The number 14 single today in 1958 was this singer’s first entry on the charts, and certainly not his last:
Today in 1967, the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” promotional film (now called a “video”) was shown on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show. It was not shown in Britain because of a musicians’ union ban on miming:
One death of odd note, today in 1973: John Rostill, former bass player with the Shadows (with which Cliff Richard got his start), was electrocuted in his home recording studio. A newspaper headline read: “Pop musician dies; guitar apparent cause.”
The number one album today in 1994 was the Eagles’ “Hell Freezes Over”:
The number one album today in 2000 was the Beatles’ “One”:
Birthdays begin with Tina Turner:
John McVie of Fleetwood Mac …
… was born one year before Burt Reiter, who played bass for Focus:
One reason, I believe, for the appeal of vehicles beyond their point-A-to-point-B utility is the sensory experience of driving them. It’s not just about rolling down the road; there are the sounds the car makes, the feel of the road rushing by (smoothly or, in the case of a certain pothole on East Sullivan Street near Ripon High School, not).
That came to mind because of two recent blogs. The first was a Jalopnik.com blog and reader poll about, of all things, car startup sounds. The other was a Top Gear blog about, of all things, car instrument panels.
My pre-driving car experiences were all sitting in the left rear seat of our various cars. Perhaps that’s where I started getting interested in the layout of the speedometer, fuel gauge, lights and wiper controls, and climate and audio controls. As for the starter, a car starter motor represents going somewhere, and as we know cars are the highest expression of vehicular freedom.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the (largely unrecognized) innovations of Chrysler Corp. was its high-speed starter, helpful in getting high-horsepower engines to start. The sound (which I first heard from my grandfather’s station wagons used for his farm implement sales) was termed the “Highland Park hummingbird,” named for Chrysler’s corporate headquarters.
Before the Highland Park Hummingbird, this Chrysler starter would get your attention, because it was attached to a 1950s Hemi V-8, which powered an air raid siren:
Before GM and Ford adopted their own gear-reduction starters (and in the days of carburetors), starting a car used to sound like this:
My favorite car I’ve ever had custody of, our 1975 Chevrolet Caprice, had the loudest starter I’ve ever heard when started in our garage:
My 1988 Chevy Beretta GT and Jannan’s 1992 Pontiac Sunbird SE had similar V-6 engines. However, her ownership experience was much more positive than mine:
From Jalopnik’s list of great startup sounds, the most out-there is Brutus, a car powered by a 48-liter V-12 engine, described thusly: “It sounds Teutonic. Not a clean, emotionless, modern executive car kind of Teutonic. Not a clean, gray business park kind of Teutonic, but a tear a hole in the world, pagan god kind of teutonic.”
Until 1969, cars were started from a switch mounted somewhere on the dashboard. (Ford ignition switches were often mounted on the left side, supposedly because Henry Ford was left-handed.) Then in 1969, GM (followed one year later by Ford, Chrysler and AMC) debuted its ignition switch on the steering column, designed to lock the steering wheel as an anti-theft measure. Nearly three decades later, at Marketplace Magazine, I got a news release from GM about the new Chevrolet Malibu, which featured the innovation of … an ignition switch on the dashboard. Now, of course, cars can be started without a key, just like in the 1950s, when the key could be removed from the ignition switch while the car was running.
One of the several reasons I’m not a fan of hybrids is the fact that turning on some of them is like flipping a light switch. I drove a Lexus LS250h, which is the upscale version of the Toyota Prius. The driving experience starts on the wrong foot when you can’t figure out whether the car is on or not.
The aforementioned left rear seat gave me a view of our cars’ instrument panels, from a 1966 Chevrolet Nova station wagon …
… to a 1969 Chevy Nomad …
… to a 1973 AMC Javelin …
… to the aforementioned Caprice …
… to the 1981 Chevy Malibu:
Most of these cars had merely a speedometer, gas gauge and odometer. The Javelin had the upgrade of a temperature gauge. My parents declined to buy the Caprice’s optional temperature and fuel economy gauge package. (Why a fuel economy gauge is helpful for a car rated at 13 city and 18 mpg is a good question.) Tachometers started becoming standard equipment during the 1980s, which is sort of ironic given that manual transmissions have been doing a slow fade for a couple of decades.
Gauges instead of idiot lights are helpful to be able to determine how your car is operating. If the oil light goes on, does that mean the engine is about to seize, or is it low oil pressure resulting from low oil level? If your battery is dying, it would be helpful to see a voltmeter show the battery or alternator putting out fewer volts before the battery light comes on and it’s probably too late.
