Accessing Universal Intelligence.
Human Ingenuity and Creativity. Our Cultural Heritage.
Favourite things. Music and Movies. Nature. Items that interest me on any topic.
For the first time car ownership became a
reality for average American workers, not just the wealthy. More than 15 million
Model Ts were built in Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan, and the automobile
was also assembled at a Ford plant in Manchester, England, and at plants in
continental Europe.
The Model T was an automobile built by the Ford Motor Company
from 1908 until 1927.
Conceived by Henry
Ford as practical, affordable
transportation for the common man, it quickly became prized for its low cost,
durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance. Assembly-line production
allowed the price of the touring car version to be lowered from $850 in 1908 to
less than $300 in 1925.
At such prices the Model T at times comprised
as much as 40 percent of all cars sold in the United States. Even before it lost
favour to larger, more powerful, and more luxurious cars, the Model T, known
popularly as the “Tin Lizzie” or the “flivver,” had become an American folkloric
symbol, essentially realizing Ford’s goal to “democratize the
automobile.”
The Model T was offered in several body
styles, including a five-seat touring car, a two-seat runabout, and a seven-seat
town car. All bodies were mounted on a uniform 100-inch-wheelbase chassis. A
choice of colors was originally available, but from 1913 to 1925 the car was
mass-produced in only one color—black. The engine was simple and efficient, with
all four cylinders cast in a single block and the cylinder head detachable for
easy access and repair.
The engine generated 20 horsepower and
propelled the car to modest top speeds of 40–45 miles per hour (65–70 km/h). In
most models the engine was started by a hand crank, which activated a magneto
connected to the flywheel, but after 1920 some models were equipped with
battery-powered starters. The transmission, consisting of two forward gears and
one reverse, was of the planetary type, controlled by foot pedals rather than
the more common hand lever used in sliding-gear transmissions.
Spark and throttle were controlled by a hand
lever on the steering column. The 10-gallon fuel tank was located under the
front seat. Because gasoline was fed to the engine only by gravity, and also
because the reverse gear offered more power than the forward gears, the Model T
frequently had to be driven up a steep hill backward.
Such deficiencies, along
with its homely appearance, less-than-comfortable ride at top speeds, and
incessant rattling, made the Model T the butt of much affectionate humour in
innumerable jokes, songs, poems, and stories.
It’s the week of release
for the deluxe edition of Sticky Fingers, the album that in 1971
transformed the Rolling Stones from rock’n’roll outlaws into world-conquering
stadium rockers. In his diner-style restaurant of the same name in Kensington,
west London, Bill Wyman — bassist for the Stones from 1962 to 1993, part-time
archeologist and photographer, author, metal detector enthusiast, leader of
R&B band the Rhythm Kings and recently reinvigorated solo artist with a new
album Back to Basics — is recalling his short-lived, ill-fated reunion
with the Stones for two concerts at the O2 arena in London in 2012.
“I jammed with Charlie [Watts],
Keith [Richards] and Ronnie [Wood] in a studio in Battersea nine months before
the gig. Mick came on the third day,” says Wyman, in a characteristically flat
tone, as he sits in one of the booths in Sticky Fingers beneath a wall decorated
with Stones tour posters and concert photographs. “And they were getting
over-friendly, Keith in particular. I invited Keith and Patti [Hansen, Keith
Richards’ wife] to the house for dinner and he was all over me. He gave me a
scarf with all these skeleton things on it and he kept hugging me, saying, ‘Man,
it’s great to be back.’ And the talk was that I’d be heavily involved when they
did their next thing.” Wyman — who no longer has the
cadaverous, crow-like air of a Rolling Stone but who now looks like your average
78-year-old millionaire, albeit one with hair — documents the frustrations that
followed. They began when he was told he could only play two songs at the
O2. “And they wouldn’t tell me which
two,” he says, managing to sound both indignant and unemotional at the same
time. “It really disappointed me. I said, ‘Why don’t you let me do the last
five, and then your guy [Darryl Jones, who replaced Wyman as the Stones’
bassist] can do the encore?’ No, no, no. So the day before the rehearsal I’m
going through 50 Stones songs, thinking they’ll want me to do my signature ones
like Miss You and Jumping Jack Flash. Then they tell me I’m doing
Honky Tonk Women and It’s Only Rock’n’Roll.” The torments didn’t stop there.
