Monday Morning Memes

Slow start...

Spent the morning blogging about cool old rocket-ship-looking Thunderbirds.

More later.

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Automotif DLXX...

These straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEGs of a droptop BMW M4 make it look pretty butch, I think. Shot with the Nikon D800.

Point, Counterpoint...

Jaguar's rebrand has run afoul of the culture wars, with Fox News calling it "Bud Light 2.0" which is kinda funny. I'm sorry, but the average Fox News viewer is going to boycott the new Jaguar for the same reason I am: Aren't neither of us the target demographic for the new over-$100k Jag EV.

The most sensible "con" take I've yet run across has been from Mr Jalco, a graphic designer, illustrator, and sometime auto writer and YouTuber:

Now, before we dive too deep, there are two things we need to establish. Firstly, I love Jaguar. I think they’ve made some of the most beautiful and iconic cars of the 20th century, and the potential offered by their brand and racing heritage is beaten only by Ferrari or Porsche. Secondly, I am absolutely not talking about their yet to be revealed new cars here. I haven’t seen them – hardly anyone outside the internal team has – so cannot and will not judge them. This is purely about the brand ident they have so far released, what it tells us about their direction of travel as a company and the quality of the creative thinking inside the company.

It's an excellent deep dive that explains "brands", "branding", and the uphill row Jag has to hoe to reposition itself in the market, to mix my metaphors as thoroughly as Jaguar has mixed the cases in its typography.

On the "pro" side of the ledger is this well-argued piece by Alex Goy at Driven:

As well as dragging some of the worst of humanity out of the woodwork, it also brought out a group of concerned Jaguar fans. For them, Jaguar’s been doing broadly the same thing since before they were born. The brand’s heritage, even post Ian Callum reinvention, has been the steadfast hook upon which Jaguar’s hat swung. Images of the E-Type (which has been out of production for nearly 50 years) are everywhere, and rightly so, the Morse (which hasn’t been on our screens for nearly 25 years) Mk II is used as a shining example of how great Jag used to be. The tales of derring do, of record breaking, of Le Mans, Geneva, and the Mille Miglia are staggering, and they hold a special place in a lot of hearts.

Keeping things the same as they’ve always been leads to two problems. Firstly, a lot of people want to let others buy new, and then snap ‘em up in 15 years time for £1,500 - which won’t help Jag now. Far from it. In 2023 Jaguar sold 64,241 cars. To put this into perspective - over 75 million cars were sold globally in 2023. Porsche shifted in excess of 320,200, BMW’s M division flogged over 200,000, and Genesis put over 150,000 new cars in homes during the same year. Lots of people are saying they want the old Jag, but the numbers show they didn’t want to pay for it.

Of course, the car hasn't even been revealed yet, and we're all talking out of our fourth point of contact until sales figures start coming in, but if the purpose of advertising is to get people talking about you, the new ad campaign has succeeded at that.

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End-of-Workweek Memes...

Posting Through It...

The graphs at this article are fascinating. Like you can literally see where he got divorced.

To work out what subjects preoccupy Mr Musk and how his views have changed over time, The Economist analysed his activity on Twitter (as it was) and X (as it became in 2023). Using artificial intelligence to trawl through his 38,358 posts between December 2013 and November 2024, we found that he is posting far more often and with a far more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the realm of policy on which he opined the most, but he now bangs on much more about immigration and free speech (see chart 1).

It's safe to say that Elon Musk has the all-time worst case of Poster's Madness in the history of ever.

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Meme Dump...

Russia Russia Russia

Vlad and Kim announced that they are strengthening economic and military ties. I don't know what North Korea has to export beyond 152mm artillery shells of apparently dubious quality and starving conscripts, but apparently Russia needs more of it.

Meanwhile, have a detailed guide to telling various Russian tanks apart.

Also, allegedly this morning the Russians dropped an RS-26 ICBM (SS-X-31) sans warhead on Dnipro.

Midweek Memes...

Automotif DLXIX...

A couple of newlyweds having a grand old time waving from the back seat of a Sandshell Beige 1962 Ford Thunderbird last weekend. The photo was snapped with a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

It's only lightly cropped from the full 16MP resolution, so it should embiggenate nicely.

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Meme Dump...

Clownshoes

Trump's cabinet picks started off normal enough. Marco Rubio as SecState? Sure, dude's been a senator for over a decade, with most of that time on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (he's currently the ranking member on the latter), and that's as solid a resume for the job as you can want. 

