The Billboard Top 100 should have been renamed the Elvis Presley 10 and Everyone Else 90 today in 1956, because Presley had 10 of the top 100 singles.
No comments on Presty the DJ for Dec. 29
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On Jan. 13, Chevrolet will introduce the world to the seventh-generation Corvette.
This blog is about what that Corvette will not look like. The purpose of concept cars is to show what could be done, such as the 1961 Mako Shark …
… which became (after practical design considerations) the C2 Corvette:
In the Corvette’s early days, GM experimented with the two-seat formula. The C1 had a trunk and either a soft-top or removable hardtop. The 1954 Corvette Corvair may have tipped off the prescient about the future direction of the Corvette:
Want a Corvette with a back seat? Consider the 1955 Corvette Impala:
One year earlier, Chevy built five Corvette Nomad wagons:
I noted here previously that General Motors has danced with the idea of a mid-engine Corvette for decades, only to stay with the tried and true (as in profitably selling) front-engine rear-drive ‘Vette.
The mid-engine idea started as early as design for the C3 Corvette. This is the XP-819 concept car, which you must admit looks more than a little like a C3:
Remarkable Corvettes tells the story:
Actually, the XP-819 was the result of a clash between Zora Arkus-Duntov and engineer Frank Winchell, who’d been involved with the Corvair project. Winchell contended that you could make a balanced, rear-engine, V-8 powered sports car by using an aluminum engine and larger tires on the rear to compensate for the rear weight bias. Duntov adamantly disagreed. A loose design was drawn that received some very unflattering comments from Duntov and Dave McLellan. Winchell asked designer Larry Shinoda if he could make something beautiful with the layout, to which Shinoda told him that a tape drawing could be shown after lunch. Shinoda and designer John Schinella sketched out the basic shape shown here. Duntov asked Shinoda, “Where did you cheat?”. It didn’t look “too bad”, so a working prototype was ordered. Shinoda supervised the styling and Larry Nies’ team of fabricators built the car. In only two months the XP-819 was on the test track. …
This car was definitely a Corvette, even though the back end was big. Unfortunately, with all that weight behind the rear axle, it was only a matter of time before it crashed during a high-speed lane change test. Paul vanValkenberg crashed it because he put the same (standard) size Corvette rim on the car front and rear and then wet down the track and went out and lost it. He bounced it off the wall a couple of times and pretty well wrecked it.
Wrecking the XP-819 didn’t kill the dreams of mid-engine Vettes. Consider the Astro II, which is neither a GMC tractor-trailer nor a Chevrolet minivan:
The Astro II, revealed at the 1968 New York Auto Show, was less extreme in its styling than Astro I. It was designed primarily to showcase its rear-mounted powertrain application. Unlike the Astro I, Astro II had doors to access the passenger compartment. The rear compartment hatch still lifted up – this time, to provide access to the engine compartment. The front compartment was designed as a storage area. Chevy R&D’s first mid-engine Corvette positioned a big-block V-8 backwards so the starter and ring gear nestled under the reclined seats and the tall accessory drive rode in back. The Tempest transaxle’s torque converter bolted to what’s usually the front of the crankshaft. The finished car weighed 200 pounds less than a stock 427 Corvette, but the transaxle was far too weak. …
By using off-the-shelf parts, the designers were able to deliver the car quickly, and at a relatively low cost. However, because of a lack of serious commitment by Chevrolet, the car was made using an out of production, ’63 Pontiac Tempest, two-speed transaxle. Ford, on the other hand, had a race-proven, four-speed manual gear box for the Mach 2. The big question was, if pushed into production, would a two-speed automatic Corvette be taken seriously. Probably not.
