The Explorers Club
№ CCXLVIII - Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885-1954), Righteous among the Nations & the savior of, amongst tens of thousands of others, Otto von Habsburg.







Project MERCATOR
I went out on Friday night at Ska Army's invitation. We took a very meandering route to my "favorite watering hole in the area," in equal parts because I do not have one & because Ska Army favors motoring in any random direction rather than sitting until a purposeful direction of travel has been agreed. He insisted on treating, & we drank pints of Guinness at "buy one, get one free" prices. We spoke of movies & television, of his recently jettisoned ex-girlfriend (a psycho hose beast by the sound of things), a new girl Ska Army is thinking of pursuing, & the debate union, to which he is an informally probationary member. (I say "informally" because we have no formal procedures to speak of, but, seemingly paradoxically, "probationary" because he has yet to encounter our absentee coach, The M.A.P., or debate in anger.) Ska Army is twenty-three, & made a declaration I've heard spring from the lips of many men his age, dating all the way back to when I was of that tender age: he vowed not to date any girl under twenty-one. Of course, the new girl he's interested in is slightly younger than the girl of whom he just rid himself, blowing the age floor right out of the water. C'est la vie. I explained to him Mrs. Skeeter, Esq.'s hypothesis of girls under twenty-five being too unstable & insecure to be worth a damn, but he seems unlikely to heed that sage advice. In his defense, such as it is, the younger-yet girl is very comely.

I got a later start than I'd hoped on my solo excursion to the Back to the Bricks car show in downtown Flinttown & I'd only been perusing the parked classic cars for perhaps twenty minutes when the heavens finally opened. It rained cats & dogs, & my bumbershoot was stowed securely inside Lumi the Snow Queen (more on her in "Autobahn"), blocks distant. But, as I often remarked in my pre-bumbershoot years, I'm not made of sugar & at no point was I in danger of melting. In retrospect, I wish I'd gotten up at the crack o' dawn & gone to the Bricks with my father, who parked his '79 Corvette in the Corvette Corral for the second year running (though this time 'round he had the foresight not to get parked in, a fate that befell him last year). I hadn't made any plans to attend the car show with any of my friends because I held out hope, longer than I should have, that my original plan of spending the weekend in Wisconsin would come to fruition.

This Week in Motorsport
I finally heard back from Captain Malice late Friday morning, by which time I'd planned to be already en route to the Badger State. I bear him no ill will, we are all overtaken by the vagaries of life now & again. At the same time, all I needed to hear from him was even less than the brief voicemail he left on Friday, received on Wednesday or even Thursday. We planned on attending an American Le Mans Series race, but, despite the many inadequacies of the Entertainment & Sports Programming Network that I have already detailed at length, I could have watched the race from home; the purpose of going to Wisconsin would have been to see my friend, making the aborted journey part of Project MERCATOR, more than just another chapter of "This Week in Motorsport."

Autobahn
The Back to the Bricks classic car cruise/car show/street festival/wingding ran from Tuesday through Saturday last week; I saw more vintage automobiles over the last week than I could possibly catalog, even if I'd known what all of them were. I will say this: the second-generation Pontiac Firebird, from the '70s, the one so often sporting a giant firebird decal on the hood? Those cars look best with just a little bit of rust around the edges. I am in earnest. Rust on a '70s Firebird is like the scar on Harrison Ford's chin, it is an "imperfection" that adds toward the near-perfection of the whole. I've seen more Firebirds over the last week than you could shake a stick at.

I've seen recently a television ad for the wee Fiat 500, the first time I've seen promotion for Chrysler's new Italian masters outside of Car and Driver & my own sightings of assumed promotional test drives on the highways & byways of sacred Michigan.

I've changed my Lumina's name from Lumi to Lumi the Snow Queen on a general belief that motor cars' names should be longer rather than shorter. This is in part a reaction against some relatives who recently purchased a minivan & have christened her Olive, despite no part of the vehicle being even remotely olive-colored. Olive is a Honda Odyssey, & to my way of thinking passing up the myriad possibilities than flow from the model name Odyssey is a crime against propriety. Also, I've realized that is appropriate to italicize the name of a motor car, just as with the name of a ship or an aeroplane. The Batmobile is not italicized because Batmobile is not the motor car's name, it is a descriptor of the vehicle's function; it is the Batmobile the same way Lumi the Snow Queen is a sedan. Motor car names differ from ship & aeroplane names in that they are not usually proceeded by the definite article, Lumi the Snow Queen instead of the Lumi the Snow Queen. There are exceptions: Olive's predecessor the Senator's Daughter, the Mousemobile. The long & the short of it: Lumi the Snow Queen is a better name than just Lumi & Olive deserves a better name than just Olive.

As I side note, Where's Teddy? refers to Olive exclusively as "New Car."

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Fountains of Wayne, "No Better Place" from Welcome Interstate Managers (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: It's been quoted before & it'll be quoted again:

"And it may be the whiskey talking,
But the whiskey says, 'I miss you everyday.'"