The term “skid row” takes its name from the run-down saloons and boarding houses near the skid roads of western logging camps.
Source – Modern Marvels Episode: Logging Tech
A skid road was a corduroy road made of logs, used to skid or drag felled trees through the woods or bog to the saw mill.
The longest log flume ever built extended over 62 miles running in the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range of California. Built by the Kings River Lumber Company in 1890 to harvest the giant redwoods. Regrettably,
…the operation felled over 8,000 giant redwood trees, all over 2,000 years old. Of those trees felled, only 23% made it to the mill. The sheer weight of the giant trees caused them to shatter into millions of unusable pieces while the portions that were too large were blasted with black powder, but this method also proved unsatisfactory.
According to Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media ecology at New York University, the original revelation of subliminal advertising effects was a hoax.
In 1957, an enterprising marketing researcher named James Vicary announced to a breathless world that he had conducted an experiment in a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey during screenings of the William Holden picture, Picnic. Vicary claimed that what he had done was to flash subliminal inducements during the screening of the film telling people to drink Coca Cola or to eat popcorn. His claim was that those subliminal flashes had actually increased sales of those items at the concession stand in the theater by some 38 percent.
This announcement took the country by [LAUGHING] storm. People basically freaked out over it. The networks swore they would never engage in practices like this. The New York State Senate passed a law against this kind of thing. Aldous Huxley appeared on The Mike Wallace Show [LAUGHS] and referred to it as something far worse than anything he’d imagined in Brave New World. It was quite a to do.
And the irony is that it turned out that Vicary had made the whole thing up.
In James Tobin’s book To Conquer the Air, I was amazed to learn that the Wright Brothers paid a premium for their first bicycles, even in today’s money, it sounds like a lot for a bike!
In the Wright family, Orville was infected first, in the summer of 1892, when he bought a fine new Columbia for $160, a very substantial sum at the time when relatively few workers earned more thatn $500 per year. He soon entered races and did well. Will bought his own model-used, for $80- several weeks later.
Wally Walington of Flint, Michigan thinks he knows how Stonehenge was built using simple techniques. Watch the video and be amazed as Wally uses what he calls “the forgotten technology” to move massive concrete blocks by himself.
According to Jeff Shaara in his book Civil War Battlefields
A function on the site, Internet Archive, lets you go back in time and look at what sites looked like in years past. They have 85 billion web pages archived from 1996.
The authors of Freakonomics relate an interesting story about the KKK after WWII. Wanting to combat the rise of the KKK, activist Stetson Kennedy went undercover and infiltrated the group. In attempt to discredit the organization and expose their covert practices, Kennedy gave the writers of the Superman radio drama detailed information about the workings of the KKK, including secret codewords and details of Klan rituals. The writers produced four episodes of the radio show chronicling the super hero fighting the Klan. The authors contend that the radio show episodes had a negative impact on the Klan and hastened it’s demise.
Neil Armstrong’s moon boots are still siting on the moon along with nine other pairs worn during the Apollo missions. They were jettison to compensate for the additional weight in moon rocks they were bringing back to earth.
A favorite cartoon of my youth, I was surprised to discover that it originally aired in prime time for a single season.
“26 Jonny Quest episodes originally aired in primetime during the 1964-65 season.”
There have been a few resurrections of the series, but none have come close in quality to the original classic 26 episodes.
Fan site:
http://www.classicjq.com/
I own and highly recommend the DVD set.
Jonny Quest First Season
Don’t let “First Season” throw you, there was only one season.