Stick to radios.

For whatever reason, people, mainly men, seem to not stop when things are going well, or OK even. They just press on and push. The result can sometimes be brilliant, like going to the moon. Or tragically over the top, like the atom bomb. Other men build things like this. The 1949 Crosley Hotshot. Right off the bat, you should be thinking trouble.

Powell Crosley Jr. was kinda famous for his radios. So why the heck build cars? That's another story. But what we have here is what he called a "sports car". Good heavens no. It was sports like in style. It had cut away doors, sat two people and had pod headlights a la MG's. Early models sold for about 850 bucks. Crosley had made a variety of utility type vehicles and power plants for miltary purposes so cost, ease of assembly and simplicity were paramount. But that was during war time. No need for that with the buying public.

Performance was ugly. The power plant was a ghastly 25 odd horsepower thing made out of brazed tin and steel sheet metal (!) and copper. Only later models got a cast iron block. If the welds didn't go during its less than jack rabbit starts, the corrosion from the combination of metals under pressure and heat would eat holes in the cylinder walls the size of pennies. To his credit, the engine was very innovative. It sported overhead cams, high rev capability (over 5000 rpm) and very light weight, just 60 pounds. Due no doubt to fact the engine was made out of sheet metal.

This car was small. It was 145 inches long and weighed a scanty 1100 pounds. No doors, no trunk. It had an interesting feature that was a hold over from the war years- four wheel disc brakes based on aircraft braking sytems. This was totally ahead of its time but suffered from constant problems because the brakes weren't sealed and were prone to corrosion.

A homely little thing with the fit and finish of a whellbarrow, it actually could go past 70mph, carry two people and cost under $1000.

Strong brew.

Austrian jazz pianist, Joe Zawinul died today. He was 75. An accomplished keyboardist, Joe played for Dinah Washington, Maynard Ferguson and scored hits for Cannonball Adderly like the 1966 gospel tinged Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.

A regular at New York's Birdland nightclub, he was never afraid to blend other musical styles into his sound. Rock, soul, gospel, r&b all mixed in with his sound. And he played electric piano, pretty out there when the only electrified instruments in jazz had mainly been guitar and organ.
He met Miles Davis there and the 2 worked together on In a Silent Way (for which he wrote the title song) and then by 1970 he worked with Davis on Bitches Brew, the landmark jazz fusion album. This same year saw the beginning of one his most enduring projects; Weather Report. Together with saxopohinist Wayne Shorter they defined jazz fusion for over 15 years.

A year later he founded the Zawinul Syndicate and had just finished a tour of Europe marking its 20th anniversary this past spring.

Don't tip this one over.

So now I'm going to have a go at travel for few posts and see what the minds of men have come up with to carry us on our travels. It's not very hard to come up some absolute head scratchers when it comes to the automobile. Even the craziest airplanes and stupidest boats can't touch what some people think is OK to drive around in. Once again, I am amazed someone thought that these wack jobs were just fine, thank you very much.

So to get the travel ball rolling (sorry) I give you the 1913 Scripps-Booth Bi-Autogo. The first, and only 2 wheeled automobile. Yeah, thats where the story gets muddy. Two wheels is a motorcycle. Not with this monster. What we have here is a V8 powered 3 seater with 37 inch wooden wheels and a set of retractable training type outrigger wheels that the driver lowered at slow speeds. These features alone secured its place in the "safe and fun to drive" category. The list goes on. Since electric starters were only available then on Cadilacs, this puppy started with compressed air power, generated from an engine mounted compressor. Hmmm, getting safer. Didn't anyone stop to think how crazy it was to power what was essentially a motorcycle with a 330 cubic inch V8 engine? Mankind hadn't really perfected the motorcycle at this stage and hadn't been flying 10 years!

Keeping the engine cooled was the work of about 140 meters of copper pipe that coiled and snaked its way around the chassis and farings. The overall look of all of this piping is truly astounding. Steering was with a steering wheel, but steering was actually accomplished motorcycle style. That is to say, by turning slightly and leaning. This ugly and ineffective system must have been terrifying to perfect as it was next to impossible to turn the wheel straight ahead from a sharp turn unless you were a linebacker.

