This popped up in my Flickr contact stream and just has to be posted. The beauty of front wheel drive: no pesky back-end drive train to fuss over. That being said, I wonder how M. Tissier dealt with the computer-controlled hydraulic suspension – I’m hoping he added more XM components and hacked the control system.
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Maserati Bora on top, I think.
Breaking the long posting hiatus with some pictures from weekend activities.
I took a long scouting walk around a salt marsh a couple weeks back and chanced upon this set of tracks in the snow. My theory is that they show a coyote’s attempt to drag down a white-tailed deer. He wasn’t successful here, but I didn’t follow the tracks to find out what happened next – I was like a horse that knows the barn is thataway – heading for the truck!
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As mentioned before, I have a soft spot for these beasties.
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Road or track, it was difficult to ignore a Flying Merkel, and not just because of the brand’s signature bright-orange paint. Merkels displayed perhaps the finest engineering of early American motorcycles, with components that were literally years ahead of their competitors.
Credit for that goes to founder Joseph Merkel, a self-trained machinist who went on to study mechanical engineering at university. A motorized tricycle he built in 1900 is credited with being one of the first self-propelled vehicles in Wisconsin. Soon after he was in the business of selling motorcycles. Where others were happy with bronze bushings inside their engines, Merkel insisted on German-made ball bearings, which quickly led to a reputation for reliability. Likewise, in contrast to the standard atmospheric pressure intake valves, Merkel designed a cam-actuated valve mechanism for both intake and exhaust. He also developed a throttle-dependent engine oiler way before Harley or Indian adopted that useful feature.
Merkel then turned his attention to suspension. Bone-jarring rigid frames wouldn’t do for Flying Merkel customers, so he designed telescoping systems at both ends with concealed springing. The so-called Spring Frame and Spring Fork gave his bikes an unsurpassed ride, leading to the advertising slogan, “All Roads are Smooth to The Flying Merkel.” The forks in particular were so good that many a competitor’s bike turned up wearing a complete Merkel front end! *
Via Hemmings.
Seems like once something is front and center in your imagination, you find it everywhere. I finally ordered Atomic Robo (Vols. 1-3) – I opened up volume one and found myself at a Nazi installation in the Tsangpo Gorge! A few days later I was skulking around a local used bookstore when I came across The Last River, an account of the ill-fated 1998 kayak expedition that claimed Doug Gordon’s life. Like the ijit I am, I didn’t buy it immediately; when I returned a week later it was gone. Luckily, it hadn’t sold – just moved to the ‘featured used books’ shelf at the main store – I snatched it up. The Last River gets 2 1/2 out of 5 stars – in spite of (because of?) the extensive bios of the participants, I didn’t empathize with any of them. Some of it may also be my ambivalence about modern ‘extreme’ expeditioning. It was extremely useful as an overview of some of the other western personalities kicking around that part of the world: Ian Baker, Kenneth Storm, et al. and as a decent timeline of western activity in the late 90s though.
While wandering around the internet looking for info on other Tsangpo exploration, I found the video account of the 2002 expedition on Hulu. Some thoughts –
I’ve been getting a lot of search term hits on ‘saturn storm’ since yesterday – a combination, methinks, of this and this (which hit on Monday):
Gigantic Storm With Huge Tail Erupts on Saturn
Via @roundmyskull, a post on a British dazzle camoufleur and Vorticist: Edward Wadsworth. The Design Student has indicated an interest in model building/painting (we’re going to ransack the house for his old Warhammer figurines – could be a nice side job); perhaps I should build a WWI ship model or 2 for him to dazzle up.
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And a print from RISD’s dazzle plan collection. I reiterate – I need more wall space.
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According to Mr. Strohl at Hemmings (where I found the image), “prints of the A2-sized poster (16.5 inches x 23.4 inches) will cost $76 each, including delivery, and can be ordered by emailing him at info [at] stefanmarjoram.com.”
I need more wall space.
I don’t know whether it was the documentary on the Campbells I half remember seeing when I was 6 or the tea cards (from the same period in my life), but I’m partial to the Blue Birds:
(more)
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and the Bluebird:
My Paphiopedilum venestum seems to be happy – it’s thrown up three blossoms. Some pictures:
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Click on the pictures to get to the video from the British Pathe historical archive.
The beastie:
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Lettin’ it all hang out:
Via Ride the Machine.
A web site that takes your Flickstream and runs it into a fast slide show – 2,445 photos in five and a half minutes.
via @blprnt
Two minutes in the sin bin assessed on all readers of this blog – for looking so good. And you, yes you there cutie, you get a 5 minute major.
