Memory Lane Museum

Today I went to a racing museum off of exit 36 of I-77 in Moorseville. It's called Memory Lane. I first heard of it while watching a show on Speed Channel called Back in the Day. The show is just a rehashing of those old racing documentaries with Dale Earnhardt Jr. making a few comments before and after commercial breaks. During the ending credits the museum gets a credit so I thought I'd go check it out. The museum in amazing if you like NASCAR. There are several old classic stock cars on one side of the room. The other side is filled with old American cars. I've never seen so many Model-T's. One was from 1919 and the sign next to it claimed it was all original. It was beautiful. I've included a few shots I took today at the museum.

This be the front of the museum.


This is a car Bobby Allison drove in the early 1980's.


This car was driven by Cale Yarborough and was owned by Junior Johnson in 1978.


This is a promotional cardboard display featuring, left right, David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Harvey Gant.


This car was driven by Dale Earnhardt in 1980.


Tim Flock's car from the 1950's.


Driven by Fred Lorenzen in the sixties


Richard Petty's Talladega from 1969.


Rusty Wallace's first car.

Sunabe Seawall

I found a webcam of the seawall in Okinawa where I used to sit and drink beer with my buddies. I'm not one to long for the past but I'd love to spend one more evening there with my buddy Mike as we polished off a twelve pack of Budweiser and tried to meet girls.

Life'll kill ya (at least for now)

"Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University, goes much further. He believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born and told the meeting that periodic repairs to the body using stem cells, gene therapy and other techniques could eventually stop the aging process entirely."

I knew it, I knew it. I'll bet I die the day before they cure death. I'll be in Wikipedia, listed as the last person to die by natural causes.

Bush Bashing Bonus

"Bush and his circle, as we now know, were not interested in breaking al Qaeda or fighting terrorism; they were interested in "establishing a military footprint" in Iraq, as part of a wide-ranging plan to "project dominance" over the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, while fomenting "creative destruction" throughout the region, in the belief that when the resultant rivers of blood had at last subsided, there would be a series of obedient client regimes installed in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere – including, in the dreams of some of the crankiest cronies, new, even more obedient American satraps in Egypt and Saudi Arabia."

More America hating

God, I hate this guy:

"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)

From an article by Fair.

Let us Demonize

I stole this link from the Illustrated Daily Scribble which you can visit via a link to the right.

Looking for a Villain
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; 12:42 PM

President Bush always does better against an enemy. His strongest public support has come when demonizing Osama bin Laden (not hard), Saddam Hussein (a bit harder) -- and then John Kerry (his finest achievement).

But as the morass in Iraq seems to worsen day by day, identifying the enemy there has become increasingly difficult. Is it Sunnis? Shiites? Foreign terrorists? The insurgency? Saddamists? Independent militias? Is it us?

Yesterday brought two strong signs that even as Bush is trying -- and failing -- to placate the public about Iraq, he's increasingly keen to focus attention on a new villain: Iran.

...As Jim Axelrod reported on the CBS Evening News: "For a speech designed to build support for the war in Iraq, the biggest headline was accusing Iran of being behind some of the worst violence."

Caroline Daniel writes in the Financial Times: "In a sign of hardening US rhetoric against Iran and an effort to shift some blame for the turbulence in Iraq, President George W. Bush yesterday accused Tehran of supplying components for some of the most powerful improvised explosive devices used in Iraq."

Oh yeah

After the debacle of The Thin Place let me say that Julian Barnes' Arthur & George has re-ignited my joy in reading. For a while there with The Thin Place I was considering never reading again and moving a television into my bedroom. The genius of Mr. Barnes has quelled such thoughts.

Post o' the day

"...the highlight of my march 14 was when my two-year old brained my five-year old with a long, yellow club."

Okinawa Memory

It's been a while since I've written about Okinawa. Urban Okinawa, for the most part, wasn't especially attractive. A lot of bulky concrete buildings that were painted white. Sometimes it seemed like an island of rectangular apartment buildings. I guess one of the reasons Okinawan architecture coule be so boring and modern at times is because much of it was levelel during World War II. I remember when the Burger King was being built at Camp Kinser they had to hault construction so the bomb squad could detonate a large bomb found on the building site. Like farming in Vietnam, construction on Okinawa could be risky.

When I could I would get off base and drive around the place. There were parts of Naha, the capital city a short drive from Camp Kinser, that were still quite beautiful and had some age to them. On this occasion I am out and about in my first few months on Okinawa. I don't remember how these couple of buddies and I ended up deep in Naha but it must have been early in my stay there because Twinkie was with us. Twinkie became a shut in after a couple of months into his year there. Some guys just couldn't handle being so far from home. I couldn't have been happier, to be honest.

Twinkie was called Twinkie because he looked like a Twinkie. He was short and a little round. He was one of those little guys that everybody likes. He had a loud raw voice and was comfortable in his littleness. He didn't have short-man syndrome and was fun to be around. It always saddened me that he shut himself off from everything Okinawa had to offer but so it goes. I tried a couple of times to get him to leave his room but he was happy to be locked up with his Ozzy Osborne tapes.

Three of us were walking through this older area of southern Naha. Perched at a corner at the bottom of a small hill was this small teahouse. We see an old old lady coming down the hill toward the shop which across the street from us. An equally tiny and old woman comes out of the teahouse. They recognize each other and exchange bows. Their bows were not in unison and the lady who received the first bow returned it. The first bower returned the second bow before the second bower finished. Then the second bower gave another one back. They were stuck in a bow loop. This went on for about thirty seconds. They did a semicircle around each other while bowing. They both then backed up while still bowing until there was enough distance between the two to allow them to politely turn and go on their way.

Twinkie summed our amazement up in the only way a young Marine could when he said, "That was pretty fucking cool."

Howdy

OK, so the wire cam during the NASCAR race wasn't all that cool but at least they tried.

Played Scrabble yesterday with the One Big Loud Guy, Granville and M. The gang hadn't played Scrabble in a long time and the first game we played was sans Granville and I beat the One Big Loud Guy for the very first time at Scrabble. He actually came in third which is unheard of in local Scrabble lore. He was so desperate that he even attempted to pretend not to know you could't play prefixes while counting on the inexperience of his competition. How's that for needing to win just a little too much?

Granville came by and we played a second game which the One Big Loud Guy one handily because during the game he had the Q, Z, X and J. Hard to beat someone when the pull those letters out of the bag.

Cooooooooool

I just saw this link of Jayski: "Fox officials say the network is bringing its popular Cablecam for Sunday's coverage of the UAW-DaimlerChrylser 400 Nextel Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The high-definition camera, made popular by NFL on Fox, will be suspended above the track by a system of cables, puleys and computer-controlled winches. The camera moves within a 250,000-square-foot area covering the front stretch, the start/finish line and pit road at LVMS. This will be the first regular-season NASCAR event in which the Cablecam is used."

That is going to be so cool.

I'm a quitter

For the last few days I've been plowing through The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis. Last night I gave up. Although the writing is top notch, I just couldn't develop any empathy for the characters. The prose distanced me from the novel while I'm sure it was attempting to pull me in. Maybe it was over my head. I may have been an Engrish major but I was more into writing and reading poems than analyzing novels. It was the chapter that opened with the thought processes of a bull moose that broke my back. Instead of continuing I went ahead and started Arthur and George by Julian Barnes and, though I only read it for about half an hour before I drifted off, I already am deeper into the two main characters than any of the dozen or so characters in The Thin Place.