As a daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, I spent every night of my childhood cooking and eating traditional Chinese dinners with my family. Our nightly food-prep routine—smashing knobs of ginger, slicing slivers of beef for stir fry, chopping veggies—doubled as nonnegotiable bonding time. Quickly, what started as a chore grew into a precious part of our days.
I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve captured a lot of critters on home security cameras or seen one too many horror movies, but entering a dark house terrifies me. Although my husband would be perfectly happy to solve this problem by leaving the lights on all day and night, it’s completely unnecessary: Smart lighting exists for precisely this purpose.
These days most mainstream audio electronics have Bluetooth connectivity built in. But if you have older home-audio gear, such as a beloved stereo receiver or a set of powered speakers, there’s a chance that either it lacks Bluetooth connectivity altogether or its Bluetooth reception is poor. That doesn’t mean you have to scrap your system and start over.
A Bluetooth audio receiver lets you pair your older gear with the latest Bluetooth audio sources—and the best ones give you great sound. The iFi Audio Zen Air Blue is our favorite due to its excellent range, exhaustive format support, and surprisingly good audio performance for the price.
Whenever my husband and I get sucked deep into a binge-worthy series, we consistently fall prey to “autoplay,” end up crawling into bed at 1 a.m. (sometimes 1:30), and feel lousy the next day.
Anyone who’s ever read a comic book from the 20th century has seen a Johnson Smith advertisement touting joy buzzers, rubber masks, fake vomit, luminous ashtrays, motor kits, rubber chickens, hypo-coins, miniature cameras, magic tricks, and other novelty items. In fact, it’s hard not to come across a comic book from the 1940s through the 1980s that doesn’t have a full-page ad from the Johnson Smith mail order company. The back cover of Action Comics No. 1, which introduced Superman, has one.
When I was a kid, I loved looking at the Johnson Smith ads in comics. They were often better than the stories in the comics. Even now, when I come across one of these ads, I can’t help but pore over the page, marveling at the hyperbolic ad copy and tiny illustrations of the products.
Alfred Johnson Smith was born in England in 1885 and raised in Australia. As a young adult, “A.J.” Smith sold rubber stamps and novelties through magazine advertisements. In 1914 A.J. moved to Chicago and began hawking whoopie cushions and masks from his car trunk. He then launched a catalog selling all kinds of curiosities, including seeds for growing giant pumpkins, ESP cards, ukuleles, live alligators, rubber knives, squirt rubber peanuts, realist fake pistols, and thousands of other items. He described his company as the "Only Concern Of Its Kind In America."
Each issue became fatter than the one that preceded it, and by 1929 the catalog had swollen to 768 pages.
Johnson Smith Co. became so famous for its jam-packed ads that in 1955 MAD put a pitch-perfect parody Johnson Smith ad on the cover of issue #21, calling it “Smithson John & Co.” (Johnson Smith ran an ad in the issue, naturally.)
To give you an idea of what you could buy from Johnson Smith Co., the spine from the 1940 edition of the catalog has a list of just a few of the things for sale: auto goods, books, cameras, emblems, hobby sets, jewelry, home goods, knives, live animals, magic, make up, microscopes, model kits, music, office supplies, optical goods, pipes, projectors, puzzles, radios, rifles & pistols, seeds, sport goods, stamps, telescopes, and time savers. (Here’s a scan of the spine next to Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library cover from 1993.)
The Internet Archive has a scan from a 1951 edition of the catalog. It’s 584-pages long and is like an alternative universe version of Amazon. Unfortunately, it has lots of racist and sexist items for sale, and I’m not going to reprint those here. Instead, I’ll share a few of the weird (bordering-on-sociopathic) products from the catalog.
I learned about the history of the Johnson Smith Co. from the booklet, “Johnson Smith & Company: Only Concern of Its Kind in America” by Mardi Timm and Stan Timm.
The fate of the visionary is to be forever outside of his or her time. Such was the life of Nikola Tesla, who dreamed the future while his opportunistic rival Thomas Edison seized the moment. Even now the name Tesla conjures seemingly wildly impractical ventures, too advanced, too expensive, or far too elegant in design for mass production and consumption. No one better than David Bowie, the pop artist of possibility, could embody Tesla’s air of magisterial high seriousness on the screen. And few were better suited than Tesla himself, perhaps, to extrapolate from his time to ours and see the technological future clearly.
Of course, this image of Tesla as a lone, heroic, and even somewhat tragic figure who fell victim to Edison’s designs is a bit of a romantic exaggeration. As even the editor of a 1935 feature interview piece in the now-defunct Liberty magazine wrote, Tesla and Edison may have been rivals in the “battle between alternating and direct current…. Otherwise the two men were merely opposites. Edison had a genius for practical inventions immediately applicable. Tesla, whose inventions were far ahead of the time, aroused antagonisms which delayed the fruition of his ideas for years.” One can in some respects see why Tesla “aroused antagonisms.” He may have been a genius, but he was not a people person, and some of his views, though maybe characteristic of the times, are downright unsettling.
In the lengthy Liberty essay, “as told to George Sylvester Viereck” (a poet and Nazi sympathizer who also interviewed Hitler), Tesla himself makes the pronouncement, “It seems that I have always been ahead of my time.” He then goes on to enumerate some of the ways he has been proven right, and confidently lists the characteristics of the future as he sees it. No one likes a know-it-all, but Tesla refused to compromise or ingratiate himself, though he suffered for it professionally. And he was, in many cases, right. Many of his 1935 predictions in Liberty are still too far off to measure, and some of them will seem outlandish, or criminal, to us today. But some still seem plausible, and a few advisable if we are to make it another 100 years as a species. Tesla’s predictions include the following, which he introduces with the disclaimer that “forecasting is perilous. No man can look very far into the future.”
