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Streetview UK!

Well, I know what I'll be up to for the next few days.


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Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 74

I'm reasonably certain that nobody wore an ascot and mukluks at the same time. Much to my pity.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 73

This is a long thin ad. I've chopped it up to make it a bit easier to manage.





Looking that over, I thought that the two places I was going to go with this were.

1. Riffing about the fjords. I love riffing on fjords.
2. Is that font the same as the Gilligan's Island opening credits?

And then I search for Raymond & Whitcomb, and find an article from 1893 in the New York Times Archive:

TWENTY-SIX MANGLED BODIES; TRAIN FILLED WITH EXCURSIONIST WRECKED AT BATTLE CREEK. MORE THAN A SCORE BADLY INJURED. A Frightful Holocaust Caused by Disobe- dience of Orders. PASSENGERS ROASTED TO DEATH. Raymond & Whitcomb Excursion Train Filled with Returning World's Fair Tourists Driven Like a Rod of Steel into a Pacific Express -- Unlucky Thirteen Cars Crushed into Splinters About Sleeping Passenger -- Then Fire Roasted Helpless Travelers Who Were Pinned Down by Debris -- Terrible Suffering and Heroic Death of Mrs. Van Dusen of Sprout Brook, N.Y. -- Pitiful Scenes, of Which Those Who Would Rescue Were Powerless Spectators -- Engineer Wooley of the Raymond & Whitcomb Train Says Conductor Scott Told Him That the Road Was Clear -- The Engineer and Conductor Arrested and Held to be Tried for Manslaughter.

That's just the summary. It's quite an article.

Raymond & Whitcomb have a website, but there's not much there. A quick poke through eBay can bring up a bunch of their old brochures as well as a few for the MTS Argonaut.

24 is now carbon neutral

Says the New York Times:

Car crashes posed a bigger problem; even hybrid vehicles emit carbon dioxide when blown up. To achieve true carbon neutrality the scripts would have to avoid shooting on location and staging chase scenes, something likely to disappoint even the greenest viewers.

So the producers decided to settle for buying carbon offsets, which in theory make up for emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, by paying other people to generate enough clean energy to compensate — in this case wind-power plants in India. The producers said they bought enough credits to offset 1,291 tons of carbon dioxide, just over a half-season’s worth of emissions.

They gloss over any estimate of how much carbon dioxide they needed to offset when they blew up that SUV a couple episodes back. Does blowing up a hybrid give off less carbon dioxide than blowing up a normal car?

How long till someone asks the Car Talk guys?

"a kind of grand scale all-in wrestling match"

The Times Archive blog brings us the review of the original King Kong.

I pass along some information

The most common thing that people seem to be Googling for when they trip across this blog is some variation of "ants in my pants dance song"

Look no further, Google Searchers.


+++++++++++

Years ago I put up this photo:


When I put them up I wondered what was going on with them. Diamond Geezer gives up the skinny:

The disused piers of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. This bridge was abandoned by goods traffic in 1964, and 20 years later the main span was removed leaving a dozen lonely red columns sticking out of the Thames. Waste not, want not. These isolated abutments are to be used to support the new west-side platforms at Blackfriars station, and engineering work is already afoot to begin linking them together.