I had forgotten about this until I needed to link his Wikipedia page elsewhere.
If you’re from the Chicago area, you’re likely familiar with the story of “Hardrock, Coco, and Joe”. If not, here it is:
The stop-motion animation was done by Wah Chang – who inserted himself as Santa. Over a decade later, Chang was a prop designer for “Star Trek”.
Never heard of that. Interesting.
Wah Cang was part of the effects company that did the special effects for Outer Limits (including the creepy stop-motion Zanti Misfits), and the special effects in the movie Dinosaurus that I recently re-watched. (Stop motion dinosaurs, although they cut corners and used puppets, too.)
I didn’t exactly stumble across this first bit, as it’s headline news today:
- though this (from 1 Nov) is a nice touch* (source)
A decision on whether to go ahead with a new coal mine in Cumbria has been delayed for a third time.
The decision was expected by 8 November, but it has been pushed back until after next week’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt.
But today’s headlines made me wonder if there were actually coal mines still operating in the UK. Working from this list, I believe there are 3 (plus a couple of open cast - I think the US word is strip mine): Ayle, Aberpergwm, and (interesting random fact coming up) Monument Colliery:
https://www.forestofdeanhistory.org.uk/learn-about-the-forest/monument-free-mine/
Owners: (from the wiki article) Ray Ashly, Richard Daniels & Neil Young
Employees: …uh, same guys. Yup, the third largest coal mine in the UK.
“All male persons born or hereafter to be born and abiding within the said Hundred of St Briavels [generally considered to be the whole of the statutory Forest of Dean and each parish adjoining it], of the age of twenty one years and upwards, who shall have worked a year and a day in a coal or iron mine within the said Hundred of St Briavels, shall be deemed and taken to be Free Miners.” the Dean Forest (Mines) Act 1838.
This qualification has recently been challenged on the grounds of sex discrimination and although legal opinion advised that the 1838 Act was not subject to Equal Rights legislation, the Forestry Commissioners who act as Gaveller of the Forest of Dean made the decision to enter females onto the register for the first time in 2010. It is now understood that the qualification of “male”, also incorporates “or female.”
j
* - irony, obviously.
Well, that explains something that has puzzled me for years - why did Santa look Chinese?
So in other words, the miners had the right to mine coal for their own use or resale? Reminds me of a line from The Hunger Games:
“Do you get all the coal you want?” Rue asks. “No,” I answer. “Just what we buy and whatever we track in on our boots.”
This one might fall into the “duh” category for some, but I just learned something that I first thought was a fake fact until I checked it out.
The Guinness Book of World Records was created by the Guinness beer company to help settle bar bets.
I was a small kid when I started buying it through our school book purchase program, so perhaps the teachers didn’t want to mention the connection to alcohol, or they simply didn’t know.
“Whilst at a shooting party in Co. Wexford, Ireland, in 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, the company’s managing director, was involved in a dispute as to whether the golden plover was Europe’s fastest game bird. Again in 1954, an argument arose as to whether grouse were faster than golden plover. Sir Hugh realized that such arguments could arise amongst people in pubs, and that a book that answered these questions would be helpful to licensees.”
From the Introduction to The Guinness Book Of Records [note the different name] 1998.
Jeez, the things that people argued about in pubs in those days…
j
According to the list on this wiki page, 2011 production was 250 tons, so that has to be somewhat commercial, but probably not commercial enough for three people (and families) to live off without other sources of income.
Also on the list is Hopewell Colliery, but that seems to be no longer a proper mine:
I’m highly dubious that you can take a stroll down a proper “working colliery” for £10.
j
Boeing using ferrets to run wire? This is an urban legend, born of keyboard warriors in the Internet age.
However a ferret named Felicia was used to clean the FermiLab vacuum racetrack tube of debris during construction. Which is probably the source material for the Boeing story.
Today I learned about Cosquer Cave.
It was discovered in 1985, and contains cave art from 19,000 years ago and 27,000 years ago. What’s most fascinating is that the entrance to the cave is 121 feet underwater. After a diver goes in the entrance, they must then swim through a tunnel that is almost 600 feet long.
How those famous double-deckers proved they were safe back in the day:
And the drivers were trained on the skid pad, too, at least until recently. See this article and the video, cued up to the appropriate point.
Today I learned about Jeffrey Lundgren, a cult leader and murderer. This a detailed account of the killings. It’s truly gut-wrenching.
