So there I was, on my Wednesday post, when one commenter, DMurray, happened to mention the Dodge St. Regis as a cop car. And years of Memories Past came flooding back in all their horror.

I associate two things with 1979 (its introductory year):

1. The incredibly-Leftist California Rose Bird Supreme Court, and
2. The incredibly-ridiculous Dodge St. Regis cop cars

Rose Bird was bad enough. She was literally removed from office in a November 4th, 1986 voting mandate because she was such an incredible tweak. Rose Bird was actually too “over-the-top” for Fornicalia. (Luckily, she passed away in 1999. I normally don’t write those things. For her, I make an exception.) Imagine that.

But to be forced to drive a Dodge St. Regis barge which was the size of an aircraft carrier, powered by a Fornicalia-mandated 318-CID? That was beyond embarrassing.

Let me make this plain: the Dodge St. Regis was the worst cop car I ever drove. Period. And I’m still a cop, driving CVPI’s. All 250-hp of them. [Less hp than my 2007 Toyota RAV-4 Limited V6, which is chipped up to 300 hp from 269 hp and still runs on regular unleaded.]

The California Highway Patrol used the St. Regis in 1979 with the 190 hp 360 CID (cubic inch displacement) four-barrel V8 and it was deemed “acceptable” for patrol use. Think about that for a moment: a 360-CID V8, four-barrel carburetor, only producing 190 hp! Anyone besides me saying: horribly “detuned”? Hello?

In my department, 1980 heralded the California 155 hp 318 CID engine, 4 bbl V8 with the California emissions package, mandated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). That was also the version CHP was forced to purchase as well. In a Dodge St. Regis.

[In terms of reference, my 2008 Toyota Corolla LE makes an issued-from-the-factory 125 hp. A Corolla!]

In 1979, CHP anticipated its 1980 cop car bid under the Dodge St. Regis. CHP EVOC instructors at the academy in Bryte were beside themselves. The car proffered times and handling similar to a 1960 Nash Metropolitan.

CHP cut its bid for the 1980 Dodge St. Regis by half. Meaning that a surcharge of previously-ordered CHP-spec’d cars were available for purchase by local agencies. At something of a discount, shall we say.

And so my department made such an attachment bid. Therefore, instead of driving our normal green-and-white cars, we drove CHP-colored black–and–whites.

Because CHP absolutely detested the 1980 Dodge St. Regis.

Three things I can recall about the St. Slow-gis:

1. I backed into a pole in 1979 whilst taking a 488 PC report at the Shell gas station on Arden Way. I didn’t report it. The car was a piece of crap anyway. No one cared.
2. The CHP-ordered St. Regis had the first generation of electric windows, adjustable electric seats (NEVER before experienced in my department!) and a great air conditioner!
3. Heading EOW in 1980, I decided to “floor” my St. Regis on I-80 towards the Madison Avenue exit, in order to head to the North Station. You can see I exhibited the word “floor” in quotes. Because, on its “CERTIFIED” speedometer, it reached a grand total of 79 mph.

And I’m not kidding.

BZ

That’s “I’m away on vacation” in Italian.

I left late Saturday for the Fornicalia coast with my beautimous wife. We stopped in Williams, Fornicalia, for a ton of garlic.

This is our view, now, out the patio door:

We’ll be here for about ten days. During that time I’ll be blogging as well, because the internet connection in the room is decent. I won’t be thinking about work at all. I decided (though I am conflicted) not to answer work e-mails off-duty any more. Nada. Finito. Done. Zip. Zero. The Null Set.

In the meantime, as I was driving about whilst my beautimous wife tanned and got even darker, I chanced upon a new boat in the latter phase of construction adjacent Noyo Harbor; see the photographs at the very bottom of this post (click to make them much larger).

This area is home to the Van Peer Boatworks (which, sadly, has no official website). Chris Van Peer has been building and registering boats since 1978 (see the chart).

Van Peer Boatworks, Fort Bragg CA

Most recent update: September 12, 2011.

Van Peer Boatworks is one of the leaders on the West Coast in fishing vessel construction. The shipyard does not have a web site. You can see it from the air on Google here, although it’s a bit fuzzy.

I wrote about his most recent boat, the Chasina Bay, in February of 2010:

I went to the indicated website, Chasina Bay Charters, and discovered that this boat is set to launch in May of this year (2010), and is the featured vessel in the Chasina Bay Charters company.

