The Ferris wheel was the invention of a man named, well, George Washington Ferris. Come on, what did you think his name was going to be. Gustave Eiffel? It was designed for the 1893 Chicago Worlds Exposition, the first such exposition since the one in Paris five years earlier which
I’ve always hated everything Disney. Hated Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Hated Snow White and Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. Hated the song ‘It’s A Small World After All’ and especially hated the score to ‘Mary Poppins.’ Worst of all was Disneyland, a theme park I was subjected to several times
One of the distressing things about nerding-out on vintage airplane videos are the soundtracks one has to endure. Either the person who posted the footage of the lovely old planes plasters ‘Top Gun’ style junk-rock over the images or they err in the other direction, maintaining the ‘purity’ of the
Take a look (and read the accompanying explanation) at yesterday’s blog entry. It’s a World War 2 pilot training film ”Learn and Live With Joe Instructor’, absolutely one of the most entertaining war movies ever made. To my dismay, the film ended rather abruptly, halting just as a plane was
Years ago I remember my father recounting to me a training film he and his fellow flight school students were asked (forced) to watch in which Guy Kibbee played an angel who admitted dead student pilots to a special place in heaven/hell, without knowing why. The flight instructor showed up
On Monday I posted a British Pathe newsreel showing the local side of glamorous Rome in 1967. Although the twitty English announcers narration was a tad on the condescending side (more than a tad actually) the lovely color photography made the whole thing a delight to watch. Today we have
What have we here? It’s a 1967 British Pathe newsreel (really? they were still making newsreels in Britain?) showing us ‘The Real Rome’. The quality of the color photography is excellent and the musical score is quite perfect. And then there’s the narration which is an astonishingly stupid and snide
Recorded on May 26, 1927, just five days after Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, ‘Lucky Lindy’ (posted below) was a major hit record and one that Lindbergh apparently loathed. He was more than a little surprised at the world-wide hoopla that greeted him upon landing and regarded much of it with
There;’s a saying in aviation that ‘taking off is optional but landing is mandatory. Yesterday I posted Charles Lindberghs take off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island for his historic Atlantic crossing. Today, above, we see his landing in France. It’s not the most graceful three-point landing you’ll ever see–the
Yesterday I read a large chunk of Scott Berg’s magnificent biography of Charles Lindbergh (rather appropiately on a plane) and discovered that the actual take-off of ‘The Spirit Of St. Louis’ was captured by newsreel cameras. It’s hard now to grasp, from a centuries distance, how special this event was