A Seat Leon FR in the United States.

Driving in Circles

So it seems like a good time to talk about circles. We seem to be living in concentric circles of people.

The innermost circle is your immediate family. Not necessarily biological, but the people you consider your closest family. The people you will confide in, can always depend on, and will do anything for. Usually they're the people you live with. And in your home there will be some tough love moments, and some constructive criticisms. There will be things you'll say to each other that you'd never accept your neighbor saying. They're outside that circle.

As annoying as your neighbor might be, you'd likely find yourself on their side when someone from the next town over called the place you chose to raise your family a shithole. But you'd find yourself and him defending each other's hometowns when some jerk on the internet calls your state “flyover country.” And when it comes to defending our country we have New Yorkers, Kansans, Texans, and Californians all serving shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches.

The circles can be geographic, like the ones described, or they can be racial, religious, our hobbies, interests, sports, or politics. So really there are overlapping sets of concentric circles.

But the one thing most of them have in common is that the further out one is from the inner circles the less likely we are to see their humanity. People are more likely to see outsiders by some stereotype, possibly as a threat, and far too often not as an individual deserving of rights and empathy.

This dehumanization has been going on since before history was written, beginning when the first Homo sapiens competed with the non-human descendants apes for resources and living space. In the modern day we're most familiar with dehumanization taking the form of racism. Racists still compare those they don't see as human to apes, showing that in over 5000 years of written history and the accumulation of knowledge, racists are still incapable of original thinking.

It's okay to have people outside of your circles that you just don't like: fascists, coal rollers, Flyers fans. But one critical aspect to tolerance that a lot of people forget is that these are the kinds of things people have become of their own choosing. We must always accept people for the things that are outside of their control. People don't choose where they are born, the color of their skin, their sexuality, or the gender they are most comfortable expressing.

And for the most part, kids are indoctrinated into one particular religion or another and we should never be afraid of someone just for which holy book they may read. What's more important is how they interpret that holy book, and whether they see it as justification for violence or an inspiration for peace. Again, judging people by the choices they make.

Humanity desperately needs cooperation to solve global problems and can no longer afford have is this situation where people outside of our circles aren't even seen as human beings.

Our outermost circle should be the entire planet. No one should be so far outside of it that we don't see them as human beings deserving of basic rights and dignity.

I don't expect people to like and love everybody equally. There are a lot of dangerous individuals who have shown themselves undeserving of being able to walk freely among us. What we need to do is to have empathy & openness as our default until proven otherwise on an individual basis, and not the reverse that we have today where an outsider is seen as a threat based on our stereotypes until an individual “proves” their humanity.

So, what does any of that have to do with cars?

Since the very beginning of The Crittenden Automotive Library I haven't set any boundaries on the scope of content on CarsAndRacingStuff.com based on geography, language, religion, or culture.

I've always been interested in other cultures. Before the internet was as developed as it is I was a longtime subscriber to National Geographic, skipping the pictures of poisonous frogs and mummified bodies to read and re-read the articles about daily life in other parts of the world.

This fascination has of course spilled over into my photography and collection of automobilia. One of my most cherished books has the esoteric title “Russian Motor Vehicles: The Czarist Period 1784 to 1917.” John & I had a particular interest in the Hongqi cars from Communist China. There was a silver Seat Leon FR that used to make the rounds on #carspotter Twitter in the Chicago suburbs just for being so out of place here, and I was so excited when I saw it myself at a car wash!

I have an old copy of an AA Illustrated Road Book of Scotland, and I'm curious as to how that ended up in the Chicago suburbs. And the Polish deli we go to has t-shirts of classic cars from Poland, but they don't come in what I'll politely call “larger American sizes” so I'm limited to the regular Corvette & Camaro shirts from Walmart & Kohl's.

And I spent a lot of the early years building The Crittenden Automotive Library with Top Gear reruns playing in the background. They were great for showing different car & driving cultures is around the world, even when they were being obnoxious jackasses about it.

So some years ago I started a page to highlight the Library's content from Africa, and later from China & Taiwan. In the latest re-sorting and renovation of the online content I'm expanding this to have Geographic Indices from every state and country that has something on CarsAndRacingStuff.com. You can find the indices that have been created so far on the Home Page in the New Indexing Features! box.

October 2023 was a painful month to be watching the news. I worry about the kind of world the next generation will be living in, and the kind of world I'll be growing old in. All I can hope is that sometimes the world seems to need a reminder of how bad things can get before we make things better. Something to shake us out of our complacency.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

This was another good month for some business books about the automobile industry.

When going to a book store or book sale, it helps to check the other sections for books that are relating to cars but might not be classified in the Transportation section. Since automakers are massive corporations employing hundreds of thousands of people, and tens of thousands more are employed in related businesses, the business section is a pretty good place to start.

In there I've found books on Toyota's production system and “Kaizen,” business studies of Discount Tire, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and General Motors' Chinese operations, and autobiographies of Lee Iacocca and Bob Rohrman.

The most fun one that I've found recently is called 15/15/15, and based on the lack of basic publisher's page with ISBN it looks like it was published for limited distribution by the company. It's The Martin Agency's story of creating the GEICO gecko and caveman advertising campaigns!

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

So that quote up at the top this month are the opening lines to a song. Not only was that the most appropriate quote I could find to accompany this month's feelings, it's also fitting because I've spent of a lot of the month reworking the entire Audio Playlist to be easier to read and similar in format to the Video Guide and Bibliography. There are over 250 original songs and over 100 covers, as well as a personal playlist of my favorites.

And of course, the list includes songs in 4 languages other than English so far.

Speaking of language, there are some English-language words that don't appear anywhere else in The Crittenden Automotive Library. They're not the kind of things I'd say, but historic preservation requires the list to be as complete as possible and not editorialized for what I personally think is appropriate. More on that topic soon.

This has been a really fun project that was sitting in my to-do list for almost a decade, combining other lists of automobile-related songs from a wide variety of sources to come up with the largest and most comprehensive one I can find. So far I've gone through the smaller lists and I'm through the B's on the biggest one. I'm hoping to get done by the end of the upcoming weekend, but I've said that for the past two weekends. I just keep finding more!

Mile Markers

Notes on the long road of progress in building this collection of automotive history.

CarsAndRacingStuff.com Collection: In addition to being reformatted, the list of songs on the Audio Playlist went from less than 100 to well over 350.

The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: A huge bundle of magazines pushed the number of periodical issues to 2,030, and Catalogs is closing in on 1,000.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

This month's stats bounced back from August. They're still down from where they were in September 2022, but given the upheavals in Google site indexing & site analytics I'm at least glad to see the numbers moving in the right direction again.

The Top 5 non-index pages for the month of October were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Topic Page: Pontiac Sunrunner

Article: We Know Who Tax The Rich 100 Is And Here's The Proof

Topic Page: Chevrolet Cavalier

Topic Page: Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is an online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

The Library currently consists of over 870,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 55,800 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.

About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection

The combined personal collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,126 different book volumes/editions, 1,829 unqiue periodical issues and over 826 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 264 hours of video.