Newspapers: Stop the Presses Already

Newspapers are falling like flies now that the news is free* on the internet. Now every time a print editor writes an editorial insisting that we're going to miss trained pro reporters when the last paper has folded and only those flakey bloggers are left, another paper dies and another 1,245 news blogs are created.

Meanwhile, of the 32 people world-wide who read the latest self-interested fall-of-newspapers editorial in the paper, only four cared, and all of them hold large stock positions in USA Today.*

As the nation's Car Czar, I'm here to help.

Newspapers have already seen how devastating free web news* is. Radio and Television: I hope you've taken some notes, because you're next. Newspapers were the canary in the coal mine because print was the cheapest medium to replicate in the nascent days of web access. Now audio and video are being pumped through the world's fat tubes with nary a buffering issue.

Here's what you traditional media must do to survive:

Newspapers: Quit printing already. I like sprawling on the couch with the Sunday paper and a steaming black cup of Maxwell House as much as the next guy, but your giant printing presses are bleeding you dry printing news that the world read yesterday. The only thing readers want from local newspapers nowadays is local news, and there's never enough of it in non-top-25-in-the-world cities to justify the trees, let alone printing and distribution.

I know. Every once in a while you print a unique in-depth investigative piece exposing the reality that those "Amish Space Heaters" and "Hoards of Never-before-photographed Collectible Coins" you've been taking-in full-page ad revenue on for years are ... shockingly ... all a big rip-off. Thanks for the tip, and too bad about all those old boogers who called-in.

But most of what you've filled the balance of your news pages with is crap.

Hints from Heloise. Nobody-gives-a-flip bloviating from Miss Manners. Crossword puzzles. Comics that are 95-percent brain dead and which will fully flatline if Scott Adams and Gary Trudeau ever leave your pages.

Even your syndicated political commentary looks pretty lame nowadays, because pro pundits are still confused about how to incisively parse this whole Obama Thing.

The left-wing scribes are trying too hard not to let Chris Matthews Chills go up their collective legs over our damned-great new president while the right-wingers have spent the past few months just gasping and wheezing in important-sounding tones.

Look. Bloggers are just better than newspaper columnists at explaining complex ideas.

Case-in-point: Obama's First 100 Days:

President O. isn't perfect, but so far he's turning out to be the greatest U.S. president any living American has ever seen.

(Syndicated columnists would take forever trying to make the case for the above basic truth or hopelessly trying to refute it. They have to meet silly tree-, ink-, and time-wasting column-inch requirements and just end up sounding tired or pompous. Bloggers quit whenever they're tired of writing).

Soon almost everyone in the free world will have a web phone or a netbook or content-pushing microwave. In another decade the print circulation market is going to be shut-ins who are still trying to figure out why their TVs stopped working 10 years ago.

So cut the crap, print titans. Please heretofore* put your professionally-vetted unique content on the web and I'll see you on my Blackberry.

Radio: Except for Clear Channel, you're pretty much headed to the web anyway. Congrats.

If reality ever sinks in with all those scared-to-death racists, hicks, and old people, Clear Channel can sell their silent towers to base-jumping clubs.

Television: You're pretty hip as well, with plenty of ad-monetized web content out there already and an army of attorneys ready to turn the YouTube to sand with every "Whoops ... we thought it was 'Fair Use'" piracy attempt. Since it costs too much to make a bad television show for long, sucky shows like Parks and Recreation (hey – "a show about nothing" worked out great for Seinfeld. Let's make the whole show all about a public dump ... that's even better than nothing) will continue to live or die by ratings.

But Saturday Night Live should consider itself on notice. You guys might survive by well-timed presidential elections and Peyton Manning appearances, but once everything's on the web you can be sure your audience will be replacing those interminably-boring Italian TV host skits with the wide-eyed fat guy dressed up as a little boy – and those Gilly skits, for that matter – with funnier crap from the You Tube on our on-screen content aggregation pages.

Web Content: Safe for now. Lots of stuff for free. It's soooo easy to ignore those Google ads.

*I know. News isn't free. And you can't buy "USA Today" stock, not specifically. "Heretofore" is used incorrectly in this blog and jumps pretentiously out of nowhere. But this is a new world order, and half-baked bloggers rule. In your face, George Will.

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SPAM ALERT to all my Feedburner Subscribers

I to all who subscribe to Art Car Central via feedburner, yoo got an email last night with my name on it which did not come from me. It was a request with an arabic return email address saying it was from feedburner via Art Car Central.

the message was

Hello there,
You recently requested an email subscription to Art Car Central. We can't
wait to send the updates you want via email, so please click the following
link to activate your subscription immediately:

DO NOT REPLY TO IT, i DID NOT SEND!!!!!!!

