Hunting Parts for a Kujira Crown

After owning a 1971 MS60 for a few years now, I can tell you one thing: It’s been pretty damn near impossible to find spare parts for it. After spending countless hours trying to find parts overseas on the internet (because there were almost none advertised in Thailand even last year) that I could afford to have shipped here, we lucked out. Parts sellers started advertising in Thai forums.

So to start with, I’ve ended up with a shipment sold as a set:

My car is not missing any of these parts, but these are in better condition(the guy who sold me the car aptly described it as “faded glory”). Some of them, like the taillight lenses, will be dissected and combined with my existing ones to make better parts.

Most important to function of the car is the full set of weather seals for the door. I’d heard rumors that new rubber was still being made in Thailand for virtually every Japanese car ever produced. Now I have proof. Perhaps even more important than the parts themselves were the labels on the bags containing parts numbers and bar codes, with which I was able to trace the manufacturer. Do you need rubber seals for an old/rare JDM car? I can probably get them now (as opposed to all of the Toyota dealers and parts specialists I talked to, who most decidedly cannot).

So what’s my purpose here? Why am I searching out parts for my old Crown, of the only generation of this make that was a complete and utter market failure (while being the first Toyota Crown – earlier models were Toyopet)? Let’s just say I’m trying to restore some glory…

UPDATE: This is what my MS-60 Kujira Crown looks like now: http://cosmicbuddha.com/2012/03/the-toyota-kujira-crown-reborn/

Specifying a starting point in YouTube’s Flash 5 Player

In my previous post, I set an embedded video to start from a determined point partway through. The video was embedded with the new iframe tags (specifying HTML 5 instead of a Flash player, which is usable by a broader range of devices, but hasn’t been fully accepted by big developers like WordPress and ebay due to inherent security concerns).

This is the new parameter, which is to be appended to the end of the video link in the embed code:
#t=5m55s

(above, m equals minutes and s equals seconds)

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So in my previous post, the embed video code looks like this:
<iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”560″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VLuHMB438gc#t=6m17s” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen ></iframe>

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Google states that the actual starting point may vary by up to a couple seconds, so you should take this into account.

Why the newspaper died

Clipping from the Bangkok Post, early 2011

At first I thought this was an early April Fools thing, but it wasn’t. The Bangkok Post was/is the widest circulated English language paper in Thailand (possibly initially funded by the OSS/State Department!), and printed a half-page article on how to properly shovel snow. In Thailand. Apparently, somebody sent a complaint to the editor that was printed in a subsequent issue. This was addressed by claiming that this article was pulled from a partner news source, which is just a ridiculous defense… They really should have claimed it was an early April Fools thing.

Food Dreams (CUTTLE FISH THE WATER)

Quite often, Max awakes from a deep sleep craving certain foods – strawberries seem to appear in his dreams quite often, as do hot dogs and toast with jam. Just now, I carried him from one room to another after he fell asleep, and he woke up kicking and screaming saying, “NO! I want to eat it! I want to eat it!” It was quite hilarious, except that he woke up Mina, or to be more specific, my laughing woke her up. Nam glared at me for a while, so I dove onto the bed next to Mina until she went to sleep again.

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The photo above was taken in the seafood section of Big C, however, Max has never woken up asking for CUTTLE FISH THE WATER or any other cephalopods.

Thailand’s Got Talent

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A few years ago, I had a conversation that went like this:

LostSoul: I accidentally slept with a guy, I thought he was a girl.

JY: Yeah, I hear stories about that all the time.

LostSoul: The thing is, I can’t get her our of my mind. I want to see her again. Does that mean I’m gay?

JY: It doesn’t mean you’re gay. It just means you like fucking guys.