Now the years have flown and the plants have changed,
And you're lucky if you work.
The big line moves but you're lucky if you work.
Back in '55
We were makin' Thunderbirds.

We were makin' Thunderbirds.
We were makin' Thunderbirds.
They were long and low and sleek and fast,
They were classic in a word.**

Daniel Greenfield tells you all you need to know about the current "Motor City" scam in "Halftime for Obama:" "The Motor City brand is one of those things that doesn't mean a whole lot anymore, but still stirs up sentimentality, like the immigrant experience or freedom of speech. That Detroit is as real today as the Chicago depicted in Sandburg's poem which served as the hog butcher, tool maker and wheat stacker to the world. Today Sandburg might have called it a food stamp scanner, scammer and welfare taker instead."American industry is a ghost of that former vigor, its hog butchering, tool making and wheat stacking done in by the progressive vision of a post-industrial society. Today it's Shanghai that might qualify for a Sandburg poem and it's also the only place to find that kind of aggressive industrial growth, but Halftime in Shanghai doesn't sound the same even if Shanghaiing American industry is the name of the game.... "Some of Eastwood's most famous Westerns were actually filmed by Italian directors in Italy. If Sergio Leone could give us Eastwood staging six gun duels in the Apennine Mountains off the Adriatic Sea, then why can't Sergio Marchionne give us Clint Eastwood pacing around an LA stage and breathily pontificating on how hard it is to keep the people and car companies of Detroit down?"

[** From 1982 when we were still makin' rock n roll.]

"Here's the pitch. He swings. It's a long one..... a long one..... it's..... OUTAHERE!"

This video is unlisted at YouTube. Only those with the link can see it. Pass it on.

UPDATE: And it just keeps getting better!

Clint Eastwood Opposed Bailouts Before Ad "We shouldn't be bailing out the banks and car companies," actor, director and Academy Award winner Eastwood told the Los Angeles Times in November 2011. "If a CEO can't figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn't be the CEO."

Clint Eastwood Motor City ad 'not affiliated with Obama' The ad was subject to additional backlash today after it emerged that it wasn't even filmed in Detroit at all - but in New Orleans and Los Angeles.Seems reasonable. Who would want to spend any time in the open sewer of Detroit if he didn't have to? Certainly not a septuagenerian movie star.

"The Derelicts by ICON are known for being vintage classics refashioned into stylish modern vehicles. The hand made classics are one offs that boast a fully patina'd exterior. Jonathan Ward's upgrades and attention combined with a modern Art Morrison powder-coated chassis, unique interiors, and all new electrical components are what make the Derelicts so desirable. The 1952 Chevy Deluxe Business Man's coupe has a 430hp Camaro 6.2 LS3 engine while the 1952 Chrysler Town and Country custom wagon has a DeSoto front end with the power from a late model Hemi engine." -- Via eGarage - VIDEO

Here's more detail on one of the derelicts, a 52 Chevy coupe that is nearly identical to one that I owned in 1970. Could be the same one. I think I sold it for $250.

Come now, gentleman, your love is all I crave.
You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing on my grave.
-- Memo From Turner

The monsters from the id that now control the Democrat Party have transformed that party into a mob of undead extras from The Dawn of the Dead. It's an indecent and disgusting spectacle and I suspect there's more than a few million long-time Democrats who are revolted by it. That certainly seems to be creeping into the polls. No matter the good it once did, the Democrats today present as sick and crazed political party that is so greedy and hungry for power that it will do anything, including selling its country down the drain, to get it back.

Regardless of the race of the Democrats' current leader and failed president, Martin Luther King's dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin has been transformed into a tawdry thing; a dried husk in which they wrap their skeletal remains, a hollow phrase spewed by the ascendent race hustlers of the party and lapped up by their acolytes.

Severe cold continues in Europe

"A man walks past an ice covered car on the frozen waterside promenade at Lake Geneva in Versoix, near Geneva, Switzerland, early Feb. 5. The death toll from the vicious cold snap across Europe has risen to more than 260, with the winter misery set to hit thousands of those seeking to escape it as air traffic was hit."

How cold is the Winter of 2010-2011 in Great Britain and Ireland? Well, it has been "referred to as The Big Freeze by national media. In the UK it was the coldest December ever, since Met Office records began in 1910, with a mean temperature of -1°C. It broke the previous record of 0.1°C in December 1981."

And it obviously broke records for cold set before the "Met Office records began in 1910" as indicated in this souvenir:

Or this bookplate made in 1740,

"In that Obama has rendered no act of contrition or repentance, and is at the moment, at liberty in the land, we do, here and now, separate him from the precious body and blood of Christ, and from the society of all Christians. We exclude him from our Holy Mother Church and all her sacraments, in heaven, or on Earth. We declare him excommunicate and anathema. We cast him into the outer darkness. We judge him damned with the devil and his fallen angels and all the reprobate, to eternal fire and everlasting pain!"

HT: Mabuse

If you're lost you can look and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you
I will be waiting
Time after time -- Cyndi Lauper

You can set out to make ?great art,? but that?s almost always the wrong tack. Set out in that direction and it usually won?t happen. You'll often end up having to come about on a lee shore. ?Great art,? art that endures and grows over time, is almost always a gift. One of its hallmarks is that the creators really aren?t that aware of what they?re doing when they do it. Greater forces than individuals are at play when great art is made. It?s that kind of thing that sort of dawns on you in the classical sense of light coming up slowly out of the dark.

