Yes: there was a plastic cylinder to fit 45s that slid over the 78 spindle, with a latch on a spring that synchronized it with the drop latch on the spindle.
(A lot of kids’ records came as 45’s. Mom could load a stack and leave you with your toys while she did housework.)
My mother worked for a real estate broker with the last name of “Doctor.”
He had a brother…
I can remember my parents purchased a 3-album set of something (a long opera or symphony, perhaps?) and the ‘sides’ of the albums were such that you could place the 3 albums on the changer, and it would play the first 3 parts of the music, then flip the stack over, and play the last 3 parts.
So Side 1 had Side 6 on its flip side, Side 2 had Side 5 on its flip side, and Side 3 had Side 4 on its flip side. (At least that’s how I remember it.)
Also, when I was a kid, there was a chiropractor in Wichita named Dr. Bonebrake.
Double LPs (like the Beatles’ White Album) had sides 1 and 4 back to back on one disc and 2 and 3 on the other for the same reason.
And Monty Python releases a three-sided LP. One side had two tracks that alternated around the spiral, so unless you were very careful, which one you got was random.
Which side do you get when it’s brought out and split up when you get divorced?
The Ronettes sing Midaeval Agrarian History
On the TV show Remember WENN, which was about a radio station in Pittsburgh, the sound effects guy was named Mr Foley. He had no lines in the entire series.
The Tour de France Femmes is ongoing at the moment - I already posted about it upthread. But here’s a piece of weird that I just discovered.
Background
A bike race can have several supplementary contests within it. One of the races-within-the-race is the best climber - King/Queen of the Mountains. Throughout the race the major climbs are highlighted, and classified for their severity. First over the climb (and second, third, fourth…) score points, and the person with the most points wears/wins the polka-dot jersey. For example, the final climb of the race this year is the notorious Alpe de Huez - 13.8 km at an average gradient of 8.1% - so, an altitude gain of about 1000m, finishing at an altitude of 1850m. Ouch.
Interesting fact
As I noted upthread, This year’s TdFF starts in the Low Countries. Stage One of the race is around Rotterdam - highest altitude listed, 10m. So: no Queen of the Mountains points to be won there, then? Er… wrong. The climb out of the Maasdeltatunnel is a classified climb. According to the TdFF website, this climb starts at 25 meters below sea level and is 1 km long at a gradient of 3.1%, giving a finishing altitude of 6m.
Take a bow Cristina Tonetti, first over the climb, and thus the current wearer of the Queen of the Mountains jersey. (She rides for Laboral Kutxa - Fundación Euskadi, a tiny team, and so this is actually a huge deal for them.)
j
Jerry Seinfeld “If you name your child Jeeves, you have pretty much set his career path”
Yep! And we would get yelled at if we stacked too many albums on there because we were told they would get scratched. I don’t remember if it had the insert for 45s though.
TIL that with the recent euthanizing of Suki, a 60 year old Asian elephant at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, there are now no elephants in the state of Washington.
The exact locations of the remaining 376 elephants in the US are tracked on the Elephant Database
So somebody does talk about the elephant in the room.
We couldn’t stop talking about him. He crushed all the furniture and shit everywhere.
Last week I got to go to the Elephant Sanctuary in Somerset, PA. The elephants have large paddocks to wander in and a one acre barn with heated floors. Half of that is a sand pit for them to play in. Jackson, the bull elephant, has his own page on Atlas Obscura and a statue at the local Eat n Park.
I once went to a proctologist called Dr Killingback.
And there is the classic instance of the Filipino cleric named Cardinal Sin.
Not many old school buildings are left in L.A., other than a handful of high schools built in the 1920s. There are probably some older elementary and middle schools, but those are difficult to research. What’s more, school websites tend to be all about “Now!” and “The Future!”, and often don’t even tell you a thing about their history.
IIRC due to a spate of fires in wooden school buildings, California passed a law in 1915 requiring all schools to be built of brick or masonry. I don’t know all the details, but it seems that previously existing wooden school buildings had to be replaced eventually. Unfortunately, the new masonry structures often fared worse in earthquakes than wooden ones would have.
How long was this 1915 law in force? I went to school in San Diego, and that law was certainly not in force there when my schools were built.
Reminds me … didn’t one of the former CEOs of Volkswagen catch some heat (hehe), b/c he had a heated driveway leading up to his mansion … any german colleagues here with the straight dope …
Not sure why. I mean they exist:
According to this website, a 20-foot x 20-foot driveway in the US will cost about $3 per hour to operate, so a six-hour snowstorm will cost you about $18 to keep the driveway snow-/ice-free. You can scale it up for bigger driveways, but then you’d also scale up the price for a snowplow contractor. A luxury to be sure, but not any more ridiculous than living in a 10,000-square-foot house in the first place.