Things got progressively sillier from there, though. I'd make fun of RFK, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's been thoroughly covered elsewhere.

The proposed Director of National Intelligence, though, is a huge yikes. You know who's excited about her? Komsomolskaya Pravda.

“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.

Jesus wept.

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Sign of the Times

Jaguar apparently shopped around for a new logo and the one they bought was, um... questionable. It's vague, communicates nothing, and sticking a capital "G" in the middle of a bunch of lower case letters is a crime against typography.

Designer: “What are your company’s core virtues and strengths?”

Jaguar: “Tradition. Luxury. Excellence. High performance…”

Designer: “Cool. Here’s a logo fit for a Spice Girls cover band.”

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Mirthful Memes to Get You Through Monday...

Sunrise, Sunset

It's a bit of a puff piece, but this WaPo bit on the solar shenanigans in American's northernmost decent-sized town, Utqiagvik (née Barrow) in Alaska, is full of interesting bits of triviata. 

Meanwhile here in Hoosieropolis, sunset tonight will be at 5:27. Fortunately, though, it will rise again about 7:30 tomorrow morning, rather than in frickin' 2025.

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Memewhile...

Did some video game reminiscing at the other blog (and there's fixin' to be more), but in the memetime, here...

End-of-Workweek Memes...

Ugh, it's starting...

We've reached that time of year when sunset is occurring before the time when normal people are just starting to think about dinner. Combine that with three days in a row of overcast skies, drizzly weather, and the leaves being off the trees, it's time to get the SAD lamp down from the attic and plug that thing up.

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Memes Before Lunch

 

Written Elsewhere...

• My 200th post at Cars Gone By: A 1966 Mustang GT convertible.


• On the reasons behind the enduring popularity of the 1911.


• The U-Shaped Utility Curve of All the Things.

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Hump Day Meme Dump...

 

Busted

Well, they caught the guy they think was the leaker of the Israeli attack plans. Turns out he was a CIA employee.

A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

Meanwhile, the dweeby A1C who put all the classified docs on that gaming Discord server is going to the big house for fifteen years. He should have kept them in a spare bathroom or garage, then he could be going to the White House for four.

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Meme Dump...

 

U-Turn

Looks like Rubio's investment in the good kneepads has finally paid dividends.

Gotta wonder if Don's gonna slip up and refer to his Secretary of State as "Widdle Marco" in a tweet out of sheer force of habit?

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Monday Meme Delivery

Know Nukes

With all the data center construction that's accompanied the AI... boom? bubble? ...the demand for power is off the charts and this is leading to talk, wild speculation, and outright misinformation about nuclear power and potential reactor construction.

Here's a dude who knows something about the topic talking about small modular reactors:

Tech giants are signing deals with nuclear power companies to supply energy to their data centers. Many of these deals revolve around unproven Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is a relatively new term for most people, so I figured it as worth it to dig in a little to help it make sense.

First to get the hysteria out of the way. No, Microsoft and Google will NOT be running nuclear reactors. No, AI will not be running nuclear reactors. These SMRs will be operated by highly trained operators licensed by the NRC, just like I was on my reactor. Every licensed operator is personally responsible for ensuring nuclear safety. Like go to prison personally responsible. It doesn’t matter who’s name is on the front gate.

Go thou and RTWT.

And remember, any talk about running a technological civilization on clean power that doesn't involve nukes is fundamentally unserious.

Armistice Day

On the eleventh hour

Of the eleventh day

Of the eleventh month

The guns fell silent

Automotif DLXVIII...

This 1970 Chevelle SS looks like it's down to party. It sounds like it, too.

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Happy Birthday, USMC!

Did you remember to leave cheap whiskey and crayons out for the ghosts of Dan Daley, Smedley Butler, and Chesty Puller last night?

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Processing

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." -Satchel Paige

Yesterday was the Monumental Marathon here in Indianapolis. Like last year, I pedaled my bicycle up to the intersection of 58th Street and College Avenue, which is the closest good vantage point. (And it is a good one! The runners are coming right at you as the course heads east on 58th before turning north on College.)

This year I shot the race with the Oly E-M1X. I had a choice of a fast lens or a long one, and chose the long one. Until the sun started peeping through the clouds, I kept it in aperture priority at ISO 400, shooting in the f/5.6-6.3 range. It left me wanting a fast, long lens.

Still culling through the images, hoping for a real winner or two.

Here are the runners headed north on College Avenue.

FREE MEMES. PLEASE TAKE ONE.