Tesla goes on to predict the elimination of war, “by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself,” after which war chests would be diverted to funding education and research. He then describes—in rather fantastical-sounding terms—an apparatus that “projects particles” and transmits energy, enabling not only a revolution in defense technology, but “undreamed of results in television.” Tesla diagnoses his time as one in which “we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age.” The solution, he asserts—along with most futurists, then and now—“does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.” As an example of such mastery, Tesla describes the future of “automatons” taking over human labor and the creation of “a thinking machine.”
Matt Novak at the Smithsonian has analyzed many of Tesla’s claims, interpreting his predictions about “hygiene and physical culture” as a foreshadowing of the EPA and discussing Tesla’s work in robotics (“Today,” Tesla proclaimed, “the robot is an accepted fact”). The Liberty article was not the first time Tesla had made large-scale, public predictions about the century to come and beyond. In 1926, Tesla gave an interview to Collier’s magazine in which he more or less accurately foresaw smartphones and wireless telephony and computing:
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
Telsa also made some odd predictions about fuel-less passenger flying machines “free from any limitations of the present airplanes and dirigibles” and spouted more of the scary stuff about eugenics that had come to obsess him late in life. Additionally, Tesla saw changing gender relations as the precursor of a coming matriarchy. This was not a development he characterized in positive terms. For Tesla, feminism would “end in a new sex order, with the female as superior.” (As Novak notes, Tesla’s misgivings about feminism have made him a hero to the so-called “men’s rights” movement.) While he fully granted that women could and would match and surpass men in every field, he warned that “the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee.”
It seems to me that a “bee civilization” would appeal to a eugenicist, except, I suppose, Tesla feared becoming a drone. Although he saw the development as inevitable, he still sounds to me like any number of current politicians who argue that society should continue to suppress and discriminate against women for their own good and the good of “civilization.” Tesla may be an outsider hero for geek culture everywhere, but his social attitudes give me the creeps. While I’ve personally always liked the vision of a world in which robots do most the work and we spend most of our money on education, when it comes to the elimination of war, I’m less sanguine about particle rays and more sympathetic to the words of Ivor Cutler.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
When we think of a “midcentury modern” home, we think of glass walls. In part, this has to do with the post-World War II decades’ promotion of the southern California-style indoor-outdoor suburban lifestyle. But business and culture are downstream of technology, and, in this specific case, the technology known as insulated glass. Its development solved the problem of glass windows that had dogged architecture since at least the second century: they let in light, but even more so cold and heat. Only in the 1930s did a refrigeration engineer figure out how to make windows with not one but two panes of glass and an insulating layer of air between them. Its trade name: Thermopane.
First manufactured by the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, “Thermopane changed the possibilities for architects,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards in the video above, “How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture.” In it he speaks with architectural historian Thomas Leslie, who says that “by the 1960s, if you’re putting a big window into any residential or office building” in all but the most temperate climates, you were using insulated glass “almost by default.”
Competing glass manufacturers introduced a host of variations on and innovations in not just the technology but the marketing as well: “No home is truly modern without TWINDOW,” declared one brand’s magazine advertisement.
The associated imagery, says Leslie, was “always a sliding glass door looking out onto a very verdant landscape,” which promised “a way of connecting your inside world and your outside world” (as well as “being able to see all of your stuff”). But the new possibility of “walls of glass” made for an even more visible change in commercial architecture, being the sine qua non of the smoothly reflective skyscrapers that rise from every American downtown. Today, of course, we can see 80, 900, 100 floors of sheer glass stacked up in cities all over the world, shimmering declarations of membership among the developed nations. Those sliding glass doors, by the same token, once announced an American family’s arrival into the prosperous middle class — and now, more than half a century later, still look like the height of modernity.
Related content:
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A Glass Floor in a Dublin Grocery Store Lets Shoppers Look Down & Explore Medieval Ruins
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The seven-square-mile island of Bequia is a destination Rolf “Erik” Stromberg first heard of in the 1970s. Stromberg’s sailing buddies in Seattle, where he lived at the time, painted a picture in his mind of a tropical paradise where, over the winter holidays especially, sailors from all over the world dropped anchor in Admiralty Bay. They socialized on each other’s boats, had toes-in-the-sand parties ashore, and sailed to the neighboring Grenadine islands for raft-ups in out-of-the-way bays.
“I never made it to Bequia back then. But about a decade ago, I saw an article about the island in the travel section of The New York Times,” says Stromberg. “I clipped it out for my partner to read and told her I’d teach her to sail if she wanted to go. She did, and that’s how I first visited Bequia.
“Since then, we’ve chartered and sailed the Grenadines every year,” he says, adding his charter choice is a 40- to 45-foot monohull, equipped with an autopilot and an in-mast furling mainsail for easier boat handling. “We chartered most recently with Horizon Yacht Charters (Blue Lagoon, St. Vincent). They have a great option where for one hundred dollars, they picked up the boat in Bequia and sailed it back at the end of the charter so we could stay and spend an extra week ashore in a rental villa visiting all our Bequia friends.”
St. Vincent and the Grenadines are part of the Windward Islands, a stretch of the southern Caribbean that spans from Dominica to Grenada or about 190 nautical miles (nm). This includes Martinique and St. Lucia. The British are credited with coining the term Windwards. It was a pragmatic way to divide the chain because 17th– and 18th-century ship captains sailing on transatlantic currents and trade winds from Europe usually arrived somewhere in this middle crossroads. Thus, the islands located to the windward of this point became the Windwards, and those leeward, the Leewards.
“Sailing from Martinique to Grenada is popular, and we offer one-way sails for guests wanting to do this route,” says Dan Lockyer, the UK-based vice president of global tourism for Dream Yacht Charter, with Windward Caribbean bases in Martinique and Grenada. “This part of the Caribbean is beautiful, and we’d suggest allowing eight to ten days to sail down to Grenada.”
