1st gen

Hey it's almost 2008 so I better get a post in or two. Took an extended week off from the blog to do some first hand beer research and plug Stella Artois. If I ever do a series on wine I have a bit of leg work completed too.

When I first looked at the video game "thing" I was a little surprised at how far back it all started. Like many, PONG was the game I thought was the first. Since it came out as a coin op arcade game, I was too young to actually get into bars to play it, but I did get a glimpse at the local pool hall where it was a sensation. Really odd to see the pool hall cool guys getting their licks down on this thing.

Atari came out with the arcade version in November 1972, a year after Computer Space. But it did something that all the other games didn't: it became a hit. As goofy as it seems nowadays to slide a white bar up and down, it was serious fun 40 years ago. The very first ping pong type game, Tennis for Two by William Hinginbotham, came out in 1958, but was played on a tiny oscilloscope screen. Few homes had TV's let alone electronics test equipment. What were they thinking?

Anyway, along came the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console with a version of ping pong on it in 1971. So Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had a legal fight on their hands. No matter, the profits from Pong would more than settle it up. Bushnell's concept was brilliant: devise a game that everyone already knows how to play. He had discovered from his release of Computer Space that consumers didn't read the written instructions provided with the game. But everyone can play pong.Pong's instructions were "Avoid missing ball for high score".

The game was tested at 2 bars and became a huge instant hit. One major reason was that almost all arcade games were for one player at a time, you took turns if you were playing against a foe, but Pong allowed two players to go head to head. Both machines were played till they broke down.

The lawsuit mentioned above was launched in 1974 by Magnavox and they won on all counts, but in one of the gaming industries first dramatic twists, Magnavox discontinued the Odyssey a year later and never went into the video game fray again. Atari did, and released the home version of Pong in 1975.

Say goodbye to 2007, see you in 2008.

Blah Blah Blah

A few more posts and I hit the century mark! In anticipation of the coming year I thought I'd give readers a hint at what's coming around the bend. I will definitely be going back to beer for a few updates, I plan on doing a series on recluses(especially kooky ones)and I'm going to go out and buy a model airplane and try to build it. This one will have a photo diary to chronicle the progress. OOh, and yes, the launch of WellBoy is nigh.

I will be posting through the hols and should pass 100 in a few days. Stick around.

Now its getting complicated.

So not long before the Magnavox Odyssey was launched an intrepid engineer named Nolan Bushnell had a few ideas of his own about where video games were going to go. Mr. Bushnell was thinking that no one was going to play games on their stupid TVs. You had to connect it up, they didn't have sound anyways and whats with those weird stick on backgrounds? He figured pool halls and dives was a much better place to learn your video game chops. Pinball arcades, long the haunt of rebellious youth, were a perfect spot to set one of these bad boys up.

After seeing a demonstration of Spacewar! in 1970 he built a hand wired arcade machine to play a version of it called Computer Space. Bushnell, along with his partner Ted Dabney, moved pretty quick in getting Computer Space to market. They had also seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey and were concerned in getting out of the gate first. Now technically, the Odyssey is considered first but only really if you count the fact that it was a "take home" game. Computer Space, released 6 months before Odyssey, was the first commercially available computer game, though designed to go as a stand alone machine in arcades.

The actual machine is quite cool looking, even if its almost 40. With its moulded sparkle blue cabinet and deeply recessed screen giving the player a real sense of immersion. The game electronics are absurdly basic. It didn't use a computer chip or IC's for that matter. Just hard wired components. Output was to a 15" B/W picture tube from a General Electric portable television.


Bushnell and Dabney moved on from Computer Space (it wasn't a huge hit) and formed Atari, who gave us Pong, which was a huge hit.

Crackle and pop.

Okay, here's one for the books: On this day in 1957 the first atomic power station opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Called "the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses"

Built by the Duquesne Light Company the first reactor went critical the beginning of December and the first watt of power ran through the wires on December 18th. The plant was built under the Atoms for Peace program of President Dwight Eisenhower.

It ran until 1982 when it was decommissioned and taken apart. A new plant,the Beaver County Power Station, was built adjacent to the old site and continues to run today.

What can brown do for you?

German / American scientist / engineer Ralph Baer (enough slashes for you?)came up with the idea in 1951 to attach a gaming system to an ordinary TV set. This earth shattering idea, in 1951 no less, would mean that any home with a TV could play games. Doesn't say much for the TV shows back then does it? TV out only 5 years and people are already thinking of playing video games on the damn idiot box.

Ralph came over to America with his family from Germany in the late 1930's. His father had quite rightly diagnosed the coming hell that would be Nazi Germany and moved his Jewish family pronto. He attended technical school and graduated a radio service technician in 1940. After a stint as an intelligence officer in the war he went back to school and earned a BSc degree in 1949. His specialty was the little known science of television. He eventually joined Sanders Associates and stayed with them till he retired in the late 80's. The company is a defence contractor
specializing in electronic systems.

Although he thought about the idea in 1951, it wasn't until 1966 that he started work on the first video game console ultimately called the "Brown Box". What his bosses thought about it I don't know. Still it must have seemed odd when their primary contracts were complex electronic devices for military applications.

By 1971 he had the thing going and Sanders Associates licensed the gizmo to Magnavox whose clever marketing department spotted a dud with its original name and changed it to the Magnavox Odyssey. By today's standards it was pretty plain. It lacked sound and had a bizarre method for dealing with black and white TVs (by far the dominant set in the homes of Americans then): the system was furnished with coloured plastic sticky overlays to put on the TV screen to simulate colour. Yeesh. Wonder how that worked if you changed game and left the old overlay on?

It did, however, have some epochal developments, genre defining technology, such as game cartridges and cool extras like the first "light gun". You plugged it into the console, loaded the shoot em up game and you could actually aim at the screen and, in real time with not that shabby accuracy, develop a video game "skill". Pretty heavy for 1972. Trouble was any light source worked for the gun, but hey, not many homes had electric lights then either.

Magnavox had its headaches marketing the machine and spent more time either suing or being sued by rival video game companies over the next few decades. In an ironic twist, video game giant Nintendo actually got its start in the industry marketing the Odyssey in Japan in 1975.

December 12 in music history.

Every so often I get looking at stuff online and find some pretty intriguing info. It's the Internet after all, and should come as no surprise. The neat thing is that you can assemble a pile of stuff and look at it side by side, like comparing washing machines or melons at the market.

So since I usually have a today in history thing or who died on this date post I was getting stuff together and realized that December 12 had some pretty awesome and shitty music hit the charts then.

How about Dec 12, 1957 when Presley had Jailhouse Rock and Buddy Holly had Peggy Sue. Parents all over North America learned how to yell `Turn that goddamn racket down!`

Or 1965 when Turn, Turn, Turn by the Byrds and I Got You (I Feel Good)by James Brown made the charts. Wow.

But you gotta have some balance too. 1973 had the Carpenter`s Top of the World and in 1981 (brace yourself) Physical from Olivia Newton-John. Sorry.

And here`s one, not a song, but still big news: the Chairman of the Board, Francis Albert Sinatra, was born this day in 1915.

To finish up and totally unrelated because I`m in a mood tonight, I watched (for the 3rd time) last night on PBS, the Buena Vista Social Club. Superb.

Use the fork, Luke.

It surprises me that during the late 50's when the first space shots had captured the public imagination and the cold war and all it's technological sabre rattling held the generals gaze, that somewhere, someone didn't put the pieces together and come up with a space video game. It seems obvious that the public would go for it. There was such a game, much heralded in programming circles, but rarely seen outside of the engineering department at MIT, called Spacewar! (don't forget the exclamation point)

Conceived by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen to run on the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1, which came out in 1960. It boasted a whopping 9 K of memory and became notorious as the first computer to elicit the hacker mentality in computer science students. Back in 1960 hackers were the crazy into computer people, rare animals indeed in a world of less than a thousand computers. The idea of constant debugging and upgrading to improve performance can be blamed on them.

