NAME THAT CAR!

Also an experiment!

2009-10-30T20:08:00.001-07:00

Experiment!

2009-10-30T17:25:00.001-07:00

Hint: It's a hybrid

2009-10-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

But what particular brand of hybrid? If you've driven any of these dual moto-mobiles, you know they go in for these power-goes-here, power-goes-there dash displays. And this one belongs to a:

2005 Ford Escape Hybrid

2008 Nissan Altima Hybrid

2008 Saturn Vue Hybrid

The Day the Earth Tilted 45 Degrees

2009-10-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

Most other people would have panicked and grabbed for the nearest tree, but not Hedley Gasket, Auto Photographer. When the world went suddenly askew (was that a split infinitive, I askew?), your faithful photog just kept squeezing the shutter button. The earth regained its equilibrium soon thereafter, and all I have to remember that strange moment is this strange picture, the subject of which being a (you tell me):

2006 Honda Ridgeline

2004 Chevrolet Avalanche

2007 Chevrolet Avalanche

Meanwhile, back at the Mustang boneyard

2009-09-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

Yes, Namers, it's been a while. But the good news is that I'm back with more photos of cars for you to so eagerly identify. Before we get to them, however, let's examine the NAME THAT CAR! signature vehicle, which I'm sure you can put year, make and model to:

1968 Mustang Fastback

1967 Mustang GT

1968 Mustang California Special

Say it ain't snow

2009-07-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

Enough with the e-mails, not to mention the phone calls, telegrams and telepathic messages (and how you got those last ones past my Reynolds Wrap firewall, I'll never know). Here, Namers, is a new challenge for you to identify.

2005 BMW 6-Series

2006 Chrysler 300

2006 Buick Lucerne

Yellow, yes. Fast? That too

2009-06-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

At Haus Gasket, the rule has always been: Bring home not a yellow car unless very fast it is! (Talking like Yoda is another source of constant mirth at Haus Gasket.)
Fortunately, the yellow car you see here, with 420-h.p. V-8 engine, proved to be extremely fast.
But what, besides yellow, is it, exactly?

2006 Audi S6

2006 Audi RS4

2006 Audi A4 Quattro

2006 Audi A8

Found in a Mustang boneyard

2009-06-20T16:00:00.001-07:00

I came across this in a junkyard -- well, not really, a junkyard so much as a farmer's collection of old rusting cars that aspired to be a junkyard -- that included at least three Mustangs, and maybe more, given the unrecognizable (even to me!) state of some of the resident autos. But every junkyard and even every wannabe junkyard must boast at least one Mustang, since Ford has built some two zillion of them since introducing its ponycar in 1964. Two zillion, by the way, is an approximation -- if you can supply the actual number, or even something close, say within a couple of hundred thousand, I'll happily print it here.
Can't supply the number? Bet you can supply the year and model of the Mustang you see here. Choose from the list and provide your answer in the Comments.

1971 Ford Mustang Grande.

1974 Ford Mustang II Notchback

1968 Ford Mustang GT

1969 Ford Mustang Hardtop

And if you can't identify THIS locale, you're just not trying

2009-06-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

But what is the vehicle?
Your choices:

Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, Circa 2005

Chevrolet Impala 9C1 (Police Package), circa 2004

Chevrolet Impala 9C1 (Police Package), circa 2006

Dodge Charger Police, circa 2007

Bonus points if you can ID the locale

2009-06-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

No hints with this one, Namers, since it's really not that difficult.

A cool little car for you to identify

2009-06-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

That's young Haskett Gasket on scraper duty. Notice the bare hands? Even on the crummiest days in winter -- and that day, marked by a deep freeze that followed freezing rain overnight that followed a brief thaw, was inarguably, unmistakably crummy -- Haskett declines to wear gloves.
Kids today!
You've probably guessed the car already, it also qualifying as unmistakable -- but in case you haven't, here are some choices. Put your answer in the Comments section.

