Wednesday, April 01, 2026
a court has concluded the 15-year legal battle over a Caltrans project that aims to modify a stretch of Highway 101 through Richardson Grove State Park.
a three-judge panel in California’s First District Court of Appeal affirmed a lower court’s decision to reject the latest lawsuit from conservation groups that challenged the project’s compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The Richardson Grove Improvement Project, as Caltrans has dubbed it, will modify an approximately one-mile stretch of Highway 101 as it wends through the state park’s massive coast redwoods, some of which are more than 300 feet tall and thousands of years old.
Caltrans describes the work as “minor adjustments” that are necessary to improve traffic safety and accommodate industry-standard-sized semi trucks that are currently prohibited from passing through this narrow stretch of 101.
Project opponents, on the other hand, argued that both the construction activity and the resulting road realignment could harm the ancient trees — not by removing any of them down but by cutting into their root systems.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2026
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.
I've covered the Wrigley ownership in https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2016/01/private-island-owners-used-to-be-quite.html
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.
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.
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
Monday, March 30, 2026
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.
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.
He held a Pennsylvania non-domiciled CDL issued in July 2025.
The van he struck was carrying six Amish people. Four of them died.
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.
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 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
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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.”
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.
