Daydream Notes

Last time on "posts as big as airships" we read the background for a fantastic engineering competition, where private industry and the British Government would try to build the best airship, and the winner would get a nice fat contract to build four more airships to create a unique skyship airway system to connect the British Empire. We also met the R100, the scrappy underdog of the competition. Somehow, Vickers took a leaky hanger you could hide a cathedral in, some aluminum sheet, some Yorkshire farmers and almost no machines, and managed to construct a seven hundred foot airship that worked. The overdog when this project started was the R101. The men of the Royal Airship Works (RAW) had it all - a blank check and the overt support of their government in this competition, and the engineers of the Airship works saw the R101 as England's big chance to take the lead in LTA technology. The R101 flew before the R100, and did a minimal amount of flight testi...

I've been hard at work on part 2 on the R100 and R101 - it should be done soon - but I have to make a quick post about Life readings. I'm in the middle 1960s now - the middle of the decade is filled with news about Vietnam, mostly - but something weird is happening with the ads. They are becoming more overtly sexist - or at least a lot more gender normative. Not really sure why. It could be ads are targeting specific genders more, and naturally reveals more sexist and normative attitudes. Sex of course was always used to sell things, but in the sixties it becomes a lot more...overt. If I were an academic I could probably explain it all, but all I really have to say about this is that I'm a little surprised. I figured these things would get better, not worse as time went on. But as it is, the 1930s and World War 2 actually look better than what came after. Maybe it is just another example of American culture after the normative 1950s going every which way at once. ...