Fiat Abarth 500 Commercial

Maybe I am just getting old, and my memory is failing me.  But I cannot remember ever seeing a sexier advertisement (for anything!) than this one for the new Fiat Abarth 500.



According to Ward's Auto World, the translation for the young woman's Italian is:

"What are you looking at?!"

Then, after she softens a bit:  "Poor baby, your heart is pounding."

Mine was, too.  Whatever ad agency created this understands men pretty well.

Specs for the car can be found here.

Here is an older Fiat Abarth, that I saw last year in Garden City, Michigan:

Ford Raptor vs Fiat 500 vs Leaf Blowers

Remember when pollution was really pollution?  When poisonous hydrocarbons were the culprit?  When CO2 was understood as a normal bi-product of all plant and animal life, and not considered a pollutant?

Here is an interesting test:  In terms of real pollution, which pollutes more?  Ford F-150 Raptor truck, the tiny Fiat 500, or a leaf blower?  You might not be surprised that the leaf blower creates far more pollution than the two vehicles.  But you might be surprised that the Ford Raptor Crew Cab pollutes less than the diminutive 2012 Fiat 500!

During part of the cycle, the Raptor was actually cleaning the air.  That means that the exhaust coming from the tail pipe of the F-150 was cleaner than the air going into its intake manifold!

Put that up your tailpipe, enviro-wackos!



More here.

Return of the Son of P90X ...

There is, as has been stated many times, no such thing as bad publicity.

If, as I have done in the past, I make some snide comments about the failings of Toyota automobiles, then Toyota ads appear magically to the right of my blog.

I posted a blog entry a while back about "Team Beachbody Coaches", in which I mentioned P90X, just in passing.  Now there are P90X ads attached to my blog.  You cannot stop the juggernaut!

Playing Real Good ... For Free

A lot of people have seen this by now.  It makes me cry.  It makes me, honestly, lose ALL hope for humanity.

Cliff Notes:  World-class violinist Joshua Bell goes into a Washington, D.C. Metro station and plays Bach on a Stradivarius for 45 minutes.  No crowd gathers.  Hardly anyone even stops.  No applause is given.

Read the entire account here.

I know one thing:  If my wife had been commuting to work on that day, she would have willingly skipped work to hear him, and tears would have been streaming down her cheeks for the entire 45 minutes.



It reminds me of the story line of this Joni Mitchell song, in which another street performer, a clarinetist, performs great music for free, and is ignored.  In the end, nearly all people are Phillistines, with no sense of aesthetics.  If they do not have a ticket stub to check, they cannot tell the value of what they are seeing or hearing.  So sad.

Sheila Bleck Posing Routine

Behold the art of physique and the artistry in presentation that is Sheila Bleck!

Search Engines, Good Rats, & The Persistence of Memory

I've always liked Dali's painting, The Persistence of Memory, but that is not what this post is about.

It is about lost things being found and redeemed.  Specifically, about things supposedly lost to memory, but brought back to the present in a very real way by the wonderful invention called the internet search engine.  Search engine, as in Google, or its many imitators.

Once there was a song.  It was on an album that I bought on a whim while attending The Cooper Union back in the late 1970s.  On this album was a song called "Does it Make You Feel Good?"  It was very catchy, and soon became a favourite of mine.  I learned to play it on guitar, and I memorized the lyrics.

Years later, I still played the song from time to time.  By then, I had two children, and I used to sing them to sleep with guitar accompaniment.  One of the songs I sang was "Does it Make You Feel Good."  It was, being a song of twisted attraction to a sadistic lover, a bit of an odd song to sing to children.  But, I am a bit of an odd man.

Blow me around like a cigarette wrapper
Smack in the middle of a hurricane.
Sucker me in like a Venus Flytrapper
Baby I'm startin' to think you don't like me!

Does it make you happy, makin' me sad?
Does it really, really get you off?
Does it make you feel good makin' me hurt?
Does it really really get you off?

Then, a few weeks ago, it struck me that I ought to locate this song on YouTube.  I knew that the band was something with "Rats" in it.  I thought it might be the Hot Rats, but that was a Zappa album.  Then I thought it might be the Boomtown Rats, but that was wrong, too.  So, finally, I Googled "sucker me in like a Venus fly trapper", and I was taken to a page that mentioned the name of the band:  Good Rats!  From there, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to finding the song on YouTube, thanks to the grace of God and the nearly universal neglect of YouTube's Terms & Conditions of Service.

And, due to the same, here it is for your aural enjoyment!

Herman Cain, Satan, and the Physics of Falling

In the early days of his run at the Republican nomination, I was really excited about Herman Cain.  I really liked the guy.  Actually, I still do.  He was not afraid to talk (or even sing) about Jesus, for one thing.  That, to most politicians, seems like the kiss of death.

I'd like to say that I was surprised by the derailing of the "Cain Train", but I am not.  I am old enough and have learned enough about men (partly from introspection) that sinful behavior never surprises me too much.

What I was extremely surprised at was that I actually felt a small bit of glee in watching Cain fall from grace (or, at least, from the realistic hope of ever becoming President of the United States).  I was shocked at myself.

It is a fairly well known and documented feature of mankind that we like to see people in high places cast down.  I think that, actually, it is in large part the animus behind the Occupy Wall Street movement:  The 99% have a fierce desire for the 1% to be cast down, if not from the pinnacle of the temple, then at least from their penthouse balconies.

I got to thinking about folks in high places getting cast down, and I came round to thinking about Satan:

The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”

He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

I remember that back in my old LCMS days, Pastor Paul Terhune commented on this passage that the falling of Satan like lightning from heaven was not merely a one-time event, but that the sense of the passage was that "Satan is a falling-from-heaven kind of guy."

Of course, everyone likes to watch creatures like Satan or Kim Kardashian fall from heaven; it's just pure fun.  But what can explain the glee felt by one relatively decent Christian man at the fall of another.  It should bring only sadness.

So, I was pondering this during yesterday's sermon (Sorry, Father!), and I came up with an analogy based on Physics.  For the civilians out there, what I mean to say is that watching someone fall from a height is, basically, like a roller coaster.  It is exciting to see (or feel) the velocity build up.

In Physics terms, any object that has physical mass (I will introduce the concept of spiritual mass later) and proximity to another physical object with mass ... has what is called Gravitational Potential Energy.  Because of the gravitational attraction (given by Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation) between the two bodies, the less massive body "falls" toward the more massive body, or "wants" to, if nothing holds it up in its lofty position.

When people are in positions of fame, notoriety, earthly or spiritual power, authority, honor, etc., there is a certain Spiritual Potential Energy that they possess based upon the height at which they sit suspended, and their "Spiritual Mass", their gravitas, so to speak, or their "largeness".  When the restraining force is taken away, whether in the case of the roller coaster or in the case of a falling creature, Potential Energy is converted into Kinetic Energy, which is proportional to mass, but also to the square of the velocity of the fall.  And I guess in the end it is just exciting to see Potential Energy converted to Kinetic Energy.

One can even ponder whether, for certain types of adventurous (though less kind terms could be used) persons, the experience of one's own fall can give this kind of excitement.  It is possible that this type of person will go about, to all appearances, sabatoging himself.  When all the while he may be engaged in an intentional spiritual skydive.  I'm not saying that Herman Cain is this sort of person, nor that he entered the Republican Primary to see whether he could "get away with it."  But it is worth pondering the reasons for self-destructive behavior in all persons:  Herman Cain, Kim Kardashian, Satan, and me.