Henry Luce’s (far-right, jingoist, unreliable) The March of Time radio show provided extensive coverage of Italy’s incursion into Ethiopia.
In a serendipitous voltpunk twist, the August 28, 1935 show tells the (fictional) account of a conversation between Mussolini and Marconi, regarding the wartime and peacetime uses of a ray gun Marconi has developed.
An unknown number of local teenagers likes to hide out in our yard and smoke dope. The smoke drifts in our windows, and eventually one of our daughters says, “What’s that smell?” Then I have to go out and stalk around sniffing the air and listening for giggling from the bushes. When I do this, I look EXACTLY like Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace, right down to the weird mustache.
I spent a chunk of the day reading about sword making and sago processing, for use in the Srivijaya section of the Derby Ram story. I now know the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, I can tell you how to produce several types of crucible steel, and I know how to make pempek. Mmm, pempek.
In the course of doing some research for the Pismo story, I came across the following items:
Town Gas: Evidently, natural gas was not in common use in the U.S. until after the Second World War. Each town manufactured its own gas– town gas– out of what was available: most commonly coal, but also rutabagas. (I would use rutabagas at any rate.)
Wood Gas: A cursory googling will yield a number of cars retrofitted to run on wood. Big tanks of wood.
Homemade Gasoline: This seems obvious in retrospect, but if you have a source of crude oil in your backyard and you rig up a makeshift still, you can make your own gasoline. It’s easier than making moonshine.