Tuesday, March 31, 2026

there's an easier way to start an old motorcycle than an electric starter... a shotgun shell port, same as airplane engines

 

lol, enlisted grunt doing his time in the Navy fixing jets (in boondockers!) memorialized with a photo... when officers memorialized their Navy time with a photo, they were flying the damn jets, or in the cockpit


https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4268308513419014&set=gm.4345004079073980&idorvanity=2444464425794631

the Wrigley family (Wrigley Field in Chicago named for them) bought a Douglas C-47 Skytrain, converted it to a DC-3 in 1947 and used it to fly from Chicago to Catalina Island



The Wrigley family eventually sold the plane and only recently was the family able to track it down and repurchase it. Alison said last week the family was fortunate to have been able to re-locate the DC-3 and said it is undergoing a complete restoration. 

 With only 3,434 hours in its logbook, this apparently is the lowest-time DC–3 in the world.


Charlie Chaplin’s half-brother Syd was the first to offer air service to Catalina in 1919, operating a small seaplane service that lasted two years.

environmental and Indigenous groups filed a lawsuit in Las Vegas federal court, arguing that the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project in Nevada, one of North America’s largest sources of lithium, poses a major threat to the endangered Tiehm’s Buckwheat, a desert flower endemic to the area, which could even cause it to go extinct.


Of course, it's in the middle of nowhere between Vegas and Reno, and no one outside of the people in the lawsuit have ever heard of, or think that one flower in the middle of nowhere that no one will ever visit the area to see


In fact, other than this news about the lawsuit, no one will ever hear of the flower.  



Walt Disney and Ward Kimball at the Chicago Railroad Fair of '48


the Santa Rosa parents of a 16-year-old just discovered the cost of getting their i8 BMW out of impound, and bail for their kid, as that dumbass was arrested for reckless driving, at 130 mph on the 101


This is NOT that actual car, it's the i8 I found last week parked in Mira Mesa. 

dropping a new Vette.... really? How after all these decades of using lifts, has the process not become fool proof? How after a decade of internet ridicule, hasn't every shop and garage, gotten the message "there will be international online shame and notoriety if you drop a car on a lift"?


it’s not the first time a C8 Corvette has fallen off a lift. This marks at least the third documented case since the model’s introduction, with earlier incidents in 2020 and 2021 pointing to similar mistakes.

While these cases are rare relative to total production numbers, they reveal a pattern that shouldn’t exist at this stage. By now, lifting procedures for the C8 platform are well-established. These aren’t experimental vehicles anymore—they’re widely sold performance cars with known service requirements.

Yet the same type of error keeps happening.
 
https://www.yahoo.com/autos/ownership/articles/dealer-drops-corvette-z06-during-133000493.html



https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10163792604429373&set=pcb.1592745625111871

Sunday, March 29, 2026

lucky kids got to do the family Christmas card photo in their Dad’s jet on Miramar



I was stationed there for the last two years of it being a Navy base, 95-97. It was flipped from Navy to Marines in the fall of 97 around Sept/Oct.  


Were any of you stationed there?

The infamous "Backwards Train"


https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=26611142471815685&set=gm.27213622404906461&idorvanity=164403560255045

TTI headers are reputed to be the best. Looks like they fail to do the same fundamental thing everyone fails at. Do a good job at spark plug clearance! What the EFF is this BULLSHIT? It's GD LAZY is what it is. Look at all that space to the rear of the engine!


https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=26267649229564386&set=pcb.25963293093366007

On February 3, 2026, a Kyrgyzstan national who entered the United States through the Biden administration’s CBP One application, was driving a commercial truck in Indiana

he failed to slow for traffic and swerved into the westbound lane. 

The van he struck was carrying six Amish people. Four of them died.

He held a Pennsylvania non-domiciled CDL issued in July 2025. 

He had been employed by AJ Partners, a carrier connected to the Sam Express and Tutash Express chameleon network. 

The CDL training school that certified his competency was Aydana Inc., operating as U.S. CDL, incorporated in August 2022 at 524 Continental Road in Hatboro, Pennsylvania.

Aydana Inc. had no presence on the FMCSA Training Provider Registry. 

It had no presence on Pennsylvania’s list of licensed CDL training providers maintained by the State Board of Private Licensed Schools. 

It had no website, no Google Business listing, no Yelp listing, and no discernible digital footprint of any kind for an entity incorporated for more than 3 years.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education states explicitly that providers on its licensed list are the only training providers in Pennsylvania legally permitted to offer ELDT instruction. 

PennDOT accepted the certification from this entity and issued a commercial driver’s license.

