Posting useless automotive diversions to distract from mindless jobs since 2004
I love that it's already custom painted in Statutory Grape.
Edit: I appreciate the upvotes, but felt compelled to mention this expression came up in a lot of old Jalopnik threads, so it's basically a mini-meme.
Bonus: The first time I saw it mentioned was when the Challenger first came out (remember those days) and they offered purple as a color. The commenter was pretty cynically accurate about Mopar's target customer base at the time. IMHO, of course. 
First off, huge thanks to everyone involved in starting this site. I don't want to overshadow that at all, but...
What in the hell, G/O? I didn't get an email or anything about saving my posts. 12 years and probably 25k posts (including hundreds of threads and all of my Oppo satire pieces) are just gone?
Anyone willing to fill me in a bit? All I can find online is that the Herbs finally shut down a lot of the sub-blogs after a year of false threats. I couldn't visit Oppo for a while because it wouldn't even let me log in, so I waited until I got a new browser this morning to try again.
THANKS A LOT, BIDEN!
Edit: I didn't realize I disappeared right after my daughter was sent home from school for a sore throat. Weird coincidence. And it happened again in October, but apparently the school's Covid fearfulness has paid off since the kids have been able to stay in school at least 2 days a week since September (with a long virtual break from Thanksgiving to Christmas to prevent spikes). All good in the hood!
The kid was amazed at the mechanical handbrake and joystick. ‘98 Passat GLX, V6 5MT, Eibach Pro System, some other stuff…donated a couple years after this pic.
Looking through some CDs. 1 in the dash and 10 in the trunk. Ballin!
Fast forward to yesterday. Now we build trebuchets and pneumatic tennis ball cannons together on our porch. How the time flies. Adam Sandler once said that with kids, the days are incredibly long, but the years are incredibly short.
And the cat's in the cradle til I fire this gun, watch him get up and then scramble to run. When he's coming home, dad? I don't know when. We'll shoot another then. I know we'll have a good time then.
EDIT: the instructions we followed. About $85 in parts at Home Depot (damn inflation!)
https://www.instructables.com/Compressed-Air-Tennis-Ball-Mortar/?amp_page=true
Hey peeps! Work and life have been busy AF for the past several months, and I don't have copy/paste privileges on this site, so I apologize for the lack of non-textual content. Our work restrictions are pretty random, with site blockages and copy/paste limitations (I had the same issue on Kinja, too).
Car search: Still driving my 2001 Passat wagon. Now I'm just going to keep it thanks to the used car market insanity...hopefully it will die down later this year because I'm itching to get into something I can drive without fear of it falling apart any more than it already has (the Germans' secret ingredient for ensuring the integrity of interior components is: dust!)
We strongly considered a travel trailer, so I know more about towing capacities of SUVs and trucks than I ever wanted to...but hey. Now we're reassessing our needs and not likely to take the RV route, but along the way I fell in love with the Jeep Grand Cherokee Summit Edition -- with Hemi, leather dashboard, air suspension, etc -- which is basically like a Range Rover for half the price and twice the reliability (note: twice the reliability of a Range Rover is still half as good as the rest of the market).
Got the Covid vax as soon as I could, then lived a semi-normal life with a summer beach vacation and not wearing a mask indoors. That's over now, apparently, thanks heavily to my rural neighbors who are still convinced that vaccines might have long-term effects.
However, we are still planning to hit Colorado in late September with the kids AND my parents. Flying to Denver and immediately driving to a nice rental house up in Estes Park. Planning to hit Rocky Mountain NP for 3-4 of those days, plus daytrips to Ft. Collins and renting a modded Jeep Gladiator for a day so we can do some light/moderate offroading in the area. Extremely excited -- that's Elk and Moose rutting season, so they're supposedly all over the place. We won't have any real time in Denver thanks to our flight schedules, but TBH I could take or leave almost any large city. I'm there for the mountains, anyway
How's everyone doing?
Ash
My issues with Carmax go back almost 10 years and 4 cars (1 bought and returned, 3 nearly bought before rust or mechanical defects were found). I'll go into more detail some other time. This is more of a rant about how bipolar an experience can be depending on how it's handled.
Issue: Wife thinks she might have left her purse in a test drive vehicle. We scour the house, retrace our steps, and make a call to the salesman (we had just returned the car a few hours earlier). Salesman calls back a couple hours later and says he couldn't find it.
We turn the house and car upside-down several times over the following week. I monitor credit card activity closely for anything odd, but nothing comes up. This adds to the evidence that the purse is in our possession somewhere (fyi: The kneejerk cancellation of credit cards is a big PITA unless you're SURE the purse or wallet is gone).
Almost 2 weeks go by, new credit cards ordered, old ones canceled, all of our documents are in order for a REAL ID license replacement, and I make one more call to Carmax and manage to get transfered to the back office.
"Yep, we have it right here."
My 5 minutes of relief is quickly overcome with anger. Despite my wife's oversight in the first place, we did our best to make calls and locate it. Even if the salesman missed it, how did everyone else involved think "I wonder who this belongs to?" when there is an ID right there inside, belonging to a customer who had JUST returned the car? You have our phone numbers. You just chose to do nothing.
On the flip side, had they called us, I'd probably have them at the top of my list now. Instead, I've been forbidden from ever talking to them again
Followup: Never in any of my 20+ years of work would I have failed to try to contact the owner of something left behind at my workplace...especially in any customer-facing roles where your assistance can so easily translate into sales and reputation. You can't pay people enough to do the right thing. You have to hire the right people in the first place.
Sorry if this comes across as a rant, but I want to talk facts and economics for a second.
