Here's Don........

http://cgi.ebay.com/BATTERY-FROM-URINE- ... 240%3A1318
This guy is a one man band of cool and weird things.....I've listed one of the funny ones......eBay handle:
smitty1752

He has plans for everything...I mean everything. Tres Cool!
Caiyros

Wow, nice find! Added to my bookmarks. Thanks.

Brill-thanks for sharing!

When I was a kid, there was a type of "Grown-Up" who was usually a male who was honest and genuine as the day is long and was a basement inventor and fixer. It was a quite common occurance. TV busted..."Hell, let me get my tools...I'll be right back...." or "I'll need to take this with me...it'l be fixed in a day or so..."

And Also, us kids would hang out and help fire up a Tesla Coil...or help pour concrete for the bomb shelter.....yes there were a lot of them in the 1950s...all home made.....One of these guys ( "Uncle Willie" real name Steve Forrest - helped me build my first jet engine...and helped me build my Heathkit short wave radio. My real Uncle - Uncle David (Kaiser) showed me how to repair motor boat motors and test radio tubes with a tube tester. My grandfather, a real inventor (1st fully successful bloodpressure gauge, the Recording BArometer, Candy thermometers, and books on Weather Forcasting) taught me how to take a watch apart, use a lathe, do Hand letter scripts, and how to use a movie camera for continuity, etc.

Everyone I knew, knew men like these mentioned, some of them had become Edisions and Teslas, while others just loved to tinker. There were a million Tom Swift books published...Tom Swift and His Photo-Telephone (pub 1912)...Tom Swift and His Sky-Train (pub 1913) ...Today we have photo-telephones all over the place...And The US and Russia have had sky-trains orbiting the earth.

Girls were allowed in but at that time there were few....My best childhood friend, Tink (from the family of Enrico Fermi) was into this sort of thing...one summer ..using scrape lumber we built a full size underground room...completely buried....we asked a guy at the lumber yard if it could have be done..."Yes, here are some things you have to know to build it and test it safely, give me your dimensions and I will leave some "scrape" lumber out for you each day...and we built it and it worked.....

Those were the days when things could be built and fixed...When a lumber yard would help 2 14 year olds build a dream, and when your neighbor could actually help you, and you them........

There were backyard telescope up many a night the day after Sputnik was launched....Long John Nebel had a late night radio show where he talked with people who claimed to have ridden in flying saucers.....

One home inventor in New Jersey somewhere near Fort Monmouth, "rebuilt" a garden chair and using surplus high altitude weather balloons took off and got into trouble for flying over an airport.

The day after I heard Buddy Holly's song Peggy Sue, I went down to the local Appliance Store, walked past the washing macines and portable radios, and order the "45" (45 RPM record) and 3 days later was playing it on my record player.

My grandmother, would mail a letter before 10 AM inviting her friend (today it would be called lesbian lover) to tea at 4 pm. the letter would be delivered at 2 pm (except on Wednesdays, Saturdays, & Sundays) and her friend would show up at 4 pm.

Wednesdays were half-day workdays as were Saturdays. You couldn't get a haircut at the barber shop after 12:30 PM on Wednesdays. Pharmacies usually closed down until 6 PM and then opened for a few hours......

The weekends were quiet....sometimes in the summer, I would ride my bike down the back streets. Front doors were open with only the screen doors closed (not locked)...and I could hear people playing the piano....some badly....some well..."They're really pounding on Debussy's Claire de Lune...hehe..."

I knew the old man with the cane and the big brimmed hat...Billy Bacon Evans...poet...activist...and screwy scientist..."Hay take a look at this..I found a dead bird, and before I buried it, I cut off its foot and removed the outer areas....see when I pull this teeny-tiny muscle, one of the claws close....its God's miracle...take a look...." and I did. He had a book sticking out of his brown coat pocket.

"Whats the book!"

"Oh that's the collected poems of Walt Whitman, a great man with a great Vision...."Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the 9th month midnight..." ya need ta be a little older to read this...but remember two names. They are: Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson....and a great woman Caroline Stephen ....."Criticism fades away, abashed in the presence of what is felt to be a real, however faltering, endeavor to open actual communication with the Father of Spirits, and with each other..." Humming cicadas....a 1947 dark green Nash Club Coupe backfired...."He needs a new muffler...time to go" said Billy.

It was time to bike over to Oliver's Newstand and get the latest copy of True magazine. When I got there, True was sold out, but I saw a Bantam paperback of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. It was in the spinner. I took it up to the counter with my 25 cents..."Ya sure ya wanna buy that kid, its a loooove story?"

"Yeah."

"OK"

and then over to the Rexall for a cold cherry coke, and then back on my bike riding, riding, rideing, the wind in my hair and kissing my face, the SUn watching Our every move, zipping around corners, careening, and careening, racing full blast through a real world, real world real, real, real world beginning to cry, knowing somehow, that someday this world would be gone. I could sense the enemy on the horizon and I wasn't ready for this.

And then I thought....

Caiyros
Copyright 2008