Getting away

The Drunkablog heads east tomorrow. Destination: Tokyo--uh, central Illinois, home of Ward Churchill. He'll have a laptop (borrowed from the D-a-W) and will attempt to post along the road. On the way back he may even wander a little (and not just his mind!), check out some places, meet the people in the villages.

It's almost exactly a thousand miles from Denver to Lincoln, Illinois, and the Drunkablog is a little scared because he will be driving his 1993 Ford Escort. Yes, this is actually one of the six semi-operational Escorts left from that model year:


Don't touch it!

But leave us not wax over-snooty. It's just that since his own Preliterate Era the D-blog has yearned tragically after the mighty (large) Vistacruiser:


You can't tell from this picture, but the Vistacruiser was 86 feet long (2006 Drunkablog estimate). In 1969 a single poorly maintained Vistacruiser consumed more oil than the entire People's Republic of North Korea (1970 U.S. Department of Oil estimate).
I've always wanted one.

The Escort will do fine

But the Escort will do fine, I keep telling myself. And there's one major technical improvement I've made (not to the car, of course) that'll make things go much better. When Billy Bob and I drove to northern California not quite two years ago (3000+ miles round trip) this was our sound system:


The car's radio and tape player (and air conditioner) gave up the ghost years ago, and, unbelievably, the 1993 Escort didn't come with a CD player. Hence the triple-threat boombox and allied crap.

But this year Billy Bob will actually be able to sit in the front passenger seat (when he's not driving), because this year we broke down and bought the not-new-to-anyone-except-us miracle music-playing device, the Opid:


The Opid: It's in the center of the Frisbee, in case you didn't spot it right away.

This is the four-gigabyte (well, 3.88) model. Besides all the music, I've put on scores of old radio shows, than which there is nothing better to listen to while driving.

Hackneyed

This is hackneyed (it's the Drunkablog, after all), but it kills me that on this tiny ultramodern hunk of metal I can listen to (just as a few examples) a live 1927 broadcast of Charles Lindbergh's triumphal procession up the Potomac to Washington, D.C., after his return from Paris; Pete Seeger singing a surprisingly bloodthirsty little ditty called 'Round and 'Round Hitler's Grave during one of the first coast-to-coast radio hookups in February, 1942; and, at the far end of the same war, Lord Haw-Haw's drunken last broadcast from Berlin as it fell to the Russians ("Hei Hiller," he slurs).

Plus Jack Benny. And "Dragnet." And "Information Please." Living history, done live (well, not "Dragnet"), and for that perhaps more entertaining now than when first broadcast.

Cut the maundering, freak

There'll be a post from somewhere tomorrow, probably. Maybe after I get across the line into Kansas and "the fuzz" can't hassle me no more.

(weirdly defensive Peoria Journal-Star article on Ward Churchill via PB)

Update: Since I mentioned the trip here's Billy Bob chasing his Frisbee in northern California surf. He got absolutely crushed a couple times, which seemed to learn him:


He'd always forgotten by the next day though, so I, at least, had lots of fun playing Frisbee with the idiot.

Update: The picture of the front-passenger space full of stuff is a re-creation. I never thought to take a picture of the actual mess, but it was much worse what with the spilled coffee and dissolving dog biscuits, etc.