Weird coincidences

I just got off the phone with my father. He is in the Houston, TX airport, about to board a plane for Buenos Aires, and subsequently Santiago. This is a trip with my mother scheduled probably about a year ago… well BEFORE we knew that Christopher was going to be in Chile. Of course Santiago is over 500 miles from where Chris is living. But, to add even more irony to the situation, Christopher’s host family is travelling to Santiago tomorrow, and staying through the 20th! Their daughter is leaving as an AFS exchange student to Japan for one year. (can you imagine flying from Santiago to Tokyo? What a marathon!)

We’ve been trying to coordinate a meeting, which is difficult between three parties and over 70 degrees of Latitude, even with email and cellular phones! My father finally confirmed, just prior to boarding, that he has spoken with Christopher, and his host-father Gerardo, and they have made the arrangements. I had my dad pick up a book to bring down to Chris, as it seems he has almost run out of reading material (which made up half of his luggage!)

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Oh, the photo above is Christopher, in an especially geeky teen-age moment, during the Seattle Jaguar Club’s Mt. Rainier drive a few years ago. It has no relation to any of the above, I just figured the post needed a picture of Chris. 😉

Name that … um… car.

Over on Autoblog today there is a photo gallery of GM hood ornaments. In my opinion, the hood ornaments from general motors don’t hold a candle to the wonderful ones from Packard, Dusenberg, Pierce-Arrow, etc. But the theme they were illustrating was “aviation”, which brought to mind this photo I took in 2004.

The car is in the collection of Dean & Wendy Edmonds, and I’ve only see just this one example of the marque. I love this hood ornament. It is a diminutive copy of the Schneider Trophy winning Supermarine seaplane, and yes the propeller works!

The radiator of this car had the name of the marque splashed across it in big letters, so I blotched it out in Photoshop (the first time I’ve done something like that for a “name that car” test I think!) If you want to have a go at guessing, feel free.

Sunday Worship

A recent editorial posting on The Truth About Cars used the term “cathedral” to describe the form of the Jaguar XK engine. So here I present for you the XK, it its namesake chassis. Note the Flying Buttresses of the exhaust. The row of fire-starting sparkplugs within the Nave. The rising Basilica Domes of the timing chains. The coil, perched upon the Choir of the intake manifold like a Gargoyle.

You are invited to Sunday Worship.

Mystery Car.

Yesterday I had a “name that car” post entitled “Hard, Easy, Easy”… which I ascribed the relative difficulty of identifying the machines. This one was the “hard”. Yeah sorry about the fuzzy photos, but hey, the only OTHER photo I have of it clearly has a badge on it that identifies the marque, so where’s the challenge in that? So here you go.

We know that it is British, and it is NOT an Aston-Martin or an MG.

What is it?