The guy’s a REAL artist…
I guess I am getting older or just so worn out to the point that seeing something that is truly well designed and executed or is just aesthetically pleasing to the eye is something I am starting to really appreciate more and more.
Take for instance my friend Mark Brodie. While to some he certainly is ”well designed and executed” and may quite possibly be “aesthetically pleasing to the eye”, I will leave that to members of the fairer sex to render judgement on.
Mark is a SUPREMELY talented artist. He is also the pin striping wizard on call for the Phyllis Diller Auto Group. He is honest to a fault, fun and quite the hoot to talk to. I enjoy Thursdays only because I have a chance to watch him do his magic and chat him up.
You can take a look at his work on his websites here and here. Beautiful work, all done by hand. A true art form that I have not seen done so well in many years, a hand laid pinstripe is, in my opinion, just tits. Mark is just such a wizard that when he loads his brush and starts, he will go from the back of a car all the way to the front of the car without ever lifting or having to reload his brush. His lines look like they were laid out by laser!! The paint is straight, uniform and just gorgeous.
Don’t think that he only does pin stripes!! Oh no!!! I watched in amazement as he copied a picture from a magazine onto a fender of a customer’s car that was so good it looked as if, somehow, the picture was rising out of the original paint. The colors were a perfect match!! Unless you saw this being done, step by step, you would be left scratching your head, wondering “How in the hell did they do that?”.
Really, he is that good.
OK.
Brown nosing over.
On to the fun stuff.
To set the stage for the following true story, I certainly believe that all really good technicians, carpenters, plumbers, etc have a devilish streak in them that makes the idea of a good practical joke not only outrageously fun and exciting but also necessary to maintaining good mental health and a general sense of well being. This true story is a good case in point staring our aforementioned Mark Brodie as the unfortunate victim.
A technician I work with who we will only refer to by the pseudonym “Jason Gone-Postal” (to protect his reputation and continued good standing in the community) is a solid tech with a wealth of knowledge, years of experience, great work ethic and a huge fan of “Things That Go BOOM!!!“
(Btw, Things That Go BOOM!!! is the name of my new band…).
Mr. Gone -Postal has taken the art form of making loud explosions to the point where at anytime you may hear anything from a pop equal to that of a cheap Hispanic (sorry, gotta remain politically correct these days) firecracker to explosions equal to the sound pressure of 227 Hiroshima type bombs… These feats of sonic frivolity are accomplished by filling normally inert, innocent plastic bottles with compressed air until they explode. This is best done in secret so as to, literally, scare the crap out of anyone within the prescribed 5 mile radius.
One day Mark Brodie was pin striping a car inside the shop where it was only the temperature of the Sun’s corona instead of the Sun’s surface. Mr. Gone-Postal had been perfecting the ultimate (up to now) plastic bottle bomb made up of an empty antifreeze bottle. Up to this point in time his largest experiments had been conducted on 2 liter soda bottles which created quite a stir in and among themselves. Mark had loaded his brush and was doing his normal outstandingly straight pin stripe when the blast occurred at Ground Zero (aka the tool box 20 feet away).
I never found out if it was the sound of the detonation or the resulting shock wave that caused the problem, although a picture taken from a United States Department Of Energy helicopter orbiting Surprise!!! Arizona was able to take this picture immediately after ignition:
The aforementioned “problem” (as in “Houston, we have a problem…”) was in fact that up to just about T MINUS 1 second an atypical Mark Brodie pin stripe was being applied to this car.
At about T PLUS 4.2938157 seconds Mark was once again able to focus his eyes amongst the blaring of car alarms, air raid sirens and Civil Defense Wardens shouting to “duck and cover”. (yes, I realize I am dating myself…)
It was at this point he also saw that in the blast he had inadvertently created on the side of the car he was working on, what could best be described as an exact duplicate of the seismograph printout of when Mount Saint Helens blew it’s main gasket…
To say that it is indeed anyone’s guess why Mr. Gone-Postal did not achieve instant and irrevocable Automotive Practical Joke Martyrdom is a foregone conclusion. It took Mark quite a bit of time to recover enough to:
1. Avoid killing everyone indiscriminately
2. Stop shaking.
3. Avoid killing everyone indiscriminately
4. Buff off the offending paint strokes
5. Avoid killing everyone indiscriminately
6. Check his surroundings thoroughly and often
7. Avoid killing Mr. Gone-Postal slowly and everyone else relatively quickly and indiscriminately
8. Re-stripe the car
Mark has since recovered and does not seem to be any the worse for the spectacular events that he happened to survive. Except for The Twitch.
As a note: Yes, there are times I do tend to exaggerate these little stories. But please be aware that the above really did happen. Be also aware that there was a continued look of slow and painful death emanating from Mark’s eyes. And honest-to-gawd that was a HUGE boom… So huge, in fact, that is is now specifically outlined in the employee handbook that “Coolant Jug Bombs are strictly prohibited and use of such will result in immediate termination…” Termination meaning fired. Or maybe meaning TERMINATED. You know – the other way.
I guess when the GM wets himself, that is enough cause to change the employee handbook, eh?
