1440 New Customers For You Each Day

Think of it. Every day there are 1440 new customers available to make your business a success*. And the best part is you do not have to pay marketing research organisations or social-marketing firms to access this bonanza – these people are provided by Heaven for you. We have the solemn word of one of the most successful marketers of the 19th century on this.

You may be thinking that your business might not fit into the demographic, or target planform, or mimeographed list on the local IGA notice board – and that as a consequence you will miss out on connecting. You need have no fear – it does not matter what you are selling, or giving away with a small charge for shipping and handling – with 1440 new clients each day – and that includes Sunday – you cannot fail to make a profit each and every day

It doesn’t matter whether you are selling sanctity or saccharine – whether your scheme involves animal, vegetable, mineral, or morality – you will find a mental string that can be plucked. Once it begins to vibrate, their money loosens and flies out of their purses and wallets. And once it flies your way, all you need is a fish net to scoop it up.

Often, just a simple paragraph will pluck enough of these mental strings to set up the sound of a full orchestra. Try this:

Are you worried about your children being exposed to secret black government helicopters spraying mind-altering GMO gluten trails in the ionosphere? Are your chakras accessing enough ancient vibrational conspiracies by the secret society – and you know who we mean…Are muslim Methodists taking over the air compressor at your local service station? Well, write in NOW for the book that they could not suppress. $ 39.95 plus postage, handling, and taxes ( slightly higher in Washington State and Mississippi ) will free you from your dependency on Big Parsley forever. You owe it to your grandchildren. And they have debt collectors to see that you pay.

Are your strings vibrating? Sounds like Berlioz on speed, doesn’t it? Well we can put you onto this same gravy train of gravitational unified energy fields – and if you build the fields, they will come. Some of them come several times. And you can purchase full HD video of it. Who said marketing couldn’t be fun?

*  One born every minute…

 

 

 

 

Can You Afford To Own A Chevrolet?

Or put another way – If they try to sell you a Plymouth can you Dodge the question?

No good Nash-ing your teeth over it either…

How odd that as we pull away from the curb into the twenty-first century in Australia, we should do so in the Toyota, Subaru, Daihatsu, Nissan, Suzuki, Honda, Mitsubishi, and Fuso vehicles. Or, if we have been successfully greedy, in Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Lancia cars.

We should be hard pressed to do the same in a Humber, Standard, Triumph, Rover, Hillman, Austin, or Vauxhall.

And yet today I will go to a car show that glories in Ford, Chevy, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Willys, Cadillac, Mercury, and Chrysler. And they will be spectacular and bright…or rotten and rusty…but will reflect the best of a car builder’s skill. Very few of them will be oriental or continental. What do the hot rodders and custom car builders know that the rest of us have forgotten?

Can we be reminded by an industry that needs to stop repeating what Europe and Asia say? Can we still build what we need, for ourselves, where we live? I hope so.

 

The Fire Belle

The owners of luxury motor cars must do a great deal of comparing and subtle bragging when they get together over the brandy and cigars. They probably assert ever-higher performance and engine size as well as going on about the electronic gadgets and the overly plush upholstery. And they probably skite about how expensive their cars are but how cheaply they got them for…the rich are like that.

None of them, however, can have a word come out of their luxuriously imported mouths that speaks louder than this little Fiat coupe.

Topolinos and Topolino bodies are no stranger to the hot rod world…indeed I have seen more of these tiny Italian coupes with racing slicks and violent exhausts than ever in stock form. The vintage Fiat Topolino is a charming mini car, and I should love to own one, but this Fiat has something special – an engine that no luxury cars could ever aspire to…It is wrapped around an American LaFrance fire truck engine.

Not a daily suburban driver, perhaps. Nor yet the sort of vehicle one would choose to travel across the Nullarbor with a caravan in tow. Probably poor on petrol mileage, and the radio would struggle keep up with the engine and road noise.

