Neanderpundit

And quotes the same Solzhenitsyn piece I did earlier this month. Alger picks up the ball from Bob Owens, all well connected to what Farmer Frank is saying here.

I had hoped we could avert this sort of situation, and I have hope still. But I am not ruling out anything.

To those without young children, or other hostages to your fortune: You are the front lines. If the shit hits the fan, you are the advance guard, and you need to hold back the tide until those of us with young children get them to relative safety.And to those with small children, have a plan to get them someplace safe, out of the country if need be.

Yes, it’s too soon to know what will happen. And it’s too soon to know- really- what to do. But it is not too soon to be prepared.

Several months back I upgraded the Intarweb to a 15 mb data pipe, from a 1.2 mb one, and the price actually went down.

Partner has just done a similar thing, and because he had little use before his price went up slightly, but now he has a smoking hot connection. Amazing how fast those yuoutube videos load, now.

Still drives me nuts that a bunch of the websites I visit take forever to download- I like pretty pictures as much as thenext guy, but you really don’t have to have the high res on your site, do links instead. I can download a whole movie from Hulu in the time it takes to load half of the websites on my sidebar.

inside a lot of engines. Ford, of course. Chevy. First engine I ever built was a Dodge Dart Slant Six. Indestructible little bastard, those were.

I have a lot of friends with a lot of cars that I’ve worked on over the years, too. My aging land rover. Partner’s Alfa. Shit, that Alfa, one winter we took it apart. I mean Apart. We held every part of that drivetrain in our grubby little hands. That is and was a fine engine, with a lot of very clever engineering, and damned if it wasn’t still being made right up to a little while back.
MG’s. VW’s. Porsches. Yesterday I helped a co worker pull a couple broken studs out of a Porsche 911 case, and it was not pretty- he ended up welding nuts onto the studs and working them slowly while I heated the area around the broken stud. You have to be extremely careful, because the wrong amount of heat in the wrong place can distort that casting. Still, he will be able to put in the new studs which will be installed properly, and this engine will run like a striped ape.

Eventually, if you do this stuff enough, it gets in your blood. I have plenty of days when I think, damn, wouldn’t it be nice to never have to wrench on a car again, to just do like most people do, and drive them, and pay someone else when they need fixing. But I can never walk past someone porting a head and not stand and watch, or help, if asked to do so. I have yanked broken studs out of Mazda exhaust manifolds (Common) more times than I care to recall, and changed the suspension on so many cars it’s not funny.

You get to know people, too. I have met some of the people on some of the teams, and even a few of the drivers; the good old days of drivers coming from among the ranks- especially in the top series- is over, but for a few flyers. That’s why I like the guys who race on mud and small local asphalt tracks. Most of them hammer their cars together all week long to be ready to race on sunday, and they know exactly what the car will do. That makes for a good show, in my book. And you know those gys have scabs on their knuckles under those nomex gloves. I love ’em all.