Hello again, getting close to the end of this chapter! And that puts us close at the halfway point in our overall story.

I found this article about the Pioneer Zephyr, it had this great picture of the train pulling into Oakland on a promotional tour.

I was looking for some kind of vintage advertising for the Zephyr but ran out of time!  I’m sure it’s out there though.

Hello!
First of all, these two pages took me way too long. I almost hate looking at them. Almost.

Got a new watch this week. The Tauchmeister T0196 XXL Military Worldtimer Watch.  I ordered it from Long Island Watch, they have a lot of other cool vintage style watches.  I wish I could have bought more!

I also got a scale replica of the USS Macon Airship, but I have to glue all the engines back on since they came off in shipping.  Bummer.

Meanwhile I have been very busy this last week.  I posted what I’ve been up to over at my business blog www.kopetkai.com/blog.  I haven’t been updating it much since I moved but I will from now on. . .

This Sunday!  I am hopefully going to see “Flying Down to Rio” at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

From the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles:

“In the 1930s, in the age of Art Deco streamline design, people were traveling farther and faster than any humans had ever traveled before. Fast cars, streamlined trains, luxury steamships, swift airliners, giant seaplanes and majestic Zeppelins opened up new horizons to those with the money to spend.

Walter Nelson will present a program of film, poster art, photographs and music that will bring to life the experience and romance of travel in the years just before the Second World War. This will be followed by the classic musical Flying Down to Rio, with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Dolores Del Rio and a host of other stars and marvelous music.

This is a Co-Presentation with the American Cinematheque.

Lecture: 4 PM

Screening of Flying Down to Rio at 5 PM

Tickets are $7 for members of ADSLA and American Cinematheque. Regular American Cinematheque prices apply for the general public ($11) and students/seniors ($9) and are available via Fandango, or can be purchased on the day of the event at the door. Please bring your ADSLA membership card with you to the box office.

Parking: $2 per hour metered parking available near the theatre. $2 for four hours validated parking available at Hollywood and Highland. There are also pay parking lots on Las Palmas and Cherokee that cost approximately $10. Why not take the metro? The Egyptian is a very short walk east from the Hollywood and Highland METRO station.”

Apparently in 1931 there was a staged aerial combat above new york.  I would love to see that in action, although something tells me they wouldn’t let them do that these days.  Click the image for more pictures at popular mechanics, thanks to io9.com for the link.

Last week I got to go to a car show here in Ventura.  I took a couple pictures with my phone of some interesting cars. On the way back home we stopped at a small gallery that used to be a bank in the early nineteen hundreds.  So I took some pictures from inside the vault.  Here is a closeup of the time lock system and the emergency ventilator in case you got trapped inside.

Hello, a lot of onomatopoeia this week, I guess it just seemed to fit.  If anyone has any questions or suggestions drop me a line!  I usually disable comments after a few days because of spammers, but I read all of them, and thanks for those of you who have commented so far, either here or on my facebook page.

This week’s movie from 1930’s Hollywoodland is Heat Lighting.  It’s a short movie, only about an hour.  But it provides a nice snapshot of 1930’s cross country travelers.  The whole movie takes place at a gas station in the middle of the desert where some criminals and rich divorcees cross paths.  A lot of pre code Hollywood moments that only a few years later they wouldn’t be able to get away with.  According to TCM this  movie made the Legion of Decency’s list of movies that Catholics shouldn’t watch. Also watch for an appearance by Jane Darewell who played Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.

I give it two stars out of 4, with an extra star for the very realistic garage scenes, desert setting, and the Mexican family that stops at the gas station and serenades the campers there at night. So that brings us to a grand total of 3 stars!

The team is splitting up for now. The first page of the second chapter finds some members at the Carbon and Carbide building in Chicago, an art deco landmark. And some members on the Zephyr, a historic piece of art deco machinery.
In 1934 the Pioneer Zephyr set a speed record between Chicago and Denver in a famous run called the “Dawn-to-Dusk” dash.

Oh and by the way, I just picked up Bioshock 2 special edition today, very nice packaging, nice art deco style posters, hope it’s as good as the first one!

Well, I am moving next week, and I just went to New Orleans last weekend, so between those two events I am sort of taking this week off.  I say sort of because I have gone back and redone the first page of the first chapter and changed a few things that were bugging me on pages here and there.  Next Episode Chapter Two starts, I have decided to include a little peek at one of my long term projects, a board game based on The 19XX.  These are just a couple of the character cards from the game, artwork is not final of course, but that is Fay Wells, and a character you won’t see until Chapter Two, Glänzen Schädel, or Shining Skull in English.  So that’s the end of Chapter One, more of a prologue I guess, but either way, I hope you found it mildly amusing!

Not much to say this week, I’m going to New Orleans in two days, so my mind is kind of on that.

Ok, wait I thought of something…

The line about the runway being too short… I went to the Minter Field Air Museum in Shafter last summer.  It was something like 110 degrees outside and a B-17 was supposed to be there.  But when we got there we learned that the runway was too short for the plane to land on because of the heat.  If it landed it wouldn’t have been able to take off again.  So instead of landing the Flying Fortress did a fly by over the airfield.  It seemed like we were trapped in the heat and the smog and no one could save us, the ship they sent couldn’t even land, it could only fly past and look at our helpless faces, camera lenses, and pathetic waves.  I hope it found someplace better to land. Some place safe.

Minter Field B-17

John the Conqueror Root

So, in 1833 Frederick Douglass was a slave who rebelled against a brutal farmer and went on to become “The Sage of Anacostia” and is one of the most prominent figures in African American and United States History. Well that’s according to Wikipedia. But I read this interesting story* about another version of his rebellion. The story said that one day after a brutal beating Douglass ran out into the woods to hide. While he was out there he ran into an old Black man. The man told Douglass that he had something that could help him out with his problem. He handed Douglass some John the Conqueror root. He said that the root would protect him from anyone wanting to do him harm. So Douglass took the root and went back home where the brutal farmer continued to beat him. But this time Douglass lashed out at him and overcame the farmer. Douglass won this confrontation and the man never tried to beat him again. What’s interesting is that later after winning his freedom and writing his first autobiography, Douglass retold the story and attributed at least in small part his new found strength to the John the Conqueror root. But later in life he told the story again in another biography and this time left out all mention of the man in the forest giving him the root. So what really happened? Why did his story change? Did the root really protect him? Who knows..

*Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation -Mitch Horowitz