How should I file this story about a wooden-bodied ’68 Scout postal vehicle?

Whenever I clean out my clip files, there’s the problem of what to do with this story from the Omaha World-Herald.

I don’t have a file for wooden-bodied cars. Nor one for auto bodymen-versus-carpenters.

Maybe “Puns” would be appropriate. But I’ll hold my tongue-in-groove.

Dean Haden built the custom wooden body after his wife Marlys complained about their rusty 1968 International Scout. The former postal vehicle had been in the family ten or twelve years.

“Now Haden’s portable sundeck (with matching aerodynamics) is saluted by Weber grills and patios everywhere,” the Associated Press reported, adopting an unusually waggish tone.

“But there are worries. Like termite insurance. And you’ll note a unique vulnerability to penknives and young love.”

Maybe so. The vulnerability I see is in stopping the thing. With such a heavy body, you’d better hold brake the pedal to the floorboard.

Only a sap would push past 50 mph on the open road.

Oh well, no telling where the Redwood Runabout is now. The number I had for the Haden residence is out of service.

Maybe it’s on an errand at a nice lumberyard somewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bears in your hair or only in my neighborhood?

I was ten minutes into my afternoon walk yesterday, just starting up Hidden Valley Drive, when I saw this mother bear and her large cub.

Now I know why University of California sports teams are called the Golden Bears.

A friend’s challenge to a creative writing exercise causes me to face my fears

I have an amazing new friend who this afternoon challenged me to a creative writing face-off. We would give each other a topic, and simultaneously in a ten-minute window of time write to the topic. The one I received from her was a bit unnerving, really: ”Write a sweet piece about a little pony, for the age range 6-8 year old girl.” Outside my comfort zone? Yes. For the last few years all I’ve written about are cars and business history. But the name Fred surfaced in my mind, and I started.

 

Fred was a hairy little pony who hated his name. He took his name from the pizza restaurant, Big Fred’s, where he worked. He was tied all day to the railing on the front porch, and his job was to greet patrons. Children loved him, petting and stroking him. (Some bad little kids tried to give him their medication.) Fred liked his job all right, but whenever a shrill little voice called him–”Hey, Fred! Freddie, Freddie Krueger”–he found himself dancing and tugging at the rope that kept him from running away. One day a toad named Herbert came by to say hello. They were old friends, but it had been a while since Herbert had been around.

“How can I get my name changed?” Fred asked.

“You could work at a different restaurant,” Herbert said.

Fred stamped his front hooves. “That’ll never happen.”

But one day a crew from the sign company showed up in the parking lot. They had a big new sign for the restaurant, which they put into place that day. It had a picture of a pony and the name Winkie. There was a banner, too, that said, “Under New Ownership.”

Once Fred’s tears stopped flowing, he braced himself for his new life.

10 bêtes noires, pitfalls, bugbears, and simple everyday things I absolutely, unequivocally !@#&ing hate

Still life photo of Pink Lady apples with Gerbera daisy by Baggy Paragraphs

Boy, I’m telling you, I just hate it when I:

1. Run out of staples in my Swingline stapler, which is as aggravating to me as a political reversal to the committed party member, or a home team’s loss to the ultrapartisan fan
2. Wake from a nap and see a ten-inch lizard on the floor, which awakens my primitive flight response, as though my inner eye were seeing a dinosaur
3. Forget whether I locked the car, which may or may not feature my iPhone standing as ripe as an artichoke in one of the center-console cupholders because, of course, I forgot it, too (the day when we wear our phones as part of our clothing will be a good thing for me and others, including those who drop theirs into the toilet and vaguely report, “It fell into water” — unless adding apparel before flushing is a routine thing)
4. Bite my cheek while too avidly chewing, or scald my lips and tongue with a hastily imbibed hot drink, leaving me with the vague hope that the tissues of the mouth indeed heal quickly because of superabundant vascular circulation
5. Leave my shopping list on the counter and my collection of cloth and polywollydoodle shopping bags in the car’s door pocket, while my main emphasis upon entering the market is to find the restroom
6. Am taking my daily walk, and the hard rubber ball or the baseball with which I play Mouth-of-Driveway (high toss with backspin; sharply angled carom from driveway’s sloping mouth received with the off hand without breaking stride) bounces awry and rolls with dismal, disheartening finality into the storm drain
7. Go outside for the newspaper that hasn’t been and won’t be delivered today
8. Break a drinking glass
9. Flip the light switch and hear the filament snap, making me want to curse Thomas Edison
10. Have to peel fruit labels

How headlines are conceived and written

Isky’s Good Karma

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After today’s Motor Press Guild‘s luncheon in Los Angeles, I went for a short ride in the Fisker Karma with hot rod culture’s legendary Ed Iskenderian and two others.

