U-Boat

Finger Lakes U-Boat #2301. (Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the Spotmatic.)

The other day (Thursday, May 29, 2008) I began viewing my Pentrex old U-Boat DVD.
The U-Boat was General Electric’s first attempt to market a general diesel-electric freight locomotive after splitting with Alco. At that time (1960), most diesel-electric railroad locomotives were from General-Motors’ ElectroMotive Division (EMD). —Now GE dominates the railroad locomotive market, and EMD is playing catch-up.
The U25b was introduced in 1960, 25 being the horsepower (2,500), and “b” being a four-wheeled truck.
Railfans nicknamed them U-Boats following GE’s “U” nomenclature. “U” stood for Utility.
General Electric had built equipment for early electric locomotives, complete export units, and small locomotives for the domestic market (e.g. the highly successful 44-tonner). But the U-Boat was the first GE attempt to counter the immensely successful EMD road-switcher series, the Geeps (“GP”) and SDs (six axle GPs).
American Locomotive Company (Alco) in Schenectady, N.Y. was also building diesel-electric railroad locomotives, but EMD was dominant. Alco eventually tanked.
The U-Boat required a new diesel-engine, the FDL-16 (16 cylinders in a V).
Many locomotive manufacturers were using marine diesels, the engines used in WWII submarines.
They weren’t very successful (reliable). A railroad locomotive frame isn’t as stable as a submarine.
EMD was one of the few builders to offer diesel-engines designed for railroad use. —I remember hearing the chant of a EMD 567-series V16 in a tugboat (what goes around, comes around).
As railroad diesel-engines the EMD diesels were successful until the SD45, which as a V20 had a crankshaft too long (and prone to breakage).
The EMDs were two-stroke and the FDL-16 was four-stroke.
EMD’s two-stroke was the principals set down by Charles Kettering. At the bottom of the cylinder(s) were open ports that the descending piston uncovered. These ports were charged by air from superchargers — the cylinders were in an air-box charged by the superchargers.
Intake air was thereby blown into the cylinders as the pistons descended to bottom-dead center.
At the same time four poppet-valves were opened in the cylinder-head; and exhaust was blown out by the incoming air-charge.
The GM bus-diesel used the same principal, although of course quite a bit smaller than a locomotive diesel (yet larger than a car-engine; but not much).
A four-stroke diesel is very much like a car engine; poppet-valves for both the intake and exhaust. The intake air charge gets blown in through an open intake-valve; then that air-charge gets immensely compressed and diesel-fuel gets injected as the piston reaches the top. It self-ignites in the hot air-charge, forcing the piston down.
A two-stroke diesel does the same thing: compressing the air-charge and injecting fuel at the top of the piston-stroke.
The announcer was making the common mistake of saying the diesels were “throttling up.” Diesels aren’t throttled. The intake-air charge is always the ultimate. The power output of a diesel-engine varies according to the amount of fuel injected. Maximum fuel delivery on a railroad diesel-locomotive is “Run-Eight.” There are eight fuel meterings on a diesel locomotive control-stand, and “Run-Eight” is the maximum. Even GE uses the same eight fuel-meterings as GM.
Bus engines were the same way: for which reason the gas-pedal was called the “accelerator.” Depressing the accelerator increased the fuel-metering. (Only gasoline-engines are “throttled.”)
Two-stroke diesels sound different than four-stroke diesels. Two-strokes roar, and four-strokes chug.
EMD also began using turbochargers to supercharge the intake air — which is the turbocharger whistle you hear.
All railroad diesels are slow-turning because of their immense size, but a two-stroke will cover this enough to roar, whereas a four-stroke will chug for every piston activation.
I guess two-strokes were sloppy; I think EMD had to field a new four-stroke diesel to meet emission requirements. (But maybe not — I don’t pay that much attention anymore.)
Most early U-Boats were retired long ago, although a few still survive; although none are any longer in use on the major railroads.
Most that remain are inactive on display, or in use like the Finger Lakes Railway B23-7 #2301 pictured.
#2301 is originally Conrail #1979, a B23-7; technically not a U-Boat (a Dash-7; which replaced the U-Boat series), but looking very much like a U-Boat.
It’s powered by a 12-cylinder FDL engine, the engine introduced in the U23b in 1968 (to compete with the less intimidating [unturbocharged] GP38 from EMD).
It’s one of seven GE units Finger Lakes has; one of which is a U-Boat (#2201), and all the rest are B23-7s. Finger Lakes also has three Geeps — although I hear one is on its last legs, and may be out-of-service.
All (but 2201) are in the old New York Central lightning-stripe scheme (see pik), which was probably applied to the original NYC U25bs — they had 70. #2201 is painted Cornell red like a Lehigh Valley unit.
The major locomotive manufacturers don’t even market four-axle power anymore.
The major railroads can accommodate six-axle power, but short-lines often have track that would be abused by six-axle power, like tight switches and tight curves.
Short-lines have to find old four-axle power, like the old U-Boats.
A company has gone into business marketing four-axle power, but it’s on remanufactured Geep frames.
So most of what’s on the Pentrex old U-Boat DVD is shortline U-Boats.
“Watch for the fireball out the stack as the U-Boats pass,” the announcer says.
Four filthy U-Boats rumble through a switch, and emit HUGE clouds of black smoke as notched up.
The rearmost one belches a fireball in the dense smoke.
U-Boats are turbocharged. The amount of fuel delivered is appropriate to turbocharging, so if the turbocharger doesn’t spool up fast enough, we get clouds of black smoke, or perhaps even a fireball as unburnt fuel travels out the exhaust-stack and ignites.
I have an ancient video-tape of Conrail U-Boats on the Rochester Bypass years ago, and on one the turbocharger fails, sending a giant blowtorch of yellow flame out the exhaust-stack.

RE: “‘Old guy’ with the SpotMatic.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). The “Spotmatic” is my old Pentax Spotmatic 35mm film camera I used about 40 years, since replaced by a Nikon D100 digital camera.

“Pentrex” is a marketer of railroad videos.

“EMD” is Electromotive Division of General Motors, GM’s manufacturer of railroad diesel-locomotives. Most railroads used EMD when they dieselized; although many now use General-Electric railroad diesel-locomotives.

The “44-tonner” was a very small switching locomotive, built to meet the union-rule for a railroad locomotive over 45 tons needing more than a one-person crew. A 44-tonner could get by with only one person — although it was too small to move many cars.

“Geep” is the nickname given to EMD GP road-switchers (four axles). “Covered-Wagon” is the nickname given to full cab-units: e.g. F-units by EMD, FAs by Alco.

“Charles Kettering” (Boss Kett) was essentially an engineering vice-president at General Motors, and had an incredible number of engineering patents (over 300), including the Kettering ignition for cars, the self-starter, and better automotive lighting. He was instrumental in development of the light-weight diesel-engine.

RE: “Throttled......” — A gasoline engine has a rotating throttle-plate between the fuel/air mixture source and the cylinders, to restrict the fuel/air mixture intake: a “throttle.” That “throttle” can be fully closed, so the engine idles, or wide-open (full-throttle) for maximum performance — or anywhere in between (part-throttle).

“Conrail” is a government amalgamation of east-coast railroads that went bankrupt pretty much at the same time as Penn-Central, a merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central. Conrail included other bankrupt east-coast railroads, like Erie-Lackawanna and Lehigh Valley; but eventually went private as it became more successful. Conrail has since been broken up, sold to CSX Transportation Industries (railroad) and Norfolk Southern railroad. CSX got mainly the old New York Central routes, and NS got the old PRR routes.

“The Rochester Bypass” is the old West Shore line south of the city — it bypasses Rochester; doesn’t go through. The “West Shore” was a line financed by the Pennsylvania Railroad built to compete directly with the New York Central Railroad in New York state in the late 1800s. It was merged with NYC at the behest of J.P. Morgan, who got all the warring parties together on his yacht in Long Island Sound. The NYC got the West Shore for no longer financing the proposed South Pennsylvania Railroad (which was graded but never built, including tunnels, which were incorporated into the Pennsylvania Turnpike). It was called the “West Shore” because it went up the west shore of the Hudson River. It’s been largely abandoned west of the Hudson, although the segment around Rochester became a bypass around Rochester.

“Will the owner of a gray Buick Rendezvous.......”

(Do I ever leave the Canandaigua YMCA without some piece of utter insanity to write up?)

I am quietly cranking the arm-bicycle in the exercise-gym.
“Will the owner of a gray Buick Rendezvous, license number BCB-9035, please move your car. It’s blocking other parked cars on Atwater St.”
Minutes pass.
“Will the owner of a gray Buick Rendezvous, license number BCB-9035, please come to the front desk.”
More minutes pass.
“Will the owner of a gray Buick Rendezvous, license number BCB-9035, please report to the front desk, or your car will be towed.”
WHOA! This is getting serious. As an old news-hound I am duty-bound to see what’s going on.
I leave the exercise-gym to change clothes in the locker-room.
“I can’t believe that guy is not on the premises,” says nice receptionist-lady to the guy whose car is blocked. “He must not want to own up to his transgression.”
I change clothes and trudge up to Atwater St.; it’s right next to the YMCA, which is planning to expand there soon.
Sure enough; there’s the Rendezvous, blocking a silver S-10 Blazer.
I go around back: the whole stinkin’ kabosh. “Bush-Cheney 2004,” “God is my copilot” (and I’m the pilot), “Rush is Right,” “Pray for our troops” (that they may slaughter the Infidel with gay abandon), the Christian fish, “Git-R-Dun,” and “In case of Rapture this car will be unpiloted.”
Too bad I park four blocks away, and my camera is in the car. I coulda taken a picture!

I work out at the Canandaigua YMCA.

RE: “As an old news-hound......” —For almost 10 years I worked for the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over two years ago. Best job I ever had.

“Rush” is Rush Limbaugh.

