Carroll Shelby @ 81

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Terry Box on the legendary muscle car builder Carroll Shelby:

Sometimes late at night, 81-year-old Carroll Shelby lies awake, thinking about all the cars he still wants to build.
“I’ve got 10 different cars in my head,” said Shelby, the lanky, legendary Texan who created the fierce Shelby Cobras and Mustangs of the 1960s and was a renowned racer in the 1950s.
At a time when most men his age are settling in for the final chapter of their lives, Shelby is on the move again.
Earlier this year, he and his wife, Cleo, bought a 4,600-acre ranch outside tiny Annona in east Texas. After years of living mostly in Los Angeles, he said he expects the new ranch to become his primary home — a symbolic return of sorts to east Texas, where he was born.

He has a website, of course.

Verizon’s Fiber to the Home – Yesterday’s Architecture

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While SBC raises rates in Wisconsin for a long since paid for copper network, Verizon pushes forward with fiber to the home. David Isenberg notes that they are installing broadband fiber with speeds up to 60Mbps; that’s over 60X the speed of my DSL line. Isenberg also notes that Verizon may have chosen a difficult to scale architecture (that 60Mbps may be set for decades…)
Wisconsin politicians evidently continue to drink SBC’s Kool-Aid, as there’s no evidence of progress here.

Big Media & Authority

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Daniel Henninger on big media’s declining authority:

Authority can be a function of raw power, but among free people it is sustained by esteem and trust. Should esteem and trust falter, the public will start to contest an institution’s authority. It happens all the time to political figures. It happened here to the American Catholic Church and to the legal profession, thanks to plaintiff-bar abuse. And now the public is beginning to contest the decades-old authority of the mainstream media.
Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media’s ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%–what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago.

GM, Ford SUV Stability Enhancements

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Greg Schneider:

General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. said yesterday that they are rushing to adopt a new safety technology called electronic stability control, and together they will make such systems standard on most of their large and mid-size sport-utility vehicles by the end of next year.
The nation’s two biggest automakers were quick to offer the new technology on 1.8 million vehicles after preliminary testing by the government and the insurance industry showed enormous safety benefits, especially for popular SUVs that ride high and are more likely to roll over during a crash.