2005 Smart Fortwo

1972 Cadillac Sedan De Ville

2005 Mitsubishi "i"

Zamboni Model 445, year unknown

Turn, turn, turntable

2009-06-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

2008 Acura Advanced Sports concept car

2009 Dodge Challenger concept car

2010 Chevrolet Camaro show car

2004 Chrysler Crossfire prototype

From Gasquette to Gasket, with a stop in Glascow

2009-06-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

Many Namers have written to ask, "Hedley, your last name, Gasket, is certainly unusual. Where does it come from?" Let me explain. The origin, as determined by a lengthy (and rather expensive) investigation conducted in the mid-1970s, appears to be rooted in the Provence region of France. At that time, however, the spelling was Gasquette (varieties: Gasquet, Gasqué, Gasquer). At some point in the Renaissance Period, the Gasquettes left Provence, reportedly over a dispute between Michel Gasquette, the leader of the family, and others in his town over the correct names of certain flora. Michel, known as an educated and intelligent man, was undoubtedly right, and the others resented this.
One branch of the Gasquettes ended up across the Channel in Glascow, where the surname would eventually become Gasket. Well, actually, O'Gasket, due to a strange misunderstanding by certain Glaswegians who took the foreign accent of the arriving Gasquettes to be Irish, not French. The name would take on its present form only after the arrival of Oliver O'Gasket, who very much resented his childhood nickname of "Oh-Oh Gasket."
That was but one of Oliver Gasket's significant contributions to history, however. Oliver, a mechanically adept individual, found himself working in the shops of James Watt, and helped the famous engineer redesign the Newcomen steam engine as a far more efficient machine. It's said, in fact, that it was Gasket who suggested cooling used steam in a separate condenser, though Watt would later claim credit for this.
Regardless, my relative is known for helping Watt solve the perplexing problem of steam escaping from the various places where metals joined, regardless of how tightly they were bolted together. Oliver determined that the problem was caused by temperature-related expansion and contraction, and could be solved by the introduction of a malleable material -- in this case, compressed rags -- between the metal surfaces. As so was born the gasket.
Gasket and Watt had many differences, both being forceful, creative types. Yet between arguments they remained cordial to each other, and were even known to enjoy regular variations of the following exchange:

Watt, noticing steam engine is leaking: Oh Oh!
Gasket: What?
Watt: What?
Gasket: You called me.
Watt: No, you called me.

This is said to have sometimes continued for hours.
Later generations of Gaskets may not have achieved the distinction of Oliver, but have continued to bear the name with pride, and even, in recent decades, to manage to smile when friends and co-workers make endless, tired jokes like, "Hey -- don't blow a gasket."
Sometime soon, I'll tell you all about the history of my first name, Hedley.
Meantime, since so many of you did so well with the last challenge, let's do it again with the same choices but a different car.

* 2004 Honda S2000

* 2006 Mazda MX-5

* 2005 Chevrolet Corvette convertible

* 2007 Pontiac Solstice

Interior motive

2009-06-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

Just from this overhead view, you can tell that this is a:

2004 Honda S2000

2006 Mazda MX-5

2005 Chevrolet Corvette convertible

2007 Pontiac Solstice

Dedevil is in de details

2009-05-31T17:06:00.000-07:00

Not a lot to go on here, Namers, but I have full confidence in your ability to put a year, brand and model to this one. Me, I put the mud on it! It was fun. Very fun.
Your choices:

2009 Kia Rondo EX

2008 Ford F-350 SuperCrew

2007 Mercedes G55K

2006 Range Rover HSE

Now is the season of my blog content

2009-05-30T08:43:00.001-07:00

The other day when I was talking about the tricks bloggers and other website-feeders use to increase traffic, I neglected to mention my favourite technique: packaged blog posts!
Yes, for a fee, you can subscribe to services that will automatically feed new content to your site daily. Just what those posts say, well, who cares? What's important is that they are fresh and presumably contain many juicy, topical keywords that will draw web surfers to your page so they can see the advertising you have arrayed there and click on those ads and earn tiny fractions of a penny for you each time they do until you become famously, fabulously, frickin' rich! Nice non-work if you can get it.
The content services assure us that their products will make readers "view you as the authority on the subject" (whatever the subject may be -- guess they decide). And the best news? The entries are prepared by English majors and other skilled writers, so no need to fear grammatical embarrassment.
As one service notes so reassuringly: "The solution for people like you and I is to use content that we get from alternate sources."
Here at NAME THAT CAR!, however, you can be confident that all material is unique. Real unique!
Does get me thinking, though. Maybe I should be a content supplier. Maybe this will be more lucrative than the foreign banking transactions that have yet to work out. What think? Would you pay Headley Gasket a small fee to have scintillating posting like this routed automatically to your blog? Hey, stranger things have happened.
Like the vehicle you see here, for instance. Pick one, baby.

2004 Porsche Cayenne S

2003 Alfa Romeo Kamal

2007 Audi Q7

2006 Subaru B9 Tribeca

Think you know this one?

2009-05-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

First one to leave the correct answer gets this very car delivered to his or her front lawn. Enter often!