Zero-turn follies

Last Sunday (May 25, 2008) I mowed our south wing and the Back 40 with our dreaded zero-turn.
One of the advantages of a zero-turn is that you can cut sharply around a bush.
But it wasn’t working — at least not at first, which was the south wing.
Push the right lever, and stop the left lever, which is supposed to turn it sharply left, and it would go a foot or two, and then do nothing.
I also mow a shallow roadside drainage swale, and it wouldn’t go straight; doing so requires pushing the right lever to offset the left side of the swale.
I stopped after the south wing before attacking the Back 40, and then continued — and on the Back 40 it mowed like it always has, cutting sharply left around the bushes.
So yesterday (Tuesday, May 27, 2008) I went to the guy who sold me the zero-turn three years ago to pick his brain.
“I have a hunch them twin hydro-static units in that mower have fluid-levels to maintain, and the right one may be low.”
“If one was low, you’d see a leak,” he said.
“What if it was a slow leak; it is three years old,” I said.
“Nope,” he said. “If it leaks it would be a fast leak. You’d see a puddle. And if the hydro-static unit was low, it wouldn’t work at all. You’d hear a racket.”
“Okay, lemme tell ya what happened,” I said. “Push the right handle to turn left, and it would go about a foot, and then nothing.”
“Then after sitting off a few minutes, I mowed the Back 40 and nothing was wrong.”
“Sounds like a fluke to me.”
Whoa! Say “fluke” to The Keed and I wonder about that — everything (supposedly) has a rational reason; except after driving ‘pyooters I’ve come to expect “flukes.”
“What if the right dump-valve had been tripped?”
“Wait a minute! Define ‘dump-valve.’”
There are two rods at the back of your mower, that trip the internal dump-valves in the hydro-static units so ya can move the mower. If one had been tripped, that hydro-static unit won’t do anything.”
“But if a dump-valve had been tripped, I wouldn’t have been going a foot.”
“Yes you would. That unit still works a little even dumped.”
“I don’t want to force you to pick that thing up if I can fix it myself.”
“If I were you, I’d try it again and then call me if it gives ya problems. Mighta been a fluke.”

RE: “South wing and the Back 40.....” —We have about 4&1/2 acres, comprised of four mowing areas: the front yard (small), the north and south wings (large side-yards), and the “Back 40,” a huge backyard field.

Our “zero-turn” is our 48-inch Husqvarna riding-mower; “zero-turn” because it’s a special design with separate drives to each drive-wheel, so it can be spun on a dime. “Zero-turns” are becoming the norm, because they cut mowing time in half compared to a lawn-tractor, which has to be set up for each mowing-pass. “Dreaded zero-turn” because my macho, loudmouthed brother-from-Boston, the ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, claims I am incapable of driving a zero-turn without mistakenly mowing trees, flowers, and taking it into the ditch — which is mere noise.

Back in business

Followers of this blog, assuming there are any, will recall that my fantabulous HD radio dove a few days ago, although I’m more impressed with the radio itself, than the fact that it’s HD.
The HD radio would come on for a few seconds, tuned to the regular analog FM station, and then when it switched to HD it would go dead silent.
Morning-man at Dubya-Hex-Hex-Hi, the classical music station from Rochester we listen to, is ‘pyooter-savvy, so I e-mailed him that their HD service was dead, had been the entire previous day, and still was the following Monday morning.
So Morning-man responded that it was my antenna, that it wasn’t them. —He also allowed that he’d had similar problems with his HD antenna.
Well, I’ve had HD service dive before, but it came back eventually.
Be that as it may, I decided to experiment with my antenna, which was only a puny little three-foot wire dangling behind our bookshelf.
I stretched the wire up and held it vertical: HD radio!
I taped up the wire, and let go: nothing!
“Aha!” I thought. I used to have this happen long ago with crystal-sets. The radios (including the HD) were using me as an antenna.
Next move: I went down cellar and dragged out the large T-wire antenna that came with the HD radio; four-to-five feet horizontal across the top of the T, and about six-to-seven foot vertical drop.
I taped it up, connected it to the radio, let go, and HD radio.
Morning-man was right. I probably wouldna tried it except he said he had similar problems.

“Dubya-Hex-Hex-Hi” is WXXI-FM, 91.5, the classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to.

Blogging

The other day (Saturday, May 24, 2008) I hit Hairman.
“So what are you doing with yourself now that you’re retired?”
“Blogging,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I write a story and then fly it on the Internet at a blog-site.”
“Does anyone read it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a few. There are over 700 hits on my profile.”
“Then why bother? Sounds like you’re just throwing stuff into cyberspace.”
“The other night, the national TV news was suggesting you had to do things with your brain to avoid Alzheimer’s. They were suggesting crossword puzzles. This is what I do. I’ve always liked writing.”
“Well, I don’t know what blogging is.”

“Hairman” is my hair-dresser. I’ve gone to him at least 16-17 years.

prom catastrophe

Last night’s (Monday, May 26, 2008; Memorial Day) local TV news reported a major prom catastrophe; not the usual drinking-and-driving deaths, but the falling of a giant light-fixture onto a high-school prom dance-floor.
The fixture was a giant truss-beam with many spotlights attached.
The Police thought teenagers were probably hanging off the truss-beam, but witnesses disagree.
Teenagers knocked out cold, and injured debutantes in mauve strapless gowns carted to the hospital in giant white Chevy ambulances.
A dance-floor lit by flashing red gumball lights instead of purple disco lights — yellow crime-scene tape around the fallen light fixture.
“Well, that wouldn’t have happened to us!” my wife and I both exclaimed. Neither of us attended our proms.
I should explain.
My father was a Christian zealot, and like most zealots at that time (this was the early ‘60s), thought dancing was of-the-devil.
So the thought of attending my prom never even crossed my mind.
Linda was different.
She was a class wallflower, so no one invited her to her prom.
My sister reversed the anti-dancing position of my father by doing a grandstand. She had been invited to the prom by a really nice guy by the name of Sergei Sirochnikoff (“Sir-GAY Sir-OTCH-nih-cough”), her first boyfriend.
My father wasn’t up to countering her noisy tirade, especially when my mother weighed in on my sister’s side.
When we first moved to Delaware a scion of our class visited and invited me to take part in class activities — like an upcoming sock-hop.
I had to defer, of course. I knew my father would go completely ballistic.
Later I helped DJ a sock-hop, and my father appeared at 11 p.m. pounding on the school door.
Other attendees were horrified.
“Man, your father is weird,” they said.
He dragged me out by my ear.

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years.

“My sister” is my sister Betty (Elizabeth). She’s second after me, 62 (I’m the oldest at 64). She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Our family “moved to Delaware” in 1957, when I was age 13. We moved there from a south-Jersey suburb.

Fear and trembling

So here I am the other night (Thursday, May 22, 2008) returning from the regular monthly meeting of Local 282 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, the bus-union at my old employer, Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y.
The meeting was also in Rochester; so I’m in the Bathtub southbound on Interstate-590. It’s after 10 p.m.
North-south Interstate-590 interchanges with east-west Monroe Ave.; a route I have to take east a short distance to get to parallel north-south State Route 65, the road we live on.
(Actually, I don’t use all Route 65. I use another road that skirts a dogleg.)
So I get off 590 at the southbound exit to Monroe Ave. east, a cloverleaf.
There also is a northbound exit off of I-590 onto Monroe, but it’s not a cloverleaf.
It’s direct to Monroe Ave., controlled by a traffic-light.
I drive through this intersection on Monroe to get to Route 65, and that exit is signed as “no right on red.”
Suddenly, about 200 yards in front of me — i.e. well out of “phenomenal avoidance” range — a tiny Corolla blasts through the “no right on red” sign (and the red-light) smack into the path of an oncoming full-size Chevy pickup.
The pickup slams on its brakes and blows its horn. Stuff inside the bed slides into the cab — old tires, a wheelbarrow, etc.
Thankfully this is all 200 yards ahead of me. It ain’t me; just the pickup.
But Monroe widens to four lanes as it quickly approaches Route 65, the right-most lane being a dedicated right-turn lane with a separate arrow-signal (and the left-most lane being a dedicated left-turn lane with its’s own signal-arrow).
I have the green right-turn arrow, but the Monroe through-traffic is stopped by the light, so I pass the Corolla on the right.
FEAR AND TREMBLING!
Too dark to see inside, but I recognize a beehive, or whatever the current Republican equivalent is.
Probably one of them bloated 300-pound sexy mommas I often see at Weggers in short-shorts and tank-tops.
But maybe not — too dark to see.
Also too dark to see if it had a Dubya-sticker, but I did recognize a “Get-R-Dun” sticker next to a “Pray for our troops” ribbon.

For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.

“The Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub.

A “phenomenal avoidance” is a near crash with a car or motorcycle (or bicycle or shopping-cart). Close, but no contact.

“Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at.

“Dubya-sticker” is a Bush-Cheney 2004 bumper-sticker. All insane traffic-moves seem to involve Bush-supporters. They seem to think they have the right.

