WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by […]
It’s always interesting to see echoes of the golden age of aviation in today’s pop culture. At the Avia-Corner, Scott Palmer ends an update on the search for Amelia Earhart with a related music video: Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear, by The Handsome Family. Well, I’ll see his ‘aviatrix lost at sea, never to
Chain letters are a kind of meme, but not a good kind — inane, threatening, pointless. They are surprisingly venerable and ubiqitous, however. Many past cultures had some form of chain letter, generally claimed to be communications from a god. In medieval and early modern Europe, these “messages from heaven” seem to have been fairly
Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl
This sticker is in the back of a book published in 1940, originally part of the collection of the Public Lending Library of Victoria (itself a part of the Public Library of Victoria, as the SLV was then known). I was struck particularly by no. 4. Were books considered possible vectors for infectious disease —
I’ve previously mentioned the Holden airship. At the moment it is at Brisbane, and there are concerns that it will be flown over the Gabba during the first Ashes test next month.1 The problem is that Holden isn’t paying Cricket Australia anything for the privilege of flying a billboard over the cricket ground, where it
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Mark Grimsley has an interesting post up at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age / Cliopatria asking people how they would fill out a history department of 15 full-time equivalent positions. I thought it would be fun to try this exercise for an Australian history department. Rather than trying
Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever heard of it. That’s Big Grammo for you, I guess. (Or maybe not …) Source: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London:
A report from the 14th annual conference of the National Federation of Hairdressers, which opened at Blackpool on 31 May 1915: A Swansea delegate said the trouble was not now. The trouble would be when the war was over, because men who had enlisted would have been trained to shave themselves. The result would be
I just tried out Bruce’s Australian Name Generator (well, it’s alun‘s, really). Being an actual Australian, I was expecting something special, and I got it: Brett Holman from this day forward you will also be known as: Airborne Bruce the Great Galah That’s almost uncanny.
