Boycotting Berea.

Over this past weekend, my son and I made a quick trip down to North Carolina to pick up this motor and transmission which we had purchased on ebay last week. 

Most of the weekend was great, including the driving.  But coming back through Kentucky, we had a very annoying experience.  We were trying to make good time back to Michigan, and so we were pleased that the pace of the Kentucky drivers was brisk.

We decided to stop at this Travelers' Center at Berea, to use the restrooms.  I had a good feeling about it, since they correctly place the apostrophe on the sign.

But the good feeling didn't last long.  The city of Berea in all their wisdom, decided to make us go on a 2-mile tour of their town to reach the Travelers' Center, just so we could see how great their town was.  The thing is, we were in kind of a hurry.  They sent us off at Exit 77 rather than Exit 76, which was much closer to the Travelers' Center.

But the great offense was yet to come.  The place was CLOSED!  Totally locked up!  No access to the restrooms!  As a courtesy, they might have thought to put on the sign:  CLOSED on Sundays.

It was about 50 miles to the next rest area.  And now we knew why everyone drives so fast in Kentucky:  They are trying to get into Ohio or Tennessee, so they can pee.

The one redeeming feature of Berea (which I am officially boycotting for their lack of hospitality!) was this space-age looking High School:

The Automotive Art of Lawrence Gardinier

The other day, I featured the automotive art of Ed Tillrock.

Today, I'd like to show you the work of another artist we met at the 2012 Detroit Autorama, Lawrence Gardinier.  His stuff is exquisite.  He works in acrylics, and I got to talk to him about his technique.  He uses very small brushes, and magnifying lenses to see what he is doing.  He also mentioned that he is, like myself, self-taught.

The results are spectacular!  It is not often that I see a painter's work and think:  "Wow, I wish I had painted that!"  But Larry's work does that to me.  Well done, sir!

Kodachrome - on the Mourning of the Loss of Film

An artist friend posted a question about film vs digital on her blog, and this was my reply:

Oh, ABSOLUTELY!

I have two nephews who are incredible photographers both, and who bemoan the loss of film. I have a feeling that they will be buying and freezing (or otherwise preserving) film and using it for a long time.

The amount of information captured, and the continuous-vs-discrete thing just makes film totally own digital. I find this so emblematic of what is wrong with the world that I started to write a song about it. We have done what is necessary to allow EVERYONE to be a "pretty good" photographer, while disallowing the best of the best to produce their optimal work. Or, if not "disallowed", then at least "discouraged".

Along those same lines, one of my nephews got a gig as a photographer in Africa for several months on the strength of a "Frankenstein" camera he built with a modern digital body and a coveted 1968 Minolta lens.

Why use a lens created in 1968? Because back then, they didn't know how to make the lenses perfect, and there was some natural distortion to the shape of the lens which makes stunningly beautiful shapes in the out-of-focus portions of short depth-of-field photographs. Now, manufacturers know how to make the lenses perfect, and something has been loss.

The world is crazy. I miss film.

 This song now appears to have been prophetic!

Vinsetta Garage - The Restaurant

When Woodward's legendary Vinsetta Garage closed its doors a little while back, it was a sad day for me.

But making a cool restaurant out of it seems as good a thing to do with the space as anything.

It's only about 2 miles from my house, so I'm sure I will get a chance to eat there after it opens!

Read about it here.

Atheists and Spaghetti

I am puzzled and amused about the fixation of Atheists with spaghetti.

Of course, their references to the Flying Spaghetti Monster are legion.

Just yesterday, an Atheist on facebook "proved" to me that God is a bowl of spaghetti.

Given the logical equivalence of believing in the two, you would think they'd be puzzled by the huge number of people who worship God, and the miniscule (i.e., zero) number who worship spaghetti.  But I guess Atheism just makes you stupid.

A Blog I Will Be Following - Heather Policky.

I've just (re)discovered the blog of IFBB Professional Bodybuilder Heather Marie (Armbrust) Policky.

It is rare that anyone is so transparent as Heather is in this entry.

Check it out!

Me, Kate Upton, Carl's Jr., the AFA and Sex.

My wife and I have had a long and storied history with the American Family Association.  We go back so far with this organization, in fact, that we pre-date its current name.  It used to be called the National Federation for Decency, and Cindy and I founded an NFD Chapter in Humble, Texas, back in the 1980s.

Our Chapter meetings were interesting, because a lot of "characters" showed up, not all of who had the same notion of decency.  Once, a fellow showed up who was a conspiracy theorist.  He believed that television was evil, because the government had secretly turned every TV receiver into a combination camera and transmitter.  They used it to spy on the citizenry.  If we were watching the TV, the government was watching us.

Another guy showed up just once, a European.  He didn't really hold to our and the NFD's idea that "decency" inheres in the absence of smut.  He had ideas about how people ought to treat other people decently, that kind of thing.  Since then, I have often wished that I had really had the ability to listen to him that evening.  Sometimes, I even wonder if we entertained an angel unawares.

The guy who ran the regional NFD organization was kind of nutcase Fundamentalist.  But maybe so was I; I had not yet discovered Anglicanism and become a nutcase Anglican.  This pastor held a Rally for Decency in Civil Society, or some such thing, which  Cindy and I attended.  The onliest thing about that was that the pastor's definition of decency was basically that women should not wear shorts, and Cindy wore shorts to the rally that day.  We both felt like the guest at the wedding feast who had crashed the party without the proper clothing.  At this rally, the pastor also told us that the Bible defined "nakedness" as any skin being visible above the knee.  We went out later that week and bought Cindy some new, very long jogging shorts, cut ridiculously below the knee, so that she should not be seen running around the small Texas town "naked".

We eventually realized that the Humble Chapter of the NFD was going nowhere, so we dropped out of active participation.  But we still read the NFD/AFA magazine and supported their boycots where we could.

It was still in the 1980s when my thinking started to depart from that of Don Wildmon and the AFA.  I remember that the AFA magazine had featured an editorial by Tim Wildmon, Don's son, about the absolute scandal of bumper stickers on which was written "Shit Happens".  He objected to the coarse language.  I fired off a letter to Tim Wildmon, letting him know that he had missed the point entirely!  I told him that his objection should have been that the bumper sticker denies two basic truths of Christianity:  God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.  By stating that "Shit Happens" the bumper sticker leaves God out of the picture.  It also purports to give man an excuse for his own misdeeds.  Curiously, I never heard back from Wildmon or the AFA.

But I promised you Kate Upton and Carl's Jr., didn't I?  Today, I received an email from the AFA, asking me to boycot Carl's Jr. and Hardee's for running the following "sordid titillation" ...



I guess that since leaving the AFA and buying Cindy some regular length jogging shorts (she has great legs!) I have gone over to the dark side, but I am somehow not shocked or even titillated by the Kate Upton commercial.  Maybe I'm just getting old.  It did make me want a hamburger, I will admit.

Using sexy girls to promote products has been done for a very long time.  I'm sorry to tell Mr. Wildmon and the AFA, but I think they lost this battle at least as early as 1950 ...