......into the filmy past

And so concludes another regular monthly meeting of Local 282 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, my bus-union at my old employer, Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y.
Attendance thereto had to wedged in among —1) getting the oil changed on our CR-V that morning, and —2) putting our beloved dog to sleep that afternoon.
My attendance at these meetings is sort of a joke, since as a retiree I am no longer an active employee at Transit, and can’t vote on union business.
But during my final years at Transit, the early ‘90s before my stroke October 26, 1993, which ended my bus-driving, I became deeply involved in my bus union, especially when I started doing my dreaded 282 newsletter.
I had to discontinue going to union meetings, when MessengerPost Newspapers, my post-stroke employer, started flying half the Post web-sites on Thursday, also the day of union meetings.
I was doing the Post web-sites, which often took all day. I’d come home utterly bushed, and had little time to eat supper before setting out to attend the union meeting — getting to the union meeting takes 45 minutes.
But last fall I decided to return to the union meetings. I had retired from the Messenger, so no longer had that excuse.
So far I have attended four or five meetings, all with little input. I can’t vote anyway.
My attendance at these meetings is little more than support for my union — and a reminder to union officials our pension hasn’t been updated (increased) for years. It could be.
What I’ve come away with is how much worse the job has become since I retired.
—A) Every meeting is a never-ending litany of assaults, threats, guns, and utter madness from the clientele; and management getting upset when the cops are called. (They wanna be called first, so the ne’er-do-wells don’t get thrown off the bus.)
Recently I’ve viewed You-Tube videos of bus-drivers being assaulted; on-board cameras recording the mayhem.
Usually when a bus-driver is assaulted, help is far away. On-road Transit managers may be glomming donuts, and are incensed their donut-break is violated by a mere bus-driver.
—B) The Scheduling Department has so reduced running-time, it is now necessary to speed. I had this problem running Main St. out to the eastside layover. I was given an hour to get out-and-back; and it was like the Scheduling Department hadn’t factored in my stopping at every stop to process passengers. I’d end up 10 minutes late: “Take it through; see what ya can do........”
Layover was a misnomer. What I was doing was blasting through, and changing the sign on-the-fly.
—C) It also appears some system has been installed, linked to the GPS transponders, to assure compliance with timepoints.
Well that’s just great.
I used to intentionally leave layovers 5-7 minutes late, so I could drive at a normal pace, yet get downtown at the sacred time.
My regular passengers adjusted their arrivals at bus-stops to agree with my scheduling.
Since I was doing this, I’d tell them if I might be away the next day, so they could adjust for an extra-man arriving at their bus-stop earlier than usual.
Plus there are often intermediate timepoints on the way out a line; like where a line crossed another, and a passenger could conceivably transfer.
I often arrived at such a timepoint earlier than scheduled, in which case I sometimes disregarded it, and blasted right through.
Usually when an intersecting bus had a transfer passenger I got notified of it.
And the passengers were hip. The most reliable transfer-point was downtown.
Now the vaunted system throws a red light at you, requiring you to stop if early at an intermediate timepoint. It goes green after the proper time passes.
Like all-of-sudden I’m supposed to stop in the traffic-lane, throw on my four-ways, and wait for the green light.
Worse yet is the system yammering at me to leave the layover at the assigned time, and impede traffic by running 10-15 mph slower.
Great; the clientele go bonkers, and assault the bus-driver. Management shows up after finishing their donuts and insists the thugs be driven home on the bus.
A driver also reported her system clock was five minutes different from that of another; which of course is her fault.
The meeting was the usual shouting-match.
A member droned on-and-on about statements on the Transit web-site about their vaunted GPS system being able to hold drivers to account for timely performance — despite earlier verbal assurances by Transit managers the GPS system wouldn’t be used to do that.
The union Business-Agent wanted to respond, and was finally allowed to do so, but as soon as he began he was interrupted by the protester.
So much for Roberts Rules of Order.
The protester then stomped out in an angry huff, cursing everyone.
I haven’t attended a union-meeting yet where this sort of thing doesn’t happen.
Is it any wonder Transit management perceives the union as divided?
It also reminds me of some of my fellow bus-drivers from the early ‘90s; how they felt the union was a complete waste, and union officials were a bunch of stupid obstructionists.
“If you guys had any idea what it’s like to sit with these people at contract negotiations,” the Business-Agent said.
“Here we are in this hall facing a bunch of self-proclaimed elitists who think we’re a bunch of stupid dolts.”
It helps that Dominic Zarcone (“zar-CONE”), one of my old friends at Transit, has become a union official.
Zarcone was sort of a zealot, Catholic if that’s possible, but has been educated about the futility of dealing with Transit management.
“They’ve disrespected us and mistreat us!” he loudly proclaimed.
“Should we be even arbitrating this?” a member asked.
It’s the ancient waazoo I heard at early ‘90s union meetings: “Too many arbitrations.”
“Last year the arbitration assessments per member totaled $174,” the Business-Agent said. “Which is peanuts compared to our income.”
“And we won most arbitrations. One proposed arbitration led to a settlement before the arbitration began. Management stonewalls until the arbitration is about to begin, and then caves.”
“We have to force these people to get anywhere at all,” Zarcone said. “Buckle the slightest, and they jump all over us!”
Hooray; Zarcone has figured it out.
Get involved with the Union, and you see what jerks Transit management is.
Apparently Transit management, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to have an on-site memorial to a prior union president moved to a less honorable location.
Well okay; this isn’t even union business, but the Union is suggesting moving the memorial to the union hall.
A few years ago, a bus-driver was murdered at a bus-loop, so Transit memorialized her by naming the bus-barns after her.
“I don’t know who David Jones (the memorialized union-president) is,” the protester said; “but I know who Mary Jackson is, and rumor has it Transit wants to take her name down.”
The ancient waazoo: rumors and innuendo.
“Well, I remember David Jones,” I said.
“So do I,” said the Business-Agent.
Around-and-around we went.
“The head-honcho wants a building named after her him,” someone said.
“Yeah; I gotta building for him. We could use some new latrines,” the Business-Agent said.
“Way to go, Frank,” I said. Memories of the Hazel Merriman memorial outhouses at her beloved Unibersity of Rochester.
“Any old business?” Radical-Dude asked.
“I hereby move to adjourn the meeting,” someone shouted.
“Seconded, third, fourth.”
We all left.
“Make sure we lock the building, and set the alarm,” Frank said.

For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.

“The CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV.

Our dog was “Killian;” a rescue Irish-Setter.

The “282 News” was a voluntary newsletter for our Union I did for about a year before my stroke.

“MessengerPost Newspapers” is mainly the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, a daily, from where I retired over two years ago. Best job I ever had. —They had bought the Post suburban weeklies when their publisher retired.

The “Business-Agent” is a full-time union official; one of only two not working at Transit.

RE: “I remember David Jones......” —I was 1763 badge. Most people at the meeting were far beyond my time; I even saw badges in the 2800s. I only recognized a couple. David Jones was union-president a couple years during my tenure. He died of cancer during a union-convention.

“Hazel Merriman” was our landlady in the early ‘70s. She graduated University of Rochester around 1930; one of the first women to do so, and loudly trumpeted it. She gave a lot to the University, and thought she deserved a building. “Unibersity of Rochester” is how she pronounced it.

“Radical-Dude” was my nickname years ago for Ray Dunbar (“Done-bar”), currently union vice-president, chairing the meeting.

Killian (1998 [or thereabouts] — 5/22/08)

Come down outta that tree and fight! (Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.)

So goes our beloved Killian, bar none one of the neatest dogs we’ve ever had.
Killian was a rescue Irish Setter, which means he’d already been tossed out of prior homes — we heard two.
He also was a field-setter; not as big or hairy as a show-dog.
But he also was extremely spunky; which probably contributed to his prior toss-outs. Reportedly he had knocked over a baby-carriage with the baby in it.
As a field-setter he was extremely driven to catch critters. At least 13 rabbits got dispatched; and who knows how many moles and rats and field-mice and chipmunks.
It got so every week a dead critter was in our garbage. (“Are these people into animal sacrifice?”)
Killian got hit with lymphomic cancer a few weeks ago, and it hit him like a ton of bricks.
We tried to treat it with chemo, but the chemo had little effect.
The chemo reduced his infection-fighting and open sores broke out on a leg.
Plus there were pills every day — too many pills — mostly antibiotics and anti-nausea.
And never-ending blood-draws, and rectal thermometer checks.
The sores healed, but he grew more tired and weaker.
Yesterday (Thursday, May 22, 2008) he was afraid to stand up, shaking and trembling; and was down to about one-tenth of our regular walking distance. —He’d poop out.
We got him over five years ago — drove all the way down to Williamsport, Pa.; I think he was brought up from Baltimore.
The girl gave us the right of refusal; nothing doing! I ain’t turnin’ this dog away just because he’s small.
The poor dog was a terrified nervous wreck when we got him; too many owners and too many abandonments. We had to drive him home in a crate. Sabrina was along and dumbfounded.
We very shortly took him to the so-called elitist country-club, and he promptly yanked the leash right outta my hand.
We’d been warned he pulled like a horse, but I thought he was gone forever. He had run merrily off into the woods, trailing his leash behind him.
We called and called, and hiked down the snowy trail he had disappeared on.
Finally I gave up, and started walking dejectedly back up the road.
I heard a noise, turned around; and here he comes back up the road to me.
“I thought ya were lost. Where ya been?”
We’ve been to that park hundreds of times; nearly always on the leash, for fear of him running away.
Started letting him loose, like to chase geese, but one time he disappeared.
Had to hike all over to find him, and when we did, he was frightened; like “don’t do that again!”

(Note also faux duck-toy.) (Photo by Linda Hughes with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.)

I’d run, and Linda would run along with Killian, and they usually covered most of the distance I covered.
Killian always wanted to go with me; but we had to keep him leashed. (There was no running with a leashed monster, who could all-of-a-sudden bolt for the woods.)
Get out my rubbers and he started beating his tail at me: “Oh boy, we’re going for a walk (hunt); let’s go — I’m ready!”
Dashing madly around with one of his faux duck toys in his mouth. And out the porch-door he went like a bolt of lightning — immediately over to the kennel to look for the chipmunk. He got that chipmunk not too long ago — probably after the cancer had started.
He got so he recognized the sounds of our cars as they pulled in the driveway; and the sound of our garage-door opening.
We think he was abused in a prior home; he was always overly-submissive to pants-wearers.
Yet despite that, he seemed to like me more than Linda. Linda paid more attention to him, but he was always thrilled to do anything with me.
So now I am returned home and everything is the same. —It’s much like the first time I came home after the stroke. I looked out the kitchen window, and everything was the same as it had been. Yet it was different.
This is more-or-less the same; except no enthusiastic dashing spastically through the garage so he could check out the chipmunk.
His three faux duck toys remain where he dropped them last.
No one beating his tail every time I so much as appeared.
Also no one to enthusiastically prewash every plate, dish and pan, as he did every night at supper.
More-and-more plates got used, because he had to lick off every plate after each entree.
He was especially into sour-cream and yogurt.
He also cleaned off the aluminum-foil our fish had oven-baked in. Linda had to buy salmon from the MarketPlace supermarket in Honeoye Falls, because that had skin on it. Weggers salmon didn’t. I’d pull the skin off, and he’d hoover it up.
His greetings were less enthusiastic the last few weeks, but he kept whapping his tail at me.
And pill after pill after pill with little problem.
“Any veins left?” the vet asked. “This dog has had too many IVs.”
He seemed to have rallied some as we went to the vet. Jumped in the van on his own, and walked in without a stretcher.
“Have ya ever done this before?” the vet asked.
“Yes, but this is one of the niftiest dogs we’ve ever had.”
“They’re never around long enough,” Linda said. She wasn’t along, and had to work at the post-office.
We probably could have waited another day, but there was always the possibility of him dying each night, or that he might crash in the backyard.
We also didn’t wanna have the possibility of him crashing over the long holiday weekend, and requiring euthanasia at a strange place — like the emergency vet in Henrietta, where they hospitalized him almost a week.
Killian makes the fourth dog I’ve put to sleep, and probably the youngest. We’ve lost five: Sassy ran away and was never seen again.
At least I did it at the right time; perhaps two days too late.
Casey, our first dog, had bone-cancer on her mouth; but was probably our best dog, although Killian is almost equal.
Casey’s tumor had closed off one eye, and made it very hard to drink.
But she didn’t wanna get euthanised — she was a fighter. (She’d been hit by a car, and it almost killed her.)
I always felt I was too early; so I was probably too late with Tracy, our second dog. —Probably almost a week or two too late.
Tracy developed degenerative myelopathy, which means her back end gave out due to nerve deterioration in her spinal-cord.
It got so she’d crash in the backyard trying to go to the bathroom.
We tried to get her to go on newspapers in the garage, but she would have none of that: “I’m a clean dog!”
Sabrina apparently had liver-cancer or something, and the tumor ruptured after a gay gamble at the park, and she got extremely weak very suddenly.
A vet diagnosed the cancer the next day with ultrasound, and we pulled the plug that afternoon; i.e. on time.
Sabrina was the very classy dog — always did her master’s bidding: “I’m jumpin’ in that van no matter how hard it is; the Boss wants me in the van. Get outta here with that ramp!”
Sassy disappeared well before Tracy died — I’ve always felt I failed her. My ability to search was compromised by the stroke. —It makes me give up too early.
My regret is that she probably starved to death. We can only hope she wandered into another owner — which partially explains why I grab lost dogs and try to call their owners.
We did this last year with a big buffoon who seemed to be lost.
So now I have time to fill: the time I was setting aside to walk the dog. Like every afternoon around supper-time. Killian used to paw me at this ‘pyooter; like “Hey; what’s the deal? I know what time it is. Let’s get going! Shut that thing off!”
And the so-called elitist country-club; three or four mornings per week.
I’m sure we’ll get another dog; probably another rescue Irish Setter. But probably not right away. We’d like to do the mighty Curve, and always loathed putting a dog in the slammer just to go to the Curve.
Dogs have the right priorities.
What I remember most about Killian were his eyes; they weren’t like any Irish Setter we’d had before.
They were the eyes of a rapacious hunter: very steely and cold.
He also was a smiler.
This morning (Friday, May 23, 3008) the bunny-rabbit was inside the fence. That rabbit would have been dead meat if Killian had been around.

