austin_dern

And now I bring you the slightly abrupt end of my photos from the Gilmore Car Museum. My camera must have run out of battery or something like that because we hadn't finished going through things yet. But here's what I have, starting in again on car mascots:

Now here's your glowy, stylized kangaroo for people who want cars that look like they're going to bounce on you.

And then your kangaroo with a pouch, for people who want to suggest their car is a mother.

And now we're getting deeper into furry circles, with the serpent, the otter with obligatory fish, and in the background a ram.

And what makes sense next to all these animals but Mark Twain in cowboy boots?

And finally the beloved mascot Gobbo, smiling creature of good fortune, whom you and I have certainly heard of and recognize in the slightest.

And that's the abrupt end to the mascots; here's a 1938 Packard 12 that we were allowed to go into and get photos from the driver's seat, the only car you could actually go into.

Here's bunnyhugger waving. Note she's wearing her drive-in movie theater shirt.

This is what she looks like from behind the wheel of a '38 Packard 12.

On to another building, the 50s-60s style Cadillac dealership.

Here's your Studebaker that looks kind of like a vintage electric razor.

Since the window was open I could shove the camera inside and get pictures of what it would look behind the wheel. Amazing the fabric is in such good shape.

And then here's a pile of 60s memorabilia collected there because ... ?? ????? ??? ??? but it was neat seeing stuff from our childhood held up as things to pay attention to.

What's next in my photo tour of my past year? Good luck guessing what amusement park trip it might be!

Trivia: Amerigo Vespucci's first voyage to the New World was for Spain; his second, starting 1501, was for Portugal. Source: The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name, Toby Lester.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 38: The Will of the Wimpy, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Wimpy will inherit a fortune --- if he can go forty days without eating a hamburger. It's a good story idea marred only by my remembering that Sims and Zaboly had written a loose Sundays storyline, that ran a couple years before this one, where Wimpy gave up burgers for a whole year and just to show he had the willpower to do it. (I assume they were figuring who would care, or even remember, since the Sunday storyline was just a running thread and it had been years earlier; if these Lost Popeye Zines weren't coming out so often I'd probably only dimly remember the story happened.)

And in news close to home: I had my annual physical Wednesday. This was a bit awkwardly timed because it was in the early afternoon, and while I allotted two hours for it the doctor was running later than I expected and I didn't get through until 3 pm. And then had to take a little more time to get a blood sample taken --- I had skipped breakfast and lunch for just this contingency --- because I'd figured I could stop somewhere after the exam and get, like, a hot lunch from a fast food place. Given how late everything ran I decided to just get something from a Speedway gas station and while that had its good side --- the monterey jack rollers --- it had its bad, in that the place was weirdly slammed and slow-moving and everyone else was having a complicated time buying snacks for some reason. I got back to the office, as it was an in-office day, with about 45 minutes left and it would have saved everyone time if I'd just decided to go home after the appointment. But then I had to go to the store after work anyway, and that was easier to get to from the office.

In any event. Health-wise, I'm doing fine. My weight continues its slight but annoying increase, even though I've taken to doing step aerobics for an hour most every day of the week. (In a related note I've finally watched the first two seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, the first of Strange New Worlds, the first two of Lower Decks, the first of Prodigy, and the first season of Picard and am halfway through the second season.) But all else seems well.

Including my emotions; my depression, situationally prompted as it was, hasn't been even a hint for a long time now. So after two years on we're going to try stepping me down, with a view to getting off it and let someone who needs the medicine take it instead. From next week I figure to go to a half dose (I have reasons you will learn in time not to want to start that this weekend) and we'll see whether we do, in fact, have a pill cutter in the house like I was sure we did.

With that good news shared, why not enjoy some hood ornaments?

Policeman monkey hood ornament. There were a lot that were riffs on the traffic cops, as you might expect from people who figure they'll never be on the receiving end of a loaded officer.

Boy on Ostrich, which I'm going ahead and assuming was the hood ornament Python Anghelo grew up with.

Here's a greyhound, ``stylized'' as the card says to the point it could probably also be sold as an anteater.

Here's a more photorealistic fox.

And here's an ``amusing'' chicken hatching. At this point I'm not sure these ornaments are being made with any kind of view toward what car owner they would be right for.

