Word: bleriot
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With its dignified rooms, passing from grand to aedicular scale and back again, Palazzo Grassi is an excellent place to look at art. The show has art and a good deal else, including such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace...
...much like a Rugger match or punting on the Thames, Britons were having a mighty good time just the same. Half a century ago, London's Daily Mail put up a prize for the first airplane flight across the English Channel, paid French Aeronaut Louis Bleriot $5,000 for buzzing the 31 miles from Calais to Dover in his tiny (25 h.p.) monoplane in 37 minutes. Last week the Daily Mail could think of no better way to celebrate the anniversary than to have a cross-Channel race, this time between London's midtown Marble Arch and Paris...
...contestants participated in the fun and frolic. A few tried it in the 1909 way. Frenchman Jean Salis, 63, wobbled across the Channel in his 484-lb. replica of Bleriot's monoplane ("It was like sitting on a fluttering leaf"), eventually made it from Arc to Arch in 12 hr. 17 min. 22 sec. Clutching a pet tortoise named Fangio, Health Faddist Dr. Barbara Moore Pataleewa, 55, set out from Marble Arch on foot, switched to a motorcycle, hopped a plane from Croydon to Le Touquet, on the English Channel, then ran most of the 135 miles to Paris...
...patched up an old Bleriot airplane, which had crashed near his village, and took off from the same roof. Crashing in flames atop a nearby haystack, he counted only a few broken bones. His lust for speed swiftly led him to motorcycles and racing cars. He was happiest when he could feel wheels whirling beneath him, their treads screaming along some treacherous road...
Boxing Kangaroo. To keep his palace in the public eye, "King" Selfridge grabbed all the publicity he could (Bleriot's little plane was on display in the store the day after it flew the Channel), advertised as no London merchant had ever advertised before. Selfridge's offered customers "101 unusual services," including expert umbrella rolling, cricket bat oiling, pipe cleaning, wig-making, wart removing. The store's "Great Luncheon Rooms" offered Southern U.S. cooking, such as "Fried Chicken, Maryland Cream Chicken, Corn...