“Killian” was our dog; a rescue Irish-Setter. He was over 10; we never knew his exact birthdate.

RE: “‘Old guy’ with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). I also am loudly excoriated by all my siblings for preferring a professional camera (like the Nikon D100) instead of a point-and-shoot. This is because I long ago sold photos to nationally published magazines. My wife used the same camera.

“Sabrina” was our second rescue Irish-Setter, who died in March 2007.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOW-tin”) Park, where I run and we walked our dog. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns.

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years. Like me she’s retired, but she works part-time at the West Bloomfield post-office.

I had a stroke October 26, 1993.

“MarketPlace” is an independent supermarket in the nearby village of Honeoye Falls. “Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at.

“Henrietta” is a rather effusive and obnoxious suburb south of Rochester. The emergency vet was about 20 miles away.

Our dogs have been “Casey,” “Tracy” and “Sassy” (“the Sass”), and “Sabrina” and “Killian.” “The Sass” was a Houdini-dog. (All were females except Killian.)

The “big buffoon” was a large Rottweiler-mix named “Oz.” We found his owner.

The “mighty Curve” (“Horseshoe Curve”), west of Altoona, Pennsylvania, is by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. (I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.)

The old artistic Jones

Every once in a while, I’m called upon to make an artistic decision.
Over the past year there have been three color-choices: —1) the house stain; —2) the garage paint color, and yesterday (Tuesday, May 20, 2008) —3) the color of the window-shades on the back porch.
These artistic decisions were made pretty much the same way I made artistic judgments in college — totally devoid of tact and seeming consideration, which drove the artists crazy.
My good friend Tom Eades (“EEDZ”), part of the dreaded Summer-School Gang at Houghton, made a small sculpture that won Best-of-Show in the Academé art show.
“Are you kidding?” was my reaction. “That thing is a joke!”
“It’s little more than a lump of clay that’s been glazed and fired.”
My comments, of course, engendered the usual ad hominems; intimations that I was clueless and stupid.
My friend Charlie Gardiner (now “CG”) produced two paintings he hung at opposite ends of the hall.
They were identical, except the colors were reversed; i.e. one was a mirror-image of the other, except it wasn’t, because the colors were reversed.
“This looks really cool,” I told Charlie. Why I’ll never know, so I couldn’t explain.
The usual gut-reaction; impossible for an artist to parry, except by ad hominems.
—1) Our house-painter came last Spring with his usual 89 bazilyun paint-chips.
“What stain do ya want?” The usual sensory overload.
We narrowed down to a somewhat greenish stain.
“This looks like what we already have.”
Then finally, after a few minutes: “nothing doing!” I said. “It’s too green. I go with this (more grayish).”
That’s the stain we used, and it looks great.
Not too dark; not too light. “I ain’t livin’ in no puke-green house.”
—2) Same house-painter, assigned to paint the garage interior. Same 89 bazilyun paint-chips.
“I could just paint it white.”
“Nothing doing!” I exclaimed. “That’ll look ridiculous.”
“I go with this (a lightish green color).”
And that’s the color we used, and it looks great.
—3) Yesterday the blinds-guy showed up to suggest and arrange for window-treatments on our porch.
We switched from individual roll-up bamboo curtains to a sort of venetian-blinds treatment.
So now, what color do we want the individual slats to be.
The salesman uncased the usual 89 bazilyun samples.
“I’ll let my husband choose the color,” my wife said. “He usually does pretty good.”
Uh-ohhhhhhhhh........... On the spot again; another choice where I’m expected to make the greatest color-choice of all time; out of 89 bazilyun samples I don’t have hours to peruse.
At first we tilted toward a faux-wood color; match our rocking-chairs, and the finish-stained cedar on one wall.
But then here I am at our picnic-table in our famblee-room, and I picture these slats on our porch windows; giant blocks of wood-color on peach-colored walls.
“Wait a minute!” I cried. “Can you imagine these things on our porch? They’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”
“We could switch to white slats.”
“That’ll stick out like a sore thumb too.”
“Well, we could go to a more striated shade. This is our darkest.”
“NOPE!”
“This is our lightest.”
“NOPE!”
“This is in between.”
“That looks okay. I go with that.”
Gut-reactions as usual.

RE: “Summer-School Gang.......” —Me and Eades had to attend Summer-School at Houghton in ‘62 to prove we could do college-level work.

“Houghton” is Houghton College in western New York, from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it. Houghton is a religious college. Eades and Charlie Gardiner (now “CG”) were in my class.

“Academé” was a small intellectual discussion-forum I belonged to in college.

“Puke-green” is the common description our family has of yellowish-green color.

My wife of 40+ years is “Linda.”

Tiny tidbits from the vaunted Canandaigua YMCA

I went to the Canandaigua YMCA yesterday (Monday, May 19, 2008) noting the following:

—1) The traffic-light at the intersection Pearl St. and West Ave. is finally working.
This ain’t actually the YMCA, but on the way.
The intersection of Pearl St. and West Ave. in Canandaigua is fairly substantial.
Pearl St. is a main north-south street that runs through Canandaigua parallel to state Route 332, the main north-south drag.
West Ave. used to be the main entrance of 5&20 into downtown Canandaigua before the bypass was built.
It was bypassed to -a) avoid traffic into downtown Canandaigua, and -b) avoid a low-clearance railroad bridge that often decapitated trailers — it’s only 10-feet six-inches.
West Ave. was recently widened at the intersection to five lanes (actually seven; if you include the streetside parking).
Large curbside shady trees had to be cut down, causing weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and noisy protests and tree-hugging by the environmental lobby.
Finally complete, a traffic-light was installed, but on four-way stop flash.
I had a phenomenal avoidance there once. Almost got T-boned by an enraged Caprice. It’s grizzled driver gave me the finger.
The intersection was widened to add left-turn lanes on West Ave.
It’s nice the traffic-light is finally working, lowering the possibility of phenomenal avoidances.
But West Ave. still needs its final top-coat of paving.

—2) Amazon-Lady’s son will attend Rochester Institute of Technology.
I usually avoid Amazon-Lady, since she looks and can be rather nasty.
She’s a YMCA employee, and actually quite nice.
Overlook her angry grimace and rippling muscles, and she’s great.
Amazon-Lady is on the fantabulous new running-in-sand machine next to me, pumping away.
“Lemme know if your son decided to go to RIT,” I say, as I departed the sand-machines.
“He did,” she beams. “He’s so excited.”
“Well, hooray,” I say; “good for him!”
This goes back to a long-ago discussion where Amazon-Lady allowed that her son had been accepted at all five colleges he applied to; one being RIT.
“Here’s one vote for RIT,” I said at that time.
“Boy-oh-boy, do I wish that school had been around when I was that age,” I said.
But in the middle-‘60s RIT was still a small technical-school based in Rochester. It had been supported by George Eastman of Kodak.
I remember RIT students trudging between buildings in the snow on the west side of Rochester.
But in 1968, shortly after I graduated college (1966), RIT moved to a new campus in the suburb of Henrietta, and it was fabulous.
I took photography-courses at the new RIT in the early ‘70s; partly because it was a school slanted toward photography and printing. It reflected its Kodak support, as well as support by Rochester-based Gannett Newspapers (Frank Gannett).
I probably would have been refused by RIT, and don’t regret attending Houghton instead.
If I had attended RIT, I woulda majored in photography; probably a slight misfit.
Anyway, photography has come way beyond what RIT taught, so that -a) if I had majored in photography, I woulda been ill-prepared for the changes that were in store, and -b) RIT is no longer a photography/printing school. It’s more a college.
Houghton was a liberial-arts college (dread); more attuned to teaching the advance of western thought.
I started as a Physics-major, but switched, due to -a) the fact the Physics labs were in the cellar of an old building — what we called dungeons. Even though I nearly aced Physics, having suddenly got the hang of it (and I was the onliest one that did), I knew labs in the dungeons would be drudgery.
There also was the fact that -b) all the good professors were in History; so I switched to a History-major.
What I do more now is write; which to me was advanced by a so-called liberial-arts education.
So I don’t regret Houghton at all, although at that time I woulda preferred the RIT of the ‘70s.
I barely made Houghton at all; I was part of the dreaded “Summer-School Gang;” those that had to attend Houghton Summer-School to prove they could do college-level work.
I succeeded, but mainly because the alternative was the Vietnam quagmire.
A number of roads-not-taken always dangle in front of me: one being photography at RIT. Another is moving to Los Angeles.
But compared to Ithaca College, Monroe Community College, etc., RIT is a slam-dunk.
“Tell him RIT,” I long-ago said.

—3) McCain is not McBush.
“The View” is on the cardio-theater next to me, closed-captioned of course.
“Everyone knows McCain is Bush,” says the Woopster.
“Oh, puh-leeze,” says co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
“Oh, come on,” says the Woopster. “Everyone knows McCain and Bush are attached at the hip!”
“They are not!” Hasselbeck asserts.
Perish-the-thought, I agree with Hasselbeck. She listed a slew of disagreements between Dubya and the McCaniacs.
If it comes down to McCain versus Hillary, I’ll vote for McCain. McCain versus Obama, I’ll probably vote for Obama.
Hillary-dillery is the old politics — a shyster.
Both McCain and Obama are at least respectable.

