Recent Comments:
Cannes Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull {Cinematical}
May 18th 2008 12:31PM I'm fond of saying that, if Lucas had really wanted to be a director, he would spent his life directing, not luxuriating in the wealth he accumulated via a couple of early successes. The directors of Hollywoods golden era worked at their craft and honed their skills for many year, something Lucas has assiduously avoided, as if he was too much of a wunderkind to bother. And as if the next thrilling CGI breakthrough would bail out his infantile stories and characters....
That said, I'm not surprised his imprint is apparently all over this film, and to its detriment.
Ron
Will peak oil trigger Mad Max society? {Autoblog}
Feb 16th 2008 12:03PM Whether it's next year or a decade from now, peak oil is real. To my mind, this is why we are in Iraq. It was the "easiest" middle east nation we could invade and it gives us a beachhead in the most oil-rich part of the world. My guess, and I could be wildly wrong, is that the US government knows we are on the downslide and they are hedging their bets about what'll happen in ten or fifteen years. They are looking at the "Mad Max" scenario, too....and they don't want it to happen here. Even a minor disruption in the flow of oil could send the entire planet into a tailspin. That's not to say that Bush wasn't a willing participant in the Iraq advention, and that this didn't fit in with his administrations political mindset, but I say, in the end; it's all about the oil.
To those who are waiting for the next great technological breakthrough, I hope you're right...but we can't count on it. We have heated our abodes with various forms of carbon, but we have only motored about using oil....and there is nothing on the horizon that is as scalable, abundant and easy.
Child's Play: recreation 1927 Baby Bugatti {Autoblog}
Feb 5th 2008 9:53PM I actually drove a Baby Bugatti as a young man, sometime in the 60's. The older brother of a friend of mine found a garage where two of them had apparently languished for years...and he bought one from the people who then owned the garage. The car was amazing to us, but we really didn't know what to make of it. At some point, someone added a lawnmower engine to it so we could drive it, which we did, on some seldom used country roads. It was a beautiful piece of machinery, in the classic Bugatti blue.
The sad part (it still pains me 40 years later...) is that, at some point the motor caught on fire and the thing burned. Or so I was told...though I was never really sure. They claimed they "buried it" in their yard, but that sounded very weird.
In any event, it was a magical couple of weeks...and perhaps it fueled my lifelong obsession for classic cars.
My only hint as to who could have owned such an amazing car is that John Jacob Astor had lived in our town...and he would have had the money and means to buy such a vehicle...
