Classics: Late Model MGBs in Blue. Louis Shalako.

(For illustration only. This is not from any current Kijiji ad.)

 

Louis Shalako

In a previous post, I spoke about a vehicle that is available within a few blocks of my home in the Sarnia central city area. It's not running, and it needs a fuel tank.

I'm not too interested in a vehicle if I cannot hear it run, for example, (red 1973 MGB locally, $5,000 asking price), but parts are available. There is a fuel level sending unit, there is an electric fuel pump, there is a hardware kit, which begs the question of rust...what if the bottom of the vehicle is really rotten? What if you break off bolts when removing the tank, or if they come out nice and clean, why not just re-use the bolts that were there in the first place. If the fuel tank is still in this vehicle, then the sending unit would also be there…it might not work, in which case, you put fuel in it and the gauge reads zero. Still, at this point, the vehicle should run—and if you can get it started, look for blue smoke and listen for rattles and knocks from the engine.

We are assuming the engine has run at some point in the last few years—hopefully. Many experts advise not starting such an engine, and simply pulling it out and sending it off to professionals for assessment and hopefully a rebuild. Finding a fairly fresh, used engine, is somewhat of a remote possibility. Other than that, try not to spend too much.

The question here, on my budget, is risk. 

There are better gambles out there.

You can find out all kinds of things with a quick internet search. Here is the fuel pump location, for example.

Here’s a Youtube video that takes us through a step-by-step description of the necessary parts, and then the installation, of the MGB fuel tank. (Maggie’s Makeover)

In a previous video, the gentleman talks about a rebuild of the engine, transmission, and an overdrive unit. He also does cost breakdowns for both the fuel tank and the rebuilds. The figures are accurate enough, bearing in mind U.S. dollars, (I live in Canada), the fact the video was produced some appreciable time ago, and also, the fact that he may have used a different supplier—I do a quick check, but some entries are fairly exhaustive in the sense there are a lot of suppliers, and that’s a good thing in terms of competition for your, and my, dollars.

This is one of two available late-models in medium blue...it presents well in pics. 

It is also true that prices vary by quite a margin.

The next video is about the rebuild of the MGB four-speed manual transmission. Getting it apart is half the battle, in a video I watched some time ago…the average owner will probably not attempt to do this work on their own.

Anyhow.

***

Back to Maggie’s Makeover for an engine and transmission rebuild. I don’t anticipate purchasing a vehicle with the electric overdrive, that’s one point. He spent an extra $1,000.00 U.S. to gain an estimated 30 % horsepower. He spent something like $7,500.00 U.S. on that engine and transmission. So much better, if we simply didn't have to do that.

Some of that comes down to our attitudes. This is not a muscle car and why treat it like it should be one...??? I do not have an automotive shop, I don't have an engineering firm. I do not get any write-offs on my income taxes for this one. It is not a promotional cost...

Other videos I have found discuss the earlier 3-synchromesh gearboxes, common to the MGA as well. Also, we might learn just how to take the thing apart and pull the guts out of it, and the techniques may feature a certain commonality. Assuming you have a spare gearbox, and time on your hands, it’s hard to say if you would save any money by full or partial disassembly, (and then turning over a bunch of parts in a box to the rebuilder), or whether it’s worthwhile to rebuild it at all. If you can take it apart, you should be able to put it back together. You'll need oil seals, but the videos are pretty clear. You need tools and a place to work, which I do not have. 

The gearboxes are pretty robust to begin with, and the average driver shouldn’t have too many problems with it, assuming it’s in good shape to begin with.

This is like a really severe update, added in two or three days later, but this 1963 Florida car is listed at $39,000.00 Canadian dollars on Kijiji. It's a creamy white colour with a red interior.

I hate to go out on a limb, here, but that car is just effing gorgeous.

(This just goes to show how dumb Louis actually is, but the colour is 'pearl'. - ed)

This MGB Historic Racer claims 155 bhp and seems like a lot of fun to drive.

