Tuesday, August 11, 2026
the train engine from the movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had an interesting engraved design, inspired by 1930s Art Deco industrial design, on the front of the enclosed casing hiding the mechanical components, reflecting the authoritarian and polished aesthetic of the early Capitol
spotted in traffic
SDSU is San Diego State University. I live within walking distance of it, seeing SDSU vanity plates is not uncommon
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A 49 foot section of a worn turbine blade trucked in from a Colorado wind farm was laid across a creek in an Atlanta park, and it opened 2 acres of ground
The Atlanta crossing is the third of these, and the first outside Europe. The original went in on a greenway in County Cork in January 2022, a span of about 16 feet built from two blades that once turned on small turbines, and the team counted a 20 percent reduction in carbon against the steel girders it replaced.
the oldest diesel-electric locomotive in the country (thank you George!)
The Illinois Railway Museum has restored perhaps the oldest bicentennial diesel locomotive in existence.
Ingersoll-Rand 91 was the eighth production diesel locomotive ever built and was constructed in 1926 by a consortium of American Locomotive Company, General Electric and Ingersoll-Rand.
The 300-horsepower diesel engine was perfect for low-speed switching and was sold to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western
As the only locomotive at IRM to have been given a special patriotic livery for the bicentennial, I-R 91 was selected by Diesel Department volunteers for cosmetic restoration during the nation’s semiquincentennial year.
In 2005, as floodwaters overwhelmed New Orleans and evacuation efforts struggled to keep up, 20yr old Jabbar Gibson found an abandoned school bus and took action
He filled it with people desperate to escape... And drove toward Houston.
For nearly 13 hours, he navigated flooded streets, damaged roads, and the chaos left behind by the hurricane, determined to get everyone to safety.
When the bus finally reached the Houston Astrodome, Gibson and more than 70 evacuees had made it out.
Reports said they arrived before many official evacuation buses.
Gibson's story became one of Hurricane Katrina's most powerful examples of ordinary people stepping up when others were still waiting for help.
For nearly 13 hours, he navigated flooded streets, damaged roads, and the chaos left behind by the hurricane, determined to get everyone to safety.
When the bus finally reached the Houston Astrodome, Gibson and more than 70 evacuees had made it out.
Reports said they arrived before many official evacuation buses.
Gibson's story became one of Hurricane Katrina's most powerful examples of ordinary people stepping up when others were still waiting for help.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1491330286373071&set=a.634745218698253
1961 DAF garbage truck, in the daf museum, Netherlands, was called a rolling drum; compacting garbage by gravity, According to Geesink’s website, their rolling drum was introduced in the late thirties.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sandertoonen/55065573868/in/photostream/
https://picryl.com/media/daf-vuilniswagen-ex-gemeente-woerden-pic2-7c64c5
https://www.facebook.com/reel/852360997597025
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/trucks-and-heavy-equipment/museum-classics-1964-and-1968-daf-garbage-trucks-nobody-ever-heard-of-selective-waste-collection/
https://www.lastdodo.com/en/items/1323553-daf-g1300-da475-roltrommel
https://picryl.com/media/daf-vuilniswagen-ex-gemeente-woerden-pic2-7c64c5
https://www.facebook.com/reel/852360997597025
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/trucks-and-heavy-equipment/museum-classics-1964-and-1968-daf-garbage-trucks-nobody-ever-heard-of-selective-waste-collection/
https://www.lastdodo.com/en/items/1323553-daf-g1300-da475-roltrommel
celebs that worked as gas station attendants before their Hollywood career
James Garner, prior to his military service, worked as a gas station attendant in Los Angeles. While pumping gas, he met a customer who helped launch his acting career, a young man named Paul Gregory, who was working as a soda jerk but wanted to be an agent.
Later, at age 25, while working as a carpet layer, Garner was driving on L.A.'s La Cienega Boulevard when he saw a sign: Paul Gregory & Associates. When a parking place just happened to open up in front, he pulled in. Otherwise he might never have had a career as an actor. His first gig was on a Henry Fonda Broadway play, for 8 months
James Garner, spent 14 months as infantry in Korea, received 2 Purple Hearts:
Universal cheated him on the profits from Rockford Files. He sued, he won.
According to Eastwood, all he had on his mind in high school were "fast cars and easy women". He took auto mechanic courses and studied aircraft maintenance, rebuilding both aircraft and car engines
Before starring as Little Joe Cartwright on Bonanza, Michael Landon worked as a gas station attendant near Warner Bros. studios, unloaded freight in a warehouse
Landon was an excellent javelin thrower in High School, with his 193 ft 4 in toss in 1954 being the longest throw by a high schooler in the US that year.
Landon was born Eugene Maurice Orowitz, was eventually noticed at the gas station by a local talent agent. Following his advice, Landon changed his Jewish name, selecting his new name from a telephone book.
