With the DC area fully in the throes of gas panic buying, the local news has been out and about trying to show the hysteria. One news helicopter spotted a guy at Freestate, the cheapest, cash-only gas station in my town, filling up his riding mower. He made it on the news! But...this mower is actually his daily driver.

Facebook suggested this little news vid to me, and I was like, wait a sec, I for sure saw this guy at Marathon, the second cheapest station in town, a block from Freestate, and took his picture, a WHILE ago. Thanks to the magic of Google Photos, I just typed in "gas station" and was able to find this pic from August 2020.

Then I checked the FB comments, and sure, there are plenty of people marveling and laughing at this sight. But, turns out I'm not the only one who's seen this guy out and about. Sooo many people know about this gentleman. Thankfully most of them were, shockingly for facebook, kind and charitable. For example:

That's the rockville scrap man. Lost his license. So he runs around in that picking up scrap to keep from drinking.

I seen that guy in rockville when I was working there and I respect the heck out of him.

He goes around every shop checking who has metal scraps to go sell it on his lawnmower and trailer.

He could be in the middle of streets asking for money but no he decides to actually make money in a better way actually working. And no just feeling sorry for his self.

I see him all the time scrapping metal!

If you’re local, you know him. Hardest working man in Rockville.

Yep he’s a neighbor of mine! Lincoln Park OG

Somehow, this of all things has restored my faith in humanity just a little bit.

Somewhere in my many many hours of scouring the CivicX forums for ideas of stuff to do with my Si, I encountered someone who mentioned they got fun vinyl decals for their blank switches from Everything Vinyl Decal. I loved this idea, so I got taco and Eject-O (seat-O cuz) decals for the two blanks forward of my sport button.

Yesterday I got my second Pfizer dose at the mass vaccination site at Six Flags America. Between my wife and myself this is my third pass through the place. Each time it's been less and less busy with increasingly desperate signage out on the main road pleading with the general public to COME ON DOWN AND GET YOUR VACCINE. Now the sign says no appointment needed.

The last step after getting your shot is to pull up to a holding area where you chill in your car for 15 minutes to make sure you don't have any especially concerning reaction to the shot. Various workers guide you to a particular spot and then a nurse comes up to your window to give you a schpiel about put your car in park, and if you have trouble put on your blinkers and honk your horn.

The first two visits were for my wife's 1st dose, then her 1st and my 2nd. We took her Seltos for those because she wanted me to join her in case she reacted to the shot. I went on my own in my Si for my 2nd dose, and when the nurse got to "put your car in park..." she made a long pause trying to figure out if my car was in fact in park, because she could not decipher the markings on this strange object in the console where the automatic shifter would normally be.

It was in neutral, and my electric parking brake--that manual transmission favoring weenies on the internet don't like but I do so nyaaaaa--was on. But she could not for the life of her understand whether my car was liable to creep forward, or not. I told her, "it's in the stick shift version of park," and that was good enough.

T minus 13 days until I can go get my first post-covid pedicure!

Remember when I totally destroyed my achilles playing tennis the very same night I bought my Si? Well, it's been sitting in my parents garage for the past couple months, but I'm now driving it myself!

My orthopedist gave me permission to try driving this week. I started on my wife's CX-5 in our neighborhood, and that worked out fine so we went on a couple errands. Then I picked up my car, and here it is in the garage at physical therapy. I'm still using my walking boot to get around (without crutches) but I swap it out for a shoe to drive. No walking in the shoe yet but hell, driving even a little bit instead of relying on rides the past couple months is a GAME CHANGER.

We've got another new car at my house: my wife's brand new Mars Orange 2021 Kia Seltos SX Turbo. After she test drove a Seltos at our local Kia dealer (Dealer A), she loved the car, and we agreed Mars Orange was the color we wanted. Welp, we've got the car we wanted, and we didn't buy it from Dealer A.

After the test drive with my wife, I talked with Dealer A's sales manager about getting us an orange Seltos SX. Before I brought her in for the test drive, I had searched Auto Trader, and the exact car we wanted was listed for sale at Dealer B, in another suburb of DC about 45 minutes away from us. After some calling around, the sales manager said Dealer B's car was already sold, but Dealer C (which he didn't name) had one just like it in transit that they could get us in a trade. Ok, sounds good, we'll wait for you to get that for us.

Since we really wanted to get an orange Seltos SX, I kept looking at Kia's inventory search and Auto Trader. A couple new cars showed up so I emailed links to the sales manager at Dealer A. He responded that one of them was Dealer C's car and Dealer D's car was sold.

