Well, that was fun. Musings on a Wreck-Free Sunday.

Yesterday was spent going to a museum, a used book store, and stuffing our faces until we exploded. I’m writing this from beyond the grave 😉

Going in chronological order and because I have lots of pictures, the first thing we did after lunch was make a return visit to the Lane Motor Museum . One of the things the Lane is noted for is one of the world’s largest collections of micro cars, cars with less than 500 cc displacement. These used to be quite popular over in Europe after the war for travelling distances too far to walk or ride a bicycle in the time available and not reliably served by train. They were also used for urban travel as many were small enough to take indoors when you arrived at your destination, eliminating the need to use expensive parking. Another thing they have at the Lane is an extensive collection of bicycles of varying vintages from pre WWII to the day before yesterday. And as befits a museum that has the goal of “everything runs”, they have an onsite bicycle shop.

You can see a bike on the stand, several bikes around the shop, and bins of old parts on the shelves.

I mentioned their collection of micro cars, which includes a running example of the Guinness World’s Smallest Production Car.
This is a Peel P50, which is basically a 50cc scooter with a fiberglass body. The staff at the Lane have actually driven this on the street in Nashville.

They also have one of these, described in this sign.

And this picture.

This display shows just how micro a micro car can get with this standard interior house door straddling the display.

The purpose of this American made micro was to take milady and her purchases home from the local grocery and all the way into the pantry. Only a few were built.

Microcars hung around in Japan much longer than in the US or even Europe, with this example from the late 1960s.

Yes, that is a Subaru, a 360 from 1968 if I remember correctly. Incidentally, I heard that they have a bunch of spare transmission parts for this model Scoobydoo at the Lane because they had to order 400 parts to be made to replace a single broken gear… 😀

Micro cars did not have to be stodgy transportation appliances, some had pretensions (or delusions) of sport.

I didn’t catch the name of this car when I took the picture, but browsing the collection online tells me it’s not listed (?!)

After the Lane Museum we visited one of the largest used-book stores in the US, McKay I fund a volume I really wanted to get because the title reached out an grabbed me Sex and Bacon , but I didn’t get it because I ran out of money.

After the book store we beat feet (drove, using the Interstates mostly) to Monell’s at the Manor a restaurant I have extensively reviewed in this blog previously. My current review of the food is this: I required assistance leaving the establishment because I ate too much… Oh, that meatloaf…

After that we retired for the night to console our distended stomachs.

So, how was your Saturday?

PSA, Opus

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Who sent this humidity, Wreck-Free Sunday

Wow! talk about making the statement “It’s not the heat it’s the humidity” a truism. The temperature for my ride home from morning services was “only” 93, but the heat index was 100 and it sure felt like 100 to me. I think I might have to take another shower before riding to evening services. And I can see gears grinding in people’s heads “Why does the witch attend 2 church services on Sunday?” Well it’s like this. Most people get a day off on Sunday, or at least the evening off. So to accommodate our congregants we do services on the days and at a time that most of them are off. It has to do with days off being determined by the dominant religion of the area, not because of our liturgical calendar. Our liturgical calendar has 13 introspective lunar observations and 8 solar celebrations a year, which we try to fit into our regular Sunday services as best we can with an occasional Friday or Saturday Full Moon ritual.

I almost got hit coming home from service this morning. Some idiot in a black pickup truck ran the stop sign at a 4-way stop in front of an elementary school going so fast he “got air” from the crown of the cross street. So speeding (he had to be doing at least 50 in a 30 zone) to go with the running the stop sign. If I hadn’t seen him in my peripheral vision coming too fast to stop I would have been road pizza. There was a minivan stopped on the street I was turning right to ride on and the back tires of the pickup didn’t touch down until after passing the back of the minivan, so that was about 16-20 feet in the air after getting launched from the center of the street I was riding on before I made that turn.

Applying the logic used for bicycle riders by (some) drivers, all pickup drivers now deserve to be killed horribly, and their mutilated remains strewn about the roadside in a grizzly display to deter other drivers from even using the roads because this one driver behaved in a dangerous manner. That is not true, of course. Only this particular driver needs to be killed in a horribly painful manner and have his mutilated remains strewn about the roadside to deter others from similar behavior 😉

Good news about the books I bought, they are on the road somewhere in NE after leaving the warehouse in Lincoln NE yesterday. The ETA is 6/19, right before Mrs. the Poet heads off to visit her relatives. I head out the late evening of the 27^th to join her, giving me a week undisturbed with my books 🙂 I don’t know if I can emphasize enough how much I love the printed word. Video is great, but for getting information across in the least amount of bandwidth it is hard to even match text. You know the saying a picture is worth a thousand words? The bandwidth requirements are worse than that. I grew up with text and TV, text for moving information and entertainment and TV for entertainment and sometimes information. So I love books, almost as much as I love my wife…

The Sprint Cup NASCAR race just ended with Greg Biffle winning after Jimmy Johnson blew a left front tire with 3 laps left as he was closing on the Biff. I like the Biff, JJ not so much. The Biff has more personality than JJ, I mean I can watch JJ giving his victory speech after the race and 2 minutes later it’s like “Did he say something?” while the Biff is a bit more memorable. It was a good race but a bit rough on the equipment with several racers being knocked out with mechanical problems or cut tires.

Y’all keep the rubber side down and the idiots outside your personal space and we’ll see you again tomorrow.

PSA, Opus