After Wiggia's excellent post about coachbuilt cars my mind started drifting to customised motorcycles and the bikes used in the film "Easy Rider." It is something that has niggled me for a long time.
The film was supposedly a hippie update of the Marlon Brando film The Wild One but the characters in Easy Rider were, for me, too absurd to be believable. For a start, they were clearly rich middle-class 'kids' pretending to be rebels, what used to be known as weekend hippies. Fonda's leather jacket looked exceedingly expensive and how many self respecting rebels are going to wear a crash helmet?
But the bikes. To have a bike like that in 1969 (the year of the film's release) you would have to build it yourself because they were not exactly mainstream, you would never see anything like that at your local motorcycle dealer. And if you didn't build it yourself you would have to pay somebody a lot of money to build one. Fonda and Hopper in their characters and in reality were not 'blue collar' workers, the sort of people who get their hands dirty. The hippies of the sixties grew up to be the yuppies of the eighties! (Tom Wolfe: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening")
Anyway I had a look to see who built the bikes and lo and behold - 'In bits and pieces, the story behind the Easy Rider choppers began to emerge publicly, and identified two African-American bike builders: Clifford 'Soney' Vaughs, who designed the bikes, and Ben Hardy, a prominent chopper-builder in Los Angeles, who worked on their construction.'
Oh the irony, Clifford Vaughs and Ben Hardy both African-Americans and members of a mixed race m/c club called The Chosen Few in Southern California. The two links in the story, to The Chosen Few and to The Vintagent, are dead-ends but I found this in wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chosen_Few_Motorcycle_Club
- and I found more of the story on a Harley Davidson forum:
'Proper credit finally began to shine on both Ben Hardy and Clifford Vaughs early in the 21st century. In 2006 Discovery Channel's History of the Chopper included a well documented piece on Ben Hardy's influence on the custom chopper movement, including a clip from a 1980s interview with Hardy, and a lengthy piece from Sugar Bear, a current top builder who is also African-American and has a shop not far from Hardy's old place. There was also the Black Chrome exhibition at the California African American Museum, which included both Hardy and Vaughs and their contributions. Their names now get mentioned more, including in the Profiles in History auction description of the remaining Captain America chopper for $1.35 million, which mentioned both of them in their press release. The bike was described as "designed and built by two African-American chopper builders, Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy, following design cues provided by Peter Fonda himself." '
So there is a whole hidden back story behind the film. Here is a video from the Discovery Channel which tells more of the history of the bikes and their builders (Cliff Vaughs died in 2016 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Vaughs):
Into the 1960s and the British 'blues boom' was firmly established and the musicianship improved after a chaotic and ragged start with the less talented dropping out of view.
Biden got 74 million votes, the highest popular vote in history. But Trump got nearly 70 million votes which makes his vote the second highest. So that means this election had a record turn out and the American people have become more engaged (or even enraged) by politics than ever before.
Even more significant, O'Neill says that Trump got 7 million more votes than he did in 2016. That particular statistic deserves serious consideration. Trump's base, the 'blue collar' clearly still believe that he speaks on their behalf in a way that the political class do not. Four years ago I wrote here that 'I don't like Trump and I don't trust him but... when the honeymoon period is over and the promised jobs for the rust belt States are slow to appear...'
In fact the jobs have appeared and, as the journalist Andrew Sullivan has written:
"One of the more revealing results from the polls this year came in the answers to the core question made famous by Reagan: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” In previous campaigns to re-elect the president, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide with only 44 percent saying they were better off, George W. Bush won with 47 percent and Obama succeeded with 45 percent. For Trump, a mighty 56 percent said they were better off now than when he took office."
It is also revealing to see who voted for Trump; Sullivan writes:
"Trump measurably increased his black, Latino, gay and Asian support. 12 percent of blacks — and 18 percent of black men — backed someone whom the left has identified as a “white supremacist”, and 32 percent of Latinos voted for the man who put immigrant children in cages, giving Trump Florida and Texas. 31 percent of Asians and 28 percent of the gay, lesbian and transgender population also went for Trump. The gay vote for Trump may have doubled! We’ll see if this pans out. But it’s an astonishing rebuke of identity politics and its crude assumptions about how unique individuals vote.
"This was far from the Biden landslide I had been dreaming about a few weeks back. It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. It was the moment that Trump’s core message was seared into one of our major political parties for the foreseeable future, and realigned American politics." https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/trump-is-gone-trumpism-just-arrived-886
The print media and TV broadcasters around the world have declared Biden to be the new President elect but Trump is not going to concede and intends to challenge the validity of postal ballots in, I think, four States. Covid19 has been the excuse used for so many people being encouraged to cast their votes by mail.
According to CNBC, 69 million votes were cast one week before election date... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/27/2020-elections-nearly-67-million-votes-cast-in-trump-biden-race-.html If that is correct it amounts to approximately 50% of all votes cast although The Guardian has the figure at 93 million and the NYT says 101 million early votes. That last figure is very hard to believe as it represents 72% of all votes cast. Really? Were the polling stations unusually quiet this year?
All of this is just speculative because, as I understand the US system, it is the Electoral College who will announce the winner on December 14th, five weeks from today. Biden's win will not be official until then. In the next five weeks Trump will pursue his case on the validity or otherwise of postal ballots through the courts. It seems unlikely that he will succeed but win or lose, the US seems to be broken beyond repair and what happens next is in the lap of the gods.
And a furher thought on the postal ballots. This video from Joe Biden is rather strange and disturbing: In what context did he say this and when and why?*
*(Ed.: I think he fell over his tongue, not for the first time.)
A (UK) Birmingham University-based commentary deplores Trump and the Deplorables, and goodness knows there are plenty of points to argue with about the incumbent, e.g. on environmental protection, employment protections, healthcare, pensions... But there is also the fact that Trump has attempted in some ways to level the economic playing field that has been tilted for decades against the American working (they would say, middle) class.