This Monday, after 9 days with no update from Dealer A, I once again looked at Auto Trader. Dealer B's car was still there! It felt like Dealer A's sales manager was BSing me about it being sold. I told my wife about this, and we agreed we should check directly with Dealer B about this car. I filled out the 'I'm interested' form on their website, and a whole 2 minutes later their internet sales person called me and said, "yes we have that orange Seltos SX when can you come in to look at it?"

So, clearly, the sales manager at Dealer A was full of shit when he said this car was sold. Right away we both were like, fuck Dealer A, let's go buy this car that's been chillin at Dealer B this whole damn time! Dealer B's advertised price was pretty solid, but I nailed down the details and got a bit more of a discount by email and made an appointment to buy it on Tuesday night.

There was more delaying and haggling over trade value than I wanted, and the finance guy was especially slimy and kept pulling his mask off his goddamn mouth and nose while we were in his little phone booth of a fucking office. But armed with a very generous Carvana trade-in quote, I managed to extract some positive equity from the leased 2018 Mazda CX-5 we were trading in, and we were double masked with that fucking finance schmuck so fingers crossed we don't have the 'rona.

With the long-ish drive home, which I did because my wife hates driving on DC area highways, I got a little more familiar with the Seltos. The seats and center console are much better than the CX-5 for manspreading while highway cruising. The ADAS gizmos like active cruise, lane keep and blind spot warning are generally more intelligent than those on the CX-5. There's a little more road noise, but nothing objectionable. The 1.6T + DCT is just enough torque and quick shifting to make the car feel quick-ish for what it is. The color is great, but it shows more as a blood orange almost red in diffuse light like the cloudy day it is today. The orange pops more in direct sunlight.

Modern new cars from mainstream brands keep getting better and better. I'm really very over luxury brands. Both this Seltos SX and my Civic Si are by no means luxurious, but they're just plain good-ass cars with high levels of refinement and build quality, comfy & quiet rides, and interesting colors. The Seltos packs a ton of interior space into an extremely manageable overall vehicle size, with great options content and motor for the price. The Si has fantastic practicality along with driving feel that embarrasses much more expensive cars, plus legit sporty goodies like adaptive dampers and a helical LSD. And we paid $25k-ish for each of them.

All hail the regular-ass cars!

Wifemobile shopping update: after my test drive bonanza earlier this week, the Kia Seltos SX cemented its place as the frontrunner for my wife's next car. She was very excited about what I told her about it, so we made an appointment with the dealer for her to drive it.

The result of the test drive is the Seltos is pretty much exactly what she wants. The size is more manageable for her than her '18 CX-5, which is by no means a big vehicle, but it has a tall long hood that she's gotten sick of trying to place in tight quarters including our garage. The cowl on the Seltos isn't quite so high, and there are a couple ridges sticking up from the hood that help give a sense of where the front of the car is.

Otherwise, the space, features, and drive are right on with what she wants. She was especially impressed with the amount of room inside vs. the overall size of the car and easy handling. The seats are comfier than the CX-5 and the center console is more out of the way of our knees. The 1.6T + DCT combo felt more responsive to her than the 2.5 NA + 6AT in her CX-5. That tracks with the specs, since the Seltos makes 175 hp & 195 lb/ft (at 1500 rpm!), and weighs 3,317 lbs, while her CX-5 makes 187 hp & 186 lb/ft (at 4000 rpm) and weighs 3,655 lbs.

In my test drive jamboree wrap up post, I mentioned the Seltos has start-stop. I've now realized that this is part of the Smart drive mode and (I think) not active in Normal or Sport modes. When we first started driving the Seltos today it was in Normal but when I switched it to Smart the start-stop kicked in. I think this is a pretty dang decent start-stop implementation. My wife has no prior familiarity with start-stop but was impressed by it. We'd probably leave it in Smart mode most of the time.

The only wrinkle here continues to be color choice and the blasted sunroof. The sunroof is not standard on the otherwise-loaded SX trim and instead is in the sunroof "package," which I have no idea why it's called a package, because it includes a sunroof and...nothing else.

We want a Mars Orange Seltos SX, and there are no Mars Orange Seltos SXes with sunroofs available in the US, at least not yet. Zero. Our local dealer doesn't have a Mars Orange SX on their lot, but they claim to be able to get one in a dealer trade within the next couple weeks. So it was either sunroof or get some other color. The 2nd closest dealer to us has a Starbright Yellow SX with a sunroof, but try as we might, we can't bring ourselves to like that color.