Similarly, a one-way charter starting 40 nm to the south in St. Lucia to Grenada is what Ian Pedersen, senior marketing manager at the Clearwater, Florida-headquartered The Moorings & Sunsail, calls the ultimate Caribbean experience. The Moorings offers bareboat and crewed charters on sailing monohulls and sailing and power multihulls from its bases on both islands.
“This is a bucket-list item for many sailors and boaters. It’s not for those who consider themselves beginner sailors or who have not chartered before,” says Pedersen. “This is an itinerary that requires knowledge, experience, and patience, but also one that rewards those who take the time to travel these waters with a quintessential Caribbean experience that can’t be found anywhere else. While the ease of travel and line of sight sailing are what attract so many travelers to places like the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and St. Martin, the sheer distances involved, and the knowledge and navigation required in a Windward charter vacation are what make it so rewarding.
“As for conditions, they are called the Windwards for a reason, and in the winter months, sailors can expect a steady wind from the east between fifteen to twenty-five knots,” he adds. “Temperatures remain very comfortable even in winter, varying between seventy-five to eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”
While a long multi-island cruise is indeed spectacular, it is currently challenging due to the myriad COVID-19 protocols for each island, some of which include a quarantine period. These protocols are outlined on each island government or health ministry’s website. Therefore, those cruising or chartering in the Caribbean this season may want to anchorage-hop within one island nation, recommends Ann McHorney, chief executive officer and charter broker with Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Select Yachts, which, with Camper & Nicholsons Port Louis Marina in Grenada, has spearheaded the Grenada Charter Yacht Show.
“We presently avoid the international aspect. It’s just not practical now,” says McHorney.
This 290-square-mile island, the second largest in the Windwards after Martinique, has never received many charters or cruiser traffic due to its lack of facilities. There are no marinas or charter bases. However, Hank Schmitt, owner of Offshore Passage Opportunities and founder of the North American Rally to the Caribbean, has worked for several years with the Portsmouth Association of Yacht Services (PAYS) to establish a mooring field.
“We hope to have twenty-seven of the thirty moorings we donated fully refurbished by Christmas. The new dinghy docks should also be in place by then,” says Schmitt, who will again host PAYS Yachtie Appreciation Week, March 20-27, 2022. “This is one island you want to explore inland. Nearby is the must-see Indian River Tour, and further inland, there are waterfalls, rain forests, the Boiling Lake, and the Emerald Pool, to name a few.”
One of the French Caribbean islands, and politically, a part of France, the yachting hub here is in Le Marin, a town on the island’s south coast. The Marina du Marin boasts more than 800 slips, a full range of services from refueling to laundry, and amenities like shops and restaurants. Dream Yacht Charter has its base here.
“We have expanded our fleet at our base at Le Marin, and we also have two eco-friendly floating villas for rental, called Aqualodges,” says Lockyer. “They sleep four and come with water toys, a see-through floor to watch the fish, and plenty of space for lounging and sunbathing.
“Food is an important part of any yacht charter,” he adds. “Some of our favorite restaurants in Martinique include Le Petibonum in Le Carbet, where you can sample local seafood, Le Kano in Trois-Ilets offers modern Creole cuisine…and Le Zandoli, also in Trois-Ilets, offers a breathtaking panoramic view plus dinner by a swimming pool overlooking the bay of Fort-de-France.”
Known for its two picturesque peaks, the Pitons, there are two major marinas here. One is the 42-slip Marigot Bay Marina on the island’s west coast where the 1960s version of Dr. Dolittle with Rex Harrison was filmed. The other is IGY’s 253-slip Rodney Bay Marina north of the capital of Castries in Gros Islet. The Moorings and DSL Yachting both have their bases in Rodney Bay.
“Benefits of chartering out of St. Lucia are comprehensive services and the accessibility of supermarkets, bars, and restaurants. There are also marine stores, hardware stores, and decent shopping nearby,” says Ulrich Meixner, managing director of DSL Yachting, which offers a fleet of 32 to 44 monohulls and multihulls for bareboat charter. Meixner is also the current president of the St. Lucia Sailing Association, which makes him in-the-know on all things sailing in St. Lucia.
“A must-do is to spend a night at-anchor between the Pitons. The views are breathtaking and romantic,” he says. “St. Lucia also has a lot to offer for land-based activities like zip-lining, mountain biking, hiking, and sightseeing.”
Located 100 nm east of Barbados, this 32-island nation starts at St. Vincent to the north and ends some 30 nm to the south in Union Island. Young Island, just 200 yards from St. Vincent’s southern mainland, is one of the smallest in the country and the site of the private Young Island Resort.
“With a handful of moorings, this is a wonderful place to start your charter vacation because you can climb up the two hundred and fifty steps of Fort Duvernette and get incredible views of St. Vincent’s south coast and the Bequia channel,” says Astrid Geslin, who with husband and captain, Laurent, provide crewed charters aboard the 49-foot Privilege catamaran, Isolablue. The Grenadines offer several walls, rocks, and reefs to dive. Laurent is a PADI instructor while Astrid is a PADI Divemaster.
Horizon Yacht Charters is based at the Blue Lagoon Resort & Marina, a 20-slip facility where arrivals receive a special St. Vincy Rum Punch. Horizon offers 38- to 51-foot monohulls and multihulls for bareboat charter.
“Each Grenadine has its own unique vibe, so it is like visiting a few different countries in a week,” says Lesley Dowden, Horizon’s St. Vincent-based reservations specialist. “Best places en route include the world-famous Tobago Cays. The anchorage is protected by an enormous horseshoe reef which also provides amazing snorkeling. You can swim with the turtles that feed around the five islands that make up the Cays or explore ashore with the nearly tame iguanas and tortoises. In the evening, you can arrange a wonderful lobster or fish beach barbecue with one of the local guides.”
Some say you can smell the fragrance of locally grown cinnamon and nutmeg as you approach the island. Camper & Nicholsons Port Louis is the major marina with 227 slips and the site of bases for Dream Yacht Charter and The Moorings.
