Friday, January 22, 2021
here's a mouthful: the Busch Beer Daytona 500 Sweepstakes Cale Yarborough driven Oldsmobile owned by Junior Johnson
So, someone must have won the "high performance street version of Cale Yarborough's Busch Super Car" ... I wonder if it's still out there somewhere
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Are you in good hands with Allstate? No. Not if you want roadside assistance, like a jump start, and make an appointment, and expect Allstate to get a tow truck or roadside assistance truck to arrive on time, or a half hour late, or 45 minutes late
My friend has a Prius ( I'll let you add your own jokes, she's heard all of mine) and just got back from spending 6 weeks with her mom, 3 with her dad who was dying of cancer. Yup, she hung around for weeks afterward to be with her mom, who for the first time on her 80 some years of life, is now living alone, after her high school sweet heart just died.
So, yeah, my friend is cool like that to spend weeks with her mom, and still work via laptop, and help with funeral arrangements etc.
Anyway, the 10 year old 12 v car battery in the Prius finally had enough, and when she got back here to San Diego, it wasn't able to get the car started, and the morons who designed the Prius has this big damn battery pack that can't be accessed to start the combustion engine.
And now that we're caught up with the reason it's now in need of a 12v battery, as she thought it was likely that being dead the one time she returned after weeks, was simply due to long term non use, but today she sat in the car for a half hour doing stuff that resulted in the battery draining some more, and it wouldn't start the car again.
So, she needed another jump, and called Allstate, and they have some damn app that informs their customers that they've made an appointment, and when to expect the tow truck to arrive. Well, the tow truck people, in this case, Andy's Towing doesn't update anyone on the current situation the tow truck driver is in, nor when he expects to be onto the next assignment, in this case - jump starting my friend.
So, I go to hang out and keep her company, as I don't have jumper cables, because the last time I helped out someone who needed a jump I ended up having to buy an alternator.
Allstate, it turns out, doesn't have someone answer the phone at 877 810 0834 when you want to talk to "Roadside Assistance". But the message you have to listen will tell you all about Covid first, before you can request " "Roadside Assistance" then it tells you, hey, go ahead and text us first.
So, no human is going to answer the phone, and the app isn't helpful in anyway when you want to know why they are late, BUT it does have an icon feature that lets you call and talk to their dispatcher.
BUT you will want to know why the hell they have a dispatcher, when there is only ONE driver in the 7th largest city in the USA, to answer service requests. AND I just called them at 619 900 8095, and this "24 hour" roadside assistance company?
DOESN'T answer the phone, DOESN'T have an answering service, and DOESN'T forward the call to the ONE driver they have after 6 pm.
Yeah, straight to a message that says "Our mail box is full, GOOD BYE"
Instead, the night turned out a bit different then expected when some stranger offered to give her a jump when he overheard the conversation we were having when my friends patience ran out, and I offered to take out her car battery and take it to my garage and put it on my battery charger. Yes, it has occurred to me that this entire wasted night could have been avoided if we had went with my leaving work and getting right to her car, pull he battery, and put it on the charger, give it a couple hours, and then put it back in her Prius, and she'd be set.
Or take her to Autozone where she could buy a battery and then I could either swap it out or show her how to swap out her own battery.
Instead we caught up on chit chat, learned that Allstate let her down, that BOTH of us are switching to AAA, and that Allstate went with the one tow truck company that CAN NOT be trusted to get a driver to help a woman that made a damn appointment.
But you're never going to learn a damn thing about all this stuff on Auto blog, Jalopnik, Petrolicious, Bangshift, Hooniverse, Carscoops, Silodrome etc.
But some "top 54 blogs" list felt all those websites were blogs, and decided they all do a better job blogging than I do. Very few blogs are even in that list, of what seems to be every car website in the English language
But do you want to know when a car insurance company lets your friends down, or a tow truck company advertises as 24 hours, but isn't even answering the phone or able to send someone to help when you have an appointment? Or do you want more boring articles about new Porches and Jaguars? As that's all Car and Driver seems to have, and they were #38 on that list.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
in Brunei, they are making some far out stuff, but there aren't any magazines or websites over there to give the fun stuff the publicity it deserves
Indonesia’s roads are full of scooters. Eighty-five percent of the people who live there, own and ride scooters, many as their primary source of transportation.
Vespa sampah (“garbage Vespa”) and Vespa gembel (“Vespa drifter”), as they are known by locals.
The unique design of the riders is partially attributed to their emergence in the early 2000s
When coinciding with the fall of the Soeharto authoritarian regime, and then the country went through a financial crisis in 1997 and has struggled to recover.
The prices of things like scooters has soared, meaning many cannot afford a new one; the manufacturer stopped importing them in 2001, at any rate.
A culture of rebuilding, reuse and customization has sprung up around the shortage. If you can’t buy what you need new, you find it used and fix it yourself.
So very late 60's and 1970, it's art, it's imaginative, it's colorful, and fun billboard advertising
Learn a tiny bit about each artist and what they say about their billboard at https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/6267760503
Example:
If it weren’t for hippies, 7Up, the clear lemon-lime soda pop many use to calm the stomach flu, might not exist today.
In the late 1960s, just when the company was about to go out of business, brilliant advertising executives at J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago pitched a complete rebranding of the soft drink.