The three formed the Hingham Institute (named after the street their house was on) to study how to take advantage and exploit the limits of the PDP-1. The result of their toils was Spacewar! They wanted to "demonstrate as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit", "it should be interesting, which means every run should be different" and "it should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way -- in short, it should be a game."

The game was simple; as the best games usually are. Two competing spaceships maneuver and shoot at each other, dodging and weaving to avoid being hit against a background of moving stars. Early versions had random dots, while later ones had actual correct star charts moving along. Originally control was via the computer's input controls, but that was a real snarl for 2 players to get at and one player was always farther from the screen, a decided disadvantage. Since joysticks were not available then they designed a simple Bakelite control box and had the institutes model railway club bodge them together.

The program was ready in April 1962 for MIT's annual Science Open House in May. At the end of the academic year the MIT hackers moved on to professional careers around the country. For a fun first hand account of the birth of this game I dug up this article written for long gone (1985) Creative Computing Magazine. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html

Lay a patch.

You know you're having a good day when there is a choice of cool things invented on the same day. I am torn between tire (tyres for those British folk) and the Dewey Decimal System. Seeing how in my own way, I have had a few discoveries about tires in the last few weeks, I will run with the invention of the pneumatic tire by British engineer Robert William Thompson in 1845. Mind you I will get back one day soon and prattle on about Melvil Dewey.

Born in 1822 in Stonehaven Scotland, he was one of several very famous Scottish inventors of the 19th century. He ranks with John Baird (television), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone) and another rubber pioneer, John Dunlop. More about that relationship in a minute.

The 11th of 12 children he was chosen for the ministry but couldn't figure out Latin, so at 14 he went to North America to stay with relatives in South Carolina. That didn't pan out either, so he was back in under 2 years. He did, however, have a natural ability with chemistry and physics.

His father, recognizing a budding mind, set up a shop for him. His first project was the rebuilding of his mothers washing mangle (that must have gone over well).He apprenticed with an engineering firm and started work in Edinburgh as a civil engineer.One of his early engineering coups was coming up with a way to ignite explosives with electricity. Miners loved him.

Off to London in 1844 to work in the budding railway industry. It was here he came up with his patent for an air filled tire or aerial wheel as he called it.The trouble was there were no cars then, bicycles were a curiosity, and no one with a cart could afford the luxury of air filled rubber tires to run their chickens to market. It was almost 35 years later when Dunlop re-invented the pneumatic tire that they actually took off commercially. No matter. Thomson also patented the fountain pen and steam shovel, so there.

Numero Uno

So in tramping around the Internet and the libraries looking for video game lore the "first video game ever" mantle steadily fell upon a quaint little game called Tennis for Two. The 2 games I wrote about in the posts were definitely out before this one, and they were real games, totally meant for distraction and amusement. So why is this one still called the first?

William Higinbotham, a scientist, developed the game to amuse visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory on, not surprisingly, visitors day. Higinbotham was a scientist of the highest order having first worked Los Alamos National Laboratory, where like at Brookhaven he headed the electronics division. He also had a conscience, being a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists, the seminal nuclear non proliferation group.

The game itself, according to Higinbotham was pretty simple. "Back then, analog computers were used to work out all kinds of mechanical problems. They didn't have the accuracy of digital computers, which were very crude at the time, but then you didn't need a great deal of precision to play TV games. " The tiny screen, actually an oscilloscope, was connected to an analog computer programmed to play the game. The "gamer" saw a tennis court from ground level on the side with the net a vertical line in the middle, inverted T style. A dot was the ball and users used a dial to change trajectory and a switch to hit it. The program was quite cool because it played like tennis in that the ball would drop on a long shot because of gravity and a hard shot bounced back farther than a weak one.

Barely ten years later, a very similar game broke onto the scene that was actually a hit, Pong.

OXO

The early 50's were a watershed for video game development. After the rampant popularity of NIM came OXO. Odd how the engineers and scientists of the day seemed to be insistant on making ccomputers approachable by coming up with the shortest names possible for their creations.

OXO, as you can guess, was a simple tic tac toe game. Programmed on the EDSAC computer: Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, by Alexander S. (Sandy) Douglas. It differs from NIM in that it displays the game as its being played on a tiny screen inches across. NIM simply flashed lights in patterns which were interpretted by the players.

EDSAC was originally made in 1949 for the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. The machine was there for the exclusive use of the mathematical department and turned out to be the first of two versions. EDSAC 2 came out in 1958. It's fine pedigree lived on as the LEO 1, the world's first commercially avialble business computer that was based almost solely on the EDSAC design.

Highly addictive

Back when the Second World War was a recent memory and folk had time on their hands and seemingly a future in which to have the time, men and women of science turned their efforts towards more trivial matters, like video gaming. In those heady days of the late Forties and early Fifties, people just had to have the latest game.

In 1951 that means you were going to play NIM, and play it on the Nimrod console, what else? There has been a few other "video game-ish" programs but they were basically lay persons adaptations of miltary programs used to shoot targets with missiles, one of the very reasons digital computers wee invented anyway. But NIM was designed to be just a game.

It debuted May 5th of that year at the Festival of Britain. This festival showcased the best of British endeavors and cutting edge science. It actually appeared at the Exhibition of Science in South Kensignton.

For those of you wondering what NIM is, its not a totally unique game made only for the computer that ran it. It was actually a NIM simulator, a small digital computer (the only kind they had then) which was perfect for it. NIM is a mathematical game usually played with stacks of objects, like match sticks, pebbles etc. Two players take turns removing amounts of objects in rotation until they are all gone. There are many, many websites out there where you try your hand at it. I played it a bit and its surprisingly satisfying for such a basic game.

Nimrod was a hit at the festival and then moved on to Berlin for a stint. The device was huge: 9 feet high by 12 feet long and contained hundreds of vacuum tubes. Everything was wired together, no plugs and sockets, so the designers had to build it correctly from the start. It wasn't actually, a flaw surfaced that caused grief for a few days, but once located it ran fine.

Blah blah blah

I have run the beer thing far enough for now, though like most of my other rants, I found out more in my snooping than I can ever hope to get on the pages of this blog the first time around. I found myself over the weekend trying to decide where to aim the mighty "Barn" ship this time, but I had a few distractions that got on my nerves.

Such as, I have a few lingering doubts about 9/11 and it bugs me that in the news again is the "other" airliner seen over Washington during the attacks. I had once hoped to do a few pages on the subject but it just got me so depressed thinking about how to approach the subject: On the one hand is the skeptic, the doubter who knows in his soul that the official reports don't add up. On the other a yearning for order and a simple plausable explanantion so we can get on with it. I'm still torn up over the Kennedy assasination and Marilyn's suicide.

I'm also feeling that Vietnam thing going on in Iraq, no matter how upbeat the reports get. I have plans for pieces on the American Civil War for 2008 and hopefully a shot at a few minor sized conflicts such as the Falklands War, the one that was never declared. Oh well.

So to keep the bow in the wind and the owls alert and ready I instead will spend a day or two in December, the final days of 2007, going on semi-knowledgably about video games.

Cade's cola

Gatorade inventor, Dr. Robert Cade, died today in Jacksonville, Florida. He was 80. Originally developed for the Florida Gators football team, the beverage has become a sports icon equal to Nike.

