the 1994 film analog.
I’ve noticed a few articles in the last week about DARPA planning to implant microchips in soldiers, which reminded me that I had read something about the topic in Wired a couple years ago. From that Katie Drummond piece:
“Editing DNA could have widespread implications, but Darpa seems most interested in two: microchip implants that restore senses and movement in traumatic injury patients, and the ongoing Darpa goal of boosting troop performance in the field: On the other end of the size scale, a primary goal is to apply microsystem techniques to soldier-protective biomedical systems. One example is an in-canal hearing protection device that will provide enhanced hearing capabilities in some settings, but be able to instantly muffle loud sounds of weapons fire. This one example will improve inter-personnel communications and at the same time drastically reduce the incidence of hearing loss in combat situations. For these examples and many more, the goal is to bring exceptionally potent technical approaches to bear on biological and biomedical applications where their capabilities will be significant force multipliers for the DoD.”
Tags: Katie Drummond
The colorful 19th-century Gravesend clan known as the Moreys loved horses–especially with salad and a baked potato. From an article in the January 13, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The eccentricities of the Morey family, which for the past ten years have kept the town of Gravesend guessing what was to come next, have given the place another shock of such an entirely different nature from any of the former performances that even the old residents shake their heads and declare themselves beaten. A complaint was made at the police headquarters yesterday that a horse belonging to the Moreys had died and was lying in the yard. An officer was sent over and upon entering the yard found, to his amazement, that the horse had been partially skinned and cut up. When he arrived on the spot, Lena Morey, the 16 year old daughter of Elizabeth Morey, was just finishing the work of skinning the dead horse. Portions of the carcass–the best parts–had been cut out and placed in a tub, awaiting the process of pickling, which would keep it for the future use of the family, while the portions considered poor for eating were being fed to the dogs and the pigs owned by the family.
Mrs. Morey told the policeman that she had a right to do as she pleased with her own, that there was a great deal worse meat eaten every day than horse meat and that she did not propose to starve while she could get anything as good. As to the hide, she said she proposed to make strong leather bags of it.
In spite of her vehement protests and threats, the officer seized upon all of the carcass in sight, as well as the hide, and all was sent to Barren Island for cremation, while the board of health was notified.”
Tags: Elizabeth Morey, Lena Morey
Poetry and airplanes are beautiful, but you shouldn’t try to make a living from them. From Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, a section about the author’s meeting with then-British Airways boss Willie Walsh, who was enduring a myriad of obstacles while the airline bled cash:
“Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation had never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul. It seemed as unfair to evaluate an airline according to its profit-and-loss statement as to judge a poet by her royalty statements. The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air, it had no room in its optics for the camaraderie enjoyed by employees in the Hong Kong ticket office, it had no means of quantifying the adrenalin-thrill of take-off.”
Tags: Alain de Botton, Willie Walsh
"George Clooney got old or something." (Image by Efloch.)
Where are the Rock Hudsons? (Downtown)
I don’t care that Rock Hudson was gay – he was made for the movies. I’m a straight female who wonders where are those gorgeous guys that used to headline the movies? They were something to look at. Now we have Tom Cruise – ok – he’s got big blue eyes. But let’s face it, he’s medium height, yes, he’s fit, but if he were walking down the street and wasn’t a celebrity – I don’t think anyone would notice. Then we have Brad Pitt. Now he’s got body but the face, come on now, that’s the face of a kid. Can you really get thrilled by Brad Pitt? Where are the Cary Grants, Paul Newmans? I think you follow me. Not only did they have looks, they had real talent too. I’m a frustrated woman left with no one to admire. No one to close my eyes at night and dream about. George Clooney got old or something, but yeah, he had it for a while there. I’m 51 – maybe I got old? Anyone agree about the men in movies?
From the December 31, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Albany–Governor Roosevelt today pardoned Annie Walden, who is serving a life sentence in Auburn Prison for the murder of her husband, James Walden, a horse jockey, whom she shot and killed at the door of the house of a woman who had come between her husband and herself.