According to Eastwood, all he had on his mind in high school were "fast cars and easy women". He took auto mechanic courses and studied aircraft maintenance, rebuilding both aircraft and car engines
He was invited to a house party in Malibu, where he met the film director Howard Hawks who, with John Ford, would influence his career.
In March 1951, Eastwood was drafted by the Army and assigned to Fort Ord in California, where he was appointed as a lifeguard and projectionist of training films. Don Loomis recalled hearing that Eastwood was romancing one of the daughters of a Fort Ord officer, who might have been entreated to watch out for him when names came up for postings.
Eastwood left Fort Ord in the spring of 1952 and moved north to Seattle where he worked as a lifeguard for some time. However, as he had little money and few friends in Seattle, he moved back south to L.A. During this time he worked managing an apartment house in Beverly Hills by day (into which he then moved) and worked at a Signal Oil gas station by night.
Above, Johnny Depp's 51 merc, below, Aaron Eckhart and Depp in an Austin Healey during a scene of Rum Diaries
Johnny Depp told Iggy Pop, during an interview for Interview Magazine, that one of his first jobs was as a gas station mechanic.
Depp dropped out of school at age 16 to focus on his music and took a job at a gas station.
He started out pumping gas, but was soon moved to the garage to be a mechanic. He said, “I told the dude, ‘Hey, I know very little about this.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you’ll just do what I tell you to do and it will work out fine.’ Well, it didn’t.”
He says that he changed the tires and did an alignment on a customer’s car. When the customer drove away, the left rear wheel came off. He said that after the incident, he was asked to leave.
His first car was a 1969 Chevrolet Nova, which he still has in his collection today
At age 20, Michael Douglas was employed by one of the giants of the oil industry.
It was 1964. He’d flunked out of the University of California at Santa Barbara after his freshman year; went back to Connecticut, where he’d spent most of his teenage years training for the stage at National Playwrights Conference, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Waterford, CT, in the 1960s, and got a job at a gas station pumping gas and running the tow truck.
And, Douglas points out, “I was a Mobil Man of the Month. I still have my certificate!”
“Yeah,” Douglas agrees. “Now you’ve got self-service and to get full service you gotta bust somebody’s ass. But that was a good summer. I ran the tow truck. It was the first time I had a job of my own, and it was satisfying.”
Then Douglas was nominated three times for Emmy awards for his work on the television series Streets of San Francisco. Cuckoo’s Nest got five Oscars.
At age 26, in 1973, Stephen King was a high school English teacher when he started writing the manuscript for the novel that would become Carrie.
He and his wife Tabitha lived in a doublewide trailer and each had to work additional jobs to make ends meet, with King sometimes working at an industrial laundry and moonlighting as a janitor and gas pump attendant.
He wrote a couple stories about gas stations, Rest Stop, Maximum Overdrive, From a Buick 8
and Laura Sisk-Wright, famous for General Hospital from 2005 to 2025, winner of the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in 2011, turned up in a couple of commercials and various fashion shows, she only briefly attended college before deciding to work full-time at her dad's gas station and convenience store in Clinton, Maryland, until 1991, working 12-hour shifts pumping gas, running the register, and sweeping floors
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/general-hospital-laura-wright-gas-093051617.html
This post took 2.5 hours
Olympic athletes that once pumped gas.... no less than Jesse Owens and Duke Kahanamoku
Jesse Owens worked as a petrol pump attendant to help finance his studies at Ohio State University. then made history at the 1936 Olympic Games by winning four gold medals, setting individual Olympic records in each event, plus another as a member of the 400-meter relay. And pissing off Hitler with his superior race nonsense
I already did a thorough bio of Duke in 2019 https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2019/05/did-you-know-duke-kahanamoku-famous.html
Monday, August 10, 2026
The National Museum of Forest Service History officially opens in Missoula, celebrating America’s conservation and aviation heritage, and they have a Tucker Sno Cat
The centerpiece of the 31-acre campus is the striking National Conservation Legacy Center, a mass-timber structure designed as both a museum and an exhibit in its own right. Constructed using more than 800,000 board feet of wood donated by timber companies across Montana and the Pacific Northwest, the building features dramatic tree-like columns and an architectural design inspired by the forests and mountains of the American West. Inside, visitors can explore immersive exhibits tracing the history of conservation in the United States through themes including forests, watersheds, wildlife habitats, wilderness, fire management, and public lands stewardship.
The facility also houses a research library and a climate-controlled repository preserving more than 55,000 historical artifacts and archival materials related to the U.S. Forest Service and America’s conservation history.