Cade and three others came up with the original formula in 1965. The sweltering Florida heat took its toll on local athletes and Cade wanted to create a drink that replaced what the body flushed out in sweat. Rather that just water or juice, he wanted a product that replaced vital chemicals, a true designer liquid.

According to lore, the first batch cost less than $50 in supplies and didn't taste very good, but it did do what it was supposed to do. To quell complaints they added sugar and lemon juice. It launched a year later, the year that Florida quarterback Steve Spurrier won the Heisman Trophy, a brought fame to Florida AND made Gatorade a household word.

Whoops. oh crap.

On this day in 1973 Rose Mary Woods told a federal court that she was the one who erased eighteen and a half minutes from one of the tapes that recorded President Nixon's Whitehouse conversations.

The taping system was installed during Johnson's presidency as a memory aid to help recall conversations and to use, no doubt, to settle arguments and remind visitors of promises not yet kept. Johnson found the system useful and hoped one day to use it to write memoirs. He also understood that its implememtation was secret; how could he tell visitors he taped everything and expect a straight amswer? He also knew that he himself was all over the tapes and should be careful that he behave. He encouraged Nixon to keep it installed and use it for the purpose it was intended.

Like the modern Whitehouse e-mails that have mysteriously been deleted from the server(who the heck talks like this? the average layman doesn't know or care what an e-mail server is)the Whitehouse of the Nixon era had a server malfunction just at the right time.

No one doubted Woods' loyalty to her boss. They had been together since 1951 when an up and coming young senator admired her attention to detail and efficiency and asked her to stay on after a temp assignment.

Her claim that she accidently erased the tape during routine transcription has never been misproven. I have transcibed hours of audio recordings of interviews for school assignments, probably no where near as many as she must have done during her time as a secretary, but I have to say its quite easy to lose your place and jump over portions, sometimes in a blink of an eye.

Irony of ironies, Woods herself was a victim of a break in at the Watergate when she had an apartment there in the late 60's. Thats her up above demonstrating the famous "stretch".

Where there's smoke . . . .

So in a semi-serious effort to cover parts of the noble history of beer I may have overlooked a few milestones here and there. I lean towards the absurd or unsafe when I'm delving into a subject as you may have gathered and beer offers ample fuel for that fire. As my beer rant comes to a close I wanted to look at a purely North American story, that of what's called 'steam beer".

The orginal steam beer came out of California starting in gold rush times. It was not, according to what I can find, any hell. But any good struggling state has to have some beer. This beer was brewed using the hot process, meaning the ingredients were boiled up before fermentation. The alternative, of course, is the cold one, where ice cold water and chilled fermenatation produce the distict German style beers. California in the 1880's, as well as now, lacked daily cold temperatures and a glacial water supply. I suspect they lacked the patience and just wanted to get on with making beer. European nations like Germany had the cold and a network of wonderfully chilly caves to store and ferment their beer. Recipes from the time included grains like grits.

It was consumed for the most part by the labourers and working classes. The high temperatures it was made and stored at caused the beer to be very carbonated. The miners grew to prefer the excessively fizzy beer, although in the early years it couldn't have been very tasty. Beer was needed to slake the parched throats, and whatever was available went into its brewing. batches varied (a common theme)until ice was more widely available and with the industrial revolution, commercial refridgeration.

Smoke me a kipper . . . .

Smoked beer is an offshoot of German beer that began life as a pleasant oversight or minor mistake. Dating from the 1600's onwards, these beers smokey flavour came from the smoke wafting about from the fires used to dry the ingredients, particularly the malt.

In Germany the beer is called Rauchbier, and is brewed to this day. Beers in England dating back to the same time period had smokey flavours too, and it all came from the wood burning used to dry the malt. Sometimes the fires burned too high and some batches were particularly pungent, adding to the "good batch/bad batch" lore of the time. Although quite mechanized by then, beer making in the 1600's still held a component of chance.

As beer making got more sophisticated the process became more generic and the grains used to make beer were being dried in temperature controlled kilns, not over fires, so the smokey beer started to dissappear from the table.

While Germany has several smoked beers still being made, other countries as diverse as Brazil and Japan make some too. The Japanese brewery makes smoked sausages too.

Boneshaker

So sometimes around 1863 or 1866, and possibly on November 20th, Pierre Lallement invented the pedal bike. Depending on which reliable source you choose for the date, none the less he definitely invented the bike. The year the patent was issued
was 1866, but no doubt he had done the inventing stuff well before then.

He originally earned his living making baby carriages. He was in his teens then and living in France. The story goes that one day he say a dandy horse and thought it was real neat but kind of flawed. A dandy horse was a German invention (circa 1818) that looked alot like a modern bike except there were no chains or pedals. The two wheeled machine was propelled by the rider who "walked or ran" the horse along the ground with their legs and feet. Steering was the same as a modern bike. The rider sat a bit lower than a bike so the stride was more like a natural one, not the tippy toe kind you do when you are following a friend on foot when your on your bike.

Lallement put the crank and pedals on the front wheel, gave the rider a slightly sprung saddle and voila! a bike.

But fame and fortune elluded him. He was no business man and when he went to America in 1865 his fortunes didn't change. The actual patent was registered in the States the following year but he never found any backers and eventually returned to France two years later to find the European bicycle craze winding down. Seems cyclists found the cast iron frames, wooden seats and iron wheels uncomfortable. Funny. But the real killer was the complaints from pedestrians and horse propelled vehicles.

Lallement missed the boat and died quite young at the age of 47. If he had hung on a few years he would have been lauded as a true pioneer because the next craze in 1890 did hang around. That's when the "safety bicycle" was invented. (Why do I get that discomfort when I hear words like safety? Was the safety razor safe?)

What made it safe-ish was chain drive and gear reduction hubs that reduced the diameter of the wheels AND rubber tires that reduced the number of accidents by lowering the constant pain cyclists were in and allowed them to concentrate on the road.

Kinda beer related.

Music and beer have long been willing bed mates so I think its fitting to
stray a little bit from the path and shine a light on some long
forgotten music. I speak of that wonderful Klesmer / Mambo hybrid, Bagels and Bongos.

Created by pianist Irving Fields in 1959, the music became an instant hit.
Fields was born in 1915 in New York and started playing piano
professionally from his teens onwards. He had to dress "old" to play at
bars and union gigs, and would sport a painted on mustache and a large
hat pulled down to hide his youth. His repertoire included hits of the day from Cole Porter and Gershwin to the classics.

At 17 he got a gig as a pianist for cruise ship on a run to Cuba and Puerto Rico (what a great job for a teenager!!) In Havana he fit right in with the local musicians. So much so he was often mistaken for a native Latin musician. Whilst sitting in with a local band one night he met Xavier Cugat, who, so the story goes, came up and just talked to him in Spanish, totally convinced he was the real deal. He had the genuine Latin feel in his playing.

Back in New York he played the Crest Room at the Waldorf Astoria and added the Latin sound to his New York roots. The place was packed every night and became the hip spot to be for celebs like Ava Gardner. RCA Vistor signed him and in 1946 he had his first big hit with Miami Beach Rhumba. The combination of well known, comfortable Jewish melodies set to swinging Latin beats was a recipe for success. Everyone wanted it.

He worked steadily for years playing the swankiest venues in the world. In 1959 he sealed his place in music history with the release of Bagels and Bongos. He said in an interview for the Montreal Mirror "Bagels and Bongos was Jewish music with Latin rhythms, and the wonderful thing about this music, this unique idea, was that it had no language barrier."

The concept was so succesful that RCA Victor had him do the same treatment to other ethnic sounds. Although commercially successful, I'm not sure about Pizza and Bongos or Bikinis and Bongos.