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I wish I could find my (pre-digital) pictures of the Maurice Richard statue I took when in Montreal with the Design Student (other photographic subjects: crooked knives in the Hudson Bay Company Museum, capybaras in the Biodome – none of this should shock you). One thing that shouldn’t have surprised me – The Rocket’s full name is Joseph Henri Maurice Richard, Sr. I once worked at a manufacturing facility in New Hampshire with a group of older Franco-American men. We’d worked together for a couple years before I – culturally ignorant as I was – discovered that they ALL had the same first name. Ben’s full name was Joseph Benjamin X, Roger’s was Joseph Roger Y, etc. See also – Boom Boom Geoffrion and The Pocket Rocket. Bah, cultural homogenization – it’s been a long time since I’ve heard a sentence construction like, “Up the hill, the car she went.”
Spoiler – video below is a minute and a half of introduction and six minutes of standing ovation.
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Grecian Formula via LGM.
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(h) those that are included in this classification*
I twote recently that I’d had a bit of semi-dreamtime inspiration: William Gibson is a nature writer. I think a case can be made for it and friends are curious about what the heck I’m yammering about, so here goes.
I’ve said it before – I’m not wild about the natural/human distinction. Yes, it’s obvious and oftentimes useful but it also facilitates a lot of delusional and destructive behavior. Allow me to repost a population/time graph:
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If we convince ourselves that we’re different, not ‘natural’, that the rules that apply to every other critter on the planet don’t apply to us (because we’re the crown of creation) we can ignore the obvious population dynamic conclusions suggested by the graph (crash). Our ‘us and them’ outlook gets in the way less dramatically as well – Pollan’s The Botany of Desire does a great job looking at domesticated plants from a plant’s eye, co-evolutionary standpoint. It’s not solely about us.
That being said, there do seem to be some things that make us different from our nearest relatives (posting on blogs could be one). E. O. Wilson suggests in The Superorganism that there are 3 entities one must keep an eye on when examining the evolution of social insects – the gene, the individual and the hive/nest/mound/superorganism. If you buy in to the notion of culture as an area where selection can occur (as in meme, etc.), one could build a similar triplet for H. sapien. Regardless – the fact that we can externalize and transmit information so well is one big adaptation that’s made us so (so far) successful. [aside] Looked at from this perspective, the made world – from Toyota to Tolstoy – is a natural phenomenon. Yes, we and our stuff are changing planetary systems, but that’s happened before – that exempts us neither from other natural processes nor from being a natural process ourselves.
All of the above is a perhaps overlong argument for being pretty relaxed about the natural world/made world distinction. Given that, Gibson as nature writer becomes a lot easier to accept. I’m using ‘nature writer’ here as a pretty inclusive category – one who write stories, as Norman Maclean said, with trees in them – tales where the exterior world is noticed and plays a part; where the environment is included in an important rather than peripheral way.
I’d recommended Spook Country to a friend and she responded that it felt like there was a lot of ‘stuff’ in it – I think she may have used the phrase product placement. “Hmm”, said I; though I’d noticed the presence of the world of things in both (at that point) of the Bigend books, it had never jumped out at me. I’d accepted the world as described by Gibson – because of my made/natural suspicion? Because the things he described tended to be interesting and in some consumerkulturny way, charismatic? Dunno. I read his latest – Zero History – last week (rippin’ tale, BTW) and had T’s comment floating in the back of my mind when I opened the book. The second paragraph:
Pearlescent silver, this one [taxi]. Glyphed in Prussian Blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn.
I’d be quite satisfied with a similar description applied to a startled woodchuck bolting for its hole as our natural-world-only protagonist walks across a farmer’s corn field. And that’s the thing – Gibson’s Bigend books are set in cities, in the world of made things, ideas and human generated external info flows. He describes the environment his characters are embedded in with the care any good author who writes books with trees and multilevel parking garages in them would.
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I’m not sure it’s coincidental that the title of the first book – Pattern Recognition – evokes one of my favorite ‘in the woods’ phenomena – something that I’ve heard called native vision. Native vision is the trained pattern recognition that allows a local to pick a whitetailed deer out of the jumbled shapes of the fall woods, where someone who didn’t know that kind of woods wouldn’t see a dang thing.
I may write more on the topic – or I may hear back that this is all BS and I should stop before I embarrass myself further – but I wanted to toss this out sooner rather than later. Comments more than welcome…
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[aside] One of the concerns Ray Kurzweil brings up in The Age of Spiritual Machines is that there seems to be room for one species in a given niche. He speculates that self-awareness may define a niche – so what happens to us when we create intelligent AIs? [Skynet, that’s what.] It’s of interest to me that there are MANY species of social insect – clearly superorganism is not a niche – why would we jump to the conclusion that self-awareness and externalizing info was one as well?