Post a picture... any picture

For comparison, a scan of a found photo, taken by me ca. 1973, of the aft-end of my parents' 55 Buick Special and a bit of the passenger door of my father's '66 Econoline.

Stop it, Geoff. Unless... are you considering exploring... The Dark Side...?

OleBoot wrote: »

Todays college graduate!

I go to see my boys today, pick up a cable, order a cable, and I'm met at the door like this...."Geoff, you come into exchange your Kanta's for the Utopia's??" I said, WHAT?? Look, I don't even want to see em....well, I had to take a look.....

I thought we learned this this morning - isn't this how you'd lose the other kidney?

He tried many jobs before finding the dream one, melding wood and life


Woody Jones poses for a photograph holding one of his prototypes at his showroom in his home in Decatur, Ga. Over 40 years, Jones has produced more than 3,000 pieces of mechanical amusements.

He spent decades hunting for his calling, cycling through jobs from law enforcement to mental health counseling and owning a bar at Underground Atlanta. As Jones neared 40, his aging dad was still asking when he’d settle on something. Anything.

And then, while hitchhiking in the West, still on the quest, a chance encounter started him on a fresh path, one that isn’t likely to show up on a list of potential careers. He had no real experience in woodworking. But while he was hitchhiking, a group that picked him up included a teenager who told him about carving figures out of wood. Jones decided to give it a try.

Now, going on four decades, Jones spends his days making wooden boxes that, when hand cranked, often depict playful, animated scenes from a person’s life and sometimes the fantastical. One day, a man came to his booth at an art festival and mentioned how nobody made depictions of his particular line of work. He was a gastroenterologist. The chance encounter eventually led Jones down a path of specialization. Now he only makes custom pieces, often delving into the stories of individuals.

He sometimes earns thousands of dollars on the most elaborate pieces, which have been commissioned for corporate titans, politicians, doctors, lawyers, scuba divers, cockroach trap marketers, golfers, bar owners, duck hunters, spouses. Anyone really. One that depicts scenes of Vincent van Gogh painting, with cranks that shift not only the background scene but the painting on the artist’s easel, sold for $10,000, he says. The sweeping one of people inside Grand Central Terminal sold for $24,000. And Jones says he got $40,000 for a package of 75 scenes placed inside three 30-foot-tall towers in a state environmental center in Pennsylvania.

The hand-painted scenes he portrays include duck hunters in the wild. A marriage proposal in front of a lighthouse. A Viking ship undulating on a roiling sea, pursued by a fearsome dragon with jaws that snap open and shut. A dentist drilling into the mouth of a prone patient, whose legs sporadically shoot up into the air.

There are also workers on a Ford factory line, showing different eras and vehicles over the span of a century, with parts circling overhead on a conveyor chain. And an elaborate three-level world, with heaven, hell and people who each have both angels and demons floating above them. Also a scene of 150-plus moving figures inside a miniature Grand Central Terminal in New York. And a mother in a delivery room with a doctor holding the baby and a father unconscious on the floor.




Woody Jones has hand made thousands of miniature wooden scenes about people's work and private lives. The personalized mechanical amusements, with tiny figures of people and animals, often have multiple parts that move when a crank handle is rotated.

Cats and trains