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The Sheet Metal Ship of Theseus

August 8, 2026 4 Comments

Everyone’s talking about Homer’s The Odyssey these days. Now, don’t get me wrong, Homer’s OK. If you want to get hopped up on hoplites, The Iliad‘s a great read. It’s got Achilles hectoring Hector until they go mano a mano in front of the trailer park of Troy. It used to have a hot Helen, and the original Greeks bearing gifts. Great stuff. Way to go, Homer. The Odyssey however, is plain goofy. As assigned reading, that book got thrown across the room more often than the TV guide.

If you’re in the market for Attic legends, my man Theseus was way more interesting than Odysseus. Only guy to go into the minotaur’s parking garage and come out victorious. United southern Greece under Athenian rule, and founded the cult of Aphrodite. You have to give it up for anyone who can start a cult and make it stick. I guess Waco is the exception that proves the rule.

It’s the ship of Theseus I’m especially interested in.

In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the craft on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. Over time, various of its timbers rotted and were replaced. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: If no pieces of the original remained in the current ship, was it still the Ship of Theseus? If it was no longer the same, when had it ceased existing as the original ship?

I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully, natch) to convince people that a house is a ship of Theseus, lo these many years. And in my opinion, it’s a good thing it is. A house with components that “never need maintenance” is disposable, not permanent. I testify that people actually used to like caring for their homes. They used to putter around on the weekend, stripping screws, mowing their brown lawns, and wearing out the knees on their jeans. Now people’s houses are plastic, the people mostly are, too, and jeans are purchased with the knees blown out while they’re still on the rack.

It’s lonely out here in the intellectual forest, so I’m forced to quote myself on the topic:

People don’t like this idea. They want to think of their house as a permanent structure. Don’t get me wrong, they want to tinker with it. But they only want to add stuff. They just don’t ever want to maintain the place. They want to buy hot tubs and tanning beds and ceiling fans and exercise bikes and GATHER signs from the Hobby Lobby, and put them hither and yon in their house. They build rooms in the basement to do what they should be doing in the rest of the house, but you can’t watch football with a Live Laugh Love sign hanging over your couch. That’s the living room, where normal people don’t live. The neighbors would mock you.

So, what’s all this got to do with a 1973 Mercury Shitbox Montego? Everything, sorta. It illustrates the maxim, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Simon Fordman, the ingenious and dedicated fellow you see in the video fixing that car, is demonstrating a new generation’s rhyming version of my affection for the Single Family Dwelling Ship of Theseus. My example was sticks and bricks — a house. His is sheet metal and Naugahyde. Either can continue being the original, useful thing, no matter how much of it you have to swap out over the years.

Simon is not alone. Kids these days (I can’t believe I just typed that) are fascinated with old cars in the same way I’m fascinated by old houses. They love wrecks long destined for the crusher, but somehow left rusting away in a field or a barn somewhere. My own son used to look at Bring a Trailer before he was old enough to drive. They see the value in them, no matter how ugly (honestly, a Montego?) they are.

Why aren’t kids as interested in the Ship of Real Estate Theseus as I am? I’m not sure I can blame them. Maybe it’s the total takeover of every aspect of home improvement by the distaff set. Hoary old shows like This Old House used to show actual work being performed by actual men. Now construction cable shows are all girls picking out throw pillows and hanging Gather signs, occasionally pretending to operate tools, while anonymous dusky men scurry around in the background doing all the real work while trying to avoid deportation. When construction becomes Shoe Shopping at Home Depot, maybe men look elsewhere for a safe space. Old cars will fit the bill until men are driven out of that, too.

I’ve posted a handful of car restoration (resurrection, really) videos recently. I especially like the examples with no soundtrack or banter, like this Montego exorcism. It seems like just another way for a new generation to differentiate themselves from an older one, who favored Born to Be Wild background soundtracks for their car repair videos. Working alone is quite common among the younger set, although they have a network of like-minded friends when they need a hand or a carburetor part or something.

Kids figure that a vehicle is a valuable thing, worthy of their busted-knuckle blood and auto parts receipt treasure. Why wouldn’t they? There’s real treasure hidden under the mold and mouse droppings of an abandoned car. Let’s say a new car costs fifty grand. That’s just the cover charge, of course. In addition, you have to pay exorbitant interest on elephantine loans, taxes out the wazoo, and even if it’s brand new, eyewatering mandatory maintenance costs performed by dealer mechanics in lab coats with big clipboards to hold all the zeros on the bill.