As I think we all agree, gas prices -- for the average consumer -- are usually a much larger topic of discussion than other costs because we see them plastered on every street corner in 2-foot letters. It's something we can all complain about, then people in California can get trumped by Canadians who, in turn, get trumped by Norwegians and so it goes. This is not intended to downplay the role these prices have in the lives of long-distance commuters, especially rural dwellers, whose portion of their household budget had very little room for the increase. It's devastating. But that's beside the point here.
However, one thing I don't get is the common media formula of gas prices ruining (or limiting) people's vacation plans. Granted, if you have a 3,000-mile road trip planned this summer and you're camping every night along the way, gas prices will play a huge role in your plans.
However, for the average family taking a week-long summer trip of a few hundred miles, fuel costs are typically under 10% of the total. Yes, they've doubled since last year. But with rental rates, admission costs, rental cars, and food/supplies all going up, the relative contribution of fuel to the total trip cost isn't changed that much.
To put it another way, who is canceling a multi-thousand dollar trip because they have to spend an extra $100 in fuel?
To borrow the closer from another Oppo, do comment your thoughts below!
Day 1: Let's just pack up everything and move here!
Day 2: Well, I think we'll come back next year at least!
Day 3: Have you noticed all the vagrants and weirdos?
Day 4: Why are houses so overpriced?
Day 5: Did you really need to book the whole week just to save 10%?
Day 6: You can pack your own sh*t, I'm not talking to you.
Day 7: It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Rinse and repeat with 1-2 years in between.
(every place with a decent tourist infrastructure has amazing lipstick for their pigs. I love to look deeper and observe how the service people live and act, that tells you a lot.)
@HoustonRunner Yeah, I know what you mean -- I'm just looking at this from everyday practical ground clearance.
A pallet (or worse, a ladder) falls off the back of a pickup and you run over it. Anything pretending to be an SUV should have no trouble clearing it, but I'm starting to worry it would thrash those control arms pretty soundly.
In a more philosophical sense, I see things getting more wagon-like and I appreciate that. I think that GM just could have hid the suspension a little better and not gone with their most aggressive off-road styling in their history (especially on the Z71 trims). It's a little disingenous.
@FourMalibus The last two generations seemed like they nailed it, IMO -- visually and capability. At least for vehicles that were not just doing their best impression of a minivan.
But I don't pretend to understand Chevy's decisions...they're selling like crazy here, though. I have yet to see one modded for offroading, which is very telling.
@RamblinRover When I first heard it, I thought it was The Specials. A VERY often covered ska song.
In the spirit of covers, I like this one:
@ClassicDatsunDebate YES. That's another great example I missed. It's especially fun when most of those are FWD and just have a gaping hole in the middle where the tiny pumpkin should go. Same with the Honda CR-V from that era, but they hid it a little better.
@Demon-Xanth Great point, I think part of it is that I've just gotten so used to seeing them on Fords since they moved to IRS so many years ago. But even then, the Expedition looks "normal."
The Tahoe/Suburban makes it look like an afterthought or a bespoke conversion.
As I sat behind my 27th new Tahoe this morning, it occurred to me that their move to an IRS has resulted in a really weird, low protrustion of the lower control arms. The pic doesn’t do it justice because of the favorable angle, but you can’t miss it when sitting behind it. I would ballpark the ground clearance at the inner wheel to be about 5”, or a regular passenger car.
It’s reminiscent of the most recent decade of so many Toyota/Lexus vehicles and their exhaust kink in the right rear:
Surely things like this have caused problems for people over the years and the sheer volume of these cars. And to me, they really detract from an otherwise clean design (Lexus excepted!)
Heisenberg has entered the thread
“Say my name!”
@Roadkilled SWA is a very YMMV choice for many. If you're in a major hub for another airline, it's often not the best choice for the reasons you mention. Atlanta is one rare exception, where SWA has to fight diligently against Delta. So their prices end up identical, but their service and extras are always better.
In hundreds of airlines flights, I've never had a cancellation of any kind, only delays. I think the fact that Southwest operates mostly in the Sun Belt helps with their reliability -- ie, not a lot of snow issues.
If I'm traveling solo and carrying on, I'll pick whatever is cheapest. But as soon as I add checked bags or additional people, SWA is a great insurance policy. Especially if you have a lot of other contingencies, like a rental car window or specific check-in time. They basically remove the airline stress completely because they're so dedicated to fixing things.
This is gonna be one helluva an interesting insurance fight.
I just hope the driver has a good umbrella policy because I don't think that's going to be cheap to fix. Not the car, I mean.
Welcome to the States! I'm ~100 miles over here in Birmingham (That's Birmingham Part 2; as you already know, half of out cities and towns are just pure ripoffs or have the word "New" added to them...) and have spent many long weekends and overnight trips in ATL and know the area pretty well.
I'm a bit biased, but you're in a very good location to enjoy a lot of easy, good road trips all over the eastern US in less than a day.
Sorry about the summer. If Brits stereotypically like to apologize for the weather, then this is my reciprocal duty.
8-9 months of the year are pretty close to the southern UK, just a lot drier and with longer days.
Roads suck. Atlanta is an example of a city that outgrew its ability to plan. It's not uniquely American (the third world has this issue too!) but cities like Atlanta and Houston definitely grew too quickly for their infrastructure.
Atlanta driving (in the city) is absolutely horrible. I haven't been anywhere quite as bad. DC is close. LA is bad, but predictably so.
Sorry again about the summer.
Easy access to the busiest airport in the world is helpful. Southwest Airlines, especially, has amazing values from there all over the US and is as reliable as it gets. Delta (and BA) for everything else.
Have I mentioned the summer?
Ash (Oppositelock/Jalopnik since 2004)
@svend said in Important Message from the CEO of OppositeLock:
@Taylor-Martin
Aya for saying 'MX5' though and not 'Miata'.
That fails the Oppo Turing test. Nobody calls it an MX-5 (in the US).