I comment, for what it's worth:
We've seen a four-year battle of polemic vs systemic: personal abuse, distortion, fact suppression, media partisanship and the co-option of many foolish civilians on social media as amateur political cartoon-spreaders... versus an attempt by a non-professional politician to address the systemic looting of America's working class by its own elites, using emerging market workforces as third-parties.
I see the Democrats as akin to British Labour: false friends of the lower classes. For their part, the Republicans are openly money-mad and scornful of the Deplorables, saying they don't deserve to have pensions and so on (my American brother keeps me up to date on this); Trump is a freak that both sides didn't want.
Let's see what Biden, after 47 years in politics, does to challenge the vampires. My bet is, nothing; and Business As Usual can only end in the collapse of the American economy as the welfare needs grow completely out of the reach of the diminishing tax base of an impoverished proletariat.
But America still has an excellent ratio of arable land to population; the UK will fall further, sooner and harder.
Here is ACL Blair on 2 May 1997, welcomed as a hero to do away with the venal and corrupt Tories, boosted and feted by the media. It took many years for us to be told that the adoring 'public' here were all selected Labour Party workers. And then...
For now, let due constitutional processes and the law determine matters, so that the American people, maddened by years of propaganda, do not tear each other to pieces.
Monty Don has thrown his cap in the ring regarding climate change, I have to be honest before I go on, I don’t like MD he depresses me and I haven’t watched Gardeners World for years, not just because of him and his Crufts show that seems to be the basis for every shot and his fake trademark garden wear, no different from many others but I find it wearing, but also because so many of these outdoor types of program have become vehicles for the activists in the climate change movement, so I declare there is bias in what I write, though he was a different presenter when he did his Italian Garden series which was excellent and at the beginning of his TV career, which begs the question, why the difference?
Gardening programs have changed anyway from the days of Geoffrey Smith, who I thought was the best of all and their programs set in gardens all could relate to, this on the other hand……
In the next episode we will show you how to become self sufficient: first buy five acres of...
And MD has now decided no one should buy cheap flowers from garden centres or anywhere else if the pots contain peat in the compost. He accuses garden centres of 'actively choosing to do harm' by selling compost made from peat. Oh please, they are trying to earn a living like everyone else. He is another at an age where he can afford to say what he likes with little chance of any backlash that will harm him, though backlash there certainly was.
The article is here - where else other than the Grauniad, every eco-loon's safe space:
Now I admit that the use unremittingly of peat over the years has reduced our reserves to bugger all and that is wrong, but as with all basics in all industry that was never a factor when peat was first starting to be used. What you are looking at is a reliable structure for plant growth, one that can be easily altered by the type of shredder it is put through for different uses and with the addition of fertilisers to this inert product you can manufacture exactly what is required for any given use.
No other compost comes close at this moment in time. Where it is wasted is the rubbish supermarket peat composts that resemble those cheap tea leaves you used to be able to get that looked like floor sweepings and often with the minimum of fertiliser added so the plants need feeding after six weeks or so, that is a waste of a good product.
I had a job some years back where the client wanted rhododendrons that require ericaceous soil. The garden did not have a suitable soil but the client insisted. In a perfect world you would decline, but few can afford to say no and large amounts of Levingtons compost that is no longer available were brought in. Levingtons sadly no longer exists as a stand alone company.
Many would say what I did in the light of today's knowledge was wrong, yet gardens have been created, (and they are a false landscape) for millennia using outside techniques and materials; stone is used from all over the country, most of the wood used in gardens is not indigenous and the plants themselves are a mirror of the world and not native.
The go-to word is sustainability and it has merit in many areas peat being one, yet the bulk of peat used in this country comes from abroad. Blaming the Irish and northern peat extractors for impoverishing the countryside is a little late, they have been burning the stuff for centuries in the same areas; jumping up and down now on a climate change ticket will not change that.
The surveys done on peat bogs world wide show a marked difference in the replacement time for the removed peat. This detailed analysis shows that the differences between the formation of peat bogs, and the climate they evolve in makes a huge difference, the tropical bogs are formed very much faster, and some other more recent surveys have shown that in some areas peat can be extracted if there are controls in place without affecting the biodiversity, which itself has been proven to change over time anyway.
The claim that “Peat: 90,000 years to form but can be gone in 50” is for the vast majority of peat bogs a downright lie as can be seen in the link above.
As with all these cries to shut something down the hypocrisy has no boundaries. MD has been on this hobby horse of his for awhile, which is fine, yet how many plants in the thousands planted in his BBC sponsored or taxpayer sponsored garden were not grown in peat? He may well show the believers how you can make your own, I do now for some uses as the range available has been much reduced, but who in their suburban garden is going to do all that? Virtually no one.
It took decades to formulate peat based composts for use in horticulture, they are not going to be replaced overnight and this RHS article explains why and the shortcomings of alternatives.
The truth is the alternatives have up to now been mainly rubbish. No trade grower is going to go that route until the problems with alternatives are solved: bark based composts have a tendency to leach nutrients from plants and soil and are a stopgap solution; going back to John Innes composts has many problems as well - most available today are poor quality. Again, the weight factor comes in among other problems, the poor quality can be laid at the feet of the few firms who now dominate the market, what the grower really wants is an alternative to peat that is close in performance across the board, at this moment in time it does not exist.
I did try one of the alternatives this year for the first time in ages and it was half decent even if very claggy, so still not there.
What MD is doing, as so many in their comfortable sinecures like his, is to want a change immediately that would not benefit the growers and would cost many jobs if his diktat was followed. Comparing our peat bogs with the Amazon rainforest is ludicrous, it has the same effect as shutting down all our coal fired power stations, as we close one the rest of world builds ten. Forget climate change: it will happen as it has repeatedly over the millennia: signs of tundra and tropics abound on our little island from long before peat bogs were raided or coal was burnt.