We are still watching the Kijiji ads for MGBs. Today there were 36 ads. There are two late-model vehicles, both in a sort of medium blue. They do have the detuned and pollution-controlled engine. Yet they are nice looking, whole and complete, and seem to be driveable.

Many of these ads have been up for about a month, and I have to admit to being a bit of a bug on this subject lately…

As stated in a previous post, there are issues of logistics. How in the hell do I get a car from Ottawa or Oshawa, back to Sarnia. To pay someone to pull that onto a flatbed and bring it here, that's an easy thousand bucks in my quick and dirty estimation. Then there is the question of where in the hell do I park it, how much does it cost to insure, when do I get to actually drive it anywhere, and all of that sort of thing

At this point, the whole thing remains in the realm of fantasy.

It’s a nice colour, though…these are both in the $8,500.00 range.

The ad caught my eye, and it's in fucking Ottawa...

 

END

Buying Low-Budget British Sports Cars.

Classics: Buying MGB (or other) Sports Cars.

Classics: Buying an MGB, Part Two.

Classics: On Buying an MGB. Part One.

Using High-Ethanol Fuels. (Driving)

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromGoogle Play in ebook and audiobook format.

 

See his works on ArtPal.

Illustration purposes only.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apartment Hunting and the Ontario Disability Support Program.

I am an 800-lb. gorilla, and you ain't fooling me no more.

Louis Shalako

The other day I was speaking to a young man. He is thirty-three years old. He works full time for a prominent Canadian automotive retailer. He makes twelve bucks an hour give or take a few cents.

He was lining up in front of the food bank. He had broken up with his partner, who had a couple of daughters in school or working. They’re still sleeping in the same bed, as he is currently trying to save up first and last month’s rent to get his own place. I asked him about noise, one of my petty little interests these days.

He snorted.

“We can hear the next-door lady in the bedroom beside us, snoring, coughing, and basically, her pillow is a foot from our pillows….” And the walls are obviously very thin.

Twelve bucks an hour full-time is better than minimum wage. Some would say he is lucky, to be relatively intelligent, able-bodied, and to have a job at all. In some sense, they are of course right.

One of the reasons welfare (Ontario Works) and disability benefits (Ontario Disability Support program, Canada Pension Disability, etc.) are so low in this country is because everyone knows about them. Minimum-wage workers might become understandably upset if they figured out a disabled person in ‘otherwise similar circumstances,’ perhaps age, marital status and skill-set for example, is markedly better off than someone employed for minimal wages full-time. We get about the same things, food, shelter and clothing (of a kind) without having to put in forty hours under some scab employer to get it.*

The Province of Ontario recently did away with the Moving Benefit, which clients could only get once every two years; with a maximum benefit of $899.00.

I am presently looking for another place to live. The reason I want to leave the building I presently occupy is noise.

It’s not a bad apartment unit.

It’s not a bad neighbourhood. They’re not bad people. I just can’t take the noise. The walls are very thin.

I’m tired of fighting the guy that lives above me. He works until eleven o’clock p.m. When he comes home, he might have a friend over. He might be hungry and want some grub. The thumping from above can be bad sometimes and not so bad at others. It depends who is there, and if they are drinking, playing the stereo or whatever.

I’m tired of fighting with the lady in the next apartment over barking dogs, I’m tired of going across the hall and politely asking the nice young couple that live there if they would please turn the music down. I’m tired of the people, whom I have never met, on the other side of my bedroom wall, coming home at one a.m. and having a shower, opening and closing closet doors, slamming the bathroom door, etc.

The walls are very thin.

Being the man of action, I went on Kijiji and had a look at ads for one-bedroom apartments.

I went and looked at one—and it’s on the top floor, which is just what I said I was looking for. The building and the apartment look all right—about what one might expect in the price range.

The story gets deeper. They will of course ask about your source of income. The lady told me that they have a ‘one-third rule.’ According to her, the rent must not exceed one-third of your income or they don’t want to rent you a unit.