The murder took place in September, 1891, and Mrs. Walden has been in prison ever since. Her pardon was requested by Mrs. Beekman de Puyster, a State Charities Commissioner, and other prominent women.
Governor Roosevelt has given a great deal of attention to the case and believes that the circumstances attending the crime warrant executive clemency.”
Tags: Annie Walden, James Walden, Mrs. Beekman de Puyster, Theodore Roosevelt
Ford, which gave America the perfected assembly line, now has robots playing a crucial role in the building and inspection of its vehicles. If you look closely, you can see people in the background. It’s so quiet. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
From Atul Gawande’s New England Journal of Medicine piece, “Two Hundred Years of Surgery,” the moment in the Western world when medical procedures began to migrate from the external to the internal:
“The crucial spark of transformation — the moment that changed not just the future of surgery but of medicine as a whole — was the publication on November 18, 1846, of Henry Jacob Bigelow’s groundbreaking report, ‘Insensibility during Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation‘ The opening sentences crisply summarized the achievement: ‘It has long been an important problem in medical science to devise some method of mitigating the pain of surgical operations. An efficient agent for this purpose has at length been discovered.’ Bigelow described how William Morton, a Boston dentist, had administered to his own patients, and then to several more who had undergone surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a gas he called ‘Letheon,’ which successfully rendered them insensible to pain. Morton had patented the composition of the gas and kept it a secret even from the surgeons. Bigelow revealed, however, that he could smell ether in it. The news burst across the world. The Letters to the Editor pages were occupied for months with charges and countercharges over Bigelow’s defense of Morton’s secrecy and credit for the discovery. Meanwhile, ether anesthesia rapidly revolutionized surgery — how it was practiced, what could be attempted with its use, and even what it sounded like.” (Thanks Browser.)
Environment influences mindset, no doubt, and someone’s perception of the world may vary depending of where they live or grew up. But the idea that cities make people more unfeeling, that the crowd relieves us of our capacity for goodness, seems a popular but unwarranted stereotype. But that’s the premise of “City and the Self,” by Stanley Milgram and Harry From, 1972.
Tags: Harry From, Stanley Milgram
Glenn Gould on giving up live performances, 1969.
Tags: Glenn Gould
From Matthew Lasar’s new ArsTechnica piece about the great solar storm of 1859, when the Earth became scarily brilliant:
“In New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, thousands of sky gazers wandered about the midnight streets, astounded at what they could see. ‘Crowds of people gathered at the street corners, admiring and commenting upon the singular spectacle,’ observed the New Orleans Daily Picayune. When the September 1 aurora ‘was at its greatest brilliancy, the northern heavens were perfectly illuminated,’ wrote a reporter for The New York Times. He continued:
At that time almost the whole southern heavens were in a livid red flame, brightest still in the southeast and southwest. Streamers of yellow and orange shot up and met and crossed each other, like the bayonets upon a stack of guns, in the open space between the constellations Aries, Taurus and the Head of Medusa—about 15 degrees south of the zenith. In this manner—alternating great pillars, rolling cumuli shooting streamers, curdled and wisped and fleecy waves—rapidly changing its hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, and yellow to white, and back in the same order to brilliant red, the magnificent auroral glory continued its grand and inexplicable movements until the light of morning overpowered to radiance and it was lost in the beams of the rising sun.
Popular descriptions of the spectacle appeared everywhere. In 2006, a team of space scientists assembled a collection of eyewitness newspaper accounts of the storm. What stands out in these reports is the astonishment, awe, and even pleasure that the world experienced for a week—followed by a sobering realization of how close our planet is to its indispensable star.”
