For followers of automotive art, tonight’s episode of Discovery’s Overhaulin’: That 70′s Van, features a collaboration between Chip Foose and Mike Lavallee. Foose’s subtle blend of blues and black, together with Lavallee’s “real flames” is absolutely breathtaking. This is a must see.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
The Best Thing About This Year’s “State of the Union”
…it shortened a horrific American Idol by an hour.
And yes, I’m saying this BEFORE the speech.
Update: Okay, not a bad speech all in all. Beautiful Wife loved Laura looking at him mouthing, “Thanks Babe.”
Bob Woodruff
Ya know…if the media would spend a half, a quarter, a scintilla of the amount of time reporting on soldiers, marines, airman and sailors wounded in the line of duty as they have on Bob Woodruff, I may have more respect for them.
It’s like all of a sudden there’s an IED problem in Iraq. Really? Gosh, thanks kids, never noticed it before. What would we have done without Bob Woodruff’s experience opening our eyes? (/end dripping sarcasm)
Center for the Intrepid
I take my medical appointments and BAMC (Brook Army Medical Center) and work nearby, so I have had the opportunity to watch this complex being built.The writer of the linked article about it is the local papers’ military reporter– he is one of the good guys, been embedded in Iraq, and worships at the shrine of Ernie Pyle and all. I’ve emailed him back and forth about military stuff, but I think he is too much of a gentleman to put the real answers about why this place is being funded by donations;
—-It would take damn near forever for our solons to get it in gear and approve this through the regular channels—
—-The usual suspects (those who have that silly-ass bumper sticker on their cars about schools getting everything they need and the military having to hold bake sales) would bitch about a lavish, gold-plated state of the art anything benefitting military people—
—-While military medicine does have their showplaces, most medical care takes place in rather spartan facilities, many decades old and built strictly for utility and to be used by many, many people; this kind of very specialized and state of the art facility is more often lavished on high-end athletes and movie stars—
It’s going to be a beautiful looking building, though, and all the more valued by the troops who will use it, and their families.
Currently Reading: Prayers For the Assassin
I’ve just started reading Prayers for the Assassin but I thought I’d put a couple of first impressions down before I got too deep into it.
So far it reads like a whodunit/where’dshego set in an America that’s been conquered, mostly through non-violent means, by Islam. I’m liking it more than I thought I would which suprises me. I had prejudged it in my head as simply another attempt at some sort of Twilight Zone episode writ topical and large, but I find myself more intrigued the more I get into it.
“What if?” is a hard game to play. Get too out far out and you lose the readers. Get too matter-of-fact and you risk boring us to death. Ferrigno doesn’t beg the question of how Islam took over in the United States, he simply tells the story and in the process he reveals how it happened without taking over the current story. A neat trick.
I’ll leave it at that until I’ve finished, but I’m already thinking about turning in early to read a couple extra chapters tonight and I don’t do that very often.
BTW: I love this mock news site that they’ve set up to further imerse ourselves in the world of the book.
NOTE: Thanks Kevin for checking my spelling.
Because It Annoys Me (060130)
I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. If I see a comment that has nothing to do with the post it’s attached to on MY posts, I delete them. I understand if the conversation evolves somehow from one point to another, but for goshsakes, don’t hijack one of our posts for one of your own rants or positions. Wait until we talk about it, or, better yet, get your own blog.
And if you need to complain about ads or a techie issues, simply email one of us, preferably Kevin since he likes people more than I do, most of the time, if he’s had his meds, otherwise… It should be as simple as clicking on one of our names.
And if you’re not using the Firefox Browser then I probably can’t help you anyway because my first answer is going to be, get Firefox and most of your browser problems will solve themselves.
mmmm’k?
Thanks.
Caption This One (060127) Winner
The winner and clearly a man after my own … heart is:
SFC B with: “Laura Bush prepares to demonstrate how her third date with George ended.”
Hey, you want better quality captions, play the game.
Air Taxi
The automotive industry throughout the late seventies and into the eighties underwent a major shift in it’s supply practices, outsourcing many products and services that it had traditionally built and performed in-house. One consequence of this was that the suppliers were required to attend frequent on-site meetings at various auto maker facilities, many of which were located in steel belt cities such as Detroit, Toledo, etc. This presented somewhat of a logistical problem for our company, which is located in the corn belt, over 100 miles from the nearest major airport. Not only was the travel inconvenient, but fielding the appropriate number of troops (believe me, numbers mattered in some of these meetings) was not inexpensive when considering airfare, lodging, etc. Another issue was that glitches in the then-new supply chain management technique of just-in-time delivery often meant that delivery of critical components was needed in a matter of hours to avert a line shutdown. A friend and local entrepreneur earned a pilot’s license, leased some ground for a small airstrip, and bought two or three Piper Aztecs to provide the solution to these problems.
The Piper Aztec is a twin engine (five passenger + pilot) plane that, although not terribly fast with a cruising speed of around 180 knots, was virtually indestructible and could fly even when considerably overloaded. Our pilot, we’ll call him Charlie (not his real name), was a partying sort who often flew on just a few hours sleep (I know this for fact; we often closed the bars together). Generally, he would take off, check all of the instruments, set the autopilot, and take a nice nap until we got about 30 minutes from our intended destination – he had a pretty remarkable internal alarm clock. Charlie also viewed weather advisories with a grain of salt, leading to a number of rather interesting trips with often some spectacular views of major storm cells in close proximity. Believe when I say that a cloud formation that rises to thirty or forty thousand feet, when viewed at ten thousand feet altitude and only a mile or two away, is very awe inspiring. Being sandwiched between two of them is downright terrifying.
