who's going to drive you home tonight?

In lieu of several thousand words (ha! as if that was in any way likely...) here are some pictures. They appeal to me for all sorts of reasons.

Today was a day out.

baby you can drive my car (n+1)(n+1) and another 1

It's so long ago since I was doing the series on cars I've owned that I have quite forgotten whether I had covered all them - as represented by models in collection - or not.

But as I have got lucky with two new models ordered over Christmas (including a replica red Peugeot Mi16 bought from un homme in la belle France and for which I eagerly await, I thought I would regale my reader(s) with a picture of part of the current collection.

The ones on the top shelf are models of cars I've actually owned, the others are of models I considered signifcant Aussie cars in real life.

It gives me much pleasure (as the joke used to go) and I love the smell of the cabinet they're in. This is important. I sniff it often.

cat power

Far be it from me to add to the squillions of words being writ, even as we speak I do likewise, about the election.


Well no, maybe not too far. Being of a recently improved, more optimistic, mind I hope that this campaign just past marks a low point in how these things are conducted in Oz. The relentless negative attack ads and fear-mongering, single focus on the leaders thereby distracting from pretty thin talent pools on all sides, and lack of a policy framework - call it a narrative if you will - all combine to have dumbed down what should be the most informed decision we all make.


Not to mention the role of parties' organisational wings, not to single any particular one out (ha!). The phrase 'out of touch' is one used with rare abandon to criticise leaders, but it should be aimed at the back room boys - and I guess they are mainly boys - who by their very definition cannot ever be in touch.


The instability of what we will be left with at Federal level might just start to get the 'players' thinking that maybe the political process needs some renewal. From what I read, the general public certainly thinks so.


What we do about the MSM and its corrosive influence, of course, is another thing.



Personally, I think it is more important to spend time with old cars and kittens.

i found a new love

And its arrival coincided not only with a massive increase in workload but also, and again, the 134th realisation that this blog has nothing to say.

But crikey it makes me smile and that's why I got it.

noise-works

I'm thinking of getting a couple of these as office cars. Sometimes we have to post a letter in double-quick time, or maybe the milk in the fridge goes off and we need fresh milk to make coffee for clients and meetings. One of these would enable us to get to the shop before it shut.

After we'd torn up every street in about, oh, say a hundred kilometres.

Link if video won't play.

helpless

Or You Take my Breath Away or any one of a hundred other responses. Is this not design perfection? Not a millimetre out of shape anywhere, proportions so perfect they might have been the result of millennia of evolution - well, in a sense they are - plus a stonking great V12 to make it go.

Want.

Read more if you wish.

here in my car

Before we get to cars, hat tip to David Tiley at Barista for a good pick-up: the latest analysis from John Lanchester about the toxic culture of the financial sector and its effect on the broader economy in Britain.

This one - it's quite long - includes some fascinating history of banking in the British Isles before Lanchester gets his usual head of steam up on how an industry that thinks nothing of multi-million dollar/pound/euro/does the currency really matter salaries and 'bonuses' ("guaranteed bonuses?" asks Lanchester, "that's a salary") in the industry have turned the British economy on its head.


Lanchester gives you a basic accounting lesson before going in to the intricacies of Collateralised Debt Obligations and the other arcane financial 'mechanisms' that I was bleating about not long after I started VVB. I didn't know all this pain was coming but I was tremendously afraid of the amount of risk contained in a financial system that was simply too complex, and made up of too many people over-interested in their own welfare, to last. I've also bleated about the way in which economic thinking - or at least the language - has come to inform all aspects of our lives.


Anway, here are some excerpts from Lanchester's essay:

All of this leads us to the fourth and deepest reason why the government won’t
nationalise the banks. The deepest reason is:

4. Because it would be so embarrassing. Some of the embarrassment is
superficial: on the not-remembering-somebody’s-name-at-a-social-occasion level.
The Anglo-Saxon economies have had decades of boom mixed with what now seem, in retrospect, smallish periods of downturn. During that they/we have shamelessly lectured the rest of the world on how they should be running their economies. We’ve gloated at the French fear of debt, laughed at the Germans’ 19th-century emphasis on manufacturing, told the Japanese that they can’t expect to get over their ‘lost decade’ until they kill their zombie banks, and so on. It’s
embarrassing to be in a worse condition than all of them.