As a ``Lincoln Greyhound'' I suppose this stylized dog was made for --- maybe was factory equipment? --- that model car.

Trivia: In the California gubernatorial election of 1934 M-G-M filmed phony newsreels showing radical-looking individuals with foreign accents endorsing Democratic candidate Upton Sinclair. Source: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 39: The Goat-Headed Frogmen, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

So yesterday at work we had a thing happen. There was some sort of problem with the lights and so they turned them off for a couple hours. This was about the level of excitement you might expect given that we're still telling of how cool it was that time we had a team touchpoint starting up and the place blacked out for a couple hours. This was just the lights being off, though; our computers and the Internet stayed working fine, so we worked in the dark. Also the dark was a better dark than I expected, given that there's a whole wall of windows not too far from where I sit. But this is the basement level and while there's a clear slope from below window level up to the parking lot, it's not like there's that much light from it. It did give the place the air of encouraging us all to take a nap, though.

Also going on? Well, one of the minor disappointments of the new office is that instead of a cafeteria with fountain sodas and all, we have a break room with a couple vending machines. And the vending machines have been dodgy on the whole ``vending'' prospect, based on how long they had signs up saying they don't take bills but a new changer is on order.

This week they had a new sign up, one on each machine, with a message that might be passive-aggressive and might not be. It said this was the 30-day notice that the company was taking its vending machines out of this location and that the State of Michigan is free to contract with other vendors to put machines in here. Also that they're very glad to have served this location for all this time. I can not get a bead on whether this is a matter of the vendor being sick of the clientele, or the building management being sick of the vendor not having a dollar-bill-taking machine, or what. But it does suggest that maybe there'll be a new vending machine company or that I'll have to run to the Quality Dairy on the corner when I want a pop.

Now that you've enjoyed slight anecdotes from work, please now enjoy a half-dozen Gilmore Car Museum pictures.

Motorcycle sculpture outside the motorcycle hall, so that you know what you're getting into: the skeleton of a Tron light cycler.

This motorcycle is dedicated to those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. I assume in the terror attacks because it would seem petty to dedicate it to those who died in motorcycle accidents.

So here's a delight, a 1961 Dinky-Cycle. The gimmick here is that it folds up into, basically, a suitcase and yet it unfolds into something street-legal-enough considering it was the early 60s and motor vehicle rules hadn't been invented yet.

There's a 110-year-old motorcycle, and one that really makes the case for calling them ``motor cycles''.

They like getting vintage plates for vehicles like this; I assume a 1921 plate reflects the earliest one they could prove had something to do with this motorcycle.

Road weasels, you say? Hmm.

Trivia: Mission Control played ``The Best Is Yet To Come'' and played reveille to wake the Apollo 10 astronauts the 22nd of May, 1969. Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, and John Young had already woken quietly, eaten breakfast, and were preparing the checklist for the separation of the Lunar Module Snoopy from the Command Module Charlie Brown. Source: Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, Courtney G Brooks, James M Grimwood, Loyd S Swenson Jr.

Currently Reading: Sign Painters, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon.

Been busy today so why not take in a double dose of Gilmore Car Museum pictures? Also it's Sunday so I would have been giving you this anyway.

One of the exhibits is a genuine 1930s Shell station relocated and planted here where ... if it does any work I suppose it must be refueling the Model T's that you can rent and drive around, although I suspect not even that. (Getting gas pumps that old certified would seem challenging.)

But you can see in the station things like this, a Model T reconfigured for American intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918 - 1922), Siberian front.

Peeking around inside the service station; I think we weren't allowed past the door, which is why I can't show you what's on those flyers up front.

Looking from the station back over an ancient poster for motor oil which, in the charming advertising vernacular of the day, just asserts that a product exists and not even warns that it should not be confused for Campbell's soup.

Those old Pontiacs, though, they were built like a brick wall.

Sign informing us that what we're about to enter is the G Barn. And why is it called the G Barn? Well, it started out on G Avenue, and inside it has --- ah, we'll get there. Anyway the sign notes that when the building was being moved they discovered that only the upper floor could be preserved.

Inside are a bunch of kid's cars (and other vehicles), stuff you can play with. You might notice something in the upper center there; we'll get to it.

And here you see an array of self-powered kiddie cars and tractors and stuff, many of which were clearly prime, upper-class toys in their time.

