“My first hot rod. God, I loved this car. When the transmission went on the Grand Prix, a girl who I worked with, had a boyfriend, who new someone, selling a 1973 Camaro. Did you get all of that?

So I went to look at the car. It was sitting outside of a house right off of Commack road in Deer Park. It had a brown door and steel wheels. It looked pitiful and drove worse! The owner assured me that it would run great if I had it tuned up. I was so damn gullible and plain old stupid that I bought it. I think I paid $400 for it. I proceeded to drive it up to Deer Park avenue and get it tuned up at “Precision Tune”. The guy who did the tune ( I later worked with this guy at Jiffy Lube) told me to take it easy with the car, because it was fast. Huh?! Yeah, right, OK. I get in the car and drive up to Montauk Highway and while driving through West Babylon, it starts to drizzle. Immediately after it starts to drizzle, I see a few guys in a late model Monte Carlo SS from school. The all laughed and pointed at me and the car. I was probably rather upset and wanted to get the hell away from them, so I floored it. The transmission kick-down engaged and the skinny bald tires started to spin. I went sideways, almost into on-coming traffic and then swung back towards the guys in the Monte. Finally I got a little bit of traffic and blew past those guys like they were standing still.

It was definitely a sleeper. It had a two barrel Rochester and stock, cast exhaust manifolds! As I drove the car, I found that it MUST have had .411 gears and a shift kit. It wasn’t exactly “fast”,but I raced and beat a Grand National at the time. So that would probably put the car in the mid to low 14 second range.

One day I was putting gas into the car and decided to find out what the tire valve near the gas filler neck was for. Oh! air suspension. Now that the car could be jacked up in the rear, I needed bigger wheels and tires. I went to a tire and wheel place in Lindenhurst and bought a set of Torque-thrust D wheels with tires, however, my friend Smitty liked them and was willing to trade for a set of four Cragar wheels with N-50’s on the back. Sweet.

After plotting and scheming with my friend Donato in 1st period History, we decided that he would put a cam in and do some other things to hop it up. Well, that was the end of that. He knocked the oil pickup off when he put the distributor back in and that turned one of the lobes on that new cam round. The shop that dismantled the motor said that it looked like it had a lot of nice work done to the heads. I parted the car out for like $500. That really sucked!”

Ah, Michigan. See also:

Back in Michigan, it’s a new term and It’s Hot in Here is rolling out a new season of environmental talk radio on WCBN. Don’t know yet if they’ve re-scooped the Monday noon time slot for the whole season, or if it’s just temporary while the new schedule is getting worked out, but one way or another the show is forging on. I’m looking forward to being a listener for the first time (Gina and Shannon fired off shows on the 29th and 5th, but I missed them), and it sounds like today is going to be a great one. As always, live stream at wcbn.org, and the shows will still get podcasted from this website, even though I’m not directly involved any more. Although I do have some plans to do some regional reporting once I get settled in.

Looks like they’ll be talking some environmental spatial analysis today, go figure.

Black Friday in the Herb David Guitar Studio. I know, it was Buy Nothing Day, I forgot.

So the munificent folks at Google have spared us the trauma of drunken emailing. Thanks.

But those of us at U Michigan have a more local conundrum. Now that “7-Fast” book delivery has been experimentally enabled for graduate students, it’s possible to search for a book and have it delivered to your departmental mailbox without the penalty of actually going to a library to find it or even to pick it up from the circulation desk. Without physical costs or library hours to consider, drunken librarying becomes a too-easy option.

It’s not that I’m not enjoying The Way of Ignorance, by Wendell Berry. It’s just that I have no idea what led to it arriving in my mail folder.

Don’t drink and patronize folks. Or, heck, do. Books can never be a bad thing, right?

Some news for my comrades in the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan:

Walking back from the radio station after our fab interview with Thom Princen, I asked him about the future of the “localization” seminar he’s currently running with Ray De Young and Jim Crofoot. He said they’re contemplating turning it into a regular affair, either as a Master’s project seminar (as it currently is) or as straight seminar.

As a Master’s project, it would be the only project I would be tempted to do instead of a thesis. As a regular seminar, it would be by far the course I would most regret having missed during my time at SNRE/U Mich.

So everybody should email him and the other teachers and encourage them to make it a part of the regularly scheduled programming. As he pointed out, it’s probably the only course of it’s kind in the country. It’s sooooo of it’s time.

Last week the Michigan Daily called up during my show and asked if they could come down and do some shooting. Bill Corrigan was next up and said he was down with it. The results (plus Tyler Dancer and another DJ from the previous day):

update: That’s too bad, it looks like they’ve taken the episode down.

Tomorrow is One Web Day. Is there anything more dorkotopian than One Web Day? I doubt it, so you know I’ll be there.

Turns out OWD is led by Susan Crawford, who is law faculty at U Michigan. Anybody heard of any meatspace OWD events in Ann Arbor?

Reason Magazine is a bunch of infuriatingly cocky libertarian wonks, who write well and are generally convincing despite being fundamentally wrong about life and everything. They’re charmers by and large, living out their Heinlein-goes-to-Washington boy (and girl)hood fantasy lives in print.

Jesse Walker is managing editor for Reason. He lives in Baltimore, but according to his blog, last Thursday he covered a slot on WCBN. I’m sorry I missed that, I guess I was in Chicago. It seems he was a student and dj here back in the ambiguous day and this was a triumphalist return.

For fun, here’s what libertarian turbo-intellectuals sound like when they play music and talk into a microphone:

Sounds good. Go figure. Playlist included in Walker’s blog post.

Update: if I’d read some of Jesse’s other blog posts, I would have realized that he is living in Ann Arbor for a while, and has a regular Thurs. 12-3p show. The posted audio is just the first episode. Right on.

Long live the Alley Bar.

Long live the Alley Bar.