Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

 The Blog is taking off for the Holidays.  May yours be warm and happy.

    In the meantime there's a ton of goodies here. Scroll down for the wacky wonderful Coneheads at Silverstone. Or the flip side of that madness to the days of dope and meditation in The Volvo Years.

         if you missed the all-time-record-breaking-hit- monster blog, The Real Allard Story:give it a click.  No, I lied; last week's  tribute to the women who are as"sweet as honey and smile at you like you're made of money," attracted even more hits. And If you missed the 1979 Polish Grand Prix now's your chance.

Or, click on bob judd on the top of this page or slip down the right hand column to click on such gems as  my favorite, How You Look at the Sky.   Or The Kythera Chronicles to shake hands with Barbarossa.

Or just cruise through the links on the lower right hand side of this page, maybe come upon some unexpected little gem like  an excerpt from The Candle,  In Praise of the Belleville Midgets,  The Midgets of Belleville. Part II,  Truth in Grass: a Kansas adventure, The Story of the Larned Eagle Optic, Hollywood Calls, You Pick up the Phone, Hollywood Calls, you pick up the phone part 2 maybe my favorite My Short Happy War in Afghanistan or no, wait, wait, Fangio and the Maserati 250 F for the priceless video of Fangio in a polo shirt and helmet, absolutely relaxed driving a Maserati 250F around a beat up old race track with no run off, no barriers, no safety nothing.  My lunch with Rob Walkeris a good one even though it leaves out the Betty Grable stories. 

       You wouldn't want to miss My Short Happy War in Afghanistan

 

             Then there's Erno Goldfingers house-and-mine, which throws in Ian Flemming, no extra charge. Riding around Laguna Seca with Jackie Stewart was picked up by Jalopnik.com.

              Or Uncle John's Prayer.

               Or Clarence Judd Head-Butts a Truck.  Truck dies. That's a good one. 

             And, of course, the one that started it all, Truck Story.

               Then Virgin calls, and Forrest goes to Hollywood to star with an Electric car. And Forrest does a shoot in bed with Virgin. That one is a lot of fun. 

                Although, you might want to take a look at Pheromone Dreams to see what they are doing in bed in front of a film crew. While you're there it's just a short hop to Nurse Pelvis. 

            Or take a dip in the world's largest concrete freshwater free municipal swimming pool.

           And for a fine rainy afternoon divertimento, click on my dance with a prima ballerina.

 

              For a tasty bite with bon mots check out my friend, Gerry Freeman's foodie blog as  Hungry Gerald.heads for London and Paris.

             Or go visit Elif Batumen, San Francisco's brightest and funniest writer, a fine lady to curl up with for a good read.  Here's Elif's homepage.

             Enjoy, Have a ball.  See you Monday, January 3.

The Fractured Pelvis Chronicles: Nurse Pelvis

            I’d been in the hospital a week when Nurse Pelvis came back from her vacation.

          She was short  and looked like Jaimie Lee Curtis with short legs and extra lines in her face from seeing thirty years of pain and suffering.  Her name was something like Harriet Friedman, but we called her Nurse Pelvis because she had a long story about the time she broke her pelvis and she had this kinda sexy pelvis first walk.

              I was in traction, with a cast on my arm to help the severed tendons in my forearm heal.

            She looked at me frowning. Then she smiled and the room lit up.

         “That’s not a fractured pelvis,” she said. “Your pelvis isn’t even out of place.  It’s just cracked.”

           This was true, my pelvis would take a month of traction in a hospital bed to heal enough to stand, but it wasn’t anything like the massive fractures my dad would suffer years later.

              “I’ll tell you about a fractured pelvis,” Nurse Pelvis went on, smiling happily. “We had a guy in here a couple of years ago who was fixing his roof and fell off. Knocks the wind out of him and sprains his wrist.  So he decides that is not going to happen again.  So before he goes back up to finish fixing his roof, he ties a rope around the trailer hitch on his Suburban, and the other end around his waist.  So he goes back up on the roof and over to the other side where he’s fixing the flashing around the chimney.

                "Then his wife walks out the front door, hops in the Suburban and drives off to do the weekend shopping.  He was in here for a year, his wife left him, he lost his house.

                "That," Nurse Pelvis said with a note of triumph, “was a broken pelvis.”

                As the blog said in Barbarossa, tying yourself to security is really, really dangerous.