(Warning: what started as a few lines of trivia about the Model T has turned into a thesis-length overview, likely/definitely a TL:DR thing)
I’m not a huge car guy, mostly because I’m not much of a mechanic and find working on large complex machines aggravating. However, I love vintage cars as they’re essentially rolling works of art, and I do love me some nice art. I told my wife that I’ve been giving some serious thought to acquiring and old Model T because not only are they visually interesting but mechanically they are very rudimentary – something even I could work on. Gotta do something with this midlife crisis…
Anyway, TIL that Ford created his first car, the Model A, in 1903. He only made a few hundred of them before moving on to his next design, the Model B. The model C followed that and so in down the line. Each model was not necessarily a totally new car designed from the ground up, for instance the Model B was a totally new design but the C was derived from the Model A. This is something all car manufacturers still do today.
It wasn’t until the Model T was introduced that sales really took off: over 15 million were manufactured between 1908 and 1927. Incremental improvements were added as technology improved but there were no model year changes the way modern manufacturers do. However there were several body styles available and, despite the widely-held belief to the contrary they were available in a variety of colors right from the plant including red, blue, and green in addition to black, which was the cheapest so became the most common.
A Model T had two forward gears that were operated with a foot pedal, the throttle was a stalk on the steering column, and the brakes were basically non-existent. A driver today who has only had experience with modern cars would almost certainly need some training before they could even start the engine let alone drive the car. Ford’s next car was a complete redesign. It would have what we today would recognise as the accepted standard control configuration: three pedals, a 4-speed on the floor, and modern gauges.
However, Ford broke with tradition and named this next car the Model A. In production for 4 years, it was suceeded by… yup, the model B. Ford did not give any of it’s cars a non number/letter name until after WWII and the death of Henry Ford.
Finally, (and I knew this before I started researching the Model T) Ford did not invent the assembly line. The industrial revolution necessitated such an approach. By the time the OG Model A was introduced a number of complex mechanical devices were routinely built on assembly lines, including steam engines, clocks, and firearms – anything with interchangeable parts manufactured to a given standard was an ideal candidate for assembly line production. Even car manufacturers beat Ford in implementing the assembly line approach including Oldsmobile and what is today Mercedes. Further, Ford himself didn’t come up with the idea of using an assembly line in his plant. One of his employees had worked in a slaughterhouse where the butchering of animals was done in a sort of reverse assembly line: the meat moved along a rail and each man at his station did his bit and then did the same for next one that came by. The worker did not move, the meat did. This employee, who’s name I am too lazy to research right now, thought the concept would work well in reverse: each man at a station where the part he was in change of installing would be brought to him, the car would come along, he would install the part, and then wait for the next car to come along, which would be almlst immediately. He convinced Ford to give his idea a shot. Ford did and production exploded. Ford’s Dearborn plant manufactured an average of 28 Model T’s per day between 1907 and 1914. Five years later Ford was manufacturing approximately 225 per day – approximately one car every 2 minutes – at the same plant. Thus today the pre-1914 Model T’s are considerably rarer than other years.
Finally, Walt Disney drove a Model T ambulance during the final days of WWI. He had lied about his age to do so; he was only 16. Note the drawing on the side of his ambulace:
Back in the 1970s, when incandescent light bulbs were the primary form of home lighting, almost all light bulbs were manufactured by machines with the rather goofy name “ribbon machines”. The ribbon machines were so efficient that there were only 15 of them in the entire world, and those 15 machines manufactured essentially all the light bulbs used on the planet.
I first learned about the “studio zone” many years ago:
It’s also called the thirty-mile zone, and it was only very recently that I realized the TMZ media outlet is in fact named for the place.
This reminds me of something I read in the American Heritage magazine of Science and Invention many years ago.
There’s only one factory in the world that fills traditional seltzer bottles. The bottles, surprisingly, are filled through the nozzle – there’s no other opening, and the tops don’t unscrew.
According to the attached article, many of the bottles are over a century old, hand-blown, and from eastern Europe.
Do you mean the late lamented Invention & Technology? I wish so much that there were a currently available paper magazine of that quality.
South Koreans are about to get younger.
South Koreans will soon become a year or two younger, following an official change to the country’s age-counting system.
On Thursday, the country’s parliament, called the National Assembly, passed a set of bills requiring the use of the international age-counting system, where age is based on birth date.
South Korea currently uses three age-counting systems, but most citizens abide by the “Korean age,” where a person is 1 year old as soon as they are born, and gain one year on every New Year’s Day. And a baby born on Dec. 31 would be considered 2 years old the next day.
But while most East Asian countries have scrapped the traditional age-counting system, some have yet to follow suit.
For example, in China, which uses the nominal age-counting system, a person is considered 1 year old on the day they are born, and they gain a year on the Lunar New Year.
The 1924 Democratic National Convention delegates - at Madison Square Garden in NYC - took 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis as their Presidential candidate. Davis had 2.8% of the votes on the first ballot.
Davis lost to Calvin Coolidge 382 to 136 (13 electoral votes to a third candidate) in the 1924 Presidential election.