In 1970 came the XP-882:
The experimental XP-882 looked production-ready, thus fueling hopes that the next new Corvette would have a similar mid- engine design. It definitely looked like a Corvette, with overtones of the 1968- vintage “Shark” model in its low vee’d nose and four-lamp tail treatment. The car would have stayed under wraps, but was shown to counter Ford’s announced sale of Italian-built DeTomaso Panteras. GM built two XP-882 chassis for evaluation, but only the first one had the bodywork shown here.
Zora Arkus-Duntov’s solution to the XP-880’s transaxle problem was to mate a 454 V-8 to a Toronado transmission and mount it all transversely to lower the mass. A bevel gear allowed a prop-shaft to run back through the oil pan to a Chevrolet differential. It worked and paved the way for future all-wheel drive, but the powertrain weighed a significant 950 pounds.
The Corvette has always been made of fiberglass, though GM looked at an aluminum-bodied Corvette, the XP-895:
The story took a rotary turn, you might say, in the early ’70s. In November 1973 Motor Trend magazine (which in its history has been on rumors of new Corvettes like dogs to raw meat) breathlessly reported …
… that GM was considering two Corvettes powered by a Wankel rotary engine — one with two rotors …
… and one with four rotors:
First, the two-rotor, which as a 10-year-old (I saw this first in fifth grade and used it as a Pinewood Derby car model):
This little concept mounted a 266ci and 180-horse Wankel (called RC2-266) transversely, driving a new automatic transaxle being developed for the forthcoming X-body Citation. Designed by GM’s Experimental Studio and built in 6 months on a modified Porsche 914 chassis by Pininfarina (the car was ready on April of 1972), the 2-Rotor made its debut at the 1973 Frankfurt show. Like the original XP-882, it was widely believed to be a precursor of the next-generation Vette.
The concept that got much more attention was the four-rotor …
The same XP-882 that had been shown in New York in 1970 served as the basis for this Wankel motor prototype. Under Bill Mitchell, Henry Haga was responsible for it’s design. Called the “Four-Rotor Car”, it was arguably more stunning than the Two-Rotor XP-897GT, that appeared a bit later in 1972. Built on the first XP-882 chassis under the aegis of company design chief Bill Mitchell, it carried a pair of GM’s experimental two-rotor engines bolted together into a 420 horsepower “super Wankel.” A Corvette-like face and obvious high performance potential were taken as strong suggestions that GM was brewing a radical new Corvette for the late Seventies or early Eighties.
GM design chief Bill Mitchell kept its original lines intact, however — not that there was reason to fiddle. Charles Jordan oversaw the design, which included radical bifold gullwing doors, and deformable plastic body-colored nose and tail sections which are common today, but revolutionary in the mid-1970’s. The sterling silver paint, with silver leather interior and forged alloy turbine wheels later seen on the 1978 Corvette Indy Pace Car, gave the Corvette a space craft like appearance unmatched by any other advanced sports car. The interior was more fully engineered than the show-car norm, another indication this model was indeed a serious production prospect.
… which, after GM junked the rotary idea, got a 400 V-8 …
Bill Mitchell, the ardent Corvette styling department magnate, gave the car a new life by removing the Wankel engine and reinstalling a small-block Chevrolet V8 and christening it the AeroVette. A stunningly dramatic looking car, it was promoted as the new 4th generation Corvette for 1980, but never saw series production.
Why not? The GM Heritage Center has your answer:
Bill Mitchell, Vice President of Design, lobbied for the Aerovette as the next Corvette and GM chairman and CEO, Thomas Murphy actually approved the Aerovette for 1980 production. In the end, management decided that they were selling every fiberglass bodied, front engine V8 “traditional” Corvette they could build, so why make a huge risky investment in a mid-engine car. The Aerovette project was cancelled and the Aerovette is now part of the GM collection at the GM Heritage Center.