And here's the other reason behind this being the G barn: it has actual filming props from the 1967 Walt Disney Classic that I never heard of before either, The Gnome-Mobile! All about the antics you get up to with a 1930 Rolls-Royce and gnomes.

So here's the centerpiece: an oversized replica of the backseat of the titular Gnome-Mobile. They assert this, with a confidence I'd feel dubious about for any century-old movie studio, to be the only Disney-made set to be in the possession of anyone besides the Walt Disney Corporation. If true, that's, huh, all right.

bunnyhugger peers up at the handle of the oversized door of the Gnome-Mobile shooting set.

And here's what the backseat of an oversized Rolls-Royce is supposed to look like. How well does it capture the actual look? That is a question to be answered in this column shortly.

Trivia: James Buchanan Eads's dredging and river-cleaning work, opening up the South Pass of the Mississippi dela, from 1875 to 1877 increased the slope of the river from its previous 0.24 foot per mile to one of 0.505 feet per mile, making --- an Army report descried --- ``a marked scour in the channel''. Source: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, John M Barry. So, you know, great work for making the channel ship-navigable but also part of the problem with how we've optimized rivers to create catastrophic flooding.

Currently Reading: Sign Painters, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon.

We got back to Pinball At The Zoo frightfully close to the opening of Saturday morning qualifying. There were already lines long enough for the Main tournament that I didn't even bother trying; the only tournament-player thing I'd do is cadge some of the doughnuts provided to competitors. FAE was in respectable shape but still spent the morning putting up more games, managing only one game that bettered anything. MWS, whom I think I'd seen from afar on Friday, worked even harder, putting up 24 games somehow, three of which helped him any. FAE would get into the A Division, just barely. MWS would get second seed in B.

bunnyhugger would focus all her time and tickets on the Women's tournament, where she was hovering around eighth --- the last qualifying position --- or ninth. One good game with solid improvement would get her safely in, and if she were to be on the bubble time she spent on any game was time none of her competitors could use on that game. This is one of the cutthroat elements of Herb-style qualifying; it can be worth it to waste your time on a game, if you can aim your time well.

She was disheartened by all this. I maintained my confidence that she'd have the good game, or the good enough game, to land her in finals for sure, and even bet her $20 on it. And then I went off to the show, taking in the fewer-than-usual number of games people had brought to show off or trade. Sometime after 11 am, the cutoff, she appeared at my side and told me: I owed her twenty bucks.

She hadn't made it, and by a terribly narrow margin. Finishing one position higher on any of the four games that counted for her would have put her into a tie for the last position. It's not quite that one bad bounce cost her a place in finals, but it's terribly close to that, and did so much to leave her miserable.

So much of the rest of the day at the Expo Center was trying to find some consolation; between this and her flopping at the tournament the day after Women's North American Championship Series she was not up for consolation.

Still, people who didn't know how miserable she was (or didn't say so to me) did fine bits of seeing her and chatting with her. Vix, from Motor City Furry Con, was there, making good at last the convention promise to talk with us later. So was MJB, who had brought a bunch of games from Sparks Pinball Museum way out east of Detroit, where we haven't been to a match since before the pandemic began. (I was there one day, when Sunshine was getting specialist care nearby, but didn't see anyone besides staff.) It was great seeing him, and talking with him, and you know how it is when everything feels good for a while. He also gave us Sparks t-shirts; I felt awkward about taking them when he also had them for sale but I also realized he likes us and shirts he gives away are shirts he doesn't have to haul back to inventory.

I missed the hours when the people bringing out-of-state pops had bottles of Moxie.

Our big bit of fun over the show was that someone brought Jersey Jack's newest game, Elton John, in and boy is that a fun table. I mean, I always like Jersey Jack games, so maybe I'm an easy touch. But, like, as you'd expect --- for a game based mostly in 70s Elton John --- the game has a little corner for Crocodile Rock targets, and it's got this adorable toy of a crocodile with star sunglasses rocking out, and the backglass animation has --- when you lock a ball for this --- a fun cartoony crocodile catching and sometimes swallowing a giant pinball. The game is delightfully funny, besides having what, in a couple of games, felt like a good fun set of shots to make and modes to play.

