Hello from Stockholm! I’m on a Volvo trip today, from balmy, gray Stockholm, which is lovely and full of bridges and I just saw the sun is going to set in about an hour and a half from now, at 3:30 in the flapjacking afternoon. Come on, Sweden, pay your damn sun bill! This is ridiculous. You know what else is Swedish and ridiculous? That picture of a 1957 Volvo PV444 on what has to be the most half-assed fake beach I’ve seen. I mean look at that! They found some dirt to spread on a studio floor, then placed an umbrella and literally two (2) seashells on the floor and called it a day. Oh, and they got a lady to wear a canary yellow bathing suit and kneel next to the car, pouring what may be coffee, everyone’s favorite beach hot drink.
Maybe it’s soup.
I do really like Volvo PV444/544s a lot, though, with their late ’40s American car styling and charming frumpiness, paired with great B-series Volvo engines, sometimes with twin SU carbs! Also, this:
Is that showing some kind of movable trunk light on a cord? That’s pretty great for spelunking the big black cavern of that trunk, looking for loose pills or an earring or some other lost treasure. Plus, if you get trapped in there, you can use it to read!
I’m going to see if I can find any cool cars around the hotel here. And maybe some of that fish in a tube!
Did anyone else notice the weird angle of the rearview mirror? What were they looking at, Pigeons?
I hate it when we have to adjust our clocks to wintertime, 4-5 months of darkness. I come alive again in spring when we get back on summertime and there is sun light to 22:15 and it never gets really dark.
Torch, you (volvo?) picked the absolutely worst time to visit Sweden. Dark, wet, windy and dark. In the real winter the snow brightens up everything and it doesn’t feel as bad. Please return in the summer for maximum enjoyment.
And lastly, try “Ejderns smörgåskaviar orginal orökt”. It is the best caviar in a tube that money can buy imho.
“I just love my vulva, er Volvo” Little known fact: This was one of the first photo shoots by Bergman after the, ahem, incident.
My dad had a PV444. My brother, noting the model badging, asked innocently “What’s the ‘four four four’ for Dad?” (A family classic.)
Dad was proud of the car’s machined engine block and brass(?) radiator. (He did end up working on it a lot, regardless.)
I owned a 544 in the early 1970s. Paid $300 for it. There were a couple of others in town and a bunch of 122S sedans. There were a bunch-minus-one chrome gas caps. We’d be driving around and invariably one car was missing a gas cap. The next day it had a cap and another car didn’t. Eventually either the car without a cap left town or someone broke down and bought one. I loved that car.
The only one I’ve ever ridden in had no shocks: not bad, but actually absent. I had never appreciated exactly how much shocks do. Even blown out shocks in my high-mileage beaters did >something<. This car would seesaw for what seemed like 30 seconds upon coming to a stop. Nauseating.
Old Pervo is getting an eyeful of something that isn’t fake. I hope the lady has her pepper spray nearby.
The ad people had to make do. It’s not like Sweden is on the coast, or anything…
Two seashells? Why not three?? Maybe they didn’t get Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy in Sweden? Then these Swedes might’ve known about the three rocks:
(From Wikipedia) Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be “some rocks.” Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate “some rocks” but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.”
I remember one day back in my teen years driving through a parking lot and we passed one of these, a red one just like in the photo, when my dad suddenly gets really excited and points to it and says he lived in one of those for a few months after he got out of the Navy. I had never seen one before, had never even heard my dad say the name Volvo before, but he knew all about the car and started pointing out all sorts of things you would only notice if you owned one.
I’ve known him 40+ years now and you’d think you know your own father but my sister and I still learn random fun facts about him all the time.
C’mon Jason, thermoses can be used to keep hot stuff hot or cold stuff cold. How it knows is still one of the great mysteries of our time, but it can be used for either.
They couldn’t even mock up a convincing license plate. A12345?! That’s amazing! I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!
Hey, when in Sweden, one is expected to replace the American colloquialism “flapjacking” with “flatpacking.”
So what Torch is really saying is this is the “Most Convincing Real Beach” he’s seen.
My entire existence is thanks to a PV444, my mom only agreed to go on a blind date with my dad because he “drove a Volvo” so she thought he had money. Joke was on her though, that thing broke down every other month and my dad was constantly fixing it lol. I suppose you could say my dad cat-fished my mom with a Volvo PV444.
Heh, my mom is not a car person at all, but, weirdly, the only two brands she seems to respect/treat with a certain reverence are Volvo and Peugeot – in her mind, they’re both fancy, expensive, “doctor’s cars”. But she doesn’t give a crap about Mercedes, BMW, etc, just those two. Have no idea what happened earlier in life to form that attitude/impression
My wife isnt a car person at all either, but she does approve of us going out in my 1958 PV444…. it’s a very charming little car.
To be fair, if it’s a Swedish beach, you probably need a hot drink.
Shows you what happens when you have to do that summer photo shoot in March.
Ghost in a trunk.
No Dice.
It’s the taillights that are removable, It says that:
“The taillights can be removed from inside and can be used to ligth up the trunk when the ligths are removed from the fittings.”
And regarding that “Fish in a tube” a.k.a Kaviar i recomend that you try the Smoked with Dill variant i personally like the most. And Kaviar is a must with boiled eggs at the breakfast table.
wait WHAT
Yes.
Had no idea about that either despite seeing one in very good shape every now and then growing up in the seventies/eighties.
The Swede speaks the truth. A rough translation of the end of the text (don’t kill me, my Norwegian is a bit stale):
“Rear lights can be removed from the trunk and used to illuminate the compartment when the lights are taken from the mounts.”
Someone needs to check on Jason, he may have passed out after that previously unknown tail light knowledge got processed.
Not Norwegian. Danish.
I think Jason is going to need a moment and possibly a change of shorts.
I see Ingrid is readying that roofie for what would be Johann’s last nooner.
The look on that guy’s face is downright Quagmire-esque. Good thing that the car is blocking us from seeing anything below the waist.
You can see the Giggity Giggity on his face.
He just really likes….soup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkXzeZ0KE5Q
It’s every bit as real as those Elvis beach movies.
It’s a real beach. There are sea shells. Also, who goes to the beach without a blanket?
Frumpy (perfect descriptor) late 40’s styling also carried forward with cars such as Morris Minor…yet they sold. Of course people looked askance at the buyers like a neighbor in late 50’s Milwaukee who had a PV. Topping that off he took meticulous care of it which was not the norm – at least on our street.
I bought my 1958 Volvo 444 from the original owner, 64 years, 362,000 miles, and there isnt a spec of rust under that thing…. on day 1, he took it home, put it up on stands, crawled under there with a bucket of weather seal, a brush, and coated the ENTIRE underside of the car. I also got every single record of that car going back to the early 70’s as well…. the guy was meticulous to say the least.