Given GM’s shaky quality reputation in the 1970s, it seems unlikely GM could have successfully pulled off gull-wing doors:
One Aerovette idea that may have (unfortunately) gotten into the C4 Corvette was a digital instrument panel (see the right photo):
The last attempt for a mid-engine Corvette was the CERV III …
… which would have been the first bazillion-dollar GM car because …
The body of the CERVIII is made of carbon fibre, nomex and kevlar, reinforced with aluminum honeycomb. This material forms a one-piece composite unit. Highlighting the structure is an exceptionally low drag at 0.277 Cd.
Powering the car is a Lotus-tuned 5.7-liter V8. Mahle pistons, stonger connecting rods and twin Garett Turbochargers help the engine achieve 650 horsepower. This engine combined with the low-drag body give CERVIII a calculated top speed of 225 mph!
With such high speed capability, a strong braking system is a must. On each wheel a dual disc setup is used. This creates a sandwich of brakes which effectively doubles the surface area. As a drawback, having 8 disc brakes instead of the usual four does increase overall weight.
With the transmission setup another innovation is achieved. Six forward speeds compliment the CERVIII by means of two transmissions! That’s right, a three-speed Hydramatic unit is linked to a custom two-speed transmission resulting in six gears. With this setup shifting is done automatically by computer control.
From the transmissions, power is transferred to all four wheels though a viscous-coupling system. This system helps achieve maximum traction by varying the torque to the front and rear wheels. No doubt this setup is influenced by the Porsche 959.
The ultimate reason there will be no mid-engine Corvette Jan. 13, despite enthusiast interest, is because GM already makes money on every front-engine Corvette it sells, and has for decades. The new Corvette V-8 will find its way into other GM V-8-powered vehicles, including pickup trucks. The current Corvette V-8 is found in the Chevy Camaro and the Cadillac CTS-V. The engineering involved in a mid-engine design, one that probably could be used in no other GM car, would make it cost-prohibitive, making a mid-engine Corvette either too costly for most would-be buyers or unprofitable. And as we know, GM needs to make all the profit it can.
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Republicans will not look back at the 2012 election fondly … except in Wisconsin.
Not the results of the presidential election or the U.S. Senate election, of course. Of course, the GOP did keep its 5–3 House of Representatives edge, helping freshman Reps. Sean Duffy (R–Ashland) and Reid Ribble (R–Kaukauna) become House sophomores.
The biggest successes, though, are at the state level. Between the November 2010 and November 2012 elections, the GOP won the legitimate gubernatorial election, won the illegitimate gubernatorial recall, and won and re-won control of the state Senate, while keeping the state Assembly.
The preceding paragraph compelled Human Events to name Gov. Scott Walker its Conservative of the Year:
His success in Wisconsin will change America. What was once thought an unattainable ceiling on possible Republican accomplishments has now become the floor for any Republican competing for national leadership in the GOP.
Walker led the effort to forbid state or local governments from withholding labor union dues from the paychecks of public sector workers, including teachers. Walker’s law forbids public sector unions from negotiating on health benefits, pensions, work rules or pay raises above the rate of inflation.
In one key law, Walker stopped one of the most corrupt practices: unions taking money from workers in dues and spending it on political activity. Dues can run from $500 to $1,000 per year. That is real campaign finance reform. It protects government workers from being looted. It protects all Wisconsinites from having their tax dollars recycled through the union to the Democratic Party to pushing for yet bigger government to continue the cycle.
Walker has set a high bar against which to measure the other 29 Republican governors.
The next Republican candidate for president will have to pass the “Walker Test.” …
Walker won his election in 2010. The Left tried to defeat him by winning a Supreme Court race that could have undone his reforms. They failed. The left tried to recall Walker himself—and failed. In 2012, Walker and his Republican majorities in the Wisconsin House and Senate remain in power. Stronger than ever. Tested by fire.
- Walker did it first.
- Walker did it in a blue state.
- Walker defended his progress in three elections.
- Walker kept his legislative majorities intact.
- Walker’s model is scalable. His reform can be implemented in all of the 24 other states with Republican governors and a Republican legislature. He has a raised a standard that all Republicans can follow to success.