“Two days later I went to the O2 for the soundcheck. I had to use his [Jones’s]
amplifier and he plays completely differently from me. He plays with his
fingers, hard, I play with my thumb, lightly. I didn’t have time to check out
his amp settings. Then Mick says, ‘We’ve got to rehearse with Eric Clapton and
Jeff Beck and this girl [Florence Welch] and there’s no time for a soundcheck —
for you.’ In the end I just went on stage, plugged in and hoped for the
best.” What was the reason for such
treatment at the hands of his former brothers in arms? “Maybe they were
punishing me for leaving the band,” offers Wyman, to cries of protest from his
personal assistant, who’s sitting at a table nearby. “They never wanted me to
leave. When I came off stage and went to join my wife and daughters in the pit,
the bass player started doing Miss You! He’s playing all my parts — and
not as well as I thought he should. He’s playing the octaves as single notes.
And then Mick starts saying what a great bass player he is, right in front of
me. ‘Look at Darryl, isn’t he fantastic?’ goes Mick.” Wyman shakes his head. “They
never forgave me for leaving.” He left the Rolling Stones in the
first place after feeling that his contributions were going unheard. And Back
to Basics is something of a late-career high. Conversational songs sung in a
cockney baritone like What & How & If & When & Why and
Stuff (Can’t Get Enough) recall the dry wit of Ian Dury, alongside that
of Wyman’s own self-deprecating hit of 1981, Je Suis un Rock Star. He’s
got a way with a down-to-earth tune, even if his sole contribution to one of the
Stones’ original albums, the whimsical In Another Land from 1967’s
psychedelic disaster Their Satanic Majesties Request, does not rank among
their classics. “It was a closed shop and there
was no way in,” says Wyman on the Jagger-Richards stranglehold, established in
the mid-1960s when the band’s then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham recognised the
pair as the creative force within the group. “That was [Sticky
Fingers-era guitarist] Mick Taylor’s frustration. He couldn’t get into the
songwriting and any contribution he made wasn’t given credit, same as me. He
left. I swallowed my pride and carried on.” In his book Stone Alone,
Wyman writes how he and Brian Jones came up with the iconic riff for Jumping
Jack Flash, not something they received credit for. “I wasn’t given the
opportunity to do my apprenticeship in the way Mick and Keith were,” he says,
with stone-faced composure. “They wrote dozens of really poor songs until they
started writing good ones. We’d be in Chicago or somewhere and they’d ask if I
had anything. I’d run through a tune, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll come back to
you on that,’ and then go and work on one of their songs for a week until it had
gone from a country ballad, as Satisfaction was, into something really
commercial. It was frustrating.” Wyman was always an odd fit.
Older than the others, he rarely hung out with them and he was never interested
in drink and drugs. He did, however, enjoy phenomenal success with women. He
didn’t have the dangerous sensuality of Mick Jagger, nor the ragged charms of
Keith Richards, yet Wyman, unhappily married to his first wife Diane from 1959
to 1969, slept with hundreds of female fans throughout his time with the band.
What was his secret? He tackles the question with
sober consideration, as if being asked about the inner workings of the Bill
Wyman Signature Metal Detector. “When I first went to work in 1960, as a clerk
at a diesel engineer’s in Streatham Hill, a friend of mine took me back home and
showed me how to develop film,” he explains. “He also said, when I told him I
wasn’t getting on well with my wife: ‘I’ll tell you one lesson to take with you
through life. With women, no matter who they are, no matter what they do, always
treat them like a lady and you won’t go wrong.’ Since then I’ve been respectful
to every girl I met. I was never rude. I never kicked them out like I heard
other people did. I was always nice to them, even when they weren’t quite what I
thought they might be.” Despite such niceness, Back to
Basics does feature a song called Seventeen, about a model who tries
to break into acting and finds herself being described by Wyman as “a has-been”
at the tender age of the title. “That’s a rewrite of a song I did
in 1980. We had a birthday party at the restaurant and this American model came
along, I was introduced to her — I won’t mention names — and she wasn’t as
attractive as I thought she was on screen. Seventeen is a bit cruel. It’s
about moving on from being a model — I had loads of model girlfriends — to being
in movies and how sometimes it’s not successful. Kelly LeBrock was one of my
girlfriends and for her it was great, but most of them fail. My wife Suzanne
[Accosta] was a model and she always talks about how badly they were treated by
photographers. They’d go and do a shoot and be treated like a piece of shit,
basically.” Having a song on the album called
Seventeen seems to be asking for trouble, considering Wyman found himself
in something of a scandal when in 1989, aged 52, he married 18-year-old Mandy
Smith. They were rumoured to have been together four years previously. Wyman
appears to read my thoughts. “At least I called the song Seventeen,” he
says, before Smith’s name has a chance to be mentioned. The womanising days ended many
years ago. Married to Accosta since 1993, living with her and their three
teenage daughters in their houses in Chelsea and Suffolk, Wyman has matured into
a faithful family man with age-appropriate interests, including metal detecting
and archeology. Does he have any regrets about leaving the Stones? “I’ve never regretted it,” he
says, bringing an hour’s conversation to an end. “The past 20 years have been
the most prolific of my life. I found two Roman sites they never knew existed.
