Nobless Oblige? : "He was a poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior. He was also the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum & Bailey."

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The title of this post is plucked from athe script of the classic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, a stylized account of the accomplishments of the great Thomas Edward Lawrence. T.E.L. was a Lt. Col. of the British Army and hero of World War I. It is too early to tell if such a quote could one day apply to Tariq Nasr al Fadhli; hero of the Soviet-Afghan War, former Islamist guerilla, one time associate of Osama Bin Laden, South Yemeni Patriot, tribal leader of Zinjibar and a potential ally of the United States should it ever deign to take action against Al Qaeda in Yemen. But one can certainly hope that it will.

The New York Times recently ran a positive profile on al-Fadhli: ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/world/middleeast/27tareq.html?emc=eta1 ), which has described the somewhat extreme measures al-Fadhli has taken to garner U.S. attention. After publicly disavowing his longstanding ties to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, al-Fadhli retreated to his ancestral lands in the South and is now holed up in a fortified compound replete with an erected United States' flag.

It would be easy to dismiss Tareq al-Fadhli as another tin-pot opportunist , but for the fact that his family's historical alliance with Britain, taste for good scotch, obvious distaste for the more extreme passions of Islamic radicals, cavalier rebellion against the sitting Yemeni government, the romanticism of a deposed tribal-aristocrat re-claiming his lands, and an on-again - off-again relationship as a United States' ally makes his narrative tremendously appealing. The best leaders and revolutionaries have been those with a taste for the dramatic, and often found in idividuals with complicated backgrounds. Think Samuel Adams in Boston Harbor circa 1773. The danger, of course, is when dramatic flair (Storming the Bastille?)devolves into imperious tyranny (chopping off heads en masse). For now we'll just have to be patient & see what develops.

Nixon's The One?

Dick Nixon may not have followed through on his campaign slogan of being 'The One,' (which perhaps puts him in good company with the sitting POTUS, or 'That One,' as he was indelicately described by John McCain in 2008) , and that whole issue of JFK Harvard envy was just sad. However, if this photo is any evidence, working on his campaign trail was at least half as fun as breaking into the Watergate. Even if this photo predated Deep-Throat. Still, we'll defer to the venerable Hunter S. Thompson whose epitaph for Dick Nixon was both uncharitable and probably spot on: http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html . Choice line: "Nixon was so crooked that he needed his servants to help him screw his pants on in the morning. Even his funeral was illegal. His body should have been burned in a trash can."

Sabrina 1945: Yes We Have No Bananas

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ate6yjFW-hk&feature=related ) A classic Great Depression song 'Yes We Have No Banana's' from 1945's Sabrina starring Humphrey Bogart (Expelled from Andover 1918 after being caught clutching his trademark cigarette.)

Off The Rails: Alfred Brush Ford & Elisabeth Reuther Dickman

In 1923 former chief engineer at Ford Motor Company, Edward Gray began the construction of his lifelong ambition of a private community for Yachtsmen. He called the neighborhood Graystone and soon had enlisted members of the Fisher (Fisher Body), Koerber (Koerber Brewing) and Gar Wood (Gar Wood Boats) as early landowners in the gated complex.

Amid the pre-Depression euphoria several of these families built lavish mansions
replete with amenities ranging from wet and dry-docks to small golf courses and even a berth for the Gar Wood Seaplane. The largest mansion was built by the Fisher family on 46 lots or 40 acres of the 67 acre subdivision. Serial Bachelor Lawrence Fisher spent $1.5 million in 1928 for what would become a folly to rival Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose.



By 1929's Black Friday, very few, even among the vastly rich, were interested in buying lavish real estate no matter how demonstrable the quality of neighbors they could afford. And because Graystone did not officially open until 1931 it was doomed before it began. As with the rest of Detroit, Graystone and the Fisher Mansion began a slow, painful, and seemingly inexorable path towards decline.

Born in 1950, Alfred Brush Ford, heir to the Fisher Brother's Body-works, an early supplier to General Motors, as well as a member of the august Ford family, is thought to have gone off the rails sometime in the mid-1970's when he donated a substantial amount of his inheritance, as well as his ancestral Fisher Mansion to the Hare Krishna sect. ABF also changed his name to Ambarish Das. while his wife (nee' Elisabeth Reuther Dickman - daughter of UAW president Walter Reuther ) changed hers to Lekhasranvanti Dasi. Had AFB merely donated his property to the Krishna's he might have been hailed as a genius for getting a tax write-off on distressed real-estate. But sadly that was not the case.

Shortly therafter, The Hare Krishna's began to renovate the Fisher Mansion , and redidicated in in 1983 as the Bhaktevdanta Cultural Center for International Society of Krishna Conciousness.

Apparently the Krishna's have proven to be good neighbors in what has become a bad neighborhood, although I doubt that would mollify many Fords or Fishers.

Snowpocalypse 2010?

Its 3:35pm in the Northeast Mid-Atlantic , it was supposed to start snowing at 2:00pm, it was 40 degrees (f) at lunchtime, and I still haven't seen a single flake of snow. Could all the hype be a vast conspiracy between the Dorrances (Campbell's) and the Woods (WaWa) ? Stay tuned!

Schnell !

Just don't try it in the Snow!

RIP, Gentleman Driver

Today’s racing driver isn’t what he used to be. Post-stint massage therapy and victory lanes drenched in Pepsi instead of Taittinger have rendered the true “gentleman racer” a thing of the past. Gone are the 240-mph speeds on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans. Gone are the coachbuilt Ferraris that were driven from their baronial estates to the Tour de France, raced through the countryside and driven right back home. Gone are men like the Bentley Boys, Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips, Lance Reventlow and, most upsetting of all, Briggs Swift Cunningham II.

Cunningham wasn’t a “sportsman” in the way that Jeff Gordon races AND plays in charity golf tournaments. No, Mr. Cunningham was a Yale man and college friend of the Collier Brothers (think Collier Country, FL), with whom he founded the Sports Car Club of America. He not only raced Jaguars, Ferraris, Corvettes and Listers on his own dime and all around the world, but also built his own eponymous series of racing cars in West Palm Beach, in the hopes of taking outright victory at Le Mans.


As if that weren’t sufficient, he also skippered the Columbia to successfully defend the 1958 America’s Cup, patented the “Cunningham” device of the same sport and assembled a world-class collection of motor cars that included a Bugatti Royale – Ettore’s tour de force, the most valuable car in the world, then and perhaps even now.

So the next time you listen to NBC moderators tell you how many G’s Helio Castroneves' poor body is enduring in the turns or how taxing a two-hour Formula 1 race must be, just remember...Giovanni Bracco wasn’t feeling so well in the 1952 Mille Miglia either. The endless cigarettes and brandy his Ferrari co-driver was passing him must have mixed very poorly with the 1,000 miles of switchbacks and elevation changes...

*Courtesy of Aggressively Shabby's MotorSport Correspondant: Arthur Wild