But will it get that gritty feeling out of the back of your head?

Died April 29, Albert Hofmann, Swiss scientist, inventor of LSD, studier of plants and animals, particularly natural substances that could be used to benefit people. Of note is his research into chitin, a cellulose-ish, fibre-y substance found in the shells of bugs and such.

But we all remember him for coming across lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938. I know I do. Actually he shelved the research for 5 or so years and it wasn't until 1943 that he got serious with what this stuff was. Legend has it he absorbed some of it through his fingers while handling ingredients and had a short 2 hour "trip". Soon thereafter, he deliberately experimented with it over a period of a week or so with his research colleagues. (I would like to see their notes.) This leads to another legend, the "Bicycle day", where he took a good sized dose on purpose. Not surprisingly he got good and looped and had an assistant ride him home on his bike. It was quite fun apparently.

During this trip he summoned a doctor just in case. He reported that some aspects of the experience were scary: For example, he feared he was possessed by demons, his furniture was talking to him and his neighbor was a witch. The doctor could find nothing physically wrong and just sent him to bed. Here he calmed down and had pleasant dreams filled with rainbows and sounds transformed into colours.

Wednesday, starlings, in the bar!

At 8pm, PBS has Secrets of the Dead: Escape From Auschwitz.

TMC has a whack of old train movies on all evening and AMC has a bunch of hay burners. Take your pick. Might be few crossovers in there too.

And that is all there is. Slim indeed.

This sounds nice.

So give me a sec to tie this all together, but this thread started with my son giving me a computer game about a really bad nuclear accident. Yeah, I know, sounds fun doesn't. Great kid. Anyway it got me going on the history of nuclear accidents, the real kind. Holy shit, we've had a few stinkers that nearly cost us.

As an aside, I was temporarily diverted by minor British political scandals (they are so close to nuclear disasters, it's entirely understandable.) I must recount the 1993 controversy by John Selwyn Gummer (I am not making this up) whilst he was Secretary of State for the Environment. He apparently refused to discuss acid rain causing pollution that was drifting over Norway with his Norwegian counterpart. The lusty Norwegian summoned his best diplomatic rhetoric and called Mr. Gummer a drittsekk, what we commoners call a shitbag. Nice.

Anyway, back to happier times. Just to get started I looked up how many nuclear disasters there have been and I was shocked to find there were so many they are divided into categories. Jesus. For example there are the ones that happen in the lab and kill scientists and unwary onlookers. Then there are the ones when they are building a reactor and they are (presumably) trying it out, and it goes wacko. Then there are the operational kind, like 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl.

But the one I'm gonna spend a few minutes on tonight is airplanes dropping the damn things by accident. This isn't gonna make anyone feel good, but have there been a few of those. Whoa. During the time period from about 1950 to 1980 there have been over 20 such accidents. Many involved B-52's. Engine fires, mid air collisions (!!!) and accidents while taxiing around on the ground. Some have never been found. Any weird green glow down by the tomatoes?

April 29, make mine vanilla

TCM has a couple of historical flicks from the 60's, not bad fare. Khartoum at 6 and Zulu at 7:30. Stay up late for Battle of Britain at 12:15am.

At 8, History Television has Digging for the Truth: Angkor Wat: Eighth Wonder of the World. Still waiting for this series to really grab me. If you have the jam and are in a WWII mood, at 2am they have Battlefield Detectives: Battle of Britain.

Over on PBS, Nova has Sinking the Supership, about the sinking of the battleship Yamato. Oh yeah, it's on at 9.

Not a bad mid week haul.

April 28, do you know where your lawyers are?

Good ol reliable History Television has Dogfights: Secret Weapons at 8pm. Right on. And right after is Rome: Testudo et Lepus (The Tortoise and the Hare).

The History Channel has Ancient Discoveries: Siege of Troy at 10pm and The History of Sex: The Middle Ages at 11. Hmmm, wonder if that's too early for the kiddies?

CBC has a goodish thriller on at 1am, The Ipcress File 1965. Michael Caine in a Len Deighton spy flick.

Hey, did you know that there is an entire series about parking?Whoa.

Thursday. Yum. I don't want that plate of veal.

In case this is your kind of stuff, TCM has a pile of Hedy Lamarr movies on tonight, some cool, some not.

History Television has The Worst Jobs in History: Industrial Jobs and Working Over Time:
Building Up back to back starting at 8pm.

That's is it, pretty slim.

Are you serious, c'mon.

I'm no stranger to writing about absurdly dangerous things we humans have devised for no other real reason than to try it out and see if it works. Like making a train so big it can't turn corners, or cars with 6 steering wheels.

