The GPS on our JDM Leaf has never really coped with the fact that it's 6000 miles from Japan, and insists on trying to place us somewhere that it has a map for. And we've never figured out how to turn off the nav warnings. We've therefore become accustomed to having a nice Japanese lady (who we call Motoko) burble at us at random intervals warning of railroad crossings and other nonexistent hazards.

This is a new low though - normally it at least manages to place us on an actual road. And more disturbingly, Motoko hasn't warned me I'm about to drown. Maybe she's starting to suspect we've kidnapped her .

I'd say "go home Motoko, you're drunk", except that clearly she has no clue where home is.

For major birthdays and anniversaries, we have developed a tradition of going on holiday somewhere in NZ, renting an interesting car, and staying in a luxury lodge. This week’s our 20th wedding anniversary, and we’re visiting Christchurch, the wineries of the Waitaki valley, and Oamaru. In a gorgeously blue 2001 Alfa Spider V6.

Review so far:

Getting the obvious out of the way first, we’ve done 150 miles so far and it hasn’t broken down yet! Here’s hoping that lasts, but it comes with roadside assistance if not.

It’s in remarkably good condition for a 20 year old car, never mind a 20 year old Alfa, though it’s only got 60k miles on the clock. Paint and wheels are perfect, no rust that I can see, everything seems to work, and there’s very little sign of wear on the interior.

The Busso is everything they say it is. Smooth, a linear power delivery that keeps on giving all the way to 7k and feels like it wants to keep going, and sounds great anywhere north of about 3k, though not as loud and sharp as I’d like it - you can hardly hear it over the wind with the top down. There’d be a sports exhaust in its future if I owned it. The guy who we picked it up from also has a 155 with the 2.5 in it, which he says sounds way better. I guess being just about the last Busso- engined car it’s suffered from noise regulations.

Gearshift is very nice though takes a bit of getting used to. The lateral planes are closer together than the amount of free play in the shift, so it feels like you don’t move the shifter sideways at all, you just apply pressure in the relevant direction and let the spring loading do the work. So for example 4-5 is just apply rightwards pressure to the lever and push straight forward. Once you figure that out and stop stirring it around trying to find a slot, it’s light and fast. Pedals are incredibly badly positioned for heel & toe though (and close together and offset, in traditional Alfa style). Steering wheel position is also traditional Alfa - designed for gorillas. It does have adjustable reach, but even at full stretch it’s too far away for me if I’m seated in the right place for the pedals.

Handling (at 7/10 or less) is good - precise and easy to place. More power- on throttle steer than any other FWD car I’ve ever driven though - it goes incredibly wide if you give it some boot out of a corner. Lots of scuttle shake with the top off - it threw my phone out it’s holder over a mildly bumpy road - but the top up improves that a lot.

Top is electric, with a couple of body panels that lift themselves up for it to hide under. Which again, works so far, though it does come with a rubber mallet in the trunk and instructions on where to hit the mechanism if it seizes! Impressively little wind buffeting with it down. Insanely good A/C, which I guess isn’t surprising given Italian summers

Trunk is silly - very deep but mostly full of spare tire. Two squashy bags were a stretch for it. There’s a nice lockable bin behind the seats though.

You can tell it’s an Alfa because there’s a loose trim clip in the ashtray

Mk2 Jaaaag. Only a 240, but still, there are worse gentleman’s clubs to take for a relaxed cruise to a waterfront cafe on a summer afternoon.

Kids bike park with road markings and signs so they can learn the road rules in a safe environment.

And so older kids on pit bikes can set lap times in the wee hours, no doubt...

(Seent in Oamaru, NZ).

I am not the only one with a problem.

Admittedly mine's a more expensive problem, but not by as much you'd think: women's shoes are crazy expensive.

This is not all of them, BTW.

Colonel Sir Thomas Moore, the 100 year old UK veteran who raised a totally insane amount of money for healthcare worker support by shuffling round his yard on his walker, has died of Covid-19. I bet he got the best hospital care anyone’s ever had.

The Beeb has a great obituary.

@facw ...or the crowd is big enough for the Mustang to crash.

The City Council of Wellington, NZ's capital, have just released a list of the most popular dog names in the city. Dogs have to be registered here, so they have a database, and we're approaching summer break, so they obviously have nothing better to do than read it.

Of the city's 10,000 or so registered dogs, the most poplar names are Charlie (184), Bella (151), Poppy (139), Molly (120), Max (115), Coco (108), Ruby (104), Archie (85), Luna (82) and Toby (79). The most popular breeds are Labrador, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Border Collie, Miniature Schnauzer, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Miniature Poodle, Bichon Frise, Jack Russell Terrier, Golden Retriever, Huntaway

So far, what we appear to have proved is that Wellingtonian dog owners have no imagination (though I'm impressed to see Huntaway making the top 10 breeds)

Fortunately however, in defence of their city's reputation as the creative hub of NZ, and with the assistance of a few adult beverages, they have combed the list and brought us the list of what they deem the "best" dog names in Wellington. Without further ado, let me introduce you to:

