Just to compare, the somewhat similar looking 1912 Baker Electric cruised at 23 mph, had a 100 mile range, and cost $2,700, or some $70,000 today.

I’m sorry, but Frank simply owns the weird name thing; his daughter Moon Unit Zappa is living proof.

No 1970 kitchen would be complete without the Honeywell Kitchen Computer. It held recipes, computed portion ratios, and balanced your checkbook. Costing $10,000 ($66K today), it included a two week resident course in how to use it. There was no keyboard or monitor; input was via binary switches, and output via binary…

Like most people my age (71, if you can believe that) I grew up in the home of a WWII vet. My dad was in the Army, serving in the Pacific. He was in Tokyo at the time of the formal surrender, and could see the USS Missouri from his post; he watched the ceremony from shore.

As noted in the video, he played starship captain J.J. Adams in the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet. That film was one of Gene Roddenberry’s principal sources for Star Trek, and Nielsen’s character was an archetype for Captain Kirk, right down to the gruff delivery, paling around with his second in command and his…

Reader’s guide for young people: the paper computer on the right is the Apple Lisa. Released in 1983 it was the first personal computer to successfully implement a graphical user interface. Invented by Xerox, the GUI was featured in their Alto computer released a decade earlier, but it was not a success due to its…

Weapons in space are not new. One of the Russian Almaz manned space stations of the early ‘70s was armed with a 23mm revolver cannon, capable of firing over 2,000 rounds per mintues. It was successfully test fired at least once.

Growing up in the ‘50s we had this, Air-wick. I can still smell it.

Growing up in the ‘50s we had this, Air-wick. I can still smell it.

Reader’s guide for young people: The original FOTB was released in 1950, directed by Vincent Minnelli and starring Spencer Tracy as the put-upon father, and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride. It was a boxoffice hit, and was nominated for Oscars across the board.

My wife and I saw Superman in first run; yes, I’m that old. The movie was saved by Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Jackie Cooper as Perry White.

My worst neighbor wasn’t a person but a place. My wife and I bought a house on the eastern outskirts of Annapolis MD in early 1977. It was a nice three bedroom, I built on a big deck for BBQs, we got to know the neighbors. Then I discovered that about 200 yards from our house was a Superfund toxic waste site, one near…

During WWII many kinds of food were severely rationed here on the home front. Recipe books were published with all kinds of egg-less, meat-less and flour-less dishes.

I was a backyard astronomer for 50 years. I had every kind of small telescope there is, and tried stellar, solar, lunar, deep sky... every kind of astronomy you can do from your back yard. After all that time and money, I dumped it because you can’t really see all that much at all. You see pictures like this in the…

My daughter was a classmate of Hilarie Burton in high school. They did drama club and cheerleading together, and Hilarie was in our home many times for cast parties and so forth. Lovely young woman.

In The Wild One Marlon Brando’s leather jacket had BRMC on the back:

I’m confused. Jesus said:

The producers offered Lazenby a seven-film contract that would have made him Bond for the ‘70s. His agent told him that Bond was obsolete in the hippy-dippy ‘60s and early ‘70s, and that he would look silly, a relic of the cold war. Lazenby turned down the contract and showed up at the premiere in long hair and a…

And... Bond sings! Skip to 0:50, or don’t; it’s all pretty good.