Automotif CCXXII...

1977 Chevy Nova Concours coupe. The traction bars and the orange-painted front drum brakes peeking out through the slots in the mag wheels really tie the piece together.

If I'm betting on my (admittedly very dated) experience, this thing's got a 305 smog motor that's never had the heads off, a dual exhaust done at the local muffler shop, and way too much carb, possibly on the factory manifold. All bark and no bite.

This is the four-wheeled equivalent of a KZ650 with an unpainted fiberglass bikini fairing, factory suspension, a no-name 4-into-1, and intact chicken strips.

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U-Turn Charlie, they call him...

You would need a heart of stone to not LOL at this dunk. https://t.co/IDq1bUVUN0

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 18, 2021

Batman, your car is ready.

LED lighting has definitely allowed for some wild headlight and taillight schemes. Also, what's up with 1,850 horsepower? They couldn't find another 150 someplace for a nice round 2k? Somebody was falling down on the job if you ask me.

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Serenity...

This moment of tranquilo brought to you by Canon and Oh God I Needed This.

Wait, what?

"I don't mind it, but I wish they wouldn't constantly be rubbing their sexuality in our faces," says local man who has subscribed to Dillon's Blue Press with its gunbunny-of-the-month covers for the last eight years. https://t.co/K6OKThBTKj

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 15, 2021

"They're just doing that to trigger people into complaining," he complained, triggeredly.

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They made their bed, now they're lying in it.

From a WaPo story on the urban camping epidemic in Portland:

On this Monday, the city sent its contractors a list of 14 sites:

A middle school with two tents and three broken-down RVs blocking access to the student drop-off zone.

A vacant lot near Costco, where some homeless residents had been living for long enough to lay concrete foundations and start building rustic homes.

A highway underpass with at least 20 residents, where the nearby building was charred by fire damage.

A cul-de-sac littered with stolen and disassembled vehicles located next to the DMV.

During the past several years, Portland had systemically eliminated some of its tools for policing life in homeless encampments. Oregon had decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin and methamphetamine, which were common in camps. Portland had cut its police budget by $15 million and gutted its neighborhood response team. Increasingly, the city’s homelessness enforcement was left up to teams of contractors armed with nothing but de-escalation training, heavy-duty gloves, Naloxone to treat opioid overdoses, garbage bags and orange buckets to carry away human waste.

How long can stuff like this go on before you scare off the taxpayers who can actually afford the cost of living there?

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Automotif CCXXI...

Spotted this Ford Model A Deluxe Tudor while out and about. The Model T may have been the car that put America on wheels, but it was still very much the beta test version of the automobile, with controls that would seem confusing to a modern driver. On the other hand, if you can drive a manual transmission, there's nothing really unusual about a Model A, although the unsynchronized crash gearbox might take some getting used to.

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Pulling a 'Crazy Ivan'.

Democrats today be sounding like Reaganesque foreign policy hawks when just two elections ago they were dragging Romney for "That '80s Show" take on Russia.

This timeline is confusing. https://t.co/VdTyVGcS2j

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 14, 2021

Pep Talk

Marko on writing full-time:

"I sold Terms of Enlistment and its sequel to 47North in the spring of 2013, and I’ve been able to write full-time ever since. It took me until my forties to figure out that I wasn’t really cut out for any other kind of work, so to those of you who are submitting stories and trying to get a foot in the door, I’d say not to worry about being too late to the party. Nothing moves fast in the publishing field anyway."

Won't Get Fooled Again...

Although it happened over a year ago, I remember it like it was yesterday...

I was headed home from Indy Arms Company and pulled up at the traffic light at the intersection of 54th and Keystone. I was westbound, and 54th Street makes a little dogleg across Keystone Avenue, so the two sides of 54th don't get a green light at the same time; westbound gets the green light first, and after it turns red, then eastbound traffic gets to go.

The light was yellow already as I rolled up, so I stopped. Looking at the line of cars on 54th across the intersection, the fourth car back or so caught my eye. It was pretty much obscured by the cars in front of it, but the lines of the C-pillar and rear fender that were visible were the bright green shape of a Dodge Challenger. I thought about reaching for the Sony in my pocket so as to be ready when he rolled through the intersection, but really the novelty's worn off on the Mopar pony car revival for me. Unless it's something wild like a Hellcat or whatever, I rarely pull out the camera...

Man, of all the retro homage pony cars, the Challenger is the most faithful to the original, because what rolled through the intersection, turning north on Keystone to taunt the camera still in my pocket with a lingering broadside shot was an original gangsta 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A in color code FJ5, Sublime.