There are approximately 700,000 active motor carriers in the United States. Roughly four million people hold commercial driver’s licenses. The question the Jay County crash forces is not complicated. If a ghost school with no registry listing, no state license, and no digital presence can produce a CDL that a state agency accepts and a carrier relies on to put a driver on the road, and four people die before the system notices, how many variations of that sequence are currently active across an industry this size?

American drive-in restaurants, iconic for 1950s carhop service, neon lights, and parking lot dining, every little town used to have one or two, and teens in the late 60s used to pick a direction and hit everyone to test the shakes/malts and burgers

I don't have enough time to do a proper post on just how damn cool I think it must have been to be a teen in 1969-70, too young for the draft, hanging with friends in a cheap car, with cheap gas, paid for with a gas station mechanic job changing oil, tires, batteries, and having a LOT of fun on weekends with friends

Neon, great fries and burgers, shakes and ice cream cones, seeing who else showed up to hang out as planned, seeing what cars were getting shown off 

Eventually, however, drive-in restaurants went into decline, replaced by the introduction of the drive-through, which negated the need for hiring carhops and saved on money and time.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/timley-return-drive-in-restaurant-180974973

in an odd merge of themes, this one neighborhood in Mira Mesa has streets named for places in BC Canada, and stars



an ol shipmate of mine in the PI just posted that some drastic alternatives to gas have shown up


spiffy looking BMW... I never thought I'd see one of these parked on the roadside



pretty weird to see a spare wheel rim, without the tire. Ironically feet away from an advertisement about a mobile mechanic


These are some new aero things I haven't seen before on this Civic


Spotted in traffic the other day



In the 1978 film The Wiz, the Lion is named Fleetwood Coupe De Ville, and he's got a pretty cool rear view mirror

 


One of my favorite childhoood movies... the graffiti people, the lion, scarecrow and tin man, the monster trash cans, walking cameras in the Emerald City, those cool taxi cabs, and the very cool motorcycle gorillas! 

And the great songs, No Bad News, and Ease On Down the Road! 

But I'd never noticed that the lion's name is Fleetwood Coupe De Ville until now

i like this... everyone familiar with the Navy rating system will recognize that it's a couple ratings


 

I met Ron yesterday, and was shocked at what a good deal he got on this BMW... he paid less for it than it cost me to repair my Hyundai's radiator.


I saw this Buick on the way home the other day


Colorado troopers pulled over 2,540 drivers for ‘hanging out’ in the left lane and failing to move right while traveling at slower speeds than the flow of traffic, in 2025

The top roadways for traffic stops for “hanging out” in the left lane in 2025 are as follows:

I-70 (962 contacts)
I-25 (564 contacts)
Hwy 50 (297 contacts)
Hwy 160 (190 contacts)
E-470 (149 contacts)

Troopers are reminding drivers that in Colorado, multi-lane roads with a posted speed limit of 65 m.p.h. or greater designate the furthest left lane as the “passing lane.”

The Great Redwood Trail will connect the San Francisco Bay to the Humboldt Bay via a 300-mile multi-use trail.


The plan is to build a 300-mile trail along the route of the disused Northwestern Pacific Railroad, stretching from the San Francisco Bay in the south to the Humboldt Bay in the north. It will be designed for non-motorized uses like walking, cycling, and horseback riding.

When completed, the Great Redwood Trail will be one of the longest rail-to-trail conversion projects in the country. The planned route traverses California’s most scenic redwood forests, farmlands, mountains, rivers, and wine country, with a range of surfaces from 12-foot-wide, paved segments to narrow backcountry trails.



This is a long-term project spanning decades, with no specific opening date yet on the table.

The great-grandfather of all flight recorders from Germany. A porcelain plate with thinning discs, illustrating various possible causes of a crash. In the event of a problem, a crew member would puncture the relevant disc.

abandoned bus made over with street art


https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=700187430743004&set=a.498276272422745

I love this graffiti spoof of the Peanuts gang, in Batu Satu Brunei, by artists Guerrilla Architects (thanks to Larry Chen for showing this in his trip to Brunei!) the only commercial street art studio in Brunei


The transposition of a staple, to a new variant of style, it what makes art and artists, so appealing. That something that the original artist never conceived of doing with their characters, was imagined and brought into being by another, is cool. 

Imagine the Peanuts gang in Grease, Jurassic Park, Fast and Furious... etc. 

I find this type of art, maybe it's satire, maybe it's tribute, often done with Lilo and Stitch, but this is the first time I've seen the Peanuts gang in another universe








See the making of in this video 




Also see the commissioned mural in the Motul outlet in Brunei: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwrBfisJgni/