Category Archives: Around home

Vintage races @ Laguna Seca: Ferrari

Around home, Cars, Uncategorized, ,

I’ve read somewhere – and I completely believe it – that Ferrari is the most hit on luxury website. Why not, it is probably the most famous car on the planet, everybody loves them, and they have become very good at marketing, but Ferrari wasn’t always good at marketing and its history is filled with stories of cranky Enzo Ferrari – who called himself il Commendatore – getting in fights with customers. One famous fight was with Ferruccio Lamborghini who went on to make his own cars.

What Ferraris did have was character. Then know as Scuderia Ferrari – Ferrari Stable – the engines were designed by people with great Italian names like Gioacchino Colombo, Aurelio Lampredi, and Vittorio Jano, usually the bodies were designed by Pinin Farina – who later became Pininfarina – and by Carrozzeria Scaglietti. One of their great engineers was Giotto Bizzarrini, and buyers knew who the designers were of their individual cars.

In the early days, not only was Ferrari a marketing dunce, but not all the cars were gorgeous, like they are now. Actually, not all Ferraris are even good looking, but when they were good looking, they were gorgeous.So gorgeous with character, no wonder they are now so sought after.

This year, the car du jour was the Ferrari 250  GTO, celebrating its 50th birthday. On Sunday, over at the Pebble Beach Concours, there was a gathering of 22 0f the total 39 GTOs that were made. The 22 cars had an estimated total worth of somewhere between $400 million and half a billion dollars. Jeeeze!

Like most great Ferraris, the 250 GTO was built to race. By the late 50s and early 60s, Ferrari was not doing well in the production – street car as opposed to all out racing cars – sports car classes. People were racing street cars like Corvettes or Porsches or Jaguars and Ferrari was not doing well. He wanted part of the action. But, to get into the production car class, there had to be a certain number made. At the time I remember the number being twenty five but I now read it was one hundred.

The most luxurious cars being raced, at the time, were known as Gran Turismo, or Grand Touring, or GT cars, meaning the kind of car one would use to drive, encased in luxury, from Rome to Lake Como or San Francisco to Pebble Beach for a weekend. Ferrari called his new car a GT, but these were not luxury touring cars. They were hard core street racers with racing engines and lightweight bodies. Staggeringly good looking bodies! When these Ferrari GTs were accepted as eligible  to race as regular cars by the FIA – the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile – Ferrari sent each of the owners a chrome “O” making them GTOs and signifying they had been homologated into the FIA’s Group 3 Grand Touring Car category (O for omologata in Italian). (Even though he only made 39 250 GTOs, the requirement to be a production car could have been one hundred as il Commendatore was not above faking car numbers.)

There were so many GTOs at the races this year that they had their own class. Here are a couple, one early and one late, getting ready to go out and play in the fog. The fact that each car is different is part of what makes them so valuable.

And a shot of the luxury interior with the typical, for Ferrari, shifter.

And a couple of details.

My favorite racing Ferrari is the the first Testa Rosa – redhead in English -which was designed to be a fairly inexpensive customer race car designed by Scaglietti. Also and very importantly, the Testa Rosa had drum brakes while the British had disc brakes which are much better. Because disc brakes were a British innovation, Ferrari refused to adopt them for a long time (in racing years). He thought all his cars needed was more cooling air across the brakes, so Scaglietti designed huge airducts resulting in the designative  pontoon fenders. The result was the car below which is similar to one that sold last year for about $16 million.

One of the factors making this such a desirable car is the V12 engine designed by Gioacchino Colombo, with its six carburetors and the red cam covers to show how hot it was. BTW, Testa Rosa means redhead.

Here is a Testa Rosa mixing it up with two other delicacies, a Maserati Tipo 61 – one of my very favorite cars, known as the Birdcage because of its complicated birdcage-like frame – and, on the left, a D Type Jaguar.

 

 

 

Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Time

Americana, Around home, Art, Current Affairs, Games, Sports,


We went to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby meet last Saturday night with almost no preconceived ideas. It was delightful.

I first heard about the revival of Roller Derby in an article titled Revolution on Eight Wheels by Diane “Lady Hulk” Williams – the Lady Hulk part is very important, it turns out – in which she talked about going to a match thinking it might be exploitation and falling in love with the sport and the team. After going to one game, it seems easy to do.

I am fascinated by the way our culture is changing – especially in regard to women and minorities – and I am fascinated by the way that change is reflected back into the culture by our public stories, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know, technically, that Joss Whedon wrote Buffy so it could be called non-public, but Buffy ran for seven season because it resonated with society’s changing image of women. So going to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby match? game? roll-off? seemed right up my alley. It was in Oakland and we went with Courtney Gonzalez.