He has left no excuses for other Republicans who would offer themselves for state or national leadership.
By taking forced union dues off the table Walker has begun to correct an imbalance between taxpayers and the state.
The last sentence says:
Even taxpayers in Illinois and California can benefit from the Walker reforms simply by moving from Illinois and California to one of the red states that follows the Walker model.
True, but there’s one omission. Illinois’ and California’s governors, Democrats Pat Quinn and Jerry Brown, have started taking on their states’ public employee unions themselves, because they have no other choice, given the smoking radioactive crater of their states’ finances.
Human Events engages in some hyperbole from a distance. Walker doesn’t deserve the highest grade because this state still has a poor business climate because the Walker administration and the Legislature hasn’t undone the reasons for this state’s poor business climate — high taxes and gross overregulation. State finances are not balanced by the only measure that counts, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. (Which no governor has ever been required to do.)
In a generally bad year for Republicans nationwide, though, Walker stands out. Before the 2010 election, Wisconsin had just one Republican statewide elected official, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, and a Democratic-controlled Legislature. Since the 2010 election, Wisconsin has just one Democratic statewide elected official, Secretary of State Douglas La Follette, and a Republican-controlled Legislature. And on Nov. 6, voters put the GOP back in charge in the Capitol.
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You’ve read that the fiscal cliff — the expiration of the early-2000s tax cuts and mandatory sequestration budget cuts — arrives Tuesday.
Before that, though, reports Fox Business:
The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday announced the first in a possible series of emergency steps to push back the day when the government will exceed its legal borrowing authority as imposed by the U.S. Congress.
The Treasury said on Dec. 28 it would suspend issuance of State and Local Government Series securities, known as “slugs”, which are special low-interest Treasury securities offered to state and local governments to temporarily invest proceeds from municipal bond sales. …
The Treasury said it will also begin other measures, such as suspending certain retirement investments, which together will raise $200 billion.
The Treasury said the debt ceiling is set to be reached on Dec. 31, but analysts believe extraordinary measures can stave that date off into February.
Which means what? The Christian Post ran this story in August 2011, the last time the feds bumped up against the debt limit:
Jay Powell, who served as Under Secretary of the Treasury under George H. W. Bush and is a Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, made this point in an interview on The Newshour.
“There’s always going to be enough money to pay the interest on the debt, and it’s very unlikely that there will be an actual debt default,” said Powell. …
While Tea Party Republicans are correct when they say that there will be enough revenue to avoid default and pay Social Security benefits, they are incorrect to suggest that the current debt ceiling can be maintained without major disruptions. Failure to increase the debt ceiling will, as Powell points out, “have significant effects on our economy and that will ripple throughout the global economy as well.”
Republicans point out often in this debate that the debt ceiling increase was requested by President Obama. This is true, but it was requested by President Obama so that he can carry out Congress’ spending orders.
In the Constitution, Congress is given authority over the budget. The spending has already been authorized by Congress, and the President is required to carry out Congress’ spending orders. Some of those spending orders were passed by Democratic led Congresses, some were passed by Republican led Congresses.
The debt ceiling itself is odd in one sense – Congress already authorized the spending, then it needs to authorize the borrowing necessary for the spending it already authorized. Most nations do not have a debt ceiling.
Bloomberg news created an interactive tool, based upon the Bipartisan Policy Center’s calculations, where you can play the role of Treasury Secretary by prioritizing which payments should be made and which should not be made.
At the time, the U.S. had $14.5 trillion in federal government debt. Today, the federal debt is over $16 trillion. And yet voters kept the incumbent in the White House.
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Today in 1963, the London Times’ music critics named John Lennon and Paul McCartney Outstanding Composers of 1963. Two days later, Sunday Times music critic Richard Buckle named Lennon and McCartney “the greatest composers since Beethoven.”
