Part 2 of the rod saga -- More cars I've owned over the years

Following up yesterday's story about the Packard, here are a few other cars I've owned over the years...



My next rod ($50) was a 1956 Pontiac Chieftan convertible. I drove it for about two weeks when I was 16, until the differential locked up. I sold it to someone for $50.



In 1970 I bought a 1954 Ford Station Wagon from Moochie Dehnert for $200. It was a flat grey, the color of a battleship, and sported mags and a pair of threadbare pair of slicks on the back. I earned money working after school at the Westland Hatchery, where I was known as "the boy" or just "boy." I painted houses that summer, with my old Junior High speech teacher, Don Kinberg. I actually drove this for four or five months until it was struck by some expensive meltdown. I don't even remember. I got $15 for it when the junkyard guys hauled it away.



When I was 18, in 1971, I bought a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle for $500, paying $50 a month. It was pale green and detailed to a fine gloss. I had a stipend of $125 a month as a volunteer at a crisis center, which just barely covered the nut of my life. It was a sweet car other than the heating and defrost system. It ran for a year or so, when I lunched it in an accident. My friend Maureen's stepfather Gerry bought it from me for, I think $50. I don't know. I would have taken $10. . .so maybe he gave me the standard junker payment of $15. He restored it top to bottom.

When Mo finally got the car back it was totally pimped out, every ding and nick vanished, a frenched out new interior, totally new running gear and a breathtakingly gorgeous metallic Lapis-colored paintjob. Even more galling than seeing my Bug elevated to hip street rod status was Maureen refusing to let me take it for a spin! I can only assume that was at the behest of Gerry, who had seen firsthand the results of my malignant neglect of what another friend's father called "Hitler's Revenge."

I bought another rod for $200. Part III tomorrow.
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My First Car (a 1953 Packard Clipper)

My early car-owning years were spent nursing and cursing a succession of mainly Detroit Iron, every single one of them about one bearing, differential, transmission, or rod away from the wrecking yard gates. I was the last steward in their short lives and the person most responsible for their quick and ultimate demise.

My first car was a 1953 Packard Clipper with a straight eight cylinder engine. . .it was a washed out flat yellow color. Unlike this automobile, it never actually motated on its own power under my stewardship. I bought it from Art Pommer, a wall-eyed high school science teacher, for $15 and promised to "fix it up." One of my friends towed it to my house, where it sat in the parking strip under three enormous locust treets for two years.

My friends and I made perfunctory attempts to start it: cleaned the fuel filter, poured in fresh gasoline (@ twenty-nine cents a gallon), changed the spark plugs, bought some starter fluid. Someone "found" a used battery. The Clipper never responded to our ministrations, which was just as well, since we were only fifteen, unlicensed, and would surely have gone cruising had we actually succeeded in firing her up. God had a plan. It became our de facto clubhouse. I may be wrong, but I think one of my first meetings with "Kev" ( a frequent contributor to All This Is That) occurred in this very vehicle.
[tomorrow, Part II]
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Roller skating in San Francisco

Look, no kneepads!
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Politics, Oklahoma style

Click image to enlarge. . .

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You thought Disneyland was shopworn?

The "lake." Click photo to enlarge.

You thought Wallyworld was looking a little threadbare?

Dubaidave of here of arguably (actually, not so arguably) The Worst Theme Park In the World.

The good news: it costs seven Egyptian pounds to enter (about $1.50 US), although Dubaidave seemed to find that the admission may be based on how much money it looks like you have...

The grand entrance to Fantazyland. Click to enlarge.
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Poem: Changes 12/Standstill

1.
Heaven draws farther
And farther away,
While the earth below

Sinks into the depths
In a time of stasis
And standstill and decline

Heaven and mother earth
Are locked
In a stand-off

But heaven holds the cards
We're just actors
In a rosy farce

2.
The great depart
The small approach
Heaven and Earth are numb

What is above
Has no relation
To what is below

Confusion and disorder prevail
The dark power inside
The light power outside

Heaven and Earth do not unite
The standstill
Is the time of fear and trembling
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Poem: Tendrils

When a bush is cut down
Volunteer shoots sprout
From the roots

Sending tendrils of life into the world
In an urgent last gasp
A genetic S.O.S.

