Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies

Soulful Strings - Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies
Bakfot
I heard this on KMHD on the way into town yesterday morning. Normally I like my Christmas music without any embellishments, but this one tickled my ear.

Airplane of the Day - De Havilland Canada Dash 8

De Havilland Canada Dash 8 Surveillance Aircraft

The sign on the side of this airplane bothers me. Is it illogical to dislike it? Isn't better that the authorities tell you when they are watching you? Or maybe I have become so suspicious of the government that when they do something like this, I am even more suspicious. What do you mean by telling me you are watching me? Are you trying to goad me into doing something I shouldn't? It's weird, man.

This plane is not actually watching me, it used for keeping an eye on the Canadian coastal waters, looking for oil spills and whales and who knows what. Letting everyone know what you are doing is probably a good thing.

Wikipedia has a page about this aircraft.

Truck Dreams

This one happened last week. There was a car dealer across the street. There was a white sign board across the front of the building but there are no signs on it, just some square lights between one and two foot square, spaced 10 to 20 feet apart. If you touch one it turns off, touch it again and it turns on. Not quite sure how this was done as they were a good 10 or 15 feet in the air.

Truck with Utility Bed

I'm looking for a new car so I cross the street and go inside the showroom. The first vehicle I see is a pickup truck with one of those utility toolbox bodies on the back. There is a table-like extension hanging off of the back and on it is the largest vise I have every seen. The jaws are like three feet wide and it stands three or four feet tall. It was several times the size of my last dream vise.

Aluminum Underbed Toolbox

This morning I had another truck shopping dream. This time I am out looking at a 1972 Ford truck, maybe a little bigger than a pickup because it has a polished aluminum tool box hanging underneath the right side of the bed just behind the cab (exactly where you would expect to see one on a real truck). The exterior of the truck is in excellent shape except for one scuff mark on the toolbox. Somebody has gone to a lot of trouble to cherry it out. Then we look at the interior and the vinyl seats have big rips in them and the foam rubber stuffing is working it's way out. The seller wants $22,000 for it. No, that's not happening.

Someone else's much nicer 1989 Ford F-150

Back in the real world, I took my son's old Ford pickup into Madison Automotive in St Johns last week to fix some minor problems and also to take a look at the chassis and see if they can figure out why it's such a rattle trap. It should have been obvious, but the truck has a two inch body lift and (illogically) I was hoping for some kind of specialized, but easy, fix. The answer that came back was the entire suspension is worn out and all the bearings and bushings need to be replaced. It can be fixed, of course, but it would cost $2500. Not sure whether my son's affection for this beast could stand that kind of pain.

Road to Pill Hill

Meanwhile, I should probably get a different car. The Hyundai is wonderful, but since my back flaked out, getting in and out is a little difficult.  An SUV with a higher seat height might be the thing. Diligent daughter thinks we should get something with four wheel drive so she can borrow it to get to work when it snows. She works on Pill Hill and the road going up is probably one of the worst in Portland. Dump a little snow on the ground and it could very well become impassable. Since I have had good luck buying rebuilt wrecks, I am probably going to look around for one of those.

Blizzard

Sarah A. Hoyt writes. And writes and writes. She writes a bunch. I read some of her stuff. Some of it's pretty good, but most of it goes on too long for me. But today she has a fine story. It sounds like it might be at least partly true, but then again it might be entirely fiction. It's pretty great. You can find it here.

Gibberish

Cleaning out my files this morning and I came across this bit of wonderfulness. I got a chuckle out of it, maybe you will too.

That to me was just enough information that you know so I can research it so I can make a blog post out of it it's kind of amazing though I mean it's like it's a brand new 7-Eleven at open this year within the last to know six months or whatever that's crazy or maybe maybe 900 number exactly anyway very new God bless that guy for open and it's at 11 there or is this on Morrison right there so you go to the end of my street 9 for the Max's to take a left it's on the end of the street or end of the block Play Store on my block it's just you have to go around the corner just around the corner so I carry corner from Nordstrom's I think there's another Block in between but yeah minute and 50 seconds so like before you can finish counting the pocket letting your pocket it done very bizarre and you would think like I'll just taste like my Griffith doesn't paid Facebook maybe next year how many many Islamic or maybe maybe it's a nuclear reactor

I use my smart phone's speech-to-text converter to make notes sometimes and I think the radio might have been on while I was recording this and the smart phone recorded everything it heard.

Airplane of the Day - Polikarpov Po-2

Night Witches
Yarnhub

I don't know quite what to make of this video. It brought tears to my eyes. Was that because it was glorious or awful? In any case it's a little unusual. Bringing in heavy metal band Sabaton to sing the Night Witche's praises definitely put it over the top. The airplane is the Russian Polikarpov Po-2 Biplane which has appeared here before a couple of times.

Via My Daily Kona

Pic of the Day

Abandoned concrete boat on the beach in La Paz Mexico - IAman