It's that time of year again (gonna carve that Halloween Pumpkin this afternoon), but there's also a buncha news from Think Fast Central (in other words, this desk, computer screen and keyboard). So here's the latest poop:

LOTUS BOOK REFUSES TO START!

Okay, so this is hardly a suprise to anybody who knows me and my work, but my new, coffee-table quality, absolutely gorgeous and laugh-out-loud entertaining LIFELONG LOTUS LOVE AFFAIR book is gonna be late and will NOT be ready in time for the Christmas holidays. This is definitely NOT because I have been loafing, screwing off or that I've bitten off more than I can chew (although all of those things have been true at various times), but the facts are these:

1) The scope of the book has grown like fuzzy green mold on a nice wheel of cheese. I've been adding expanded and even complete new sections (including one about Lotus Cortinas, the very first "race shop" garage I ever visited and how I got to track test a real, D-Type Jaguar and subsequently got to RACE an XKSS "road-car" version of same. Really.

2) Thanks to unbelievable enthusiasm and assistance from folks like Classic Team Lotus in the UK and The Revs Institute in Hurricane Alley (I mean Naples, FL) and Evi Gurney, among others, I have all sorts of wonderful images coming in, and it takes time to find the best one and fit & fold them into the layout.

3) Speaking of images, I still haven't located the source or the shooters for some of the images I want to use, and you want to get that nailed down so as to avoid bad feelings and even worse conversations with lawyers...

So let me gaze into my crystal ball and give you our NEW, best-guess, bottom line prognosis:

We MAY have books done & ready ship by Valentines' Day (also wife Carol's birthday as well as our 51st wedding anniversary) on February 14th. And I mean 2025 this time.

Plans are to do the official RETAIL LAUNCH with a book signing in the Hall of Fame Museum during the 12 Hours of Sebring March 13-15, 2025. Followed by a presentation by Yrs. Trly. at THE REVS INSTITUTE in Naples, FL. the following Monday, March 17th. More details as they become available.

NEWS FLASH--THE TRASHWAGON HAS LANDED!

For all you folks who have been waiting (most of you patiently) for your long-ordered copies of the third "Buddy Palumbo/The Last Open Road" novels (i.e.: THE FABULOUS TRASHWAGON), I'm both pleased and slightly embarrassed to tell you that (drum roll, please): "THE TRASHWAGON REPRINT HAS FINALLY ARRIVED!"

We had a bit of a problem with our, ahem, "previous printer," who no longer had the files (my fault, really--they warned me they were purging their old files--but they HAD printed it a couple times before). And then I couldn't locate a copy of the color insert "ad and sponsorship" section files. Now that part is really separate from the "story" part of the book, but I promised all of our fine sponsors and advertisers that their names, ads and/or messages would appear in "every copy we ever print" and, as every political candidate currently running for office, regardless of party, will tell anyone who will listen (they're all getting a bit desperate right now), it's IMPORTANT to keep your word...at least if it isn't too much trouble or if you don't think anybody will much notice or care.

Well, we found a new printer whom I'm initially very happy with them and then, after I was about to do the printing WITHOUT the center color section, I dug through the garage (pardon me...I mean "our computerized and scrupulously organized filing system") and damn if I didn't find a copy of that "TRASHWAGON" color section on an old ZIP drive (remember them?) covered in dust like "The Mummy" character Boris Karloff played in that creepy-but-strange-and-ever-so-slightly-racist movie of the same name from 1932. Those old Universal Studios "monster" movies are just PERFECT for the Halloween season, n'est ce pas?

So we quite literally hollered "STOP THE PRESSES!" (I always wanted an opportunity to say that!) and put the color insert pages back in. And damn if the printer didn't do a bang-up job. So now we have them in hand and will start shipping all the copies we owe on Monday. But there are well over 100 of them, so it will take a few days. But they ARE on the way. Really they are. Honest. And thank you for your patience (not that you had any choice).

Related Issue: We're about to reprint the fourth book in the series, "TOLY'S GHOST" (we ran out of that one, too), so if you ordered one of those (or a full set with a few titles temporarily out of stock), figure you'll have them in plenty of time for Christmas. And I mean THIS year...

For those stalwart supporters waiting for your unbelievably rare (only 100 numbered copies will be made) and even more unbelievably tardy copy of our excruciatingly classy, suede-bound THE LAST OPEN ROAD 25th ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIVE EDITION...it's still in the pipeline. But there have been snags and it's been shuffled to the bottom of the "to do" shit list a couple (okay, so more than a couple) times. I'll be happy to refund your hunnert bucks if you're sick of waitinmg, but I WILL get this thing done. But there's two other projects in front of it right now that I hope--in fact I'm SURE--will sell a lot more than 100 copies and, in any business, y'gotta go where the green stuff grows if you want to stay in business. I'm figuring first quarter next year. Stay tuned...

By the way, we DO have a few choice numbers of the Commemorative Special Edition still available.

Investors/speculators take note: this has GOT to be a better investment than Fungible Tokens, cornering the maket on Fiat X1-9s & DeLoreans or Crypto...

A HARROWING HALLOWEEN TALE!!!
REVENGE of the FREAKING SQUIRRELS!

As many of you already know, I make kind of a "thing" out of Halloween. Think it all started when my brother Maury and I would stay up and watch those old Universal "Horror Movies" referenced above ("Frankenstein," "Dracula", "The Wolf Man," "The Invisible Man," etc.) on "SHOCK THEATER" when we were kids. If it was a really "good" one, we couldn't sleep afterwards.