Part of this trend is simply what’s possible nowadays. Nothing in any of these car restoration videos is mysterious to me. I’ve done a slipshod job at a lot of the operations depicted. But back in the day, both the information necessary to know what to do, and the availability of car parts to do it, was light years harder to find. These guys are performing miracles, don’t get me wrong, but maybe the most miraculous thing is how easy it is for them to immediately get any kind of gasket, belt, or rebuild kit for 50-year old cars. We had to fight snakes in junkyards to get the same stuff most of the time. And the knowledge? Mostly hard knocks, and hearsay back before the intertunnel. These videos are incredible not only for what they’re accomplishing, but how well they’re depicting it. It’s cinematic shop class, and you could take a whack (literally, sometimes) at fixing a similar car just by watching a few of these videos. And stocking up on Marvel Mystery Oil, transmission fluid, and band-aids.

So stay with me here. If a new car is worth fifty grand plus, then an abandoned car is worth that, too, if all you care about is using it for its intended purpose, which is transportation. In the words of Peter Lawrence of Arabia O’Toole, what seems impossible to some is quite doable if you’re dedicated enough to pull it off. “It’s only a matter of going.”

And bringing a trailer.

I Read All These Books and Boy Are My Lips Tired

July 26, 2026 21 Comments

It occurs to me now that the books I read when I was young affected me deeply, although it didn’t seem that way at the time. They weren’t presented to me in some sort of Skull & Bones ceremony as sacred texts or anything. It’s just what we had hanging around.

Over 50 years ago, many a child received a well rounded education outside of school. For us, books were scarce, because they were relatively expensive, but the libraries were much better than today, so we weren’t starved for reading material.

I think today’s children are much less well read, and they don’t get exposed to important, goodhearted allegorical images and concepts early in life as much as we did back in the day. Actually, I’m certain of that, because the third book on my list is currently banned. I’m sure others will end up on the pyre sooner or later, if they aren’t already. And the local library? It’s an expensive but useless civic appendix that only exists to collect vile stuff in one place.

This list isn’t intended to be exhaustive. I’ll only list what I can remember of books that were important enough to own, and have malingering on the shelf in our house. They got read all the more, some over and over, because there weren’t that many of them:

Aesop’s Fables– Aesop, I guess

It’s the bargain basement of morality. Something for everyone. Allegory is an important concept to grasp, and the sooner you get it, the sooner you realize that there can be meaning in the subtext of everything.

Aesop’s is training wheels for your soul. As an added bonus, if you’ve read Aesop’s you know where Bug Bunny re-runs got their material:

Grimm’s Fairy Tales– Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

A fairy tale is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish from a fable. Grimm’s is a great introduction to folk traditions, some of which once warned kids off of accepting sweets and story hours from weird strangers. The concept stuck with you, even when the gingerbread house morphed into a man in a van with candy, or a welfare program with strings.

Disney ransacked the Fairy Tale aisle, and he understood them perfectly. The spice of danger was introduced into a young person’s life a little at a time. Now parents watch slasher movies with their toddlers, and worship Halloween. Not the same thing.

Disney wasn’t the only one to make hay from the Grimms. Drop the book and turn on the TV, and Fractured Fairy Tales reruns were on the case:

McElligot’s Pool– Dr. Suess

Dr. Suess showed us youngins that the English language could get up and mambo, and morph into ragtime if you mastered it. Since it rhymed, it introduced children to predicting where a sentence was going as you were reading, mixed in with the fireworks of surprising turns of phrase. Chat GPT could take a lesson.

The good doctor’s Prosody 101 course introduced children to fluency, understanding poetry, reading aloud (which supports public speaking), and is an excellent foundation for writers of all kinds.

Inside all the fun, there are important concepts introduced in books like McElligot’s Pool. It encouraged the reader to listen to others, but also to use their own imagination to see things others might miss. It argued that a vivid imagination and a healthy stubbornness might win over others in the long run. Suess encouraged the reader to look the world over for inspiration, without demanding an alienation from the familiar world to do it. His open-minded view of the world got this book banned for his troubles.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel– Virginia Lee Burton

I swear I was never able to become an Ivory Tower intellectual because of Mike Mulligan. That little book infects your mind with the concept that practical labor has value, both in a physical and a metaphysical sense. Ingenuity, hard work, and adaptation to circumstances can even happen in a ditch, you know. Those things are harder to find in buildings covered with ivy.

It’s not simply a soppy story because it has a happy ending. Mike Mulligan teaches you that time marches on, and you can fight progress with all your might, but sometimes it’s better to adapt and survive in a brave new world.