This gem was the invention of James Scripps Booth, of the famous publishing family. Luckily, he actually drove the prototype a few times and went on to 4 wheeled cars instead.

Walkin.

Ernest Tubb died September 6, 1984. Hailing from Crisp Texas, son of a sharecropper, he was a fan of Jimmie Rogers. He spent the long hours out in the fields singing and learning to yodel. He learned to play guitar too and by the time he was a teenager was getting gigs in the towns around Crisp like San Antonio.

Oddly enough it was a DEAD Jimmie Rogers that got him his first recording contract. He had written to his widow asking for an autographed picture in 1936. This started a friendship that helped him get a shot at an RCA recording contract. Nothing panned out with RCA but in 1940 he signed with Decca and after several flops hit it huge with Walking the Floor Over You.

He had a low keyed delivery, honest voice (frequently enough off key to make even him cringe) and reputation for surrounding himself with strong musicians. He's quoted as saying that men loved his songs because whenever they came on the jukebox they claimed they "could sing better than that" and were probably right.

That'll be 50 rubels please.

On this day in 1698, Peter the Great imposed a tax on beards. As part of his drive to raise state revenues he taxed just about anything that came in quantity. In actual fact it was Peter the Greats drive to Europeanize Russia and bring Western culture and tradition to the fore that led him to tax beards.

The tax was not for amount of hair but whether you had one or not. In effect if you wanted to sport whiskers you had to pay. Owners of beards paid 30 rubels and up (depending on its manliness). Russian peasants, moujiks, paid a levy on their beard every time they entered a city.

Peter was fond of taxes. If he didn't get you for your beard he taxed your basement, horse collars, food, when you were born, married and died, and . . . if that wasn't enough, or you managed to wiggle out from under all these weird money grabs, he taxed your soul.

Gone fishing.

Today, as you may have read in countless online news sites, marks the 25th anniversary of the computer virus. What a thing to celebrate! Thank heavens we mark such events. I really get into tech stories, and although few of us who have ever battled a computer with a virus don't think damn much of them it got me going off to see if this really was the first.

The AP story running now states that somewhere around 1978 a 15 year old created a program that once launched keeps creating copies of itself. The creator made copies and gave them to his friends (for now). When they plugged the floppy in to their computer the virus would burrow its way onto the machines memory. AND, if you put a clean disc in it would copy inself onto that so that when it was passed around it would continue the infection. Such a method of moving digital data around is quite innocently called the "sneakernet". Users literally carried the stuff around on discs to other computers.

Now the Internet had been running of a sorts back then. Mainly still in the realm of universities and the government, the late 70's boasted less than 200 hosts. So its unlikely a 15 year old had access. But by the end of the 80's things had heated up so to speak. ARPANET, the first Internet was reaching the end of its useful life and would soon be split up and expanded in to bigger networks.

Check out the picture above for what it looked like in 1985. Even you non techies can begin to grasp the scope of what was to come based on the sketch by Martin Lyons. Anyways, you need the Internet to have a for true virus like attack. Along came the "Worm" in 1988 and the online experience has never been the same since. A worm is slightly different from a computer virus in that it uses the computers along the way to power itself, in effect using the resources as a kind of digital slingshot.

On or about 6pm on November 2, 1988 odd things began to happen to the burgeoning Internet. The amount of stuff moving through the Internet starts to rise fast. By 9pm most systems have surpassed the number of processes they can handle and are crashing or being shut down by very nervous sytem admins. What is perhaps the first e-mail sent warning of an Internet Virus states that "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS. It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." And shortly thereafter this inciteful gem: "There may be a virus loose on the internet."

Handsome devil.

Engelbert Humperdinck, German composer was born on this day, September 1, 1854. He began composing at a very early age, and enjoyed little support from his parents, who preferred to have an architect instead.

Music was his life and he worked on many projects winning scholarships and competitions throughout Europe. His most famous work, the opera Hansel and Gretel, came in 1893. Heavily influenced by Richard Wagner (even worked for him as his assistant). He died on September 22, 1921 while attending a performance of his son directing Der Freischutz.