1962 Rambler American Club Sedan

1960 Lark by Studebaker

1961 Rambler DLX

1964 Studebaker Commander

So many keywords, so many visitors

2009-05-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

What is particularly surprising about the thunderous success of Name That Car! is that I've done nothing, beyond posting regular puzzler photographs, to draw people like you to the site.
Now you know, of course, about the various techniques and tricks that blogs and other websites can employ to increase traffic. The goal, always, is to improve the site's ranking in search engine results, so that people will see it high on the list -- preferably on the first page, even better, among the first few results -- of whatever it is they are looking for.
The search engines send out "web crawlers," or automatic programs that methodically comb through Internet addresses and their associated websites, recording the information they come across for storage in massive databases. Then when someone goes to Google or another engine looking for, say, "1964 Oldsmobile Fiesta," the engine will review its collected data and tell the searcher that that phrase exists on Name That Car! (plus 27,399 other places, as of this writing, per Google).
But the content of a site doesn't give the search engine any clue about how useful or credible the site might be. To determine this, the search providers seek indications of the site's popularity, or the approval it gets from other users. A common way to do this is by counting the number of hyperlinks (links, for short), that connect the site to others. Links to your page carry the most weight; links from your page won't help your score, though search engine-watchers contend that keywords in links on your page get more attention than the same keywords not in links.
Naturally, since this is commonly known, it means that people trying to boost their site's ranking tend to scatter links to their website like confetti through forums, blog comment features, anywhere they can squeeze them in.
There are many other ways to increase traffic. You can get gizmos that pick out key words and repeat them in a way more likely to catch the attention of web crawlers. If you have a blog, you can list it with services such as Technorati that rank sites by how often other bloggers are visiting them. Makes sense mathematically, though it also could seem like a dog chasing its tail.
You can get hidden programs that count the number of visitors, give you a pretty good indication of where they live (or even where they work), and better yet, tell you what search terms they used to find you and what content on your site they were most interested in. Confession: I do use such a program, but only to allow me to quantify Name That Car!'s spectacular popularity.
You can sign up to have the search engine place ads on your site. Will that improve your ranking, at least at the engine that now has a financial incentive in driving viewers to your site? Oh no, of course not.
I might sign up for ads, not to bring in more viewers -- I mean, how many more could one site want? -- but to earn a little folding cash, since my other enterprises with my Nigerian web buddies have yet to pay off.
But those other tricks? Don't need 'em, not going to do 'em. Not when I have faithful visitors such as you, who have patiently waded through this long discourse to get to the alternative answers -- one of them is correct! -- to this entry's photographic question: What the heck is this?

1949 Miller Cadillac hearse.

1950 Cadillac S&S hearse conversion.

1933 Dymaxion concept car.

1951 Cadillac Superior hearse-ambulance combination.

We interrupt this Internet

2009-05-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

That big slowdown we had the other day? That was me, sorry. I posted a new NAME THAT CAR! entry, and as you can guess, so many people flocked to this site that it triggered a global blackout on the ol' WWW. Same thing will probably happen with this new challenge, I imagine. Not sure what we can do about this. Maybe call your local Department of the Internet and demand that they beef up the fibre optics and turbocharge the servers. And after that, you can take a run at this question. You're looking at:

A.1965 Rambler Ambassador

B.1964 Oldsmobile Fiesta

C.1965 Ford Country Squire

Wood eye!

2009-05-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

I mean, would I, I mean, would you, like to denote this car's particulars? Your choices:

A. 2005 Honda Civic Reverb
B. 2004 Chevrolet Cavalier VLX Coupe
C. 2003 Mitsubishi Lancer Rally

I can name that car in three notes

2009-05-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Man, the flood of responses to this new site is keeping me busy. To keep up, I'm almost at the point of quitting my day job. Or I would be, if I had a day job. I do have a day pastime, however (separate from Name That Car!). It involves entering into lengthy correspondences with people from Nigeria and elsewhere who seek me out with quite attractive business proposals, often involving large sums of cash that have somehow become available. So far, despite the hundreds of hours I've put into this, I have yet to become rich. But, come to think of it, neither have any of my would-be associates. At least, not from me. And, my thinking goes, the more time they spend conversing with me, the less they have to devote to taking advantage of the more gullible types out there, or to wasting the time of more discerning folks like you. No need to thank me. Just show me how car-knowledgeable you are by identifying the vehicle you see here. And this time, I'm going to give you three possibilities to choose from -- one of which might even be right!

A. 1959 Ford Galaxie 500 Coupe

B. 1958 Ford Thunderbird Hardtop

C. 1960 Dodge Polara 2Door

The correct answer will be posted here in a while, in the unlikely event that no one from Name that Car!'s many daily visitors can supply it.

This one should be pretty easy

2009-05-13T17:08:00.000-07:00

Due to the unprecedented response to the first Name That Car! entry, here's another subject to identify. If you're a dedicated car-watcher, you shouldn't have much trouble with this one. Remember: first one to correctly identify this vehicle -- year, make and model -- gets... absolutely nothing.
Except a nice warm feeling.

In development -- item 1.

2009-05-12T07:16:00.001-07:00

This blog is in development while I look for the best way to present it. Feel free to name the car -- year, make and model -- if you can. Thanks!