So this time I think I’ve REALLY sold my car, and the good news is that the price went even higher this time around: I got $6,400 for it on eBay Motors.

The buyers are coming with a trailer to collect the car on Wednesday, and will be taking it to Ohio. They seem very excited about it, which makes me happy too — I’m glad the car is going to a good home.

So… Goodbye Deathmobile!

Unbelievable — the U.S. Army is running out of bullets! According to a BBC report today, current demand is running at 2 BILLION BULLETS PER YEAR, whereas supply is only a trifling 1.2 billion bullets.

Where do all these bullets go? That’s gotta be tons and tons of lead (or whatever else they make bullets out of these days — maybe depleted uranium?) going into the earth, buildings, cars, people etc.

So it seems my farewell to my car (see previous posting) was premature, thanks to a non-paying bidder on eBay — apparently the guy’s son “made a mistake,” so now I’ve had to re-list the car on eBay, and will have to fill out a load of tedious non-paying bidder forms in order to get a refund of the listing fee from eBay. Thanks buddy!

Well it finally happened, after 15 months of expensive procrastinating and 5 months of getting my act together: I SOLD MY CAR TODAY! I will no longer be the proud owner of a black 1969 Ford Mustang Grande hardtop (affectionately nicknamed “The Deathmobile” by a nervous passenger in San Francisco).

After creating it’s very own website and picture gallery, I eventually put Deathie up on eBay Motors, and someone bought it today for $5,995 using the “Buy It Now” feature.

I have very mixed feelings about this… Although I’m happy to have finally sold the car for a good price, and will no longer have to pay $160 a month for it to be garaged on Roosevelt Island, and can forget about maintenance headaches, I’m also quite sad; both because I’m much more attached to this car than I should be, and because in many ways it marks the end of my initial American adventure — I bought the car within a month or so of moving to California in 1999, and it’s been a constant (and a constant headache, truth be told) in my life ever since.

Ah well, there’ll be other cars, I guess…

Someone’s invented a practical flying car!

It’s about time — when I was a kid, I thought we’d all have personal jet packs by now…

Michael Moore’s new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival tomorrow. However, it’s not yet clear when the film will get a U.S. release, because Disney have blocked its subsidiary Miramax from releasing it.

According to a BBC article (I couldn’t find any mention of the film on either the Disney or Miramax sites), Moore alleges that a top Republican has been pressuring movie companies to block the film’s release, and of course Disney wants to stay friendly with Jeb Bush because of the tax breaks they want in the State of Florida.

Anyway I eventually found myself on Michael Moore’s website, where there are some pretty interesting things to read and look at, which are usually a combination of amusing and appalling:

Letters from Soldiers in Iraq

As the name suggests, letters written to Michael Moore from U.S. soldiers based in Iraq. It seems they are much more aware of, and much unhappier about what is going on than the media would have us believe.

Faces of the Fallen

A link to an interactive presentation by the Washington Post showing the names and dates of U.S. personnel that have died in Iraq. It also describes how they died, which gives some idea of the chaos there: Amongst all the deaths from enemy fire and home-made bombs are more unlikely or surreal demises, such as being run over by a dumptruck after the driver was shot running a checkpoint, or being electrocuted in a swimming pool.

Now Are You Ready to Join Al Qaeda?

Poignant cartoon from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and isn’t that a bizarre name for a newspaper?).

Ashcroft Sings

Now this one is just plain weird; a link to a videoclip of John Ashcroft ending a speech in North Carolina with a tuneless rendition of a song he penned himself called “Let the Eagle Soar.” This man is the U.S. Attorney General!

So anyway, big kudos to Michael Moore; his analysis isn’t always totally thorough and he can be kind of irritating at times, but he gets regular people fired up about bad politics in a way no-one else has been able to, and it just might be enough to tip the balance come the Presidential Elections in November — I sure hope so. Nice one geezer!

I come across a lot of librarians and other information professionals in my job, and I just found a great source for gifts: LibrarianGear.com!

I had a new article published recently in the online Internet journal First Monday; it’s a paper based on a presentation I gave earlier this year at the 2004 IMLS WebWise conference, titled “Building semantic bridges between museums, libraries and archives: The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.”

One of the things I like best about the word “asinine” is that you get to say “ass” emphatically at the beginning.