Finally! The doctors identified the bacteria that ate up my graft and there’s an assassination plan in place. And, more importantly, I’ll be free today, free of this bed and these tubes and these wires and the indignities and discomfort of hospital life, ready to jump back into the indignities and discomforts of normal life once again. A shower. Oh do I want a shower! Let’s celebrate my upcoming freedom with some nice Citroën DS brochure images, selected mostly for that top image there, from a 1959 brochure and looking so strangely medical.
I think that heart-and-vascular system drawing is supposed to analogize the DS’ hydropneumatic suspension system, and, I suppose, the whole network of hydropneumatics in the car, which are a pressurized circulatory system, of sorts. I do love the illustration and the strange bio-creepiness of it, something I can’t see any modern carmaker doing today. Can you imagine a new RAV4 being shown with a heart and blood vessels?
They just showed me how I need to use the port they installed into my veins to upload antibiotics into myself every day. What a weird process! I feel so mechanical. I have to bleed air out of the syringes first before connecting them to my fluid lines – it’s like doing a brake job. But inside my body.
But back to this amazing DS brochure. Look at that image up above there; I’m not exactly sure what is going on? Is that the field where they grow women in leotards and airport semaphore-type signage? If so, I’ve always wondered about that.
Also, just gaze on that dashboard! It’s still one of the most incredible dashboards of any car. The one-spoke wheel, the integrated vents, the swoopy shapes, the strange positions of the levers and stalks – I love it.
This whole brochure is so gleefully unhinged. Like, is this picture taken inside one of the Great Pyramids?
I mean, it’s not, but it feels like it could be. Speaking of, have you ever seen a cutaway of the chambers in the Pyramids? They’re not very space-efficient:
I mean, that yellow DS looks fantastic there, or, I suspect, anywhere, really. They sort of prove this point on another page of the brochure:
Sure, just park it in front of a, what is that, cement factory? Or a gravel-making something? there’s what looks like a hopper and some sort of conveyer system, but whatever it is, they’re not wrong, the DS still looks good.
I always appreciate a good trunk-packing photo, especially when they cram some kids in there. It’s odd they didn’t cram those last two bags in there, though? Unless the implication is that’s where the kids are now?
I love cutaway drawings, and one of the conceits of these I love is the jagged hole, as seen in the roof there. They could have illustrated it with smooth edges, but I suppose to avoid any confusion that the roof may actually have the opening, they use that wonderful zig-zag like sawed-open look. It’d be fun to get a real DS and inset a plastic roof panel with those same type of edges in there.
More nurses are coming explaining things for when I leave! Freedom! I’ll be free from this bed, these smells, the needles and cuffs and wires! I can’t wait!
Look at it this way, you normally have to pay extra for that treatment yet you get it as a medical expense.
Get the road to recovery and stay weird.
I’m struggling to understand the blue stalker vehicle in the background of the ancient ruins shot. Is it to draw a contrast between the Goddess and mere mortal cars? Or maybe it was parked there when they arrived for the shoot, and nobody could find the owner and the lone cop on the scene was demanding an…incentive to call for a tow.
No it is a sneak preview of the prototype Ami.
An annoying sibling attempting to steal the shot by running into a column.
Hey Jason,
While you were all hopped up on delicious hospital drugs, any chance you came up with new Mack Hardigraw stories? It’s been two years since the last one and I think they’re the sort of thing you can write while full of drugs, because no one can tell how they were meant to be written in the first place!
Hope you get better soon!
Release the crack-up!
Carry on our wayward son.
Holy crap get better soon! Someone in my old neighborhood in Cary has a Citroen. It sits in their driveway under a tarpaulin.
Yet another example of the past being modern nightmare fuel…
Jason, glad to hear you are getting out! I thought of you last weekend as we walked around the Cary Auto Show. You would have enjoyed it, much more interesting cars out there then I expected for Cary and a lot of them. There was a beautifully restored Citroen 2CV that you would have liked.
Dang how did I not know about that?
We had no idea how big it was. Expected like 20 cars and some food trucks. It was more like 100 cars, including some 1930s models. I’ll make a note to attend next year for sure.
I know Torch is in the shop for vascular reasons but I feel like he’d be just as excitedly blogging about his release from a mental asylum so that’s how I’m choosing to read this, it’s official headcanon now.