Sorry for the weirdness and I do I appreciate you all being loyal subscribers to Art Car Central. I love making you all laugh.

Rudy: Cuban Gynecologist and American Used Car Salesman

Why is this so funny? I used to sell cars once upon a time and I heard a lot of stories about ways to sell cars. But this is by far the worst gimmick I have ever heard and hopefully Rudy the Cuban Gynecologist and American Used Car Salesman doesn't plan on doing both at the same time. Or maybe he plans on throwing in his services as an added feature to the 100k mile warranty.Wait I think I just spotted the spoof. This video was made by Rhett&Link and they also have a making of the making of this funny commercial they made.

Medical Help for Tea Party People

Anybody remember those people who spent aggregate decades making fun of anti-war protestors during the Vietnam and Middle East wars?

You know ... the people who passed by sign-toting wackos and shouted, "Get a job!" ... assuming that only the unemployed had enough time on their hands to organize a protest against the government?

Well, lots of those people are out protesting against the government this week.

Instead of protesting against senseless killing (OK, not all of it's senseless. Pretty cool seeing Sadaam's neck snap on the YouTube, and we just can't frag enough of those Taliban) they're protesting against senseless drains on their collective wallets.

The world feels your self-interested pain.

But we're not going to laugh at you.

(Not too much).

We're not going to assume you're unemployed.

We're not in any way going to suggest you're not worthy of free speech.

But would you please stop wasting so much perfectly good tea?

(This whole tea-buying frenzy can't be helping your wallets either, and you nutjobs have already driven the price of ammo through the roof).

NEWSFLASH!

These massive government spending programs you're protesting began with your guy last October ... $1.5 trillion to who-knows-where, for starters, just so we could dodge a major economic Armageddon.

Remember?

We radical centrists don't disagree with your outrage over these murky bailouts, but your collective re-packaging of the whole she-bang as "socialist spending by the Obama Administration" paints you just as hopelessly perplexed as your ongoing confusion between Iraq and Afghanistan in The War on Terror.

Want help with future tough distinctions in everyday thinking? Get it here.

[I am the Car Czar, and I'm here to help.]

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The Fahrvernpüssy Lounge by Tré Taylor

The Fahrvernpüssy Lounge VW Art Van is the creation of Tré Taylor who is also the amazing vocalist for The Dangerous Martini Quartet. Her VW Art Car is a 1973 type 2 camper van and has a 911 Porsche engine. The Interior, Custom Glass Mosaic Art done by Sherry Tobin and is basically a mobile Cocktail Lounge, with it's own little wet bar.

The Fahrvernpüssy Lounge with Tré Taylor at the Wheel


The Fahrvernpüssy Lounge Interior


The Fahrvernpüssy Lounge in Full Lounge Mode

via

Star Wars Art Cars II - Revenge of the Art Trucks

I got an email the other day from Pete owner of GalacticBinder who sent me a link to some pretty amazing Star Wars Art Cars, Vans and Trucks. When I saw these I knew that without them ACC would not be complete so I had to post these. Pete also claims that his site is the biggest Star Wars directory in the world. I think he is right and if you are a big Star Wars fan its the place to go for all kinds of interesting and odd Star Wars stuff. By the way I think Art Car Central is the biggest Art Car directory in the world now with over 450 entries. SO if you are a fan here are a few more Star Wars Art Cars you cant live without.

Star Wars Van Art Car


Star Wars Darth Maul Art Van


Star Wars Phantom Menace Big Rig Art Trucks


Star Wars Custom Art Van


Star Wars Art Camper

First Ever Desert Jet Ski-Margaritaville Jet Ski

here is the skinny on this first ever Desert Jet Ski via

When the project started early November 2003 I knew exactly what I was after: “The Evolution of a Jet Ski”. I was in search of a watercraft to build my little bit of Paradise. A friend of mine showed up with this poor, mistreated, abused and beaten body of a wave runner. I went to work on her. And when I fired up the first set of lights on her engine cowl and stood in front of her, I knew that she was in fact alive and ready for her new life. Rita was built from a 10 ft Kawasaki wave runner and a Murray lawn tractor. (best thing that ever happened to a Murray). It was literally like attaching a 2x4 to a rock! Now She is an Art Car. An Art Car is a vehicle that is transformed into art, where Her body becomes the canvas.

Rita now sits on a John Deere frame as of 7/12/08. Ready to go with a hydrostatic transmission.