This is where it gets interesting. When I told her that I was on ODSP, she immediately told me that the rule might be ‘a little bit different’ for me. She asked me to provide ODSP benefit stubs for four months. She also told me, “A lot of ODSP people have their cheques sent to us from the Ministry.” 

(Not a direct quote but without attribution we will paraphrase. – ed.)

Interesting conclusion: neither this landlord, nor my present landlord, would have any kind of moral objections to a disabled person paying 65 % to 70 % of their income in rent. 

There’s more. What they want, is a certified cheque or money order for the last month’s rent. Before I can move in, I must pay the first month’s rent. Sounds simple enough, but I want (as a point of honour) to give sixty days of notice at the other building? (At a later date, I may need another place to live, and the present company owns a number of buildings in town.)

Still sounds simple, right?

My next disability cheque is spoken-for. I need to pay the February rent. If I put a stop on that payment, my present landlord would be a bit irate, even if I explained the circumstances, which would go something like this:

“I need a money order to give to the next landlord, but I have already paid last month’s rent here—is there some reason why I can’t do that, (skip a month and pay the next, even though I have not been officially accepted into the next building) and come back and pay next month’s rent, and then, a month after that, use my next disability cheque to pay the first month’s rent over there?”

I suspect the answer would be, “How do we know that you will come back next month, not stiff us, not force us to go for an eviction, and leave us with a month in arrears, you’re safely out of the building and we are now forced to make a decision…hire a skip tracer, and try and collect through the credit agency or small claims court? Or just let you screw us and forget about it?”

So I'm being profiled, right? Or punished for the crime of some other poor working or disabled slob...right? (We all look the same to you, right?)

Sometimes a simple ‘no’ would suffice, ladies and gentlemen, but there is still more.

While the rents are about the same, in the new building they have electrical meters for each unit. It’s an extra charge. They require tenant insurance for all tenants, that’s an extra charge. My income is low enough on ODSP and the income from my books is still in the small but developing stage—and you know all about how much fun that is (on ODSP) from a prior blog post on that subject.

There are one or two other considerations, but simply telling someone ‘if you don’t like it then why not just move’ doesn’t really take facts, circumstances, needs and capabilities into account.

Simple people give simple answers. One is well advised to think it through, get all the facts, (and I have no idea what tenant’s insurance would cost, nor the electricity) so essentially I am done for the time being...as far as I know, or until we get more information, or something in the equation changes for the positive.

We’re still not done yet.

What, the average reader may ask, is the problem with the ODSP/Ministry sending the rent to the landlord? Even though my credit is good, and I am a responsible adult and not a spoiled brat?

Answer: "Since when did I develop a cognitive disorder...???!!!" 

"Oh, well, Mister Shalako...we're just trying to help you, but if you don't want our help..."

(Yeah, what then, and thanks for the implied threat, incidentally.)

Answer: at some point there may be a noise problem, a bedbug or cockroach problem, an abusive neighbour, and the ODSP social worker will ask certain questions.

“Have you spoken to the landlord, the police, the animal control people, the building superintendent, have you been feeling all right lately, are you sure there really is a problem and you’re not just blowing it all out of proportion, you only just moved in there, etc, etc, etc….ad infinitum, ad nauseam…have you been taking the meds, are you sure you don’t want to speak to nice Mr. doctor-man, etc, etc.”

Here is the truth, ladies and gentlemen: landlords love having disabled residents. They get their cheques every month, straight from the Ministry. The client gets what’s left.

The landlord doesn’t care if you have electricity, they don’t care if you have a phone, or the internet, (essential to my business), they don’t care if you starve or line up three and four times a month at the food bank.

The landlords, in collusion with their government cronies of all political shades and stripes, will do everything to ensure a profit for their shareholders. And they don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to you.

For some reason, the disabled are not well represented among their ranks, although they have a few pets that they trot out from time to time for the photo-opportunity that goes along with every fresh, glowingly-positive and completely bogus policy or program announcement this government makes.

And now you know all about it.