Am I a Luddite? Not at all, but there has to be some pragmatism on the way forward. Today all we get is soundbites from those in a position to make them, never any concern for jobs lost or the inevitable rise in prices or the loss of products, but they will feel warm and cosy in their funded bubbles or in their private jets going to world-wide forums where they can spout more of the same; there is a saying about coming to court with clean hands, and none of them do.
This recent statement from the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) lets the mask slip somewhat. So much of the drive from the climate change agenda groups has disguised the underlying thrust of what they want, it is not just to ameliorate items they believe are harmful to our planet but to significantly change our way of life, an evening-up of aspirations, a deliberate dampening of demand, a way of life with little to enhance it, to re-set - yes, they use the phrase at the end - our way of earning a living, though naturally this is one area they have no alternative answer to.
We are already seeing moves by governments to go with the green agenda despite those who would actually vote for such a future being extremely few; it is not being done on our behalf, and nothing they set out will change the way the planet behaves, nothing ever has.
As I have said before, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but something is going on when so many nations are going down the same path. Nothing is for the people whatever leaders' protestations when challenged (which itself is a rare event); when people like Soros and Gates have the ability to affect political direction in so many countries we have a problem.
So I say to Monty Don, however much you believe in your objectives, it will only affect the little people - so Bog Off!
Still looking over my shoulder and not quite drowning in nostalgia but looking to see how it came about that British teenagers fell in love with American 'blues' and 'rhythm and blues' music and how British groups adopted the style and successfully re-introduced it to the USA.
In the post war period traditional jazz became one of the popular music styles of the time and among the well known names, via radio and TV, were Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton. Jazz, imported from the USA, had its roots in blues and ragtime; blues being the music of the African Americans and ragtime was so called for its 'ragged' rhythms. Both Barber and Lyttelton would include blues style music in their repertoire. In 1955 Chris Barber and his guitar player Lonnie Donegan had a hit with 'Harmonic Blues' and in 1956 Lyttelton had success with 'Bad Penny Blues' which was transformed about ten years later by Paul McCartney into 'Lady Madonna' But the main impetus came, I think, from Lonnie Donegan who would lead a skiffle group during the intervals of Barber's shows, and sing Leadbelly songs. Most of the British 'beat' groups would cite Donegan as an influence on their own development.
So I have been digging into my own collection of records as well as digging into my memories of a mis-spent youth visiting the local jazz and beat clubs. Nostalgia is wonderful and thanks to the 'time machine' known as YouTube we can re-live our youth, although dancing as in the old days is not so easy now!
A random post from JD about a rather special car... brought about this piece.
When most people buy a car there is no doubt that the aesthetics are as important as the practicality. Even with today’s computer-generated automobiles that have very generic shapes because of the demands of aerodynamics, some still manage to stand out from the crowd and sales are boosted by that look. In the early days it was no different, except that there were fewer constraints on design and cost was less of an issue; hence these amazing vehicles.
A Daimler Double Six 50 Sport Corsica Drophead Coupe 1931 with originally a body by Thrupp and Maberley but later altered by Martin Walter and then again after an accident by the firm of Corsica; and very nice too.
The car here won the Concours at the world famous Concours event at Peeble Beach in California in 2006 which for motor-heads is a drool day as so many exotic and rare automobiles are on show at what many people believe to be the premier show of its kind anywhere.
What the show also highlights is the preponderance of coach-built cars that the rich and famous sponsored in the pre war years. Almost every prestige car, and there were a lot of them pre war, had coach-built versions on the road; the standard models were simply not enough for many people who had the money to create something different, and some indeed ended up improving on the original factory designs.
As I related to JD I have a very close old friend whose father worked for Park Ward, known mainly for their coach-built Rolls Royces. This was after the war when this type of business was struggling for obvious reasons but the same man showed us kids how to coach line a car body freehand, something that today is a lost art.
Park Ward themselves merged with another coach builder H J Mulliner in 1961 and all was owned by Rolls Royce Motors anyway, which in 1971 became Rolls Royce Motors Ltd.
Captain Cuthbert W. Foster, heir to the Birds Custard fortune, commissioned Park Ward to build a body on a rare (one of only six) Bugatti Royale - a design not dissimilar to a Rolls Royce he had Park Ward build earlier for him. Sunsequently acquired by the reclusive Schlumpf brothers, it is now in the museum in Molsheim, France, a place no self-respecting car buff should miss, where it sits alongside Ettore Bugatti's personal Royale known as the coupe Napoleon.
The Bird's-Eye Bugatti !
Other French cars that received the coach-builders loving touch included many Delage and Delahaye and Talbot top-of-the tree automobiles pre-war. The Delahaye below is a 135 convertible by lesser known coach builders Franay but what a wonderful job they did with this model:
The list for inclusion in this short piece would fill a library book so I have attempted to give just a representation across the board; those who know about these things will scream 'why was so and so not included?' But the reason is simply space.
Another Delahaye below is the 1949 175 Saoutchik Roadster. Saoutchik was originally a cabinet maker and moved from the Ukraine to Paris in 1900; he then spent the next fifty years involved in designing some of the most desirable cars on earth.
'Saoutchik was commissioned to produce the spectacular work-of-art by flamboyant English collector, Sir John Gaul. The design was based on the first post-war Delahaye chassis from a 175 S Roadster (chassis number 815023) producing 165 bhp from an engine much larger than the pre-war Delahayes ran – a 4,455 cc naturally aspirated overhead valve inline six cylinder engine with four-speed electro-mechanically actuated Cotal Preselector gearbox, Dubonnet coil spring front suspension, De Dion rear axle with semi-elliptic springs, and four-wheel hydraulic finned alloy drum brakes. The wheelbase was a whopping 116 inches.'
