Popular Culture

It’s Always 1932

Iowahawk has a brief history of the hot rod:

Even back then Deuces were highly collectible. Car guys started hoarding them, heeding Mark Twain’s famous advice to “buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Strangely, though, they did start making Deuces anymore: high demand spawned an entire industry devoted to replica and restoration parts. Body repair panels and replica fiberglass Deuce bodies began appearing in the late 1960s, and are now available from dozens of suppliers, as are reproduction 1932 Ford frames. Recently several companies – such as Brookville Roadster and Dearborn Deuce – have introduced complete steel reproduction bodies. With a big enough budget, today you can make a pretty faithful steel recreation of a real 1932 Ford out of nothing but brand new parts. The paradoxical result is that 1932 Fords are more plentiful today than they were new. A scant 275,000 Fords rolled off the assembly line in 1932; today a greater number of “1932 Fords” are currently registered just in the state of California.

Popular Culture

It’s Always 1932

Iowahawk has a brief history of the hot rod:

Even back then Deuces were highly collectible. Car guys started hoarding them, heeding Mark Twain’s famous advice to “buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Strangely, though, they did start making Deuces anymore: high demand spawned an entire industry devoted to replica and restoration parts. Body repair panels and replica fiberglass Deuce bodies began appearing in the late 1960s, and are now available from dozens of suppliers, as are reproduction 1932 Ford frames. Recently several companies – such as Brookville Roadster and Dearborn Deuce – have introduced complete steel reproduction bodies. With a big enough budget, today you can make a pretty faithful steel recreation of a real 1932 Ford out of nothing but brand new parts. The paradoxical result is that 1932 Fords are more plentiful today than they were new. A scant 275,000 Fords rolled off the assembly line in 1932; today a greater number of “1932 Fords” are currently registered just in the state of California.

Political Commentary

Dispatch From Fantasy Land

Kos:

“It was a time that was very stifling for liberal voices in the American landscape,” he remembers. “No one could criticize the president because it was considered treasonous to criticize the president in time of war.” But as an Army veteran who served in artillery logistics in the first gulf war, he felt he could question the rush to combat with impunity. “I vowed my life for the right to criticize our leaders. Nobody was going to tell me I could or could not criticize anybody.”

Yes, I recall well the night all the dissenters were rounded up and sent to the work camps, with just the scraps of clothes on their backs–the wails of anguish, the cries for missing loved ones. Just a few brave souls, veterans like Markos Zuniga, were willing to stand up to the man, and speak truth to power, in defiance of the storm troopers.

—

It’s funny, he probably said this with a straight face, and the Newsweek reporter sees no need to align it with reality. Other than Ann Coulter, I recall very few people being accused of “treason” for “criticizing the president” (and even in her case, I think that the charge was a little more involved than that). Hell, I criticized the president–I still do. What he means is that he (and many others) weren’t allowed to spout inanities and insanities issued from the depths of their dementia and Bush derangement without being criticized for it.

Sorry, Kos, but the rest of us have free speech rights, too.

War Commentary

Perspective

Whenever you hear someone talk about 2500 deaths in Iraq over three years, recall (or learn about), almost ninety years ago, the Battle of the Somme:

The first day of the battle, codenamed Z-Day, was generally accepted to be the worst of them all, with some battalions suffering losses of more than 90 per cent.

The Battle of the Somme was supposed to be won by the Allies on that first day of July. It was partly thanks to this overconfidence that the generals allowed Malins access to the trenches. Instead, the battle lasted until November – long after the finished film had been screened at home. By the end of the offensive, there were more than one million casualties from both sides. After five months of bitter fighting, the Allies had advanced just five miles.

As horrific as the battle was for the British troops who suffered and died there, it cost hundreds of thousands of French and German lives as well. One German officer famously described the Somme as “the muddy grave of the German field army”.

Among those to experience the horrors of the battle from within the trenches were a young JRR Tolkien, later to write the epic Lord of the Rings, the poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, future British Prime Minister Anthony Eden – and an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler.

Space

Only One Shopping Day Left

…until the registration rates at this year’s Return to the Moon conference in Las Vegas (which, at least for this year, also coincides with the annual Space Frontier Foundation conference) go up. It’s at an auspicious time of the year–it will be the week of the thirty-seventh anniversary of the first steps on earth’s moon. If you can’t attend the conference, I hope that you’ll celebrate it at home.

Popular Culture

Woohoo!

About an hour ago, Detroit was tied with Chicago for the division lead. I clicked over to Fox Sports to watch the box score of their current game against St. Louis, refreshed every thirty seconds (it’s surprising how well you can actually follow the game this way). When I started, they were down 6-4 in the bottom of the ninth. Through the miracle of the Internet (thanks, Al!) I watched them come back and tie it. Then after another scoreless inning, the Tigers won the game in the bottom of the tenth, 7-6 , with an RBI on a double.

In days of yore, they would have lost this game. But this year, they’re playing like a team that could go all the way. I may have to waste much time of my waning life actually following games this season…

Satire

The Grapes Of Ego

Byron York has some of Markos’ modest little speech the other day, but I’ve found the rest that he decided not to use:

“Yeah, they can take me down, Ma, but I’ll still be there, with Armstrong. I’m a part of something bigger–the way I figger it, I’m just a small part of one big netroots movement. I’ll be all ‘roun’ in the dark. Stumblin’ ’round in the dark. I’ll be ever’where. Ever’where you look.

Whenever there’s a brutally murdered American in Iraq to scorn, I’ll be there.

Wherever there’s a few loons milling around with misspelled protes’ signs saying ‘Bush Lied! People Died!’ and pictures of Che, and paper-mache puppets of Uncle Sam and Bushitlercheney McHalliburton, I’ll be there.

Wherever there’s a politician panderin’ to the tiny anti-American, ‘anti-war’ constituency, I’ll be there.

Wherever there’s a politician who los’ an election because he decided that he wasn’t far enough to the lef’, I’ll be there.

Wherever there’s a moonbat business associate whose political beliefs seem to shuttlecock with the financial winds, and who thinks that Osama attacked us because the Moon is in the Seventh House, and we were oppressing the Oort Cloud with our technoimperialism, I’ll be there.

I’ll be in the way that mindless minions compassionately tilt their heads in sorrow and regret over the fact that Saddam and the Taliban are no longer in power.

I’ll be in the way that leftist blogs spew spittle and obscenities at whoever has the temerity to disagree with them, or acquaint them with facts, and logic, and then delete or modify their commen’s.

I’ll be in the way that any position other than extreme lef’ is branded ‘full of hate,’ ‘racis’,’ ‘right-wing,’ ‘neocon,’ ‘fascis’,’ etc.

And wherever there’s a buck to be made, and an ego to be gratified, off the ‘progressive’ suckers that are seemingly born much more frequently than P. T. Barnum could have ever imagined, I’ll be there, too.”

[Update on Saturday night]

What, now they’re embarrassed to call Amstrong an astrologer? Why?

And doesn’t Google cache just suck? Well, at least if you’re the type who wants to toss things down the memory hole…

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!