The engine is V 12 but apparently can be run on half of those cylinders. It has double of a lot of things – for reliability. I would advise that readers enlarge the notice board and get the info fresh.

Apparently it is over 500 cubic inches in the engine. Eeeeeee… And my complements to the designer who thought of the dog. perhaps they can find him a small fireman’s helmet in the future.

Note: Sydney was taken on the Fujifilm X-T10 with the 18 and 27 mm lenses plus the ef-42 flash. In the event, the flash was not needed much. That little X-T10 is getting to be the go-to for exhibitions due to the waist-level finder.

The Mini-Motor Trade Monthly Report

Well, the last of the boxes have arrived from New South Wales – this year’s quota of new die-cast models for my collection are ready for unboxing and display.

Or, I should say, they are ready for further work. They have already figured in complex plans for photo shoots and now it is time to prepare them for their roles. They will be unboxed and the worst of the anomalies ground off them…by this I mean any mounting posts that the makers have left visible on the bottom of the chassis. They do this even on some quite pricey models and the result can spoil low-level shots if you are not observant.

Then it will be time to consider whether there should be any weathering. While I am quite enamoured of the normal wear and tear look of normal daily drivers, some of these cars are always going to be showpieces or central players in advertising scenarios. That means clean tyres and no road grime on the sides of the body. The license plates might need to be changed and little anomalies polished out, but essentially the models are ready to go.

There is one model scheduled for a big repaint straight away, and I have no idea exactly how to do it yet. It will be a complex pattern with advertising signage and extra accessories glued on. It goes to the back of the queue…

I am starting to collect more trailers and caravans as well, and have started to notice more of them in the smaller scales ass well. They certainly appear to have been a popular subject for the classic die-cast makers of England and France in the 50’s and 60’s. I would add some of them to the collection except that the market seems to regard them as far more valuable than new models. I am not a great fan of being driven to overspend by someone else’s urging.

And then we’ll start on the structure building and the set making for the new shoots. A new building was completed this week, and will show up in the studio shortly. I am getting better at assessing what degree of detailing is necessary for a good appearance on the photographic table and the new foamcore construction methods are speeding the construction no end.

And finally, the new series of Hot Rod Honeys and Hunks shoots started last weekend with a Hollywood starlet and a pesky news reporter at The Goldfisch Studios. The prep shots were all ready to go beforehand and I am happy to say that the talent were perfect in their roles. The only technical hitch occurred  when the studio cameraman inadvertently turned off the RAW recording on the camera and only saved medium fine JPEGs. Fortunately Fujifilm JPEGs are superb and the images are excellent. A dumb mistake…he’d get fired if it wasn’t for nepotism.

 

 

Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory…

Have you ever noticed that whenever Hollywood movies play ” The Battle Hymn Of The Republic ” someone is going to get a well-deserved pasting?

The rest of the movie might have been occupied with the Americans getting slaughtered in great numbers – tanks, planes, and ships blowing up and all – but when the chips are finally down the old Civil War song comes on and business starts to pick up. This has been the case ever since it was written, and I hope it continues in the future.

Make no mistake about it – I am on the side of the US in past and future wars. It was a point of polite contention when I was a guest of the old Confederate Historical Society here in Western Australia, and it is bound to be a factor when in social gatherings in the future. People who point out that I was raised in Canada and am a naturalised Australian citizen and thereby hope to change my mind can go and get knotted – and I am prepared to buy them a Boy Scout manual to assist them at it. I still admire the US and the US military.

It’s not a popular view – at least not in the trendy pink-tinged circles I frequent. Contempt for the American military is a basic tenet of the locals – and I have learned to largely ignore it. For my part I have developed my own assessment of foreign claims to military or historical fame…but have kept them to myself. I shall continue to do so – I prefer to live on speaking terms with my friends.