Saoutchik could be said to have been the leader of the French car designers/ coach builders in the Art Deco period.
This particular Delahaye was once voted the most beautiful car in the world; difficult to argue with that.
Pourtout were the firm responsible for this magnificent Delage:
Delage D8 120S Aero Coupe 1937
In the UK, apart from the above mentioned we had Barker, Hooper James Young, Gurney Nutting and many more specialist coach builders mainly working with Bentley and Rolls Royce chassis.
This beautiful and restrained version of a Rolls Royce Phantom 11 Continental Sport Coupe 1933 is by Hooper & Co.
The Italians have a very diverse body of coach builders. Many have been involved with versions of cars like Ferrari Alfa Romeo and Maserati as well as saloons. It is very difficult to select a few as there are so many; my favourite Alfa I have shown before, so a link will do for that one: https://www.citedelautomobile.com/en/collections/alfa-romeo-type-8c-2-31
Alfa probably had more coach built versions of their cars during the pre- and immediate post-war period than anyone else so just one or two here will have to suffice: Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Touring Berlinetta 1939 by Carrozzeria...
... and a more modern Alfa:
There were many different versions of Alfa’s TZ. Many were racing-only versions as well as the road models. This one by Zagato, a TZ3 Stradale, is not strictly an Alfa, one of nine built in 2010 as a celebration of the anniversary of the TZ. The first of these was a one-off built for a German enthusiast with an Alfa 4.2 V8 engine from the Alfa 8C but the others all had Dodge Viper engines of 8.4 litres in V 10 configuration pumping out 640hp- a modern coach-builder's classic.
Elsewhere Ferrari has had many one-offs built on their chassis. The Drogo-bodied Ferrari here is extremely rare and is built on a Cooper Climax grand prix chassis from 1957; really, the description in the text is best.
As an aside, it was interesting to see who had survived from that golden age; amazingly, quite a few but of the better-known names most are Italian: Bertone, Castagna, Fantuzzi, Guigiaro-Ital Design (who should be forever damned as having anything to do with the redesign of the awful Marina and its reincarnation as the ITAL, no doubt a decision they still regret and indeed it doesn’t exist in their list of works on their Wiki page - shame), Pourtout in France, Pininfarina, Touring, and Zagato... but then design has always been a big part of Italian production of anything.
This below is a Ferrari! Bodied by Ghia in 1952, the 212 Inter Coupe is really is a one-off, sold in ‘53 to the President of Argentina, one Juan Domingo Peron; I am sure his wife Evita would have loved it but she was dead by then.
In the USA before the war, they were spoiled for choice of material to work on: Duesenbergs, Packards and others were world-class automobiles. Many like Packard were leaders in new technology, which is difficult to believe seeing the post-war cars that were based on lumbering V8s and basic suspension.
This is the only surviving example of three built by Murphy &Co of Pasedena California: a Packard 343 from 1927. I would have this one for the colours alone - they are original Packard colours; note the matching central hinged doors.
Now the Cord, a brand named after the owner one Errett Lobban Cord, an automotive entrepreneur who produced this luxury car at the Auburn Automobile Company in Indiana, who were known for innovation as for example producing the first American car with front wheel drive and hidden headlamps; they also had a form of electro-mechanical gear shifting.
All Cords had a very distinctive front end as seen here; the ribbed exhaust was a feature used in Duesenbergs and Mercedes in Europe.
Though innovative, Cord suffered from reliability problems; the initial enthusiasm cooled, the dealer base shrank and the company was sold. E L Cord moved on to Nevada where he made millions in real estate.
With Duesenberg you're spoilt for choice, so many are good and what wonderful cars they were.
Rollston Duesenberg SJ Arlington Torpedo Sedan 'Twenty Grand' 1933
'Rollston's most famous car was the 1933 Duesenberg Model SJ Arlington Torpedo Sedan "Twenty Grand.
'Designed by Gordon Buehrig, the Twenty Grand was built as a show car for the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, and the finished car's price tag was $20,000, an astronomical amount at the time.'
Another Duesenberg will not go amiss here - a Murphy Duesenberg Model J Convertible Coupe:
Murphy was considered to be the best of the Duesenberg coach builders and you can see why: when this 1929 model was announced it halted trading on the NY stock exchange, another over-$20,000 car that was only for the few (in today's money over $1 million.)
Back in Europe others were challenging Rolls Royce for recognition as the ultimate luxury car. The two that got nearest were Hispano Suiza and Isotta Fraschini.
Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A from 1927
Hispano Suiza K6 Cabriolet by Brandone; a lovely car, just oozes class
As I said earlier you could go on and on with these magnificent vehicles of a bygone age, but is it bygone? Not really; although the ravages of war meant an end to most of what you see here, it revived later and is making more headway today; in the USA it could rightly be said the early hot-rodders were the coach builders of their time, and of the future as many have morphed into companies that custom build for customers and very successfully too.
Back in Europe firms like Mercedes are branching out with their versions of ‘dream’ cars. This stunning concept car is due to appear soon (or not, as the world ditches big automobiles in favour of mobility scooters); a nod to the past, it is a big step up for Mercedes who have not exactly rocked the boat design-wise for years.
I include another Alfa, I lied earlier! Before the company disappeared into a state-owned rust bucket it was still pushing the frontiers of design. This car had an amazing drag coefficient of 0.19, not beaten I believe in any road-going car since.
And this with a young Jeremy Clarkson driving the BAT:
Packard were at the top of the luxury car market in the thirties with V12 engines, hydraulic brakes, independent front suspension and small-production customised coach-built bodies for discerning and wealthy customers. They became the car of choice for the Hollywood stars and influential politicians. This video gives Packard's history, and if you want to skip that part from 15.00 on there are some stunning auto mobiles to view:
And the very last Packard concept car and the end of the Packard line in 1956: the Predictor. This car had push-button adjustable suspension (Packard had introduced adjustable suspension that could be changed from within the cabin before); an early ‘39 form of overdrive, the Econo-shift; and were among the first to use plastics in body detail.
