Friday, May 11, 2012

Spitfires

Good to be home again, and greeting me is this from a reader, regarding an earlier Gerhard Richter post:
Check that picture again.  They appear to be British Spitfires.

I leave now to check the picture...
Long pause
Wow, that is annoying.  I believe they are exactly that -- British Spitfires.

But hey, sometimes it's good to be wrong.  At least in this situation.  I mean, it makes a hell of a lot more sense that they're Spitfires than U.S. ordinance.  I mistook the underbelly fuel tanks for scoops on Mustangs.

And isn't it odd how plane names end up on cars.  I was always a Camaro guy (although that ardor has cooled considerably), so I never owned a Mustang.  But I owned two Triumph TR-3s (and a third for parts, until Jim Dingle's mother told me I had to get it out of her back yard), which might as well have been Spitfires (either the cars or the planes).   Or Sopwith Camels.  Or, cooler still, Spads.

I'd go into some depth here about how the introduction of the Datsun 240Z changed the entire dynamic of owning inexpensive sports cars (usually British or Italian).  The fantasy image in your head ceased to be WWII (or I!) fighter planes and became Korean War era jets.  And the world, I should say, is a sorrier place for it. 

But right now I'm unrolling my Steven Davis painting and inscribing 60 or so annotations received via the web, and I'm on a bit of a deadline with that.

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