In case you don’t know what a steam shovel is, here’s one in action:

Greek Mythology–

I can’t remember the title of this particular book. It served as a pattern book for humanity. Archetypes. After fables and fairy tales, archetypes need to be introduced, and myths is as good a place as any to find them. Greek gods are mostly just descriptions of extraordinary persons, albeit with a key to the executive washroom on Olympus. The pantheon of gods is a catalog of human behaviors, writ large, if you discount the lightning bolts and winged shoes at par. The human horizon is bounded by myths, not facts. This is the book that taught me to look for them.

The Call of the Wild– Jack London

We had White Fang, too. It’s too facile to say you learn about nature from Jack London. What you really learn is that nature has no opinion. You’re supposed to test yourself against its arbitrary whims. It’s a scoreboard, not an opponent. London’s books showed that man, civilization, and nature are three legs of a stool, and something is always trying to saw off at least one of the legs..

Swiss Family Robinson– Johann David Wyss

This book is pretty old (1812), but doesn’t seem so. Unlike most man against nature tales, it pits an entire family against the elements, and eventually against the local pirates. It established the primacy of the nuclear family in overcoming odds together, and explored the friction that happens when people are added to it.

The Three Musketeers– Alexandre Dumas

Forget the Ginger/Mary Ann dilemma. You have to choose early on between Dumas and Victor Hugo. Dumas was ever so much more fun than Hugo. The book demonstrates what lies one step past the adventurous family. The Three Musketeers is a great introduction to growing up, physically, mentally, and morally, and what happens when a young man leaves the nest to make his way in the world. The story demonstrated that notions of individual honor should be subsumed in fellowship with others, or they don’t mean much. It was also a blast to read.

Treasure Island and Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson

The original title of Treasure Island was the blase: The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys. In its day, it was well regarded by every author who mattered, but eventually fell into disfavor with the usual suspects who lord over libraries and faculty lounges. Robert Louis Stevenson has enjoyed a better reputation in the recent past, but still nowhere near his due. These two books are basically the Ur-volumes of their respective genres, and no matter what the original title says, girls like them too.

Treasure Island is a bildungsroman, and no one has mapped out the moral and  psychological transformation of a young man in a more lively maelstrom of action. Treasure Island is in the running for the most durable stories ever told, with uncountable adaptations in text, radio, stage, and screen. Stevenson’s image of a pirate with one leg, an eye-patch, and a parrot on his shoulder remains the canonical form.

At first, Kidnapped seems like more of the same, but it’s more than just a coming of age story. It introduces the concept of justice, not just fairness, which are often two different things. It also illuminates the possibility that two very different people can come together to right wrongs for very different reasons. It’s a fantastic suspense novel, too. The mental image of young David Balfour creeping up his creepy uncle’s staircase in the dark, only to find out it ends in a bottomless pit when lightning flashes, is the scariest thing I ever read, at least until I grew up and got a look at a 1040 Form.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas– Jules Verne

I suppose you could lump Verne in with Stevenson and Dumas in the adventure category, but you’d be making a mistake. There’s plenty of adventure in his books, but the direction the adventure comes from is completely different. It’s technological, geographical, and scientific. It puts the explorer front and center in the action, and often has the whole world as its backdrop, indeed, other worlds, too. Jules Verne’s men of action are the wellspring of characters like Indiana Jones. Captain of the Football team and valedictorian rolled into one.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court– Mark Twain

This might seem an odd choice as the primo example of Twain if you had The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on the shelf. But Connecticut Yankee is a completely underrated book, especially for a young person. It’s funny as hell, which makes it lively reading. But it has trenchant commentary on economics buried in it (Hank almost gets hanged after trying to explain that how much you earn is not as important as what you can buy with it). It’s not quite the first science fiction story, but it’s close. It might be the first time travel book ever written.

It’s a better illustration of the evils of slavery than even Huckleberry Finn, because he points out its evils as a universal practice, not just a local problem. Twain also eviscerates the very idea of inherited nobility, but tempers his opinion by pointing out that progress without checking with Chesterton’s Fence first can be just as unpleasant as being backward.

It was pretty prescient, too. It was written in 1889, and it predicted the kind of slaughter that trench warfare and technology run amok would turn World War I into.

Also hidden in the text is an amusing and touching exposition of courtly love. Hank Morgan falls for “Sandy” while being constantly annoyed with her. A love that lasted centuries.

Of course there are many roads to enlightenment, so you can list all the books you preferred in the comments. If you put Harry Potter in there, I may come looking for you, though.