The young man with his twelve dollar an hour wage also faces certain challenges, and I think it’s fair to say that none of us at the lower end of the income scale has it exactly easy.

I would like to know whose interests are truly served when government and commerce, working hand in hand, knowing all the facts, seem determined to make life harder for all those unable to defend themselves and who are completely lacking in effective political representation.

But it must serve somebody somewhere…right?

END

*Conventional (bouorgeois) wisdom is that we should just be grateful; and keep our mouths shut.

Simenon's House.

(Flamenc. Wiki.)

The house pictured is where Georges Simenon, the great Belgian writer of detective fiction was born. It’s 34 Leopold St. It’s in some shit little town in Belgium. The housing is fairly typical of big cities all over Europe, and you can find similarities with buildings even in North America and in the former European empires in Southeast Asia. A murder has to happen somewhere, right? One place is as good as another.


While it is by no means necessary to have a floor plan, which some mysteries do, it’s interesting just to learn by looking. It’s what a proper detective would do.

How do the residents get into the private apartments above? These homes were all built separately, yet the norm appears to be an unobtrusive door at sidewalk level on the left side of the building. The business entrance is much more prominent. In my hometown of Sarnia, Ontario, in Canada, there are similar buildings uptown, admittedly only three or four stories tall. There are definitely stylistic differences, but in art form follows function.

But what they do have in common is a business on the ground, and private apartments up above, with separate doors for each.

Any reader of mystery novels can see that the layout, how people came and went from a murder scene, whether it was the victim, or the killer, witnesses, it all has a bearing on the outcome of the event, the case, and the book. How many people live there and who else has access?

Looking at this picture, it’s impossible to say if there is an alley behind it or not. For the purposes of fiction, let’s say there is. Where did it lead to? Can patrons of the shops on the first floor use the alley? One would think not. Delivery men, possibly…the reader sees where I am going. We can learn much by the layout of the place and yet all we really know is that someone was murdered there. As a writer, we have to start someplace, and in a murder mystery, to begin at the beginning is to present the reader with a nice, luscious, tasty victim, i.e. a corpse.

What prevents people from wandering in off the street? How do people get to the second level, which also appears to be a place of business?

Presumably the private apartments, which start on the third floor in this building, have some kind of locked door on a landing at the top of the third flight of stairs. There is the need for some kind of research, if only to visualize the simple movements, and to learn what is possible and what is not. Just as an afterthought, the houses may have had fire escapes, over the roofs. I haven’t decided yet. I’ll throw it in if I need it!

I don’t know for sure, but it is possible, or possibly there might be an external staircase on the back of the building.

Watching House Hunters International a few years ago, they did a show where they looked at apartments in Paris. It was the dream of a lifetime for the people involved. Imagine: to live in Paris.

It was amazing to learn that a half a million U.S. dollars inside the city limits of Paris, would buy four or five very small and oddly-shaped rooms, stacked up vertically inside a narrow building on a street with no parking for miles and cobbles right up to the doorsills. The bathroom was little bigger than a broom closet, and the stairs were more like the kind you would find on a schooner from the 1840s. They were narrow and steep. The stove was eleven inches wide…you get the idea.

This puts the houses in this picture into their proper perspective. Assuming one private owner, there is some prosperity in the picture. My present novel takes place in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, which affected France a bit later than some other countries.

Other than that, I don’t want to give too much away.

Enjoying the Process.

'Ceridwen,' Christopher Williams, (1910.)

c2011 (S)

The fun part of doing research for a novel is the interesting side-trails that we inevitably stumble into. I had never heard of Ceridwen before, although the legend actually stems from Wales and my new Inspector Maintenon story happens for the most part in Devon. More specifically, it happens on or about the fringes of Dartmoor, as well as having a few small scenes in London and elsewhere.

One thing I am specifically interested in is police organizational structures, insofar as that relates to a murder investigation at county or village level in the west country of England in 1927.

