Flaming

1941 Willis Coupe Hot Rod

If I was gonna build a car, I'd wanna build summin like this. I dunno, maybe on account of one my first plastic model cars was a similar model. My model didn't come out so good. My gang and I held a competition and we'd grade each others cars. We'd assign a grade of zero to ten to several categories and then add them up. Now some car models included a model engine, but some did not - the hood was fixed in place and the only indication of the engine was whatever was modeled into the chassis, if anything. Cars with fixed hoods, meaning no model engine, were automatically awarded five points. How bad was my car? I got three points for my model engine. I was not a dedicated model maker.

I looked for information about this car but all I found was that the photo was taken at a car show in May 19, 2018 Santa Barbara, CA, USA. Ask Google and it comes back with a whole slew of similar coupes with flame paint. Shoot, I might be able to just buy one.

I am counting today as a success. I have put up a post on each of my three favorite topics: girls, guns and cars.

Women at War

Senior sergeant Valentina Ivanovna emaeva (1924 -1943) bandages a wounded soldier, Voronezh Front, July 1943. Photographer: Alexander Gribovsky [colorized]

Voronezh Russia

Wikipedia has a page about the Battle of Voronezh (1942). 

Text at lower left reads:

LEFT A Family outing an Sunday afternoon is the same as always in Rhodesia - except for the automatic rifle at the ready "just in case."

RIGHT If the terrorists come the girls will be ready for them. They practice regularly because they know that the first shot could be the one that counts.

Wikipedia  has a page about the Rhodesian Bush War, Rhodesia is now called Zimbabwe.

Via Bustednuckles

Train hits truck with wind mill blade

Train hits truck with wind mill blade
Dave Hughes Farm

Seems like videos like this pop up on a regular basis and I got to wondering just how often this happens, so I asked Mr. Google and he says nine per week! That's near 500 per year! You've got figure that every time there is one of these collisions it's gotta cost a million dollars, and that's if nobody gets hurt. Besides the immediate damage, there are the delays, the disrupted schedules, the investigation, the penalties, and there is a good chance there will be litigation, even if it's just the insurance companies arguing about who will pay.

On the other hand there are three million trucks in the USA. Figure they're driving 50,000 miles a year and each mile costs at least a dollar, that's $150 billion dollars. Compare to that $500 million is just noise, especially when the true cost of trucking is closer to a trillion dollars.

Still, you'd think that even a measly $500 million bucks would bestir someone in trucking or insurance to try and put a stop to these collisions, or least reduce the frequency. Actually, industry ought to get their act together cause if they don't, the federal government is liable to step in, and then nobody will be happy.

All of which reminded me of this tune:

Men Without Hats - The Safety Dance
Men Without Hats

Why do I persist in thinking this is a David Bowie tune? Does it sound like him, maybe? 

There's also a cool mashup of this tune with a bunch of different dancing people. The voice is not the same though.

Iceberg #2

INCREDIBLE COLLAPSE TRIGGERED BY GLACIER CALVING | South America, Chile
Licet Studios

Update:

Curious how the bottom of the berg flips up. I has expecting it to topple forward, but then I wasn't expecting it to be a one thousand feet tall either. Nine tenths of an iceberg is underwater, so if the glacier cliff face is one hundred feet tall, then the ice must go down for another 900 feet below the water line.

Paraphrased from the YouTube blurb:

A large chunk of the Grey Glacier's ice-sheet breaks off and flips over in Southern Patagonia, Chile. The ice-sheet of the Grey Glacier is part of the 'Southern Patagonian Ice Field', the world's 2nd largest contiguous extrapolar ice field and the largest freshwater reservoir in South America.

The glacier wall collapses during the summer when large icebergs – often up to 100 feet in height – are breaking off the glacier and collapsing into the water of 'Lago Grey'. The waves created by such glacier calving events often splash dozens of yards through the air. The glacier itself is about 3.7 miles wide and has an average height over 100 feet above the surface of the water.

Grey Glacier in Patagonia

Grey Glacier Extent

Iceberg

Map showing the trajectory of iceberg A23a, the largest iceberg in world, from 1986 to its breaking up at the end of August 2025 north of South Georgia island.
Click to embiggenate

Back in December 2024, which is 38 years after it broke off of Antarctica, it covered 1,400 square miles. Now it's only half that size and they aren't expecting it to last much longer.

Has anyone been there? Google knows:

When the iceberg calved from Antarctica's Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1986, it broke off with a Soviet research station, Druzhnaya 1, still on it. 

PHYS ORG has the story.

Via daily timewaster

Fancy

Fancy Truck

Stopped by the body shop yesterday afternoon and this eye-popping beast was there. Photograph doesn't really do it justice.

Grodziec Castle

Grodziec Castle, Poland

Wikipedia has a page about this place.