What’s better than a barn find? How about, preserved under a Ponderosa Pine tree! The second owner of this early ‘54 Vette drove this car to a friend’s house to have the seats reupholstered and took them out, set an old wooden Pepsi pop bottle case in place of the driver’s seat and drove it home and parked it under a Ponderosa Pine tree. That was 1963 in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado at an elevation of 9,000 feet.
Well, 43 years later, I had the good fortune of rescuing this gem. All of the tires were flat and sitting on the ground, one would think there wasn’t much of a frame left. Well, not only is the frame rust free, but the original painted frame stamp from the factory is still on the frame and very much legible. The umbrella of green pine needles above and 6-inches deep on the ground miraculously saved this car, along with the rare hardtop.
OK, so there’s the still the occasional rare car find out there. Surely all the major mountains have been climbed, right?
There still exists today large unclimbed peaks in the Himalaya. But they are generally very remote, closed to climbing, or perhaps uninteresting sub-peaks of larger mountains. To find one without these characteristics is not only rare, but also alludes to a very special peak. To find one that is the visual centerpiece of a major Himalayan valley, the Rolwaling; a peak that hundreds of trekkers and climbers pass by every year; a peak so prominent, you can view from its summit six 8,000-meter peaks plus every major peak in the Rolwaling and Khumbu valleys; a peak that rises over 3,000 meters above the valley’s largest Sherpa settlement – this is extraordinary. This is Kang Nachugo.
Puryear and Gottlieb’s story of the climb is worth a read. So many climbing stories these days feature military-styled assualts with troubled millionaires that’s it’s nice to read about a couple of life-long climbers who figure things out, have fun along the way, and succeed at it.
In the front, holding the plate of food: John Wayne. Standing in the back: Lee Harvey Oswald
I don’t quite want to be the person to write Weird Orange County, but there’s enough old-growth conspiracy in O.C. to fuel at least a couple of chapters. A photograph of OC’s Most Famous Resident and an assassination enigma is just the starting point… Oswald first reported for Marine Corps duty at El Toro where he became friends with Kerry Thornley. Thornley would go on to write a book about Oswald called The Idle Warriors - the only book written about Oswald before the JFK assassination. Thornley was also the main guy behind the Principia Discordia and the Discordian Society, later fanning the flames of paranoids worldwide who took a joke concocted in a Whitter bowling alley to inevitable and extreme conclusions.
The only thing missing from a county of flying saucers, assassination connections, corrupt sheriffs, and banking scandals is a crypto-monster, but perhaps O.C. could adopt Elsie the Lake Elsinore Sea Serpent from next door Riverside.
Midway through the FMDiSC meeting this morning, I got an email message saying that there was going to be a low altitude multi-plane flyby in conjuction with the opening ceremonies for Air Force Week Los Angeles. A U-2 spy plane was scheduled to participate, so I ducked out to Barnsdall Art Park to grab some pictures.
B-1
B-52
And… the U-2. I’ve never seen one of these flying before.
"We are bombarded with information about our alert status and we're told to report suspicious-looking characters," Penn said. "That primes people to be more paranoid. Traumatic events can make people more vulnerable to having paranoid thoughts. Since the attacks, Penn said Americans have been conditioned to be more vigilant of anything out of the ordinary. While heightened awareness may be good thing, Penn said it can also lead to false accusations and an atmosphere where strangers are negatively viewed."
Master list of errors, noise and horrid mastering on the double-disc New Order reissue CDs. Number of confirmed errors: 299 and counting…
Bottom line: these remasters were sourced from vinyl or previous dubiously mastered CDs and were not QA'ed before being shoved out to the marketplace. DO NOT BUY.
It’s difficult not to have a tremendously bitter aftertaste here in California, but I suspect a flurry of lawsuits might just ground everything to a halt. If anything, the world now knows who Howard Ahmanson is and where to shine the flashlight the next time he scuttles in. Orange County again has a lot to answer for.