—4) Spike’s Amazing Videos.
I’m on a cardio-theater treadmill.
Mine is off, but the one next to me (unused) is on.
An Illinois Central freight-train is bearing down on a grade-crossing. The gates are down, crossing-signal lights flashing, but a large truck-trailer is partially blocking the tracks.
Sparks are flying off the train-wheels — the engineer has it in emergency; the wheels are locked, and momentum is sliding the train down the tracks.
BAM! The lead locomotive, a Geep, hits the rear of the trailer, and shoves everything down the tracks. It doesn’t derail — I bet the crew is under the control-stands.
Welcome to Spike’s Amazing videos.
Amazing car-crashes, sky-high racing-car flips, motorcycles flying riderless through the air, and then cart-wheeling madly through the dirt.
A steeplechase horse hits a jump and flips its rider 25 feet in the air. He tumbles on the ground like a ragdoll, and gets trampled by following horses.
The camera pans an Amtrak train doing about 40 mph toward a grade-crossing. Twin silhouetted Genesis units, elephant style.
A small car is hung up on the tracks.
The train hits the car, and suddenly a massive fireball of yellow flame fills the screen.
Wait a minute — a Genesis unit doesn’t just blow up. Amtrak required the locomotive-designers to hide the fuel-tank away from where it could be penetrated. It ain’t like the common freight-diesel, where the fuel-tank is slung between the wheel-trucks.
PHOTOSHOP® ALERT! —Or whatever the video-equivalent of Photoshop is.
Flaming fireballs! Seems like every crash ends in a flaming fireball. And every fireball looks the same. Spike seems to wanna paste that fireball onto everything.

—5) The earphone-jack is down here.
Same treadmill.
A girl gets on the treadmill next to me and wonders where to connect her earbuds.
Boyfriend is consulted. “Insert earphone plug in jack below.” They poke around, trying to find a jack up near the cardio-theater.
Finally I reach over and point out the secret earphone jack which is down between the hand-grabs. I.e. nowhere near where they were looking.
“Oh,” the girl laughs.

I work out in the exercise-gym at the Canandaigua YMCA.

“5&20” is the main east-west road through our area; State Route 5 and U.S. Route 20, both on the same road. 5&20 is just south of where we live.

“Amazon-Lady” is a YMCA-employee. We call her that because she is extremely muscle-bound.

“Houghton” is Houghton College, from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it. Houghton is a religious college.

RE: “Liberial-arts college (dread).......” “Liberial” is how my loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston noisily insisted “liberal” was spelled. (Now it’s “liberila.”) He loudly insists a liberal-arts education is inferior to being trained as an engineer. He of course was trained as an engineer.

A “cardio-theater” is a small flat-screen TV on your exercise-machine, so you can watch TV while exercising.

“The Woopster” is Whoopi Goldberg.

Illinois Central Railroad.

“Dubya” is George W. Bush, our current president.

RE: “The engineer has it in emergency........” —The guy driving the train (the engineer), has dumped the air in the trainline, so all the train-wheels are locked, including the freightcars — full braking (“emergency”).

“Geep” is the nickname given to ElectroMotive Division (GM) GP road-switchers (four axles). These looked like GP40s.

RE: “Genesis units, elephant style......” —General-Electric makes a passenger diesel-locomotive for Amtrak called the P-42. They call them “Genesis units.” “Elephant style” is nose-to-tail. The nose of the follower is coupled to the rear of the locomotive ahead.

Cart-wars at mighty Weggers

I decided to go to mighty Weggers today (Sunday, May 18, 2008) so —A) I wouldn’t hafta go tomorry after the YMCA; or —B) I could take the dog to the vet — if needed.
And it appears that won’t be necessary, since the dog is still weak, but he appears to be improving.
Say to the dog the chipmunk is outside, and he springs into action, trotting to the door, tail wagging furiously, wimpering and yelping.
I took him for a walk last night, and he saw a bunny-rabbit — gave chase, pulling me strongly.
I think I should be putting his lights out, since supposedly he can’t be himself.
But every once in a while, he’s just like old times.
We navigated the neighbor’s fence last night, and he heard a sound.
All-of-a-sudden, bolt-erect; stop and sniff along the fence.
The old fire is still there. As long as it is, it’s near-impossible to give up.
This morning we took the dog along to the so-called elitist country-club, and he went farther; although the fact he can’t run with me is depressing.
And when we returned, the dog jumped up into the Bathtub on-his-own.
No help.
“Get outta here with that help. I can do it.” BOINK!
(The van-floor is 20 inches above the ground.)

So here I am at Weggers. I get in a checkout-line, and Granny falls in behind me in a powered handicap-cart.
She slams it into my ankles.
“I was hoping you’d help me unload my cart, young man. You look pretty strong.”
Um, PASS! I don’t think slamming my ankles is a good way to drop a hint.
I move up, and the checkout processes my order.
Again, Granny slams her cart into my ankles.
“Oh, excuse me, young man. I guess I gotta be more careful. This cart is either on-or-off.”
“Um, I’m 64, Granny.” I say.
“Well I’m 72. Part of the greatest generation that ever was!”
Checkout complete, I proceed out the aisle, and stop to fold my receipt and put it in my wallet.
Again, Granny slams me with her cart.
“Now what? Is this a hint I should take out your order? Do I look like a ‘Helping-Hands?’ Go slam a store-employee.”
“Well, excuse me, young man.”

“Mighty Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua.

I work out in the exercise-gym at the YMCA.

Our dog is “Killian;” a rescue Irish-Setter. He has lymphatic cancer, and probably won’t survive. —He’s over 10; we don’t know his birthdate.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOW-tin”) Park, where I run and we walk our dog. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns.

“The Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub.

“Helping-Hands” are Wegmans employees that load groceries into cars for people and collect the carts.

HD tanks yet again

(Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the dreaded and
utterly reprehensible Nikon D100 with flash.)

This morning (Sunday, May 17, 2008), as I usually do after rollout, I turned on our fantabulous bedside HD radio.
As it usually does, it brought in the analog signal for a few seconds, and then it switched over to HD.
Nothing. Deafening silence.
Uh-ohhhhhhh........... Sounds like Dubya-Hex-Hex-Hi has lost its HD signal again. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I turned on our PAL analog radio.
Actually, I’m very happy with our HD radio, although I think it’s more the radio than the fact it’s an HD radio.
Boston Acoustics has done a bang-up job to extract good sound out of a tiny 3-inch speaker.
I suspect they’ve boosted the base to offset the limitations of a tiny speaker. Plus they’ve ported out the back.
In fact, you can vary the base-boost to fiddle for room acoustics.
I have it near a wall, so had to back it down.
Bose (“Bohz”) did this with their fantabulous 901 speakers I bought back in the ‘80s.
A phased array of nine tiny speakers with turbojet-shaped porting out the back.
The system also had an “equalizer,” that boosted the base way up.
I thought it sounded pretty good for what I wanted, and I was comparing against systems with 12-inch woofers.
The Bose sounded “silky,” which was what I wanted with classical music.
Classical music on other systems sounded harsh — not much different, but noticeable.
Woofers were probably better for Jimi Hendrix, but Hendrix was good enough on 901s.
This Boston Acoustics HD radio sounds pretty good too; when the HD signal works, which is usually.
Our HD radio replaced Tivoli PAL radios — I still have both.
The PALs replaced my ancient boombox when I finally gave up on it.
As always, the given was for whatever we bought to fit our bedside bookcase (see pik), which has a well on top for indoor plants.
We no longer put plants in there, but the boombox fit, as did the PALs.
I measured. An HD radio had to fit that well too.
I bought the boombox years ago after comparing it to other boomboxes.
It had better sound.
The PALs had better sound than the boombox, which may have degraded. It has two six-inch speakers.
Our HD radio is much better than the PALs.
I was gonna get rid of one PAL, but hung onto it in case Dubya-Hex-Hex-Hi’s HD signal tanks.
I also play the PALs when I leave the dog alone in the house.
The HD signal is always about a tenth of a second behind the analog; which I can only discern when I hear both.

RE: “‘Old guy’ with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). I also am loudly excoriated by all my siblings for preferring a professional camera (like the Nikon D100) instead of a point-and-shoot. This is because I long ago sold photos to nationally published magazines.

“Dubya-Hex-Hex-Hi” is WXXI-FM, 91.5, the classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to.

The “Tivoli PAL” (Portable-Audio-Laboratory) is a small portable analog FM radio.

Our dog is “Killian;” a rescue Irish-Setter. He’s over 10; we don’t know his birthdate.

Mighty Lowes freezer follies

We were supposed to have a new small chest-freezer purchased at mighty Lowes in Canandaigua delivered yesterday (Friday, May 16, 2008). But that crashed mightily in flames, thanks no doubt to our not using Outlook.
The Lowes delivery-guys called last Thursday (May 15), and I said we wouldn’t be home Friday morning, but if possible they could deliver it Friday afternoon. (The delivery reservation was all-day Friday.)
So yesterday morning while I was at the so-called elitist country-club dodging schoolbuses and the honey-dipper attempting to run, they apparently called my cellphone.
I carry along my cellphone in a holster should I have to call 9-1-1.
Retrieve cellphone from rear location, remove cellphone from holster to answer, flip open cellphone.
Too late. Dead as a doornail.
No message; not even a callback number. —Didn’t even know it was Lowes. (Where is Outlook when I need it?)
We were still expecting the freezer that afternoon, but 3 o’clock came, so Linda (not Outlook) called Lowes.
“On the truck,” the girl said. “In my computer for delivery this afternoon.”
5:45 p.m.; still no freezer.
So Linda called again.
This time she got Chris. “I’ll connect ya to major appliances!” (“Please hold during the silence. Boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka.”)
Major appliances is clueless, so back to Chris — wouldna happened if we’d used Outlook.
“Please hold during the silence. Boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka.”
This time it was Kitchen Cabinets — so back to Chris.
“Please hold during the silence. Boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka.”
This time it was the Garden Department (??????????).
Back to Chris.
Meanwhile I’ve been able to walk the dog and return: about 15 minutes.
“Lemme go get a manager,” Chris says. A Keystone Cops episode that could have been avoided with Outlook.
Manager attempts to locate the truck, but they don’t have the freezer — and it’s after 6 p.m.
Manager-man went into Indian tech-support mode: “we are so-so sorry, Mrs. Hughes. Apparently there had been some kind of mixup for which I deeply apologize.”
“Our delivery people tried to call this morning to confirm your delivery, and no one answered.”
“We said we wouldn’t be home. And ya didn’t leave a message. People can’t always drop everything to answer the phone. That’s what voicemail is for.”
(Of course, this wouldna happened with Outlook.)
“Again, I am deeply-deeply sorry, Mrs. Hughes. Yada-yada-yada-yada.”
“Everything is out of our old freezer melting.” (OUTLOOK ALERT!)
“We’ll emergency deliver your freezer tomorrow (today, May 17). And we are so-so sorry. Just make sure you’re around to confirm appointment.”
Thankfully the zero-turn was not from mighty Lowes.
The mower-shop delivered it without a problem — i.e. without Outlook.

