I Love Kei Trucks
9/30/200911:28:54 PM Link 0 comments | Add comment
The K-Truck is a phenomenon that should be sweeping the nation, but it's not. In Japan, there's a whole class of automobiles with engines under 660cc in displacement called "kei jidosha". As you can imagine, this segment includes lots of subcompact "micromachine" type cars. Those cars are cute and practical. But the stars are the kei trucks. These tiny trucks are everywhere. It's amazing how much work gets done in Japan with k-trucks. When I moved to from one apartment to another in Osaka, my brother-in-law rented a Daihatsu Hi-Jet to get the big stuff across. In America, no one even considers the possibility of cars with 660cc engines. In Japan it's an absolute standard. In the 50s and 60s, the engines were even smaller. The first Honda truck had a 360cc engine, and it did the same kind of work k-trucks do every day, which is basically the same kind of work big Chevy trucks with V-8 engines do in America most days. In fact I'd wager the average k-truck does a lot more work in a day than the average Ford F-250 Superduty or Dodge Ram Dually. Americans (at least we Texans) buy trucks as commuter cars. Giant machines transporting one city slicker from home to work to Dairy Queen and back. We don't need so many V8s pouring out carbon monoxide and diesel fumes every day. You can haul two people and an apartment-full of crap with a 660cc Daihatsu Hi-Jet. These are the makes and models in production:
Daihatsu Hi-Jet
Honda ACTY
Mazda Scrum
Mitsubishi Minicab
Nissan Clipper
Subaru Sambar
Suzuki Carry
I found a place online where Americans can buy cast-off k-trucks from Japan. They're not street legal here, so you can only buy them for use on private property and they come with 25mph restrictors. Farmers and ranchers purchase the majority of them for hauling stuff around the farm. That's right, the only people who really need a truck are buying k-trucks. For utility and work, get a 68 horsepower Subaru Sambar. For peeling out and doing donuts in the high school parking lot, get a 300 horsepower Chevy Silverado.
Come on America! Let's make the awesome kei truck legal to drive on the street. This is what a truck should be!Snowy Alpine Village
6/9/200912:32:58 PM Link 0 comments | Add comment
Do you remember the opening shot from Pinnochio? Zooming in on the little mountain village where Giapetto lives? That kind of scene really kills me. It just needs these elements to be perfect...
*framed by trees in the foreground
*snow on the ground, rooftops and treelimbs
*village houses with interior lights glowing
*stars in the sky
*mountain peaks in the background
You get that kind of scene on Christmas cards a lot. This sample image is only missing the stars, but it's pretty close to perfection.Berenice's Hair
6/8/20099:35:16 AM Link 0 comments | Add comment
Never heard of it? Thought this page was dedicated to a hair salon? It's not. I don't care for hair salons. Berenice's Hair, l.Coma Berenice, is the only constellation named after an historical figure, Queen Berenice of Egypt in the 3rd century BCE. I learned that from H.A.Ray's book The Stars, A New Way to See Them. This queen sacrificed her hair to the goddess Aphrodite, but the hair was stolen from the temple. The court astronomer tried to assuage the queen's anxiety by pointing to this group of stars and assuring her that Venus had transformed her hair into a new constellation. I wonder if she believed him.
Berenice's Hair is a very faint constellation. Even so, I managed to see it here in light-polluted Austin, Texas a few nights ago, armed with my old copy of H.A.Ray for reference. You can use the stars of Virgo and Bootes as a guides, but you have to be aware that stars in the sky appear much further apart than what you imagine by reading a star chart. I've been heavily interested in visual astronomy since I was 14, but I still have trouble tracing the larger constellations because I still underestimate just how much real estate they cover.
I picked out what I thought to be Coma Berenice right at the zenith, just barely perceptible, and then verified it with 8x40 binoculars. A beautiful site. It re-quires just enough work to find this star cluster, which is gradually dispersing because the stars involved are of low mass. Her hair is growing.
Read more in Burnam's Celestial Handbook, Volume Two.