Wendy's EXCELLENT adventure—top primary vote-getter in 73rd AD

From the OC Reg; info from Registrar of Voters

Gabriella (D) and Brough (R) will
advance to the general election

     ...[Wendy] Gabriella had the best chance of riding the ideological divide in the Republican Party into Sacramento if Petrilla or Bryson had been nominated. Brough makes it a harder road. But she’s a bright and engaging figure and he apparently has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way — I heard people wonder if his coming out of an apparently resigned slumber to almost overtake Gabriella for the top spot in the primary was some sort of ballot tabulation error. Gabriella has worked hard and is not just another Democratic sacrificial lamb in South OC. If Brough doesn’t do a really good job of consolidating the party — and he’s going to need good luck to make that happen — Gabriella could be the sort of shocking Democratic success coming out of OC than Sharon Quirk-Silva was in 2012, except even more unlikely. She has already gotten off to a decent start! Anyone in touch with Jesse Petrilla, so we can find out what he thinks about his coming in third? –Greg Diamond in Wednesday’s Orange Juice Blog

My love of old contraptions is sparked, like the Hindenburg

     I was watching "American Pickers," and the boys came across an old "shave ice" machine—somewhere in the midwest, I think. It was manufactured in Japan and it sported an image of a Zeppelin, among other things. Pretty odd. Nobody on the show seemed to know much about it.

     The way the contraption works is this: a block of ice is positioned below the plate at the end of the screw. As one cranks the lower plate that spins the ice, one tightens the wheel above, forcing the ice slowly downward. A blade below the lower plate shaves the ice, depositing the shavings underneath.

     I did  a little research and came across the above image, which seems to match what Mike and Frank came across—I recalled the name "Tomitashiki" on the front of it.

     Evidently, "Tomitashiki" or "Tomita Siki" (see below) manufactured and sold these things pre-war. "Shave ice" treats, it seems, were made popular in the U.S. via Hawaii, which, as you know, has long had strong cultural connections with Japan.

Why a Zeppelin?

     I have learned nothing about the reason for displaying a Zeppelin on the machine. Obviously,  the Zeppelin company was German, and, ahem, the Germans and Japanese did seem to make connections in the late Thirties. Still, why display a blimp on an ice shaving machine? Maybe it was simply an iconic "modern" gismo of its time. (The Zeppelin's iconic status changed, of course, in 1937, when the Hindenburg crashed and burned. But that tragedy was more about the politics of fuels like hydrogen and helium than about the viability of dirigibles and the like.) (1929: Graf Zeppelin flies around the world. Stops in Japan.)

     I found an image of a similar model below.

     Very cool.