It was the 90-year-old Isky’s first-ever ride in a hybrid. 

So I made a video.

The video is only 2:23 long and ends with a laugh as Isky thoughtfully (and revealingly) fields the last of my questions.

I promise this will be worth your time, and I invite you to share or Tweet the link: http://youtu.be/A24sOclfZtI

Related articles

• First Drive: 2012 Fisker Karma [w/video] (autoblog.com)

Shoe Cartoon 02

Murky history of the 1954 Merkle Subatom MC2 Sport

The 1954 Merkle Subatom MC² Sport was a side project of Captain Hyman Rickover’s when he was developing the nuclear navy and adapting that technology for civilian power production. It was named Merkle, for an old friend of the admiral’s back in Poland, as a way of deflecting attention; yet it was indeed Capt. Rickover who climbed behind the wheel when the Merkle competed in the Carrera Panamericana. As viewers of that race remember, the entry surged to an enormous lead by the middle stages, proving the efficacy of nuclear power in automobiles, but during a restroom break at a tiny pueblo in Zacatecas, Capt. Rickover decided to power down the reactor and learn the Spanish subjunctive mood from a woman he met near a bougainvillea hedge.

Series production of the Merkle was briefly considered, and the Packard Motor Car Company appeared interested in acquiring the model as the linchpin for a new division of high-performance automobiles. The plan snagged when Packard’s assistant chief engineer John DeLorean insisted the Merkle be equipped with the company’s Ultramatic transmission, which he had helped to develop; but Capt. Rickover’s minions, who were handling the Merkle deal, let it slip that they preferred General Motors’s Hydramatic tranny, and DeLorean stormed out of the meeting, going home to his mother, with whom he still lived.

Hyman G. Rickover

After this traumatic episode, the one and only Merkle fell into obscurity. Following his promotion to Vice Admiral, Rickover began to drive Cadillacs. The Merkle languished for many years at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. Later it was put back into driving condition for use as an airport shuttle at Los Alamos National Laboratory; then it served as a hogan near Round Rock, Arizona, with the built-in central heating being a prized feature.

A decade ago, the Merkle was sold at a well-known vintage and collector car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, realizing a disappointing sale price of just $12,750. Quickly taken away on a flatbed, it was spotted in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and subsequently reported in Beatty, Nevada, by an automotive spy photographer who spends her summers there in pursuit of future production models that are undergoing tests in Death Valley. Pictures of the Merkle were found to have been spirited away from archives such as the National Automotive History Collection in the Detroit Public Library, where a tall, bespectacled, white-bearded gentleman in a bespoke English suit, who signed the guest register as Lorem Ipsum, was the last to request the file. The only known surviving image of the Merkle, seen above, was recently acquired by a collector at a literature, toys, and memorabilia show for vintage Porsches and VWs in a hotel near LAX.

An existential question for philosophers, bulldogs, and pollsters

What if your backside is your upside--especially by a wide margin?

Refrigeration rectification: A new Frigidaire solves more than one storage problem

This was one automated phone call I received not with annoyance but a thrill. The stumbling computer-generated words relayed welcome news: tomorrow between 12.30 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. my new refrigerator would be delivered to my home in “Monrovia, Caw.” Such poetry! Not just a new refrigerator: a real refrigerator! Because of uncertainty as to my future, not knowing whether I’d stay long in this small house I’m renting, I had endured the last five months since May, when I moved in, with a 2.8-cubic-foot mini-fridge. This is like having R2-D2 as your best friend. It’s a dorm-room fridge, good for keeping the beer and liverwurst and mustard. I do a modest amount of cooking and had increasingly struggled to make do with this compact fridge. The tiny freezer compartment wouldn’t preserve leftover mac and cheese; it’s so disappointing to open up your presumed dinner and find mold. And the cooler needed to be reorganized with every new Rubbermaid storage container. I spent a lot of time squatting before the little pint-sized thing, always forgetting the door lacked a self-closing tendency and instead, being stupidly pendulous, would swing all the way open and smack into the nearby jelly cupboard.