Got To Have a Celebration

July 3, 2026 1 Comment

Way back In 1985, America’s own John the Baptist told us what was what, in advance, and in the rear-view mirror too. Happy Birthday, America.

I Make a New One

July 2, 2026 8 Comments

I’ve told you people a million times that I’m prone to hyperbole. So you’re sort of forewarned. Here goes: This Swiss dude is The King of all the anal-retentive restoration project YouTube video generators, and there are legions of them. There can be only one, and he’s it.

I started you out with the book press, a small dose of My Mechanics. It’s just 25 minutes long, because I’m not sure you’re ready for this guy’s whole thang in one eyeball injection. A little later on, I’ll post his three-hour saga of restoring a Datsun 240z with the same level of care he brought to the book press. This is like homeopathy, you can’t tolerate a full dose right away, you have to build up to it.

I could have posted any one of his other videos instead of the book press. An old table lamp. A battered, venerable kitchen scale. A set of headphones it looks like Edith Piaf used. Each, in their own way, is the work of a lunatic. I mean that in the most complimentary way. I love lunacy like that.

There is no rational explanation for the amount of effort and care he puts into every project. There’s no way to torture a spreadsheet to make it profitable on its own merits. Stuff taken off the walls in a defunct Swiss TGI Friday’s and restored to perfection is not a business plan. There’s no way for someone with that particular set of skills to make it pay off by fixing flea market finds.

A highly skilled machinist like him makes bank. He’s the only one who could possibly afford to hire him, because he’s not paying himself. No one is going to give him twenty grand for a restored bookbinding vise, no matter how nice it looks. After watching his 240Z restoration, I wracked my brain thinking of someone who could afford to buy it when he’s done, if you factored in all the highly-skilled effort that went into it. Maybe Toyota? I doubt even they have enough money in their couch cushions. Museums? They don’t have that kind of money in their budgets. And what would they want with these mundane things, just because he made them perfect?

So I settled on the idea that that he does it for one of two other reasons. Either he does it for the love of it, or he does it as performance art. Upon further reflection, neither one of those explanations seems like a viable answer, either.

For love? This guy doesn’t love doing what he’s doing. He’s obsessed. Any girl with a stalker will explain the difference between love and obsession. He is demanding that the world conform to his standard of workmanship. He is a Bridgeport Canute ordering the rusty tide not to rise. Hell, he’s telling it to recede, and he’s getting it to go back out to sea.

He doesn’t just restore things to their original luster. He plows past restoration and fixes any original sins he finds. He grinds off extraneous hidden casting marks that came straight from the factory, and chamfers every single edge. He’s not a fairy godmother. He’s an avenging angel.

As performance art? We’re getting closer here, maybe. He has a prodigious list of Patreons. YouTube videos with the counter in the millions pay fairly well. Selling the objects could never make it pay, but letting people watch you fix them seems like a going concern in the rarified air of millions of YouTube subscribers.

But it’s a very unusual form of performance art, if that’s what it is. He never shows his face, never utters a word, never even grunts when a particularly tough nut won’t turn. Performance art is the land of “look at me.” He doesn’t seem to want to live there. Personality cults require more personality than he feels like delivering.

I wanted very much to put this guy in context, compare him to things that came before him. Shadetree mechanics? Model railroaders? Reproduction woodworkers like Wallace Nutting? Basement boatbuilders? Hell, ship in a bottle makers?

I began to fear that the guy doesn’t even care as much about the objects he works on as much as making a video of what he’s doing. It’s easy to overlook that his videography is better than all the other restoration channels, too. Unlike his competitors, you never fast forward through his vids. He never skips anything he needs to show you, and never lingers on any operation long enough to be boring. And you’ll eventually sit on the edge of your chair, waiting for him to find something that’s not up to (his) snuff, and the chyron to read, “I make a new one,” and watch him do it.

So I don’t know who or what this guy is, or what he represents. But he sure is something, ain’t he?

And if he can bang on this thing for 2.5 years, without even getting to the engine or interior yet, you can spare three hours, can’t you?

 

Baseball, Baby Vladimir, and Other Discontents

June 24, 2026 6 Comments

I must admit I don’t see TV much. I even avoid restaurants that have teevees blaring on every wall. That was easy to do back in the states. I had no money so I didn’t go to any restaurants and that teevee problem solved itself.

There are plenty of TVs in Merida, Mexico. They’re all tuned to one of three things: soccer games, soccer highlights, or episodes of COPS dubbed in Spanish. I know Mexico is portrayed everywhere as living in Mad Max times, but in reality, Mexicans are mystified by American criminality. There’s a paucity of crime here, so they like watching ours. I’m mystified by soccer, although the lawns are really nice, so we call it even.

