Tag: cars

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Notes Suitable For A Nine-Inch Screen

Friends,

Here are a couple things that just made me smile. You’ll note that there’s nothing here about work. There’s a reason for that.

One Laptop Per Nephew – I was finally able to deliver the tiny laptop to my six-year old nephew’s Charge d’Affaires and gave her a little instruction on its operation. No real manual is available and my help was minimal, but the printed Quick Start guide give a nod toward serendipity. She sent this note:

I just had to write you a quick note about the laptop. So Maxi was eating his breakfast as I jumped into the shower. I could hear him shout, “YES!” I finished up and he yelled to me, “Mama, I got on the internet!”

He was sitting on the couch with the computer in his lap and sure enough, he was on the net. He was so proud of himself. He said, “Mama, I figured it out before you could.” Then he showed me a map of Europe. “Here’s Sweden.” He went on and on exploring different countries.

I think in a way it is good that there is no instruction b/c he was really excited to figure it out on his own and then show me how to use it.

Thanks so much.This is really an amazing present.

“Here’s Sweden.” Good gravy, he’s already smarter than the rest of us. I always thought that Sweden was a county in Wisconsin.

The Mighty Road Racing Dakota – I out-drove and out-handled a guy in a late model Porsche Carrera 4 running down the hill this morning. In a crappy (but free) ten year old, four-cylinder mid-size American pickup. I found it a completely bizarre and hilarious development. It’s so wrong.

Primaries – Obama won Texas after all by three delegates? Breaks the narrative of Hillary as comeback kid, doesn’t it? Dad’s already bored by this thing though. We usually have a long chat about the latest results on the phone, but this week he couldn’t care less. And he watches fishing shows—on purpose!

The Mollusk Channel – The Clam has been doing very well with the weather predictions lately. Everyone else (except for Yahoo!, who we don’t track regularly) has been wildly inaccurate. Your winning lottery numbers are forthcoming…

Your pal,

– bob

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Powerful Sadness

Friends,

Listening to the Bluegrass station on Sirius on my way down the mountain this morning (“won’t have no more pain, ain’t gonna cry, when I go to bed this evenin’ just gonna curl up and die…” **sniff!** Tragic.) I had plenty of time to consider the car holding up the line. (Speaking of lines, did you know that Bluegrass music is almost completely obsessed with trains? Why not mules? Or perhaps corn liquor? The mind reels.)

The car holding up the line wasn’t a car at all. It was a Volkswagen Eurovan.

Styling by Kelvinator.

What ever happened to those things? I understood that they were okay drivers, if underpowered. The genius of communal speculation that is Wikipedia reports that they stopped selling in the states way back in 2003. This brings me to the saddest news of the week…

Isuzu has announced that they’re going to stop selling passenger vehicles in the United States. Their end date is a year from now but the worst part of all is you don’t even care.

Styling by committee.

How soon you forget about the mighty Isuzu Impulse. The diesel I-Mark. The fun and sporty Stylus!

Styling by some middle manager's nephew.

But most important of all were the Isuzu P’up/Chevrolet LUV twins. Just marvel at the flowing design… I’ll wait.

What may be the saddest part of this story, besides the crushing economic loss to the dealers and all the people who support them, would be the L.A. Times story itself. Clearly it would be difficult to provide analysis of the company’s failure so instead they interviewed David Leisure, the man who played Joe Isuzu on the teevee.

Yep. Journalism is dead. I think I’m gonna write a song about it.

Your pal,

bob

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Monster Jamb

Friends,

My nephew and his staff invited me to America’s Finest Okay Joyless Awful Substandard** City to be his guest at a brazen display of carefully choreographed vehicular nuttiness. I’m referring, of course, to monster trucks.

We've arrived.

The circuit that the unnaturally huge truck owners belong to is well defined. The trucks themselves are brands since you can’t mention the series without Grave Digger popping up. If you haven’t perused the Hot Wheels aisle at Target in a while, you’ve surely missed the madness. Bad night for the guy running—at Qualcomm Stadium at Jack Murphy Field (barf) on the eve of the AFC Championship game in Foxboro—the truck called The Patriot.

When being a patriot is a bad thing.

You’ve never heard such booing. Even after the perky announcer guy implored the crowd to give the guy a break. “He’s from Santa Cruz…” Boo! “He’s a California boy…” Boo! “C’mon people…” Boo!

Chargers fans, it seems, are not the most discriminating bunch.

It turns out that the intermediary bits, the semi-final race heats, are deadly dull for even the six-year old demographic:

When do they jump again?

Things started picking up later during the “freestyle” event. Ninety seconds to crush as many cars and jump as high as possible for each truck.

Okay, this is more like it.

But after we’d seen a contender set his truck on fire, it was time to go. Good thing, too. It was after ten, my host was sleepy, and we’d seen all we needed to see. Rollovers, crashes, fire, jumps, we’d taken in that, hot dogs, and all the exhaust fumes we could stand.

Good times.

– bob

P.S. Remember Jose Jimenez, the comedy persona of Bill Dana, who was popular in clubs and on teevee in the 60s? I guess you’d have to be over 40 to recall this stuff, but who in the Chargers P.R. office has this much of a tin ear?

Don't touch that! It's J.B!

Here’s a piece of his TV Engineer bit to help explain what’s going on here. Even he gave up the bit for its perceived racism. Three decades ago.

** SUNDAY UPDATE: Las Chargitas lost to the Patriots this afternoon. Apparently the booing didn’t work.

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YooHooToob! Passive-Aggressive Moment

While I was stumbling around for a certain suitably heinous music video that we should never speak of again, I tripped over this…

It’s a 1959 Volkswagen ad that essentially smacks about the head and shoulders all of the dead domestic manufacturers. They pursued perfection (or something relentless in that vein) while DeSoto, Nash, Packard (hello, larry), Studebaker and Hudson over-promised, under-delivered, then withered away. Nice grave dancing. Classy.

– bob