One of the best rides I ever got back in my hitchhiking days was a short one – one town to the next one over, here in NH – in an old Saab. It was powered by their three cylinder two-stroke engine, sounded like a pack of angry chainsaws (and smelled like one too) and was driven by a tiny woman with a salt and pepper braid about 3 feet long. She pulled over, I hopped in – noticed the box full of cans of two-stroke oil in the back seat – and we passed a pleasant 10 minute ride talking about cars and who can remember what else. Pointless reminiscence inspired by metacool – also, check out his Flikrstream (this is not a Saab!):

Later – I can’t believe my friend Eliza’s pea soup green 96 slipped my mind – what a good car!
Even later – I remembered another great set of Saab pics driving home tonight – Coop’s from La ’06 Carrera Panamericana. Click through and scroll down just a bit. Check out those Minilite wheels (and that chainsaw exhaust)! More info from el equipo Saabpearl Svenska here.

A few things I’ve run across that I wanted to post…

• One of my very favorite web cartoonists (graphic web-page-ist?) visits the Google campus. Personally, I would have risked failure and filled my pockets at the hundred dollar bar. Also, Echo and Siouxsie Sioux? Awesome!
• A brief trip down memory lane courtesy of Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber. The linked post on ’embodied energy’ (and the subsequent link at the Yorkshire Ranter) are interesting in and of themselves, but it’s the reference to Piero Sraffa and theories of value that takes me back. In the mists of prehistory, when I was finishing my BA in Economics and doing an ill-fated year of graduate work on same, the big battle royale among the theory types on campus was Neo-Ricardians versus Marxists (forget the neoclassicists – boooring >grin<). Ah, good times...
• Inexpensive book scanner. The Plustek Optibook is optimized for scanning bound material – the glass runs right up to the edge, cutting down on shadows and the amount of squashing (grits teeth just thinking about it) one must do to get a good image. Maybe with one of these I could scan some of the books I really ought to cull, making me a little more likely to do so. Haaa, ha, ha, gasp, snort – who am I fooling… h/t BoingBoing
• Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Lot’s ‘o Lovecraftian fun on the interwebs over the past few days – if Darren Naish is going to venture into the biology of Howie’s critters, I can help out with research on the Old Ones – Arkham isn’t too far away and I assume the Miskatonic University archives still have material from the ill fated Pabodie expedition. Semi-seriously, though – I re-read At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu recently – spurred on by Charlie Stross’ A Colder War (you can read it on line by following the link) – and I think that Rucker’s Hollow Earth needs to get queued up on my nightstand. Incidentally – the edition of Mountains of Madness I linked to above is a two-fer – it’s got a great introduction written by China Mieville.

That ought to do it for now…