It?s that way with Groundhog Day. Slowly and yet surely this initially unassuming although initially successful film comedy has been revealing itself to be one of the greatest American films. It?s certain that none of the principles set out to make that happen no matter how much its director, Harold Ramis, might like that to be the case. With this film, unlike a number of others, the greatness of it occurs not only through its creation but from what its hundreds of millions of viewers help anneal to the film itself. It?s through this strange symbiosis between creators and audience that the film has become what it is today. It?s the Velveteen Rabbit effect.

In Margery Williams childrens' classic, The Velveteen Rabbit a toy rabbit becomes real through the love of the boy who owns the toy. With Groundhog Day, the film has become real through the love of the people who've seen it; many over and over again. To take another literary metaphor, the reality of Groundhog Day is like Topsy: "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me.? No, nobody did. Everybody did.

There are lots of theories being tossed about concerning Groundhog Day. It seems that many philosophers and most major religions want to make the film their own: In the years since its release the film has been taken up by Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and followers of the oppressed Chinese Falun Gong movement. Meanwhile, the Internet brims with weighty philosophical treatises on the deep Platonist, Aristotelian, and existentialist themes providing the skin and bones beneath the film?s clown makeup.... Countless professors use it to teach ethics and a host of philosophical approaches. --A Movie for All Time - National Review Online

But that all seems to me to be just much of a muchness. Internet pundits, as well as pontifical human beings of all sorts, are famous for blowing things, simple things, all out of proportion.

To my mind, Groundhog Day is a great film because it is a simple film; because it takes up, once again, ?the supreme theme of art and song? as stated clearly by Yeats:

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
After Long Silence

The film, of course, takes this insight and inverts it. Wisdom enough to love is allowed to come, finally, to Phil Connors after a long time spent in the same day. How long a time? That?s subject to some dispute, but the best estimate for the timespan of Groundhog Day is ?eight years, eight months, and 16 days, based on him spending three years learning to play the piano, three years learning to ice sculpt, two years learning French, and six months learning to throw cards into a hat.?

It?s nice we have the Internet to help figure timelines like that out, but to me the "actual" time is also beside the point. The real point of Groundhog Day is that in life you will, sooner or later, have to learn to love, learn to really love, and the lesson on how to love will be repeated until you learn it. How long is that? As Groundhog Day shows us, and one of the reasons we continue to love it more, that time is ?as. long. as. it. take.?

Learning, at long, long last to love is why people everywhere love this film. What makes it great, however, is that in the end we do in fact see Connors, and by extension ourselves, learn this lesson. We find that, in the end, after a long time, love arrives. Sometimes in just one day.

Here?s the best video summation of the film I can find. It?s really the whole show in a time capsule.

"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book." --Northrop Frye

One of the recurring themes in the discussion of the "new media" (internet, blogs, databases, web pages, online encyclopedia's, Google's thirst to control and contain all the information in the known universe, the cloud, ebooks, etc.) is if bytes will "replace" books. To many, it certainly looks that way on any given day at any given rest stop on the Information Highway. After all, the current Holy Grail of Deep Geek Hipness is to have everything -- every scrap, note, frame, word, and image -- stored on one's iPad for display at the touch of a fingertip. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Be that as it may, the book is not going anywhere. Indeed, the book -- in form and concept -- is the foundation of the new media; it is contained within and yet contains it. The very way in which we discuss the new media ( web pages, web browsing, and that constant root of all places cyber, the place, space and file called "index.html" ) asserts that the book remains the dominant permanent record of all things worth keeping. Storage mediums come and go in the cyberverse ( One word: "floppy."), but I don't think that the age when all information and opinions and records and history is held in some immense GoogleServer pile is one which we should welcome. Distributed information is more powerful and more secure when it is distributed not only throughout the Net, but in more than one medium.

The way-new information universe, straddled by the ever growing hulk that is ("First don't be evil." ) Google is barely out of infancy and just about due to grow into "The Terrible Twos." The book, by contrast, represent a fully mature information retrieval system.

What is good about the book? What makes it persistently valuable in storing, not the trivia of the day, but that which is valuable to humanity over the long term?

Let's review:

1) No "advanced" technology required. Ability to manufacture present in all areas of the globe.
2 ) Crude but functioning units can be made by kindergartners with pencil, paper and glue.
3) Operating system and interface rock solid.
4) All types of information can be stored.
5) Has been demonstrated to be able to retain information in retrievable form across several thousand years.
6) Of the two, the User will often crash first.
7) All parts can be recycled.
8) All or part can be backed-up at any Kinkos.
9) Can be powered for hours with one candle.
10) All users receive up to 12 years of interface training free.

Add to that the tactile and aesthetic pleasures of fine books where art combines with craft, and you have something that will be with humankind long after today's high-tech toys are consigned to a museum and listed in their paperback catalog. Perhaps there may be some new innovation at the dawn of some new day that will really and for all time displace the book, but that innovation and that dawn of that day is not yet. For now, if it is a really important bit of knowledge or expression we put it in a book. Just to be safe.

"The Luminarie De Cagna is an imposing cathedral-like structure that was recently on display at the 2012 Light Festival in Ghent, Belgium. It was created from 55,000 LEDs and towered over 90 feet high." --Via A Cathedral Made from 55,000 LED Lights | Colossal

"I don't really need an artisinal flatscreen TV. But I need to see artisans, and feel like one, too." -- S. Cottage

Sippican tracked down this video covering the area of my recent Favorite Shoes: Better Than New | Re-crafting the Red Wing 875 @ AMERICAN DIGEST

"When I restitch a shoe I try to hit all of the same holes with the thread."