Case in point. There has been a bit of media attention given to one Reverend Adelir Antonio de Carli, of Brazil, who strapped himself into a chair attached to many brightly coloured helium filled balloons. Apparently you can have enough of these balloons to get some serious flight out of it because the good father skyrocketed to 20, 000 feet before being blown off course. Sadly, he hasn't been since yesterday, not long after takeoff.

You may remember the fellow with the lawn chair and weather balloons, Larry Walters?

Tonights historical televisual feast. It's decidedly tepid.

Thank god this series is playing again on History Television. At 8pm catch The Worst Jobs in History: Royal Jobs. Highlights include whipping boy and food taster. Yeah.

PBS has Secrets of the Dead: Aztec Massacre at 8 too. Tough choice. Beats the Osmond's 50th or whatever.

TCM at 9pm has a Basil Rathbone flick: Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night. Looks like they're running a bunch of B/W thrillers all night, some good, some yeesh.

CBC has Harry and Tonto on at 1am. Hey a road trip with a pensioner and a cat. That's history.

Not a bad Wednesday. Lets get out the table tennis game.

Now this is a smart idea. Not.

On May 8, 1842, at Versailles, France, (enough commas for you?) a train returning to Paris with revellers who were celebrating the King at the Palace of Versailles crashed after the lead locomotive broke an axle. The carriages accordioned into the locomotive and caught fire. All told, 55 passengers died.

Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville, explorer, that's him up above, was probably the most famous of the victims of this wreck. He and his entire family perished. Oddly enough, his remains were identified using the now quackified science of phrenology. It seems Dumont allowed his head to be inspected and mapped and a cast taken at some point just before the accident. In what was probably a forensic first, a phrenologist identified his body by comparing his head lumps to the cast.

The horror of the accident lay however, in the European practice of the time of LOCKING the passengers into their carriages for the journey. On top of that, the carriages had just been smartly re-painted in honour of the celebrations. Just what an out of control coal fire needs. They stopped locking passengers in trains after this incident.

Tuesday night. Something other than the Penn primary.

History Television has a repeat of that excellent series The Worst Jobs in History: Urban Jobs at 8pm. With such hits as a pugger and a link boy, you know it's good viewing. If you can hang in till 2:30am or something they have Battlefield Detectives: World War I: Jutland.

The only other thing on is The Naked Archaeologist: Chasing the Temple Booty, Part 1/A Nabatean By Any Other Name. It's on the History Channel at 11pm.

That's it for tonight. I'm gonna go watch the primaries now.

Hope this week is better.

Here's one my fave shows, go watch Dogfights at 8pm,the Luftwaffe's Deadliest Mission. It's on History Television. And at 9 its Rome: These Being the Words of Marcus Tullius Cicero

TCM has this mighty fine flick at 9: Operation Petticoat. Hey, movies about pink submarines is art.

The History Channel actually has pretty good stuff tonight. Starting at 8. Modern Marvels:90's Tech, Cities of the Underworld: Stalin's Secret Lair (I knew it all along), Ancient Discoveries: Ancient Computer? (they needed one to build the pyramids you know, it WASN'T aliens), and finally, Decoding the Past: The Real Sorcerer's Stone.

Not a bad start to the week.

Thats gotta hurt.

On May 24, 1847 the Dee River bridge collapsed as a train passed over. Five people died and many were injured. The bridge was unusual in that it was made of cast iron. In fact it was made of three large chunks of cast iron strengthened by more cast iron girders.

Anyone that has ever messed with cast iron will know that yes it is hard and heavy, but it is brittle. Makes great frying pans and barbecues though.

The bridge was designed by Robert Stephenson and was finished in the fall of 1846. It was in use about 8 months. It appears the very day of the disaster, Stephenson had extra ballast added to the bridge deck to cover over the wooden ties as a precaution against fire. Fire had recently destroyed a Great Western Railway bridge at Uxbridge.

The extra weight of all that gravel was no doubt a huge factor in the bridge snapping that day. An inquiry was struck to find out the cause and many learned men rubbed their chins thoughtfully. The conclusion was unanimous: cast iron makes crappy bridges. Whether it was stress cracks, bending from overload, or simple bad design, they all agreed not to go there again.

But there still was quite few other cast iron bridges that collapsed, at least six in England alone in the subsequent 30 years. Like I said, makes nice lawn furniture.

TGIFF

Good old History Television has Go Deep: Ancient Egyptian Boats at 9pm. And if you have the jam and this stuff gets you going there's another in the Engineering an Empire Series with Greece at 4am. I say it's worth the wait.

Don't know if this counts but what the hell, Delinquent Daughters is on TCM at 12:45am. Crazy teens and jalopies, that's history, right?

