As an enthusiastic long-time fan of his products during my childhood, I read this story with a touch of melancholy-infused nostalgia.
Hat tip to my Dad for the link.
San Francisco is being invaded by Prius cars, and Noe Valley seems to be one of the frontlines of the invasion. A few days back, while walking around the neighborhood, I saw no less than 7 Priuses in one city block. I’m not kidding. Of the remaining half dozen, another two were Honda hybrids. Now, I’m as environmentally conscious as the next guy or gal, so I cannot see this proliferation of hybrid cars as anything but a good thing. Still, when I look at the plasticky, almost disposable looking exteriors of these cars of the future, I sometimes yearn for the iron monsters of the Detroit of yesteryear. Those were real cars, which looked every bit like metal spawn stamped out in the hellfire bowels of some smoke-belching factory behemoth. And then I think fondly of the first car I ever drove in America, the splendid Buick Skyhawk.
When I tell people I went to school in Detroit, they give me commiserating looks, as if I’d told them my dog just died. I could never figure out this response, because despite the muggings, the freezing weather, the chewed up roads, the shelled out abandoned buildings, and the freezing weather, I generally had a good time in the Motor City. Part of it was because I was too stupid to know any better. Then again, I had a good bunch of friends and even hell can be bearable in the right company. I should know. Alcohol helped too, and Mr. Daniels saw us through many a roach infestation.
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With all of the unpleasant side-effects of our addiction to oil (e.g. pollution, dependence on OPEC), I’ve been wondering how to reduce my own personal oil dependence. I’ve already been using my 55 mpg (= 65 mpg Imperial = 4.3 liters/100km = 23 km/liter) motorcycle for several years for most commuting & some errands, so the next step was to either buy a vehicle that gets even better mileage (but still uses gasoline), or buy one that doesn’t use gasoline at all. My preference was the latter.
The next questions were what fuel to use and what vehicle to get. The U.S. Dept. of Energy has a great alternative fuels webpage, on which one can find the pros & cons of various alternative fuels and a partial listing of alt fuel vehicles. They even have a sort of “store locator” to find locations near one’s home that sell each type of fuel. Since I’m keeping my conventional car and motorcycle for long trips, I figured a short-range vehicle for commuting and errands would be fine. I decided to get the Taiwanese-made, Vespa-style EVT-168 electric scooter after extensive research*. It can be charged at home using a standard household outlet, and, at about $2,200 delivered, is a way to test the alt fuel lifestyle (drivestyle?) without making a massive investment. On that note, beware of cheapo scooters that are more likely to be novelty items than durable vehicles.
After successfully catalysing the sub-orbital space travel industry, the
X Prize Foundation is now trying to push the limits of automobile efficiency through the Automotive X PRIZE. The prize for the first car to run 100 MPG is rumoured to be $25 million.
PS Anousheh Ansari has her own “space” blog.
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A couple of days ago, in my daily commute to work, in the usual company of fellow San Francisco commuters, with the usual boredom, one of the favorite topics came to the plate: dumb people (which of course is everybody that drives except whomever is in the car at that moment - no pun intended to my fellow bloggers and (some) acquaintances).
Bear with me in this line of thought and (un)reasoning. While talking about bad drivers, we sort of link it to the Darwinian mechanisms of survival of the fittest. So bad driving is really a natural mechanism for getting rid of certain number of people, which is, we suppose, one of nature’s problems: how to keep these annoying humans for growing larger and more powerful than nature. So we tied that to the fact that nature was very clever and was savy enough to embed human kind with some “stupidity” property, which comes small or large depending on the subject, and the geographical location (don’t ask me why but I suspect it is very true). Then nature decided that is not good enough because stupidity by itself won’t get rid of many people. So nature kept trying and decided to embed the “power” property in these human subjects (or objects for the OOP geeks). And then nature came with the master plan and based on probabilities, IT thought that eventually you could have one subject with enough desire for power that would take advantage of the stupid people. Chi chin! big win for nature, mathematically speaking, and we all know nature is about zeros and ones, this would guarantee the possibility of yielding enough stupidity together to raise to power somebody stupid enough, managed by people that desire power, that would cause the destruction of a lot of people.
Of course I am not referring to anybody in particular, or any sbject in particular.
Ahh! the wonders of commuting.
The word auto-sex is something I hadn’t heard before. But now a man in Bratislava, Slovakia, has been arrested after crashing his auto(mobile) while having auto-sex. Got to love the English language. Bloody brilliant, I say!
Sympathies should go out to the rantlusters residing in the Northeast US. Apparently, the dumbest drivers in the US are from there. One out of five didn’t know that pedestrians have the right of way in a crosswalk.
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