As with any trend, the pendulum swings both ways and as Vietnam and acid rock started to seep into muisc culture, the appetite fro Jewish/ Latin fusion wained. Fields kept working and returnd to the lounge circuit and has been playing ever since.

Laying down the law.

The popular notion of witches dancing around a kettle probably came from the "beer witches" who caused batches of beer to wrong in the 14th and 15th centuries. Of course none of the boneheads making poison beer took any responsibility for their wacked out recipes going wrong. That they might have something to do with it never crossed their minds. So blame it on some folksy tale thats hard to prove is better for business.

Beer making really had turned into witches brews by then and there must have been deaths, or at the very least some painful weekends passed grasping one's stomach. The Germans had had enough and got tough on the beer makers. In 1516 the German Beer Purity Law was passed outlawing anything but barley, malt, hops and water be used to make beer. Back then yeast was an unknown additive that was found in enough quantity naturally to produce the fermentation needed to make alcohol and carbon doixide. Not surprisingly, there were many "flat" batches.

And just to fool you a bit the picture up top is of Egyptian beer jars. They were made to hold the beer that were put in the tombs of the dead so they had beer in the afterlife. Practical.

How we made it this far I have no idea.

As an aside, the term "King of Beers" comes from the patron saint of beer, King Gambrinus, who pioneered the use of hops to flavour beer. As you'll see below, there is a good reason he is a saint. Because some of the crap that people used to flavour it until then was just awful, if it didn't kill you.

Brewers in Germany used what was called "grut", a mixture of flavourings to give their unique beer its taste. The brewers were so fond and protective of their blends that a law was enacted, the Flavourings License, that protected the recipes. Consequently they were not happy about the use of hops as a flavouring agent. It totally ruined any secret, cool special blend they had concocted to set their beer apart from the crowd. And to heap coal on the fire of their disgust, the beer drinkers preferred hops flavoured beer.

So what did some of these gruts contain? Some basic Internet research has turned up- Juniper berries (gin flavoured beer?)
Caraway seed
Anise seed
Thornapple (a poison) more of that coming up
Gentian (used to flavour one of the world's first soft drinks "Moxie", said to be able to cure softening of the brain and loss of manhood, whatever that means)
Spruce chips and pine roots (for those of you who like air freshener flavoured beer)
and my favourite- Helbane, aka, Stinking Nightshade. It is poisonous but was a common component in what were called witches brews because of it psychoactive properties. Consuming helbane flavoured beer induced hallucinations, elevated heart rate and induced a good old glorious buzz.

Helbane was the original flavour used to make the classic German Pilsner beer until it was outlawed in 1516 and as a poison in several noted Victorian murders.

Only in Germany, pity.

So the Romans continued the beer making thread only until they discovered wine making. After that they pretty much poo pooed it. Now we know where uppity wine drinkers come from. To be honest, most beer was still unfiltered and had no shelf life, refridgeration was thousands of years away AND, horror of horrors, it didn't have a head. No wonder the Romans preferred the drink of the gods.

In the outer reaches of the Roman empire, beer was still king. The Teutons were noted for their brewing prowess as early as 800 BC. Over the years beer making in what is now Germany became an art and then a trade. Beer had mainly been brewed by families for their own needs and bartered occasionally for other staples, but the Teutons saw it as a business. Bread making and beer making still went hand in hand.

Beer making made its way up to the Nordic tribes and figured prominently in many sagas. But it wasn't until the Christian era that beer enjoyed its first major popularity explosion. Odd. The monastaries were at the hub of early Christian beer making. Like beer makers before them they started out making beer for their own enjoyment. Rumour has it they preferred beer to almost anything else. The monastic life could be very frugal with little enjoyment. Beer fixed that. It was particularly handy during fasting when drinking liquids wasn't considered breaking the fast. We can thank the monks for this tradition of drinking beer for long periods without eating very much as a ritual shared worldwide to this day.

Why we celebrate November 8th.

November 8 is the feast day celebrated in honour of St. Godfrey of Amiens. Born in 1066 in the town of Molincourt, France. Seems he was a prickly priest and although had a knack for getting things done was mainly remembered for his fierce conservatism.

He banned people wearing rich clothes to his church, had a deep dislike of drinking and was crazy about celibacy and clean, simple living. He was known throughout his life though as someone who cared deeply and worked hard for the sick and infirm. Kind of balanced it out a bit. He also consistently turned down gigs because he felt he wasn't worthy. He relented and his first post found him at the abbey of Our Lady of Nogent, a broken down place with an equally sad looking staff. His talent for order got the shop in order and he bagan to earn his reputation. When a local drought threatened crops and soon the lives of his countryfolk, he recommended people fast, and for good measure the animals too. Well it worked. The clouds gathered and rain fell. He was on his way.

He was offered a bishopric and turned it down, again feeling unworthy. King Phillip and the Council of Troyes both got pissed off and forced him to take it. He longed for the monastic life and tried repeatedly to give up his title. No one would have it. He died in 1115.

Take 2 beers and call me in the morning.

The Egyptians carried on the beer making traditions started by the Sumerians and Babylonians. Like these cultures it was revered for the calming and invgorating effect it had on people. Nothing changed there. And interestingly it crossed all class boundaries, from lowly peasants to the highest priest.

The preferred brewing method still often used bread as the starchy component. I think this is partly, according to folklore, how beer was "accidently" discovered. That bread got wet somehow and was left in its container and voila! beer, and they just kept making it that way. But some folk think they kept doing it like this because the main ingredients (wheat, barley, sugar amd yeast) were easily transportable in the form of bread. To make beer then you broke the bread into pieces and soaked it in water and then let the chemical reaction take over. Pretty slick actually. Everyone knows how heavy those beer bottles are.

The Egyptians used beer for medicine too. Documents have been found with lists of prescriptions that included among other cures, beer. Why not? They took it seriously enough to bury their dead with it, buy favours and appease pissed off gods. But they took a lot more beer, about 30000 plus gallons. Those gods are thirsty. Isis is the patron "goddess" of beer.

Becoming human.

Its tough to spot the exact time beer was invented, but most sources point to about 6000 BC. As for the location, Mesopotamia seems like the spot. However, because of the the simple chemical process required to ACCIDENTALY make beer, chances are there were a few tailgate parties before the Mesopotamians hoisted a mug.

Historians agree that bread making and beer go hand in hand. In fact the main components of bread: wheat, sugar, yeast water, is pretty much beer. We're used to varieties that favour hops for flavouring. However the starchy part doesn't have to be barley or wheat. In fact it can be any starch. Some horrifying variations have sorghum, cassava, potato and the agave plant.

The Sumarians actually figured out how to do it on purpose lo those many years ago and passed it on to the conquering Babylonians around 2000 BC. Little writen records remain but my uneducated guess is that 4000 years is lots of time to make beer.

The Babylonians took beer making to its logical pinnacle for the times and produced no less than 20 different variations. They also placed the beverage pretty high up on the importance scale. I know a few people who positively cannot operate without beer, but the Babylonians insisted on daily consumption. A law was written outlining a daily beer ration that ran from 2 litres per day for ordinay folk, to 3 litres for civil servants (thats a good move, slightly less than the current modern equivalent in many cities) to a whopping 5 litres a day for high priests.

One invention to come out of these times was the drinking straw. Seems the brew was unfiltered, so to avoid drinking in the muck rolled reeds were used to suck up the beer. Now there's a plan: drink 5 litres of beer slowly through a straw.

Gentelmen . . .

I tire of explosions, isotopes and molten sand. Nothing perks me up like a good birthday! It's David Ogden Stiers birthday today. Born in 1944 the actor known for his sophisticated edge has long been a TV staple. His most memorable work being "Winchester" in the MASH series. He is also a lover of classical music who actually knows his stuff; he has guest conducted for many symphony orchestras.

