…and you knew what you wanted
Goils were goils and men were men
Mr. we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
Didn’t need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee our old La Salle ran great
Those were the days
…or something like that.
I like to think that ‘gee our old Lasalle ran great’ refers to the Lasalle St. Station and not the car.
https://archive.org/stream/georgiusagricola00agriuoft#page/n3/mode/2up
https://hoover.blogs.archives.gov/2016/04/13/de-re-metallica-translated/
Two things about the above from Wanswheel.
Automoblie manufactures such as LaSalle were in many ways more sophisticated than today, perhaps not on a technical/performance scale but when it came to the comfort, desires and needs and also marketing they were top notch. Of course this was for a slightly different class of people and perhaps, outside of the Roadster, they likely had a ‘driver’ to get them around.
So much magnificence, lost to mass production. Reproductions and preservationists fortunately keep the lamp lit somewhat.
The Mining book DE RE METALLICA as translated by Herbert Hoover from Latin is my Mining book #1, always has been, and I’m grateful that Wanswheel put it up here. Great great inspiration can be had from these pages and I am using a few quotes from it for my presentation at our Core Days event.
Terrific stuff all around.
From the LaSalle ad…“curite hues”…a Uranium mineral, named after Madame Curie. Highly radioactive, so I hope they left that part out.
You got to luv that 2 tone purple …Come on Lincoln and Cadillac, get with the program.
Maybe Bentley?..naw, too stuffy…a Mercedes? …nope, strang verbotten
Gee our old Cadillac ran great
The poor old La Salle, a casualty of World War Two. The war ended, but the La Salle “didn’t come home.” The “powers-that-be” at Cadillac decided it didn’t make much sense to compete with themselves (a certain logic to that, when you think about it) so the La Salle line was dropped when post-war consumer production began again. So if you wanted a “top-of-the-line” GM car, it was Cadillac, or nothing. Oh, well.
And in subsequent decades Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Saturn have all been done away with.
I always had the impression LaSalle was competing with those Packard 120s. Successfully… as far as providing a less expensive alternative to one of your own can be.
Of course, there was a while where ‘top-of-the-line’ was a bit relative. Hard to believe GM could market a Caddy Nova as the most expensive thing in the line, or that Catera as “the Caddy that zigs” (a problem being it had trouble zagging back), or the ridiculous I-left-my-DeVille-in-the-wash cars from 1988 that Roger Smith stuck the world with. (I must say that we had one of the last '76 convertible Eldorados, and when they re-introduced the convertible in '85 the showroom example was the same color combination … but I actually looked under the dashboard to see if there was a crank and pedal arrangement; it was that shriveled. Then they got smaller! This summed it up pretty well.)
However, they got the picture with Art and Science replacing Art and Color as the source of design drama, and have done some interesting things since, including a better Vette than the Vette.
Yes but not in 'Curite hues"
Well, the whole ‘radium’ magic whipped up by Union Miniere and the rest of the rapacious Belgian setup didn’t last that long past the introduction of Art and Color and those magical ‘season’ cars of 1928. In fact I would suspect that in between the Radithor scandal and the introduction of the Delaney Amendment the whole idea of cheerful radiation – the sort of thing that would later be measured in ‘sunshine units’ with little particular public take rate – was over and done, and of course events overcame the racket of “medicinal” radium paid for by publicized schoolchildren’s pennies at, what was it, $23,000 a gram FOB Olen (and wouldn’t you love to learn about the Love Canal-like radiological hazards lurking in THAT area now???)
I wouldn’t go back to that era, no matter how I feel about the ghastly proliferation of high-level radioactive elements since then.
Now a wee wee bit of radiation is actually ok for you, but has to be natural occurring, as in very slightly above background.
Curite of course is highly radioactive but the mineral has a stunning colour and in various hues that blend would be outstanding, just the colour, not the radioactivity.
And if your car glows in the dark wouldn’t that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nightime driving?