Anyway, the show ended, people started packing up, FAE made it through the first round of playoffs and ended something like 13th in the overall tournament, a great finish. MWS took second place in B, the traditional spot for someone in our household (back before Pinball at the Zoo got so big it draws a lot of out-of-state ringers). MAG, whom we've owed a translite as a prize for ages now, was at the tournament all three days and all three days we forgot to bring the translite with us.

When all that was cleared away --- I'm sure main finals weren't done, but the people playing were folks we were more remote from --- we went to the afterparty at MJS's pole barn. There we met up with JTK, who hadn't been to the expo center that day but did join us and FAE and some other people for hanging out and a postmortem on the competition and then dollar games. Here, now, you'd think I would at least have a chance not to come in last on everything. I usually do pretty well at the dollar games at MJS's afterparties. Not here; not only did I never take first, I finished last all but one game, I think it was. Even as I kept getting to pick them. FAE, now they won a lot. Me, I ran out of dollars.

We wouldn't close out the afterparty, for a change. I think that reflects our post-pandemic embrace of not needing to maximize every minute of a pinball event, and letting it be, instead taking just enough to enjoy. Or that it maybe wasn't fair to keep FAE, an introverted person, out all night just so I can try to grab the high score on MJS's FunHouse. (I would never come close.) Anyway we got home and could start the wait to see how this all affected our standings.

(We are still hilariously far out of competition for Michigan open tournaments; in fact, as I write this, I'm actually higher-ranked in Indiana, where I played exactly one tournament this year, than I am in Michigan. bunnyhugger has fallen to second-seeded among women in women-only events; had she qualified for finals, she would still be first-seeded.)

Now for pictures, let's get back to the Gilmore Car Museum. Last time I left off in the diner that ended up being the first indoor restaurant we ate in since the pandemic began. We're up to like two now.

Just because they moved the whole diner here doesn't mean they had every bit of it functional. Also, little surprised there isn't a working bathroom in the diner.

They did have a phone booth, though! We had no coins so couldn't say whether it functions. Guess it depends whether they still have copper lines.

Back to cars! Here's a number 28. I wonder if it raced.

Another shiny winged person on the front of one of these cars.

I think they're mis-applying their bumper stickers here. I don't know what the Hemmings Motor News Great Race is but I assume it's not a slightly overstuffed comic take on the 1908 New York-to-Paris race.

And here we move into shiny goosery! Or something with a great long neck, at least.

Trivia: There are 49 ``Devil's Bridges'' (ponts du Diable) in France. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb. Mostly medieval stone bridges, not all of them commemorating terrible fates.

Currently Reading: Sign Painters, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon. An informal, oral-style history of a profession that can fairly be said to have vanished and the sort of thing that might be a great birthday gift for my dad and probably also yours, just saying. Anyway in the intro the authors mourn how much the role has vanished (a fair complaint), mentioning along the way how schoolchildren aren't even taught to write longhand anymore and ... I'm supposing they equate longhand with cursive which probably has some foundation but it was an unexpected word to me.

After the eclipse we didn't have much to do besides regular stuff, at least for the couple weeks until Pinball At The Zoo. This would be, as usual, at the Kalamazoo Expo Center and not the literal zoo (which wouldn't open for a couple more weeks anyway), with the tournament there growing ever-bigger and ever more a part of the show. As in the past, there'd be Herb-style qualifying, buying tickets and putting up your best scores on a slate of machines, your eight best machines qualifying. They'd be open all afternoon Thursday and Friday, with a couple hours of qualifying on Saturday, plus some side tournaments including a women's tournament that bunnyhugger had her sights on.

I would not be going up for Thursday. I could have asked for the time off, but felt that between Motor City Furry Con, the eclipse, a dentist's appointment (that turned into two), and coming soon a doctor's appointment and Anthrohio that I didn't want to ask for the extra time off. I knew this meant I would not even remotely qualify for the tournament, but that's all right. When 2020 began, before the pandemic, I had resolved to make competing in pinball tournaments less of a Thing, and taking a relaxed attitude toward the majors like this is good for me.

bunnyhugger, though, now she had class yes, but she could arrange her days to take the whole afternoon off and go down there and play. She'd done that last year and, without making it into the Main or Classics tournament, had put herself in a good spot for the Women's tournament.

