Some motor vehicles become iconic. Almost everyone, at least in the US, will instantly come up with an image of the Ford Mustang in one of its many forms. A classic shape that Ford has more or less stuck to since it was first introduced in the 1960s.
Another automotive icon is the Jaguar E-type.
That up there is the image most people think of when someone brings up the car brand.
Jag has always produced cars that are stylish, sporty, elegant and, of course, bloody expensive. And often not very well made, I’m afraid. My experience with Jag is that it is a company that has always valued style over substance. That beautiful E-type up there? I never owned one but I have driven two different examples of that car back in the 1970s when they were still relatively new, and I can tell you from first hand experience, that while looking at one is fantastic, driving one is something else again. Both of the ones I drove were utterly awful in every single way. Over the last 20 years or so that’s changed, the cars certainly handle and perform better. But, alas, they have earned a reputation for unreliability that has hurt sales badly.
Jaguar’s biggest problem though has always been that it can’t seem to be able to actually sell cars. At least not enough to remain profitable. The company has changed hands more than once over the last few decades, and since 2007 has been owned by an Indian conglomerate called Tata. And it is doing worse than ever, I’m afraid.
Jag’s solution to the problem is to stop building cars entirely. Seriously. It is completely shutting down all production of all current models and in the future it is going to completely retool and produce only newly designed EVs. So what is it going to do to tide itself over while waiting to bring out the new models?
This is what Jaguar dropped on an unsuspecting world a few days ago:
I’ve watched that ad about six times now and I still don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to be. No one else seems to know WTF it is either.
The ad sparked a firestorm of controversy on social media, as I’m sure you can imagine. The comments on FB, X, Youtube, etc. have been scathing, and often they have descended into downright abusive language and even hate speech directed at “woke” ideology and LGBTQ persons. It’s all really rather sad.
Basically all Jag has going for it right now is its brand, Jaguar, a maker of over priced, over powered, stylish and not very good cars that seemed to be aimed squarely at the kind of fellow in upper management who takes his Jag to a secluded resort in the Catskills to cheat on his wife with his trophy girlfriend, and the golf clubs in the back so he can go golfing with his boss on Sunday while trying to explain why he doesn’t have all the receipts for his expense account claims.
What this ad tells me is that Jag is desperately trying to change that image. And I mean seriously desperate. It also tells me that they don’t have a fucking clue as to what the hell they’re actually doing. They have no sense if direction, no market that they’re aiming at, no technology they are trying to push, and worst of all, no cars. They got nothing. So all they can do is put out whatever the hell this is to try to keep the brand name alive until they have something, anything, they can try to sell.
But this? This is supposed to give consumers confidence in the brand? This is supposed to somehow make people curious enough that they’ll wait until Jag can retool and start producing cars again? No. Sorry.
Stop it. Just stop it. It’s time for Jaguar to just hang it up and retire gracefully instead of trying to hang on far, far too long like an aging quarterback who refuses to admit he no longer has the ability to compete.
We’ve been getting rain! The drought finally seems to be over. We’ve received several inches of rain over the last week and will be getting more today. Things were getting bad, and not just for home gardeners like me. We’ve had enough rain now that the plants have completely turned around and things are actually starting to look lush out there. The tomatoes have tripled in size and in full blossom. We even have some baby tomatoes on them already. The squash are growing so fast you can almost see the vines getting longer. We have baby cucumbers developing. The raspberries are probably going to be ripe in a week or so. Wow, it’s amazing what a bit of rain can do.
Baby cucumberThe color on the lilies has been almost breathtaking this year.The warm, damp weather has really jump started the tomatoes. They look beautiful this year.The raspberries are so loaded with fruit this year MrsGF had to put posts with string to rest the canes on because the weight of the fruit was bending them in half and snapping off the canes. I’ve never seen that happen before.
Anyway, as you can see the gardens here have been doing very, very well of late. Yes, we were watering everything carefully during the drought and keeping an eye on soil moisture and all of that, but for whatever reason artificial irrigation never seems to give the same results as natural rainfall, at least not for me. Even though I was sure the plants were getting adequate water, once it started raining everything just started going crazy.
Possible Logo
I’m going to (well, maybe) start selling some of my wood stuff. I got an account with Etsy now, but haven’t gotten around to actually putting anything up for sale over there, and I’m thinking of putting up a separate set of pages here to showcase a few things for sale. Don’t worry, none of that will appear here in the blog except for a link to the sales site. I’m not going to spam you or anything like that.
But I needed to come up with a name for this for Etsy, and a logo or something to mark the bowls. Most of my bowls have a 2 1/8 inch mortise (basically a shallow hole) in the bottom. This is how I attach them to the lathe with a four jaw chuck. I like using a mortise rather than a tenon because unlike a protruding tenon which has to be removed, I can leave the mortise in place. That means that if something goes wrong with the finish or something else happens, I can easily reattach the piece to the lathe to rework it or refinish it. And as for the remaining hole, I thought why not use it for a logo? I got these thin, 2″ wooden disks which work really well with the laser engraver, so I came up with a name and logo that looks pretty good when burned into the disk.