This was on my mind the other day when I was riding along with Marko and noticed that distinctive roofline... purple this time ...waiting to pull out on a side road. I had my 5DS in my lap with the 24-105mm f/4L, and I hefted it expectantly, but fully prepared to be disappointed by another provocatively-painted current Fiat-Chrysler product.

Only nope.

As we rolled past the side street I was staring straight down the snout of a Plymouth Barracuda.

Marko pulled over and let the guy drive past and we continued along behind him. 

When we took the on-ramp to the interstate and the 'Cuda continued straight, I managed some good shots. I was kinda wishing for a longer lens, but the 50MP sensor in the 5DS gives you plenty of room to crop.

It appears to be a 1970 'Cuda with a 383 in color code FC7, In Violet (the Plymouth name for what Dodge called Plum Crazy).

Nice clean lines, no wings or tape stripes... about as low key as a car with a color named "In Violet" can be. With the standard engine, the 335bhp 383 Super Commando, and a four speed, this must be a pleasant ride in the mountains on a summer day.

Good news, everyone!

Bobbi’s bionic eye upgrade went very well!

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Automotif CCXX...

I've been trying to get a shot of this guy for a while. The best I've done so far is this one, which was snapped on the way home from the Indy 500. It's a center crop from a shot taken across 62nd Street, which is five lanes wide at that point, using my RX100 pocket cam, which only has a 105mm equivalent zoom.

El Cutlassino

Yes, I know it's not actually an Oldsmobile, but I'm willing to play along with dude's whimsy.

Now in my headcanon there's an alternate universe with a '70 Hurst/Olds 442 El Cutlassino...

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A Dash of Decadence...

In case the idea of a touchscreen LCD in the middle of the elegant wood dash of your Bentley Flying spur is too gauche, you can apparently hide it at the touch of a button...

I mean, you can if you add an option costing around seven grand to a car whose base price is almost every bit of two hundred long.

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Tailgunner

I stumbled across an interesting article this morning while looking for pictures of the tailgunner's station in a B-52...

The first American to shoot down five enemy aircraft was Frederick Libby, an ex-cowboy from Colorado who joined the British Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and served as an observer-gunner in FE-2B two-seat pusher aircraft.

FE gunners used two machine guns, including a rear-facing Lewis gun, mounted on a steel pole, which required them to stand up on their seats when firing. “Only your grip on the gun and the sides of the nacelle stood between you and eternity,” said Libby years later.

That sounds like an acrophobe's delight, right there.

The reason I was looking for the photo was because of this photo of the exterior of the gun position, along with one very cool dude:

SSgt Sam Turner is apparently the founding member of a very elite club

The guy in the photo, SSgt Turner, had the first confirmed kill from the tail gunner position of a B-52.

During Operation Linebacker II, one of the last big conventional strategic bombing campaigns...

USAF B-52s flew 729 sorties and dropped 15,000 tons of bombs on 34 targets. Fifteen bombers were shot down, all by North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles. During this period B-52 gunners claimed five MiG kills. Only two were confirmed. The first was Turner’s aerial victory.

I wondered how many other times a tail gunner in a jet bomber might have scored. I looked around, thinking maybe an Il-28 Beagle gunner might have gotten lucky over the Strait of Taiwan or in one of the various Indo-Pakistani or Egypt v. Libya scuffles, but I'm coming up empty-handed. The number of gun kills from defensive gun positions on jet bombers is truly tiny. More dudes have driven dune buggies on the moon than have scored a confirmed gun kill from a jet bomber.

Interestingly, the B-58 Hustler originally had a tail gun, too, and one that spawned an amusing urban legend, claiming that the bomber was so fast that the rounds fired from the tail gun would actually move backwards relative to the ground when fired. A little math will show that the Hustler's maximum airspeed was about 1,900 feet per second, while the muzzle velocity of the Vulcan in the rear was something close to 3,500fps, so that's a myth busted.

Worth keeping an eye on...

Supposedly Senator Cornyn of Texas is negotiating a bill that would tweak who is required to perform a NICS check when disposing of their own personal property. 

This is almost certainly yet another attempt to close that non-existent loophole, and will be framed as one of those "compromises" where one party gives up something and gets nothing in return. Normally that's considered strongarm robbery, not a "compromise".

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Messy Used Plane Lot?

It's like some giant kid in Bolivia forgot to pick up his toy airplanes...

There are a bunch of areas at Jorge Wilstermann airport in Cochabamba where the planes look like they've just been shoved into a corner. There are a few clusters and singletons parked in weird places at the La Paz airport, too. This might be the aftermath of the demise of Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano.

