Well...there was the late-1920s Bentley—maybe a Red Label Tourer?—that my father stored and occasionally exercised for his cousin (40 years later, he’s still bitter that said cousin didn’t give him first refusal when he sold it). There was the Rolls-Royce two-seater of similar vintage that a friend of my grandmother’s…

I was driving home from work in a hurricane (well, the outer bits); lots of rain, lots of wind. I got off the highway and headed in the front drive (I lived on a farm at the time) and found a big tree down across the farm road. Okay, fine, I’ll go around to the back drive...another tree, this one on the county…

There used to be a really good annual folk music festival in New Bedford, MA, in early July. One year when the Fourth fell on that Saturday, we were heading home up Route 24 after sunset and we saw a fireworks display off to the left. And then another to the right. And another to the left, and maybe a couple more...it…

(This was a duplicate.  There must be some way to delete it, but it’s not obvious enough for me.)

Various other sources say it was the Lixinsha Bridge (crossed by Lixinsha Road). It carries a water main as well as traffic, so perhaps the lack of water was the reason for the evacuations?

Surely that’s I-84 in Farmington, CT? I-80 is a bit further south. I’ve been on car trips between MA and VA at least yearly for most of my life and remember asking my parents about the unused “concrete spaghetti” early on.

I got the McAfee full page scam ad twice while reading this (backed out, started over). I don’t know whether that type of ad is actually paid for or hacked in somehow, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one outside of those sites that specialize in clickbait listicles and I’ve never seen one that didn't smell mightily…

Please nobody egg him on or we’ll all be toast.

Came looking for this, leaving satisfied.

We all have our particular quirks.

I think “Henry Sugar” qualifies as a novella—at any rate, it was published in a collection, not by itself. It’s aimed at an older audience than his better-known books, so I can see how it might not have come up on your radar (I think I got it from a cousin...). As for the watchability of Wes Anderson movies, I’ve yet…

You may be right, but I think that’s also the time range when automakers started making instrument panels illuminated all the time, thus removing the driver’s biggest clue that the lights weren’t on.  That little green icon is nowhere near as effective.

Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” comes to mind: there’s a scene about halfway through when he throws lots of money out his hotel window, causing a bit of a riot, and is roundly scolded by a policeman for not choosing a suitable charity if he was so determined to give his money away.  The prior part of…

See now, you’re being logical...

An encounter at an antique motorcycle show. Two middle-aged guys were asking about my bike, a Series C Vincent Rapide. They asked me how much horsepower it made. I answered that they made about 45 hp from the factory. They were disappointed because, they said, Brough Superiors made 200 hp. From one liter. In the 1930s.…

So what if it was the biggest thing on YouTube 10 years ago? YouTube isn’t the whole world. Of course I was aware of YouTube then, but I only went there if I was looking for something specific or following a link, and no one I knew posted a link to this. Perhaps those of us less YouTube-savvy than you were would…

Apparently they’re cousins...

Reverse does say that it’s the UK’s oldest toll highway, which the reader might reasonably take to mean the first one in that country, which would be surprising, since major inter-city roads in England have been called highways for centuries (this is what Hugh was saying, not that anyone had suggested it was the first…

Next to it was a Bentley with a jar of Grey Poupon on one of the back seat fold-down tables.

I went to the Yankee Candle car museum a couple of times in my 20s when visiting friends in Deerfield and was deeply disappointed when it disappeared. I remember seeing a Battery Tender or some such thing on a mid-60s Ferrari and being impressed at this evidence that at least some of the cars saw the road from time to…