THIS PLOT IS FICTIONAL – SO FAR
In John Updike’s scary new novel, Terrorist, a New Jersey teenager and devout Muslim named Ahmad is persuaded at a storefront mosque to forgo college for truck-driving school. Given the title, you needn’t be a member of Highway Watch to figure out that Ahmad is being drawn into a sinister plot, but the book is suspenseful nonetheless – if you don’t expect an action thriller. The closest thing to a James Bond character is Ahmad’s hapless high-school guidance counselor.
THAT VOLVO DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A GOLF CART
Gator Register is not an endangered-species list but a Florida trucker and avid golfer profiled in the December 2005 Truckers News. That article, and Register’s subsequent appearance on USA Network’s “PGA Tour Sunday,” generated so much interest that he’s now the president of the brand-new U.S. Truckers Golf Association, which holds its second tournament Oct. 27 in Columbia, S.C. The group’s slogan appears on the side of Register’s 2005 Volvo: “Trucking Across America, One Golf Course at a Time.” Visit this site.
REVVING WITH THE BADDEST OF THE BAD
Familiar brands were among Diesel Power magazine’s “In the Company of Greatness,” a Top 10 list of the all-time “baddest diesels on planet Earth.” Class 8 honors went to Detroit Diesel’s Series 60 (pictured), medium-duty honors to International’s DT466. Caterpillar’s C12 Super Truck Racing Engine was listed, as were several pickup engines, including Cummins’ B Series and International’s 7.3-liter Power Stroke. Biggest on the list: the 109,000-hp Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C, which powers container ships. Visit this site.
PAST OUR PEAK
“You can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on every continental shelf, and atop every hill in America for that matter, and you still won’t reverse the fact that our oil production is in permanent decline. We’re just sopping up what’s left, digging ourselves into a deeper hole.”
– U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., quoted in the Chicago Tribune
ANOTHER OPTIMIST
“We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.”
– Bumper sticker spotted on an 18-wheeler on I-81 in Virginia
TEMPERING ‘IRON MIKE’
“We were all scared of Mike Ditka. He’s really
mellowed since then.”
– Roger Staubach, speaking at the Great American Trucking Show’s Fleet Forum in August, on his 1971 Dallas Cowboys teammates
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