Actually no. The wee bit has to be in the right bands of wavelength, as well as reasonable intensities. The analogue y’all will recognize is the difference between the traditional UV ‘tanning wavelengths’ vs. those that are specific for DNA cleavage (UV-A vs. UV-B and C in simplistic form)
The amount of tonic ‘sunshine units’ in the various bands also differs with individual genetics and phenotype – I suspect we still don’t know some of the pathways that are regulated, modulated, etc. by the EM involved. There is certainly an amount of DNA “damage” that is beneficial for cells to remediate, up to the Hayflick limit at least, but it is hard to find academic papers on the subject that do not suffer from political spin of some kind or other.
A colleague of my father’s invited us up for a dinner party one evening, and it would have been amusing to have watched my facial expression change as I looked around. They were collectors of beautiful glass, a beautiful ethereal-yellow glass, thousands of pieces (some quite large) of beautiful yellow glass. Not colored lead glass. Much of the apartment in fact was dedicated to glass shelving and cases which were full of this beautiful yellow glass. I was NOT a happy guest.
And if YOU glowed in the dark wouldn’t that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nighttime walking … or an increased factor of safety recognition for crews if you are trespassing on the ROW wearing your headphones?
Unless one lives in a thick concrete bunker you are not going to stop Gamma. Alpha and Beta are easy peasy to block and our own bodies, and all living things, have well adapted to handling all 3 as it naturally occurs in background or else we would not be here.
Just don’t lick the rocks …I have a sign in my classroom that states that. Alpha can be ingested, then you might be in trouble.
Of course Russian spies like the highly unstable super short half lifes of microseconds embedded on umbrella tips.
Radon daughters not good either.
Normal respiration takes care of almost all of the lazy half lifes but the fast high energy stuff will be deadly…
You obviously survived your dinner encounter with the yellow glass but I have to ask if you developed a third eye in the back of your head or something else a-la X-Men superhero mutation?
There’s no particular issue with ingesting alphas – they’re just helium nuclei and rather promptly regain electrons to become inert noble gas.
The problem is with ingesting alpha EMITTERS – in quantities that give reasonable flux at an energy that can release to a Bragg peak in biologically significant places. Think of them as essentially .500 Nitro Express hollow-points with merc cores. And you don’t have to lick the rock to get into Dutch … handling it without gloves and not washing your hands might get you there.
That stuff doesn’t have supershort half-life: it isn’t even a timed decay chain producing high-energy daughters at ‘just the wrong moment’. It’s stuff like polonium-210 that selectively has a LONG enough half-life that it goes to the bones and then does the irradiation thing in suitable volume.
We should tell them why. “Radon” is a noble gas, and it can be breathed in just like any other gas. If it decays radiologically it turns back into a particle (which can stick to lung tissue like any other particle) and then proceeds to shower out energy down the decay chain. A Bragg radius away from parts of you.
In my opinion most of the fun stuff is neutron flux or neutron activation. Not so much radiological poisoning as incident radiation. But there are other interesting things – consider the number of curies of xenon released in the Three Mile Island incident; where
We teach here at the school, and again taught and enforced at the Mine sites all about personal hygiene in Uranium Mining. Of course gloves and washing hands, along with many other things,no jewelry, clean fingernails, no beards, lunch is brought down to them, drink only provided water and so on.
The don’t lick the rocks sign is just for effect and comedy of a sort but it is a good metaphor for all the care that must be taken. Thats in my classroom not at a minesite.
Of course they wear on their belts a personal alpha dosimeter (PAD) and a necklace with the dosimeter under the clothing …and there are Prisim stations in many locations. Ventilation costs are many many times higher in Uranium Mines as the air cannot be passed on down as in flow through, but one and out.
Now about that sample in our PreCam Lab…the less said the better.
We call it Thors Hammer.
Waiting for the day a bunch of black Chevy Suburbans pull up with Federal License Plates, badges are flashed, we are pushed aside and it’s gone.
Flux Capacitors!
You betcha! And man, could I have a lot of fun in old cemeterys, abandoned houses, Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, old covered bridges…
This list could be endless…