She didn't make the hour-plus drive herself, though. FAE --- formerly IAS --- from the local pinball league had wanted to get to Pinball At The Zoo for some time and she agreed to drive them. She was anxious about this, not knowing the level of small talk to maintain with a person who is almost as small-untalkative as me. But they're a pleasant person and, like we'd always known, they landed a really good seed in Main with the time to play.

bunnyhugger finished her Thursday something like second-seeded in the Women's tournament, not bad in any circumstance, even though there'd be a full day and more people coming to qualify on Friday. This including out-of-state women come for the big sanctioned-ranking points bounty this offered.

Friday during the day she stayed at home, doing some work and worrying how her seed was declining. But once work was done, I was ready to drive down to Kalamazoo and put in my $20 worth of entries into Main. We picked up FAE and went to see what we could do with a couple of hours.

Me, I put in my twenty entries, this year --- unlike last --- focusing just on the first eight that happened to be free. The lines for other games ended up longer than I wanted to deal with. I hoped this year to achieve a more modest goal than ranking: I wanted just to do better each time I replayed a game. I would not achieve this, having one game of Hardbody (a delightfully 80s workout-themed game I never heard of before), one game of Demolition Man, and two games of Stars worse than I'd already had.

Ah, but my very last game that short Friday night? I was playing on Stars and I finally, finally had the outstanding game on this table --- the one that goes to big Michigan tournaments has been an unbeatable challenge to me for years --- that I had enjoyed in Fort Wayne a few weeks earlier. Not just a satisfying game, but one that was really good. It would be something like the 13th best game anyone put up in qualifying on Stars; it was good enough, that, with a slate of those, I'd be in the A Division, higher seed in the first round. The rest of my games were nowhere near that good; I would end up --- after a couple more hours of qualifying on Saturday --- in 61st place. The top 32 would go into either A or B finals.

bunnyhugger meanwhile put in a couple games here and there in Main but got more worried about her position in the Women's tournament. With the arrival of out-of-state ringers and more women playing overall, her seed had dropped to eighth. Eight women would go to finals. She had some reasons for hope, among them that she'd somehow acquired The Knack for playing Game of Thrones, one of the women's-tournament games. She was routinely putting up scores in the hundreds of millions of points, scores she would kill to get in league or head-to-head play. In this, where people were putting their best scores of the weekend against everyone else's best scores? She kept putting up good scores but not quite advancing her stance. (Other games included Metallica, on which she was doing pretty well, and Jurassic Park, which has always been a mess for her; for me too. The electromechanical game in the set was Abra Ca Dabra which was uncharacteristically mean to her; we couldn't explain that.) We would need to get back first thing Saturday morning, to defend and if possible shore up her standing. I was confident in her.

And now for the other half of my blog, how about some Gilmore Car Museum stuff?

Cadillac emblem salvaged in rather good shape from the wall of a Detroit car factory that was closed long ago and torn down in 1995. The emblem's gone through various changes and this is the one current to about 1930. This is also where I learned that the ducks --- pardon, the merlettes --- were removed in 1999. Hrmph. They'll be back.

More signs from the Cadillac/LaSalle dealership area. LaSalle: it's not just an inappropriate line in the All In The Family theme! (LaSalles were upscale cars, like one level below Cadillac, so unlikely for working class people like the Bunkers.)

Hey look, it's a gigantic shiny banana! Now and then I feel bad about how big my Prius is and then you see something like this, which is about six Priuses long.

Shiny wingy woman on the hood of an early 30s Cadillac.

And here we move into the Lincoln Experience. Note the Lincoln-Zephyr in the middle because Zephyr is a great car name that they'd never have courage to use anymore.

And here's a shiny dog on the hood of a Lincoln something or other.

Trivia: Human blood is about three parts per billion silver. Bones are between 10 and 40 parts per billion silver. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Your Pinball Machine: How to Purchase, Adjust, Maintain, and Repair Your Own Machine, B B Kamoroff.

We did some riding before the eclipse, even as we kept checking the sky through our eclipse glasses and confirming the sun was still up there. bunnyhugger even briefly put her eclipse glasses on while riding the Calypso ride, looking for the Sun, and discovered that was an efficient way to get motion sick.