It’s for this reason that the thing the governments least want to do – take over the banks – is something that needs to happen, not just for economic reasons, but for
ethical ones too. There needs to be a general acceptance that the current model
has failed. The brakes-off, deregulate or die, privatise or stagnate, lunch is for wimps, greed is good, what’s good for the financial sector is good for the economy model; the sack the bottom 10 per cent, bonus-driven, if you can’t
measure it, it isn’t real model; the model that spread from the City to government and from there through the whole culture, in which the idea of value has gradually faded to be replaced by the idea of price. Thatcher began, and Labour continued, the switch towards an economy which was reliant on financial services at the expense of other areas of society. What was equally damaging for Britain was the hegemony of economic, or quasi-economic, thinking. The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn’t belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employees’ rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values; then you have the conversation about costs. In Britain in the last 20 to 30 years that has all been the wrong way round. There was a reverse takeover, in which City values came to dominate the whole of British life.

If you are interested in this sort of stuff I also recommend John Lanchester's earlier pieces, Citiphlia and Citiphobia, which a friend alerted me to some time ago.

Anyway, cars. There was some kind of fundraiser just a little way down the coast so I went for a look. Here's what I found:

My first car was a two door version of this Austin A30. Since 1968, it's been the only car I ever made a profit from selling. The owner had made this one somewhat more driveable by replacing the original 803cc A-series motor with a Datto 1400 and 5 speed gearbox.





I also owned several Austin Freeways like this one. "Powered by the Blue Streak Six."












However old Pommy and bastardised Pommy/Aussie cars were in the minority. Try this for size.











If you can't get enough detail, then try this.


















But the Lincoln Continental leaves them all for dead.

between the buttons (*)

I suppose time does pass more quickly as we age, but to me it seems like about two decades ago that Jensen Button arrived on the Formula 1 scene amid shrieks of hope from Old Blighty about the next Pom F1 champion since Stirling Moss or similar.

So it's been all those years during which Jensen Button has been circulating around countless F1 tracks in the middle or the back of the field (ie about 350 places ahead of Mark Webber, obligatory snipe now discharged).

But now it seems Jensen can't put a foot wrong, even as England's Up-Until-Recently-Great-But-Not-Exactly-White-Hope Lewis Hamilton, who was F1 champion last year, is a damaged brand on account of being a cheat. And once your brand is damaged, no matter how good a driver you are, you're dead meat. Nowadays, it's all about the Brand.

So let's all get behind Jensen Button. At least there we'll be giving Mark some company, boom-boom.

Having been too busy to do anything bloggish during the week beyond a couple of comments around the traps, I've been to BookForum tonight. Here's what I found.

Why FaceBook doesn't work as a business. Beats me why people use it for anything. Disclosure: I had a page for a while but I couldn't figure out how to find people whom I didn't know already. I'm sure it's simple because of all the people who've found school friends, mothers, fathers, lost pets, deceased pets, two cent pieces that had fallen down the back of the lounge and so on, but I couldn't do it. And without that gigantic incentive, it just seemed like such a waste of time.

I am on LinkedIn, but again the people I've found are ones I knew already and the only ones who post regularly only seem to be joining groups such as Obsessively Interested in Finding Enough Two Cents Pieces to Become Rich. I'm evidently missing the point - in fact I'm missing all of them.

But what about this? (That was kind of a joke).

But this is serious. I haven't heard of Carlota Perez and there are so many embedded links in the article I'd have to take a week off to get through them. But her work seems interesting (in the sense of being genuinely interesting, not in "interesting" as in "I don't like it)." Here's a sample, it's analytical and descriptive rather than normative but presumably later in the book you get to the instructions.

Anyway, if you do have a week a to spare you can go diving for yourselves.

There wasn't a Friday night music clip because we went out to see some real live music. This was the main act and he was brilliant as you'd expect, but the support was the bloke you see below and it was really good.




