A friend forwarded the following as a reminder of the effect of 84 years on our world.  It’s a 1928 auto repair mailer sent on a penny postcard.

I haven’t done the math but I’d guess that the prices in the mailer would equate to today’s prices, but how nice would it be to walk into your favorite saloon and tell your buddies that you got new brakes installed and the garage only charged $1.25 for labor.

Here are a few Model T facts:

• The Model T was introduced on Oct. 1, 1908. It had a 20-horsepower, four-cylinder engine, reached a top speed of about 45 miles per hour, got about 13 to 21 miles per gallon of gasoline and weighed 1,200 pounds. It was the ninth of Henry Ford’s production cars.
• It had a 10-gallon fuel tank and could run on kerosene, petrol, or ethanol, but it couldn’t drive uphill if the tank was low, because there was no fuel pump; people got around this design flaw by driving up hills in reverse.
• More than 15,000,000 Model T’s were built and sold. A modest ceremony on May 26, 1927, marked the formal end of Model T production.
• The car was introduced with a price tag of $850. The Model T later sold for as little as $260, without extras, because of production savings Henry Ford passed on to customers.
• In 1914, Ford, with 13,000 employees, produced about 300,000 cars while 299 other companies with 66,350 employees produced about 280,000 vehicles.

I also dug up this pic of my grandad driving one of the few Model-Ts to be found in the town of Campobasso in southern Italy. As you can see, the man was way ahead of his time.

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Batocchio over at Vagabond Scholar, carries on the great tradition of Al Weisel in asking bloggers, the big and not so big, to submit their favorite post of the year.  The list is a great way to catch up on writing you missed, or more important, to get introduced to some talented political bloggers you never knew existed.

I was fortunate enough to have been asked to submit a piece and I did so with no real idea what to send in from the 1000 plus posts I wrote this year.  In any case, check out the 2011 Roundup. You might very well discover a gem or two.  There’s a big world of wonderful bloggers out there.  And feel free to write up and link to your favorite blogs in the Comments section below.

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I need to get out more. I had no idea there was a whole world of smartass doormats out there.

You can find them here and here and here.

(h/t: Gary DeSomber)

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One of the hypothesis concerning the origin of modern humans is that we emerged out of Africa 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  By 1804, there were 1 billion of us on the planet.  Over the next 200 years, we found a way to increase that number to 7 billion (give or take 56 million).

If you’re not quite sure how we accomplished that feat, here’s a short NPR video which helps explain it.

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Scary image, I know.

I’m on door duty tonight so I get to play with the smoke machine.  Happy Holloween to all.

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Children make me melt.  Take a look at this adorable clip of a 2 year old reacting to a pre-recorded video of her dad who was away with the military.  Half way through the video, the family cat knocks something off a shelf and the child attempts to get her father’s attention to tell him, “silly kitty”.

If I could go back in time, I’d choose the period when my children were between the ages of 2 and 5.  While it’s all been special, I think I loved that time more than any other.  They were innocent and eager to learn and each day brought a brand new adventure…and they were small enough that I could carry all three of them on my back at the same time.

Our favorite time of day was that last half hour before bedtime when they’d wash up, brush their teeth, change into their jammies and eagerly jump on to my bed.  They would take turns putting imaginary quarters into my mouth, pressing the Start button located at the tip of my nose, grabbing the reins which also served as my hands and readying themselves for the wildest horsey rides any child could imagine.  Once the laughter and commotion subsided, they’d all cozy up around me and I would read them Forest Hotel or No More Elephants for the thousandth time.

And when it was all over, it was a piggy-back ride to their rooms (bumping into doors and walls along the way, of course) where I’d tuck them under the covers and get back from them the only thing I ever needed – to feel their little arms wrapped tightly around my neck and the words ‘I love you daddy” whispered into my ear.

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One of the better lines you’ll ever hear on television: “You’re being shagged by a rare parrot.”

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Hard as I’ve tried to get into politics and news and photoshop over the last number of days, I can’t do it.

I’m reluctant to whine about my illness of late but the fact is that it’s got me down and out and there is little more I can do other than rest up, drink plenty of fluids and take my medication.  I’ve been battling a fever that’s taken me on a roller-coaster ride and makes it near impossible to focus on anything.

That said, I have caught up on all five seasons of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ (great sitcom) and have come to know every fleck of paint on the ceiling of my bedroom.  Yippee.

Hope to get back into it all tomorrow.  And to all my Canadian friends and family…Happy Thanksgiving.

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For all of you who can’t get enough of a 3rd rate writer’s offering of selfishness and greed, your prayers have been answered.

Penguin Group will launch a new iPad app of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” combining the unabridged text and rarely seen photos from Ayn Rand’s archives.

The app [...] will include videos and audio lectures given by Rand, original manuscript notes, an illustrated timeline of Rand’s life, and other features.

Excited?  I certainly hope so but if you aren’t, I’m sure Tea Partiers, Libertarians and many conservatives are.  They have made Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged a metaphor for an America suffering through an economic recession.  Where is John Galt when you need him?

I would urge teabaggers and friends, though, to hold back from spending their hard earned $14.99 for the iPad app until they’ve delved a little deeper into this Ayn Rand person they so adore.

And to help them along on their journey of discovery, here are a few selected Ayn Rand quotes these good people might find interesting.

On Conservatives:

“Today’s ‘conservatives’ are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead,” she said. “They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.”

On Ronald Reagan:

“I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word – i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose – see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.”

On Homosexuality:

“All laws against homosexual acts should be repealed,” she said in 1968. “I do not approve of such practices or regard them as necessarily moral, but it is improper for the law to interfere with a relationship between consenting adults.”

So what would Ayn Rand think of today’s Tea Party folk?  Well, based on the avowed atheist’s own words on issues so dear to teabaggers, I’m thinking disdain would best describe her thoughts.

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Not in a political frame of mind this morning, especially after checking out the main stories of the day and discovering it’s just a repeat of last week’s headlines.  Same old.

Fortunately, I stumbled on to a non-political site that calls itself  Happy Place.  What they do is post pics of well-meaning signs which have been defaced with “smart-ass responses”.  I loved it and spending a few minutes on the site was a perfect way to start a wet and dreary week.  A few of my favorites…

And I especially loved this one…

When I see stuff like this, it gives me hope and let’s me know that the world is worth saving.

(h/t: The Dish)

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