We were invited to a friend’s house yesterday. He lives in a privada. That’s a gated subdivision. His house is attached to a row of others, mostly identical. They’re a couple of years old. They’re small-ish, and entirely constructed of some form of masonry. There are two bedrooms up, one with a balcony that also serves as shade for the parking space underneath it. Downstairs, there’s a small all-purpose room for living and dining, with a kitchen next to it.

It is not possible to not watch TV at Carlos’ place if it’s on, because he’s got one so big that it sticks out of both sides of his house. No matter where you plunk your ass, it’s like sitting in the front row at the movies. You slouch down and your head reels back and forth like a lawn sprinkler while you try to take it all in.

In some ways, I had the most interest in what was on the screen of anyone in the crowd, because I had no idea what was going on, on any level. Once you’re out of the teevee loop, you can feel Amish in a hurry. Yesterday was like that. Everything was familiar to everyone else, so they just let it drift on by, unremarked and unremarkable. Me? I had questions.

The baseball game was on. It was a Canadian broadcast, with the Toronto Blue Jays playing the Houston Astros. I did not, as they say, have a dog in that hunt. However, the assembled crowd was rife with Canadians and people from Houston, so they cared who won.

I was mostly interested in the commercials. Canadian teevee commercials were slightly weirder to me than the Mexican variety. I don’t understand anything in the Mexican ads, so I find them soothing. But Canadian ads are disturbing. They enter an uncanny valley because they’re in something resembling English (eh), and the products they’re touting are almost, but not quite familiar.

Just like the US, mildly retarded ballplayers tout boxes of inexpertly heated chicken guts shoved out of a hole in a drive through wall. However, it’s from a brand I’d not only never heard of, but I still felt I hadn’t heard of after watching the ad. There was so many nouns and adjectives on the boxes they were selling that I wasn’t sure which was the cook and which was the cook-ee, as it were. The original ad man that came up with the idea of putting everything in lower case is probably already dead, so it would be pointless to execrate him here. But a little part of me wished that whatever he died of, I hope it hurt.

My search for familiar things perked up a bit when Vladimir Guerrero was announced to take his place in the batter’s box. The thrill of recognition faded a bit when I was informed that it was Vladimir Guerrero’s son, not the genuine article. I began to feel old. I’m informed that Junior makes half a billion dollars, and strikes out a lot. He also wears two earrings that would be too feminine for a drag queen. My eye wandered on.

The game was tied after nine innings. This produced a longer stoppage in play, and treated us to a larger ration of advertising than before, which, being a baseball game, was a lot already. A deal at a totally different off-brand chicken place was offered to me, although the 4,000 mile trip to the drive through might have rendered the value of their digital coupon nugatory. Baby Vladimir reappeared. He was featured in a commercial to exhort the public to gamble responsibly, which is an oxymoron. The next commercial after him was for a degenerate gambling app that lets you cash in your bets before the end of the game if your team was up by more than 4 runs, so you could get another bet down faster.

So we came back from the commercials to view the extra innings, and get this, there was a guy standing on second base. Literally just standing on second base, outta nowhere. I thought it first he might be a streaker, but he was wearing a uniform and everything, and not running, just standing idly, exactly like 17/18ths of the ballplayers do through most of the game, when all 18 aren’t doing nothing. Streakers are a more wayfaring animal, and rarely even slow down except when tackled.

So the guy on second was a head scratcher. I cast my mind back to coaching T-ball. You could find all sorts of players on the field at odd times, and in odd places. An opposing player standing on second would excite little commentary. His friends ran off to sit on the bench, but he saw a butterfly in center field. It’s understandable.

But there was no butterfly in center field in Toronto’s stadium. There was a TV screen almost as big as Carlos’ mounted over the stands, but the guy didn’t seem to be looking at it, even though it had lots of statistical information on it, and multiple chicken sandwich offers.

I asked around the room, trying to figure out this mystery. Did I have a seizure or something, and black out? Did the chicken ads run long? Whahappen?

Everyone told me that they just stick a runner on second base during extra innings. It’s what they do. They said they’ve been doing it for a while. They said it made the extra innings games go faster. I asked if they let the other team stick a man on second, too. They said yes. So I asked how this could speed things up, if the other team can just tie the game again under the same circumstances.

This conundrum made the crowd uncomfortable, and they started making the same sort of faces that crowds about to burn a witch used to favor, so I deftly shifted the conversation to the designated hitter rule. Apparently, they don’t let the pitcher take his turns at bat anymore…

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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