“Grenada is almost as remote as it gets in the Caribbean. This is generally the endpoint of most Windward Island vacations, and guests enjoy dropping their yachts off at our base and utilizing the nearby international airport to fly home,” says Pedersen. “The main highlight in Grenada is the capital of St. George’s itself and the local, world-famous spice market from which the island derives its nickname.”
The best part is that the Windward Islands are fun to cruise any time of year. “In the winter, you get the Christmas winds, and in the summer, there’s a good breeze, too,” says Stromberg. “Plus, in the summer, it’s much less crowded. It’s possible to have an entire anchorage to yourself.”
-by Carol Bareuther
The post Chartering in the Windward Islands appeared first on Southern Boating.
Boating can be one of the most pleasurable and memorable times in one’s life, but the cost of ownership is often a detractor. It usually leaves many on a dock gazing at a group out on a vessel laughing their socks off as if their lives were a serendipitous event.
Fortunately, there are boat clubs throughout the U.S. that offer opportunities for experienced as well as newcomers to enjoy the boating lifestyle. The boat club experience is not only geared toward individuals looking for a more accessible, affordable option, but also to former boat owners who are aware of the cumbersome responsibilities of ownership.
Companies such as Freedom Boat Club, Carefree Boat Club, Sovereign, and others offer boaters the opportunity to take watercraft out on their own for the day and head home afterward without worrying about maintaining it or the insurance costs. Another big advantage is that those who want to get into boating but have never owned or operated a boat will go through training by the boat club staff to ensure safety and confidence in taking the helm.
Andrew Novak of Lighthouse Point, Florida, is a former boat owner who wanted a departure from the constant upkeep and overhead of ownership. “I thought, ‘Let me give this boat club a try and see how active I can be with it,’” he says. “I don’t have to keep it trailered. I can give it back when I’m done.”
Novak became a Freedom Boat Club premium member and pays just over $500 a month in addition to his $5,000 initiation fee. He explains that the premium membership at Freedom is 10 percent of the members at a particular location. “If there are 600 members, only 60 are allowed to belong to the premium membership,” he says. The main benefit to him is being able to commandeer a hearty vessel capable of knocking out waves on his way out to sea. “It gave me access to the twenty-five-foot and larger boats,” Novak says. “I take out a twenty-seven-foot Cobia center console regularly from Lighthouse Point Marina.”
Novak likes to use his private membership to fish. He typically goes for dolphin and wahoo, which hide just underneath the mahi-mahi. “The boat isn’t super-set up for live baiting. I could slow troll because the twenty-seven-foot Cobia is equipped with outriggers, but it’s not my cup of tea,” Novak says.
Not all clubs will allow you to store a boat at your personal dock overnight, but Freedom Boat Club does for up to three nights in a row. “I love being able to take the boat home,” says Novak. “There’s something about me looking out of the back window of my home and seeing a boat that makes me happy.”
Boatsetter.com is a peer-to-peer renting service that has a very large marketplace with more than 17,000 boats in more than 600 locations worldwide. The main benefit to Boatsetter is skipping the sizeable initiation fee of $5,000 that most boat clubs charge. However, avoiding the initial fee may cost you in the long run. One of the lowest rental prices is $44 per hour for a pontoon boat, which adds up to $352 for an eight-hour day. This is just above the average monthly cost at a lot of boat clubs ($300), once you fork over the mandatory $5,000, sometimes less, sometimes more.
The question then becomes, “How much will I use the vessel in a month or year?” Novak says his premium membership at Freedom allows as many reservations as his schedule permits, which is a mainstay at most boat clubs.
If you were to buy a boat, the typical down payment range is 10 to 20 percent of the total cost. For instance, to purchase a $30,000 boat, 10 percent down would be $3,000. The advantage to joining a club is that you can cancel your membership after a year (or less); whereas, buying a boat would leave you on the hook for four to five years or more. The initial fee for a boat club ($5,000-$7,000) is comparable, but then factor in no maintenance or upkeep and that cost lessens overall. The South Florida Boat Club has a trade-in option if you own a boat with less than 200 hours.
Boat clubs generally require a one-time initiation fee. South Florida has the lowest initial fee starting at just $1,200, but it only has locations in Fort Lauderdale and Miami. It allows a member and any of their guests to board a vessel, including your Labrador retriever. This may not seem like a big deal (to let any guest, furry or otherwise, on board), but Suntex Boat Club has restrictions that limit your guests if they are not immediate family members and breaks up the membership based on this sole factor. Suntex has other locations in various states, but only two in Florida and has pet-designated boats and a $5,000 deductible for non-negligent repairs.
Most clubs above either offer or suggest ways to find boating education courses and, in some cases, it is a mandatory precursor to taking a boat out. In addition, most clubs require members to be 21 years or older to drive. Every club has an online reservation system and allows unlimited usage with the only requirement to return the boat fully fueled.
Carefree offers “spur of the moment” reservations by simply calling the dock to determine availability so a member can arrive and throttle out to sea. All clubs generally carry boats ranging from 18 feet to 27 feet. Boatsetter also has larger vessels available, but usually require a licensed captain.
A boat club is the perfect way to get your feet wet in operating a boat and knowing how boating can fit into your lifestyle. Joining a boat club allows you the chance to experience being out on the water and is a great way to figure out if owning a boat is right for you, including the chance to try out a variety of boat models to see which you like best before purchasing one.
Typical boat rentals give a similar opportunity, and chartering a boat is good when you want to go for a day of fishing, a sunset cruise, or a week-long vacation, but as Cecil Cohn, president of Freedom Boat Club, says, “Customers can plan their vacations around a club location. We want our members to have a lasting, great experience.”
-by Jamion Dietrich Kries
The post Boat Club Memberships: Why Should You Join? appeared first on Southern Boating.
