Beau Rivage - Beautiful Shore

Sir Stirling Moss Maserati 250F 1956 Grand Prix of Monte Carlo

Sunday, May 21, 1950, Circuit the Monaco, Montecarlo. With the leaders already out of sight Jose Froilan González and Luigi Villoresi head a group of cars up Beau Rivage at the start of the first world championship Monaco GP.

L'ascension de la côte de Monte-Carlo par Rudolf Caracciola (Grand Prix de Monaco 1937)

1933 – Beau Rivage

Inaugural 1929 Monaco Grand Prix

Mighty Mouse

Mighty Mouse (The original cartoon theme intro)
inventorr77

Just another blast from the past that popped into my head today. Mighty Mouse got started in 1942 and continued up till 1967.

Eilean Donan Castle

Eilean Donan Castle

Wikipedia:

The island's original castle was built in the thirteenth century; it became a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the Clan MacRae. In response to the Mackenzies' involvement in the Jacobite rebellions against the newly United Kingdom, Royal Naval ships destroyed the castle in 1719. The present-day castle is Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap's 20th-century reconstruction of the old castle.

Eilean Donan Castle, top

The three placemarks at the bottom of the map are for other island castles previously posted.

Bannerman Castle

Bannerman's Island Arsenal on the Hudson

Europe isn't the only place with castles on islands. New York has one as well.

Bannerman started a military surplus business after the the American Civil War. He bought the island in 1900 to use as a place to store his growing inventory of munitions. He built the castle to use as a warehouse. Wikipedia has the story. Bannerman Castle Trust offers tours of the place.

Bannerman Castle

Forgotten Weapons got me started.

There is an I-84 that runs north of the castle. It goes west as far as Scranton, New York. There is also an I-84 that runs east out of Portland, Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah. The two are separated by 1900 miles.

La Favorite Distillery

La Favorite Distillery Stationary Steam Engine
Fort de France, Martinique

La Favorite distillery was founded on a former sugar cane plantation. La Favorite has been producing Rhum Agricole near the village of Fort de France since 1905.

La Habitation

Martinique Tour has a bunch of photos as does Google Maps.

 

La Favorite Distillery Fort de France, Martinique

Martinique is only about 30 miles long.

Martinique is an island in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the eastern Caribbean Sea. A part of the French West Indies, Martinique is an overseas department and region and a single territorial collectivity of France.

Colin Seeley

Number 55, Seeley-Weslake 750, 1972

Colin Jordan Seeley (1936 – 2020) was a British motorcycle retailer who later became a motorcycle sidecar racer, motorcycle designer, constructor and retailer of accessories. In 1992 he was involved in running the Norton Rotary race team.

Colin got started with motorcycles when he was 16 and for 20 odd years he was a prime mover in motorcycle racing. Ask Google for a Seeley 750 and you get a bunch of Honda CB750s.

I found another picture of this bike on flickr

Chicago

Chicago Timelapse - 1870 to 2026
RealGoodVideo

Video actually starts in 1761.

Very cool. Via The Feral Irishman

Update August 2026 replaced missing video.

STOP

Why the world rejected the UN's road signs
Chris Spargo

This morning's random video.

Why Only Three Countries Bother Building Ships Anymore

Why Only Three Countries Bother Building Ships Anymore
Micro

This is something I have wondered about for a long time and, as he points out, I thought labor costs were the big reason. Turns out that is not the case. The video is a little long, but it is information dense, so much so that I didn't even notice how long it was. 

Most all I know about shipping comes from the news, and news organizations really give a poor description of what's going on in the world. They're too focused on scurrilous tidbits and give short shrift to whole picture.

More Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer - Lobachevsky (with lyrics) '1953
themisfitoddity

Schneier on Security got me started.

That Time Tom Lehrer Pranked the NSA

Bluesky thread. Here’s the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3.

Previous post here. 

Paranoia

JMSmith pulls up a bit of history in A Conspiracy Within a Conspiracy He opens with this quote:

“Finally we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about the outside world.  In [the] atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite . . . . There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of [the] outside world.” - Telegram of George F. Kennan to James F. Burnes (February 22, 1946).

The full text of the  "Long Telegram" can be found here. 

Story of a French Admiral and a Russian Diplomat

Second Battle of the Virginia Capes

Entertaining bit of history about two characters, Jean-Baptiste de Traversay and Zinovy Mikhailovich Sverdlov:

Meet the Frenchman who became Russian nobility – and the Russian exile who charmed de Gaulle

Jean-Baptiste got around:

Jean-Baptiste de Traversay

Sokol Slet & The Biggest Stadium in the World

The Forgotten Story Of The Largest Stadium Ever Constructed
The Tim Traveller

Very cool. I like the way he ties the history of the building to what was happening in the world.