According to the website, the vessel is a 75-foot expedition yacht that will ply the waters in and around Ketchikan, Alaska. One planned itinerary includes 8 days of crabbing, whale watching, kayaking, fishing, nature viewing, beach combing and hiking.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? With one small caveat: click on the tab that indicates “rates & reservations.” Booking the boat, which can berth 8 persons, is $22,000 for the first four days, and $4,800 each additional day thereafter.

Let’s see: for that 8-day trip I mentioned above, your tab would be $41,200.

Nice work if you can get it — and nice cash, if you can afford it in this economy.

The Chasina Bay did in fact launch from Noyo Harbor in Ft Bragg, as documented on video here:

That said, there’s a new boat in town.

I don’t know its name, I don’t know its potential buyer, but I know that it’s being built by the Van Peer Boatworks much closer to Noyo Harbor than before (as opposed to half a mile farther away on Highway 20). As in: let’s not have to travel so far to launch and float this boat.

Fishing vessels, and other boats, are frequently like icebergs: much of their bulk lies hidden beneath the water line. As you can see above, the draft of this boat (the measurement of how far the boat’s hull will extend underwater) appears to be huge — at least to the untrained non-boat-builder’s eye like mine. An excellent article on determining a boat’s draft can be found here.

In this view, you can see the vessel under construction directly adjacent South Harbor Drive off of Highway 20, on the south side of Noyo Harbor itself. Here one can access the Harbormaster and the Coast Guard. Click on the photograph to enlarge it, and notice the size of the boat as compared to the red pickup truck on the left.

It’s my understanding that the bulbous nose at the bow of boats and ships helps to reduce drag, increase speed and stability, which also helps with fuel economy. Technically, it is called a “bulbous bow.” The fishing vessel Time Bandit on Deadliest Catch, for example, acquired a bulbous bow refit in 2008. Captain Andy Hillstrand said that the new nose also adds roughly 20,000 pounds of lift to the bow.

Here is a satellite view of Noyo Harbor and its area.

The weather should be quite nice during our stay, with some clouds and fog but, according to the weather, no rain. And with that, I bid thee adieu.

“Fair skies and favoring winds” to you.

BZ

P.S.
I just visited the Chasina Bay Charters website, where one can rent that 75-foot custom-built yacht as it plies Alaskan waters and noticed — at the very bottom of the site — that the Chasina Bay (admittedly, a beautifully-appointed boat) is for sale after only a little over one year in service. At $41,000 for an eight-person, eight-day trip, I can understand why.

And this somehow seems to be a revelation because . . . ?

If, for example, I had to physically pay for access to every site I attributed, I’d be broke in less than a month.

When, in truth, every site to which I link in terms of attribution BENEFITS from my direct linkages. My site directs traffic there from my links because I always attribute my contestations. I make no claims that aren’t backed up with information and links.

Every site wants its own Tybalt-like “pound of flesh” these days. Good luck with that.

You likely won’t get it. From CNBC.com:

The rapid adoption of tablet computers like Apple’s [AAPL 397.77 -8.00 (-1.97%) ] iPad has not reversed the slide in paying customers for news, as many media company executives had hoped the devices would.

Getty Images Apple iPad

Only 14 percent of tablet news users are paying directly for content on the device, according to an extensive survey from the Pew Research Center’s Project for excellence in Journalism.

“In some ways news content on portable devices will go the same way as digital music did a decade or so ago with proliferation of high speed internet and personal computers,” said Dan Nathan, trader and editor of RiskReversal.com. “For a long while people thought they were entitled to it. It wasn’t until it was cheaper and easily accessible through iTunes that people actually bought it.”

So let that be a lesson.

Your crap — particularly your Leftist Crap — isn’t deserving of pay. If everything starts charging a fee, I’ll just turtle up and start producing my own attributions.

I am NOT — repeat — NOT paying each and every news site to which I make an attribution for access to its so-called “information.”

I KNOW, having been a member of the Fourth Estate even in the 70s, that news is skewed.

Simple as that.

BZ

That also = the American Taxpayer is about to be FLEECED.

Particularly in the vehicle arena.

I wrote on Saturday, October 22nd, about the LIE that was proffered by the Obama Administration — or more specifically, from Vice President Joe Biden — about an American electric car company:

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million dollar federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.