Dear MOby,
And why did no one make me aware that tire choices for the 18-inch wheels on my new-to-me ‘87 Suzuki GSX-R750 were going to be severely limited? I guess it’s not a big deal, but it just got me curious how we went from 18s, 16s, 16.5 and 17-inch tires not so long ago – to almost nothing but 17-inch tires now on nearly every sportbike and sport tourer sold today? Why only 17-inch tires on sportbikes?
Curiously,
T. Rizz
Dear T.,
It’s an interesting question with a fairly simple answer, but first a short history lesson or why not a long one, since it’s a slow news day? The first “modern superbike” 1969 Honda CB750 had a 19-/18-inch front/rear tire combination, and the 1973 Kawasaki Z1 that usurped its title wore the exact same 3.25 x 19-in front and 4.00 x 18-in rear tires, on probably the same wire-spoked rims, and it was good.
By 1980, we were beginning to suspect we’d never be able to afford a Porsche 928, but might be able to someday aspire to a 1983 Suzuki GS1100E. OK, maybe a 550.
That GS was the new first “modern superbike” via its 16-valve Twin Swirl Combustion Chamber engine, but its 19- and 17-inch cast wheels were pretty high-tech too. Wikipedia says the ‘76 Yamaha RD400C was the first motorcycle by a major manufacturer to have cast wheels (18/18).
On the 25th anniversary of its first radial tires, in 2012, Michelin sent us this press release, which sums it up well:
Three years after first using it in racing, in 1984, Michelin decided to bring to market its radial motorcycle tire. In 1987, the MICHELIN A59X and M59X signaled the beginning of a revolutionary new era for high-performance tires that enabled riders to get the most out of the new motorcycles of the period. 
Today, all road, sport and supersport bikes are equipped with radial tires. Without the radial tire, racing bike engines would never have become so big since traditional cross-ply tires would not have been able to support today’s 1,000 cc engines. The radial tire has been the key driver of the faster pace technical improvements for racing and series produced motorcycles in terms of the torsional stiffness of the cycle parts as well as the power output of the engine.
In 1983, thanks to the genius of Freddie Spencer, Michelin won the first Grand Prix event on a 500 cc bike fitted with a radial tire (on the rear wheel only). The following year, Randy Mamola became the first rider to win a Grand Prix race (San Marino) on a motorcycle equipped with radial tires on both the front and rear wheels. A radial tire undergoes less heat build-up than a conventional tire. As a result, the rubber remains softer and delivers better grip when cornering.
Pirelli was right there too, building bespoke MP7 radials for the crazy, 150-mph European-spec 1984 Honda VF1000R– a 120/80-16 front and 140/80-17-inch rear.
Bridgestone, too: When the next “first modern superbike” Suzuki GSX-R750 arrived in 1986, it rolled on 18-inch Bridgestone Cyrox radials.
Radial tires were here to stay by the time I got to California: The amazing 1988 FZR400 and FZR400R I cut my Rock Store teeth on rolled on 110/70-17 and 140/60-18 radials. The even more amazing FZR1000 a year later, and Suzuki’s new GSX-R1100, both got fat radial tires on wide 17-inch wheels. Meanwhile, contemporary sport-tourers like the GSX-F1100 Katana and Yamaha FJ1100 were a bit behind the times on 16-inch bias ply tires.
I loved these things. The 1991 FJ1200 got a 120/70-17 radial in front to go with its 16-in bias-ply rear.
Your now highly collectible Honda RC30 threw the world an 18-inch rear curveball and a 17 front, and Mr. Baba decided to mix it up again with a 16-inch front tire on the world’s next first modern superbike, the 1992 CBR900RR.
Basically, it was all in flux. The radial tire revolution opened the door for the power revolution and the chassis revolution, and all the engineers were busily trying to find what worked best while the appetite for sportier sportbikes just kept expanding. It was all a great excuse for the factories to go racing. Former Dunlop PR and Cycle magazine guy Ken Vreeke got this out of Eddie Lawson, who most famously won the 1988 500 GP championship on a Yamaha before doing the same on a Honda in 1989:
When Kenny and I went over in 1983, we tested both the 16 and 17 with the 500 GP bike. The bike wouldn’t turn on the 16 because it was wider. The 17 turned much better – the geometry on that bike worked with the 17. Later as the year went on, we only used 17s on the Yamaha.
When I went to Honda, they wanted me to try a 16. I knew I wouldn’t like it. But then I tested it and it worked great and we won races on the 16. Later on, the Honda geometry changed, and the 17 worked great. So I got to experiment with the two sizes, and really it was all about the bike’s geometry at that time.
Which makes perfect sense. Honda said the point of the 16-in front on the 900RR was to reduce weight and provide a bigger contact patch, but a lot of testers felt the RR was nervous in front and labeled the bike Experts Only.
OG CBR900RR came with a 130/70ZR16 front, supposed to provide more grip and less weight. (JB photo)
What we learned anew since then is that more grip in front isn’t a good thing at all if it throws off the fine balance between front and rear. Serious roadracers routinely drift both ends of the bike, especially now with traction control, and no matter what size the tires are we’ve always known it’s critical to maintain that the rear will break loose before the front. We’ve also learned the value of the standard steering damper.
And while Honda was battling Yamaha was battling Suzuki in that golden era of 500 GP racing, so was Michelin battling Bridgestone and, in America anyway, Dunlop. All the tire companies were looking for an advantage, too, which meant building tires to fit whatever wheels the customer was convinced were the winning hand that week – 16, 16.5, or 17 inches.
Neill Rampton, at Dunlop, was there:
“In GP and WSBK, the rims were not defined by regulation in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. That’s how we got to R420 (16.5”). There were also many different rim widths used (even within the same team). I think with most series going to spec tires, everyone realized how much money they were wasting on carbon rims and the 17-in. regulation made sense. Especially for SBK, where the OEM fitments were all 17-in to begin with.”