It is a movement that is as active today as then and deserves a piece on its own but I will just include some examples.
The difference between coach building in a general sense and customising is that the coach builder designs and creates a body on an existing chassis, whereas a customiser alters an existing body. There are nuances to it but that is basically the difference though the skills are the same. The custom car has also branched out into hot rods and a whole new world in the use of paint finishes.
As explained in the link many of the custom car ‘tricks’ came from the early factory concept cars.
I have taken just one photo from the link because it was such an important car in the custom car movement.
This is a typical! customised hot rod version of probably the most popular of all cars that came from the custom car movement: a 1927 model T Ford Coupe.
Few of these custom cars are what we would call practical, but that is not really the point of them.
At the other end of the custom car spectrum are the cut-and-shut versions of everyday saloons, though by the time the body shops have finished with them it is hard to tell what the original car was apart from the badge.
Several sub-divisions came from the custom car genre: the hot rods, even drag racing cars, lowriders that emanated from Los Angeles in the mid-Forties, highrisers that came from the South, monster trucks and several others including those with ‘trick’ adjustable suspension.
What is interesting in all this time in which coach building/ custom cars have looked for new avenues of expression is how the custom car today in many aspects reflects those wonderful designs by the likes of Delahaye all those years ago; back to the future indeed. The Cadillac below is an example, not the best, but decent enough to show that nothing is new in the world of design whether it is cars or clothes or whatever.
A Cadillac, I would imagine a Fifties model beneath the distinctive paint job
Custom car paint jobs can be incredible. It is an art form on its own; the use of flaking metal and other techniques in their multi-layered finishes is a large part of the custom car and renovation final presentation.
As with the old hand-painted and beautifully-finished coach jobs of the past it is just a modern extension of that art and is an integral part to all coach building in whatever form.
Another I am going to guess at - a late-Forties Mercury?
And to finish, the Batmobile from the original Sixties TV series.
The car was based on Ford’s luxury sub-division Lincoln concept car, the Futura, that was purchased by legendary custom car builder George Barris who created the Batmobile around it. The Futura itself was built by the Ghia firm in Turin Italy in 1954 at the enormous cost of over $2 million dollars in today's money and appeared in the film 'It Started with a Kiss' starring Debbie Reynolds.
Barris purchased the car for a nominal $1 and it languished in his workshop for some years. It was completed for the TV series in just three weeks and retained by Barris who leased it to the makers of TV series.
The car had problems during the filming and numerous changes were made including replacing the engine as the original overheated.
In 2012 Barris put the car up for sale and the following year at auction it fetched $4.2 million dollars.
A real-life Batmobile was the Phantom Corsair, a concept car designed by Rust Heinz of H J Heinz family and Maurice Schwartz of the Bohman and Schwartz coach building company of Pasadena, California.
Apart from the futuristic aerodynamic shape it had electronic interior and exterior push-button door openers and various electronic indicator lights on the dashboard, the first of its kind in that area.
It was based on a Cord chassis with front wheel drive and the electrically-operated four-speed pre-selector gearbox plus fully independent suspension and adjustable shock absorbers; the engine was a Lycoming V8.
The passenger layout was unusual with four across the front and two in the rear; the rear layout was compromised by drinks cabinets! Heinz was killed in a car accident and the car never made production as planned, so the prototype is the only one that ran.
And to finish, a Bugatti TYPE 57SC Aerolithe, painstakingly and at tremendous cost restored to its former glory as seen here in this Youtube video. No problem getting your money back on one of these as alongside its stable-mate the Royale they are the most expensive cars in the world should one ever come up for sale.
The Elecktron panels used for the bodywork made it extremely difficult to build as it cannot be welded owing to combustion at low temperatures so the riveting seen on the body work is not there for effect as often thought - though it does have an effect - but it was the only way to join the panels.
Yes, I am one of those engaged in the newly fashionable WFH - working from home! But only because I am retired and no longer have a proper job. Working from home is not really working because I am not compelled to do it, I am painting pictures and it is better than working! So here are a few recent 'lockdown specials' (...not that lockdown has made a noticeable difference to my daily routine)
Claude Debussy has featured already in this series but he deserves another outing. We are currently surrounded by hysteria and panic so we deserve a tranquil interlude.
'The composer Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, a few miles outside Paris, in 1862. While a pupil at the Conservatoire, he composed music that did not conform to the theory of the times. He contradicted his teachers by claiming that pleasure was the only valid rule of music, and that music could not be learned. Debussy was to become one of the greatest French composers, creating works which threw open entirely new musical horizons. This fascinating documentary gives deep insights into the life and work of Claude Debussy based on reports by those who encountered the great composer.'
(Ed.) Ironically. just as well-meaning activists are pushing pension funds to disinvest in oil companies, the latter could be leading the way to the advanced energy solutions the former would like to see... _________________________________________________________________________________
Notwithstanding
her much-trailed return to being an ordinary school student, Greta
seems still to pout in public quite a bit. Must be very tempting, I
guess. She may not vont to be alone.
So, asks our good host Sackers, what plans do her NGO handlers have for further exploiting her enormously successful global brand?
I'm rather repeating myself here, having written about the shift in
climate-change response several times, and can't stress enough how the
whole thing has now gone 100% mainstream, as of mid 2019.
The NGOs did their job too well ! As such, they risk being completely
swept aside by Big Business / Big Banking, as it swings into full action
mode. Yes, we really get it, we're really doing it - now just piss off! (We don't take advice from people in sandals.)