It’s kind of ironic that the one car I’ve owned that had the complete set of instruments — speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, voltmeter and oil pressure gauge — was also the worst car I’ve ever owned, the aforementioned Beretta GT:
My wife’s favorite car was the aforementioned Sunbird, which had a well-designed instrument panel, including its radio; too bad the tall had great difficulty getting in and out:
Time was when additional gauges were optional. The base Sunbird offered just a speedometer and fuel and temperature gauge. One level of options added a voltmeter and oil pressure gauge, and Jannan’s added a tachometer. The automakers now generally don’t offer additional gauges, consumer choice having lost out to efforts to improve build quality through fewer variations.
One innovation, if that’s what you want to call it, that reared its garish head in the 1980s was the option of all-digital gauges. I think one reason for the comparative lesser popularity of the fourth-generation Corvette is that between 1984 and 1989 drivers had to stare at this …
… which not only looks like an ’80s video game, but apparently dies, requiring increasingly expensive replacement. A similar instrument panel was available on the late ’80s Beretta, which I declined to purchase:
Since, other than the windshield, the instrument panel is what the driver looks at the most, badly designed instrument panels would drive me nuts. (For a few years in my youth, I drew instrument panels based on drawings in the owner’s manuals of cars of family and friends of my parents. Yes, I was a strange kid.) There were a few cars in the ’50s and ’60s where the interior designer got the brilliant idea of removing the zeroes from the speedometer, leaving the impression that the car could go no faster than 12 mph.
Top Gear’s most out-there instrument panel design comes from a Lancia Orca, a concept car in the height of the digital dashboard craze:
I think I could put 100,000 miles on this car and still not know how to do certain things with the car.
With increasing interest in ergonomics in the 1980s, car instrument panels started becoming less, shall we say, creative. In the late ’60s, a couple of GM cars featured speedometers with a drum-like display — the needle was stationary and the numbers rolled vertically by as the car sped up.
Some Lincolns had a thermometer-like speedometer — instead of a needle, a bar would go to the right as the car accelerated. Pontiac and Oldsmobile started putting controls on steering wheels in the ’80s and ’90s, which lasted until airbags started getting installed.
(A former employer of mine once owned an Olds Toronado with pushbuttons on the steering wheel. This proved to be a design flaw when he left the car windows open before a sudden rainstorm, and a few miles later the radio decided to increase volume to maximum level.)
One sign of how serious the car is (or so the carmaker wants you to believe) as a performance vehicle is the location of the speedometer vs. the tachometer. The Porsche 911 traditionally has had a five-gauge layout with the tachometer in the middle:
BMW’s Mini Cooper has the tachometer in front of the driver, and the speedometer and other gauges between driver and passenger:
The coolest interior option presently available on an American car might be the Ford Mustang’s MyColor option, where you can set your own favorite instrument panel lighting color, based on red, green and blue as with a TV. Twopeople with a lot of time on their hands created two guides for creating your own instrument panel colors. (My wife liked the red of her two Sunbirds. I recall the bright green of the aforementioned Javelin.)
No employee of a car manufacturer has ever asked me, but if they did, I would tell them that as far as gauges are concerned, more is better. If I ever got the money to do a car project where I could design my own instrument panel, it might have more gauges than an aircraft — speedometer, tachometer, fuel level and pressure, engine temperature, oil temperature and pressure, volts, engine vacuum, and who knows what else. A month ago, I spent an afternoon in my brother-in-law’s tractor–trailer, and while he was filling the trailer with corn I was trying to figure out what the gauges indicated. And numbers are preferable to letters; “C” and “H” don’t mean much on a temperature gauge.
Beyond that, I’m surprised the aforementioned MyColor option hasn’t been copied by other car manufacturers, because it is a great idea. (My Subaru Outback has white for the instruments and red for the air and audio controls.) I once drove a BMW that had three main air controls, for fan speed, temperature and outlets (the panel, floor and defroster outlets, plus combinations thereof), with buttons for air conditioning and rear defrost. I prefer that to trying to decipher an electronic display — how do I get the air to blow out of the air outlets? — and attempting to figure out whether I’d prefer the air at 68 degrees or 70. I’m fine with the headlight switch on the turn signal stalk and the wipers on an opposite stalk, but I prefer transmission shifters off the steering column — either on the floor or, as with newer Honda Odysseys and 1960s Dodge vans, on the instrument panel. And I’d like to be able to easily figure out, without consulting the owner’s manual, how to change the radio station.