Our favorite sick friend Kaming Ko recently had Pirelli produce a run of 16.5-inch tires for his ex-Ducati MotoGP bike.
Tire competition in World Superbike was the same, but on a slightly less grand scale and on production machines. For 2004, the decision was made to make WSBK a spec-tire series, with Pirelli stepping in to supply 16.5-in tires to all the teams.
Following the success of that experiment*, the tire wars also came to a Stylema-style halt in MotoGP when, in 2009, it too became a spec-tire series, with Bridgestone as sole supplier of 16.5-in rubber. That move both leveled the playing field – or at least gave riders one thing they couldn’t blame bad results on – and brought down costs in the aftermath of the previous economic crisis.
Four years later, in 2013, World Superbike made the switch from 16.5-inch to 17-inch Pirellis. The Italian tire behemoth is contracted to be WSBK’s tire supplier, for all classes, through 2023 – a 19-year run.
The final coup de grâce for any non-17-inch sportbike tire came in 2016, when Michelin took over from Bridgestone as MotoGP’s lone tire supplier, and proclaimed it would be 17-inchers for the lot of you going forward. Like Eddie said, you can make a 16 or a 16.5 or a 17 or 16.25 or a lot of other sizes work perfectly well once you adjust the motorcycle’s geometry to suit, but why spend all the money and effort to produce so many sizes, and have dealers stock them, etc., when 17 inches front and rear seems to have hit everybody’s happy place? Now all you’ve got to obsess about is the width. And air pressure. And compound. And?
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* Pirelli put out a press release after that first WSBK season that read, in part: So what changed with Pirelli and the spec tire rule? Practically everything. Last year, a staggering 218 points separated the first three riders at season’s end (103 points between the two factory riders, 115 points between second and third place). This year, there were fewer than 100 points between the first five riders. Neil Hodgson won every race up to Laguna Seca last year, while this year’s championship was called “one of the most exciting and closely contested” in the 17-year history of the series. It came down to the final weekend.
Staying the Course: The FZR400 and FZR1000
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The post Ask MO Anything: How did we finally settle on 17-inch wheels for sportbikes anyway? appeared first on Motorcycle.com.
I am a huge fan of avocados. There’s something about the silky rich fruit I can’t get enough of. (I know deep down inside that it’s the fat content I really love.) I shop for avocados infrequently, however, because they’re usually not cheap in my neck of the woods. Unfortunately, I’m guessing they’re not going to go…
Robot vacuums are feats of engineering. Even a basic bot can keep your floors tidy with little effort on your part, handling pet hair and dust adeptly. Top-tier models can map your home, schedule cleanings, take voice commands, and empty themselves.
But don’t set your expectations too high. These machines excel in routine midweek cleanups but can’t replace traditional plug-in vacuums, especially on rugs. And even the fanciest models can drive you mad, getting tangled or trapped, or missing piles of dirt.
We’ve tested a range of models over the years, from cheap, aimless bumblers to sophisticated machines that (usually) navigate with ease. We think that the Roborock Q7 M5+ and the Tapo RV30 Max Plus are your best choices.
Did you know that even the smallest beams of light in your bedroom can become focal points that draw your attention and distract you from sleep? The disappearance of light in the evening tells the brain that it’s time to wind down.
And few people realize that bright-light exposure during the day can improve sleep, since sunlight, especially in the morning, helps to regulate your circadian clock for the day, signaling your brain to wake up.
The bigger the contrast between night and day, the better you sleep. Here’s how to make that happen.
Trout On The Table – Part 3 TROUT BAKED IN FOIL While I’d argue, perhaps with some vehemence, that nothing quite matches fresh-caught trout fried over an open fire in a backcountry campsite, perhaps with a side dish of ramps and branch lettuce or fried potatoes and onions, you can skip the grease and use…
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THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE FEBRUARY 12, 2022, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE.
Faced with near-infinite choices, sometimes it’s nice to have the same dinner on the same day every week. I’m pretty sure that’s why Taco Tuesday has become an American mainstay: Restaurants have a special on a slow day and, at home, families can serve something familiar and fun.
But Taco Tuesday is just a particularly famous example of this dynamic. Around the world, examples abound of people devoting a day of the week to specific foods.
The reasoning behind each differs: Catholics eat fish on Friday for religious reasons, the power of alliteration led to Meatless Mondays, and clever marketers invented Taco Tuesday-like days as promotions. Certain foods can make even the worst weekdays better, and a set day to eat a traditional food allows people to cook up meals that would be impossible to make without time and pre-planning. Here are seven days when families come together over couscous, pea soup, and spaghetti.
Mogodu Monday sounds satisfying, almost as satisfying as mogodu itself: a hearty traditional dish of tripe seasoned with tomatoes and spices such as curry powder and cloves. The concept of Mogodu Monday is still fairly new. In the South African township of Soweto, the last decade has seen restaurants proudly serving the dish on Mondays as a tribute to traditional cuisine, often with a side of live music.
Taco Tuesday. Sounds straightforward, right? Like something any restaurant or maker of shredded cheese could use to advertise their products? Nope. My colleague Alex Mayyasi once wrote about Mexican food chain Taco John’s tooth-and-nail defense of the trademarked term, which they claim a franchisee came up with in the 1980s. If your local Mexican restaurant has a Taco Tuesday special, chances are they just haven’t received a cease-and-desist letter yet.
In 1969, a commercial first aired on Boston television that led Wednesday to be termed “Spaghetti Day.” Specifically, spaghetti from the Prince brand of products. In the ad, a woman leans out a window and calls for her young son Anthony, who proceeds to sprint across the city for dinner. A narrator tells the audience that Anthony is usually not too eager to get home, except on Wednesdays, because, “in the North End of Boston, Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day.”