I also keep my opinion about political figures in the USA to myself – aware that it would be as pointless to air them as it is to listen to others. We in Australia are…to put it bluntly…in Australia…and would do well to concern ourselves with our own governance. We’ll need all our wits about us to remain on good terms with the Asians now that the price of iron ore has fallen and the price of apartments in Sydney has risen…

I wonder – is there any other piece of music – save the ” Marseillaise ” – that is so evocative in a motion picture? I can’t imagine Canadians turning steely at ” O Canada ” though I must say that whenever I heard ” The Maple Leaf Forever ” I experienced an overwhelming desire to beat up on a Quebequois. To be fair, I felt that way when I heard a doorbell. French-Canadians’ll do that you ya.

 

 

The Little World – Modelling Yourself A Story

The featured image is where I lived in 1959. This house still stands and is seemingly occupied by people no different from who we were. Google Earth has revealed their choice in cars and vinyl siding, and the prodigious growth of the tree out front of the place in the intervening years. The rest of the landscape – mostly volcanic rock – is unchanged. Apart from Mt St. Helens, not a lot can change in the rocks around there.

In making the model I have surprised myself. I was able to locate models of the cars that my Grandfather, Father, and Uncle owned at the time. I was able to fill the garage with the tea chests and Bekins barrels that were the common receptacles of our nomadic life. All that is needed now is a red Raleigh bicycle to complete the picture.

It has been the work of a month, and encourages me to think that I can tackle much more complex structures…if only I can think of them. As we lived many places there are lots of possibilities – but in the future I am going to be guided by the principle of modelling my own experiences rather than those of others. This is not to decry other people’s work or interests, but to tell my story rather than repeat that of others. We get enough second-hand and third-hand political, religious, and moral instruction as it is.

Or rather, we are enriched by other’s visions in art, and can be enriched by the same in modelling…but we are far better showing our own art rather than repeating that of others.

I am encouraged to think that I do not need to restrict myself to just the cars of the 50’s and 60’s…I’ve been driving since then and I’ve gotten to see some pretty exotic vehicles. It is as valid for me to stage modern car shows as it is to make models of old houses – I am still telling my own tale.

The Little World – Internet Lists

There is nothing more boring than reading an internet list of lumber sizes…or advertisments from roofing firms in the state of Washington. Unless you are trying to find out something that everyone takes for granted and no-one bothers to record.

I will say that today has had a happy ending – I did find out the measurements for siding on houses in Washington in 1959…and I did find out the forms of cheap mastic roofing sheets that were in use at the time. No-one else in the world cares a damn but at least I can use some of the innumerable facts in storage to do something useful. It is going into the construction of my new model building – a house I lived in as a child.

There must be a whole universe of practical facts that we have come to live with and depend upon…but take no notice whatsoever of. The capacity of concrete trucks…which determines how much concrete they can carry…which determines largely how big a concrete structure is.

This does not apply when you are building flak towers in Vienna and have the slaves of the Todt organisation to make the concrete – then you can make the walls metres thick and impossible to remove, even now. But when you are making a cost-limited structure like a basement for a tract house I would be willing to be a fair amount of the planning and design is predicated on concrete loads per se. Fewer is better, and even numbers of loads are desireable to cut down on wastage.

That’s concrete – I was researching siding and found that there were really only three lengths supplied – all of which are shorter than modern practice. Why? Because the delivery trucks were shorter. There was no sheet siding used as it was just before the era of the vinyl cladding. I would also be willing to bet that it might have been James Hardy asbestos siding as well – sourced from the Canadian plants rather than the Australian ones. Good thing the paint finish was unblemished and I didn’t breathe heavily.

I was terrifically impressed with the roofing sites – mastic is a large sheet of heavily filled tarpaper with patterns impressed upon it but the use of it rather than shingles, tiles, or metal sheets argues that the house we lived in was a cheap-built kit job. As a kid I never had that impression – it was big and complex. I had little to compare it to – all the rented houses we lived in were of the same construction, and none of them home for long enough to form a distinct impression. Perhaps the entire world lived in simpler houses then…

All the same, I wish they had used longer pieces of siding for the thing – this gluing 150mm strips in is getting tedious.