Tags: Matthew Lasar
At the BBC, Adam Curtis has posted “White Negro for Mayor,” which examines the subtext of Norman Mailer’s failed 1969 mayoral campaign in New York. Included in Curtis’ post is a really good documentary about Mailer as politician. An excerpt:
“But Mailer was a complicated man – and as well as embodying many of the hipster values he was also a perceptive and vocal critic of the new sensibility. Back in 1957 he had written an essay for Dissent magazine called ‘The White Negro.’ In it he had described how fears of nuclear annihilation had begun to produce a new kind of young alienated being in America. These hyper-individualists trusted only their own feelings and desires and refused to be part of any group or organisation. And in black culture, Mailer said, they found their identity – the culture of the dangerous outsider.
This outsider culture had originally been created, Mailer wrote, by blacks in response to racial oppression and violence. But for the ‘white negroes’ that culture was then co-opted in order to give a meaning and grandeur to their psychopathic narcissism.“
Tags: Adam Curtis, Norman Mailer
This grisly classic photograph shows the aftermath of the hanging of murderer and train robber Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum, a botched operation that left him headless and spectators stained with blood. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Ketchum had, in 1899, single-handedly robbed a train of the Colorado and Southern Railway in Folsom, New Mexico. During the holdup he was wounded by a bullet fired by a crew member and had to have his right arm amputated as a result. He was subsequently captured and marched, shackled, to the gallows. A report in the April 27, 1901 San Francisco Chronicle in the wake of the execution in Clayton, New Mexico:
“Thomas E. Ketchum, alias ‘Black Jack,’ the notorious outlaw, who terrorized the people of the Southwest for the past fifteen years, was hanged here this afternoon for the last of his many crimes. His head was severed from the body by the rope as if by a guillotine. The headless trunk pitched forward toward the spectators and blood spurted upon those nearest the scaffold. The execution took place inside a stockade built for the occasion. The inclosure was crowded, 150 spectators having been admitted.
When Ketchum mounted the platform at 1:17 o’clock his face was very pale, but his eyes swept over the crowd coldly and boldly. A priest stood at his side as the rope was put around his neck. The condemned man had consented to this at the last moment. Ketchum declined to make a speech before the noose was put around his neck. He merely muttered ‘Good-by,’ then said ‘Please dig my grave very deep,’ and finally ‘All right; hurry up.’ His legs trembled, but he kept his nerve.
When the body dropped through the trap the half-inch rope severed the head as cleanly as if a knife had cut it. The body pitched forward, with blood spurting from the headless trunk. The head remained in the black sack and flew down into the pit. Some men groaned and others turned away, unable to endure the sight. For a few seconds the body was allowed to lie there, half doubled up on its right side, with the blood issuing in an intermittent stream from the severed neck as the heart kept on with its mechanical beating. Then, with cries of consternation, the officers rushed down from the scaffold and lifted the body from the ground.”
A couple of minutes from “First There Was,” by the great Johnny Dowd.
Tags: Johnny Dowd
"I figured you were all assholes."
dear dead baby birds: sorry (cos cob)
i know that you probably wont read this because you are dead and most likely wouldn’t understand english.
but I am sorry. Sorry i let you build a nest under my air conditioner. sorry i yelled and beat the air conditioner. you were probably just tweeping at all hours because you were hungry.
i figured you were all assholes, but by the time i plugged up the sides of the air conditioner to keep you away, i realized that i sealed you in.
this resulted in much more verbal abuse (sorry), as i thought you sneaked through somehow. nope. my fault.
also, sorry i then shoveled your nest into a shoe box using a spatula (since thrown away). you probably thought I was your mother and it was fresh worm time.
finally, I am sorry for leaving you in the shoe box outside. actually i dont know if you are even dead. someone took the shoebox before i could check it in the morning. maybe it was your avian folks. to be fair it was probably my landlord.
anyway, hope this note finds you well and that you arent mad and considering any ghost tweeping.
Life speeds in one direction, and how can anything ever be different? Then events occur. Similar traumas in the past haven’t caused a break, but this one takes hold. The brain rewires itself. All is different now. You can never return.
British racer Stirling Moss in the crash that retired him, 1962.
Tags: Stirling Moss