floundering

for content.

all I want for Christmas is

1932 was a rough year for the auto business and the end of the line for designer Charles Weymann.

Weymann was born in 1889, three years after our ClockTower.

He was first accomplished in aviation but soon drawn into the luxury auto-body market.

By 1926 he had made a fortune on his patents, boasting licenses for a wide range of innovative features.

He used metal plates in wooden car bodies to eliminate squeaks.

His door latch hardware design was the quietest and best in the business.

And he made a wild bet on fabric-covered automobiles that paid off bigtime.

This 1932 DV-32 fabric covered Stutz Super Bearcat was the bees knees of its day.

But it was a very expensive ride, over $100,000 in today’s money.

Even the wealthy had a hard time keeping up after the stock market crash in ’29.

A simple shift from a steel body to aluminum added $2500 more to the cost, on an already very expensive automobile. 

They finally outpriced their buyers.

1932 saw his last line of auto bodies and he returned to aviation until his death in 1976, at 87.

This Bearcat is one of the last two remaining, from an original production run of only 12.

It goes on auction March 12th, 2015.

Santa, please take note. Thanks.

promises kept

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Were_Promised_Jetpacks

west 79th

I agree

With the Sony hack up and the Pirate Bay down, there’s a lot going on in network law enforcement.

Sony, for its part, has no more secrets and the FBI still cannot pin the hack on North Korea.

Pirate Bay, the most resilient unlawful music and movie copier went down hard yesterday and as of this morning, remains inaccessible worldwide.

Swedish police raided their Portlane data center, hidden deep in Sweden’s bedrock.

The SONY datadump is a victory for the hacker underground.

Shuttering Pirate Bay, even temporarily, is a symbolic victory for artists everywhere but it’s like emptying the ocean with a teacup.

Google’s Eric Schmidt would have us believe we face a binary decision: 

That’s spoken as a wealthy man making bank against Canadian pharmacies and stolen movie downloads.

His underlying premise is the internet is global and unprecedented and that barriers should not exist to anything technology will provide. 

But that’s nonsense. 

It permits the Sony hack and Pirate Bay, and business has operated globally for a very long time.

avoxi.com

An ethical society should resist any deliberate conflation of lawful behavior as some form of “online censorship.”

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner observed in his keynote address at the State of the Net conference in 2012: 

Christmas by the numbers

1 douglas fir tree

2 ambitious families

3rd Avenue Bridge

4 all the right reasons

5th Annual Harlem Christmas Tree Walk 

and Bridge Climb

6 foot evergreen 

7 hungry people

and so we 8!