I don't want to have an Inspector attend to the scene if it should be a Superintendent, or Chief Inspector, or whatever. Also, I need to determine the proper title of the person who would run an inquest, whether that would be a coroner or justice of the peace, a sheriff's jury, (or whatever.) This is very important in detective fiction, because unlike sci-fi or high fantasy, I can't just create a body of law or political and legal structures out of whole cloth.

Let's just say that like relying on memory, there are dangers here, and every simple fact and statement must be challenged by the author, and no, it isn't enough or even proper to just grab a few used Dame Agatha paperbacks and 'study the era a little more.'

I will probably check out the music of the day--this leads to ever more specific key words and search engine queries, such as 'popular songs English, 1927,' for example; and then you just hit 'search.' There will be some passing references in there I'm sure. But if Maintenon is listening to Berlioz, I'd better be damned sure the song wasn't first published or performed in 1928.

In terms of wildlife and the natural environment, so far I have mentioned sun-dews, and the dipper-bird, and some other indigenous creatures in the text. The moors and heathlands, the tors and crags are easily enough described by anyone familiar with the outdoors and who has the time to read up on it!

I've chosen the village, and some other details will naturally enough fall into place.

In the last three days, the story has advanced by about 2,700 words and that's not a bad pace. The most I ever wrote in a day was maybe 12,000 words. That book came out too long, and there was some cutting involved by the end of the process.

In other matters, I spend a certain amount of time each day searching out marketing images, and just keeping up in general. It is summer, and now that my life is a little more settled, it's a good idea to relax, take it a little easier, and try to enjoy the process a little more.

Pulp Fiction. For Real.

Common sizes.

'Hondo,' by Louis L'Amour,
is a pocketbook.






by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved



Time for another scatter-brained post. What I have been doing is researching POD at Lulu.com.

I've made a pdf in a 5x7" format, for example. This has big wide margins all around and the information from Lulu says they 'scale it down' to 75%. They offer a free downloadable template, for both the cover and the manuscript.

This is fine, but the template wouldn't open on my desktop and it took all day and a lot of reading before I stumbled across another post where the author mentions his own template is for OpenOffice.org.

A little light went off in my head, as Lulu also points the way to OpenOffice software in their help pages...so it looks, maybe, by a process of pure and irrational deduction, that I need to download the 76-meg file from them. (2.0.0 minimum noted by Lulu.)

And maybe, just maybe I will get the answers I need. It's a matter of comfort zone, important enough to any control freak.

But in the paperback by Thomas Harris, 'Hannibal,' the left margin 'gutter?' is about 3/8 of an inch and the outer margin about 1/4", maybe a little more.

So what I need to do is format a new pdf, from a .doc file, built up in the 4.25 x 6.875 inch size, with appropriate margins at left, right, top and bottom.

I will take pains to include the proper number of blank pages, and in some small idiosyncratic way, minimal but tasteful end matter.

My great dream in life is to produce the finest in pulp fiction that I possibly can.

At Lulu, in order to publish a book for sale, the author must purchase a 'proof copy.' My initial calculation shows a 427-page book in this class will run about $13.04, although at this point I have no idea of whether that is my cost or what? Or what? You sort of have to sort of er; fudge your way around inside any of these websites to learn what's going on. I could 'publish' what I have in a heartbeat.

Let's assume that I am either distitute of any cash whatsoever, or a cheap prick.

Either way, wouldn't it be nice to simply nail it the first time around? Rather than fixing this, and that, and the other thing, and end up with twenty bogus, unsellable copies of the book laying around?

One of my big questions in this size of book is the margin and font size. My first impression in a .doc was that it looked like a children's book, due to the big size and few words on the page!

But I will work that out as I go along.

Anyway, that's one of my goals for 2011. I want to publish, 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' as a POD somewhere, using my micropublishing business model.

Notes. I printed out a re-sized B & W of the cover, which startled me until I remembered that I now have this little wide-screen monitor, which stretches tthings wider. Comparing it to an actual paperback in the same size shows that the text is a little too close to the edge of the book.

The jargon is important, otherwise you don't really know what you are talking about. That seems clear enough.