His early career was classical theatre and improv but he headed out west to Hollywood where he appeared on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Kojak (oh my) among others. But it was in 1977 that he joined the cast of MASH where he won two Emmy's for his performance as a stuffy Bostonian.

His smooth authoritative voice projected breeding and style and was used in many animated movies and as voice overs for such diverse projects as Beauty and the Beast, the Myst PC game series AND George Lucas' THX 1138.

David Odgen Stiers shares his birthday with that well known bandleader Kinky Friedman.

Noble force of the explosions.

Sometime in the mid 60's the Soviet Union started to look seriously at what atomic bombs could do other than barbeque enemies. Originally it examined the same 2 objectives as the American Ploughshares program- nuclear "landscaping" and oil extraction. Frighteningly named "Program No. 7, Nuclear explosions for the national economy" it soon grew to take on at least a half dozen more uses for this power. One idea was to move asteroids. No details on what that means.

The first real use of the bombs was to cap runaway oil and gas wells. It was a success. Now they felt that this could actually be a viable business. The Soviets set off 122 nuclear explosions from about 1965 to 1989.

I had a look at the list and there are some ho hum shots and others just don't sound good at all. For instance theres the Water Reservoir Construction project. A bomb was set off and the ensuing hole left to fill with water. But what about the Toxic Oil Field Waste Disposal shot? Hmmm, maybe the toxic waste is ok after all. And here's the one I like- The Decoupling Experiment.

In actual fact the toxic waste disposal was as simple as the reservoir construction. A bomb was set off deep undergound and the hole it produced became a holding tank for the crap. Apprently, some are still in use.

The decoupling was nothing more than attempts to isolate the seismic vibrations all the explosions created so nosy parker US wouldn't know what uncle Joe was up to.

If you have the time, energy and would like to read a fairly technical summary of the entire Soviet peaceful nuclear program check out the link from the US Department of Energy's web site. Its actually quite well written.

http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.jsp?purl=/793554-ZAQEpq/native/

So why is this a better idea.

Other countries flirted with the idea of using atomic bombs to move earth too. Most notably the former Soviet Union, but surprisingly Canada also toyed with the notion. Now in the middle of a huge oil and gas boom centred in North Eastern British Columbia and Northern Alberta, the industry pumps millions of litres of oil and gas.

It wasn't all roses for this business. Back in the late 50's engineers grappled with how the hell to get all the oil out of the tar sands and how to get the gas to come out of the ground easier. Production costs were insane, investors were wary of the new sources and oil was not at 90 bucks a barrel yet.

I found an excellent piece on Alberta's dance with lady fission on the Innovation Alberta website (link below) by historian Dr. Michael Payne. In it he describes how the plan was to detonate an atomic bomb at a place called Cheechum Crossing, just outside one of the hubs of the industry, Fort McMurray.

It was the progeny of the same Project Ploughshares that started the dig a canal campaign. A Dr. L. M. Natland of the Richfield oil company actually came up with the idea of setting off an atomic bomb under the Athabasca Oil Sands. The hope was to liberate the oil from the sand. It had long been a puzzle for engineers; so much oil, so close but how to get it out. The engineers, the oil companies and the provincial and federal goverments got together and started planning.

Thankfully, public sentiment and generally touchy world relations (the Cuban missile crisis was barely a year away at this time) stopped the idea from blossoming. It didn`t completely die out for a while though. In 1973 a Canadian oil company called Phoenix Oil actually took out a patent on a method for extracting oil using atomic bombs, but it never went any farther than that.

http://www.innovationalberta.com/article.php?articleid=90

Stand back a bit while I light the fuse . . .

My love of the ridiculously unsafe has once more been satisfied in this, the beginning of a new series playfully called: When using too much explosives is fun. I give you Project Plowshare. A program devised by the Americans to use atomic bombs as excavation tools.

No doubt the military tests, over 300 alone just in the United States, gave engineers something to think about. At the very least the damn bombs left great big holes in the ground. Seizing on the opportunity to pacify their guilt and perhaps use atomic bombs to give back to society, the engineers and scientists said "Whoa, look how many construction workers lives we can spare by creating and instant hole in the ground the size of a university."

In actual fact the bombs did work well for earth moving uses, it not only moved the earth but vapourized a good bit of it and deposited the rest in the atmosphere too, reducing the need to find a place to put the stuff.

One of the projects considered was replacing the Panama Canal. It had simply become too narrow and slow. The canals locks proved cumbersome and prone to repairs. The idea was to create a sea level canal (no lifting the boats up and then floating them on to the other side). By using atomic bomb excavation the canal could be cut through anywhere in the area regardless of terrain and it would be much wider and deeper.

Beginning in 1950, Project Plowshare seriously examined sites all over Central America until deciding on Darien province in Panama. It was 45 miles across Atlantic to Pacific at this point and scientists figured on a couple of dozen really big atomic bombs would soften the ground enough to auger out a canal.

This project was seriously considered. Only the test ban treaty of 1962, which halted all testing, actually stopped it. Engineers needed to do more testing before beginning excavation. Various other test bans came and went with no real progress on this idea, but Project Plowshare wasn't officially closed until 1977.

Logistically speaking.

Whilst puttering around looking for automobile failures and extra large things that blew up I came across this fellow and promised myself I'd find 5 minutes to write something down. Frederick William Lanchester was an inventor, engineer and transportation pioneer. Born this day in 1868 in London, England, he was one of eleven children ( 3 sisters and 6 brothers).

To say that he was an engineer doesn't quite cover the sheer range of his work. He worked on cars, boats, planes (before and after they were invented) photography, physics, and even created an entire new field called operations research. A real Renaissance Man.

He built his first engine in 1893 and together with his brothers, who had built a boat, created in 1894, the first powerboat to ply English waters. The following year he built, with the aid of another brother,(thank God they weren't all barbers) one of the first cars in England. The performance sucked according to Frederick so he built another engine with more power and a smoother feel. He had already begun to realize that the consumer wanted a quiet, comfortable vehicle to ride in. Automobile owners needed to feel safe and secure.The image of a soot covered mud encrusted Shakelton-esque trail blazer that owning an automobile then required of its owner was foreign to Lanchester.

In 1900 the brothers formed the Lanchester Engine Company and utilized Fredericks advanced designs like mid mounted engine for stability, 3 speed automatic transmission and a unique disc braking system that braked the clutch disc rather that the wheels.

Frederick never stopped with innovative new designs. When he invented larger and more powerful engines he again was faced with the vibrations and noise that occured. This would never do. He set about to design counter balancing shafts to smooth out the engine performance. A feature used today in high preformance cars.

Through several permutations of his company, Lanchester continued to build cars until he was bought out by Daimler in 1933. Tinted glass, left hand steering for export models were some of the options available.

Avast me hearties.

Crews have rebelled against captains, troops against generals for as long as men (and women) have been led or told what to do. I was watching a superd show called Mars Rising, narrated by William Shatner on Discovery Channel last night, when there was a brief snippet about rebellions in space.

As per usual I did some snooping and came up with a few close calls dating back almost 40 years.

Apollo 7 astronauts had an extraordinarily hard time of their mission in 1968. The first new Apollo launch after the Apollo 6 launch pad disaster, the crew felt the pressure to make this one a success. They had pressures from onboard as well: they all had colds. Great, a cold, clammy microscopicaly small capsule with 3 runny nosed men. For 11 long days. Around and around they go, orbit after orbit, testing and re-testing. Getting hundreds of trials completed, scenarios played out in orbit before the first long range charge at the moon. It is said that not all of the requests from mission control were carried out when they wanted them to.