Read that again: “thousands of American manufacturing jobs” — promised by Joe Biden, Demorat.

And again, just like the now-bankrupt Solyndra company, half a BILLION of our taxpayer dollars were purposely injected by the Obama Administration into a “green” company. Because “green,” after all, is our future. It does nothing but sell itself!

In the case of Solyndra, however, it failed. The Obama Administration then adhered to the definition of insanity: it wanted to give ANOTHER half a BILLION dollars to Solyndra.

What is the definition of insanity? Oh, that’s right: “doing the same thing over again and expecting different results (absent Psychology Today).”

In the case of Fisker, half a BILLION dollars were spent on an electric car company just so it could outsource the manufacturing to FINLAND. Goodbye to those “thousands” of PROMISED American jobs.

With that in mind, ∞ ≠ ø provided a link in the comments section of my Fisker post, bringing another aspect of their electric vehicle to light: its incredible INEFFICIENCY. From Forbes.com:

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).

Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place.

Warren Meyer continues to write:

As I calculated in my earlier Forbes article, one needs to multiply the EPA MPGe by .365 to get a number that truly compares fossil fuel use of an electric car with a traditional gasoline engine car on an apples to apples basis. In the case of the Fisker Karma, we get a true MPGe of 19. This makes it worse than even the city rating of a Ford Explorer SUV.

Congrats to the Fisker Karma, which now joins corn ethanol in the ranks of heavily subsidized supposedly green technologies that are actually worse for the environment than current solutions.

To summarize: the American Taxpayer was fleeced — AGAIN — to the tune of half a billion dollars so that:

1. American jobs can be shipped to Finland
– in order to produce
2. An electric car which is less efficient than an SUV

I’ll go you one better: I have a 2008 Toyota Corolla LE which I purchased used in 2009 from CarMax.com and had shipped from Los Angeles because I liked the color and the interior. I could have purchased a new Corolla or a new Escalade or a new Porsche for that matter, but I didn’t want a new Corolla or a new Escalade or a new Porsche. I wanted what I ordered. I limo-tinted the windows, applied custom sheepskin seat covers, and have the only 2008 LE on the planet with fog lights — which you can only get on the Corolla S. Because I had them custom-installed by a Toyota body shop.

The new Corolla body change occurred in 2009. I didn’t like the 2009, or the 2010 or 2011 Corollas (nor the new 2012 Corolla) because they’re heavier, get worse gas mileage, and I still don’t care for their interiors. My 2008 Corolla has gotten 44 mpg and averages 35 mpg. 44 mpg is PRIUS territory. And my 2008 Corolla doesn’t rape the environment like a Prius.

To wit:

Prius vs Ford Expedition.

Prius vs Hummer.

Where do all those batteries come from? From where are those materials, ingredients, metals and resources mined? How are they collected? How are they packaged on-site? How are they shipped? Who mines those materials? How are they paid? Under what conditions must they work? What kind of breaks or wages are they afforded? Are the miners repressed? How many miles and over what transportation sources are those toxic materials shipped? How does the shipping affect the environment? Are the shipping procedures “green”? Through how many customs sites and borders must they pass? How costly is this? How far must these materials travel and over what kind of energy-inefficient conveyances?

All excellent questions that need to be asked regarding hybrid and/or electric vehicles utilizing huge battery packs. If you’re not asking those questions, you’re not truly “green.”

And how, when sold or discarded, are the massive battery packs in hybrid vehicles like the Prius handled? How are they disposed? Where are they disposed? Who disposes them? Under what regulations are they disposed? Wet batteries? Dry batteries? Acid? Toxic materials?

You’re an adult. You can figure it out.

BZ

P.S.
Not to mention how Emergency Responders, fire and police, have to factor hybrid or solely-electric vehicles into their action plans in terms of driver/passenger danger, environmental hazards, broken battery packs, acid leakage, widespread distributive factors of collision influence, length and breadth of affected scene, and HazMat issues.

I’ll take the Hummer. Its simpler.

Let the ploys of the KGB speak for themselves, from this Soviet defector:

1. Demoralization
2. Crisis
3. Normalization
4. Destabilization

A Russian defector, Yuri Bezmenov, predicted America’s fall back in this 1984 (ominously dated) video.

Listen well, Americans:

“You will have nowhere to defect. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.”

BZ