This instrument panel from a Koenigsegg CCX certainly provides a lot of information, but not at one glance …
Today’s weather notwithstanding, let’s hope AccuWeather doesn’t live up to its prediction:
The AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team is predicting another brutally cold and snowy winter for a large part of the country, thanks in large part to La Niña… yet again.
La Niña, a phenomenon that occurs when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific are below normal, is what made last year’s winter so awful for the Midwest and Northeast. Monster blizzards virtually shut down the cities of New York and Chicago. Last winter was one of New York City’s snowiest on record.
The way the jet stream is expected to be positioned during this winter’s La Niña will tend to drive storms through the Midwest and Great Lakes. Last year, the jet stream steered storms farther east along the Northeast coast, hammering the Interstate 95 corridor.
Therefore, instead of New York City enduring the worst of winter this year, it will likely be Chicago.
The division of The Weather Channel that handles long-range forecasting has similarly sad news:
WSI (Weather Services International) expects the upcoming period (December-February) to average colder than normal across most of the northern and western US, with above-normal temperatures confined to the and south-central and southeastern states. The WSI seasonal outlooks now reference a standard 30-year normal (1981-2010).
“So far, November has been fairly mild across the major energy demand centers of the US. While no short-term change to this pattern is expected, we do foresee a trend towards colder temperatures across much of the northern US, including the Midwest and Northeast, in December,” said WSI Chief Meteorologist Dr. Todd Crawford. “The winter pattern will be dominated by the current La Nina event, which favors below-normal temperatures across the northern US and above-normal temperatures across most of the South. … For the December-February aggregate period, we still feel that slightly below-normal temperatures will occur north of a Denver-Philadelphia line and across all of the western US. …”
What about the weather forecasters paid for by our tax dollars? The next maps are the National Weather Service’s predictions for, in order, temperature (blue is below-normal and orange is above-normal) and precipitation (green is above-normal and brown is below-normal) for December …
… December through February …
… and January through March:
Aren’t you happy that meteorologists have come together to decide that our winter is going to suck once again? Of course, given that there’s a large snow pile across the street, which has been there since earlier this month, we shouldn’t be surprised. One wonders what the hell was in the minds of our ancestors who thought it was a great idea to come to a part of the country whose winters feature temperatures cold enough to kill you and snowfalls deep enough to kill you during snow removal or from crashes caused by said snowfalls.
Apparently the music industry was so overstuffed today that it was unable to accomplish very much.
Today in 1969, John Lennon returned his Member of the Order of the British Empire medal as, in his accompanying note, “a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.”
Today in 1976, The Band gave its last performance, commemorated in Martin Scorsese’s film “The Last Waltz”:
The only birthday worth mentioning today is Percy Sledge:
There is no record I can find for the specific birthday, other than November, for Dennis Coffey. But Coffey wrote a ’70s instrumental that deserves his mention sometime this month:
One death of odd note today in 1974: Nick Drake, a 26-year-old singer/songwriter, of an overdose of an antidepressant. Two years before his death, Drake recorded an album, “Pink Moon,” that is apparently considered a classic in Britain. Twenty-six years after Drake’s death, Volkswagen used the title track, “Pink Moon,” in a TV ad, and within a month Drake had posthumously sold more records than he sold in the previous 30 years.
So let’s do something we haven’t done in a while, a twin spin:
What? You want another one? You people are more demanding than my kids:
The safest bet about today is that Thanksgiving dinner in most Wisconsin households (in our case, with some of these recipes) will be some time after 3 p.m.
Today’s Packers–Lions game is the renewal of what used to be their yearly event, a Thanksgiving game in Detroit. The Packers have played in 19 of the 71 Lions’ Thanksgiving games, including every year from 1951 to 1963.
One of the great things about Packer coach Mike McCarthy is that, like former coach Mike Holmgren, he embraces Packer traditions. McCarthy said earlier this week he thought his team was looking forward to playing again five days after beating Tampa Bay, thus getting what amounts to a second bye week. Other coaches might whine about a lack of preparation time, disruption to their precious schedules or whatever. But if coaches don’t surrender to distractions, players are less likely to.
Others have pointed out the eerie similarities between this season and the last time the Packers were undefeated this late, 1962. The undefeated season ended abruptly with a 26–14 Thanksgiving loss in which Packer quarterback Bart Starr was sacked 10 times. The 1962 game is claimed to be the birth of the “lookout block,” in which Packer offensive tackle Fuzzy Thurston is said to have yelled “Look out!” at Starr upon a failed block just before Starr hit the Tiger Stadium turf. (Starr reportedly called his offensive lines turkeys, or worse, in the huddle after that.)