Sheesh, that is it.

It's Tursday, as they say in Newfoundland.

Ho boy, looks like TCM has a bunch of Buster Keaton silents on starting at 7pm. Now there's a weird way to spend an evening.

History Television has Ultimate Engineering: Colosseum on at 9pm.

And man oh man, that is it, what a sickly Thursday for history on TV.

Big day.

Trying to stray from the usual is often not hard on this blog. Today was tough but I'll try.

Dagwood and Blondy had a child, "Baby Dumpling" on this day in 1934. He grew up to be that teenage rascal, Alexander.

George C. Scott turned down the 1971 Oscar for best actor for Patton calling the affair a "two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.” Whoa, would have liked to have been there.

Leonardo da Vinci was born this day in 1452 and went about painting and stuff.

And, one of my favourite authors, Henry James was born this day in 1843. Can he write a long sentence or what.

And, oh yeah, the Titanic sunk and Ray Kroc founded McDonald's.

I'm getting worried.

If you hurry there's still time to catch the 1968 classic The Producers with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. It's om TMC at 6:15pm

At 8pm on History Television is a some good episodic stuff with Digging for the Truth
Pirates: Terror in the Mediterranean. And much later on at 2am they have Battlefield Detectives The Civil War: Gettysburg

Stay up late and watch the Warren Beatty / Faye Dunaway gangster show Bonnie and Clyde it's on CBC at 1am.

That's it readers, enjoy.

It's Haypril 14

Ooh, History Television has Dog Fights: Death of the Luftwaffe. Great show. At 8. And then at 9, the Rome series. Ahhh.

Wow that is it. If you have the time and the inclination to absorb this kind of entertainment, and may God help you, AMC has a whole whack of Don Knotts movies on all night long, not even the good ones like the Apple Dumpling Gang too.

Friday, what a week.

TCM has Ben Hur on at 6pm and Khartoum at 10pm. I was waiting for the floodgates to open.

At 8pm on History Television they have another in the series Cities of the Underworld: Secret Pagan Underground.

Oh my, PBS has the 1966 (not sure what to call this) a spoof? anyways, its The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming! at 10pm.

That is the works from my corner, see ya.

Thursday's a tough one, big shows on tonight.

History Television has MacArthur, a 2 hour special on at 8. Sounds thick.

This sounds interesting. On PBS at 9pm, Nova has Cracking the Maya Code.

Knowledge Network at 11. For King and Country, Great series, kind of dry, but what do you expect.

If you have any gas left the 1946 version of Anna and the King of Siam is on AMC at 12:15am

With friends like these . . .

Isn't it amazing how a remarkable thing can be named just slightly before it bites you on the ass. We see that all the time in politics or in the fickle entertainment business too, where a celeb is on all the A list parties, then he/she does a dork-o-rama, that in hindsight you just knew was gonna happen, and then they are pariahs. Trouble is they got named something like "Mr.Clean" or "Mother Theresa's little sister" then they got caught with their hand down someones pants or worse.

Anyway, this is the case with America's first train wreck, the demise of the "Best Friend of Charleston" in (what else) a catastrophic boiler explosion. Seems these little devils were a tad tough to figure out. Safe operating range was not in the engineers' vocabulary.

Built in New York by the West Point Foundry it went into service in Charleston, South Carolina in 1830. It operated on a small 6 mile service and was immensely popular, being touted as providing lighting fast service at the unheard of speed of over 15 MPH.

The aforementioned boiler explosion was not really the fault of the engine. In actual fact an annoyed fireman either disabled or broke of the safety valve because of its constant hissing and whistling. The fireman died and most of the crew were hurt. To be fair, little was known about the science involved and boilers of that era were terribly lightly built. Combined with inexperienced crews its amazing we got out of that century.

The train was rebuilt and dubbed the Phoenix whereupon in ran for many years. Shortly after the explosion many laws were enacted making it illegal to circumvent safety valves on large boilers. Another first for American industry was born: closing the barn door laws after people kill themselves.

For a while they placed a car with cotton bales between the engine and the passengers. Seems the public needed some time to adjust.

It's Wednesday, I'm waiting.

7:30pm on TCM is Berlin Express, post WWII so-so thriller. At 11 pm or so, (no actual time slot for it) they have North By Northwest. Gotta stay up for that.

And on the other cable movie channel AMC you have The Longest Day at 8:30pm. Kinda lopsided version but still a good ride. If you can hang in they have another one at 12:30: Bataan.


Not so bad.

Tuesday, April 8. Keep me awake please.