Continue reading
When the Going Gets Wierd
The weird turn pro, and apparently write a memoir about it, which is all very nice when it sells a LOT of copies, and the writer becomes FAMOUS and sells a mega-jiga-million copies, and everyone remembers that they knew you when… maybe. Journalistic fabrication is so last year (Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, whatsisface at the NYT), the current flave of the moment must be the memoir…. One’s own life, but with with improvements.
The fun begins when everyone who knew you when— the people next door, brothers and sisters, employers, co-workers, ex-spouses, friends and former friends score a copy and begin to realize that there is a whole ‘nother reality reflected there, one with which they were completely unacquainted. So having the Oprah Winfrey/James Frey imbroglio all this week— hell, even Cpl./Sgt. Blondie has heard of it, and she is more of an HGTV fan than anything. The lesson ought to be for memoirists to linger meaningfully in the general vicinity of verifiable facts, either that or wait to write it all when everyone else is dead and can’t argue the point with you. If you really can’t wait that long, perhaps it would be less embarrassing to just call it fiction, loosely based on your own life…. Even if the stuff that really happens is sometimes stranger than you can ever make up.
Then, of course, on the second page of the paper this morning, there is a story about another writer— somewhat less well known since Oprah didn’t personally have to rip him a new one on national television— who wasn’t a Native American at all. What is it with wanting to be a Native American, all that mysticism and wilderness wisdom? And Timothy Barris wasn’t the first, (Grey Owl, anyone?) only being a porn writer may have been a little less embarrassing than the resume and club membership of this best-selling but unfortunately fraudulent Indian. And Carlos Castenada and Rigoberta Menchu still have passionate defenders willing to deny or discount certain uncomfortable findings.
Really, I feel quite sorry for people who begin with a little fib, a touch of exaggeration and eventually wind up believing it… some of them do not take contradiction well, and it is way too late in the game to get a writer and memoirist like Lillian Hellman a little painful cross-examination (But Mary McCarthy tried, anyway.)
Fraudulent memoirists like Frey and Barris may be a passing evil, best selling or not. Grey Owl and Asa Carter, although not as advertised, were possessed of a lovely and sympathetic writing style and may even have done good with their output, in the long run. But Menchu and Hellman, with the deeply politicized aspect to their writings and public personas probably have not. After contemplating how their books inflamed or warped the perceptions of certain public issues, it is a positive relieve to contemplate Ern Malley and Penelope Ashe, two last literary frauds which were done for no more reason than to make a point, and for their perpetrators to have a little fun putting one over; A self-consciously literary magazine called “Angry Penguins” is just begging to be sent up, and as for “Naked Came the Stranger”… it was proved in 1969, and for a hundred years before and ever since, that trash with a naked woman on the front cover will sell.
(PS My own memoir is still for sale, with the following corrections noted: Mom says the Toby-dog got stuck on the fence in the morning, not evening… and Pippy says that her rabbits’ name was Bernadette Bunny. Not just Bunny.
Please buy a copy! I had a small fenderbender with the VEV, which broke the front grille and both headlights, and the insurance company probably won’t pay for anything but junking the VEV entirely, so I am having to pay for all the purely cosmetic repairs out of pocket! Thanks!)
Stupid Kondracke
Today on FNC’s The Beltway Boys – on the topic of Google’s dealings with both the Justice Department and China, Mort Kondracke said “would Yahoo cave [to the Chinese government]? I don’t think so.”
Well, guess what Mort, Yahoo already caved, then they sold out.
If you are going to do business in another nation, you have to tailor your policies to match the laws, regulations, and political whims of that nation. That’s how it’s always been – that’s how it always will be.
Verizon’s Big FTTP Push
Verizon is currently the leading telco in the push to displace the cable companies as one-source voice-data-television supplier in markets they serve. They are doing this with their FiOS fiber-to-the-premises service, eclipsing the data rate capability of cable (DSL is typically half the speed of cable, or less.). They are currently offering it in neighboring Huntington Beach, I plan to get it (replacing my DSL, which runs about 700-800 kbs) when they introduce it here in Westminster. (Although I will likely keep my two-wire telephone, in case of power-out emergencies.)
Marc Strassman of Etopia Media has an interview with Verizon spokesperson Bill Kula.
Scooby Doo Rocks out to The Ramones
Since Boyo is nine, I often get to enjoy current cartoons where many grownups may miss some of what’s going on in that arena. Okay, fine, I watch cartoons with my son sometimes. I’m all for the current trend going on at Cartoon Network where they’re once again producing cartoons with some very grown-up humor that goes right over the kids’ heads and smack into our funny bones. When Grim from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy awoke from a dream saying, “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.” and Billy was chanting “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” I almost lost a mouthful of tuna salad. A Talking Heads reference was not expected, and I loved it. And last night when Billy unearths a frozen Fred Flintstone from his front yard? Funny stuff.
Yesterday morning, before school, Boyo was watching a new Scooby Doo cartoon. I’m not big on the newer Scooby cartoons, the formula was old when I was watching them and the artwork has gotten downright sad. However, something stuck out in this one. As the gang was fleeing from a giant sea monster, Daphne surfing a 10 footer with the rest of the crew on her shoulders, Rockaway Beach by The Ramones was playing. Not some cheezy, producer written, studio musician performed psuedo 70s rock tune, Rockaway Beach by The Ramones.
I don’t know who’s behind this, and I don’t care, but I think it must be celebrated, it must be cheered, it must be encouraged. My son’s musical tastes are currently centered around the soundtrack from The Chronic (WHAT) kulls of Narnia to Evanescence to Enya, who we played in his nursery to get him to sleep some nights. Any more good music that he can get exposed to that doesn’t come from us (because, what do parents know about music when you’re nine?) is well appreciated.
Bravo Scooby Doo. Keep up the good work.