That turned out to be the only loss for the team that arguably was Vince Lombardi’s best and one of the best in NFL history. So if today’s game turns out the wrong way, as 1962’s game did, consider that as your consolation, along with the fact that the Packers went into today with a three-game lead in the NFC North.
The most entertaining game might have been the 1986 matchup, which swung from a 10–0 Lions lead to a 10-point Packer halftime lead to a 40–30 Lions lead. Packer wide receiver Walter Stanley scored two points for the Lions when, fielding a kickoff at the 1-yard line, he backed into the end zone thinking that would result in a touchback. It resulted in a safety instead. Stanley made up for his brain fart, however, by catching two touchdown passes and returning a punt 85 yards for the game-winning touchdown in the Packers’ 44–40 win.
This week’s winner of the Most Strained Metaphor Award may be ESPN.com’s Kevin Seifert, who compared the Packers to James Bond and the Lions to John Rambo:
The Packers’ surgical precision is embodied by quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who leads the NFL with a 72.3 completion percentage and, these days, limits his on-field emotion to an occasional fist pump. (“The Belt” has recently been reserved for paid advertisements.) The Lions, meanwhile, play every game as if they’re avenging past injustices. They are emotional, often angry and not beyond pushing the far boundaries of the rules.
One approach will prevail Thursday over the other. The Lions will either overwhelm the Packers with energy, trying to win their first Thanksgiving Day game in seven years, or the Packers will slice through that emotion with professional calculation.
A fellow football aficionado, who is not a Packer fan, surprised me earlier this week by predicting a Packer win. He thinks the Lions peaked earlier this season (and they certainly appeared to be running on fumes until their 49–35 win over Carolina Sunday) and is overrated anyway. The Lions appear to be trying to emulate the 1970s Oakland Raiders defense for their familiarity with the personal foul, and the non-Packer fan believes that a couple early personal fouls on the Lions might intimidate their defense.
The Packers’ defense is the sole sticking point in this year’s 10–0 team among many fans. But Sports Illustrated’s Jim Trotter notes what’s actually important:
If there is a more overrated statistic in football than total defense, it has yet to be found. The stat, which is often tossed around by casual fans to differentiate good defenses from bad … sounds good but means little without proper context.
… Teams with high-scoring offenses typically don’t rank in the upper echelon in total defense because they surrender a lot of yards late in games, while the other team is playing catch-up … The Saints won the Super Bowl two years ago with the league’s highest scoring offense and its 25th-ranked defense. The Colts won the title in ’06 after tying for second in scoring and ranking 21st in t
A statistic more connected with postseason success — even more than points allowed — is scoring differential (points scored minus points given up). Fifteen of the past 21 Super Bowl champions have finished first or second in this category. The Pack was second in 2010 and is No. 1 this year with an average differential of 14.3 points per game.
Trotter also points out which statistic negates yardage given up: turnovers, where the Packers are number one in interceptions and tied for fourth in takeaways. Moreover, during their 10–0 start, the Packers have yet to trail in the fourth quarter, and during their 16-game winning streak, the Packers have never trailed by more than a touchdown, which speaks volumes about the NFL’s top-scoring offense. And points are all that count.
The upcoming month will feature a collision of sports and other activities, including other sports. On Saturday, while the Badgers play Penn State, I will be announcing the Ripon College men against Illinois Wesleyan. On Dec. 18, Ripon College hosts Monmouth while the Packers are at Kansas City. (That’s assuming the NFL doesn’t shift the Packers–Chiefs game to Sunday night. In either case, all three games — in fact, all Ripon College conference and home nonconference basketball games can be viewed at www.pennatlantic.com.) If things work out, perhaps I can emulate ABC-TV’s Brett Musburger, who, during ABC’s Kansas State–Oklahoma State game, was doing simultaneous play-by-play of the LSU–Alabama game, which was over on CBS.
Saturday’s game between Wisconsin and Penn State for the Big Ten Hayes Division title (which should be the name of the Leaders Division) demonstrates the truth that seasons can be redeemed from bad losses. Wisconsin lost on the last play and in the last minute of consecutive games, which made fans think the season was lost. (Standards are now such that a non-Rose Bowl season isn’t such a great season, particularly given the buildup to this season.) However, Penn State lost a game, which turned out to be the least of their troubles this season.
In fact, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Penn State’s Board of Trustees considered canceling the season after the revelations accusing a former Penn State defensive coordinator of repeated sexual assaults of boys resulted in his arrest and the firings of Penn State coach Joe Paterno, college football’s winningest coach, and Penn State’s president for their roles in covering up the sexual assaults. The Capital Times comments:
The fact some members of the board at least considered calling off the remainder of the season shouldn’t come as a surprise. It was an idea being floated by some nationally, and the New York Times earlier this month posted a series of commentaries that examined the question, “Should Penn State cancel its season?”
