Simanaitis Says

On cars, old, new and future; science & technology; vintage airplanes, computer flight simulation of them; Sherlockiana; our English language; travel; and other stuff

CLEARING INNES IRELAND’S NAME

GRAND PRIX driver and R&T contributor Innes Ireland was larger than life. He was also a good friend, even before I cleared his name with the City of Needles, County … Continue reading

April 14, 2016 · 6 Comments

AN EDITOR’S DELIGHT—AND A DISCLOSURE

RESEARCHING AND COMPOSING SimanaitisSays.com is great fun. As the dotty old woman said, “I never know quite what I’m going to say until I say it.” And so it is … Continue reading

April 13, 2016 · 6 Comments

A YORKSHIREMAN’S SPORTS CAR

QUICK, LIST CARS named for planets in our Solar System. If you like, include the Uranus even though it’s a fictional marque from the Grand Theft Auto video game. Next, … Continue reading

April 12, 2016 · 1 Comment

EULER’S ELEGANCE

IN A SEARCH for elegance in mathematics, look no further than Euler’s Formula, e i π = -1. This equation takes three perhaps obscure mathematical constants, e, i and π, … Continue reading

April 11, 2016 · Leave a comment

RED & TRACK

WE USED TO joke that the real name of the magazine was Red & Track. Subscribers, bless their hearts, would enjoy a magazine whatever was on the cover. But a … Continue reading

April 10, 2016 · 8 Comments

SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIO

IT’S NOT LIKE they’ve just found the original typewriter ribbon from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. On the other hand, there were perhaps no more than 750 … Continue reading

April 8, 2016 · 2 Comments

THIRD PERSON SINGULAR

THE LINGUISTIC gender war in English has been raging over the third person pronoun, particularly in its singular personal form: he/him, masculine, and she/her, feminine. There are those, macho, feminist, … Continue reading

April 7, 2016 · 6 Comments

THE POTENCY OF COLOR

IT WAS the color scheme that attracted me to the Vulcan American Moth. Its photograph in Classic Airplanes of the Thirties: Aircraft of the Roaring Twenties (Flight, Its First Seventy-Five … Continue reading

April 6, 2016 · Leave a comment

BEAR WITH ME, DEAR, AS I SPEAK CREATIVELY

I MAY have had more pressing matters on my mind, but I was also musing on the difficulties of the English language, its pronunciation and spelling. It’s quite enough for … Continue reading

April 5, 2016 · 8 Comments

OPERA PUPPETRY

I’VE BEEN enjoying puppets in operas. Not puppet operas per se, where all the characters are controlled by puppeteers, but rather operatic productions making use of puppets interacting with real … Continue reading

April 4, 2016 · Leave a comment