A good read, I highly recommend it. I’ve always said that 9/11 was the last airline hijacking that we’ll ever see in our lifetimes. No planeload of passengers will EVER just sit back and watch another one unfold. Never. As such TSA security is an absurd and invasive example of futility. Why bother?
Month: January 2009
Car Photo of the Day: Fangs of a Snake
I’ve had this image queued up for a while as I figured the guessing game from a few days back would still remain unresolved, but our resident Insane Canine pulled off a win around midnight last night. I also have to present my photos from my Jaguar outing yesterday, but I’m having software issues (more on that later!) preventing an update. Meanwhile, enjoy this gaze into the maw of a Shelby Mustang.
Car Photo of the Day: Double Jaguar Hero Shot
Since you guys are still ruminating over the last guessing game (that post is casting a long SHADOW) I present to you a hero shot of two Jaguars. Garth Norton’s S1 E-type is in the foreground – captured at a perfect moment with a wave from the driver (though the lens flare is a tad annoying), and his wife ahead driving the S2 E-type. A wonderful sunny late summer afternoon in Montana, and taken an hour and 100 miles prior to the Mystery Porsche Driver shown in the still unanswered CPotD guessing game from earlier in the week.
Today is a shockingly sunny January day so I’m going to unwrap the cat and wake it from its hibernation. Expect some photos later. 😉
Pondering Interesting Data
Have a look at this map.
I love maps, and when I was a kid I thought of becoming a cartographer. I can spend hours looking at atlases, Google Earth, etc. In fact I have found Google Earth to be a wonderful companion to reading books about history. You can visualize the terrain the author is describing.
Anyway, I saw this map linked from an article on Reason Magazine’s website: Washington’s Wealth Boom: The D.C. metro area is getting richer every year. That’s a problem for the rest of America. – Reason Magazine. As you can see they were concerned about the concentration of wealth around the nation’s capital.
You see this map paints the wealthiest counties in the USA red. The statistical anomaly I noted was the areas which we tend to think of as “vacation” spots: The San Juan Islands in Washington, The Lake Tahoe region, the areas around Sun Valley Idaho, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Park City Utah, the Colorado ski towns of telluride, Aspen, Vail, etc. Outside of LA, SF & Seattle they pretty much make up the “rich” areas of the Western US… exclusively.
So does this mean the wealthy are not just vacationing there anymore, but have taken up permanent residence? Or was the data collection flawed? Interesting to think about.
(BTW: Can anyone explain the one county in SE Alaska? I thought the rich folks live in Anchorage?)
Car Photo of the Day: Sporco Stallone
While you guys are still pondering the identity of the Porsche driver (hint: He cast a big shadow over racing in Canada and America) in yesterday’s CPotD, I present to you an image that should need no guessing. The famous Prancing Pony of Modena here has been splattered with a bit of arthropod shrapnel acquired at speed. If I recall correctly this was adorning the front of a 250 GT Lusso on a New England 1000 a few years back.
Car Photo of the Day: Prestigious Porker Pilot
This 911 is being driven by a famous person, made famous partially for his prowess in piloting Porsches. Do you know who he is?
I didn’t take the photo because of it… I just like this particular style of photo, as many of you know. I call it “the hero shot” as it makes any car look heroic. It is easier to look at than it is to take however, as it involves some derring-do out the side of a fast-moving car, risking life, limb, and camera gear in the process. In this case I tripped the shutter just a tad too late, but it’s still a good shot.
Shaun Redmond is ineligible as he was with me on this event.
Last thing I’ll post about the recent weather…
I love the Internet. The fact that data about anything you might even be slightly interested in is just out there just warms the cockles of my heart. My friend Dan sent me a link to this satellite image. It was taken on the morning of December 17th, 2008. While it is focussed on Oregon, and is cropped about 60 miles south of my house, it shows the nature of the snowfall that blanketed the Northwest before Christmas. This was the morning after the snow first fell. We were expecting a dusting of an inch or two, and instead received a dump of 12 to 14 inches. I drove the boys down to Seattle that day to fly to Colorado, and this high-pressure and clear skies vanished quickly. Thankfully I had already started my timelapse gear and captured the brilliant sunrise and clear morning before those clouds you see on the western edge of the photo barreled in and delivered another foot of snow that night. I struggled home the next evening, and then got stuck in my driveway. The following week of being snowbound was sort of fun, but as it stretched into three weeks our patience ran thin.
It appears the weather has settled back to rain and in fact has now cleared – perhaps a bit of sunshine and dry weather will bring the Jaguar out of it’s hibernation?