Art Truck Bed By Patrick Amiot- A Great Place to Crash

via Armstrong Creates: blog

I found this art truck bed yesterday photo taken by David Bacigalupi from Armstrong Associates and I had to post it on art car central. The funny thing is that hours later on my walk around Sebastopol California I decided to go visit my friend Patrick Amiot who creates the most amazing and whimsical sculptures made from junk. His work is all around town and many are located on Sebastopol's famous Florence street. He is also the creator of the Shark Art Car and has many more art cars on his web site. So I am chatting away with Patrick and Brigitte in the back studio when he offers to give a tour of the house. The first stop was the bedroom and what did I see??? This amazing Art Truck Bed right there just like in the picture. It was totally weird how only hours ago I had made a mental note to put it up on my blog. After I saw it I knew it had to put it up, and so here it is. I love how it has the gas tanks for bed posts and the old GMC grill. 

The Von Tiki - Tiki Style Party Bar on wheels

I wrote about the von tiki party bar art car some time ago. Now I bring you the in depth video interview with the creator of this art car, Jake Goldstein.

An Invitation to the Obama-Deranged

Dear Disenfranchised and Frightened Peoples of America:

Spring and a new world are here, and despite all the doom and gloom on your ever-crackling AM radios, everything's going to be fine. It's been a long winter – extra long, for you, because it probably started sometime in early October.

That's when it became apparent that Sarah Palin, the sassy Great Northern Savior you embraced overnight as Good People after over a year of not-really-knowing-who-Barack-Obama-is,^TM wasn't going to be able to rescue your political party from being ousted after all.

When reality spoke on November 4, many of you headed for your basements and spent the dark cold months playing records on your record players whenever talk radio was taking a station break. Your record players played songs of The Apocalypse like "He's a Muslim," "He's Gonna Take Away Our Guns," and "He's a Muslim, Really."

When you weren't jamming to odes to the End of Days you were forwarding chainmail to each other.

And that's pretty much what you did all winter.

Some of you poked your heads up the basement stairwell periodically in February and March to shriek, "The Messiah has tanked the stock market" or simply "We're all Doomed."

The room you've been living in – the room that looked to the rest of the world like just another small, dark personal dungeon – must instead have been as comfortable and enveloping as the soft, dark inside of your very own fleshy posterior abyss, for everyone not inside there seemed to remember that the stock market had tanked last October and that it was already the End of the World back then.

I'm writing you today to invite you out into the great big world with the rest of us. There are some great sales going on in this brave new world, and you're going to want to take advantage. Cheap houses and cars. Low interest rates. Land's End is having more blowout internet sales than an Oriental rug store. We need you to come out and spend, spend, spend with the rest of us, because both the past and current administrations have made it clear that this country is heading straight down the rabbit hole for-real if we're not all perpetually in debt.

Just so we're all on the same page, here's what's been going on while you wintered in hell.

... Obama took away all your guns and ammunition. Well, only kind of. You guys scared yourselves so badly passing around chainmail rumors about Obama taking all your guns and ammo away that you guys took your own guns and ammo away from yourselves by making runs on gun stores. Most of the ammo shelves are now bare, and what's left is going for three times the pre-panic market rate. Way to go.

... The whole New Messiah Thing: Your invention, your nightmare. Wake up whenever it's convenient and you'll find that wide-eyed zombies have chanted mindlessly for presidential candidates since the beginning of time. The "Obama ... Obama" chanting crowds were real here too, but were a small segment of the folks who elected the Big O. to the Oval Office. See, your Grand Old Party, bereft of any clue as to how to beat the O. Express late last year, ran the chanting "Obama" ads to make it look like only mindless people were behind the whole Obama Thing. Talk radio happily forwarded the message, since you guys live and die by the United Front, even if it's a United Front to Disaster. To pull this stunt off, the whole cabal counted on a large percentage of you folks to be mindless. And for large numbers of you folks ... dang ... they pulled it off.

... President O. has lots of people torqued-off on both sides of the aisle. And that's as it should be. Do you really think we'd get anywhere if those foaming-mouthed liberals got their way on everything? (Hint: We've already seen what happens when foaming-mouthed conservatives get their way on everything). Everybody says this all the time, so I'm going to say it too: The United States of America is great in-part because it was founded on a system of checks and balances. If, on balance, President O. gets it wrong, he's out of office next time around. He knows that, and so does his base. We like it that way, and we hope America likes it that way for a long time to come. No more keeping a president in office just because he shares our opinion on when life begins or who sticks what where ... let's hope.

... President O. isn't perfect. He screws up a lot. Head-hunts people with nanny and tax problems. Shakes hands with saluting Marines. Makes dumb jokes about the handicapped. Fox News is reporting that President Obama gave Queen Elizabeth a Wet Willy (I made that one up, but I like the line anyway ... going with it). In short, O. has lots in common with your beloved once-upon-a-time Decider-in-Chief, except for that being-dumb-and-aggressive-at-the-same-time-and-rarely-if-ever-admitting-when-you-are-wrong issue, not to mention the pandering-to-the-base-at-all-costs issue. Sometimes just good character trumps being perfect, and though history has not been all the way writ on O., so far, so good.