In 1972, the crew of Skylab (remember Skylab?) got fed up with an over ambitious schedule and simply booked a flex day. The day after they worked out a more realistic work load.

MIR wasn't so lucky. A workhorse both in kilometers traveled and hours logged by its crews, it was also the first true space outpost. A place astronauts went and moved in and stayed. In 1995 2 Russian astronauts simply refused to don their space suits and head outside. Ground engineers couldn't do a whole heck of a lot so they said OK, fine, have it your way. Back on earth there was some crap flying. The MIR commander of the time had simply had enough and wanted to wait until fresh replacements arrived.

MIR had suffered an enormous fire that year, that if it had not been put out, could have done in the place. Later on in June a supply ship crashed into MIR, cutting its power in half and generally making a hash of the place.

Eeek, a mouse.

Joey Bishop, the 5th and last surviving member of the Rat Pack, died today, he was 89. Born in the Bronx, Joseph Abraham Gottlieb, was a comedian from the start. Unlike the other Rat Pack-ers, who were actors and singers first (true song and dance men) Bishop did stand up. He started doing vaudeville before he went off to war.

When he returned he went back to comedy, this time stand up in clubs, radio and that fledgling medium, television. Frank Sinatra caught his act and helped him get better gigs, including working with Sinatra.

Always the sombre "rat", his long face and quiet delivery eaned him a reputation for being the responsible one of the gang, the designated driver. He never matched his buddies for partying and girl chasing. In fact he was married to only one woman, Sylvia Ruzga, for nearly 60 years.

With the exception of a few movies in the fifties and early sixties, most notably, Ocean's Eleven, he was working the Vegas Clubs with the Rat Pack. TV offers surfaced starting in 1960 with many appearances on the tonight show hosted by comedy heavyweights Jack Parr and Steve Allen.

Soon after he starred in his own comedy show, The Joey Bishop Show, about a guy who stars in a late night talk show. When will they learn. Anyway it didn't last past a few seasons. Next was his own late night talk show, a real one, but it fizzled. Partly because Bishop was a comedian, not an interviewer, and partly because now he was up against the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson at the helm. A young up and comer, Regis Philbin, was his sidekick.

Ironically, Bishop would guest host the Tonight Show more than 150 times.

Sometimes he appeared to be the junior member of the Rat Pack, or mascot. In typical Joey Bishop fashion he's quoted as saying “But even the mascot gets to carry the ball, too,”

Borrowed mind.

I said I was going to look into Tesla's remote controlled boat. The challenge with anything Tesla is, of course, the vast amount of stuff out there. Not so hard to sift through the printed works, but holy shit there is a mountain of it on the Internet. And Telsa is exactly the kind of guy, unfortunately, to draw wild eyed and creative thinkers to. You get my drift, not all of it is reliable, and I have pretty easy standards.

The year was 1898. The place, Madison Square Garden. In a custom made pool Tesla demonstarted a remote controlled boat. It was a homely thing, oven roaster shaped; it was hard to tell the bow from the stern which was slightly pointed. Constructed of metal and filled with batteries, wires and small electric motors, it thrilled onlookers. No one had heard of radio then, let alone witnessed the technology in action. Many thought HE controlled the boat with his mind.

The boat was over 6 feet long and heavy as all stink. Even though the device was high tech for then, all the batteries, motors and running gear weighed down the craft. It barely broke the surface. It had some cool features like running lights that the operator could control, and amazingly Tesla designed the receiver circuit to only operate on the signals from his transmitter, which is nowadays a common technology used in everything from cell phones to garage door openers.

It didn't take long for folk to go "hey, lets pack that puppy full of dynamite and drive it into the side of a ship". Tesla had, indeed, thought of this too, but war was far off for now and the navy (US and British) wouldn't bite. He did think that remote controlled craft in general were good for mankind and had originally hoped they would be used as labour saving devices. So was his death ray, oh well.

Robot-esque

Although not really a robot, Robby means robot for many people. Actually a very elaborate suit that an actor wore, Robby the Robot has it all going on. Designed by Robert Kinoshita for the 1956 MGM movie Forbidden Planet it had a plexiglass "head" spinning antennae, lights and rotating appendages galore.

Actor Frank Darro strapped on the Robby body during this film. A veteran actor who worked through the silent era and into the age of serials was well suited for this. Known as a fit, acrobatic and thankfully thin actor, he stamped around the sound stage from shot to shot. Since this was a suit, not unlike modern deep sea diving systems, it was hopelessly hard to keep your balance on solid ground.

I have been trying to find out who was inside Robby when he appeared in other movies and TV shows, notably: Gilligan's Island, The Banana Splits, Columbo (!), and Wonder Woman. Anyone out there have any info?

Yeesh.

So after the magical sophistication of Bow Shooting Boy we move into the 20th century. There is a brief stopover at the turn of the century for Tesla's radio controlled boat, but I started reading all the stuff and Tesla's just too big a subject for tonight. I give you instead, Elektro. Built by Westinghouse in 1937 for what reason I don't know. It was, no doubt, a promotional device, and Westinghouse dragged it all over the States for years, showing it off at fairs and expositions. I'm not convinced that it did the company much in the way of drumming up business. I mean, did anyone ever go "Hey, there's Elektro (with a "k"), make my next TV a Westinghouse!" Seriously it drew thousands of curious, astonished and nervous Americans who were staring at a world war just around the corner.

So, heres a few facts about the boy: Stood seven feet tall, weighed 265 pounds, could move by voice command, and talk, sort of. It played a 78rpm record of about 700 words delivered in robot speak. It could wave its arms and rotate its head. And for you kiddies out there it could smoke. For some unknown reason its photo electric eyes could distinguish colours. (It just gets more and more useful.) Someone decided to give this robot a chance and built a robot dog companion called Sparko for it in 1940.

Amazingly it was still being paraded about in 1950! It gets weirder. Elektro starred as Thinko in the 1960's classic Sex Kittens go to College. In the film he played a robot that could handicap horses. Elektro didn't do well after that. It was taken apart and pieces of it went south. Westighouse employees were quick to see the cultural significance of the example of the robot maker's craft and hung on to significant chunks of it. The result is on display at Westinghouse's robot exhibit of Mansfield's Memorial Museum.

Of the many things Elektro could say was this gem "My brain is bigger than yours."

Look up, way up.

I'm off for a bit, maybe just today, from the robot thing because I just found out that on this day in 1967, the Outer Space Treaty was brought into force. Thank heaven. Originally just the US, USSR and and the UK signed on, odd since the latter hasn't had too many space shots that I can see. Whats even odder is that to date there are nearly a hundred countries that are party to the treaty.

Claiming to be the "law" when it comes to space, this treaty lays out what you can and can't do up there. No nukes are allowed, and definetly none on the moon (or any other object for that matter). Same goes for any other kinds of weapons, however the law is surprisingly fuzzy around laser technology, suggesting there could be peaceful uses for mind frazzling death rays.

Just to ease my mind, I did some snooping and found a copy of the treaty. Some of the countries that signed it include: The Holy See, Luxembourg, the Seychelles and mighty space explorers, the Swiss.

Karakuri ningyo man.

Hisashige Tanaka was a Japanese engineer/artist living in the Edo period (1603 to 1868). He actually lived from 1799 to 1881. He built the tricky, playful robots called Karakuri Ningyo, and probably created the most intricate and detailed examples.

He is best known for the Myriad Year Clock, or Japanese perpetual clock. But what I'm interested in is the Bow Shooting Boy, or Yumi-iri Doji, a mechanical wonder that took the art of robot making to the highest level. A young archer would pull an arrow from his quiver, load his bow and shoot a target in the bullseye.