Like what they say
Happens
When you hang a man.
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Another time travel Help Wanted: wanted, an alien or someone with time travel technology

Further to the want-ad I posted here last week looking for a fellow time traveler, this gent from AOL was looking (a few years ago) for both a companion and some hardware:

To: <rountreej@earthlink.net>
From: Bobby<timetravel@gdcs.net>
Subject: Time travelers PLEASE HELP!!!!!!
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 01:46:04

If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed!! I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age back to 4.

Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in very great danger and need this immediately!

I am aware that there are many types of time travel, and that humans do not do well through certain types.

I need as close to temporal reversion as possible, as safely as possible. To be able to rewind the hands of time in such a way that the universe of now will cease to exist. I know that there are some very powerful people out there with alien or government equipment capable of doing just that.

If you can help me I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, Along with hotel stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be provided.
Please be advised that any temporal device that you may employ must account for X, Y, and Z coordinates as well as the temporal location. I have a time machine now, but it has limited abilitys and is useless without a vortex. If you can provide information on how to create vortex generator or where I can get some of the blue glowing moon crystals this would also be helpful.

Also if you are one of the very, very, few beings with the ability to edit the universe PLEASE REPLY!!!

Only if you have this technology and can help me please send me a (SEPARATE) email to:

Robby0809@aol.com

Please do not reply if your an evil alien! Thanks

Poem: Rub-a-dub

1.
Tidiness is phobia
Cleanliness is delusion
Order is madness

So much is lost
The love music art
Books and walks and idle moments

Of shocking profundity and beauty
Put on hold or abandoned
Even Dr. Lister would be appalled

2.
We've become a nation of
Rub-a-dub-Georges
Wielding sprayers wipes and germicides

Madly laving away
The sepsis germs and cooties
Scrubbing for dear life

3.
Cleanliness and tidiness
Are a bulwark
Against the inevitable

Tidiness to the extreme
Exterminates the connections
Between the parts

4.
No one ever said
On their deathbed
I wished I'd kept a cleaner house.
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Alien Lore No. 75 - What the f***, duck? Grey body appears in mallard's X-ray

Last week, workers found what seemed to be the image of a Grey in the x-ray of a duck. At least, some workers at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia (in the Bay area) seem to think.

Lodged in the duck's gizzard, is an image of a scowling Grey. However, when an autopsy was performed after the mallard died, the Grey had departed the host's body and was no doubt off performing implants, abductions, and other mischief.

Jay Holcomb, the director of the rescue center, said "I don't know my aliens well, but it looks like one of those with the big eyes and the long fingers."

The bird arrived at the center last Sunday with a broken wing. Workers do not know how the mallard was injured, but, well, eating a Grey can't be that salubrious for your health. One worker, first seeing the x-ray cried out "Look at this, it's an alien head!"

According to one worker at the rescue center, strange things happen among male mallards during the spring mating season. Their testicles, for one, grow to three times the size of their brains; none however have ever grown an alien head before.

The one-of-a-kind X-ray, which measures 17 inches by 14 inches will be auctioned, along with a certificate of authenticity, starting this week.

Maybe the mallard stumbled upon a nest of aliens and ate one of the babies.

Cordelia is something of a hotbed of alien phenomena. Crop circles have been discovered twice in the past three years on wheat fields near the rescue center.
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Digging for Jimmy Hoffa

I guess Jimmy Hoffa is really the Judge Crater of our time. . .although Hoffa clearly had far more enemies. FBI teams yesterday sifted dirt from a chest-deep hole in the ground in an intense search for the body of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa three decades after his disappearance.

FBI agents directed a work crew that used heavy equipment to rip up the concrete floor of a horse farm barn demolished a day earlier. After the rough stuff, they started working like archaeologists... sorting through the soil under the foundation of the barn by hand, photographing and videotaping evidence (they hope) inside the yellow crime scene tape. The investigation was triggered by a tip from a federal marijuana prisoner who lived on the farm at the time of Hoffa's disappearance.

The property was previously owned by Hoffa associate/Teamster official/Mafia associate Rolland McMaster. The farm is about 20 miles from where the Teamster boss disappeared without a trace in 1975.
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Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in new movie

Cate Blanchett will play Bob Dylan in his "androgynous" phase (I assume they mean the made-up Bob during his Rolling Thunder/Desire era) in an upcoming film by director Todd Haynes (who made the interesting and strange Velvet Goldmine, roughly based on Bowie's life).

Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain) and Richard Gere will play (presumably) the younger and older Dylan. Click here to read the full AFP article. . .
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