“Mighty Lowes” is Lowes Home-Improvement. They have a store in Canandaigua.

RE: “Thanks no doubt to our not using Outlook..........” —Outlook is the Microsoft calender and e-mail program. My macho, loudmouthed brother-from-Boston, the ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, excoriates me for not using Outlook, noisily claiming it will solve all my scheduling problems; like too much to do in not enough time. I have suggested mowing his lawn instead of watching NASCAR, if he can find his mower.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOW-tin”) Park, where I run. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns.

RE: “Dodging schoolbuses and the honey-dipper.........” —Victor (a nearby town) buses high-school students to the park for canoeing instruction, and the park has Porta-Johns that have to be serviced with a so-called honey-dipper.

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years.

Our dog is “Killian;” a rescue Irish-Setter. He has lymphatic cancer, and probably won’t survive. —He’s over 10; we don’t know his birthdate.

“Indian tech-support mode” is Microsoft tech-support based in India.

Our “zero-turn” is our 48-inch Husqvarna riding-mower; “zero-turn” because it’s a special design with separate drives to each drive-wheel, so it can be spun on a dime. “Zero-turns” are becoming the norm, because they cut mowing time in half compared to a lawn-tractor, which has to be set up for each mowing-pass.

Errand overload

RE: “Ah, the retired life..... free to run errands all over the place......”
The errand-overload has gotten so extreme the refrigerator-door can no longer keep up.
We have to print out a calendar-sheet to organize all the errands and avoid conflicts.
Appointments get added willy-nilly.
So far Budget-Blinds has been shoved at least three times.
Doctor-appointments, vet-appointments, car service, home improvement and maintenance, etc, etc, etc.
We made another appointment with Budget-Blinds two days ago (Wednesday, May 14, 2008), “with hopes we can actually keep it this time.”
Almost two months have passed since our first try — first of three attempts.
And wedged in are attempts to run, the YMCA, working at the post-office, lawn-mowing, visits to mighty Weggers, gas-stations, etc.
Yesterday we called to set up an appointment with the window-man; same guy we did the window replacement project with last year.
“I can only do that this month next Wednesday afternoon — it’s the only opening we have.”
Meanwhile the garage-door replacement and hot-water heater replacement haven’t even been dealt with yet.
And then there’s finishing the house-siding on the back wall, and removing the porch skylights and roofing in. (They leak — or condensate.)
—And the rear deck of paving-stones.
(I also have a Union-meeting to attend.)
Next week our HVAC contractor comes to clean and service the furnace, which may mean a new air-conditioning compressor.
We can spare the expense, but have to be here to have it installed.
The vet-appointment proposed for yesterday afternoon had to be put off as untenable — our vet wasn’t available at that time.
The vet-appointment had to be rescheduled for this morning, which scotches the YMCA — I hope I can run instead; there may be enough time.
The rescheduled vet-appointment shoves freezer-delivery; unless they can deliver it this afternoon.
(Appointment-times have been divided into morning and afternoon — afternoon seems preferable.)
But they can’t specify a time; only a day — this is mighty Lowes.
Yesterday morning I was supposed to have the oil-filter changed/tires rotated on the Bathtub, my onliest opportunity to appraise the new AWD Matrix, which may be more agreeable than the Suzuki SX4 wagon we’ve been considering (which is also AWD).
Who knows when I’ll ever be able to trade the CR-V; I told the salesman hopefully by year’s end. (Processing would eat up a morning or afternoon.)
Thanks to various cancer-delays, Toyota has brought out a new Matrix, making AWD available again.
Recently it was no longer available AWD.
Who knows if I’ll ever make the mighty Curve this year.
That depends on the dog.
I’d rather have my dog back than watch trains, but that may not come to pass.

“Ah, the retired life..... free to run errands all over the place......” is something my ever-tolerant zealot sister in south Floridy said criticizing my running a couple errands last week in a spare afternoon I had.

RE: “Budget-Blinds......” —We are looking to install blinds (or shades) on our back porch.

My wife of 40+ years is “Linda.” Like me she’s retired, but she works part-time at the West Bloomfield post-office.

“Mighty Lowes” is Lowes Home-Improvement Super-Store. They have a store in Canandaigua.

RE: “window replacement project.......” —Last summer we replaced over half of the windows in our house.

“Garage-door replacement and hot-water heater replacement” are not currently emergencies, but could be some day.

“Mighty Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua.

“The Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub.

“The CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV. It’s too much like a truck — we’d rather have a car.

My wife had lymphatic cancer, as does our dog. My wife will survive, but my dog may not.

“AWD” is “All-Wheel-Drive;” full-time four-wheel-drive that doesn’t have to be engaged. I always get it to avoid blowing out our driveway.

RE: “Making AWD available again.......” —Previously the Matrix was not available with All-Wheel-Drive. At first it was, but it was recently discontinued. Now it’s available again — in a newly upgraded Matrix.

“The mighty Curve” (Horseshoe Curve), west of Altoona, Pennsylvania, is by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. (I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.)

Not a phenomenal avoidance

Last Sunday (May 11, 2008) I decided to hit mighty Weggers that day, lest I have to take the dog to the vet the next day (Monday, May 12, 2008).
I usually go Monday afternoons after hitting the YMCA, since they’re both in Canandaigua.
So here I am traveling east on Routes 5&20 toward Canandaigua in the CR-V, and I turn south on the vaunted Bypass that was built long ago to avoid downtown Canandaigua. It also avoids a low-clearance railroad bridge that decapitates trailers. It’s only 10-foot six-inches.
At the bottom of a long grade, the Bypass intersects with State Route 332, the main drag through Canandaigua, and also with Eastern Boulevard, a four-lane divided road built years ago to take traffic off nearby Lake Shore Blvd., which goes by the lake.
The intersection of 332 and Eastern with the Bypass is gigantic. It’s protected by traffic-lights, and the Bypass goes straight across into Eastern.
So much traffic is going through it, and turning, the traffic-lights have five possible cycles.
Southbound traffic on 332 gets its own light — northbound traffic onto 332 has to be stopped. Most southbound cars on 332 are turning left onto Eastern.
The northbound traffic across the intersection onto 332 also gets its own signal. So many are turning left onto the Bypass, the southbound traffic from 332 has to be stopped.
East and westbound can move together (two lanes each); since not that many are turning left.
But separately signaled left-turn lanes had to be installed (totaling three lanes each way).
If only the eastbound left-turn lane is occupied, left and straight eastbound are signaled together.
Conversely, if only the westbound left-turn lane is occupied, left and straight westbound are signaled together.
If both left-turn lanes are occupied, only the left-turn lanes are signaled. All straight-through traffic is stopped.
So here I am driving eastbound on the Bypass (it turns east) toward Weggers on Eastern Blvd.
I approach the intersection, and am stopped. At least two cars per lane are ahead of me — a noisy GeezerGlide with a grizzled cigarette-smoking macho-thug is idling loudly in the adjacent left-turn lane.
Both left-turn lanes are occupied, so they will get signaled first. Us straight-drivers will have to wait.
The left-turn signals change to green, but of course not our straight-lane signals.
Suddenly a beige Buick LeSabre lunges into the intersection, but slams on her brakes, having almost hit the car turning left from the opposing left-turn lane.
Straight-driving LeSabre’s light is still red, of course; and won’t change until the opposing left-turn traffic clears.
So here’s the Buick, still sitting in the middle of the intersection; brake-lights glowing brightly.
She waits until the opposing left-turn traffic clears, and then blasts through the red-light.
Sorry chillen; too far away to see if it had a Dubya-sticker. Sure drove like a Dubya supporter.

“Mighty Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua.

Our dog is “Killian;” a rescue Irish-Setter. He has lymphatic cancer, and is being treated for it with chemo. —He’s over 10; we don’t know his birthdate.

“Routes 5&20” is the main east-west road through our area; State Route 5 and U.S. Route 20, both on the same road. 5&20 is just south of where we live.

“The CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV.

“GeezerGlide” is what I call all Harley Davidson ElectraGlide cruiser-bikes. My loudmouthed macho brother-in-Boston has a very laid back Harley Davidson cruiser-bike, and, like most Harley Davidson riders, is 50 years old. So I call it his GeezerGlide.

“Dubya-sticker” is a Bush-Cheney 2004 bumper-sticker. All insane traffic-moves seem to involve Bush-supporters. They seem to think they have the right.