He built these mechanical dolls from early on and even travelled the country in his early 20`s showing them off to the delight of all. In fact he created a puzzle box when he was 8 that couldn`t be opened until he revealed the secret. To give you an idea of the level of detail he worked at, his Yumi-iri Doji would even smirk when it was a good shot or look sad when he missed!

Hisashige was practical too. When the Japanese economy tightened up in the 1830`s and obvious luxuries were looked down upon, he moved to the manufacturing centre of Osaka to work on more useful household devices. Among them a collapsable candle, and the invention that started his climb up the industrialist ladder, the Mujin-to lamp. He spent so much time staying up late working on his inventions he probably got pissed off and invented it to save his eyesight. The genuis of the lamp was an air pump that created pressure in the oil reservoir, forcing it into the wick. The result was an intense light for the size of the lamp. In the end he turned the nighttime into productive time for the Japanese.

He founded his own engineering company,Tanaka Seizosho, in 1875. After several permutations and mergers it turned into Toshiba Corporation in 1978.

Captain Hercules Vinegar

Henry Fielding was just just 47 when he died, this day, in 1754. English novelist, dramtist and satirist, Fielding was a constant thorn in the side of ruling governments of the day. In fact, during one period in his early career when he wrote for the theatre, his pen was so savage that a law was created to blunt it, called the Theatre Licensing Act. In actual fact it was simply brutal censorship by the then Prime Minister, Robert Walpole. Any new play had to be approved before it could hit the stage. Along with Fielding's Tom Thumb, plays causing a fuss then included John Gay's Beggars Opera and Henry Carey's Chrononhotonthologos.

He wrote because he needed the money, and since he got himself censored, and plays did not bring in the cash anymore, he returned to his first vocation, law. He didn't so well at that and money became tight. In fact, money would remain a constant worry in the Fielding house.

He loved satire and didn't have the time of day for Walpole, so while his plays were quieted, his novels weren't. The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild is an example of his hatred of the liberal ruling class.

1749 saw the publication of Tom Jones, his greatest work. Written in the picaresque style, the novel still holds up. Its detailed accounts of the day and robust sense of humour make it worthy of any bookshelf. Other lesser known works credited to him include a real odd piece about a female transvestite called The Female Husband, where this person is brought to court because he/she tried to marry another woman.

His interest in law and things conseravtive got him appointed London's Chief Magistrate. He took the post very seriously and together with his little brother John worked hard to make London safer and criminal justice, well, more just. It is said that he and John created London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners.

Quack.

Just so you know, it was Karel Capek, a Czech writer, who came up with the word "robot" in 1920. Prior to that they were called "automata or automatons". He gave the world this word and stoked their imagination with his play R.U.R - Rossums Universal Robots. Actually, gave is the wrong word; the word "robot" was the invention of his brother Josef, from the original Czech word "robota" or forced labour. (so many quotation marks). One day I'll get back to this idea and write about the play etc etc, but I really wanted to get to a truly important piece about a robot duck.

Jacques de Vaucanson, a French inventor/engineer, born 1709, made robots that actually mimicked the bones, tendons and muscles of the real article. Originally he studied to become a surgeon, where, no doubt he gained the expertise and insight needed to create his inventions. He was very curious about the various systems in the body and wanted to recreate them in his robots.

Good timimg for him, because the early to middle 1700's was the time to build mechanical oddities. His first creation, not that unlike Al Jazari's musicians from 500 years earlier, was a shepard that played a Pipe and Tabor, a rather cool but kooky little flute and drum combo. Both instruments are designed to be played by one hand- you play the flute with one hand (the holes are all within reach) and the drum is tied to the waist or side and struck with a drum stick in the other hand. His little beauty was life size, it had to be loud, and was impressive in detail. The hands were covered in a skin like glove to give the illusion of moving fingers. Here's the cool part, it could be programmed to play over a dozen songs.

If this didn't get him press, his Digesting Duck sure did. This device from 1739 had 400+ parts and could do all the duck stuff- flap its wings, drink water, eat seeds and grain from a dish and poop. Because de Vaucanson was such a anatomical perfectionist the duck represented the digestive cycle with but one flaw. The robot fowl could not really turn the food into crap so it had a compartment of tasteful crap like pellets (it was often demonstrated to the wealthy elite of Europe) that came out after the correct interval.

Have a look at the cross section drawing above. I love the little arrow coming out of the ducks bum, in case we might be confused by the direction.

Beep.

So this is weird. I was combing the Inet looking for likely story ideas when I came across this CBC article about a Georgia Tech professor who looked at the attraction people have for vacuum cleaners. Ok, ok. The little Robot vacs called Roombas. I won't go on about it here because this article is much better written than anything I could come up with. Here's the link: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/10/02/roomba-study.html

But I got going on about it and had to find out what some of the first robots were like. Once again I'm off on another tangent. I'll be back to musical instruments soon.

Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, we'll call him Al-Jazari, made several robots, or automata, around the year 1200. Power for the machines was limited to clockwork mechanisms, water flow (from one vessel to another) or animal power. Electrical power was a few years away. One real big example of his early work is the elephant clock. Its actually a water clock placed on top of a real big wooden elephant. The body of the beast hides the mechanism and water. The top part is the exciting bit.

Later on he built the most robotic (at least to our idea of what a modern robot should be)of his mechanical inventions. These were true humaniod automata. And they were programmable. A camshaft ran through the device, and depending on where the bumps, or pegs were placed on the shaft, the robots, in this case a band of musicians, would alter what they "played". Mainly it was drums or cymbals that were struck. You essesntially got a different group of noises, but still, it was controllable.

A buck or two.

Actress Lois Maxwell, famous for her role as Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond films including The Spy Who Loved Me, View to a Kill and Dr. No died today. She was 80 years old. The Canadian born actress left home at 15 to join up and was touring Europe in a song and dance troup as a member of the Army Entertainment Corps when they figured out she was a minor. She was so good no one wanted her to be sent back so she enrolled in Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. It turned out to be a good career move.

After the war she went to Hollywood and worked with Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan in That hagen Girl, earning her a Golden Globe. Then she appeared in a Life Magazine spread featuring up and comers of the day with another aspiring actress - Marilyn Monroe.

Rome called and she lived there in the 50's where she worked in film and met her husband, Peter Marriot. Next its a move to London and a family was started. It was during this time that she was appraoched about what was to be her iconic role, the flirtatious secretary to M. She lasted through 2 Bonds, Sean Connery (argueably the best) and Roger Moore (most prolific).

Canadian born, she returned to Canada after her husband died in 1973 and worked in film and television, wrote a newspaper column and just hung out and chilled.

She moved back to England and thence to Fremantle Australia, where she died. Roger Moore said at one time "I think it was a great disappointment to her that she had not been promoted to play M. She would have been a wonderful M."

Erhu and me.

The Chinese erhu, or Chinese fiddle is an interesting musical intrument. It has 2 strings, is played with a bow and has a most unusual sound box. The erhu has a heritage going back some thousand or so years. A similar instrument came to China around the 10th century that had 2 strings and was either plucked or bowed. Its possible that the erhu was derived from this instrument called a xiqin, from the Xi tribe of Central Asia. Anyways, the Chinese liked the vibe and developed a whole family of intruments called huqin. Theres even a big version, bass size, thats evolved to play the more modern compositions.

The overall look of the intrument is fragile. The neck is thin, the tuning pegs mere pencils and the soundbox, well thats another story. Traditionally it has been either hexagonal, liu jiao, indicating a southern Chinese intrument, or ba jiao, form the North, and just to be different, 8 sided. Made from hardwoods it is capped on the ends by python skin. Things get a little odder the more we examine the erhu. The skin has to be python skin. Period. Its what gives the erhu its distinctive twang and can't be duplicated with, say, polyester.

