Peter Fonda, the son of a Hollywood legend who became a movie star in his own right both writing and starring in counterculture classics like “Easy Rider,” has died.
The first line of his wikipedia article says it all:
Peter Henry Fonda (February 23, 1940 – August 16, 2019) was an American actor. He was the son of Henry Fonda, younger brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget Fonda. He was a part of the counterculture of the 1960s.
Posted in Because I Can, Events, The Big Screen
When Chevrolet started designing ‘Vega’ during the 1970s, one of the main objectives was to keep the cost of the car down around $2,000 in circa-1970 dollars.
At the time, the freight charge for moving a loaded railroad car from the Lordstown assembly plant to the Pacific coast – the longest distance that cars produced at Lordstown would need to travel – was around $4,800. Since the Vega was a subcompact, it was possible to squeeze three more cars on a railroad car for a total of eighteen, instead of the usual fifteen.
But that still worked out to around $300 per car – a substantial surcharge for a $2000 car. If only Chevrolet could get more Vegas on a railroad car, the cost per unit of hauling them would go down.
The engineers at GM and the Southern Pacific Railroad came up with a clever solution. Instead of loading the cars horizontally, the Vegas will be placed vertically on a specially designed auto-rack – the Vert-A-Pac. Within the same volume of an 89-foot car, the Vert-A-Pac could hold as many as 30 automobiles instead of 18.
The Vega was hugely popular when it was introduced in 1970 however it quickly earned a reputation for unreliability, rust, safety issues and lousy engine durability.
When the Vega was discontinued, the Vert-A-Pac cars had to be retired as they were too specialized to be used with anything else. The Vert-A-Pac racks were scrapped, and the underlying flatcars went on to other uses.
Posted in Because I Can, Gadgets, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Artist Jordan Monsell has created a poster containing references to all 156 episodes of the iconic series. Can you identify all of them?
Posted in Because I Can, The Little Screen (Television)
In Woodbridge, Virginia, a woman wandered into her yard and found an eastern copperhead slithering through her flower bed. That’s not so unusual where she lives, as the region is home to a plethora of ophidians, from harmless corn snakes to venomous rattlers. But this one was different: It had two heads.
Read the rest over on Wired
Posted in Critters
The Enola Gay dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.
On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout
Posted in On This Day
It was with minimal expectations that, on August 3, 1977, Tandy Corporation teamed up with Radio Shack to release the TRS-80, one of the first personal computers available to consumer markets. While Don French — a buyer for the Tandy Radio Shack consumer electronic chain — had convinced some Tandy executives of the need to release a personal computer, most felt it was unlikely to gross substantial profits. This bulky item with complex operating procedures would never sell, they thought, more than 1,000 units in its first month… As it turned out, the TRS-80 surpassed even the most cautious sales estimates by tenfold within its first month on the market; the burgeoning prospects of a new era in personal electronics and computing could no longer be denied. It had no hard drive and four kilobytes of memory, according to the article. Radio Shack’s $600 PC was preceded by the MITS Altair, as well as PCs from both Apple and IBM, but “the TRS-80 was one of the first products that came fully assembled and ready to use, bridging the gap in accessibility between hobbyists — who took interest in the actual building of the computer — and the average American consumer, who wanted to know what this new, cutting-edge technology had in store for them.”
Posted in Gadgets