I’ve found Iron Age coins. I’ve opened events for the British Museum. I’ve
opened the Castle Museum in Norwich, one in bloody Newcastle. Done photographic
exhibitions around the world. Now it seems like this album might do quite
well.” Then, as if to make peace with
three decades of frustration at the hands of the Rolling Stones, he concludes:
“Makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?” By Will Hodgkinson With many thanks to The
Australian
Below: Bill Wyman releases new album. Now available.
QUEEN Elizabeth has led celebrations
of the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, a document that
cemented a key step on Britain's path to its modern parliamentary
democracy. THE Queen travelled to Runnymede, 30 kilometres west of London,
where King John applied his royal seal to the document on June 15, 1215,
guaranteeing a new relationship between the king and his subjects.
The Queen's husband, Prince Phillip, and her grandson, Prince William, also attended Monday's ceremony. Prime Minister David Cameron was scheduled to speak at the event, to which 4500 guests were invited.
Prince William unveiled Hew Locke's art installation The Jurors, which
features 12 bronze chairs symbolising the right to a fair trial under
the Magna Carta. Many other events were held in Britain and other
countries to mark the anniversary, including a series of
parliament-sponsored "LiberTeas" tea parties and political debates
across Britain on Sunday.
In Canberra, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Magna Carta
"remains a very important foundation stone of our democracy".
"It
remains a very important watershed for the whole world, because
decency, civilisation, human rights utterly depend upon the rule of
law," Mr Abbott said. The Latin document's most famous clause
grants the right to justice and a fair trial to all "free men", although
in 1215 most British people were peasants tied to landowners so they
were not counted as "free men" under the law.
Meaning "great
charter," Magna Carta is credited with inspiring democratic reformers in
Britain and other nations, including Thomas Jefferson in the United
States and Mahatma Gandhi in India, and documents such as the US
Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With many thanks to The Australian Related:
I’ve often suffered shame. I have a
secret that very few people know. I have dyslexia — or rather, a form of
it: mild dyscalculia, involving difficulties with time, measurement,
maths and spatial reasoning, which affects between 3 per cent and 6 per
cent of the population. I often wear my clothes inside out or back to
front and wonder why people are laughing at me. Recently I wore an
elegant hat with the label sticking out on my forehead. Prancing down
the street with people staring, I thought: “I must look fabulous!” Unlike regular dyslexics, I’m a whiz with reading and words, but
when handed bills in shops or restaurants, I stare for too long at the
numbers, often sweating in anxiety or frustration. Friends think I am
being mean with money. As for spatial awareness, I’m an excellent driver
but, sadly, concrete pylons in parking stations and petrol bowsers keep
running towards me and headbutting me.
Ironically, despite my
(then undiagnosed) disability, I became a finance journalist. I love the
corporate world, the excitement, the intrigue, the passion, and never
wanted my disability to stop me following my dream.
Some people
have noticed my weakness and been cruel. A former accountant humiliated
me publicly when he could see I was struggling. “What kind of financial
journalist are you?” he demanded. I went red. I wish I’d said: “A good
one.” I learned to compensate by getting my interviewees to write
numbers down for me (“forgotten my glasses”) and trusted colleagues to
crunch the numbers back in the office. This way, in 25 years I’ve never
made a numerical error in my articles. I was finally diagnosed recently
and I no longer hate myself for “being an idiot”.