The commercial played for nearly a decade. It made something of a celebrity out of Anthony Martignetti, the actual North End boy in the ad, and ensured that people still associate Wednesday with spaghetti in Boston and beyond. When Martignetti passed away in 2020, the comment section of the 1969 commercial on Youtube flooded with heartfelt tribute.
Nothing goes with pancakes like a nice bowl of pea soup. What, that’s not something your family says? In Sweden, it’s a classic combo served in restaurants and homes across the country every Thursday. A bowl of ham-filled pea soup and an eggy pancake covered in jam is a very filling meal. It had to be. Centuries ago, when Sweden was a Catholic country, people fasted on Fridays by avoiding eggs and meat. So Swedes needed something hearty to bolster themselves until Saturday.
Couscous on Fridays has been called “Morocco's most valued tradition.” Muslims there often make a day of it, sharing couscous and all the fixings with their families, especially since Friday is the main day of worship. Instead of a quick boil, Moroccan cooks knead and steam the pasta nubs until they’re soft and flavorful. The process takes long enough that it’s a dish worthy of a special occasion.
Recently, I found an ancient entry on the food site Chowhound plaintively asking where to get feijoada on a day that wasn’t Saturday. That should tell you how much this dish is associated with the weekend. Slow-cooked black beans with pork is pretty much Brazil’s national dish, and, much like Moroccan couscous, it takes long enough to cook that it’s saved for weekends. Luckily for that long-ago Chowhound poster, feijoada is often served on Fridays and Sundays as well.
The British Sunday roast started out as a meal eaten after church service. A large family meal with roast beef, chicken, or lamb as the centerpiece was especially welcome back when Friday and Saturday were considered fast days. Root vegetables, Yorkshire pudding, and abundant gravy often round out the meal. Like both feijoada in Brazil and couscous in Morocco, Sunday roast is both Great Britain’s national dish and one of its most valued traditions.
The Olympics are a playground not just for athletes, but for historians as well. The Games are littered with sports that only see wide television coverage—or any coverage at all—once every four years, at least in the United States. The Winter Olympics have a very particular strain of these sports. While just about every country has a climate that allows for, say, running or swimming, a comparative few have the weather, topography, and resources to have a thriving winter sports culture.
For those countries that do have both hills and snow, though, there is a near-universal appreciation of the sled. Sleds are great even without snow—they might have been used to build the Egyptian pyramids—but are particularly great at high altitudes and latitudes, to move gigantic building materials in China, or food and belongings in pre-Columbian North America. But how in the world did this utilitarian origin give us luge, what appears to be a psychotically dangerous sport that requires athletes to blast down artificial ice tubes at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour while seated on the most minimalist fiberglass-and-steel object that could be recognizable as a sled? The story takes us on a journey from Germanic tribal wars against the Romans, to aristocratic and very bored Englishmen on vacation, to the world of highly advanced sports technology.
The Winter Olympics are necessarily limited to events that can all be traced back to a select few countries with the right winter climate. The most recent Summer Games boasted a whopping 51 different events or disciplines, many of which have multiple sub-events (“Athletics” covers every length and format of footrace, hurdles, long jump, pole vault, javelin, discus, decathlon, and more). The Winter Olympics has only 15.
A surprising number of these winter events involve bored Scandinavian soldiers. Skiing has a basically undateable history as a form of alpine transportation, but only begins to be documented as a recreational pastime in the Norwegian and Swedish militaries in the 1700s. Several Scandinavian nations had ski regiments even then; the earliest recorded use of ski troops was during Norway’s civil war, somewhere around 1200. The biathlon—cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting—has roots in civilian hunting, but it was the Norwegian military that turned it into a competition.
Other events are really just modernized and winterized ancient games. Curling comes from Scotland, but the concept of throwing (or pushing) one object at another object is about as old as games get. Ice hockey has precursors all over the world, but using a stick to hit an object (ball, puck, whatever) is pretty fundamental.
Then there’s luge. Luge is pure folly, a creation of bored, aristocratic, and sometimes destructive men on vacation. Do you remember ever being bored on vacation, and making up a game with a sibling—tossing seashells or creating an obstacle course in the hotel room? Now imagine that game ended up a heavily funded fixture at the freaking Olympics. That’s luge.
Luge first emerged in the late 1800s, in the Swiss Alps, and more specifically in two resort towns: Davos and St. Moritz. At the time, these towns were used as summer resorts by aristocrats from all over Europe for their clean, temperate, alpine air. The names and dates get a little fuzzy or disputed here, but some time, probably in the 1860s, somebody—maybe some German doctors, maybe a Swiss hotelier—decided that only operating these resort towns during the summer was leaving money on the table. Winter in the Swiss Alps is great, they thought, so how can we get people here?
Winter sports had been growing in popularity, around the same time that others—soccer, boxing—were codifying and formalizing their rules. It was the age of steam, making travel more accessible to some and leading to more formalized global structures. Kingdoms, empires, or fiefdoms were giving way to connected nations bound by a common identity of some sort. The Industrial Revolution also made many non-royals—industrialists—extremely rich for the first time. And where there are rich industrialists, there are rich and bored children of industrialists.
In the 1860s and 1870s, some of these rich, bored folks began to head to the Swiss Alps for winter vacation. Two excellent books on luge, which delve into the history of the sport, were written in 1894. Both were penned by Englishmen, and carry a bit of English superiority, but by their accounts, Davos had become a recreational ski resort by the 1880s. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was an early Davos skier, and publicized the sport in some of his articles.) “The nature of the Englishman is competition,” writes Harry Gibson in Tobogganing on Crooked Runs. “Whether riding, driving, walking, running, or sliding down a hill he must race, otherwise the amusement palls on him."
