A friend of mine Elliot Washor, just returned from Australia where he had a couple meetings with Mark Thomson, who wrote: "Rare Trades, Makers, Breakers and Fixers" and "Blokes and Sheds". Those are books I know I'll have to look into, and perhaps some of my Australian readers will fill us in.

Earlier in the year, I told here in the blog about my visit to Mora, Sweden at prom time, when there were hundreds of American cars on the street. You can find out about this if you use the search function at the top left of the page. When I was in Little Rock with friends last week, they told me about meeting a couple young Swedish men traveling on a great American road-trip in an old American car that they had purchased on eBay. They had to spend more time than expected in Chicago doing needed repairs, but barring further breakdowns are probably home in Sweden now, ready for a long winter restoring it to perfection in time for the spring thaw and prom night. There is a code hard wired in the human genome that says: take apart and fix or make.