Joey Long

ZZ Top - I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide
XxPowerMetal50Xx

This song paints quite the scene. Songfacts gives us some background:

This song was inspired by Texas blues musician named Joey Long, who was good friends with the band. As Billy Gibbons tells it, Long didn't have a driver's license, but he always had a new Cadillac that his beautiful wife Barbarella used to drive him to gigs.

Here's one of Joey's tunes:

Joey Long 4 AM - Texas Blues
BluesTex

Texas State Historical Association has a page about Joey. Here's the first two paragraphs:

LONGORIA, JOSEPH EARL [JOEY LONG] (1932–1995).Joey Long, blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter, was born Joseph Earl Longoria in Zwolle, Louisiana, on December 17, 1932, the son of Earlene Leone and Fred Longoria. His parents were of Italian-French and Mexican-French extraction. When Joey was very young the family moved to Merryville, Louisiana, and continued sharecropping during some of the bleakest years of the Great Depression. Along with his parents, six brothers, and one sister, Joey picked cotton, worked on the farm, and lived a hard rural life. When he was four years old he developed polio. The disease left his legs weak and slightly deformed. For a time, until his legs became stronger, Joey's mother had to carry him on her back into the cottonfields.

Although Earlene played mandolin, young Joey's interest in music came from his friendship with Charlie Wiser, an old Black sharecropper who lived down the road from the Longorias. Wiser taught Joey to play guitar, and, after working all one summer saving his money, Joey bought himself a guitar. He also learned to play the harmonica and sometimes sneaked out of the house at night to go out to the pasture and practice his music in the moonlight.

I could have sworn there was a music video of the ZZ Top song that had the car and the girls, but I didn't find it. Might be I just imagined it. Well shoot, just have to put up a picture of Cadzilla.

Cadzilla

Wikipedia even has a page about it.

Michoud Assembly Facility

NASA - Liquid Oxygen Tank - LOX/GWT Tool. Time Lapse Video.
NASA is charging ahead with the construction of their SLS (Space Launch System) rocket booster. It's a sizable construction project and in order to build the rocket they needed to build some tools. The video shows the erection of two specialized welding tools in the Enhanced Robotic Weld Tool. The two hemispherical scaffolding-like structures are the tools. The one on the left is the Gore Weld Tool and the one on the right is the Circumferential Dome Weld Tool.

They are using Friction Stir Welding to join the parts of the tanks. Stir welding is kind of weird in that it does not involve burning flammable gases or electrical arcs. It works with brute force, which kind of explains why they need such substantial jigs, which is essentially what these 'tools' are.

This is all being done in the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans, Louisiana.

MAF is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres under one roof, and it employs approximately 3,700 people. From 1961 to the end of the Apollo program in 1972 the site was utilized by Chrysler Corp to build the first stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB, later joined by Boeing Corp to build the first stage of the Saturn Vs. From 1973 to 2010 it was used for the construction of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta Corp., Denver Colo.  

The facility was originally constructed in 1940 at the village of Michoud, Louisiana to make plywood C-76 cargo planes and landing craft. During the Korean War it made engines for Sherman and Patton tanks, and boasted a 5,500 foot paved runway. - Wikipedia

In the Electric Mist (with the Confederate Dead)

It's a murder mystery, with a side story about making a movie about the civil war. IMDB sums it up pretty well:

"A detective in post Katrina New Orleans area has a series of surreal encounters with a troop of friendly Confederate soldiers while investigating serial killings of local prostitutes, a 1965 lynching and corrupt local businessmen."

General John Bell Hood at Gaines's Mill

Levon Helm as the Confederate General John Bell Hood is outstanding. He is a figment of Tommy Lee Jones imagination, of course, as the General has been dead for well over 100 years, but his antiquated way of talking and his pithy comments make a good counter-point to our modern day lawman. I had never heard of him before, which might be the reason the author included him in his book.

Peter Sarsgaard plays the obnoxious drunken actor, and plays him well, I guess, as he certainly is obnoxious. He does have one good line in the movie when our lawman's daughter asks him if he likes being an actor. He replies that "it's just a job". A good point I think.

Update September 2023 YouTube trailer here.