Yet another post about cars.

Regular readers of this blog (and you know who you are, all two of you) will know that I often rattle on about sports cars, usually of the expensive, red and Italian variety. And with spring apparently just around the corner, despite the dire warnings of Canada's leading weather guru, the watch is on for all those prancing horses to leave their stables and start prowling around the highways and byways of the Greater Toronto Area.* So far, the best I can report is a silver convertible BMW 650i, seen today not a hundred yards from my home, its top resolutely up against the cold. And the usual selection of Porsche 911 variants, which people seem to insist on driving year-round in these parts.

But this post is about something much more important in the world of high-performance, luxury cars, or at least in the world of companies that used to make them. I'm talking about Jaguar. Dear old Jag, which has apparently been bought by the Indian car maker Tata Motors. The same company that will happily sell you, your neighbour, and several million other people in your immediate vicinity a car for $2,500 US, if their press hype is to be believed.

Now, I'm not sure that the sale of such a storied franchise as Jaguar to Tata is necessarily a bad thing, despite the dubious ethics around the idea of replacing as many rickshaws, bicycles, and ox-carts as possible worldwide with low-cost automobiles. Imagine Beijing, or Bombay, or Manila, with twenty or thirty thousand additional vehicles on the street. Or Toronto, for that matter. But maybe this purchase will be good for dear old Jag. After all, the once-proud marque has been languishing in the arms of the Ford Motor Company since 1989, and while I initially thought the introduction of the low-cost X-type was a brilliant ploy catering to the entry-level luxury car market, most buyers seem to have pretty quickly decided that competing offerings from Acura, Lexus and BMW were more attractive. Ford's styling of the S-type, which looks like a smoothed-out Lincoln, and the tediously boring Camaro knock-off that is the XK, probably didn't help. And Ford's penchant for bolting superchargers onto just about everything, from the Mustang to the mighty GT, just seems silly when applied to the Jaguar XJ Super V8. Why they can't get back to basics and build a nice, high-performance, normally aspirated Jaguar supercar, I don't know. Although, truth be told, they had the chance much, much earlier with the V12 XJ220 concept, and backed away then too, replacing it with a silly, silly six-cylinder twin-turbocharged powerplant instead, housed in a chassis roughly the size of Gibraltar.

So where does this leave Jaguar, once the envy of the sports car world with their tremendous, sexy, E-type? Even though Ford did get back to classic styling cues with the XJ series, will Tata once again make a glorious, luxury saloon car that British aristocracy would love to own? Will there ever again be a wonderful GT sports car like the lovely, classy XJS? Let's hope so. I'd love to see a few driving around these parts, next time spring rolls around.



*I apologize for the atrociously mixed metaphor - prowling horses and all that. Ah well.

Grumpy

From the archives, a vintage button:


That's me on the left. Now you know why I complain about the weather, not to mention everything else.

Update - I shoveled.

And now my back hurts.



And in the back yard, the birdbath. Or a snowman's backside*, you decide.



*thanks to Flickrite deadmanguru for this comparison

ONOZ! IT SNOZ!

Although I really don't have as much to complain about this winter as some folk do, I thought I'd share the latest winter storm with you. Because in Canada, this is what we do, complain about the snow, and then proudly show it off to anyone who's foolish enough to listen.

Here's the view of the front path yesterday morning, around 9:30. It was snowing. That little drift is in a spot where snow always accumulates - some peculiarity of the geography of wind, walls and the road, I suppose.


By about 5:00 in the afternoon, it looked like this:


And this morning, we awoke to the lovely scene below. Note the driveway at the top left (see it? It's the white thing). Mrs. Ricardipus had already shoveled a foot of snow off it yesterday.


I have to leave you now. There's a shovel with my name on it, hanging on the garage wall, drumming its fingers impatiently.

Wasting copious amounts of time...

...doing things like this:


A flame fractal, with some clouds and a lens flare.

and this:


Julia fractal, with a plastic wrap filter, stretched and pinched and overlaid on itself.

and even this:


Another fractal, colour somewhat tweaked in Photoshop.

Ridiculous. This is what comes of having a full installation of Photoshop CS2, an open internet connection, and tripping across people like Song_sing on Flickr. If you like these fractals, check out her stuff - some of it will blow your eyes out, like this picture, or this one.

And of course, she turned me on to Tierazon (which was used for the second and third of the above, before the usual Photoshop jiggery-pokery), a nifty little freely download-able fractal drawing program that works pretty well and doesn't consume massive amounts of your computer's CPU cycles.

Which then led to exploring the Tierazon group on Flickr, other fractal groups like this one, and more general digital artwork ones such as Digital Abstract, Pixel Art, and the aptly-named Abstract Nonsense. All of which led me to some other fun and publicly available tools, like ChaosPro (which I used for the flame fractal at the top of this post) and the trial version of ArtRage, which I have yet to try out, but can be used to make things like this nice little "painting".

All of which, as I noted at the beginning of this post, adds up to a huge waste expenditure of time. Ah well, at least I have a hard drive full of shiny things as a result.

More in the art set.