One of the banes of my post-wreck existence is knowing I used to know something that I can’t remember. It’s seldom something earth-shattering, usually it’s media related like a song title, or lyric, or some bit of dialog from a TV show or movie. What is really frustrating is when the snippet isn’t searchable because it’s not something in the name of the song or show or whatever.
Like a search I recently completed, I remembered a guitar riff from a James Gang song, something not searchable because I don’t have a guitar, and can’t play one even if I had it. But eventually I found the song, by accident when I was looking for something else, and the song I was looking for came up in “related”. What I was looking for was “Funk #49” by the James Gang. The search I was using that the song was related to was “Living in the USA” by the Steve Miller band. Now I have no clue how the one was related to the other, but I’m glad it was. The lyric that got me to “Living in the USA” was a snippet “… and the Howard Cam Special takes it at the line!” And that got me to “Funk #49” as a related song. One thing that was a big help was remembering that guitar riff was from a James Gang song.
Oh, yeah, the reason why I was searching Steve Miller songs was one came up in my playlist on YTM, and I remembered they did a song that right at the end was a radio sports announcer calling a race that was won by the Howard Cam Special so I looked it up by lyrics. And just FYI the Howard Cam special was an oval track car that won a lot of races in the late 1950s and early ’60s so there was lots of recordings of the car winning races to sample. And in the related songs list to “Living in the USA” was that James Gang song I had been trying to find. Serendipity!
And speaking of the Howard Cam Special, that was a car that started out as a track roadster and evolved into a full sprint car and was a spiritual ancestor of the Sprint-T. If you want to see it… I looked it up and the oval track car I remember isn’t there, but there is a series of dragsters of the same name in the pictures I found, and no mention of the track roadster or sprint car. Do you suppose this is another example of the Mandela Effect, or did I conflate two different cars with similar sponsors but otherwise completely different? I lean to the idea that I had so much information floating around my brain that the sprint car and the dragster got commingled into the same car.
Anywho, design work for the Sprint-T is ground to a halt because of not knowing what parts I’m going to use. Which is caused by not knowing if I’m going to buy the rear axle now or in a while. And also I don’t know which one I’m getting, candidates are the Ford 9″, the 8.8″, and two different models of quick change, one with a 10″ ring gear, and another with an 8″ ring gear but a different design that handles much more power for the same diameter ring gear so they made the ring gear smaller to reduce weight and rotating inertia. Naturally the lighter version costs a metric butt load more because lighter. Lighter always costs more unless it’s lighter because it’s weaker. It’s even a meme, “Light, Strong, or Cheap; choose two”. But there will be major differences in the rear suspension design and how it connects to the frame depending on which one I choose.
And at this point I don’t have anything more new to write about so it’s a good place to stop.
Witch on a Bicycle 