Trusting my Dad’s shadetree mechanics. I took it in for a “catalyst fault” and they STOLE the catalytic converter and stuck a straight pipe where it had been.  The twats were too poor to sue.  I should have had them arrested.

Ed Berrier has made a habit of bringing his NASCAR stocker to Goodwood and making a spectacle of hill climbs in it.

Of course the big big problem for Robotech is the judgment on intellectual property between Big West (the franchise rightsholder for the creators of Macross) and Tatsunoko (the production studio/copyright holder for the TV series of Macross which was adapted [or pirated in the opinion of the franchise’s creators]).…

It isn’t just Disney, either. Lots of remakes in the world of anime these days too. Urusei Yatsura is in a revival now, Space Cruiser Yamato got reimagined, Mobile Suit Gundam: Origin somehow transited from a prequel to remaking bits of the original series. Rurouni Kenshin, Trigun, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Megazo…

When I was most into comics in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Alien and Predator were in Dark Horse’s product line-up. And Planet of the Apes was with Eternity/Aircel/Malibu.  Just a datum.  Of course, Marvel’s forays into licensed pop culture are legendary.

Found an unrepaired recall on my vehicle.  I’ll likely have it fixed in a few weeks.  Thank you!

I studied a little of the Iroha system when I was playing Gundam Network Taisen, as I was using it rather than alphabetics when chosing the names for my bases and carrier ships. What is even more idiosyncratic about it is that it uses a more medieval version of the Japanese language than the modern version that…

Back when I was in High School, my art teacher was really big into the 60s artists and thought the world of Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Warhol. And it was strange to me that he was against me trying to develop my skills in a technical or comics manner but all for using a steal-and-repurpose manner like…

More and more Defense Department manuals and tech orders are generated as .pdf files first and then printed in hard copy, rather than the other way around. I know because I build scale models and I found the latest Navy/Marine Corps/Coast Guard directives for markings on aircraft from a semi-public database--the…

I really wanted custom shops to grab these Amaties and further enhance the vibe out of them and either make them look more Benzish or more Jaguarish. They were very popular in the area of Tennessee where I lived. When the drivers’ Pontiac or Olds or Mercury finally bit it, they got one of these to replace it.

If I were the Italian military, I’d set aside a couple weeks out of the year, and invite NATO to train their UXO and UDT people at the site. Seabees too. There are a lot of lessons learned there that could apply to maybe the situation on the Black Sea? Or the Baltic Sea pipelines?  Make the cleanup not just a job in…

Was I the only person in America who liked ABC’s LIFE ON MARS?

King George The Millionth

They own the KFCs there?  They should call the car the SANDERS.

I’m not saying either/or.  I’m saying yes, and...

They can, but an array of lights spaced along the sides of the lane can control a much larger stretch of highway for the same cost as one light sign.  Too many signs and the drivers will tune them out.

While the message signs are good, I think there needs to be indicator lights along the divided highway, that can signal not just for wrong-way vehicles and pursuits, but for other hazards such as heavy volume, environmental hazards like ice or fog, and so on.

PS: I’ve found out from a gazetteer site that the name Gonchary is shared by several places across western Russia and in Belarus. Especially in the Volga region. There are bad jokes I could make about this fact, but I won’t make any.

I’m working on my own piece of fiction and needed a name for an airfield in the then-Soviet Union. Goncharov it is.
The way artificial intelligences are going it’s only a matter of time before somebody somewhere uses the tech to spawn highly plausible “vintage” movies. Several years ago I’d posted in my blog about Gorgo…

The Monkees TV series was heavily edited between its original run on prime time TV and its tenure as a Saturday Morning rerun on a completely different network, then edited again when it went into syndication about a decade after its premiere.  One of the reasons was because their record label wanted to push the…