Thursday meander
What was all that about? Enroute to bed last night I plugged in my iPhone to recharge, giving a quick check on anything I should read. Long situation report about the State Department, with 70,000 employees worldwide, administrative and career foreign service officers, drifting aimless without policy guidance because executive levels below Secretary Tillerson are vacant. No meetings to go to, no policy guidance to implement, employees arriving late, going for walks and long coffee and lunch breaks and going home early, ... Brings to mind, frankly, my last Navy tour of duty in WashingtonDC, that I thought the two assignments I had, first an O5 billet then an O6 billet, were sheer wastes, little to do but stare across the office at the cute women in one direction, watch out the window for Admiral Rickover to come and go in the other, I thought the entire organization should be abolished, seemingly only existed to justify one more four-star admiral at the top, a three-star vice commander, and half dozen or more two-star division heads including my boss. One of the two main things about that tour of duty was the car pool coming and going, we had eight officers in our car pool and everybody had a station wagon (our yellow nine-passenger Olds Custom Cruiser that we'd brought from Ohio). So I’m watching from afar to see what havoc the new administration wreaks in the State Department and other bureaucracies. Trump bent on reducing the WashDC bureaucracy.
What else? Besides snapping the above sky shot from 7H, other news this morning. In the London police department detectives are quitting, leaving the career because of overwhelming workload. One former detective reported having twenty different cases to work on at a time, I don’t know whether to spend a lot of time worrying about that or not, now sabbatical’s over I do have other things to mind. And the sleep habits of elephants, that they may go several days without rest, require less sleep than any other mammal, apparently their size is a factor. Sloths sleeping maybe sixteen hours a day, humans six to eight, but elephants a couple hours down to fifteen minutes or so. Not yet sure how elephant naps fit into a sermon, but I’ll work it in.
Other: cars. Yesterday, waiting outside in the car park while Linda was in Sam’s renewing a prescription, on my iPhone I watched “Hagerty News” videos, the Barn Find Hunter driving his 1939 Ford woody wagon around hunting for great stuff, and finding it here and there. A blue 1960 Morris Minor two-door sedan (saloon), right hand drive, that had come from Australia and New Zealand. We had a Morris dealer in Gainesville during my UnivFlorida years, and making the dealer’s acquaintance I drove several Morris cars, Minors and the next size up (Morris Oxford? WTH it was more than sixty years ago), sedans and station wagons.
The Morris Minor was a neat little car in the day, VW just getting started in America. Seems like I also tried out an English Ford Anglia and Prefect, maybe at the same dealership. No cars coming from Japan yet, middle 1950s. When Linda came out of Sam’s I’d shifted on Hagerty's to the barn find of a Ford station wagon with four speed stick, it was a full size car, Ford did really well with station wagons in those days. I’m thinking this one was, not the fancy Country Squire, but a Country Sedan, all we saw besides the stick shift was the front, car badly rusted, I’m thinking a 1969 judging by the front grill. There was a fender emblem showing a Ford's 428 V8, and we had a Ford Thunderbird fordor with a 428 bought in Newport, RI while I was at Naval War College, but it was a 1967. I think a 1969 Ford hottie was a 429, not sure anymore. That emblem may not have been on that particular Ford that The Barn Hunter was showing us.
That car’s special manufacture for a customer had to be authorized by Lee Iacocca himself when he was FoMoCo president. I loved those big Ford station wagons, but never owned one, for some reason bought GM cars instead, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile. Also two Nash Rambler wagons. One Dodge.