Pilot's Log

Weirdness is like my oxygen sometimes.

Did a lot of shopping today, as the weather was nice and I hated the idea of sitting between two TVs, one showing football and the other showing golf and both of them with the volume a little too loud. Wound up getting four boxes of herbal tea and a couple things for my brother for housewarming/upcoming birthday.

Anyway, I was in a Tuesday Morning discount store and saw a coffee table book on celebs who collect cars. Race cars, luxury cars, rare cars...and one fellow who is into concept cars. He has this machine in his collection:



The Chrysler D'Elegance, built by Ghia in the early Fifties along with other Chrysler concepts and stylewise the father of the VW Karmann Ghia.

Didn't buy the book but perhaps I may go back for it someday. When I got back here I got to looking through pictures of other such concept cars from that and other eras, not just online, but in a book I bought when I was a cashier at a Borders bookstore. One weirdness idea of mine would be to artistically backdate the history of GM's Saturn marque, as if it existed in those decades instead of Oldsmobile or LaSalle or some other brand of the times. Take some features of the current Saturn cars and some features of the Motorama concept cars and some features that production cars had and breed some hybrids.

I'm already thinking up names for spurious cars, mainly based on the moons of the planet Saturn and the Titans of classical mythology, as well as temporal terminology (as Saturn, as the Greek character Cronus, was the master of time).

Moonshine has job security...but I can dream about having a weird car.

Dad got the replacement killer engine today and it looks to be a perfect match. But we've all heard that before. :/ Once again, it's our Mechie's problem to see if the shoe fits the foot.

FP

Evidently Dad felt confident in himself enough to do all the legwork today. He got together with the Mechies (both our own and others) and they're satisfied that the engine we saw yesterday (from a '93 Corsica) is good enough for the Skylark. He paid the deposit at the junkyard; their Mechies will extract yon motor, and either they'll deliver it to our Mechie or our Mechie will go there to claim it. Or maybe we'll have to port the motor. Dad didn't share that detail with me.

I'm glad to be spared another afternoon at the permanent parking lot, tho'. Overday was the hottest day in the eleven years I've been here. May be hotter yet today.

FP

1) We can't fit a Pontiac engine into our Buick because the makes have different motor mount schemes. So either we try to find out if we can use a Chevy or Oldsmobile engine, or we have the prospect of another Buick engine that may only be slightly better than the one being replaced.

So what happened? Our Mechie showed us at his garage. A retaining ring behind a valve disintegrated, and the pieces went into the piston space and chewed up the cylinder and piston.

I found seven leads for "new" engines via car-part.com. The nearest Buick engine is in Maryville. This looks to be an adventure...I am a Raider of the Lost Part.

2) Social Security isn't paying what they owe Cariten for my mother's health care program. Or at least that's what it looks like. Mom & Dad were looking over a bank statement for last month and saw a withdrawl Cariten made without telling them. They called Cariten, and Cariten blamed Social Security.

3) I got my letter from Human Services formally stating that I was rejected for Medicare. So I'll have to take it to the psychiatric clinic tomorrow.

My horoscope for this week said that what happens to me this week will determine how I remember 2007. That thought holds no comfort for me.

FP

Hey.

This afternoon, I had to follow Dad as he delivered his Buick to a repair shop and then bring him back to the house in my car. Current theory is that a gasket is leaking and water is entering into the crankcase. The ultimate result is a massive trail of visible fuming from the exhaust pipe...as well as a tendency for the engine to quit at low revs.

I don't know how my father finds his mechanics. The one we went to is in a neighborhood of the Jefferson County hinterlands I'd never seen before. The trip was rather dicey, but we made it there in one piece, even if it wasn't pretty.

FP

Hey.

My father decided to spiff up a vehicle he's selling to my brother, so we went looking for replacement hubcaps.

Our search brought us to (and I'm not kidding) Strange Auto Salvage in White Pine.

We spent the Lion's Share of an hour sitting in their waiting room while a mechanic tracked down the hubcaps and brought them to us. We took in the ambiance...redolent in the noise of tools, the smell of grease and oil and rubber, the cliche classic rock radio playing in the background, and the chatter of the mechanics. While we were being waited on, other mechanics were in the main shop removing an engine from a totalled Chevy SUV.

My fictive mind was attempting to morph the setting and circumstances to a future where the place would be servicing the needs of mecha owners rather than motorists. "Leg access panels for a Contender Mark III? Well, I'm not sure...I thought they all had forged leg structures and integral armor plating. Maybe we can substitute units from a Powerbrute...got plenty of those."

"Don't worry about the blaster scoring...go over it a little with a lambdanite torch and it'll look factory fresh!"

Yes, it is surreal. But I'm a cyberpunk at heart.

FP

Hey.

Anybody know of any scale models of this car on the market?



Yes, that is an Amby, made by Hindustan...which is in the same conglomerate as our (Stateside) General Motors. One of my big pipe dreams is, now that Detroit is in the mood for retro, for GM to buy the body tooling for the Amby and to build a new version here, with all 21st Century mechanics under that charmingly rounded body. Give it some nice nostalgia-inducing chrome and a two-tone paint scheme, and dub it the Bel-Air. (Or course, this would give India an excuse to bring their carmaking tech into the 21st Century as well.)

Think globally, buy locally.

FP