Hudson Tubes

I’m at the vaunted Canandaigua YMCA yesterday (Monday, May 12, 2008).
I’m on a cardio-theater treadmill.
I have it off, but the giant wall-mounted plasma-babies above me are on.
The one to my right is tuned to CNN, silent but close-captioned, as always.
A reporter is standing in a railroad-station somewhere in north Jersey.
It looks like it may be the Corridor, because the railroad-ties are concrete.
“Currently there’s only one railroad crossing under the Hudson River from Jersey to New York City,” he says.
Well, more-or-less kerreck, although PATH is a second railroad-tunnel under the Hudson, if it’s still operating. PATH’s New York City station was under the World Trade Center. —But PATH is more a subway.
Only one railroad ever accessed New York City from Jersey, and that was the mighty Pennsylvania railroad — now the Amtrak Northeast Corridor.
A union railroad-bridge was proposed in the late 1800s, but never built. Only Pennsy crossed the Hudson; all the other railroads continued using ferries (Pennsy had ferries before the Tubes).
Pennsy opened its twin tunnels (“Tubes”) about 1910, and they remain the only viable railroad crossing; still in use.
The Tubes are electric, but the entire Corridor is electric; it’s trains powered by electric locomotives that collect current from an overhead trolley-wire (the “cantenary”).
The Tubes had to be electric, because sufficient ventilation couldn’t be built to run smoky steam locomotives. Railroads now use diesel-power instead of steam, which would be less a challenge than steam-engines, but still the Tubes lack sufficient ventilation.
The Tubes are also small; not big enough to clear the standard Amtrak double-deck passenger-car, or a freight-train.
In fact, anything that runs the Tubes has to be small enough to clear — e.g. the standard Amtrak Metroliner car, the AEM7s and the GG1. Also the Acela equipment and the HEP locomotives.
The GG1 was very long, but not very high.
The standard railroad passenger-car from the ‘50s was small enough to clear the Tubes.
New Jersey Transit also uses the Tubes. New Jersey Transit took over commuter operations from Pennsy — the Tubes became a commuter connector as well as a connection to railroads out west.
So now the Tubes are a bottleneck; which was why PATH was built long ago — to take some of the commuter pressure off the Tubes. PATH was originally built as the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, with Pennsy backing.
But it ends at Newark, and now Jersey Transit is running commuter-trains well beyond Newark.
And all they can currently use are the Tubes to get to New York City. (Plus they have to be electric.)
And all the Jersey Transit trains that use railroads that were non-Pennsy (like Erie and Lackawanna) still have to use ferries.
So now a giant project has been proposed to build an additional railroad-tunnel under the Hudson into New York City.
Well, it’s about time.
The Tubes are almost a hundred years old.
Too much traffic is being rammed through them. —And it has to come off the Corridor; the commuter-districts in north Jersey don’t cross the Hudson.
Of course, the dreaded Tubes, bad as they are, were built with private capital. Any new tunnels would be built with public funds.

A “cardio-theater treadmill” is a treadmill with a small flat-screen TV, so you can watch TV while exercising.

“Plasma-babies” are what my loudmouthed macho brother-in-Boston calls all high-definition wide/flat-screen TVs. Other technologies beside plasma are available, but he calls them all “plasma-babies.”

“The Corridor” is Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (railroad), originally Washington DC to New York City; but now to Boston. It’s very successful — the most-used Amtrak line. —The Corridor uses pre-cast concrete ties because of extreme usage: the trains run at very high speed, often over 120 mph.

“PATH” is Port-Authority Trans-Hudson.

“Pennsy” is the Pennsylvania Railroad, no longer in existence. It merged with New York Central Railroad in 1968 as Penn-Central, and that tanked in about eight years. “Pennsy” was once the largest railroad in the world.

All the railroads in north Jersey that served New York City by ferry (including Pennsy) were going to use the proposed “union railroad-bridge.” (This is late 1800s.)

“AEM7s” were the standard Amtrak electric locomotive from the ‘80s until recently. Some are still in use. It’s a Swedish design built by General Motors. The “GG1” was the standard Pennsylvania Railroad electric passenger locomotive used from the late ‘30s through the ‘70s (outlasting Pennsy). It was extremely successful, and was arguably the greatest railroad locomotive ever made. “Acela” is the newfangled electric train designed to operate the Corridor over 120 mph — often over 140. The “HEP locomotives” are an Acela-derived power unit to replace the AEM7. (The Corridor is still a very old railroad, and has limitations.)

Monthly Calendar Report for May 2008

The Stooges (Moe, Curly and Larry).
This month’s calendars are okay, but since my Stooges calendar is pretty good, I’ll make it number-one.
As usual, it’s probably a clip from a movie, but it’s fine: Moe and Larry are holding their ears as Curly lights the fuse on a supposed can of explosives.
And Moe looks pretty young, not the older looking codger he looks like in other calendar entries.
Curly, of course, is what made the Stooges. I have a nerf-ball of Curly’s head on my ‘pyooter tower. It used to go nyuk-nyuk-nyuk on impact.
Moe and Larry contributed, but Curly is the essence.

Pennsy FF2 electric #3 in Columbia, Penn. in helper service. (Photo by Jim Buckley.)
My All-Pennsy color calendar features the Pennsy FF2 box-cab electric locomotive, one of the locomotives Pennsy bought from Great Northern Railway when GN gave up on its Cascade electrification in 1956.
The FF2 didn’t end up being a prime over-the-road locomotive. It was too heavy and big for most routes, so heavy they had to be disassembled for repair at Pennsy’s Wilmington electric shops. They also had to be modified in Juniata for use on Pennsy.
This one is in helper service in Columbia, Pennsylvania, to help push trains up out of the Susquehanna River valley over the hill towards Philadelphia.
It’s not that much of a hill, but enough to require helpers. Beyond the grade a train could make do with minimal power.
Their service life-expectancy wasn’t that long; they were built by Alco-General Electric in the late ‘20s.
By April of 1962 only three out of seven were left, although Pennsy got eight from Great Northern, but one was kept for parts and not put in service.
They were excellent helpers; too big and powerful for anything else.
They were also used as helpers from Philadelphia to Paoli on the Main-Line, and as freight-engines to Baltimore via Perryville (i.e. down the Susquehanna River valley — too big for the old Northern Central line through York, which also wasn’t electrified; the Perryville line was).
You will note that both pantographs are up — the FF2 was the only Pennsy electric that required that.

Gloster Meteor. (Photo by Philip Makanna©.)
My May 2008 Ghosts WWII warbirds calendar is a Gloster Meteor, the first operational turbojet-powered fighter airplane.
The Meteor isn’t much to look at; not as attractive as fighter-jets that came later, e.g. the F86, and the utterly gorgeous Lockheed F104 Starfighter; little more than a giant, powerful jet-engine powering not much of an airplane.
In fact, being a jet, I have a hard time seeing it in the warbirds calendar, since nearly all WWII warbirds are propeller airplanes.
But it was introduced late in the war, and replaced Spitfires.
It’s a British design; melding small Rolls-Royce turbojets with a supporting airframe.
It wasn’t very aerodynamic, being straight-wing. Swept-wing jets came later.
It also wasn’t very stable; air would separate as it approached the speed-of-sound, so that the control-surfaces became useless.
Airplanes were approaching the so-called sound-barrier. Air piled up as an airplane approached the speed-of-sound, so that airplanes were hitting a wall.
The first pilot to break the sound-barrier (go faster than the speed-of-sound) was Chuck Yeager, piloting the rocket-propelled Bell X-1 in 1947 over Muroc Dry Lake (later Edwards Air Force Base) in Californy.
Later aerodynamic development made the sound-barrier within easier reach, as did more powerful jet-engines.
The X-1 was straight-wing, and didn’t benefit from the aerodynamic developments that came later.
Yeager was extraordinary to extract the speed-of-sound out of that experimental turkey. Earlier test-pilots crashed and died trying.
Later designs were much better.
I remember the so-called “Coke-bottle fuselage” applied to a redesign of the massive Convair F102 Delta-Dagger interceptor.
The earliest iterations didn’t have it, but engineers noticed an airplane was more stable at the speed-of-sound if the fuselage was pinched like a Coke-bottle (or Marilyn Monroe).
So the Meteor was often not as fast as a propeller fighter, or as glamorous.
But it was fast enough to chase the unpiloted jet-powered V-1 flying bombs that Germany was firing at England.
And Meteors shot down a few.
What the Meteor did was display the awesome potential of jet-powered fighter-planes.
It had the one thing fighter-jockeys covet most: raw speed.
Speed is what it’s all about — speed to pursue and catch the enemy, and speed to flee. Wonky performance and compromised maneuverability can be offset with speed.

1932 Ford roadster hot-rod by Roy Brizio. (Photo by Peter Vincent.)
My May 2008 “Deuce” calendar (1932 Ford hot-rods), featuring the 1932 Ford hi-boy hot-rod by Roy Brizio, has only one flaw: the laid-back two-piece DuVall-style windshield.
Sorry, but the ‘32 Ford looks best with the stock one-piece windshield; chopped perhaps — but a two-piece windshield looks out of place.
The ‘32 Ford is an early ‘30s car. A two-piece split windshield is late ‘30s or early ‘40s. It looks out-of-place on an early ‘30s car.
The body is also fiberglass, not the real stock steel body.
Well, I guess that’s okay. Fiberglass is better than no hot-rod at all. The only advantage to the stock steel body is rarity. (And there are companies making reproduction steel bodies for hot-rods.)
Brizio had enough class to remove the exterior body-hinges for the doors; and the car probably has bigger doors and more interior room than stock.
I remember a 5-window Model A coupe hot-rod, a remake of the yellow Milner car from American Graffiti, built by one of the guys who remodeled our kitchen on Winton Road.
It had a plywood floor, and you sat on it.
Chopped, channeled, sectioned and lowered meant it looked great, but was horrible to sit in.
You sat on the floor, scrunched under the roof.
But this Brizio car looks pretty functional.
And it looks great!
The paint, though dramatic, avoids the garishness of flames and heavy pin-striping.
It also shows excellent choice of wheels: American Racing five-spoke mags.
I suppose ya can still get ‘em, but maybe not. Mags always looked great, and now custom-wheels are spindly and garishly overdone. Mags are ‘60s.
The car looks great, except for that windshield.