(*) Obscure Rolling Stones reference. Unless you're of my generation and musical tastes, I guess.

take me for a ride in your car car

There's a few kilometres between our place and 'town'. It's mostly dual carriageway but there are a couple of stretches of single lane road. I was on the road today and, coming up to the end of dual carriageway before the longest piece of single lanery, I came up behind a car obviously travelling slower than me and, it seemed, well below the 100 km/hr speed limit. I went to sneak past, they immediately sped up and also moved into the right hand lane early, to keep me out.

And then proceeded to drive at between 85 and 90 for the whole stretch of single carriageway, at the end of which there was a procession of a dozen cars waiting to get past.

Some people should have their licences taken from them if they can't handle the posted limits. Then be shot, and then eaten. And not get their licences back.

Jeremy Clarkson is someone who appreciates the meaning of a posted limit in terms of smooth flow of traffic, but look what happens when he drives a car that can't make the grade. I loved his suggestion that they should have called it the "Imodium."

Mr Clarkson is also a vehement opponent of the nanny-state and I have to say I'm with him in most cases. The arrival of technology that simplifies remote monitoring of both public and private behaviour, combined with the incursion of the State into more of our lives, is far from a benevolent development.

It's trite and a truism that technology has outstripped governments' ability to respond. You'd think that this would be a sufficient reason to look at government processes with a view to ensuring that governments can respond in a more timely fashion.

This is where our adversarial model of government is unhelpful. If a government and opposition could agree on what were the big long and short term challenges, they'd be better placed to respond.

Instead, we get this kind of puerile schoolyard spat.

Inconsequential linguistic annoyance of the day: the use of "name-check" for "reference."

sad eyed lady of the lowlands

Why do think women have been so sad recently? Only in the UK. Hah!

Jeremy Clarkson dismisses the Mazda 626 diesel. The good thing is it only takes him about 5% of his review to do it. The other bits, including the bit about the knickers, are very good (and strangely apposite given articles in today's Sunday Mail). (Do not read this if you are sad woman, it'll only make you cry. Or go wtf?).

Rolling Stone sticks the knife into the financial gurus. The main shame about this piece is that ever since Hunter S. Thompson, every up and coming smart alec wants to write like him. And none of them can.

Busy week coming up, no posts for a little while at least.

i wish i was still drinking

Being a short account of the boys' weekend away. Every year at Sydney Motor Show time the three of us catch up and try to act like we're still 21.

We're not, but it's fun to try.

Anyway hanging out at the Sir George Young on George St with Kev, the bloke who balances a guitar on his forehead while strumming another one. We were a few beers into it by this stage, in fact it was our second visit there of the trip. I'd like to say that there's no limit to the quantity of grog one can put away but regrettably, as we age, there is. Don't know what time it was when we folded the tent but all three of us left half full schooners. There was just this moment when we looked at each other, all thinking the same thought at the same time: "can't do this any more."

Damn, and damn again.

The show itself is just an excuse but this year, even though there were far fewer exhibitors and all the brands you'd want to see, ie all the Europeans, weren't there we still spend a fair of time looking (and of course making sarcastic comments where warranted).

The best bits were probably the oldies on show for the next Shannons auction. A black Triumph TR3A with paintwork far in advance of any original even when new. One of us used to own one, so we know what they were like then.

A gorgeous E-type roadster: look at it, who wouldn't want to own one?

I got the opportunity to give the McIntosh stereo which is fitted to the premium versions of the Subaru Liberty a good work-out and can confirm that it is indeed excellent. Thank you Subaru people for leaving me alone while I tested the limits. Kick arse, I would venture, just the right amount of sound pressure levels from the sub-woofers, ie not ultra doof doof but just thumping enough. If we ever get rid of Chateau VVB and there's enough money in the kick we might even be able to stretch to one, maybe 2-3 years old.

The weekend started...well for me it actually started on Thursday night at an awards dinner I attended, then a few beer o'clock coldies with friends on Friday evening which morphed into sharing a bottle of red and some pizza with offspring no 2, a necessary prerequisite to enable me to sleep on a mattress on the floor at her place. Also to dull the after-effects of over an hour and half of dental work that had been done earlier.