But even so, we wanted more...

Now that I'm old and craggy and nothing scares me as much as real life, I still get a kick out of Halloween. I try to make the house look properly creepy with skeletons and such, always dress up for "Beggars' Night" (which has now become "Beggars Afternoon" thanks to all the horrible, even unspeakable things people keep doing to each other and which the news media is only too happy to plaster all over their front pages, radio reports and TV/computer screens 'cause it attracts human eyes and ears like ants to spilled sugar and you know how much advertisers like that sort of thing).

So the experience has changed a bit since I was a wee tad (there are warning labels and cautionary advice from well-meaning do-gooders all over it) and what ever happened to the spirit, spunk and delicious mischief of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, eh?

You can take my soapbox now, sonny...I'm through with it.

But the point is I still love Halloween and enjoy putting my scary-but-not-too-scary mask on when I anser the doorbell and I have this box I built back when our son Adam was a tyke that I haul out of mothballs every year. It looks like a small coffin or maybe a "buried-treasure" box, and there's a big padlock on it that each new kid (or band of kids) has to undo. And then they open it up and (I am not making this up):

1) Screams, rattling chains, creepy organ music, etc. come from deep inside.

2) This huge, mummy-looking hand with a rubber snake (only the kids don't know it's rubber) wrapped around it pivots up out of the bottom (the mechanism works thanks to a spring from an old rat trap).

3) In the old days, the box used to shake and shiver any time you shifted it a bit--I mean right in your freaking hands!--but that "oscillator" part broke years ago and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement.

4) And of course, underneath all the above, is the candy, and the kids can reach in, if they dare, and scoop up enough to keep their dentists' wives in fur coats and fancy vacations...

So another part of my yearly "Halloween" celebration is a very special pumpkin. I've shown you some of them here before, but a couple of my favorites, even though they weren't that hard to do, were my "Laurel and Hardy" from a couple years ago:

Below is my "this year's" Jack-o'-Lantern, which I finished yesterday afternoon in a messy marathon of eyeballing, chopping, scooping seeds & glop, eyeballing & supposing, marking, carving, cutting, scowling and assembling. I thought he (or is it a 'she'?) was kinda cute. And below that image is what he/she looked like on the porch last night.

Now I have to admit that long-suffering wife Carol warned me repeatedly about putting him (or her?) out on the porch where the squirrels could, uhh, "have their way with him or her." I tell you, this "being careful about your pronouns" stuff has gotten WAY out of hand. I mean, how can a single human being be a "they," which is, at least according to all of my many English teachers over the years, a PLURAL noun?

But back to the squirrels in our back yard, which is a far more straightforward proposition to comprehend. I have to admit that I leave stuff like sunflower seeds out in a sort of hanging planter that's become a bit of a squirrel feeder, and there is one big, brown squirrel who's a Certified Stinker and three or four smaller grey squirrels who try to get in there and gorge themselves whenever he (or she?) isn't looking. And so the stinker big, brown squirrel has taken to perching on the nearby fence post in a VERY aggressive posture after he (or she?) has eaten all the sunflower seeds he (or she?) can hold without exploding, the general message to the smaller, grey squirrels being: "DON'T YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!!!"

Like I said, he (or she?) is a stinker.

But back to The Pumpkin Conundrum. I'm no fool (or at least that's what I tell people) and so I made sure, when I finished up the cutting, scooping and carving, to apply a bunch of Vinegar to the inside of my handsome new pumpkin before I started fiddling with the installation of the nose, ears and eyeballs (all made out of little gourds that are of no use to anyone after Halloween and maybe Thanksgiving) and putzed around with the internal illumination. I thought it looked pretty damn good. And then I put it out on our front porch and enjoyed a golden little "appreciation moment" like you get after you finish rebuilding a race motor or set a new high score in "Tetris."

Now the scene shifts to this morning, just before my bike ride through the woods (it was a beautiful day!), but I couldn't resist a quick peek at my pumpkin. And what do you know? The damn squirrels (and, I hate to admit it, I saw one of the smaller grey ones hanging around with a guilty look on his--or her?--face) had left the main body of the pumpkin, saturated as it was with vinegar, completely alone. But everything not so slathered in vinegar was...GONE! The little gourd eyeballs, one of the slightly larger gourd ears and the entire, elongated gourd probocis had vanished into the collective digestive systems of those damn squirrels. See sad evidetiary photo below:

Still looking for sponsors and advertisers for the new LOTUS LOVE AFFAIR book, which will be my first-ever all singing/all dancing/full-color/large format/gloss paper/top quality coffee-table effort. And it's gonna be grand. So think about sponsoring or advertising in the new book. It'll not only reach a fantastic, upper-demographic, car-savvy audience, but it's an ad presence (unlike periodicals or media shows) that will last damn near forever! Ad specs below:

Or consider becoming a sponsor. If you've already ordered a hardcover book and paid for it, that purchase can be applied to the sponsorship cost (see flyer below). Becoming a sponsor is guaranteed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Me, too.

Lastly, how would you like a picture of YOUR favorite car (or your friend or spouse's favorite car) in our Beloved Cars Gallery in the new book? Details below as well.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER STUFF

FROM THE WEBSITE

Catch the latest poop & pictures, the Jay Leno interview, Last Open Road swag & highly inappropriate attire from Finzio's Store and the lurid & occasionally embarrassing "ride with Burt" in-car racing videos on the hopefully now fully operational website at:

WWW.LASTOPENROAD.COM