The Chronicle, however, notes the idea to call off the games never gained much traction because there was a feeling among Board of Trustees members that the move would harm the student-athletes who had nothing to do with the ugly and tragic situation.
The decision also would have cost Penn State and the Big Ten Conference millions of dollars in ticket revenue alone. Penn State lost to Nebraska before a crowd of 107,903 at Beaver Stadium on Nov. 12 before beating Ohio State 20-14 before 105,493 at Ohio Stadium Nov. 19.
As crass as that last paragraph may sound, the fact is that so-called “revenue sports” — football and basketball, and at UW, hockey — pay for all the other sports. So losing “millions of dollars in ticket revenue alone” would have affected not just the football players “who had nothing to do with the ugly and tragic and situation,” but other student–athletes, as well as fans of Penn State and its opponents. Nor would that have done anything at all to attempt to make the victims whole.
Unlike many in the media, the Wall Street Journal got it right (as in correct) about Paterno:
As everyone has noted and Mr. Paterno himself now seems to accept, the coach fulfilled his legal obligation, but not his moral duty, to look after the well-being of that child and others who may have been victimized later. He is now paying for that lapse in judgment with a tarnished end to a long and distinguished career.
This is not to endorse all the media moralizing, which revels in schadenfreude that another man of great reputation has been revealed to be flawed. We live in a culture that worships celebrity but seems not to want heroes, or even figures of respect. The icons of our age are the Kardashians.
Mr. Paterno has done enormous good across six decades at Penn State, especially for young people, and that legacy should not be forgotten amid the denunciations. Given the relentlessness of modern public scrutiny, and the thousands of young men who have traveled through the Penn State football program, it’s something of a miracle that Mr. Paterno could coach for 46 years without a previous notable blemish. We doubt it will happen again. It’s also something of a relief that in a culture as libertine as ours at least some behavior—sexual exploitation of children—is still considered deviant.
The events at Penn State are indeed a tragedy, and doubly so because they give new license to cynics who want Americans to believe that no one who achieves prominence in public life can be honorable.
One has to believe the Big Ten fervently hopes for a Wisconsin win Saturday. No one wants the first Big Ten football championship game in Indianapolis Dec. 3 — or even worse, the Rose Bowl Jan. 2 — to be the sidebar of a rehashing of the Penn State situation, but given how the media operates, Penn State’s going to Indy or Pasadena would make Penn State, not the game, the story.
A 2004 column by Benjamin Powell of the Independent Institute is necessary to repeat to teach a lesson that schoolchildren aren’t learning:
Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did.
In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on “equality” and “need” as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” The problem was that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.
Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. While not a complete private property system, the move away from communal ownership had dramatic results. …
Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years. …
We are direct beneficiaries of the economics lesson the pilgrims learned in 1623. Today we have a much better developed and well-defined set of property rights. Our economic system offers incentives for us—in the form of prices and profits—to coordinate our individual behavior for the mutual benefit of all; even those we may not personally know.
It is customary in many families to “give thanks to the hands that prepared this feast” during the Thanksgiving dinner blessing. Perhaps we should also be thankful for the millions of other hands that helped get the dinner to the table: the grocer who sold us the turkey, the truck driver who delivered it to the store, and the farmer who raised it all contributed to our Thanksgiving dinner because our economic system rewards them. That’s the real lesson of Thanksgiving. The economic incentives provided by private competitive markets where people are left free to make their own choices make bountiful feasts possible.
Assuming everyone involved can be roused out of our tryptophan comas, I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday at 8 a.m.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill. (that is, the state whose finances are worse than Wisconsin’s), WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Today in 1899, the world’s first jukebox was installed at the Palais Royal Hotel in San Francisco.
Today in 1956, a sheet metal worker was arrested in Toledo for punching Elvis Presley. The man claimed his wife’s love for Presley caused their marriage to end. The man was fined $19.60 but, because he couldn’t pay the fine, ended up experiencing …
The number one U.S. single today in 1963 was probably getting almost no air time on that day:
The number one British album today in 1974, Elton John’s “Greatest Hits,” represents about 10 percent of his career:
In contrast, the number one single today in 1974 was a one-hit wonder recorded in two takes:
The number one album today in 1974 was the Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock and Roll”:
The number one British single today in 1975:
The number one British album today in 1991 was Genesis’ “We Can’t Dance”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 