Something/Someone Old

I've been looking into the history of the bicycle. Jeez, what a tangled web. There were multiple antecedents to the modern bicycle and controversy at several points over who got to claim credit for inventing any one of them.

The first mention of the idea seems to have come from a student of Da Vinci's though there is a mighty fight going on between different factions of historians over whether or not the sketch is genuine:

The earliest comes from a sketch said to be from 1534 and attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1998 Hans-Erhard Lessing described this as a purposeful fraud.[1][2] However, the authenticity of the bicycle sketch is still vigorously maintained by followers of Prof. Augusto Marinoni, a lexicographer and philologist, who was entrusted by the Commissione Vinciana of Rome with the transcription of da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus.[3][4]

This is a model built from the possibly fraudulent sketch:

Back to what is more verifiable, a German named Baron Karl von Drais invented a sort of bicycle in 1817:

Who knew that the invention of the bicycle had anything to do with a volcanic eruption!

Hans-Erhard Lessing (Drais' biographer) found from circumstantial evidence that Drais' interest in finding an alternative to the horse was the starvation and death of horses caused by crop failure in 1816, the Year Without a Summer following the volcanic eruption of Tambora in 1815)

The next advance in bicycle technology inspired the poet Keats to make a 19th-century version of a "nothingburger" statement:

The concept was picked up by a number of British cartwrights; the most notable was Denis Johnson of London announcing in late 1818 that he would sell an improved model.[12] New names were introduced when Johnson patented his machine “pedestrian curricle” or “velocipede,” but the public preferred nicknames like “hobby-horse,” after the children’s toy or, worse still, “dandyhorse,” after the foppish men who often rode them.[8]

the poet John Keats referred to it as "the nothing" of the day.

This one is kind of hilarious. Somebody claimed his dad invented a new version of the bicycle and cited as proof the fact that he got cited for a moving violation:

The first mechanically propelled two-wheel vehicle is believed by some to have been built by Kirkpatrick MacMillan, a Scottish blacksmith, in 1839. A nephew later claimed that his uncle developed a rear-wheel drive design using mid-mounted treadles connected by rods to a rear crank, similar to the transmission of a steam locomotive. Proponents associate him with the first recorded instance of a bicycling traffic offence, when a Glasgow newspaper reported in 1842 an accident in which an anonymous "gentleman from Dumfries-shire... bestride a velocipede... of ingenious design" knocked over a pedestrian in the Gorbals and was fined five British shillings.

After this point, the development of the machine gets so shrouded in controversy that I almost didn't want to write about it. Suffice to say that at some point in the late 1860s a French metalworker attached pedals to the front wheel and a lot of people fought over who should take credit for it.

It was so damnably uncomfortable to ride the things at this point that they were nicknamed "boneshakers."

In the 1870s, a British man from Coventry, James Starley, upgraded the boneshaker to the traditional "penny farthing" bicycle. I mainly associate this bicycle with the 1960s dystopian spy thriller The Prisoner. In real life, they were apparently pretty damned dangerous; "coming a cropper" originally meant hitting a bad spot in the road and pitching over the handlebars:

Even this story is contested, with some people claiming the Frenchman Eugene Meyer invented it.

The big jump forward in bicycle technology was the "safety bicycle," invented by James Starley's nephew John in the 1880s.

The development of the safety bicycle was arguably the most important change in the history of the bicycle. It shifted their use and public perception from being a dangerous toy for sporting young men to being an everyday transport tool for men—and, crucially, women—of all ages.

Interestingly, the first bicycle to have the same frame as the modern bicycle was invented by an African-American inventor, Isaac R. Johnson, in the late 1880s.

When the bicycle became safe and affordable in the 1880s, it contributed to the rise of what was called, in Britain and the United States, of the "New Woman." It gave women freedom of movement that they hitherto had not enjoyed. What I don't understand is why the prejudice against women walking alone, or for long distances, or doing much of anything outside--which was rife in British culture though not as much in American culture--caved before the advent of this new technology. In other words, why did people change their ideas about female mobility just because there were bikes rather than horses to ride?

But they did, thankfully:

As bicycles became safer and cheaper, more women had access to the personal freedom they embodied, and so the bicycle came to symbolise the New Woman of the late nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States.[40] Feminists and suffragists recognised its transformative power. Susan B. Anthony said, "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."

Once women cyclists were accepted, that of necessity led to a lot of other changes:

Since women could not cycle in the then-current fashions for voluminous and restrictive dress, the bicycle craze fed into a movement for so-called rational dress, which helped liberate women from corsets and ankle-length skirts and other encumbering garments, substituting the then-shocking bloomers.