So how do people with any disability rise to great heights in any
profession, be it in sport, business or the arts, exposing themselves to
work or a life that demands extraordinary perfection when they are well
behind the pack?
They succeed because they have what Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, author of international bestseller Learned Optimism,
calls “grit”. During an interview in Australia a few years ago, he told
me there were three types of people: optimists, pessimists and people
with determination whose passion outweighed fears, humiliation and
failure manifold.
“People with grit don’t give up,” Seligman says.
They ignore pain, setbacks and immediate gratification to get where they want to be.
Grit
people are the dogs that never let go. They are people whose arm might
be broken on the football field but they put the pain aside and keep
going. Studies show grit can be at the root of success because it leads
to perseverance, tenacity, resilience and commitment to the long-term
objective.
Recently Isley Hermansen, a 12-year-old girl from
Queensland with severe dyslexia, made a video and sent it to Virgin boss
Richard Branson.
Branson, who also has dyslexia, praised her
“inspiring” story. In her video #likeadyslexic, with pictures of
Branson, Hermansen says “one day I’m going to fly like a dyslexic”;
“sing like a dyslexic” — John Lennon; make movies like a dyslexic —
Steven Spielberg; make discoveries — Albert Einstein and Stephen
Hawking; do business — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Kerry Packer. She
mentions Leonardo da Vinci, Roald Dahl and Jamie Oliver, and quotes NASA
as saying it loves hiring dyslexics for their superb problem-solving
skills.
The point is that disabilities, be they dyslexia, autism,
stroke or no legs like Oscar Pistorius, need not hold you down if you
have grit. Indeed Peter Fox, son of Lindsay Fox and executive chairman
of Linfox, says his learning disability prompted his success. “Negatives
are great positives,” says a man who failed his final school exams but
achieved miracles, expanding the Linfox empire a staggering 14 times
since taking over nearly 22 years ago to a turnover of $3 billion. And
he eventually got a degree from Harvard in 1996.
The trucking
magnate says that reading felt like pushing a truck uphill. But he
learned to compensate for his weaknesses by playing to his strengths.
“I’m great with numbers, I can do them in my head quicker than a
calculator.” Not that he gave up on his deficiencies. “You have to keep
the mind working, applying yourself: drilling down and down,
practising.”
“Use it or lose it,” say renowned neuroscientist
Michael M. Merzenich, recently in Sydney for the Mind & Its
Potential conference, and psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of the
international bestseller on neuroplasticity The Brain That Changes Itself.
They maintain the brain has the capacity to grow, change, rewire itself
and develop new talents. When you switch on one area, the whole brain
is stimulated to grow. They advocate going back to university, or doing
any course, to keep expanding neural pathways.
It’s true. Like
Peter Fox, I took myself back to uni and did a masters in the very
technical field of video-making, requiring editing suites, camera craft,
spatial awareness and lots of buttons. I explained to my tutors that I
had a learning disability — and needed to be told and shown things three
to four times. They’d laugh and laugh as I battled through, pressing
exactly the button they said not to press.
They said I was their
most entertaining student ever. But all of them helped me because they
said they admired that I never gave up (besides, I always brought them
chocolate). I did well and found my brain was better all around.
Associate
professor Angela Duckworth, who studied under Seligman and operates The
Duckworth Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, has examined the
interplay between grit and self-control. “Grit is the tendency to
sustain interest in and effort towards very long-term goals.
Self-control is the voluntary regulation of … impulses in the presence
of momentarily gratifying temptations,” she says.
I’ve interviewed many corporate leaders over the years for my book
The New Boy Network on the psychology of success. Many came from
war-torn countries, or had been in concentration camps, or came from
abusive families. As one man who escaped a prison camp said: “Despite
the odds, you just climb over the wall.”
Fox says part of his
success was to see what was lacking in himself, then hire people who
could do better. He says: “Don’t fight where you can’t win.”
Fox
says: “I got through school eventually because I surrounded myself with
people who had the abilities I didn’t. I learned by association. I also
learned never to give up — true persistence.”
His advice to others
with any disability: “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. When you are
young and told not to touch the hotplate, what do you do? We are trying
to push ourselves to excess and how can that mean not falling over and
making mistakes? Make them, don’t be afraid. Why are there rubbers on
the back of pencils?”