Sledding was done at Davos as well, but early sleds were not particularly well-suited for competitive sport because, well, you couldn’t steer them. Some of the earliest accounts of sledding are the (possibly apocryphal) use of shields as sleds by the Cimbric, probably a northern Germanic tribe, who slid down the sides of mountains to attack (and lose to) the Romans in 103 B.C. This idea of a sled as an unsteerable plank was pretty universal until the late 1800s.
Interestingly, the word used for sledding, even competitive sledding, by those in the Alps who were documenting the birth of the sport was not sledding or luging (the French term). It was “tobogganing.” That word comes from, probably, one of a couple of Algonquin languages spoken by the residents of eastern Canada and northern New England. To these late-1800s writers, the toboggan was the overall category of equipment, and there could be many types of toboggans.
This early period of winter sports creation in the Alps drew Englishmen and Americans. In broad strokes, the Americans brought the equipment, and the Englishmen brought the ceremony. It was these tourists who, when they weren’t skiing, took sleds down the picturesque mountains, often right down the main roads in town, which seems to have been very annoying for the townspeople and great fun for the tourists.
“Of all the varied kinds of sport which men in their incessant search after amusement have discovered, those which have taken the most lasting hold, and attained the greatest perfection, appear to be the various forms of rapid motion, upon earth or water, in which one man's strength or skill can be tested against another's,” writes Theodore Andrea Cook in the other 1894 book, Notes on Tobogganing at St. Moritz. St. Moritz is probably the birthplace of the lineage that gave us luge. According to some accounts, it was in Davos that toboggan races had been held to the great entertainment of tourists in the early 1880s. Hotel operators in nearby St. Moritz took notice, and according to the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, in the winter of 1884 through 1885, five guests at the Kulm Hotel formed an “outdoor amusements committee,” and built a sled-racing course to compete with Davos.
This course was known as the Cresta Run. As a matter of fact, it still is. The English private-school vibe is obvious in the names within this curvy downhill track. Features of the course had names like Shuttlecock, the Battledore, and the Terrace. The Cresta Run was a phenomenal success. Every season, in the early years, four men would link arms and walk through the deep, powdery snow along a predetermined path. Then they’d go back, stomp the snow flat, craft tall banks astride the curves, and clear rubble out of the way. Initially the competitors rode what they called “Swiss” sleds, with wooden runners, on which the rider sits comfortably upright. They dutifully recorded times, awarded prizes, and probably got very drunk.
But soon there was a desire to go faster, and faster still. Here’s where we get into some heavily disputed stuff. The sleds almost immediately began to evolve, with metal runners being the biggest improvement. There is no apparent consensus about who actually created or introduced metal runners, metal frames, movable seats, different steering mechanisms, and all the other improvements. The English writers from 1894 do acknowledge that some Americans had brought a metal-runner sled, which became known as the “America,” but the names of those Americans are not always the same. This is also right around the time of the invention of the Flexible Flyer sled in Philadelphia, so it seems clear that the United States and its wealthy tourists were involved in the speed improvements.
One of the authors, Gibson, was sort of scornful of the New World sledders, despite their technological skill and the fact that the word “toboggan” came from natives of North America. “It is only fair to add,” he writes, “that I have met Canadians whose idea of real tobogganing was to start from the top of any convenient mountain and slide forthwith to the bottom, if Providence were kind enough not to stop progress on the way.”
The Cresta Run was initially a sledding run, but it became so popular that it soon changed. Cook writes: “Machines going at an ever-increasing rapidity were found to wear away the banks too fast; little by little the run became not merely iced but actual ice.” And that meant more speed and consistency. Soon all sled runs were constructed of ice, which was celebrated by speed junkies, and mourned by those who noted that a hilarious spill into pillowy snow is less fun than a crash on unforgiving ice.
All sorts of sled-type sports were created in these resort towns. Skeleton, which is essentially head-first luge, was just one possible way of riding a toboggan at the Cresta Run: Some sat upright, some weirdly lay on their sides, and some led with their heads. Bobsled, or bobsleigh, came about when one competitor showed up with two regular sleds hammered together to make a super-sled. Skeleton, bobsled, and luge evolved, within a few years, into separate disciplines.
The sport gained further popularity, as rich men (and some women) from all over Europe, North America, and even Australia began showing up at St. Moritz, Davos, and what became a host of other alpine ski resorts. In 1913, the first international federation of sled sports was founded. Others followed.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is in charge of deciding which sports will be held in each Games. Skateboarding and surfing made the cut in 2020 for the first time. Croquet and tug-of-war are former fixtures that have been discarded. The IOC also happens to be located, since 1915, in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 1923, a larger and more ambitious organization called the Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing was founded in, you guessed it, Lausanne. They immediately started petitioning to have their sports added to the Winter Olympics, which held its first event in 1924. The four-man bobsled was part of that inaugural Games in Chamonix, France, and has been part of the Winter Olympics ever since—well, except for the 1960 Games, when local officials in Squaw Valley, California, decided it was too expensive to build a bobsled course and so just … didn’t.
Skeleton debuted in 1928, but was dropped until 1948, and then dropped again until 2002. Some sources chalk this up to the danger of the sport, but it seems equally or more likely due to the sport’s limited popularity. The two Games it had been featured in, 1928 and 1948, were both in St. Moritz and used the original Cresta Run, sort of an ode to the town’s contribution to winter sports, but this particular sled sport might have been considered too niche to be featured in Sapporo or Lake Placid or Sarajevo.
By the late 1950s, luge had surpassed skeleton in popularity and had its own organizing group, the Fédération Internationale de Luge de Course. It was scheduled to debut in 1960, but then Squaw Valley again, so it ended up making its first appearance in 1964 in Innsbruck, Austria. The Germans dominated that year.
Luge has been a fixture of the Winter Olympics ever since, and Germany a fixture on the medal podium, having produced nine of the top 10 medal winners. And this year, 2022, is the first Olympic luge without a single competitor from either Switzerland or Great Britain—the countries that, probably, started it all. The Americans and Canadians are there, though.
