The return of The Evening Rambler

Every so often I think of something I want to write here. Short stuff usually, a little of this and a bit of that. Of course I don't always have time right then to blog...and so I don't forget (ahem), I'll word process a list of titles or short descriptions.

An outline without the Roman numerals, capital letters, or indentations.
A grocery list without the food.
Yeah, I can hear you all now, "But Bob, a list is no good if you Can't Find It!"
So I guess I'll have to wing it...

Where are they now?

Last November I had a job assignment through a local temp agency, at a big insurance company with their North American headquarters in the metro. My task was to enter data into a secure database for the Salvage department; mostly account numbers and vehicle identification numbers. The paper file folders included photographs...some of the cars / trucks / etc. looked barely wrinkled, but were a total loss anyway. Others were barely recognizable as cars. Most were somewhere in between.

As I went along I noticed something interesting. Most of the vehicles were made in the 1990's or 2000's. Part of the reason was there were claims for entire car dealers with huge losses due to floods, hurricanes, etc...that, and attrition. There's just more of the "recently" made cars still on the roads...more that could be involved in accidents at any given time. There were quite a few cars from the mid and late 1980's.

Some days into the project and hundreds of listings later, I noticed I hadn't seen anything older than 1978, so I started keeping a mental list. Eventually I noticed some older cars, a handful from 1974 - 1976, and a very few from the early to mid 1960's, say, 1963 - 1965. Just two or three days before the end of the month long assignment I finally found one 1957 Chevy. Got me to thinking back...it doesn't seem all that many years ago that you'd still see lots of cars from the sixties and seventies on the road, and cars from the late fifties weren't all that rare. Not like they are now.

I did see one beauty of a classic, maybe six or eight weeks ago. It was either a 1955 or 1956 Chevy Bel Aire...in motion and just far enough away that I'm not sure which year. (And not that I'm a car expert - but I can recognize a few.) This car looked to have been restored, with a really nice dark blue and white paint job. I'd like to see it again.

So, my question for the evening...what old cars have you seen lately?

Logos! Get your logos!

Cousin Mike has been adding some eye catching logos to his blog (scroll down a bit an start looking in the column on the right). Mostly these are professional sports teams, and it's a neat assortment. I'd like to do something similar here, but right now I seem to be drawn more to scans of nostalgic stuff that has gone away...old pop bottle caps, old gas station signs, a stack of 45 rpm records...stuff like that.

So I need to figure out how I want to go about that. One thing I've thought of, a scan of the week "feature" might be fun. Something that would be in the same location on this page, just the image would change from time to time. I wonder if besides the Blog Archive I could set up a second "Scan Archive" for the older images. I'll have to read up on that.

In the meantime, I've started collecting images. A few days ago I got to thinking of old electron tubes. I have some from my dad's collection still in boxes, but I wanted to go online to see what else I could find. One thing I clicked on was a wall chart of tubes. This was in a photo stream called Diagram Diaries, on a site of charts and graphs...lots of creative ways to show data. I started clicking on the photos to see what else was there. I stopped when I saw something really different...which leads to the following...

Fun stuff...you've got to see this.

Check this out...click here.

I've got to admire artists who can work at that scale and keep that perspective all in their head.

September 18th

Happy birthday, Sis! I'll see you soon.

September 19th

Shiver me timbers, it's that time again!

Ahoy, mateys! Everybody be practicin' yer "Arrghs" and "Landlubbers" fer tomorrow!