The garage of Dr. Caligari
Glad you are on the mend Mr. Torch! I like Citroens just fine, but will re-read later. Just glad to hear they sprung you from the hospital!
Great to hear, Jason!
That photo of the DS’s circulatory system reminds me of the 80s Val Kilmer movie Real Genius. They pull a prank on a fellow student and put his DS into his dorm room and rig the hydraulic suspension to make it look like it is inhaling (raise the suspension) and exhaling (lower the suspension) while it snores in the student’s bed. It’s a silly movie, but silly fun.
All veins and arteries tie to the mushroom pedal.
Mushroom what?
If you go looking for a brake pedal in a DS you’ll find it missing with a mushroom growing up from the floorboard instead.
So, it’s like Wikifeet. Gotcha.
Said by #45?
That was his response when one of his kids mentioned “microdosing shrooms.”
Ooh, time for the hospital bill! Talk about Jason and the Golden Fleece.
I’m a big fan of the US, and US stuff, but the whole concept of having a hospital bill seems utterly alien.
Not that our system is great, I recently spent 8 hours crumpled in a corridor in A&E in severe pain waiting for a doctor to give me some pills and tell me to “come back tomorrow” to get a cast on my broken bones. But at least they didn’t expect me to pay for the experience.
We definitely believe in adding insult to injury here.
See, if you lived here you could get that same level of service in half the time! All it costs is bankruptcy.
Ha, as a medical professional who is very familiar with wait times, you could get the same ER wait time or worse on the west coast! I read eight hours in a hallway and thought “That’s not terrible!”
It was an eight hour wait to be told to come back tomorrow, not an eight hour wait for treatment. And that was after I arranged to be driven to hospital in a car because the ambulance was delayed for at least three hours. The hospital was only ten miles away.
But it was free. And I got to pick what colour cast to have.
Oh, that is pretty horrible. I’m so sorry you had to wait that long.
Good luck in the battle, these things seem to always take longer than we’d like even without the complications.
Not the same without you regularly, but don’t rush back either! Make sure you’re over all the big hurdles and your family will have you around for a long time first!
“A shower. Oh do I want a shower!”
On behalf of everyone else, we also want you to have a shower…
Glad you’re on the mend!
No spaghetti though, that lesson has been learned.
Jason is the perfect example why we’ll always be proud to be humans. Can you imagine chatGPT 14.0 trying to keep up with him? And Jason, watch out, Sam Altman may come for your brain now that Scarlett Johansson left him in the dust. Stay healthy and strong dude!
Congrats on identifying your particular plague and beginning the reconquest.
The sticks are there for the women to grow around, like trees.
Leotard ladies are surveyors trying to locate a single straight line on a DS.
Glad you have achieved hospital escape velocity. Have a pleasant home reentry.
Yeah, man. That first shower after getting out is pretty great. The ol’ double shampoo and double soap down to get all squeaky clean is a great feeling! And then, even better is getting out of the shower and brushing that clean and fresh smelling hair…
Oh shit, I forgot who I was talking to. Well, I guess, take my word for it on the hair brushing part. Either way, congrats 🙂
Fantastic news! Continue unchanged, you are a real hoot as they say. Dan, aka Mr. mediport.
Who needs rear facing child seats. Just put them in the trunk and wedge suitcases around them. Done and done. Are we there yet? nobody heard them ask because they’re in the trunk. Perfect.
The French are not real big on bathing.
The top photo is just the bi-weekly “airing out of the crotches.” The more you know, or something like that? (The Col knows these things. Don’t ask how.)
Behave Torch. Please.
As the Coneheads said, “France. We are from France.” That kind of explains it all.
Congratulations on Escape from Baptist Memorial, Torch Plissken.
“Are they from another planet?”
“If they’re not we should nuke France right away.”
I’m so happy to hear that you’re on the mend Jason. You are the weirdest voice in auto journalism, and I consider you a national treasures. Like the DS, your strangeness is your greatness.
Yay for freedom from medical tyranny!
That cutaway of the pyramid reminds me of the Jag F-Type. All that exterior, and yet only just enough room inside for a couple of people at most.
Congrats!!
Shouldn’t the heart be under the hood?
I think it’s because you, the driver, are the heart of the car. Or something.
Maybe that is where Jason got his homonculus theory for Cars.