They
never really knew how business worked, and they don't know how to
intervene in a genuinely purposeful business dynamic such as is
happening everywhere now, except as spectators and way-behind-the-curve
cheerleaders. They'd be gobsmacked if they saw the detail of what the
heavy-duty, truly purposeful reengineering of whole, real,
steel-&-concrete sectors of industry actually involves. (I'm
working on a hydrogen project right now - it's mind-boggling in its
ambition.) They have nothing to contribute!
It'd
be like a 1930's refugee, fetched up in America, who'd been writing to
her congressman for a couple of years urging him to drop his
isolationism and get the USA into the war. Then along comes 1941-42.
What does Roosevelt or Ford or Bethlehem Steel or Boeing need to hear
from her on the subject of how you build tanks and ships and aircraft by
the thousand?
I'm
guessing the NGOs (the ones with the really devious world-government
plans) were hoping, or planning, that their Big Chance was if business
continued to dig in against change, and would need ongoing and detailed
cajoling / direction / manipulation / hand-holding / external
interventions of all kinds, by self-appointed green missionaries.
Too bad, Greta - it'll be Goldman Sachs in charge, as ever.
ND
[A version of this post first appeared on the C@W blog]
In recent comments someone said how the US had laid waste to Central and South America. Not quite true, the 'cono sur' (southern cone) has shaken off the US influenced dictatorships and in my experience is a wonderful place to live, particularly Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
I'll have to dredge up some memories, Pablo Neruda's house for example - https://www.vayaadventures.com/blog/visit-isla-negra-unusual-seaside-home-pablo-neruda/ First thing you see is a narrow gauge steam engine in the garden! Or maybe the Giles Gilbert Scott-designed phone boxes in Buenas Aires, exactly the same as those we used to have here. They are even the same colour. Or the surprising discovery that all three countries have hundreds of cricket clubs.
This is somewhere on the coast road to the north of Valparaiso. I wasn’t sure of the exact location so I searched Google maps and found it and borrowed a few screen shots –
A very spectacular location, I’m sure you will agree. In fact the whole coastline is spectacular – I feel a bout of nostalgia coming on
A few changes since I was there. They have some street lights now and the roadside caff looks as though it has been abandoned (blue in my pic but a sort of dereliction cream in the Google view).
The second image below shows the view from within the painting looking out over the Pacific. The cliff top at left is where I stood to take a few photographs which I have used as the basis for the paintings.
I did a watercolour ages ago and it has been hanging on the wall for the past ten years; at least. I shall be doing a few more paintings. Can’t stop even though there are dozens if not hundreds on the wall here or just lying about the house. Why would I want to stop, anyway?
America has gone emo. I think it's a generation thing - every generation wants a big fight: 1914, 1939, the Sixties, the Fall of Soviet Communism - I'd have said every 25 years or so, except that Western women are having their babies later now so instead of c. 2014 it was a few years later this time.
Not just America, of course. The PC madness has taken hold of our educational institutions here in the UK, from primary school right up to Oxford University; liberal thinkers are being cancelled (the revolution eats its children), zealots are foisting Nuspeak on us so that Bad Things cannot be thought, and so on.
But emo it is. The Age of Reason is passing, and with it the rational political institutions that kept quarrelsome factions in some sort of balance. The common currency of our time is the scream.
Here, for example, is an image posted on Facebook by a highly intelligent and educated friend across the Big Water:
Funny, though, that some black people see no difficulty in supporting the Republicans, at least the Republicans as headed by that man of many sins Donald Trump: Thomas Sowell; Kanye West; Candace Owens, here most effectively rebutting attempts by old white men to misrepresent her - https://www.facebook.com/watchparty/195577945043970
Also funny that Hillary Clinton should have said recently that Republicans themselves don't want Trump:
"Most Republicans are going to want to close the page," Clinton says. "They want to see him gone as much as we do, but they can't say it publicly."
Now I don't know the lady personally, but I doubt that Mrs Clinton knows many ordinary Republicans personally either. I think her remark refers to Establishment Republicans, the types she'll have met, and I think I know why she said that: they're in the same game as the Democrats - self-interest and political survival. The difference is that the pseudo-Left throws scraps under the table to their supporters but never lets them sit on the bench with them; whereas the Right throw steaks at the faces of their supporters so they don't get eaten themselves.
And in came Trump the Disruptor, just when it had begun to dawn on the workers that their customary choice was between an enemy and a frenemy. For the choice is between two systems, only one of whch supports both mainstream political parties.
The choice is between globalisation and national self-interest. The former is not sustainable for the West - the late Sir James Goldsmith (a billionaire entrepreneur) warned about this a quarter century ago, at the time of the GATT talks in 1994 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI , and again in 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RowLyW5X52A .
For a time the prosperity of ordinary people was kept going because even if real wages were no longer rising, goodies imported from China and other Third World countries lowered prices so e.g. it was still possible to stuff children's bedrooms with Christmas gewgaws from Toys "R" Us; but personal debts rose, unemployment rose, government spending on the Welfare State (and its US equivalent) rose.
Trump's catchphrase 'Make America Great Again' grates with some who cringe at the thought of nationalistic economic imperialism; but more honestly it should be something like 'Prevent America Becoming Destitute'. I attempted to graph the way the system works, eight years ago, and some on the Right didn't like it, but I think it's essentially correct: America's rich and powerful jumped at the opportunity to arbitrage massive differences between the developed world and the developing world in the exchange-rate-adjusted value of land, labour and nonfinancial capital; actually it was a robbery of their own people.
Lately the elite themselves have begun to wonder if they can survive the smashup of the society in which they live, hence their purchase of boltholes in e.g. New Zealand.
Is Trump a liar, cheat, swindler, sexist adulterer etc? Yes; though as people are learning what's on Hunter Biden's laptop some are wondering whether his crazy behaviour is not symptomatic of something that went seriously wrong in his childhood. In any case, close examination of Biden Senior is beginning to characterise him as a grifter slowly going gaga.
