Davestuff

Dear Jim, For the eight years I worked at Hemmings, you made it painfully obvious that if I wasn't sitting at my desk with a Word document open, you didn't think I was working. You and Rich Lentinello showed me over and over and again that you felt any time spent out of the office was too long, that a full day was too much time for a feature photo shoot three hours away; and you repeatedly publicly belittled those of us who sometimes "only" worked 8-5. The ludicrous, if informal, "three stories/day" rule for travel served only to generate a great number of truly terrible stories, none of which were ever rejected. Since quitting, I've written just as much as I did while working full time. But with the luxury of being able to do some actual research, the quality of my work has improved. And when I don't have anything pressing, I'll stop and read a book, or go for a walk, or play a game, or watch a movie, or just stay home. Because writing isn't...

IVOR LARSSEN: TENNIS PRO             Smash!  Grunt!  “30-Love!” calls the umpire.  Ivor takes a couple new balls from the ball girl, Linda, he thinks her name is.  He tries to learn all their names, but with over 30 tournaments in a normal season, and half-a-dozen or more matches in a good tournament, it’s hard.  Bounce, bounce, toss…Whack!  Damn.  Let.  The crowd whistles with the Cyclops and the umpire calls for silence.  OK, still first serve.  Bounce, bounce, bounce, toss…Whack!  That one feels good from the moment he reaches up, a high kicker at the corner.  But Joseba “Joe” Zulaika, the Basque great currently ranked in the top 30 in the world, has read Ivor’s motion and is ready with a backhand down the line.  Ivor comes up to the net following his serve and cuts it off, slicing it hard to the other side.  “40-Love!” call the umpire.   S...

2000 Ford Contour Sport It is an unloved, small American car today, but the Ford Contour was designed to be revolutionary. It was designed to be the first new World Car in 50 years. For some carmakers, the phrase “world car” has a frighteningly compelling ring. Like perpetual motion machines, squaring the circle or mysterious black helicopters, in some minds it can be an obsession that drives you mad, and, if you’re Ford, to the brink of ruin. Standing next to a first (US) generation Contour today, your first reaction is “So what? It’s a used Ford.” Your second, if someone reminds you of the numbers, is: “This thing cost six billion dollars? Didn’t I rent one of these once? Did they actually sell any?” The answer is complicated. If we’re generous, we can call US sales one million (peaking in ‘98 with about 260,000 combined Contour/Mystique). But let’s not forget, this is a World Car, so we can add sales of the foreign market Mondeo (which was comprehensively reworked by 1...

Fun Fact: On March 15, 1863, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles met with my Great- something grandfather William Aspinwall and John Forbes at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to discuss sending the two to England to buy suspected Confederate gunboats, specifically two ironclads under construction by Laird Brothers. For plausible deniability of what would be a covert action in direct contradiction to both Lincoln administration policy and international law, Chase only told two other people in the Union government about it. To lay groundwork, Forbes and Aspinwall personally funded the English activities of Lincoln’s spymaster Thomas Haines Dudley, whose network quickly identified a number of potential targets. Chase provided $10 million in 5-20 treasury bonds to obtain capital in England. Forbes sailed on March 16, and Aspinwall came two days later, bearing his trunks full of bonds. where in early April Forbes and Aspinwall obtained a £600,000 ($3 ...

Introducing the world’s first ever scientifically proven precipitation enhancement device (PED) for small and midsized farms. The Traverado PED© is based on research conducted by the US Army and is the only method of increasing rainfall that works on a small scale—right over your crops. The story of the Traverado PED© is one of coincidence, research and discovery, and for inventor Dr. David Traver Adolphus, it started one day in fourth grade. On that overcast day, his school held one of their periodical air raid drills*. When the big siren on the roof went off, David joined his classmates under their desks, and waited for the all-clear to sound. So he had plenty of time sitting under there to think, and to look out the windows, and then to wonder: “Why did they always seem to hold air raid drills when it rained?” A seed was planted. The seed didn’t sprout until years later, when Dr. Traver Adolphus saw a magazine article about new military technologies, including non-lethal pacif...