Orders get hooped up to a northbound Pennsy train at Leolyn, Pa. on the Elmira branch. The engine is an M1a 4-8-2. (Photo by Jim Shaughnessy.)
My May 2008 “Audio-Visual Designs B&W All-Pennsy calendar is a classic shot taken by Jim Shaughnessy.
Shaughnessy was one of the fabled photographic chroniclers of the end of steam-locomotive usage on American railroads.
Steam-locomotion has largely been forgotten, but I am old enough to have been around in the late ‘40s when steam-locomotion was still used on the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines (“REDD-ing,” not “READ-ing”) in south Jersey.
Diesel-electric locomotives began replacing steam in the late ‘30s and ‘40s, but Pennsy hung on until 1957. Supposedly this was because they shipped so much coal, and steam-locomotives burned coal.
They also were rather conservative.
Shaughnessy lived in or around Binghamton, N.Y., so much of his photography is railroads around Binghamton, particularly Delaware & Hudson.
His coverage of Pennsy is mainly the Elmira branch, which went from Williamsport, Pa. up into New York, and eventually a large coal wharf on Lake Ontario at Sodus Point to load coal-bearing lake steamships.
This is the old Northern Central, which went from Baltimore north into New York. (Much of the line is now abandoned; and the coal wharf at Sodus Point is removed.)
Steam-locomotion is something I’ll never forget. A roaring steam-locomotive at full song is a living, breathing animal.
It also was a HUGE technological leap; a mechanical contrivance that made the pack-horse obsolete.
It also could move a lot more freight than mere pack-horses or canal-boats; and unlike canals could operate in winter.
Steam-locomotives weren’t as efficient or effective as diesel locomotion, but far more dramatic.
A few steam-locomotives are still in use, although they’re restorations. Years ago I rode behind Nickel-Plate 765 in West Virginia and it brought tears to my eyes.
That thing was doing over 70 mph!
Shaughnessy was using a 4x5 press-camera that was commonly in use at that time; probably a Graflex or Speed-Graphic.
I used 4x5 negatives for a photography course at Rochester Institute of Technology in the ‘70s, and they were a bear.
But it wasn’t a Graflex or Speed-Graphic. It was a view-camera on an adjustable pole-stand.
It was unwieldy. At least a Graflex is fairly portable; although the negative-size contradicts.
During the ‘50s the Rollei Twin Lens Reflex using 120 roll-film came into use, along with even smaller cameras using 35mm movie-film.
I think 120 film was about 70mm. It had a 2&1/4-inch-square image.
My neighbor in northern Delaware bought a Rollei Twin Lens Reflex, although it was a cheaper model — a RollieCord. He was about 15.
It was at the instigation of salesman Bob at the Custom Sport Shop, our source for HO-scale model trains. Salesman Bob was a railfan, and had shot Pennsy steam.
But twin-lens reflexes suffer from parallax-error, the fact the viewfinder was seeing slightly different from the film.
The workaround was a single-lens reflex, an idea that was just being developed.
With it, by a retractable mirror, the viewfinder saw the same thing as the film: i.e. the viewfinder was looking through the camera lens.
—Don’t know as this is that important, except at close range.
My wife’s mother is always upset her pictures of people with her old Brownie weren’t centered. “I had it centered,” she’d bellow.
Um, parallax-error.
At Houghton College I was introduced to the Pentax Spotmatic single-lens reflex 35mm camera.
Someone was using one to shoot candid shots for the college yearbook.
They loaned me the yearbook Spotmatic for the 1965 Watkins Glen Grand Prix; and it was much better than anything I had ever driven before.
So after I graduated I bought one myself, and ended up using it over 40 years. In fact, I bought a second body, and a slew of Pentax lenses — tried to make my way into freelance photography with it.
My attempt at freelance photography went nowhere, although I sold many race-photos to Road & Track Magazine.
That was long ago in the early ‘70s; and I had my own darkroom and developed my own film and made my own prints.
Mostly it was black-and-white; and usually my film was TriX, since I had the most success with that.
The goal was to barely record an image on the film, kiss the film for a few seconds with developer to render a printable image, and then manipulate the print to get an image. —That way the highlights recorded as printable; hit the film too hard, and the highlights bleached right outta sight.
(I have a slew of prints that are too contrasty; i.e. before this.)
Now I have the dreaded Nikon D100 digital camera, essentially a single-lens reflex recording a digital image onto a memory-chip instead of film. (Nikon has since upgraded the D100; first the D200 and now the D300.)
The D100 was enough to make me switch to digital from my Spotmatics, where I was no longer using the integral light-meter anyway because it could be fooled. —I’d take along the film’s exposure card, and shoot only in sunlight (or daylight).
Digital is much friendlier than film; I’m no longer limited to shooting an entire 24 or 36 exposure roll before I can remove the film.
Just remove the memory-chip and put it in my ‘pyooter.
I also have Photoshop®, which is much better than a darkroom with its messy chemicals.
I also am shooting color instead of black-and-white. Color film back then was a farm-out — no way could I have ever driven all that mess in a darkroom. Black-and-white was messy enough.
Thankfully, pretty much the same rules apply to recent photography as my old photography: namely that every picture needs a foreground — something to give the viewer a sense of scale.
It also doesn’t hurt to allow part of the photo to be out of focus; although I can get more depth-of-field with a smaller aperture. Sometimes a blurred background doesn’t distract from what’s more important — if it were in focus, it might.
I learned all this stuff from viewing photographs used at the mighty Mezz.
I didn’t have that in the ‘70s; although it appeared maintaining contacts was more important than your eye.
So here’s old Shaughnessy standing trackside in the cold on the PRR Elmira branch at Leolyn, Pa., waiting for a train.
A snow-shower starts, and the Leolyn operator comes out to hoop up the train-orders to the fireman of the passing engine.
It’s a fabulous shot; probably fabulous enough to make it number-one ahead of the Stooges.
Shaughnessy never lets us down.

Norfolk Southern freight rumbles across the Mississippi River into Missouri. (Photo by Bob Koehn.)
My May 2008 Norfolk Southern Employees’ Calendar is a photograph of a Norfolk Southern freight-train crossing the Mississippi River toward Hannibal, Missouri.
The photo was taken by Bob Koehn, bridge-tender for the draw in this bridge. —Although I don’t see a draw.
But I would guess we ain’t looking at the entire bridge.
I’m sure the Mississippi is very wide at this point, so there’s a lot more to this bridge than what we see in this picture.
Like what we’re seeing is a segment toward the shore from an island in the river. —The draw is probably beyond the island, in a navigable part of the river.
And like all upper-deck trusses, it’s a tunnel. The train is enclosed by the bridge.
Koehn had to wait until the right moment, when the nose of the lead-unit poked out of the truss.

1978 Indianapolis 500 Corvette pacecar Limited Edition. (Photo by Richard Prince.)
My May 2008 Corvette calendar is a 1978 Indianapolis 500 Corvette pacecar Limited Edition.
Corvette paced the Indy 500 a few times, and 1978 is the first time.
Chevrolet made 6,502 1978 Corvette pacecar replicas, black on silver with red trim — with a complete Indianapolis 500 pacecar decal package if the buyer wanted it installed.
It’s the C3 Corvette, made from 1968 to 1982; great looking, but supposedly a terrible car.
Supposedly quality-control was spotty, and in a drift the car would do a whoopdy-doo: set and then break loose.
You had to be very careful and compensate for its handling flaws lest it spin into the trees. It had immense grip, but was tricky.
There was a discernible hiccup in the suspension. You had to allow a few seconds for the suspension to set up. If you didn’t, it spun.
It was also during the C3 that Corvette became more a profiler’s car than a sportscar — a car for divorced dentists with gorgeous trophy-wives. (Thank you, Belknap.)
Many C3 Corvettes came with air-conditioning; since when is air-conditioning a necessity on a sportscar?
I remember John Greenwood tried to make a racecar out of the ‘Vette, but had to just about reengineer the entire car from ground up. (For example, a stock Corvette would fly at speed.)
Supposedly the C4 Corvettes rectified the handling problems, and the C6 is a great sportscar.
But Corvettes are still more profiler’s cars than a sportscar — a car for divorced dentists. (They’d make a great sportscar in the hands of non-profilers.)
Nevertheless, the 1978 Indianapolis 500 Corvette pacecar Limited Edition is a great looking car.

“Pennsy” is the Pennsylvania Railroad, no longer in existence. It merged with New York Central Railroad in 1968 as Penn-Central, and that tanked in about eight years. “Pennsy” was once the largest railroad in the world.

“Wilmington,” Del. (I lived in a northern suburb of Wilmington as a teenager.)

“Paoli,” Pa., is a western suburb of Philadelphia, about 20 miles out. It’s on the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and is as far west as Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) goes. PRR once had shops there for maintaining self-propelled commuter cars. SEPTA still does. Originally PRR’s electrification only went to Paoli, but that was originally only for commuter-service. Electrification was later extended farther to Harrisburg, for over-the-road electric trains.

“Spitfires” were the supreme British fighter-plane. The SuperMarine Spitfire.

“Chopped” is cut down. “Chopped, channeled, sectioned and lowered” is extensively lowering the appearance of a car. “Chop” means cut out a section of the window-pillars, so the roof can be lowered; “channel” is to build channels in the car-body so it can drop lower on the frame-rails; “section” is to cut a section out of the sides of the car-body, so it isn’t as high; “lower” is to reconfigure the car’s suspension so it sits lower. —Often this meant installing “lowering-blocks” (spacers) between the axle and the springs.

“Model A” Ford, built from 1928 to 1931.

We lived in an old farmhouse in Rochester on “Winton Road;” 1976-1989. By the time we lived in it a suburb had grown up around it. That suburb was later merged into Rochester.

“Mags” are cast-magnesium custom wheels — very light.

“Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines” (PRSL) is an amalgamation of Pennsylvania and Reading railroad-lines in south Jersey to counter the fact the two railroads had too much track. It was promulgated in 1933.

“Northern Central” was bought by the Pennsylvania Railroad about 1880.

“Nickel-Plate 765” is a restored steam-locomotive of The Nickel Plate Railroad. It’s used frequently for railfan excursion service. —Nickel Plate was merged into the Norfolk & Western Railroad, now Norfolk Southern Railroad (see below) and ran from Buffalo to St. Louis and Chicago. It was called “Nickel Plate” by scions from the mighty New York Central railroad, because it offered such stiff competition.

Rochester Institute of Technology is a school founded by Kodak, the lead employer in Rochester years ago. It was first in Rochester, but by 1970 moved to a new campus in the southern Rochester suburb of Henrietta. Founded by Kodak, it specialized in photography and later printing. It’s now a college, and specializes in engineering.

“Custom Sport Shop” was a hobby-shop in Fairfax Shopping Center in northern Delaware, near where we lived.

“Houghton College,” in western New York, is from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it. Houghton is a religious college.

“Watkins Glen Grand Prix” was the one-and-only United States Grand Prix at that time, at Watkins Glen Road Course near Watkins Glen in central New York.

“Dreaded Nikon D100......” —I am loudly excoriated by all my siblings for preferring a professional camera (like the Nikon D100) instead of a point-and-shoot. This is because I long ago sold photos to nationally published magazines.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over two years ago. Best job I ever had.

RE: “train-orders.....” —A segment of a railroad might be unsignaled, so a train might have to operate by train-orders: written instructions as to how to operate over a railroad; e.g. where to stop and take siding so an opposing train could pass. Train-orders would be written up by lineside dispatchers and “hooped up” to the train-crew as the train passed.

“Norfolk Southern” Railroad; a 20-year-old merger of the Norfolk & Western and Southern Railroads. It’s now a major player in east-coast railroading.

Six Corvettes have been made over the years: the first Corvettes — 1953-1962; the early Sting Rays — 1963-1967; the later Sting Rays — 1968-1982; the C4 — 1983-1996; the C5 — 1997-2004; and the C6 — 2005-present. The C6 is the current iteration. —Earlier Corvettes are the C1 through C3. The “C” designation is a fairly recent fan application.

“Belknap” is Tim Belknap, an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked. Like me, Belknap is a car-guy.