Early-ish flight from Brisbane to Sydney but offspring no 2 kindly took me to the airport. So when I hit the hotel room about midday on Saturday, one of the fellers had thoughtfully brought a six-pack (well actually a five pack) of Reschs Pilsener stubbies, got his 12-string Aria out and awaaaay we went. Thence to the Sir George Young for the first of our visits and that brings us back to where we started.

Tell you what: I don't miss big cities. I had one night in a hotel in Brisbane, it had a small balcony which I went out onto in the early morning and there was that city drumbeat: construction noise, traffic noise, just building noise, that incessant hum well it's more than a hum, dunno what you'd call it. But it's always there, no wonder people in big cities go a little rat-in-a-maze crazy.

Anyway that's the story. Now time to catch up on a little sleep before the working week. Ciao for niao.

the music goes round and round (*)

Around the newspapers today.

The SMH carries this article about political polarisation in the US. When you have participants in rallies apparently calling out for the other candidate to be assassinated, and it doesn't seem like a joke or heat-of-the-moment stuff, that's pretty scary. And not only is the real, suburban, world increasingly partitioned, but the media both mainstream and alternate. Admission: I don't visit blogs I find to be extreme, although I'll trawl some those whose views I don't share. But my living in a self-imposed cocoon isn't good.

Update: It's worse than I thought. Nothing like a mix of ignorance and arrogance to bring forth the worst in human nature. Whay aren't these people at work, one might ask (listen to first clip). Courtesy of Club Troppo.

Irwin Stelzer in today's Courier Mail more than hints that we are moving into a protectionist era. He's sad about this, naturally, but he employs the same glib dismissal of real impacts that I used to read from (Australian) Treasury in the early 1990s, about the same time as Michael Pusey identified the cult of eco-rationalism.

"Defenders of free trade...have failed to develop a defence of the way free trade's benefits have been distributed."

Plasma TVs and cheap t-shirts, is my glib interpretation of Stelzer's answer.

Which he then follows by "Meanwhile, globalisation has increased the opportunities for members of the managerial class: they can spread their talents over larger enterprises. Result: Rising inequality, with trade the apparent villain."

I wonder who the real villain is? When the ratio of American CEO salaries to average weekly incomes has gone up by some phenomenal extent (read it last night, can't find it now, google not helping, must have wrong search terms), I assume the real villains are in hiding.

And, btw, doesn't Pusey still cop it?

Let's be slightly serious for a tick: we have been hearing non-stop for some decades that markets are the answer and anybody who now is seeking to qualify, in any way, what they have been saying over that period is really indulging in a little revisionism. And yes, markets were the answer to a period where structural rigidities in various areas including trade and labour relations indeed stifled growth. So we got real growth, far larger than during the 'long boom' after WW2.


Then, inevitably, some of the unintended (yes, I'm being charitable) consequences started to rear their heads including a widening gap of income. The answer, equally inevitably, has been: reform. Code for: more of the same.


You know that definition of stupidity? The one about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?

Hmmm.

Finally, the Courier Mail's Paul Syvret relates a letter to the editor from an unrelated paper which in essence blames the prolonged drought - which we didn't use to have when t'writer were a lad - on less moisture in the atmosphere because of one more hour of daylight due to - you guessed it - daylight saving. As Syvret says, "How can you argue with logic like that?"

Enjoy your weekend. I have to go and give the TV a work-out, it's Bathurst weekend. Haven't been there since 1974 but I read about a bloke who's been there annually for 40 years. That's dedication.

(*) In this case, it's the music of the V8!

on the road again

Have just done the Capricorn Coast to Brisbane and return road trip thing. Chateau VVB was up for auction on Saturday, someone needed to be there (so it seemed, anyway). Left after work on Friday, a bit of a bugger really as I'd been in Gladstone anyway, but had to bring a work colleague back and then swap the office car for the yellow Saabmarine, as offspring no 2 calls it. So an extra 280 km or so just for fun.

It being a late departure after a full day, and a few full days before that, I didn't feel up to going all the way (I'd be in Adelaide if I did that, ha ha) so stopped in Maryborough. Still arrived late, after reception had been closed a while, they left the key under the doormat. Cute. I had a small bottle of vino collapso from the well stocked bar and hit the sack.

Awoke early, before reception was operational so I left the cash for the vino on the table, put the key back under the mat and hit the frog and toad.