The number one album today in 1969 was “Led Zeppelin II” …
… the same day that the number one single was this group’s last:
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb of New York University:
The fiscal cliff is not really a “cliff”; the entire country won’t fall into the ocean if we hit it. Some automatic tax cuts will expire; the government will be forced to cut some expenditures. The cliff is really just a red herring.
Likewise, any last-minute deal to avoid the spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1 isn’t likely to save us from economic turmoil. It would merely let us continue the policy mistakes we’ve been making for years, allowing us only to temporarily stabilize the economy rather than address its deep, systemic failures. …
Stabilization, of course, has long been the economic playbook of the United States government; it has kept interest rates low, shored up banks, purchased bad debts and printed money. But the effect is akin to treating metastatic cancer with painkillers. It has not only let deeper problems fester, but also aggravated inequality. Bankers have continued to get rich using taxpayer dollars as both fuel and backstop. And printing money tends to disproportionately benefit a certain class. The rise in asset prices made the superrich even richer, while the median family income has dropped.
Overstabilization also corrects problems that ought not to be corrected and renders the economy more fragile; and in a fragile economy, even small errors can lead to crises and plunge the entire system into chaos. That’s what happened in 2008. More than four years after that financial crisis began, nothing has been done to address its root causes.
Our goal instead should be an antifragile system — one in which mistakes don’t ricochet throughout the economy, but can instead be used to fuel growth. The key elements to such a system are decentralization of decision making and ensuring that all economic and political actors have some “skin in the game.” …
First, in a decentralized system, errors are by nature smaller. Switzerland is one of the world’s wealthiest and most stable countries. It is also highly decentralized — with 26 cantons that are self-governing and make most of their own budgetary decisions. The absence of a central monopoly on taxation makes them compete for tax and bureaucratic efficiency. And if the Jura canton goes bankrupt, it will not destabilize the entire Swiss economy.
In decentralized systems, problems can be solved early and when they are small; stakeholders are also generally more willing to pay to solve local challenges (like fixing a bridge), which often affect them in a direct way. And when there are terrible failures in economic management — a bankrupt county, a state ill-prepared for its pension obligations — these do not necessarily bring the national economy to its knees. In fact, states and municipalities will learn from the mistakes of others, ultimately making the economy stronger.
It’s a myth that centralization and size bring “efficiency.” Centralized states are deficit-prone precisely because they tend to be gamed by lobbyists and large corporations, which increase their size in order to get the protection of bailouts. No large company should ever be bailed out; it creates a moral hazard.
Consider the difference between Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who are taught to “fail early and often,” and large corporations that leech off governments and demand bailouts when they’re in trouble on the pretext that they are too big to fail. Entrepreneurs don’t ask for bailouts, and their failures do not destabilize the economy as a whole.
Second, there must be skin in the game across the board, so that nobody can inflict harm on others without first harming himself. Bankers got rich — and are still rich — from transferring risk to taxpayers (and we still haven’t seen clawbacks of executive pay at companies that were bailed out). Likewise, Washington bureaucrats haven’t been exposed to punishment for their errors, whereas officials at the municipal level often have to face the wrath of voters (and neighbors) who are affected by their mistakes.
If we want our economy not to be merely resilient, but to flourish, we must strive for antifragility. It is the difference between something that breaks severely after a policy error, and something that thrives from such mistakes.
Readers may remember the term TooBToF: Too Big to Fail. The 2008 bailouts were of companies the George W. Bush administration deemed Too Big to Fail — specifically banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, which included the biggest banks with a presence in this state — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and US Bank.