When two former farmers started
selling ugly fruit and vegetables that would usually end up in the bin,
supermarkets chains scoffed at them. Now the firm launched by Nicolas Chabanne and Renan Even is being
hailed as a commercial success, having sold 10,000 tonnes of twisted
courgettes, deformed carrots, strangely shaped tomatoes and other such
produce in only eight months. The success of their business,
called Les Gueules Cassees (The Smashed Gobs), is so great that they
have starting distributing deformed camembert, which, too, are finding
purchasers. The initiative comes amid widespread calls to cut food
waste in a country once proud of its ability to turn imperfectly shaped
ingredients into fine dishes. The two men launched the initiative last
year after Mr Even discovered that many of the strawberries produced in
his native Vaucluse were rejected by supermarkets because of their
shape.’ “In a garden, you pick the fruit because it’s ripe, not because it’s
27mm in diameter,” he said. “But supermarkets cannot stand these visual
flaws.” Denouncing the waste, Les Gueules Cassees scoured
wholesalers for fruit and vegetables destined for their bin. The firm
buys them cheap and offers them to retailers. Supermarket buyers
reacted with horror at first, but trials proved such a hit the big
chains changed their minds. Mr Chabanne says that more than 5,000
retailers now stock his products. The “smashed gob” fruit and
vegetables are priced 30 per cent less than standard produce, and have
proved popular in poor districts suffering from high levels of
unemployment. But they have also been a hit among wealthier consumers
who see the purchase of ugly produce as an ecological act.
Do you miss space?
Not really. I lived it extremely fully, flew three times in space
and served 21 years in the Astronaut Office at NASA. It’s like you’re on
top of Kilimanjaro and someone says, “Do you miss climbing?” I’m on the
top; I can see things more clearly now. You’re a Canadian who
spent five months as International Space Station commander in 2012-13.
What steps did you climb to get there? Scuba diver, downhill ski instructor, a fighter pilot intercepting Soviet bombers, a test pilot. When you performed David Bowie’s Space Oddity in space, masses of people began to follow you on social media. Why were you so savvy? Long
before that, when NASA announced that mission’s crew, one of my kids
said, “How come it’s not in the news?” I said, “What do you mean? It’s
on the radio, the TV, the newspapers.” They said, “Yeah, but not the
news we read. We’re on Reddit and Twitter and Facebook – can we put it
on there for you?” That really got it started. You have 1.35 million followers on Twitter. What’s the attraction?
It’s a two-way conversation that can be extremely open and honest and
all round the planet. The great beauty is you’re not forcing it down
anybody’s throat, you just say, “I am doing some really cool stuff here,
you’re welcome to join me. You don’t have to buy anything, or subscribe
to anything.” Your belief in openness springs from the first moon landing, doesn’t it? The
Soviets at the time would only tell people when they had been
successful at something, so it became a stunt instead of a human
experience. Whereas the Americans for better or for worse broadcast it
live. It was the original reality television, unscripted. It set the
standard for me, that if you’re going to do something magnificent, don’t
wait until it turns out nicely – let people judge for themselves. You talk about “thinking like an astronaut”. What does that mean?
It applies to how you deal with danger in your life, how you deal with
fear, and the relationship between the two. How do you prepare to do
something for a long time that will probably never happen (as astronauts
have to) and yet still enjoy what you are doing along the way? So, how do we think like astronauts?
At the outset you might identify what you dream about being. But how do
you convert a fond wish into reality? What are the discrete steps you
take? You don’t get chosen as an astronaut, you turn yourself into one.
That applies to everyone. Who inspires you? When someone
finds out what my profession is, all normal conversation stops. I learnt
long ago to talk about the other person instead. The delightful
side-effect of that was learning that every person has done heroic
things. It makes me stay optimistic and inspired. You have an album of songs you recorded in space coming out. What’s behind that?
I’ve played in bands for 20 years. The key part is to try and
understand what you are doing through art and to express it that way. You travel constantly. What happened to settling down?
My wife and I have a home in Toronto. But I teach at a university,
there are book tours, I work with schools almost every day and people
ask me to speak all around the world. I was incredibly privileged to be
able to do this thing on behalf of so many other people, so it’s just a
choice of what do I want to do with that experience. I think it’s the
fifth time I’ve “retired”. By Jill Rowbotham With many thanks to The Australian Chris Hadfield’s Amazing Photos of Earth from The International Space Station