About twenty minutes or so before totality we left the park, getting back to our car, to stow the souvenirs we'd gotten --- the store had this great little plush Iron Dragon, imitating the mascot of the roller coaster --- and to get out the camera tripod. bunnyhugger had been waiting for a chance to learn how to use this, and the time for that would have been more than twenty minutes before the eclipse. But a hard deadline does offer a certain clarity of focus as well. It was all tolerably familiar to the tripod I'd had in Singapore; I just needed a bit to remember how you extend the legs (there's latches that have to open up). Figuring out how to lock the angle of the tripod mount on top of the lens --- and the height of the mount above the base --- would wait until after totality, but that's all right. Her pictures, aided by a sheet of eclipse filter strapped to the barrel of her camera, came out good. Mine did not.

We set up our viewing stand just outside the park, although inside the X-ray station where the big metal tripod attracted less interest than bunnyhugger's camera did our first time in. There might have been a better viewing spot inside the park but we figured this was a good spot, none too busy and it's not like we wouldn't be able to hear the announcements, or wouldn't be able to tell when totality arrived. The DJ even announced that for totality they would be turning off the park's lights and going quiet. This was almost but not quite so; the sign above the front gate continued to proclaim the cosmic phenomenon throughout the park. (And I know what you're thinking: wouldn't it have been hilarious if they'd played the whole of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' for the duration of totality? Sorry, totality here lasted about three minutes 45 seconds or so, and the radio edit of the song is four and a half minutes. The album cut is seven minutes(!), which is an exceptional length for an eclipse.)

I know I had joked about the terror of having to go to the bathroom right at totality but there was a woman who ran into the bathroom with a minute or two to go. I have no idea if she got out in time.

And then came the countdown and just as predicted --- isn't that amazing? --- the reduced sun went from too bright to stare at to too absent not to stare at. It's hard to think of everything there is to do in such a strange circumstance. bunnyhugger took a few pictures before realizing she needed to take the eclipse filter off her camera. I tried looking around seeing the light and the fundamental strangeness. Not that the whole sky was dark, but that the zenith was dark while the horizon bright. Other things happened that stunned me by being just as predicted, such as birds coming in to roost the way they would at night. The seagulls, being the most populous bird around, made the biggest attraction out of this. They swept in from the shore, cawing and coming to roost just as they might at sunset, but faster.

I wrote this when I did my quick post, right after the eclipse, to capture my fresh thoughts but I was so amazed by how present the Moon looked in front of the Sun like that. They both looked like things, not just features, tangible in a way that the Moon only looks in a telescope and the Sun ... never looks. Or didn't look except for this.

The most amazing thing besides everything, though, is how long it felt like it took. Or how little time. It just --- look, three minutes 45 seconds is not long. You can spend that long doing something without remembering a second of it. But here, now ... even as the Moon and the Sun were racing in opposite directions ... it felt like there was nothing but time, as if it might go on forever like this.

It didn't. It wasn't even four minutes before a sparkle appeared at the bottom of the Moon and Sun, and then a little bit of totality ended and the day was back at once.

Enjoy some more of the Gilmore Car Museum, if that's not inconvenient for you.

Of course what would a car museum be without motorcycles? And what would a motorcycle exhibit be without one of the motorcycles actually ridden by Henry Winkler in Happy Days? I don't know whether the booth is a series prop or just something that looks diner enough.

And now here we have one of those adorable ridiculous cars you enter through the front hatch!

This was a part of the building that showed comically tiny cars mostly by Europeans. The Blanchina here was part of the ``Transformable Series 1'' which means it coincided with the Dinobots and Constructicons but predated the Insecticons or learning the secret of Omega Supreme.

And hey, it's one of those Crosley cars I was reading about a couple months ago. I didn't know they had moustaches!

Here fresh to us from 1980 is the Comuta-Car electric vehicle, and please hold your giggling. There'll be more pictures coming.

Now this here is the King Midget Model 2, one of many attempts to meet postwar consumer demand for cars by providing them with a thing smaller than most lawn mowers and lacking such frills and luxuries as speedometers and reverse gear. Still, it was only five hundred bucks so what else would you do with that much money, buy a G.I. Bill home?

Trivia: In 1727 the German mineralogist Franz Ernst Brückmann published a book about geology printed on asbestos paper. Source: Paper: Paging Through History, Mark Kurlansky. (Ray Bradbury Firefighter: [ growling ])

Currently Reading: Your Pinball Machine: How to Purchase, Adjust, Maintain, and Repair Your Own Machine, B B Kamoroff.