That *was* a big deal. Imagine being a Victorian and seeing women riding around in bloomers!

Something New

Around the time I was 34, for some reason, I mostly stopped listening to new music. This was in 2002. Since then, I've listened to only a few new (to me, at least) artists: Pink, Adele, Duffy, System of a Down, Florence and the Machine--and in all those cases, I really only listened to a few of their hits. I don't know why I suddenly started listening to nothing but old music, but I did.

Perhaps it has something to do with the way the technology of listening to music shifted; I've never warmed to the mp3 or its various players, which I find annoying in almost every way except their storage capacity. The interfaces on those machines, in particular, are extremely counter-intuitive for me. I also hated the way Apple's mp4 worked only with Apple hardware, and the way in which the early tendency to being able to buy singles of, well, every song, rather than just what the record companies decided to release as a single--which was the one other useful aspect of the mp3/4 phenomenon--shifted somewhere along the way into mainly being able to buy just albums again. Looked like a loss leader to me, and loss leaders irritate me too. I ended up listening to music either on CDs in my car or on YouTube. Thus, the only new music I encountered I found by chance on YouTube (such as this, which came out of a search for Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy):

Anyway, this sad state of affairs has continued for 15 years, and now I'm attempting to bring it to an end. It's time I started listening to some new music. Also, I need something not horrible for the Something New portion of this thread!

So I've been digging around in articles about new bands, looking for things I might like. I came across this in a list of best new albums of 2017. It's a band called Priests, the title track off their album Nothing Feels Natural.

It's supposedly punk. I gotta say that coming back after 15 years is disorienting, because to me this band sounds more like a cross between Bjork and The Cure than Sid Vicious or the Ramones, but whatever. I'm learning.

Something Borrowed

Apparently most of the retro Spanish/Mexican architecture around Tucson is not the way Spaniards or Mexicans built in Arizona at all. Tucson's most famous and influential architect, Josias Joesler, imported the look from California.

The first true Tucson architecture can be found in Barrio Historico, where a few blocks of 19th-century Sonoran adobe rowhouses survive south of the Tucson Convention Center. (Hundreds of other Mexican-style houses were leveled during the urban renewal of the 1960s.) These hand-built, thick-walled houses—warm in winter, cool in summer—are authentic pieces of vernacular architecture. Their homegrown style responds both to Tucson’s harsh climate and its cultural history as a northern Mexican town.

By contrast, the Swiss-born Joesler borrowed his styles from elsewhere, notably California, where Mission Revival (red tile, white facades) became all the rage after the Panama-California Exposition of San Diego in 1915. Arriving in Tucson in 1928, Joesler created undeniably romantic—but ahistoric—houses for the Old Pueblo. His best-known works, the mini-haciendas of the old Catalina Foothills Estates, were meant to attract wealthy buyers to a fairytale Southwest redolent of Spanish California.

Joesler did not build as well for the local climate as the older houses were built. But he did build a hell of a lot better, and more sensibly, than the dribbling architectural goons who followed him later in the 20th century:

He carefully oriented his houses in the foothills toward views of the nearby mountains and desert. To be sure, these snowbird houses were poorly insulated, but their indoor-outdoor spaces took advantage of the mild winter climate, their courtyards, colonnades and screened Arizona rooms drawing on centuries-old principles of design for hot climates. He prized craftsmanship, and employed local Mexican artisans to weld old-style ironwork for the windows and to carve lintels and ceiling beams.

And unlike the slash-and-burn developers of today, who pile on the pink tile and scrape the land bare, Joesler and the Murpheys exactingly preserved the gorgeous vegetation of the desert.

https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/tile-roofs-and-borrowed-styles/Conte...

Something Blue
Dr David Waterhouse, a fossil expert and Python fan, has found that parrots not only lived in Scandinavia 55 million years ago, but probably evolved there before spreading into the southern hemisphere.

His discovery was based on a preserved wing bone of a previously unknown species, given the scientific name Mopsitta Tanta - and now nicknamed the Norwegian Blue.

He was studying for a PhD at the University of Dublin in 2005 when he visited a museum in Jutland and spotted a fossilised 2in-long humerus - appropriately enough, the funny bone - among bird remains which had been found near an open-cast mine.

Research has now confirmed the bone was part of an upper wing from a bird in the parrot family. Although the mine was in Denmark, the birds would also have lived in what is now Norway.

Waterhouse says of its odd Scandinavian location:

"It isn't as unbelievable as you might think that a parrot was found so far north.
"When Mopsitta was alive, most of northern Europe was experiencing a warm period, with a large shallow tropical lagoon covering much of Germany, South-East England and Denmark."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-566600/Norwegian-Blue-parrot-rea...