One of the experiment logo tests
Then just glue the disk into the mortise on the bottom of the bowl. I’m not sure if this is going to be the final version, but so far I’m fairly satisfied with it.
Hollowing Tool
One of the issues I’ve run into with wood turning is dealing with objects that aren’t actual bowls, but instead are what are generally called “hollow form vessels”, things like, well, this one down below here.
This thing is supposed to be hollow, and it is. Sort of. Kinda. But not much. I ran a 2″ hole into it with a forstner bit and then fiddled around with the tools I had to try to hollow it out, but it’s a damned poor job because trying to reach in there to hollow it out without damaging the small opening and without hurting myself is a pain in the neck, even with special tools. I have tools that claim they are for hollowing out forms like this, and for whatever reason they just don’t work well for me. I see guys on YouTube doing this stuff effortlessly. How the heck do they do that? I’ve tried using their techniques and tools and what I’ve ended up with is dangerous catches, broken bowls, broken tools, and a real mess.
So I spent way more money than I wanted to for this:
This is the “Simple Hollowing System” from Harrison Specialties. Harrison markets a line of lathe tools under the “Simple Woodturning” brand. I have some of their carbide tools and they are very, very good indeed. This system is supposed to make it relatively easy to hollow out even something like the bowl in that photo up there. This version comes with just about everything you need, including the system itself, the tools, cutters and even a laser guide system to prevent you from accidentally cutting through the side of a bowl as it is being hollowed out.
As you can see I haven’t even had a chance to set it up yet because it’s been so busy here, but hopefully I’ll be able to give it a try in the next week or two and I’ll talk about it then. I also want to cover the laser engraver in some detail as well in the future. So keep an eye out for both of those coming up.
Car Stuff
Let’s see, what else… Oh, almost forgot. I sold the Corvette. It was a very, very nice car, it was huge fun, but, well, even I had to admit that it wasn’t exactly practical. Basically it was a vehicle that I could only use about 5 months of the year, was a two seater, had very little cargo space. Oh, and did I mention that new tires for that thing were $500? Each. Yeah, it was over $2,000 to put a set of four tires on it because it ran high tech, high speed, run flat racing tires.
I bought, heaven help me, a Buick. Yeah, a Buick. It’s an Envision Avenir which is, according to Buick, at least, “the highest expression of Buick luxury” available. Here’s a photo swiped from Buick’s website because I’m too lazy to go out to the garage and take a picture of mine at the moment.
And I really, really like it. Well, of course I do or I wouldn’t have bought it. Duh.
The list of options on this thing runs two full pages of small type. Emergency braking systems (which I tested the first day I had it. Neighbor’s dog ran in front of the car when I drove into my driveway and the car stopped itself before I could even get my foot off the gas pedal. Wow), lane divergence warnings and even steering. Apparently if you wander outside your lane on the freeway the thing will actually steer itself back into the center of the lane you’re in. Automatic headlights, automatic cruise control that slows down or speeds up itself to match traffic, a 360 degree camera system along with radar systems to assist with parking. I won’t go into the whole list because it’s a bit ridiculous, really. Bumper to bumper warranty that covers everything, and I mean everything. With the package I got even the interior fabrics are covered. Tears, burns, stains, paint chips… All covered. Sheesh…
This thing is very, very nice. I absolutely love it.
And there’s another reason I went with it. It’s four wheel drive with good ground clearance. The roads here in Wisconsin are utterly horrible and getting worse every day. We have one of the worst maintained highway systems in the country. The roads around here are so bad you’re risking doing serious damage to your car if it doesn’t have enough ground clearance to get through the pot holes, cracks, gravel patches and other garbage we have to contend with. The Buick can deal with that a lot better than the Vette.
Why are our roads so bad? Go talk to our state legislature if you want the answer to that one. They can find billions to pay for building new freeways down around Milwaukee that no one wants, but they can’t find the money to maintain the highways, roads and bridges we already have. Those multi billion dollar freeway expansion projects are done by huge corporations that funnel enormous amounts of money into the campaign funds and PACs of our dear legislators down there in Madison. Meanwhile most road maintenance is done by local governments and small contractors who don’t have any influence at all with the legislature.
Let’s see, what else… I’m hoping to actually go fishing this year. Maybe. Every year I get my Conservation Patron license. That is an all inclusive license offered in Wisconsin that covers just about everything you can legally fish or hunt for in the state. At first glance it seems expensive, but when you consider that it includes almost everything, it is actually cheaper and more convenient than trying to get individual licenses. So I get the license every year and generally end up doing, well, nothing, because I don’t have the time. Spring turkey season came and went this year before I even remembered I had a spring turkey permit. Sigh… I think I went fishing exactly twice last year, and once so far this year.
I don’t deal with leisure time very well, I’m afraid. Heck, I’m retired for pete’s sake. I don’t need to constantly be doing something practical. But every time I start planning to go fishing there’s this little voice in the back of my head that’s saying things like “you know you really should be weeding the gardens, not wasting your time with this”, or “you should be spending your time finishing that jewelry box you started last week not sitting along a river waiting to catch a fish and wasting your time.”
grouchyfarmer 