For aviation enthusiasts, one of the museum’s standout attractions is the Forest Discovery Trail, where historic aircraft illustrate the critical role aviation has played in protecting America’s forests. Among the highlights is Neptune Aviation’s Lockheed P2V Neptune Tanker 12, donated to the museum in 2023 after decades of service as one of the nation’s premier aerial firefighting aircraft.
Originally built as a U.S. Navy maritime patrol aircraft before being converted into an airtanker, Tanker 12 flew thousands of wildfire suppression missions during its career with Neptune Aviation.
Its permanent display tells the story of aerial firefighting and the evolution of aviation’s role in safeguarding America’s public lands.
The arrival of Tanker 12 represented a fitting partnership between Neptune Aviation, long headquartered in Missoula, and the National Museum of Forest Service History.
The aircraft now joins other outdoor exhibits, including a historic fire lookout tower and ranger cabin
What's even cooler, is that since they are a LONG way from everywhere else, they have put their extensive collection online https://forestservicemuseum.pastperfectonline.com
the rich people around London are pushing for more scrutiny from London Metro Police to bust hooligans... and a Dubai-registered Ferrari Monza SP2, (1 of 499 made, worth 4M), was confiscated because it was uninsured and the driver wasn't properly licsensed
what a ROTTEN BRAT! (unless, it was an autistic kid, that is of course, the obvious understandable exception when "rotten brat" does not apply)
A flight in Canada had to be canceled last week after a young child stood on their seat and refused to put on their seat belt for takeoff
The Porter Airlines flight was set to take off from Victoria International Airport in British Columbia to Toronto Thursday night, but it could not depart as a safety precaution due to the child, Brad Cicero, a spokesperson for the airline, said in a statement. The airplane had left the terminal and was on the runway, but despite efforts from the child's parent and cabin crew, the child would not sit down or allow their seat belt to be secured.
Flight attendants opted to return to the terminal and deplane all passengers because the time it would have taken to bridge the plane, deplane the child and parent, retrieve their baggage and refile paperwork would have caused the plane to depart too late. The runway at Victoria's airport closes at 12:30 a.m., and the flight was initially scheduled for an 11:03 p.m. departure.
Flight attendants opted to return to the terminal and deplane all passengers because the time it would have taken to bridge the plane, deplane the child and parent, retrieve their baggage and refile paperwork would have caused the plane to depart too late. The runway at Victoria's airport closes at 12:30 a.m., and the flight was initially scheduled for an 11:03 p.m. departure.
Sunday, August 09, 2026
1977 Ford Bronco Stroppe Ambulance built by Bill Stroppe himself as part of Ford's "Limited Edition Sail" promotion, which was an effort to set a cross-country hot air balloon flight record back in 1977.
Hot air balloonist Karl Thomas was at the helm of the obscure promotional balloon, and his plan was to fly from Los Angeles, California, to Daytona Beach, Florida, in under 41 days to break the prior record.
Unfortunately, that record-breaking flight never materialized. Thomas was blown off-course and landed somewhere in Mexico, and though Henry Ford II allegedly campaigned for the stunt to be abandoned, eventually, the balloon made it to Jacksonville, Florida. However, though the journey was technically completed in 18 days, it didn't count as a record-breaking run due to technicalities with the recording process. And, allegedly, Stroppe himself collected eight speeding tickets while chasing the balloon.
https://fordauthority.com/2026/08/1977-ford-bronco-stroppe-ambulance-live-photo-gallery
once again, a federal circuit court of appeals has weighed in on "are personalized license plates (“vanity plates”) government speech or private speech" (1st amendment protected free speech the govt can NOT interfere with) Thank you Capt Doug!
In the case of Whateley v Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
"Does Virginia
speak for itself through the character combinations on the personalized plates it issues – in
which case, it is entitled to express the views of its choice?
Or do Virginia’s personalized
plates convey the private speech of drivers like Whateley – in which case, government
restrictions on that speech must pass muster under the First Amendment?"
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Virginia’s personalized license plate messages ARE private (free) speech subject to 1st
Amendment protection the govt may not censor
And of course, the starched shirts in state govt won't have any free speech go uncensored, and immediately replied that this will be appealed to the Supreme Court
“The commonwealth has a responsibility to ensure that state-issued license plates are not profane and do not promote dangerous hate speech or incite harm,” said RaeAnn Pickett, a spokeswoman for Jay Jones, the state’s attorney general.
Seemingly ignorant, or deliberately overlooking the implication that the govt by this rationale, has the responsibility of not promoting and inciting harm, which, clearly no govt entity I'm aware of operates with any concern about promoting hate and inciting harm/riots (see history of US Govt, and state govt, and police departments, operating with racism and prejudice against blacks and native Americans (2/3rds vote, slavery, police tactics in the March to Selma, pepper spray on nonviolent protesters during the past decade https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/search?q=pepper+spray etc etc ad nauseum )
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