Finally a truck can I draw
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
my usual cynicism:
stainless steel is very difficult to repair, I’m speaking as a fabricator who worked with it. it responds to the required heat uniquely- look at the St Louis Arch and recall the surface was supposed to be smooth, not wrinkly. difficulty acheiving proper results will be measured in cost.
I don’t want to clean the interior of the windshield nor deal with the relection of the dash it will bear, or maintaining the other window interiors.
I’m waiting for my dinner and this is just going to get worse…
If it can haul 40 sheets of plywood and costs less than $20k cash, I’m your huckleberry.
Didja note that it is made from 30X cold rolled stainless steel? The video only mentioned that about six times.
I suspect the angularity is for the same reason the DeLorean was all angles and planes: as GWB writes, bending stainless is difficult. No doubt especially so for 30X cold rolled stainless steel.
It does seem to be resistant to impact damage and gunfire, probably because of that 30X cold rolled stainless steel. I looked up the bed size for you, Ghost: 57 inches, no wheel well intrusion. So you can getcher plywood in there.
Full of toxic materials. Earth-killer to make (I’m playing the enviros because this ecological vehicle is not that big a benefit to the ecology). Where TF to get a charge? I need an onboard computer to guess me where my next power “hit” is going to be. Can I carry a little red can to the nearest service station, and return to my truck with a can of electricity?
Vehicles used to be steel. I’m good with that.
Looks dorky. I bet there are blind spots all around that, but who cares since it drives itself? Ford wanted vehicles for the people. This one is for Californiacs.
I will admit when I saw the shitter on the back, I did put that in the plus column.
No blind spots (supposedly) because there are no mirrors. Cameras that give a 360 degree view. Musk wants nothing hanging off the outside to create drag.
Of course (as Heinlein noted in Starship Troopers) we might drive over a cliff or into a wall while your eyes are glued to the 17″ flat screen. Probably while trying to look down the blouse of the blonde in the convertible in the next lane.
I’ll never forget the time the vehicle flashed a message: don’t look at this back-up camera, you might hit someone! Right then and there I swore off robots, and automotive engineers.
The insanity…the insanity…
Betcha the extended vehicle warranty on that monstrosity is gonna cost an arm and a leg. (!)
nice first try. certainly interesting. But… stainless steel rusts, yes it rusts. and like others have said, it is very difficult and expensive to repair.
First ones go to rap stars, hollywood types, and James Bond. those of us who actually use trucks for work, not so much.
When the gas or diesel model comes out I’ll consider it.
I’ll give him his due….Elon Musk is a billionaire.
But part of me thinks he is also a huckster. YMMV.
OK – nice promo video. Several claims are too outlandish that I am surprised they are in the video – faster than a Porsche 911 (60 mph in 6.2 sec is not close to the 4.0 sec of the stock 911 which also has a top speed of 182pmh), it can pull a nearly infinite mass (14k lbs is a lot but it’s NOT a nearly infinite mass and I imagine battery life would be about 10 minutes), etc. Is the Cyber Truck unique? Yes in many ways but the hyperbole is silly.
Just doesn’t pencil out. Seen a couple electric vehicle fires. Fireman were hurt badly. Requires a very specialized approach to fighting electric car fires, zero Water, Some sort of dry powder only.
Is cool,,,,,, kinda.
VI
This video gives off a vibe, like one of Goebbels bragging about the V2. It is yet another example of engineers working from some “everything is possible” fantasy. These types do not live in the real world.
Elon Musk may be a genius—as if that matters at all—but he most certainly is a weirdo. And without the massive subsidies granted him by the US government—subsidies paid for out of your tax dollars—he would be nothing more than a clever manager of a Starbucks.
Where does all the electric come from? Certainly not solar/wind/wave power! Where / how do we recycle all the “green” lithium batteries? For that mater, where do those batteries come from? This vehicle is not sustainable or practical for anyone but the 1%. In the near future we will still need polluting fossil fuels from Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Why would Americans want to use our own natural resources?