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Dark-roasted Blend gives plenty of images (as usual) of smoke-belching, steam-filled tractors. We are particularly enamored of the wheels.

A gallery of photos from the late, lamented 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - The Ride

I got to ride on this… ride in 1987. It was beginning to be dilapidated. The Carousel of Progress was still around at that point, too….

1985 car, a Yugo, run by 125-year-old technology — wood-gas.

The Antartic Snow Cruiser was built in 1939 for driving at the South Pole.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as expected, and South Pole highways never came to fore. Which is probably a good thing.

Thanks to Things Magazine.

A gentleman walks, or a gentleman rides. A velocipede is hardly a device for a gentleman; but we are not quite sure how to classify the Hudspith Steam Bicycle:

It all began in 1972 when I first had the notion of making a steam bike, thus combining my interest in cycles and motor cycles with my fascination and love of steam. I reallsed that in order to be able to see the water level, the boiler and engine would have to go in front of the rider. I experimented using a pannier bag loaded with four house-bricks hung from the side of a rack, mounted over the front wheel of a bicycle. Finding that I could still ride OK, providing the load was rigidly fixed, I desigued a tall, narrow boiler, to keep the centre of gravity as close in to the wheel as possible. The next few years were spent obtaining the materials and means of making the boiler and it took me until 1989 to complete it in its initial form. It is a semi-flash type, having a lower section of concentric spiral water tubes fed by a central downcomer, surmounted by a fire-tube header which has 24 × 3/8″ flues in a 4″ diameter, copper cylindrical shell. The whole assembly is silver soldered throughout, and contains less than 1 litre of water in total. The boiler is fired from below by a pressure-fed paraffin burner of the Optimus type.[….]

While the Feng Shui of precise Obelisk placement may bedevil many a gentleman’s spare time in His Garden, there are those of us who are More Concerned with the transportation of said obelisks. Fortuantely, the the Design Observer (oddly enough, but they must be some sort of “Renaissance” chappies) shows us pictures of Moving the Axum Obelisk, cc. 1880.

The Flying Cars Tribe has parked us for an inordinate amount of time in the lot of Future Car, wherein there is lots to see and mourn for:

Motor cars are the symbol of the American dream and their design is a reflection of American society, which means that the 1970s had some serious problems. The Space Age had much more fun with the automobile. Then cars were Yank tanks with steel breasts and were built so solid that the difference between them and light armour was a point of view. Engines were ever more powerful and speed seemed certain to hit the asymptote of the curve any day. Fins were everywhere and fins were king.

Going up (in a hierarchical parlance) brings us to Tales of Future Past with even more stories and images from the bygone days that should be now.

One of the pleasures of roaming the electronic internet is a plethora of diversions that tug you hither and yon. A brief perigrination can lead one into entirely unexpected quadrants of digital backwater, exposing hitherto unseen wonders. Some, I believe, have referred to it as surfing. We heartily endorse it.

This morning’s wanderings led us to Things Magazine, or at least the electronic portal of said magazine. This collection of seemingly-random arcana pointed us towards a charming set of Vintage Transportation Advertisements, mostly from the 1960s. Some further surfing (isn’t that an interesting word!), will lead one to more advertising pages on radio and television and portable audio products.

Surfing. We think it will catch on, yes we do.

Robby Dohmen has put up an electronic gallery of his classic car paintings (framed in rusty steel in “real life”). Not, we joysfully hasten to add, in postmodern hyper-restored “splendor”, no — in all of their forgotten, rain-washed, rust-streaked, abandoned glory.

This also seems like an appropriate time to mention King Crimson’s “Dig Me”.

Those eagle-eyed wags at Endgadget have spotted a Human-powered helicopter that’s going to try to capture a $20,000 prize by hovering in a ten meter zone, at the height of three meters for one minute. Over twenty unsuccessful attempts have been made, the Gadget-endians report.

Not to be confused, we caution you, with an auto-gyro (which is not human-powered—nor, strictly, a helicopter) or the Gossamer Albatross, which was not a helocopter, abeit a fine example of human-powered flight in the age of hi-tech polymers.