We pretty quickly ended up deciding to forego the sunroof, for a few reasons. The biggest is that my wife doesn't particularly give a shit about a sunroof and the interest in it is more driven by me. It's her car, and she says she can do without it.

The other reason is infinitely more interesting.

If you recall, the Chevy Trailblazer made its way onto our shopping list based solely on the two-tone look of the Activ trim, in a very similar orange to the Seltos.

Kia is doing a limited amount of 2-tone color schemes on the Seltos, but not like the Trailblazer above. Buuuuuuuutttttt.....I got to talking with my wife about, hey what if you let me hook up this car a little for you, lemme show you what I can do, and I produced this for her:

She saw this and was like, holy shit yes please I want that. This would involve wrapping the roof and mirrors white, blacking out the satin silver trim that runs below the windows and separates the roof from the rest of the car, tinting the front windows to match the factory tint on the rears, swapping on body-color door handles from a lower trim because Kia inexplicably gives the SX satin silver door handles to make it look "fancy," and Sparco Terra wheels in rally bronze. She is HERE FOR THAT.

Since that's the case, skipping the sunroof "package" saves $700 on the price of the car, and makes it easier for the roof to be wrapped.

Now we just gotta wait for the dealer to get this orange non-sunroof Seltos SX in stock, do the haggling, and it'll be ours. We'll see just how quickly after taking delivery it ends up at the wrap shop.

She didn't even need to say anything more than an emoji.

Tonight, my wife asked me to pick up some cookies from the new foo foo artisanal cookie place that went in near us recently, because of course I live somewhere that foo foo artisanal cookie shops are a thing. As I got out of my car, I noticed a small silver hatchback that looked unremarkable, and yet unfamiliar. I had to look at the badges on the back, and it's a SEAT Leon, with diplomat tags on it, like all the other non-USDM cars I see here around DC.

Shortly after I took this picture, the owner of the Leon walked up to their car, and I said, "this is the first time I've seen a SEAT in the US!" to which they replied, "you're the first person to notice my car!"

Oh, and yes the cookies were good.

Hello smurfs, smurfettes and others. Long time. I had to dip for a while and go live life. Mostly will continue doing that but what the fuck, hello.

Some/many of you may have seen me mention at various times that I'm bi. Well, it's a little more complicated than that. I'm non-binary, pansexual & polyamorous. You can kindly click the link to each of those wikipedia articles because I'm not going to be your tour guide.

I ended up amicably separating from my wife because while she knew that I was bi, she's a highly monogamous person, and I...really can't do monogamy. We are very ok as these things go. She moved to Tucson. We actually separated back in May but it took a while longer to make the move happen. We sent her stuff in a POD and drove her scooty scoot Seltos SX Turbo cross country. I ate ridiculously good Mexican food throughout the southwest. Many bugs met their demise.

Then I flew back and after a few weeks to reestablish my routine, jumped into the world of bi poly kinky () dating which, fun fact, is a huge community here in DC.

I needed to log out of here and generally disengage from the larger sphere of commenting on cars on the internet because it was, frankly, too much interacting with straight dudes for me. I chose to redirect my wit and charm into more productive endeavors.

Turns out I am extremely good at textual flirtation, my skills learned in 15 years working in recruiting are highly relevant to my personal life, and there are more than a few desirable things about me which led to having many many many options from which to choose in a very short period of time.

For a few weeks there it was quite the whirlwind. Now I have 2 not-exactly-GFs who are both also non-binary, bi/pan & poly. Everybody knows what's up with everybody else's business. It's called ethical non-monogamy. Oh, and they are both vegan Georgetown-educated lawyers (DC lololololol), one lives in the burbs near me and the other is downtown.

I'm still out here swiping, a little bit, but having basically immediately hit the jackpot with a couple of absolute worldies, I'm mostly enjoying their company while laying back in the cut seeing who else of an especially high caliber comes knocking on my door.

Anyway, don't mean to brag, but praise be to the flying spaghetti monster, this is my actual life. I'll leave you with the vegan bbq platter I shared with my downtown boo on Saturday.

An L.A. dock worker has leaked a couple preproduction 400Zs which arrived at their work recently, to the 400ZClub forum. These may be press cars for autojournos.

Aside from little details like amber side reflectors in the headlights and various sensors, the main change from the Z Proto seems to be the addition of a little ducktail spoiler, and variations with the 2-tone roof and front grille.