Some of the American Right seem to me like those heartless, money-mad eighteenth-century English grandees who claimed compensation for drowned slaves as lost cargo, on their maritime insurance; but the more vocal element of the Left is shrieking about history and trying to rewrite it, rather than improving the lot of the underprivileged today; and as I say, the party that claims to represent the interests of the 'minorities' has a stronger interest in the latter remaining in a semi-wretched condition so that they will go on voting for benefits rather than a better life. Similarly in the UK, I've wondered whether, if it could, the British Labour Party would wave a wand to transform the lives of the poor and so make their political 'pals' redundant https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-wand-of-collusion.html .
This Presidential election is a hard, hard choice, and I think it's significant that it's focused on personalities rather than macroeconomic and foreign policy. I fear that a vote for Biden is a vote for Business As Usual, with little right-on scraps thrown under the table to screaming supporters; with Trump it's whether the favours he grants to his Establishment crocodiles are outweighed by the systemic readjustments he appears to be engineering to prevent Joe Public wearing a barrel.
'What started out as a way to label people as culturally and politically aware has now become evidence of how culturally and politically aware people like to think they are. If you feel the urge to call yourself and others woke, it’s less believable that you actually are.'
I really do not like the current trend in verbiage or right-on trendy-speak, most is used simply to go with what is considered woke, a word that itself is an invented trendy way of saying 'to be aware of'.' The original meaning of 'woke' was to be awake to social injustice - particularly injustices about race - but it is now applied to almost anything being pushed by progressives (another word that has been hijacked in the political arena to mean so many more things than it was originally used for.)
The wholesale misuse of words in general lessens their impact and muddies their actual meaning, yet the never-ending competition for being seen to be leading from the front in nearly all arenas of public statement and speech leads to examples of what years ago would have been described as twaddle.
Even slogans gain new users almost overnight: ‘build back better’, a UN slogan is now uttered by what seems every politician on the planet; much has been made of this as a sign of a world conspiracy to come about after the virus is eliminated or just goes away as it will like all other similar ones. Is it a sign of new world order? I doubt it but we do live in strange times and the world leaders all singing from the same hymn sheet gives that tack credence; or it could just be, more likely, they haven’t the wit or reasoning to come up with something of their own so just jump on the slogan bandwagon.
If critical race/gender/queer theory is unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap as anyone with a brain would testify, how come the liberal left and all the ‘woke’ agenda has gained traction?
In many ways it hasn’t; it is really no different from the old CND marches for the majority. It is just another coat hook to hang their credentials on and there are so many of them, all of them squeezed to the death for maximum effect.
'Racist', a word that had attachment to the apartheid era in South Africa and the civil rights protests in the USA, has become a word that has no longer any real meaning at all; it has been used as a derogatory term for anything and anybody who does not go along with the liberal left/Marxist agenda. A word that had a powerful connotation is now just an addendum in any conversation that is not going the left's way.
'Fake News' has run its course; originally a pointer to news that was believed to be false or inaccurate, it has morphed into a phrase that is used when anything is said that goes against your own views.
'Human resources, management of'; horrible phrase - likens people to rows of pot noodles.
'Cultural appropriation', a term used by BAME people who regard anything, African for instance, to be only available to them, the oppressed minority, while they appropriate all the advances of the country that adopted them, the dominant majority; 'cultural appropriation' only goes one way.
I’m not even going to bother with 'binary' or anything attached to the LGBTXYZTRS brigade; all I will say it has completely changed the way I look at rainbows!
Reading that is enough to make you wonder if anyone actually knows what cultural appropriation is - and do you care?
In certain areas there appears to be almost a competition to appear more woke than your peers. Some wonderful examples appear these days: this one from a sudden glut of statements by supermarket CEOs on how stockpiling was the reserve of the middle classes (the middle classes by the way in this country are among the lowest for remuneration in Europe) - anyway top of the pile was the one from the head of Iceland and Food Warehouse who said that stockpiling was 'a middle class privilege and social injustice.' One short sentence but two woke battle cries: 'privilege' has just about levered 'racist' from the top spot of wokeness; and 'social justice' means anything these days' from the injustice that kids need food paid for by the general taxpayer and not the absent father to seeing that all those in the public sector are feather-bedded from any financial effects caused by the virus or that any person who is not white is automatically - regardless of their income or standing - moved ahead of the indigenous white population for almost everything now. Social justice, indeed.
Even schools and universities have fallen foul of the woke agenda. In San Diego policies that marked down students for not turning up, turning up late and failing to complete course work are now deemed racist and as the majority of the transgressors were from the ethnic groups on campus they are now having those failings moved to the students' citizen grade. Citizen grade? What is that in terms of achievement and employment? This will. according to the schools Vice President, help to amend the racism that these practices create. 'Racist' school for marking down students who fail on several levels, Jesus, how woke is that?
I wonder if future employers will be told how these students achieved their grades. Probably not, as they will almost certainly go along with this nonsense; they wouldn’t want to be seen to be lagging in the woke stakes.
The best example of the word soup created by the woke was this job advert for a diversity director for the Trussell Trust, an outfit that distributes food parcels. £62k is the going rate offered which one has to say equates to an awful lot of food parcels that could have been put together - which one would in normal circumstances have thought a priority for a charity dedicated to feeding of the malnourished; and where a diversity director fits into all this is your guess as well as mine; nonetheless it is a gem.
'Highly expert in the discipline, and able to clearly articulate complex concepts such as power, privilege, bias and intersectional injustice, you will ensure that our organisational perspective on these issues reflects the most considered and comprehensive thinking. The ability to identify and realise shared ‘quick wins’ that capture and signpost our direction of travel will be a distinct advantage. …'
Exactly!