It was just on 6, the sun was up and it was brilliantly clear. I came out of the 60 km town limit but saw a car coming up over my right shoulder on the Bruce Highway at the 100km mark. Thought briefly, not so good as I wasn't utterly awake but then floored it and pulled out in front of him. Turned up the radio, it was Bob Seger with Hollywood Nights which is a great driving song, so I cranked it up further and awaaaay we went. Life is just extra grouse sometimes, you can't foresee it. The early morning sun on the canefields, the green hills in the background, the open road...ah yup, I was extremely alert and it was all good.

The auction was a damp squib, no registered bidders although the agents (cough spit) had led me to believe we had at least one. So Chateau VVB is still for sale. Amazingly, the original architect turned up to have a look and may in fact be interested in putting in a bid. Had a yarn to him about what we had liked or not about the place. He hadn't seen it since about 1976.

Took it much easier coming home as I knew there would be police everywhere. There were. Just as well I wasn't driving one of these. You'll enjoy Jeremy's take on modern Britain, there are lots of things he doesn't like about modern life, eh?

Multiple blogger failures yesterday. I had a really nice cheap shot that comprised extract from a letter to the Editor of the Age in which someone, probably a City trader, in the UK seemed to rail against people railing at the financial meltdown (you still with me?), saying just to leave it to the experts, along with a story from Friday's AFR in which a young Sydney trader, over a beer on Thursday night as the financial world imploded, noted that some of his firm's clients had lost a lot of money ("there was blood") but the firm itself had done outstanding business, "best for months" in fact. Wonderful.

So that was the cheap shot. It's because of highly numerate but utterly amoral people - a phrase I've used several times this year, you'll note - that much of what has happened, has happened.

Along with a whole bunch of people with a deep-seated, but irrational, belief in one particular answer to all the world's problems.

I'll leave you to guess what it is, thus avoiding yet another cheap shot.

For something more substantial on financial stuff, I recommend today's Peter Martin.

And for something more substantial again, I give you the JM Toys white metal 1/43 scale model of the Austin A99. The A99, which took the A95's mechanicals and wrapped them in bodywork by Pinin Farina, was a hulking great lump of a thing yet spectacularly well proportioned. A car for the upper middle class who couldn't afford a Daimler.

Hmm, LStg79. What's the current exchange rate? Looks like it's going to cost me $185 plus postage. Might wait awhile.

baby you can drive my car part CMXIV and a half

It's been aeons since a cars-I-have-owned post. So here's another one.

I've had several cars that classified as most unreliable car in the world, a 1976 VW Passat was certainly right up there. It was about 10 years old when I acquired it and it had been subjected to ten years of Burmese mechanicking, which meant that (a) it always got going again but (b) the niceties of the workshop manual would have been honoured only in their absence.

It actually went very well when it was going and did make it up to Mandalay and Maymyo with the whole fambly aboard without mechanical mishap, although I recall we did have a small accident coming back to Rangoon. Sharing a narrow, potholed road with buffalos, ox-carts and sundry other natural wonders made for interesting drives, the like of which we really don't get here in godzone.

It was customary in Rangoon to have domestic staff to help around the house, as much a way of getting some money into the community as to actually help although the houses tended to need a lot of care and maintenance anyway.

We did have a driver for a while and when he left we got a young bloke who seemed too good to be true. Indeed. He had great English and a facility with all sorts of things so, even given the unique nature of the economy under the Burmese Way to Socialism, it seemed odd that he was just a driver for a foreigner.

Anyway the car was so unreliable that he eventually gave that as his reason for leaving us and we really had no reason not to believe him.

remember the days of the old schoolyard

Today's Sunday Mail carries a mildly hysterical little piece on how children and their parents are having trouble dealing with a rating system that indicates that some children might be performing better than other children in the same class.

Hmm, I remember many years of half-yearly exams which carried out exactly the same function. I've been ruined for life although not as ruined as my parents thought after I once came 7th.

Anyway, anything we can do the Japanese can do better so sit back, pull up a comfy chair and enjoy this story. As one commenter pointed out, it is indeed a shame that there wasn't a picture, not least because it raises the spectre of a bit of a furphy or urban myth.