... Your new president-whether-you-like-it-it-or-not is keepin' it fresh. He could sit and sulk about the economic meltdown on his plate just like GWB sat and sulked over the Middle East for most of his presidency. But O's keepin' it real ... getting out to the talk show circuit, YouTubing, BarackBerrying, and generally executing the wide range of presidential tasks in traditional and non-traditional ways without showing us a sweat. At this point we probably still shouldn't worry about where this fellow gets his cool. The Secret Service, I have it on good authority I just made up, monitors Renegade for extraterrestrial radio signal manipulation 24/7. And of course, he could always just snap.

... The stock market has buds on it. Not blooming yet, but the fundamentals are in place. Many of the banks that cried out for funding late last year took a long look at the conditionals on TARP money and decided they weren't so destitute after all. Hope you were buying bank stocks in-between all those Look What the Obama Administration is Doing Now chainmails and talk radio "We're now a socialist country" moans.

... You can average 45 mpg in your car without buying a weenie hybrid. Diesels are back, and most of them don't clatter and spew black smoke. They have torque out the wazoo. You can save some bucks on transportation costs and fill up at cowboy-hat-wearin' truck stops (hey ... remember cowboy hats?). You can also get a federal tax credit for buying a diesel, so you can stick it to da man too. (Since everybody likes to stick it to da man when their man ain't in office) .

... GM is still selling a 638 horsepower Corvette. Get one while you can.

That's what I know so far. All ribbing aside about you folks brainwashing each other into submission, seriously ... really ... think about getting that Corvette. (Obama's going to take those away, you know).

###

I'm not done yet. Next week: Your Unhumble Car Czar's Giant Pre-web Road Test Database.

Sheep Covered in LEDs to Make Art - Art Sheep

SAMSUNG LED SHEEP @ Yahoo! Video

I know this is totally off the subject but these LED covered sheep used to make art is pretty darn funny and creative. Who knew?

NYT Fires Editors, Hires Chimps

April Fools. Even chimps know there’s no apostrophe in “SUVs.”

(And, um, Al Sharpton ... go home).



Real April 1 Fun here.

Lights on During Earth Hour? Check your Utility Bill

Homeowners who turned on all their lights and electrical appliances in protest of Earth Hour last week may be in for a mildly rude surprise on next month's utility bill. Utilities in several nations including the U.S. are metering electricity used during their respective Earth Hours at three times the peak-use rate as part of a load test of the International Conservation Society's "peak-peak" initiative.

The peak rate model, which has already been adopted for trial periods in several EC countries, would charge higher- than-peak electric rates, or "peak-peak" rates to users during large spikes in energy demand whether during peak or off-peak periods. The goal is not to discourage energy use, but to more fairly apportion charges for those who use the most energy during peak or off-peak demand, according to the Bern-based organization.

Some have called Saturday's hour-long "peak-peak" test a punitive tax on consumers who elected to exercise their free speech by turning on all of their lighting and appliances on during Earth Hour instead of off as encouraged each year by the event's organizer, the World Wide Fund for Nature.

"If this isn't a punitive stunt, why this hour – exactly "Earth Hour" instead of three in the morning?" asked conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.

Others echoed Beck's sentiment.

"The hit on my electric bill for an hour of every light in the house on probably won't be more than a few bucks, said Rob Holtz of Denton, Texas, who proudly burned every light both in and outside his home during Earth Hour in addition to blasting his stereo.

"But I'm angry that someone planned a specific hour-long hike to punish people like me."

Randall Carr of American Electric Power, which serves 11 states in the eastern U.S., denies that Earth Hour was targeted for the "peak-peak" billing test to sting those who turned all their power on instead of off.

"It never occurred to us that some people would use more power than usual during this time," said Carr. "We thought running the billing sample during Earth Hour would result in the least amount of impact on our customers."

The concern over "peak-peak" billing during Earth Hour is "probably overblown," said Carr. For the average homeowner, "figure under a dollar," Carr said.

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_____________________________________________

It's about time I started an internet chainmail rumor designed to rankle (I love the word "rankle") the kind of people who forward made-up chainmail news stories. Many of them probably did turn all their lights and appliances on for Earth Hour, so let's have fun. Please forward this breaking news story to every half-wit you know in honor of this hallowed first day of April.

-- TCC

More April 1 News: New York Times Fires Editors, Hires Chimps