'Diversity' is a late comer to this woke alphabet. Originally a word used in phrases such as a 'diverse opinion' or 'diverse elements', it is now solely for the push to include diverse ethnicities, or at least they would have you believe that. It is also a wonderful way to express desires for diversity that are at the least vague or beyond comprehension, the BBC presenter Ellie Harrison has said that:
'So there's work to do. Even a single racist event means there is work to do. In asking whether the countryside is racist, then yes it is; but asking if it's more racist than anywhere else - maybe, maybe not.'
This woke attack on the fact that very few BAME people ever get out in the fresh air of our countryside has little to do with the other fact that there is absolutely nothing to stop them. We have a large RSPB bird sanctuary on the coast near us and hordes of people visit it (can I say 'horde' or is that like 'tsunami', perceived to mean unwelcome large numbers of immigrants, that only people right of centre - itself a nasty place - appear to notice.) I have never on my travels ever spotted a person from a BAME background with a pair of binoculars climbing over a stile, and one way or the other it bothers me not one little bit. The attitude of the BBC presenter is that for reasons of wokeness they should be forced to enjoy the same countryside we do, probably on a quota system!
There is so much that equates to woke in what she says it makes your eyes bleed: not a single item of unique thinking, all from the woke playbook, and this is a woman who scarred her arms, not tattooed, to show her love for a man; mental.
Whitehall naturally is in on the act. It has spent £400,000 of our money sending staff on courses for having 'unconscious bias' i.e. everybody is racist but they don’t know it.
There are 180 diversity officers across nine Whitehall departments. This woke exercise would never have been revealed in the public arena but the scheme was to be rolled out for the palace of Westminster and naturally the MPs rebelled; they would have to have electric cattle prods used on them to get them into something the rest of civil service was being forced to go to. Never slow to be seen going forward and woke unless it affects them personally, it also took national headlines to shut the Commons bars down when everyone else was denied the same ‘privilege’ - 'there, I’ve done it, I am woke!'
Or perhaps in the interests in 'fairness', another word used so loosely as to not be fair to itself, we should all stay indoors thereby creating, yes you saw it coming, a ‘level playing field’; yes, yet another phrase that the left use to mean all things to all men, though it never impoverishes those that uttered the phrase in an attempt to create the level playing field; that sacrifice is reserved for everyone else.
Elsewhere, 'no platform' has run its course as a woke phrase; 'cancelling' is the new buzz-word. Instead of stopping someone appearing at a debate, the person is now ‘cancelled’ before they are booked; at least it saves turning up and being disappointed. The only thing I can remember being cancelled was my library card when I failed to return a book.
It seems now that we are moving away from a single word that was used in wokeness: now, as with the above-quoted supermarket bosses, there is real competition for the most diverse of phrases, most of which need a translator; such as this from a NYT piece: 'the entrenched forces of white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism' - no, me neither, it’s pseudo-intellectual garbage.
Other words are constantly added to the list of those one should not use; in some cases you do wonder at the mentality of those who decide on the validity of same words. I saw that ‘hysterical’ should not be bandied about as it refers to emotional women who are not in a safe place; 'safe place' is another well-worked phrase that to me is a waste of space, and 'a waste of space' is a derogatory term for someone who is trying to reverse the results of capitalism or something; it all gets very involved.
Some I like just for the fun of it: a young criminal is now a ‘justice -involved juvenile’ - makes him sound like a court usher; 'minority enterprise development' is actually about racial quotas!
The list is endless. Dictionaries now have lists that every year they have to make room for, whereas in the past a new word made front page news. I leave you with one we all understand, well all of us who have worked or do work: 'shared responsibility payment' - meaning taxes.
Corporations have taken it on themselves to be the arbiters of wokeness, telling customers that they will not stand for any form of racism and that they will do all in their power to see that diversity among the companies is achieved, not merely an aspiration. The BBC leads on that one with racial quotas way above the norm even now and advertising positions that only BAME people can apply for; they of course are not racist - all racism is reserved for white people; how woke is that? Peak woke, methinks.
'Woke'; the word, like so many others before it, has lost its way from the original black civil rights movement about being awake to events; along with so many words and phrases, it has been bastardised to mean anything you want it to. Now, rather than signifying an awareness of social injustice, it is used to suggest that someone is being pretentious and insincere about how much they care about an issue.
Word soup has arrived.
In fact so many words and phrases are being used up I fully expect cockney rhyming slang to make a come back: bottle, bottle and glass=arse=farce; why not? That’s what it all amounts to.
Grovellers en masse
The BLM movement, despite being roundly discredited as a vehicle for a Liberal-left/Marxist movement, enthralled thousands with its wokeness: the grovelling take-a-knee participants took that whole apologise-for-white-supremacy shtick to a new level of dumb.
Even the virus is racist: it has been suggested that it unfairly has more effect on BAME communities..
Let's not leave out ('exclude'?) religion... A rather wonderful example of the use of language for the purposes of obfuscation came up in the Hackney Gazette this week. The local council has decided that unless the area - Stamford Hill, which is one of, if not the, most orthodox Jewish areas in the country - starts obeying the restrictions it will be going into a local lockdown. (It's an area I know well, having spent my formative years growing up near there; the orthodox Jewish community is very tightly-knit with large families and basically does its own thing.) This is the sentence in question:
'Visiting friends and family could be banned, and faith settings and some businesses could face temporary closure.'
'Faith settings'? Certainly new to me, and a way of not actually saying what the faith was that would be closed down, though anyone familiar with the demographics of that area would know it meant synagogues. Still, by using a phrase that in normal circumstances means absolutely nothing the council leader has avoided any case of offending a particular religion and I suppose that was the objective; but 'faith settings'? Gobbledygook.
Can this word-warping continue? Undoubtedly: those who promote the language and direction of their various agendas have nowhere else to go; the race to the bottom has only just started.