Back in 2010, Bob Atwell of Nicolet National Bank wrote:
Ending Toobtof subsidy will be a blow for economic freedom and decentralization. Systemic risk is not a naturally occurring market phenomenon; rather it is an unintended consequence of decades of increasingly centralized regulatory power. Regulation creates the systemic risk it seeks to manage. It is hard for this administration to admit that more smart guys in Washington, with even more regulatory power, are not the answer. We do well to remember that regardless of who is President, high-level regulators tend to be loaned executives from Wall Street. …
The nation will be well served by the position the President has expressed. To do this, the President will not only need to find a populist voice, he will need to change his thinking about business. His economic rhetoric to date reflects a disturbingly socialist perspective. It has been a kind of dreamy socialism with a smile. To many of us working amidst the rubble of the economic earthquake, he sounds like he believes the purpose of business is to fund the welfare state. To those of us facing investment and hiring decisions, he seems to be waiting to expropriate the fruits of the work we do and the risks we take. Until we hear something different, we will just hunker down, continue de-levering and spend more time on things we can’t be taxed for.
Wall Street invested heavily in Obama’s election. If he sticks to his current course, they will turn all their charm, their money and their formidable intellectual muscle on you. The problem you had on economic policy in 2008 is that you had exhausted your public credibility sheltering and defending economic abusers. It is your complicity that made Obama’s soft socialism seem like the least bad choice to many independents. Do not resume your customary role as Wall Street’s water boy. The natural conservative position is to reverse the public subsidy of the Toobtofs. Tea party conservatives and Scott Brown independents are waiting for you to explain what they know in their hearts. Decentralized financial intermediation is essential for economic revitalization. There is world of difference between the financial machinations of Wall Street and the hiring and investment decisions faced by the gutsy main street entrepreneurs recovery depends on.
You would think that, having watched as Wall Street gave lavishly to the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012, the Republican Party (specifically its tea party wing) would be looking to stick it to Wall Street, while trying to appeal to the much larger small business community and trying to convince voters the GOP has a better economic idea. Here’s the GOP’s chance. Not only should there be no more bailouts; there should be no more opportunities for companies to become TooBTofs.
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Today in 1963, Capitol Records, which had previously rejected the U.S. rights to every Beatles single until then, finally released a double single, the first half of which had already reached number one in the United Kingdom:
One year later, guess which group had their sixth number one of the year.
Today in 1967, BBC TV broadcasted the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” movie:
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More has happened in rock music on Christmas than one might think.
The number one single today in 1971:
The number three British single today in 1982 at least has a Christmas theme:
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Starting shortly after my birth, my parents purchased Christmas albums for $1 from an unlikely place, tire stores.
(That’s as unusual as getting, for instance, glasses every time you filled up at your favorite gas station, but older readers might remember that too, back in the days when gas stations were usually part of a car repair place, not a convenience store.)
The albums featured contemporary artists from the ’60s, plus opera singers and other artists.
These albums were played on my parents’ wall-length Magnavox hi-fi player.
Playing these albums was as annual a ritual as watching “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” or other holiday-season appointment TV.
Those albums began my, and then our, collection of Christmas music.
You may think some of these singers are unusual choices to sing Christmas music. (This list includes at least six Jewish singers.)
Of course, Christians know that Jesus Christ was Jewish.
And I defy any reader to find anyone who can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand did in the ’60s.
These albums are available for purchase online, but record players are now as outmoded as, well, getting glasses with your fill-up at the gas station.
But thanks to YouTube and other digital technology, other aficionados of this era of Christmas music now can have their music preserved for their current and future enjoyment.
The tire-store-Christmas-album list has been augmented by both earlier and later works.
In the same way I think no one can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand, I think no one can sing “Do You Hear What I Hear” like Whitney Houston:
This list contains another irony — an entry from “A Christmas Gift for You,” Phil Spector’s Christmas album. (Spector’s birthday is Christmas.)
The album should have been a bazillion-seller, and perhaps would have been had it not been for the date of its initial release: Nov. 22, 1963.
Finally, here’s a previous iteration of one of the currently coolest TV traditions — “The Late Show with David Letterman” and its annual appearance of Darlene Love (from the aforementioned Phil Spector album):
Merry Christmas.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 