Courtney , Michele, and I met for dinner at a local pizzeria called Pizzaiolo – although calling Pizzaiolo a pizzeria is a little like calling a Bentley a car – and then went over to the Oakland Convention Center to see the B.A.D.’s – B.ay A.rea D.erby girls – All Star team, The Golden Girls, play the Austin Texecutioners _whose colors are black and blood – as part of a Roller Derby tournament. Dinner was slower than I expected and I was getting agitated that we would be too late but we ended up getting to the game just in time. I had expected that we would walk into a packed  house and not even be able to see the track.

 

It turns out that Flat Track Women’s Roller derby is not packing in the crowds…yet. But it will. It has everything, sexily dressed women, real hard-driving athletic competition, high scoring, and a warm family outing sort of atmosphere. Oh! and it is very casual: for example, each player, of course, has a number, but the numbers have no rhyme or reason. The San Francisco numbers are 11, 101, 666, 1619,16, Ohh, 170c, and so on. And each player has a stage name? porn name? Some of my favorites were Astronaughty, Ivy Profane, Huck Sinn, and Aunti Christ on the San Francisco team and Lucille Brawl, The Killa Sal Monella, Belle Starr – her number is 1889, the year of Belle Starr’s death – and Vicious Van GoGo on the Austin team.

The persona of Women’s Roller Derby – flat track, atleast – is of tough, maybe even nasty, women. It is anything but. Maybe because the teams are owned by the players, which means women, or maybe it is for some other reason, but the atmosphere is nonthreatening. Very nonthreatening in a counter culture way. It is as if they pretended to be  tough to hide their tender, vulnerable, welcoming selves. But the games are rough and tough. Women get knocked down, they get hurt, they get knocked out of the game.

Scoring is based on – very roughly – a jammer starting behind the scrum – for lack of a better name – fighting through the scrum, going around the track and catching up with the scrum, and then getting one point for each opposing player the jammer passes. Here are a few shots:

 

 

 

 

The Golden girls won by a landslide – the first time they have beaten the Austin Team.

 

 

 

 

 

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San Francisco Pride Parade:The start and finish

Americana, Around home, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized,

Like a James Bond movie, or a fireworks display, the Pride Parade starts with a bang and ends with a bang. The middle was much more prosaic; not prosaic like the Sonoma Fourth of July parade which was white bread boring prosaic, prosaic like regular people prosaic. The Pride Parade starts with Dykes on Bikes. Dykes on Bikes are famous enough so that even I, who before now – had never been to a Gay Parade – have seen dozens of pictures of Dykes on Bikes.

Still, they were a surprise. Surprise number one was that many, if not most, of them on rice-burners, less on Harleys than I had expected. Number two, there were just less of them than I expected. Number three, they soon turned into something more akin to Maidens on Mopeds. Then, rapidly, nice guys in pink shorts, holding hands. I don’t say that derogatorily, it was the most charming thing about the Parade. Just nice people saying Please accept me as I am.

There were times when the spectators were more fun than the paraders.

As an aside, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people who are here, on display. People who put together a costume or outfit to go to the parade or be in the parade and people who get out their costume. The costume, or one of the costumes, that they already had. I lived with a woman, with a spectacular body, who had what she called a cat suit; it was a very tight, black, body suit . She would get out whenever she could. Halloween? Check, wear it with rabbit ears. Costume party? Check, wear it with a white collar and black tie. San Francisco Pride Parade? I’m sure the answer would have been, Check, just wear it. End aside.

But the paraders were plenty entertaining even if they were sometimes a little hard to understand.

 

And then came the finale: the horsey set and the leather crowd . Both gay and straight and, to my eye at high noon, not all that appealing. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves. It reminded me of the joke; What did the sadist say to the masochist?….. Nooo!

That was pretty much the end of the parade, but it is not where I want to end the post. What moved me most about the parade, what brought me close to tears a couple of times was not the wild and wicked; it was the quiet and nice. The normal. I think that explains what is happening right now with gay marriage and the mainstreaming of gays in general. As long as they were in the closet, in the popular imagination, they could be anything. And past the popular imagination, they could be and do the unimaginable. As they came out of the closet, they began to just be other people. With problems and worries just like anybody else.

So the couple above just becomes another older, sort of overweight couple and not a couple of wackos or, maybe, not yet. The people below just become neighbors, some of who want to get married.

 

 

 

 

The missing baby

Around home, Current Affairs, Uncategorized

We have a deer with a bad leg that lives near our house and spends a lot of time in our backyard. Last year she had two babies: one with a goiter on its neck that just disappeared, and I saw the other one by the side of the road, dead. A couple of days ago, both Michele and I saw a new born doe by the side of our house. Michele said that when she saw it, it was still wet and when I saw it, it was standing, near its mom, on very shaky legs.

Then the baby was gone.

Last night, just at dawn, Michele looked out and saw the baby with its mom. It makes us both feel better.

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The 350th post – Our Backyard in Semi-spring

Around home

This has been a cold and late wet year and not much has bloomed. Yet? or this year? is still to be determined. We don’t think that the Memorial Dogwood will bloom at all and most of the azaleas and rhododendrons are only semi-blooming. In the greenhouse, almost everything is still asleep. It is a very strange year.