Declaring 7Up “The UnCola,” paper billboards posted above highways mere months before Woodstock in 1969 exploded with colorful and trippy cartoons of pretty girls, rainbows, sunbursts, flowers, and butterflies. Creatives at the agency mined the popularity of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase and appropriated the “peace, love, and understanding” zeitgeist of the youthful antiwar counterculture—all in the name of selling sugar water.
The “Uncola” struck a chord with the younger generation as the first ads appeared in 1968. They portrayed Coke and Pepsi as “the Establishment,” and tapped into the counterculture
and it worked
vintage UnCola billboard poster by John Alcorn, 1969
much of the so-called “Peter Max look” actually originated at Push Pin Studios, an innovative New York City art and design group founded by Milton Glaser ( also known for the “I [heart] NY logo” ), Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel in 1954. Several 7Up billboard artists, including John Alcorn and Barry Zaid, studied under Glaser, who designed the swirling psychedelic poster for Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” record in 1966.
The highway billboards, 21 feet wide and 10 feet tall, were made up of 12 paper panels, which were pasted up piece by piece. But 7Up wasn’t content to just hang them alongside freeways. The images were offered to college students as posters, as “Fallpaper” to cover their textbooks, and as the actual giant, 12-sheet, 10-foot-tall billboards.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/5709252580/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/6267760503/
https://carney.co/carnage-category/ad/page/64/
https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/1597
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/collecting-7ups-most-beautiful-hallucinatory-billboards/
a 1970 biker film starring Joe Namath and Ann-Margret
Kim commented with something that deserves your time, the reviews!
This is from Wikipedia:
The New York Times:
It's not very long; it pays attention to every hallowed idiocy of its genre, and its characters talk a marvelously unreal type of movie repartee. (Truck-driver: "You a student?" She (cheerfully): "No. I'm a teen-age prostitute. Give you any ideas?") What's more, its images are crammed with advertisements (for, among other things, Hamm's Beer, Hondas and Kraft Cheese) that are its own kind of relevant symbology.
Chicago Tribune: Supplied it with no stars, felt it was "hateful", adding: "C.C. and Company" is the film that asks the musical question, "What do you want - bad acting or bad taste?" Director Seymore Robbie's idea is to have the women in the film make obscene remarks with their fingers and mouth. After 20 minutes of visual effluvia, the big race is finally on. No, not around the dirt motorcycle track ... the one up in the aisles. Ann-Margret has a brief nude scene in which she proves that in addition to having a foul mouth she is fat.
Cleveland Press: "C. C. and Company" arrives on the waves of such big budget ballyhoo that it seems a shame to dismiss it by simply calling it awful, which it is. How about meretricious? That's a big budget word for awful and the fellows responsible for this picture needn't feel they've been short-changed in the adjective department. "C. C." is a simple-minded movie for simple-minded audiences. There were times when it came close to being a fairly simple-hearted exercise in action melodramatics if it weren't so purposely and unrelievedly foul mouthed. The motorcycle movie is trying very hard to be a type by itself but it remains basically a western with wheels instead of hooves. This one is a variation on the old melodrama romance plot that at various times has been about an outlaw and a lady, a rustler and the rancher's daughter, a virgin and a gypsy, a princess and commoner and on and on. Football player Joe Namath should have stuck to football ... Actress Ann Margret should have taken up football or something else other than acting. ... [William] Smith offers a perfect picture of nastiness, especially with his whisper-soft voice. He should stick to acting. In one scene a man points to [Joe] Namath and says " ... that's what gives motorcycling a bad name." So do movies like this one.
At the peak of his powers, and but one year removed from the greatest upset in the history of professional football, Joe Namath – born and bred in coal country, yet destined for the bright lights of Broadway – decided that come hell or high water, he just had to do a biker movie.
and I hope you want to read this fantastic analysis of the movie;
At the peak of his powers, and but one year removed from the greatest upset in the history of professional football, Joe Namath – born and bred in coal country, yet destined for the bright lights of Broadway – decided that come hell or high water, he just had to do a biker movie.
And not just any biker movie, but a dead-on-arrival exercise in inertia so lame that despite the presence of Ann-Margaret and the era’s most damaged collection of dirtbags not in the Manson family, not a single breast would be exposed.
So instead of full-tilt Joe, unmasked and unhinged, we get the kindler, gentler variety; a man who lusts more for car parts than a woman’s anatomy, even one so inviting as the decade’s most beloved redhead.
More to the point, this is the world’s lone biker gang who refuses to traffic in narcotics, never so much as lighting up a joint to escape the night. No alcohol either, which makes little sense in light of their one minor sin, using the gang’s babes to hustle bread for expenses and the like.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
In WW1, two motorcycling pals living in London volunteered to set up a nursing station near the front lines in Belgium, near Ypres. They proved skilled ambulance drivers and triage nurses, and even brought their own motorcycles with them.
It was horrific duty, they were often shelled, but they stayed nearly four years, and were known as the Angels of Pervyse, for the village they had set up in, under a ruined farmhouse. They were famous women in WW1, and raised more money selling war bonds than anyone else. A few books have been written, plus their own, The Cellar House of Pervyse
https://www.facebook.com/thevintagent/posts/10158420599758791
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