as an 11 year-old, i watched our overweight, heavily tattooed mailman strike our mailbox with his truck. as you might expect, the impact almost split the mailbox post in half lengthwise, leaving a gigantic crack that nearly ran from top to bottom.
i had been peeking out from behind the front door and so, assuming nobody had seen him, the mailman threw the truck into reverse, jammed our letters in the now quivering mailbox and sped off toward the neighbor’s like the hooligan he was.
that’s why i’m always hesitant to mail my passport anywhere.
i went back to my old university for a brief visit because i happened to be in the neighborhood today. walking through campus, i noticed that unique spark that is often found in the bright eyes of college students: a frightening blend of naivety, stupidity and blind determination.
boy, am i glad that i’m not a student anymore.
credit where credit’s due:
WRC: congratulations to Petter Solberg for edging out Sébastien Ogier by 1.1 seconds in the very last stage to claim second place, to Ogier for getting on the WRC podium for the second time ever, to Ken Block for giving it a good shot during his debut and to Sébastien Loeb for winning his fourth successive Rally Mexico.
Oscars: congratulations to the cast and crew of The Hurt Locker for winning a total of six academy awards last night by beating Dances with Blue Cat People for Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Film Editing, Best Director and Best Picture.
so my brother of CornerSpeedPhoto fame is in Florida right now covering the Daytona 200 AMA superbike races this weekend. since he’s friends with a few of the racers, he’s convinced some of them to run CornerSpeedPhoto stickers on their bikes this season. for this weekend’s races, said stickers are on the Buell 1125Rs of Shawn Higbee and Paul James:
plus the Suzuki GSX-R of Skip Salenius:
it seems that i’ve angered someone at the Avanti Owners Association International when i called the boldly styled Studebaker Avanti “kind of ugly” in yesterday’s entry. in his forum post, the offended party asserts that i must have been severely drunk that night which, in his mind, must be the only logical explanation for my gross misjudgment.
fine, but let me ask you this: isn’t alcohol supposed to make things look better rather than worse?
say hello to the Studebaker Avanti, a car that i’m guessing most of you have never seen or heard of before. don’t worry, though, because i hadn’t either until i stumbled out of a Las Vegas sushi restaurant one night and found this gleaming example parked next to my Japanese econobox. seeing the Avanti shocked me in the same way that a flock of nude cyclists would shock an old Alabaman woman who’s in the middle of her very first driving lesson.
i had heard of the Studebaker name before but only in reference to the electric vehicles they were producing in the early 1900s. Studebaker was from a bygone era and therefore no longer relevant so i filed it away with the likes of the biplane and steam locomotive as an engineering stepping stone that has been thankfully left behind. little did i know that Studebaker remained active well into the ’60s, producing such bravely styled marvels as the Hawk, Lark, and the Avanti before dying a slow, agonizing death from financial exsanguination.
the Studebaker Avanti is a bit of a rarity with only 4,643 built during its 18 month production run. this explains why i had never seen one until then and why i’ll probably never see one ever again. it seems, then, that the Avanti is more of an apparition than an actual car, an elusive vestige of the American automotive industry that once was. the Avanti is an endangered species.
oh well. it’s kind of ugly anyway.
things that i’ve recently done that never would’ve happened 20 years ago:
talked to someone in a different state from a moving vehicle.
watched a movie at my desk without a television.
received driving directions from a satellite in real time.
had dinner at a Swedish furniture store.
perused an alarmingly large collection of video clips showing people falling over.
i came across an article today about a pair of crocodile mummies which were subjected to CT scans by a bunch of nerds at Stanford University. so here’s the question: why would the ancients go through all the trouble of mummifying crocodiles? with all the disease, warmongering and general suffering that was going around back in the day, you’d think that “mummifying the crocodile that bit Nickhotep’s nuts off” would be pretty far down on the list of things to do.
but i’ve been wrong before.
i heard a truly awful ringtone this morning as i sat in the waiting room during my mother’s doctor’s appointment. loud, obnoxious club music began blaring but instead of answering as quickly as possible out of embarrassment, the owner of the offending phone held it up and studied it like an ancient artifact for a good 20 seconds before he put it to his ear.