Alphonse Capone
Amy Pineapples
Baron Zeus Winston Von Pugglesworth 3
Bruichladdich Ochdamh-mor
Captain Nana Spider-Pig Wolfenstein the Second
C Fluffy Dog Web Test
Chaise Destroyer of Worlds
Cheese
Chipolata Von Fox
Coco Tui Megalodon
Colin Ladykiller
Detective Justice Butterfield
Duke Berling Saunders-Ellingsen
E Fluffy Dog Web Test
Fenrir Baldur von Ritzweber
FN2187
Gofetch Quantum Leap Frankie
Hinekehua Dixie
Eaglesham Isabel Pistol Packer
Lord Percy
Los Pollos Hermanos
Miss Penny Money
Monty Woof McGavin
Mr Fish
MURPHY IRISH STOUT
Newt Commander
Norman Pint Imperius King
Obie Jupiter McWoofington
Poppadom Banana Pants McGee
Richie McPaw
Roxy-tala Moemalo
Russel Sprouts Gordon Bennett
S
Samson Kung Fu Panda
Sir Tobias Wigglebottom
Smutley
Technical Adviser Megabyte
The Hulk
Vivienne Westwoof
Zoeroceros Flauschige

I suspect what we learn from this is that at least 40 Wellingtonians either let their kids pick a name each, or are tech geeks with a mental age of 12. Given that Wellington is the home of Weta Digital (the SFX company behind LOTR, Avatar, and a good chunk of the Marvel universe), the latter isn't too surprising either.

I bet they were holding their breath and hoping the wind stayed down.

67m long wind turbine blade being transported in Germany.

@davesaddiction

@vincentmalamute @Old-Busted-Hotness @MybirdIStheword

Sway my way
Yeah I need to know
All about you

Bonus points to anyone who can identify the car she's being a creepy stalker from

@whoistheleader Unfortunately that one's got its own searchability issues, as it only indexes by postIDs and not titles. So (unless someone has a better method?) you either need to know roughly when you posted it (in which case the other archive works better as it's by-date categorised) or be prepared to click into all your posts (several hundred in my case) one by one to find the one you're after.

@dipodomysdeserti Fair point, though I think it's a question of degree. It was never going to become a mini USA, but it might have become more culturally forward-looking than where we've wound up.

Does anyone know a way to do it? Google doesn't seem to have it archived, and I haven't found a way to find my old posts other than knowing what month/year they were posted in and doing a "find in page" on that month's index for my handle.

@davesaddiction Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting we could have fixed it in a year - as you say, changing the course of societies is a generation-scale project. I just think that most of the bad calls that made it impossible to win long term were made in that first year. Not least of which was the complete failure to have a plan for "What happens after we successfully invade?"....

In the case of Iraq, at least, this was pretty well illustrated by the contrast between the UK zone around Basra and the rest of Iraq in the first few months after the invasion. The Brits - who have more than a little institutional memory of how to run what was, lets face it, a colonisation program - were well on their way to having the region stable and the general populace on board with the liberation, until their region was infected by the issues that had become well established elsewhere: I remember how obvious that contrast was at the time - NZ troops were deployed in the UK zone, so we got a lot of local news focus on that region as well as the wider focus from US media. Broader good management of the "occupation" phase could have bought time to allow a stable local government and economy to be established, which would have made the insurrectionists lives a lot harder - people are less likely to support rebellion when they have hope for the future and something to lose.

Personally, I think the winning strategy would have been to firehose money into creating a more materialist and aspirational society among the lower middle classes and even into the rural areas: MTV and Nikes as the modern bread and circuses. The one area where the US has been wildly successful is in exporting culture, and the one resource you've got more of than anyone else (or at least had, 20 years ago) is money to toss around. The examples of Russia and to some extent China and recent-era Iran show that an aspirational middle class is what worries totalitarians more than anything else, as it's a very hard thing to shove back in its box. Create that and support it long enough to become self-sustaining, and the rest has a decent chance of following.

@davesaddiction I'm very much with you on that one. I feel that Afghanistan could have been brought into the modern world if the whole mess had been handled properly in the first year of the invasion (as could Iraq), but ever since then it's been a hopeless cause, and there's a limit to how long the international community can keep occupying the place with no real ability to make a difference. So it's hard to criticize the decision to pull out, but its also hard to accept that we're abandoning people who need us.

@ranwhenparked When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of the Illuminati card game. Unfortunately, when I was happily building world domination structures involving the Servants of Cthulhu controlling the CIA via the Boy Scouts, I failed to realise that it’s all true!.

Unlike Q, who’s obviously never seen a conspiracy he couldn’t get behind.

@dipodomysdeserti That revelation certainly makes some of QAnon's theories more plausible. QAnon being right would also help explain where the Ever Given fits in. Something something Zionist something - it can't be coincidental that it "accidentally" wound up stuck just down the coast from the world's highest density of microchipped sheeple.

@dipodomysdeserti said in Bill Gates now controls me, also I'm an active 5G tower:

The fact Bill Gates gets mentioned every.single.time someone gets a shot is starting to make me think covid was actually just a guerrilla marketing campaign launched by the Gates Foundation.

That's just the second layer of Peter Thiel's maskirovka.