And here's something else that the Japanese - well apparently, according to Jeremy - do better. However I'm with Johan from Bruges (see the comments) which is why, although the new VVB-by-the-sea lacks sufficient garaging or even parking space, there will be a TR6 or something similar in the drive - or on the grass - as soon as I can arrange it.

oh lord, won't you buy me...

"...a Mercedes Benz,

My friends all drive Porsches,

I must make amends."

Well not all of them, but one now does. Here it is. Beautiful is it not?

**Noises in back of throat indicate mixed emotions.**

take me out

On the radio at lunchtime, "the NSW will be out in force for tonight's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras..."

To which I thought, "hmm, should have read 'will be out and proud at...".

Anyway I'm glad the NSW Police Force - or Service, whichever it is (which of course depends on what you believe...) - is out. Kind of like all the emerging links between councils and developers are coming out, and between NSW State Labor and developers, not that anybody would ever have guessed that one.

And Wayne Swan admits to smoking dope.

Ahh, yup. Now let's hear from the others. Nota bene: this is not a revelation.

More importantly, more companies are withdrawing from the Sydney (International) Motor Show. That is to say, the cars you actually want to look at. Although that said, my two old mates and I have had more fun on the Mazda stand (poking our heads out of the 3/4 window on the then new RX8 and making elk noises, having just looked at the then also new A series Mercs) and the Ssangyong stand (because of everything they make!) than looking at high end Beemers. Although I did get awfully sick watching the rotating Jaguar turntable a few years ago while in the grip of an industrial-grade hangover.

So, my two similarly superannuated friends, what will we do this year?

burning love

That's burning love, not burning dinosaur.

'Burning dinosaur' may not make a lot of sense, but you have to read the article and the comments.

Anyway copying Jeremy Clarkson here is no so much to point to his journalistic style nor to mimic his pants-wetting, in this case about a very fast Mercedes (this car has redeemed M-B in Jeremy's eyes, as well as other parts of his anatomy).

Rather, it is to point to his description of driving this beast and the feeling of being utterly on the edge - one false move (pardner!) and you're off into the shrubbery, or more likely into a rock wall or over a cliff. But you get it right and it's almost as good as (you know what).

My point? It's very much like playing and singing live in front of people - especially when you're not very good and are very likely to hit a bum note, either on the guitar or in your voice.

You're trying and trying - get the chords right, get the changes right, get the flamin' words right for crying out loud, then get the phrasing right, get the emotion right, get the finish right...and...better than you know what, but by crikey it's been a ride.

Sort of what keeps us going, I guess.

Speaking of getting the notes right - did anybody see Guy Sebastian on the dancing show last night? With the original (almost, no Ray Charles of course) Blues Brothers band behind? If there's anybody who makes the moderately difficult seem baby-simple (apart from David Gilmour of course), it's Steve Cropper. A new, somewhat larger Steve Cropper, but him all the same. Just glorious.

And hasn't Our Guy come a long way? That's entertainment.

for emily, wherever I may find her

Looks like I found her on ebay. The only car owned since marriage that had a name (well apart from the the more unreliable examples which were universally called "that f**cking car"), Emily was a 1965 Morris 1100. And indeed she was in this same light green colour, although our Emily did sport a set of Starsky and Hutch stripes up the C pillar. Possibly the only 1100 to have been so decorated.

It's a big day today on ebay for cars that have graced the driveways of various chateaux VVB over the years. Apart from Emily, here's an Austin Freeway, again in the same colour as the Freeway sedan I owned. I also had a Freeway wagon in two tone grey, and here's a Wolseley 24/80 in a slightly darker green or grey than one I owned. That car had a name too - Eric, of course short for Eric the Half a Car.

And here's pretty sad looking Dolomite in the same colour as the one we had for a year or two while in Singapore.

Saving the best until last - I never owned an Austin A95, but the old man had one that he bought from maternal grandfather's estate. That car had been bought new on dad's advice and very well looked after.

In contrast to the other cars pictured here, this one has actually attracted some bids and it does look pretty good for a 1958 car. I remember very well how they drove - heavy, lumbering, but very positive switchgear - and the advertising slogan: "long, low and lovely."

Couldn't have put it better myself.