Today’s selection was inspired by the UPS guy who delivered a package to my house. The package contained a brake assembly for my skates. Long time readers may recall that prior to the horrible waste of taxpayer money that lead to the current construction of the new Vikings stadium here in Minneapolis, I very much liked to go skating at the aging but perfectly good Metrodome. RollerDome was great fun and good exercise, and now it‘s been torn down so that we can spend millions of dollars building another structure to take its place and perform the same exact function, but supposedly look better while doing so. We call this progress in spite of the fact that the roadways leading to this shiny new stadium from all over the city are cracked, disintegrating, and pocked with pot holes that can rattle the fillings out of your teeth when you drive over them… but I digress.
The point was supposed to be about my skates. I didn’t have brakes on them because at RollerDome, the floors are pretty smooth and it’s not too much wear to just jut out one foot and drag the side of the wheels against the floor in order to slow to a stop. But there’s no more Dome, and I’ve been itching to take this pair of skates out on the trails. I have an older pair of inlines that I usually use outside, but they’re not nearly as fast as the RollerDome pair. So, I ordered a brake kit in order to spare myself from having to buy new wheels when I wreck these from dragging them across rough pavement. I mounted the brake kit on the skates. Here is the finished product.
These skates are a fitness skate that uses what’s called a hi-lo set up, which means it uses different size wheels on the front vs. the back positions which is balanced out by the drop in axle placement. I run 100mm wheels on the back and 90mm wheels on the front, all packed with high performance speed skate bearings. They’re not racing skates, but they are fast. This particular skate is made my K2 and its model name is the Electra.
You know who else made a product with the model name of Electra? Buick. And the name isn’t all that it has in common with my skates. The one we’re going to look at today is also pretty fast. But before we delve into that, let’s talk about the origin of the name Electra. Those who have read my post covering the Honda Odyssey will recall that we’ve touched on mythology and Homer’s Odyssey before. Electra is also tied in with the Trojan war, only she’s no relative of Odysseus. Electra was the daughter of King Agamemnon, a guy who wanted to go to war so badly, he sacrificed one of his daughters; a child named Iphigenia, to the gods in exchange for favorable sailing weather to head out in his war ships. That didn’t go over so well with his wife, Queen Clytemnestra, mother of the now dead child, Iphigenia, and of Agamemnon’s other kids, Electra and her brother, Orestes. So, while Agamemnon was off having his war, Clytemnestra took a lover named Aegisthus. Neither were too happy to see Agamemnon arrive home in one piece years later. Worse yet, King Agamemnon , the guy who not only traded the life of his child for smooth sailing, further disrespected his queen by showing up back home with a new baby momma: a concubine named Cassandra with whom he had made twin boys. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, and Clytemnestra’s rage boiled over. When the dust settled, both Agamemnon and Cassandra were dead, either at Clytemnestra’s order or by her very own hand -the story varies.
Which brings us to Electra… the original “Daddy’s Little Girl”. Apparently not too bothered by the sacrifice of her sister, Iphigenia, Electra was a staunch supporter of her father and was royally angered by his murder. Myth, vs. Sophocles’ version of Electra’s story, vs. Euripides version of the story has this playing out in different ways, but ultimately, Electra either conspires with or has a hand in the murder of her mother, Queen Clytemnestra, as well as her step dad, Aegisthus.
This story is the basis of the “Electra Complex”, a Neo-Freudian theory developed by Carl Jung that more or less says that in a girl’s development, there exists within the child a kind of psychosexual sense of competition with her mother figure for the possession of her father figure. This complex has its male equivalence in the “Oedipal Complex”.. it is also said to be resolved positively when the child fully identifies with its same sex parent. Women who do not overcome their Electra complexes are said to maintain a fixation on their fathers and will choose mates for themselves who are similar to their father in many aspects. I’m not sure what that should mean about a woman to prefers to be single, so perhaps I’ve completely fallen off the Electra complex scale… oh well, I’ve still got the skates -and pictures of a 1965 Buick Electra convertible.
And so, since you’ve endured my tangents from motorcycle storage to the Metrodome, to rollerblades, to Greek mythology to Neo-Freudian psychology, the reward is that we are now finally on to the Buick Electra.
Electra is a name that Buick used in various forms from 1959 on up through 1990. The name plate replaced their Roadmaster model in 1959, and was itself replaced by the Park Avenue in 1990. In 1965, the year of the Astro Blue convertible we’re looking at tonight, the Electra was at the start of its 3rd generation. Standard power was from a 401 cubic inch (6.6 L) “Nailhead” V8 that produces 325 HP. That’s what this very Electra features.
-Side note, and not really a tangent, so you know, you can’t count it against me… The engine was referred to as a Nailhead because of the especially small valves (nail-like in their appearance) that were situated vertically and were teamed up with a cam shaft that lifted the valves quite high, which in turn, produced exceptional torque figures for its day.
Anyway, an Electra could also be had with a 425 cubic inch engine that when equipped with a four barrel carburetor, could produce 340 HP. But, as previously stated, this one has a 401 Nailhead, so it is most definitely faster than my speedy little inline skates. It also features a “Super Turbine Drive” automatic transmission, factory air conditioning -which isn’t much to brag about because all that means is that it can’t be recharged without upgrading the system to accept a newer coolant, and only 32,000 miles on the odometer. It was available for purchase at Ellingson Classic Cars in Rogers for $22,950, but they don‘t have it any longer, which tells me that somewhere, somebody spent some money to buy their very own Electra complex.
I’m not really sure why Buick, or K2 for that matter, decided that Electra was a good name for anything. After all, the name originally belonged to a gal who committed a shameful act of matricide, and step-patricide (if that’s a thing when it’s in step form). Though, I do suppose the acorn didn’t fall too far from the tree in ye olde Electra complex. After all, Electra was avenging the death of a father who had committed filicide in exchange for nice weather, and the other half of her genetic gene pool ended up killing a husband and his concubine, so it would seems Electra was not the product of good breeding. Well, regardless of whether or not Electra is a good name for products, the products that were named after her are in fact, good; the skates and the car.
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