BUCKLING UP WITH ROVER
SEAT BELTS came late to the automobile, as we will see here from a series of 1967 R&Ts. In the earliest days of powered mobility, no one thought of securing … Continue reading
ON BENJAMINS, JACKSONS, HAMILTONS—BUT MAYBE NOT TUBMANS
U.S. CURRENCY has been in the media a lot these days. Recently I’ve read stories about our paper money in The Christian Science Monitor, The New Yorker, The New York … Continue reading
MALIBU CANYON’S PINK LADY
I THOUGHT about a Pink Lady recently. The drink kind: gin, grenadine dashes, egg white; shaken with ice. This in turn got me thinking about the Pink Lady of Malibu … Continue reading
THE CLASSICS WITH DAFFY, BUGS, AND ELMER
THE TERM “cartoon classics” has at least two meanings: There are the Warner Bros and Disney cartoons, timeless in their humor, exquisite in their production values. And there is the … Continue reading
STILL STUCK ON YOU (AFTER ALL THESE YEARS)
ELVIS IMPERSONATORS, including some more than 10-ft. tall, got All Shook Up at the 18th Annual Elvis Festival in Garden Grove, California, this past Sunday, August 27, 2017. And the … Continue reading
HALLELUJAH HYPOCRISY
IT IS extraordinary that I am disturbed by reading something in Science, the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But these are extraordinary times. Indeed, … Continue reading
THE 1878 TOTAL ECLIPSE, PART 2
AS DESCRIBED here yesterday, the 1878 solar eclipse didn’t exactly further astronomer James Craig Watson’s search for the planet Vulcan. Today, we’ll look at the 1878 eclipse again and find … Continue reading
THE 1878 TOTAL ECLIPSE, PART 1
ON JULY 29, 1878, a total eclipse of the sun swept across the western United States, and not without scientific and geopolitical implications. David Baron’s book American Eclipse focuses on … Continue reading
SELF-DRIVING TECHNICALITY, MORALITY, AND REGULATION
WHAT WITH my muted enthusiasm for self-driving vehicles, I confess to a bit of cherry-picking by gleaning highlights from the article “Self-Driving Policy Vacuum?” by Eric Kulisch in Automotive News, … Continue reading
ETYMOLOGY CONTINUED: DEMAGOGUE
FOR ONCE in my continuing Etymology for Today series (see chaos, mendacity, and the like), I’ve come upon a difference in my two primary sources, one dated 1971 and the … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 