Anne and I biked over to the Park on Sunday, to attend the annual Easter Day antique car show. Officially the show is known as the Easter Concours d’Elegance. It is sponsored by the Horseless Carriage Club of Missouri.
Sunday’s weather capped a week of gorgeous springtime weather. The Park has been mobbed almost every day this week and Sunday was no different. We biked, so we didn’t need to look for parking, but we did get stuck in traffic. It was so crowded, that we only rode the roundtrip 9 miles to & from the show.
There were a lot of cars for sale at this show. More than I remember from past years. This looked to me to be another sign of the recession, lose a job, sell a car.
The show comprises two halves. The upper Muny lot hosts the original half of the show and has most of the antique cars. The lower Muny lot, Pagoda Circle and their environs hosts the muscle car half of the show.
We started on the upper Muny lot and then moved to the lower. Anne met and talked to a former co-worker at the Corps, Chuck. Anne and Chuck got to catch up on office gossip. Chuck specializes in the oldest of cars.
The title of this post alludes to it, the pictures with this post show it, to me the most fascinating aspect of this car show were the classic hood ornaments. In particular those ornaments that use women as their subject. I enjoy contemplating why those automotive engineers of years gone by, first chose a woman to symbolize the object of their work and also the way that they portrayed them.
Sunday night Anne and I went out to dinner with Dan and Annie. We went to Houlihan’s one of Dan’s favorites and mine too. This dinner combined our celebration of both Easter and Dan’s birthday. Dan turns twenty-five this week.
It got a bit chilly outside on the patio. Dan and Annie had biked over to our house. I was concerned that it was dark, but they made it back safely.
A former employer, Talx, was featured in a front page Sunday New York Times article and not in a good way. When I worked there, the main business was managing the annual benefits enrolments for large corporations. While I was there they had started to diversify.
I made a lot of money on one of their new products at the time, The Work Number. It was an automated verification systems that employees could use to prove that they had a job, for car loans and such. When I left, Talx had a third of the US workforce in their database and had figured out a way to resell that information. It had jacked up the stock price four fold before I sold.
After I left, Talx sold the division that I had worked in and apparently started up a new product line, handling unemployment insurance claims. According to the NYT article some of their business practices are shall we say, a little sharp. Some might be even fraudulent.