Afterwards, hoisting myself once again to a standing position, hoping I never needed to look for something to eat while I happened to be suffering from patellar tendonitis or a pulled hamstring or sciatica, I’d tell myself this was a good way to get in my deep knee bends. Calisthenics and capers! Why, yes, indeed, I was getting along just fine chasing the head of lettuce that rolled out with every opened door, dementedly meandering across the kitchen. Finally I stopped buying Iceberg lettuce. Romaine doesn’t meander. But it’s too tall; it had to be angled beneath the middle shelf, which was the first of two wire racks that got dislodged from their tracks with the slightest bump. Boston lettuce is short enough to fit in the lower tier but doesn’t make high-volume, high-satisfaction salad. Outta lettuce? Yet another trip to the market is required. Oh, and time to buy more orange juice and milk: the shallow door pocket encouraged the pairing of rapidly depleted pints.

Have you tried living without ice cubes? Do you realize what a luxury it is to have ice on hand? Not even automatic icemaker ice, just manual ice for drinks, for the Champagne bucket, for rubbing on burned fingers, for putting in a plastic bag and applying to a sprained shoulder like when I went down on my mountain bike in August. Even the dog enjoys playing with the occasional ice cube. And how about a lighted refrigerator compartment? Five months with the mini-fridge led me to conclude that it’s a phenomenal step forward for civilization to have a real door handle instead of a grip-it-and-rip-it indentation on the side of the door. Same for having a self-defrosting freezer instead of needing to unplug and empty out every six or eight weeks in order to extricate the one thing that will in fact stay frozen in this minuscule freezer compartment amid the dense buildup of frost: a pound of peas.

Meat? I had to throw out a rib-eye steak.

A real refrigerator allows me to buy gallon-size containers, to buy two bags of frozen lima beans when they’re on sale, to throw a whole turkey behind either of the doors. A mini-keg of beer, a pitcher of lemonade, a large bottle of water, a layer cake sprouting candles, a ham, a gaggle of rhubarb, a haggle of leeks, a pride of Swiss chard, a flagon of vodka (I don’t drink vodka), oodles of noodles: everything will fit! And the sculpted commodious door pockets with soft and grabby nonskid plastic and gently curving bumpers to protect against the out-of-control caroming brisket, the enclosed butter tray with clear cover, the cheese-and-meat drawer and the crispers with adjustable ventilation—all in this basic Frigidaire that I selected at Best Buy—combined to suggest most seductively the squalid excess of which I would soon be partaking.

Romero and another dude showed up early, at twelve o’clock noon, to deliver the fridge, doing a bit of setup right there in the street before harnessing themselves to the appliance and waddling along, climbing the stairs, passing through the gate and along the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s cottage. (There are four structures on this half-acre lot.) The first attempt to enter my own house was repelled by the screen door’s strike plate, which Romero removed with my screwdriver. And when he popped out the pins from the main door’s hinges, I got my tub of grease and coated them because they had been squeaking.

Here’s why I hate customer satisfaction surveys. When the fridge was put in position and plugged in, Romero handed me a card with an Internet address, saying, “If you can give a ten on each category, it would be great.” The new-car salesman who sold me the 2000 Honda Odyssey that I still drive said the same when he handed me a similar card. Wait, you’re asking for a perfect score? I just shitcan surveys like these. Here’s hoping my selfishness (often commented upon by friends and relatives) doesn’t keep Romero’s kids from attending the University of Nebraska of their dreams. Besides, there are a couple of scratches in my $500 box of steel’s thin coating of white paint, and in all honesty I’d have to mention them.

Soon after the delivery team left, I headed down to Target for ice cube trays and a bin, and to Home Depot for disk magnets to take advantage of the unlimited display space. The magnets allowed me to put up some leftover campaign buttons from 2008. So the Frigidaire has solved more than one storage woe.

Yesterday I set the mini-fridge out on the front porch for pickup by Vietnam Veterans of America. My last sight was of its ugly little compressor in the back. I imagine the mini-fridge’s future in a room on Skid Row, where it is stocked intermittently with malt liquor (sorry, no forty zips) and old unwrapped slices of pizza. Meanwhile, as the VVA driver loaded it onto his truck, teetering a bit during the clean and jerk, an imbalance in my life was corrected.