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diff --git a/drafts/2022-01-10-gatsby's-ride.md b/drafts/2022-01-10-gatsby's-ride.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b3aae31 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/2022-01-10-gatsby's-ride.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +<h1>Gatsby's Ride</h1> + +It's 2022 now, and Jay Gatsby lived and died 100 years ago. I first read F. +Scott Fitzgerald's classic _The Great Gatsby_ in high school, right before the +2013 film with Leonardo DiCaprio came out. It was one of the few "school books" +that my friends and I were actually really into. It was fun having the film +trailers to help visualize what we were reading. As a car guy, one of the +attractions of the story was the time period and, more specifically, its cars. + +The characters drive a variety of classics from the early teens and twenties. +Gatsby's car plays an important role in the plot (which I won't spoil but come +on, it's only been around longer than you or I have). But I find the car's +description and its recreation in film over the years to be wildly different and +fascinating. So let's take a closer look at Gatsby's ride. + +This is what Fitzgerald has to say about Gatsby's car: + +> I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with +> nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant +> hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of +> windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of +> glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town. + +> 'It was a yellow car,' he said, 'big yellow car. New... No, but the car passed +> me down the road, going faster'n forty. Going fifty, sixty.' + +There's not much more to go on except the color is repeated a few times. What an +awesome description. And it's exactly what you'd expect from cars of the rich +and famous from the early to mid twenties: nickel plating, multiple windshields, +probably open-air, lots of accessory boxes, and Gatsby's trademark flamboyant +colors. And it's fast (your typical Model T Ford topped out at about 40-45 MPH). + +<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZgAf9AuNc6Q" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> + + + |