Of the two cars here, the silver one has a black roof and manual transmission while the gray one has a body color roof and automatic. Looking at the grilles, the upper eggcrate section of the grille on the gray one is either body color or some other kind of gray trim that is close to the body color, while the silver car has that section in black like the Z Proto.

Personally, I prefer the 2-tone roof look of the silver car, but I think the body color eggcrate on the gray car does a good job of making the "mouth" look less like a goofy The Oatmeal comic than the all black grille.

Here are a couple walkaround vids...

@poor_sh Behold the interlocking footed croissant.

@rykros-doesn-t-talk-about-bruno Part of this comes down to Hyundai & Kia keep making more & nicer cars, and word's getting out. Dealers who were already shady are now like, 'no tire kickers I know what I got.'

A while back a car inclined friend & former turbo Toyobaru owner told me, 'my girlfriend is all about that new Kia Telluride she says they're hot AF and I can't disagree?' He was shocked by both the sticker price & dealers marking them up.

DC been a big Toyota & especially Honda town for a long time. Mazda also heavily represented. Plenty of money & flash but people try to bring a lowkey aspect to it. On the high end there's few exotics, lots of halo models from mainstream lux brands. Also lots of loaded Hondas & Toyotas parked in front of fancy 7 figure houses. They're considered the best "regular" car like people legit will be drooling over Hondas as a lowkey flex.

Regardless of the dealer experience, I'm that car person in many social interactions and while plenty of non car people aren't there yet, I'm encountering a lot of people starting to treat Hyundai & Kia like Honda & Toyota. Just in terms of brand & quality perception/enthusiasm.

@his_stigness Rejection & flakiness is the price of doing business. All in all I'm fortunate to have options.

I did see this news story recently where a woman "discovered" her bumble match was a catfish because he had an Apple Watch in one of his pictures but was a green bubble. She looked into him more and yup, catfish.

My reaction to this is, well, not a problem for me since I don't have an Apple watch. Plus it really was a catfish. But based on my own experience out in the world part of me is like, "oh honey, you gotta learn what a burner # is."

Oh, and I'm not on no bumble I'm too spicy...

@his_stigness I'm always a green bubble anyway but the reason I show as a green bubble to my dating app matches is I use my Google Voice # as a firewall.

(This is an issue I don't care about. It's funny. Everyone can buy the gadgets they like. Picking teams about it is silly.)

@rykros-doesn-t-talk-about-bruno My most recent Kia buying experience was an exercise in dealing with a relatively higher (but not insurmountable) level of BS compared to my most recent Honda buying experience. Of course, I basically accepted the fact that I was only ever going to get a small $500 discount when trying to buy one of the last unicorn '20 Si's (i.e. right before there would be no '21) to roll out the factory, off the truck while it was in transit. I got a $4500 discount on the Kia. Market conditions have changed since then. Oh, and very generous trade in values both times.

Personally while I don't like dealing with car dealers, I'm a persistent enough get shit done type of person that I'll just wade thru their shit until I get the result I want. Le sigh?

@e90m3 Timmy got you hooked on that sweet sweet platform lock-in. Watch out for green bubbles.

@facw I would say something to the effect of this is what happens when a market is allowed to persist without sufficient guardrails to prevent bad behavior by bad actors, but I don't want to get this thread moved to the politics section. 🤫

@his_stigness We all know their real reason is, "because we think we can." The extent to which a consumer is able to prove a car dealer is full of shit rarely factors into the final sale price.

@his_stigness Buuuuuuuuttttt the chiiiiiiiipppp shortage!

@bicyclebuck This isn't about your flaws as a person. It's about your behavior. It is exactly as simple as you and many other people here have been behaving badly and I've told you to stop it.

The specific way you've been behaving badly is vociferously arguing that other people are subtextually accusing white people of racism. Not only does this argument not have merit, I've told you umpteen different ways, if you as a white person want to be better on race, let go of your sense of entitlement to make this argument.

To be crystal clear: the only thing I've criticized here is your behavior. The reason I've stuck to my criticism is because you keep doing the behavior that I'm telling you to stop. Just because I'm telling you you're behaving badly doesn't mean I feel any kind of way about you as a person. I don't think your behavior is malicious or that you actively want to be bad. I'm just telling you your behavior is not good so change it.

Frankly, what you think about my openness to criticism doesn't matter. You're the one behaving badly and I'm the one telling you about it. I don't have to be open to criticism in this situation. Instead of accepting the feedback that your behavior is bad and changing it, you have defended your bad behavior and continued to engage in it.

If being told you're not acting right bothers you, good. Reconsider your behavior, be better next time, and then I won't have to tell you to stop.