Now as for playing, the bow is placed between the two strings. The musician moves the bow back and forth alternating between the strings or by placing the bow at more extreme angles, catching both strings simultaneously. Finally, to give this device an even steeper learning curve, the player does not press the string to the neck, which is common with many bowed intruments. Instead they merely press their finger on the string where they want the note to be. Combined with its unique sound box, this gives the erhu its distant, haunting quality.

Honk.

To the left is a shot of Anthony Braxton playing a contrabass sax. This is one of the better shots of this instrument as it gives you some idea of it's brute size. Braxton is a multi instrumentalist who plays all the saxes, many kinds of flutes and keyboards. His compositions are considered among the elite of avant garde jazz. Highly original in both his playing and writing it is not surprising this intrument finds a home in his music.

Scott Robinson also plays one if these fellows and you can hear this and a few other big instruments on his album Thinking Big. He plays a bass saxophone and a contrabass sarrusophone too. (that other real big horn to the right). A Frenchman by the name of Pierre Louis Gautrot invented this instrument in 1856 (it also came in different sizes, not just the size of a Peugot) and was intended to compete with the Adolphe Sax's instruments of the mid to late 1900's.

One other variation on the goliath sax is an oddity called a tubax, short for tuba-saxophone. Why am I getting that all too familiar feeling? You know the one where people start going for a vision and don't stop? It is a more recent invention as far as these kinds of instruments go, being first made in 1999 by Benedikt Eppelsheim of Germany. Its a little easier to take with you to the beach owing to the fact that its pipe is bent into more coils than either of the other ones so it doesn't scrape the ceiling.

Toot.

I'm going to give automobiles a rest for a bit and pick on musical instruments. It would be too easy to go for the odd ball crazy stuff. Instead I'm going to take a short look at genuine intruments that by the very size of them, almost got out of hand. First up is the contrabass saxophone.

Adolph Sax included the contrabass in the first group of saxophones he invented around 1840. He had designed instruments to fit most musical ranges, and with an eye for the dramatic was justly proud of this monster being part of the all saxophones bands of the era. Saxophone bands were popular through the late 1900's and into the 20th Century and any band worth its lung power had a contrabass.

A baritone sax weighs in about 15 to 20 pounds and is about 31/2 feet high. Marching bands are not fond of this. The contrabass is in the 50 pound range and stands 6+ feet high. Solely for orchestral or ensemble playing, nobody bops around with one of these. They play an entire octave below a baritone sax or bass clarinet. Check in tommorow where I'll get some pics of these beauties and links to current musicians who play them.

Cup coffee with that.

On this day in 1885 or 1890, Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe, aka Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans. His birth certificate apparently said 1890, while he said 1885. He started playing for money in brothels at 14 and by the turn of the century was looking for bigger things. He headed out on the road playing minstrel shows all over the south then headed north, first to Chicago, where he wrote the jazz standard Jelly Roll Blues in 1910 or so. It was published in 1915 and became the first jazz song ever published.

Once he got going he moved to Califiornia where he had a hit with "The Crave" then went back to Chicago in the early 20's. He was recorded and his music was sold first on piano rolls and later on records. Later that decade he moved to New York City with his wife, but hits were elusive.

In 1936 he moved to Washington DC and ran a horrible old bar called the Music Box where nothing much happened to forward his music career except that he was discovered by Alan Lomax, a historian interested in getting some of Morton's original new Orleans jazz recorded for the record of the Library of Congress. These recordings, including interviews and transcripts of interviews, are what jazz buffs remember most of his musical output as they are the truest snapshop of the birth of American jazz from the incubator that was Storyville, New Orleans.

He was stabbed at the bar he managed and was seriously wounded in 1938 and moved shortly afterwards to Los Angeles. He was never properly treated for his wounds and suffered for 3 more years before he died in 1941.

Better than a motorcycle.

I am going to be ending the series on cars with this superb example of what happens when a company looking to broaden its line of vehicles and branch into new markets makes a horrendous mistake. I give you the Zundapp Janus.

Zundapp was quite well known for its motorcycles. The company has been around since the 1st World War when it made weapon parts. After the war, like many suppliers to war effort, the company looked to move on with other products. They developed a line of motorcycles that was well recieved and notable for innovations such as enclosed engines and drive shaft powered rear wheels. Not surprisingly they supplied the German government during the 2nd World War with quality motorcycles.

After the war, this must be getting tiring for Zundapp, they again looked to find a niche. This time they produced a scooter the "Bella". The fifties found them producing their one and only car, the Janus. This amazing vehicle, named for the Roman god, was literally two ended. It had two seats; one facing forward, the other, back. A very tiny 14 horsepower single cylinder two stroke engine sat in the middle between the seats. Riders alighted from doors at each end.

It could go about 50 mph but handling was dependant on the weight balance between the front and back seats. Unless it was pretty even, the centre of gravity was alarmingly off kilter. A heavy passenger would lift the front wheels and cause steering irregularities.

Can't imagine what it was like to be the passenger in traffic.

Less is less.

The 1957 King Midget Model III, classified as a "micro car" was the mighty steed of a long line of Midgets. The brainchild of Claude Dry and Dale Orcutt, the original was a kit produced around 1946 and aimed at what market, it's hard to tell. The inexpensive very small car market. Yes the kit was only 500 bucks or so but that gave you the frame and running gear and patterns for any local sheet metal shop to fabricate the body for you. Unless of course you wanted to do it yourself. I have seen home made cars and usually backyard tickerers are very good at one aspect of automobile manufacturing. rarely do they pass all facets of the trade. I remember someone driving around my town in the buggy contraption from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It looked a perfect reproduction, but it was usually on the side of the road ringed in smoke with the owner a respectful distance away fearing other/more eruptions from the engine compartment. The point is, even though the Midget was boxy and plain with no compound curves to mystify any craftsmen, there is every chance the body work was inventive. They also sold 2 models the Junior and Trainer that had no plans included for body panels. Owners could make whatever thay wanted!

To add to the adventure of owning a Midget kit you were given absolute freedom to power it with any power plant you wanted, so long as it was small and had one cylinder. Read that to mean lawn mower. Typically Midgets were powered, either home built or factory assesmbled, with power plants ranging from 2 to about 10 horsepower. All those horses were coupled to one rear wheel only (removing the need for a rear differential) through a custom designed 2 speed automatic transmission. From what I can find out there seems to be many variations of the King Midget; from models with no reverse and pull start, to others with more sophisticated features like speedometers. The designers of the car came from the American civil air patrol and knew a thing or two about aircraft construction. As a result, this car was light, about 500 pounds.

I haven't found too much on performance specs on these except that Model 3's could go about 50mph. If you had one of the more austere models you might need to have someone pace you to find out.

Picaresque to you too.

On this day in 1771, Scottish writer Tobias Smollett died. A poet, he wrote plays, travel books and what has become his legacy, the picaresque novel. Best known for Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, he actually started his adult life as a doctor and was commissioned aboard the HMS Chichester as its medical surgeon.

While so engaged, his travels included stops in Jamaica. He eventually returned home with his bride in 1747 and set up practice as a surgeon. But writing was his thing and he quickly got to work. He published his first poem "The Tears of Scotland", about the Battle of Culloden, but his first hit was "Roderick Random" in 1748.

Quickly thereafter came "Peregrine Pickle" and "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom in 1753. He also came out with a history of England, whick took him eight years to write. Thank heavens England was 350 years younger then.

"I think for my part one half of the nation is mad—and the other not very sound."