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Automotif CCXIX...

A super-straight BMW 535i that caught my eye... and by "caught my eye", I mean I pulled a u-turn and detoured down a side street to snap the pics when I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I was driving along.

It's dolled up with an air dam and spoiler like a 535is, but badged like a 535i. If the driver would have been standing around, I'd have offered to swap titles for the Zed Drei, because this thing really does it for me. I could definitely walk the earf in a 3.5L E28.

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Ah, the Hanyang 88...

I still remember buying mine...

"...a crude Chinese copy of the Steyr copy of the German original. The wood was pretty beat up and it was missing a bottom metal screw, the buttplate, and a stock fitting out by the nosecap. The exterior was surprisingly un-rusted with no real pits and a smooth brown patina, while the action was caked with a sludgelike mix of old WD-40 varnish and dust.

I asked him what he wanted for it, more out of curiosity than anything else, and he said something about how he'd wanted $100, but these guys were telling him it wasn't worth that, so he'd take $75. I thanked him for his time and walked on.

I stopped at a table run by some crufflers I knew and asked them if they'd seen the abomination. They had. They asked if I'd looked down the bore. "No, why?" I replied

"Because the last person to stick a bore brush down it pulled what was left of the rifling out in a cloud of orange dust," they laughed.

It turned out they'd offered him $35 or $40 for it, which it was probably worth in spare parts, and he'd left in something of a huff. I smiled at the story and continued my stroll.

A couple of hours later, I ran into him again, still dragging the gun-shaped tomato stake with him. "No luck?" I inquired, sympathetically.

"Nah," he said, dejectedly, "They all say it's worthless 'cept maybe for spare parts."

I need this thing like I need a hole in my head... but I am such a sucker for a poor, neglected military rifle.

I rummaged through my pocket... A twenty, a five, and four ones.

"Will you take $29 for it?" He would and did."

Things I knew that ain't so...

Working in a gun store, I got to hear a lot of truisms that got blindly repeated, from both sides of the counter. I repeated them myself, often, blindly assuming these things to be true because everybody just knew they were. It was common knowledge!

A lot of it didn't hold up to practical observation, though. Shotguns and pistol caliber carbines do shoot through residential walls, oftentimes a lot of them. Revolvers can malfunction. Et cetera.

One was the utility of a little pocket gun, often an NAA Mini or a derringer, whose owner would refer to it as a "get off me" gun, with the implication that if they were ever caught in a physical scuffle, they could use it to shoot their assailant off of them.

While pocket carry can be useful, especially by allowing one to unassumingly have a hand already on a firearm before a potential attacker realizes it, the idea of pulling it out of a pocket in mid-scuffle is based more on hope than good planning.

One of these was actually designed with in-fight weapon access in mind.

A similar myth surrounds ankle carry. While it is useful and offers many benefits, such as an easy draw when seated and one which can be done relatively unobtrusively under a desk or table, the idea that it's going to be useful for retrieving a weapon in a grounded scuffle seems to be more optimistic myth than fact, as Cecil demonstrates.

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Continuous Lines

"Wouldn't you really rather have a Buick?"

Harley Earl's design for the 1942 Buick Super and Roadmaster was longer, lower, and wider than its predecessor. It also had memorable styling. Due to the production interruptions in Detroit caused by the war effort, the basic body style was still used through the 1948 model.

Called "Airfoil" fenders, the line of the front fenders swooped in a downward curve along the car's flanks until it met the rear fenders, creating a continuous styling swoop along the side of a Buick that was quite distinctive.

It was so distinctive that, even after the era of separate fenders had ended, it lingered on as a chrome styling line, known as the "Sweepspear" as seen on this 1957 Buick Special.

With the two-tone paint schemes popular in the Fifties, the Sweepspear was the dividing line between the different paint colors.

Buicks didn't get much longer, lower, and wider than this 1967 Buick Wildcat, and the general shape of the Sweepspear is still visible in its body lines.

The 1967 Wildcat featured the new 430cid Buick big-block V8, replacing the old 425, which was the largest-displacement variant of the "Nailhead" Buick. The 430 would eventually get a displacement increase to become the legendary 455.

Even after the swoopy space-age styling of the late Sixties and early Seventies devolved into the dull formal angularity of the late Seventies and early Eighties, the Sweepspear clung on, albeit in the most vestigial of forms. Check out the shape of the pinstripe accent line running along the top of the fenders on this 1985 Riviera convertible...