Remittance Men

cAvEman TV || Remittance Men
AvE

I love AvE, he's great. Remittance Men is a term I've heard forever, but I never had clear understanding of just what was going on. Actually, I don't know that I've heard it before, I have come across the term in numerous stories that I have read. AvE's story sounds just like Wikipedia's explanation:

In British history, a remittance man was an emigrant, often from Britain to a British colony, who was supported by regular payments from home on the expectation that he would stay away.

In this sense, remittance means the opposite of today's meaning of money that migrants send to their home countries.

Esperanto

This Made Up Language *Almost* Took Over The World
Dis-ambi

Dad burn French, so full of themselves. They are kind of impressive, or at least a large number of people thought so. My parents encouraged me to take French in high school, which led me to taking it in college. I absolutely hated those classes. They were all about conjugation and reading and writing, which I thought was a stupid way to learn a language. Learn something useful first, like learn to speak it. Once you've done that you should be able figure out the reading the writing yourself. Now I know a few French words and phrases, but probably no more than I know of Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish can be summed up in 'uno mas cerveza fria por favor' which means 'one more cold beer please'. I mean, what else do you need to know?

Jaguar Is Dead

Jaguar Is Dead
Albon

You might have seen the new Jaguar ad. Gawd awful if you ask me. This guy goes way back to the beginning and traces the history of Jaguar. I always liked Jaguars, I thought they looked cool. They had big engines, relative to the rest of the European auto industry, and the engines had dual overhead cams, which, to my teenage freakazoid mentality, was the very pinnacle of coolness.

I always knew that some car nerds worshipped the C and D-types, but I never knew why. This video shows us why.

There is an ad for some kind of bullshit that starts at the 4:30 mark and runs for a minute. Later on there is another ad for their T-shirt, but it only runs for 5 seconds. Since I can tolerate it, I am going to assume that you can to.

Linotype

Linotype
YouTube Movies & TV

Kind of long, but totally worthwhile. One of the projects I worked on at my first programming job was a data entry / data base system for a check printing company. They were using Linotype machines to set the personal information that was printed on each check (name, address, what-not). Someone had converted the linotype machines to get their keystrokes over a wire instead of from the mechanical keyboard. They had a room with several of these machines, but no operators. Instead they had a separate room full of girls sitting at computer keyboards typing away. You had to be careful out on the floor where the Linotype machines were because even though they were converted to work with electrical inputs, they still cast hot lead into lines of type, and every now and again there would be a hiccup, and a spurt of hot metal would squirt out of the machine. Those 'hiccups' were referred to as squirt codes on the premise that a bit of code sent down the wire from the computer would cause the machine to hiccup. Actually, it was just the nature of the Linotype machine. Hiccups happened before computers were even a concept. Molten lead is not that hot compared to some things, like molten steel, but it will still burn the hell out of you if you come into contact with it.

I look at the computer systems we use for text these days and while it looks clean and simple from the outside, they are several orders of magnitude more complicated. Construction of the Linotype was dependent on the whole industrial infrastructure that existed back in 1900. Construction of a modern computer needs all of that with a whole additional level of much more complicated machinery and organization.

Given a supply of metal and a machine shop, it ought to be possible to build a new Linotype machine. People have made simple integrated circuits in their garage, but what would it take it make a flat panel display? I have no idea.

V8

V8: The Engine of America | Full Documentary
MotorTrend Channel

This video is not as technically dense as my usual selections, but it does give a wide overview of the history of the engine and the culture surrounding it. Don't think I've ever seen such a collection of V8 worship before. Never really thought of the V8 engine as a religious icon before, but it certainly fits.

BIC Ball Point Pen

How This Pen Changed The World
Primal Space

The narration is a little too, I dunno, polished? Sounds like a salesman trying to sell me something. Call it slightly annoying, but the story is pretty good, especially the bit about literacy rates. Did BIC cause their dramatic rise? No, but they certainly helped.

BIC Pens Commercial 1969
johnscans97

Never liked BIC pens that much. They never wanted to write first time, every time, like they showed in the commercials. Or maybe it was the annoying cap that didn't really clip onto anything and was forever falling off and getting lost. Can't argue with success though.

Photos by Wire

How Photographs Were Transmitted by Wire in the 1930s
The Shell

Given the number of technologies involved in getting a photograph from the other side of the country and into the newspaper it's amazing it worked at all. And this video just glosses over how the printing plates were made, another complicated process.