Ah, I like this one. History Television has Disasters of the Century, Black Market Express at 6pm. A good ol train smash up. At 8pm they Have Digging for the Truth: Mummies of the Clouds and Robinson Crusoe: The True Story at 9.

Knowledge Network has another in the Studio Series: The Life and Times of Alex Colville at 9pm.

And for a kick, Zorba the Greek is on at 1am on AMC.

That's it campers. More train wrecks tomorrow.

Gather round now folks, I got something to show you.

William Brunton gives us the first true railway disaster, however the connection is slim. Yes the machine did travel on rails, and yes it ran on steam which actuated cylinders, it did not however propel itself by turning anything around. It actually didn't do a lot of propelling period, but for the time, 1813-15, it was quite the achievement. Just a rather unique way of transferring tons of deadly steam pressure to forward motion.

Affectionately called the Steam Horse or Brunton's Mechanical Traveller (sounds like a 70's English folk group), the train had a pair of mechanical feet that gripped the rails and pushed it forward at a slightly less that walking speed of 3 miles per hour. Now I'm seeing lots of safety concerns pretty quick, but if you have read any of my posts in the past this is exactly the kind of human endeavor that this blog champions. Examining the few patent drawings available its amazing to see no hand rails, no place for an operator to at least stand, let alone sit, no brakes and certainly no shielding around the boiler.

Now as kooky as this rig may appear, it was built to satisfy a need. Stay with me, it gets tricky. Coal had been mined for quite some time and tram ways had been constructed through the coal districts. The coal cars were typically pulled by horses, but years of wars on the continent has used up much of the food for the horses. It was considered an engineering impossibility for a machine to climb most hills because of traction issues, a minor concern for horse drawn trams. Steam had been used for some to power cables and gear mechanisms to get trams up the steep slopes but these were finicky and not at all portable.

Enter Brunton's Mechanical Traveller. And you see why now those strange looking walking feet made so much sense. It was a mountain killer.

The original Steam Horse seems to have ran for a few years without incident and apparently earning its keep so Brunton, commissioned a second, larger machine. It was this machine , during a demonstration on July 31 st 1815, that suffered a total boiler explosion killing 13 spectators and effectively ending any more experimentation with be-footed trains.

It's Monday , April 7 yawn.

As always, History television has the Rome series on. At 7pm with a repeat at 9.

PBS has American Experience: Emelia Earhart at 9pm.

I can't find anymore Jim!

It's hump day, hope the viewing is better than last night.

Hey, you decide. History Channel has something called MonsterQuest: Russia's Killer Apemen. Not sure how much of this is history, kind of up there with remote viewing. It's on at 8pm. At 11pm they have UFO Files: UFOs of the 70's. Looks like it's that kind of a night for the History Channel.

That is it folks. Really.

Want to see what the bulk of humanity is interested in (promise not to get depressed) just comb through the TV listings from about 7 to 11pm on any given day. I can't face the daytime listings, the nighttime ones are scary enough.

It had to happen.

Interesting observation as I went hunting for a history of sorts on train wrecks. There is a surprisingly large amount of information, both print and electronic, that classify a train wreck as an over the top, flamboyant shit storm of a human being. I'm more interested in twisted steel and crushed bones. Must be a traditionalist.



Anyway, there had to be a first and the honour goes to England and the mighty Liverpool and Manchester Railway on September 15 1830. Though not a story of trains actually colliding it is none the less a bad accident. The railway ran a pair of tracks (north and south) out of Liverpool. Apparently on that day there were at least 7 engines towing half a dozen or so carriages each on the north track (trains weren't very long then so they stuffed more on the rails to make up, always good planning). The south track had just one train with the Duke of Wellington and entourage in one carriage, one for the railway owners and a third entire carriage for a band.



It just so happened that trains on both tracks had stopped opposite each other to take on water. A one William Huskisson (member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister, among other high up stuff) jumped off a train on the north track to go and have a chin wag with the Duke. He had, after all, his own band. Since there were really a whole lot of trains on the tracks all jumbled together at this point it stands to reason that anyone wandering about on foot, even a Cabinet Minister, was going to come up bad.



Trains started to move while Huskisson was between tracks and a running jump to get on board the Dukes train failed and he was run over. He died later of his injuries. In the train vs man war, train usually wins.



Next time I promise twisted metal and hissing steam.

April fool.

Nothing but movies tonight. TCM has Psycho at 9:30 and over on the other cable movie channel AMC you'll find Force 10 From Navarone at 10:30 and Guadalcanal Diary at 1am. CBC has Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at 1am too. Hmmm, tough choice.

There is some hope for episodic TV with Battlefield Detectives: World War I: The Somme on History Television at 2am.

Good night!