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Like most of you, I was at the grocery store, tripping balls. I was wondering why the entire pancake mix aisle is now gluten-free. Yes, Julia Child, I could make my own, but I like how the binders work to seal the hole in my radiator. Plus, it smells great.

Why was there such a wide variety of pancake product available these days? I am cool with there being one kind of gluten-free pancake mix, and one kind of gluten-heavy pancake mix. Surely, there cannot be room in this market for twelve kinds of each, the shelves groaning beneath their weight, threatening to fall on someone who has very strong opinions about what kind of pancake they want to mix, exactly. Someone has gotta be putting this on the shelves and selling, like, zero fucking boxes. To get to the bottom of this, I decided that I would trick Netflix into giving me money to make a documentary.

Folks, that was what Wall Street would call a “forward-looking statement,” because it was horseshit. Not only has Netflix beefed up their security since the release of Pointlessly Offensive Statements About Things People Care Way Too Much About IX, but they’re also in, like, a whole different country. And my parole officer gets froggy whenever I tell him I’m going to cross international borders to commit something that sounds a whole lot like fraud. That’s big government for you.

So I had to figure it out my own way, which involved staying up all night and intercepting a shipment of pancake mix to the local grocery store. It was there that I saw the horrible truth: all that pancake mix, all that distinctiveness? Came out of the same truck. They were competing against themselves. Once the driver spotted me, he realized I had figured it out. Picked up his little radio and called it in. I had to run, which was not particularly easy when you’re wheezing through a single-barrel carburetor that had last been adjusted in the Carter administration. Flooring it, I jumped over several curbs, the decorative flower display in the garden centre, and made good (or at least well) my escape through the bank parking lot next door.

I thought I had gotten away scot free, until I opened the front door to my house the next morning and found a box of my favourite buttermilk pancake mix sitting on the porch, with a knife stuck in it. I love it when I get two bribes.

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“You know, ice cream flavours are entirely artificial,” said the sorbet heiress who, at this time, had tied me to a stake above a pile of cartoon dynamite sticks. The fuse was lit, as those things are, which put a limit on our conversation.

When I first signed up to be a private detective, I figured it would be like on the TV. Sleeping at your desk in a dingy office. Shooting people for reasons that the audience barely understands. Confusing triple-cross plots, explained in excruciating detail for the last quarter of the book by a character who mostly acted as a stand-in for the author. And driving a pretty bad-ass classic hot rod.

Unfortunately, what this job actually ended up being about was getting tricked into being implicated in the murder of a frozen-yogurt tycoon. I have to admit that I was told by the temp agency about this particular risk in advance, but I was caught up in my zeal to pick up a shit-box 60s Mopar with a loud exhaust and kind of forgot about it.

I’ll save you the details of how I got out of that particular jam, and the exploding-mini-golf-emporium, because they don’t really matter. What does matter is that I eventually tracked down the heiress, and got my name cleared. This, even though I have been proven structurally incapable of remembering names, faces, patterns of speech, accents, what people actually said, the whole lot.

I got lucky. It turns out one of her goons drove a 1996 Plymouth Neon coupe. How did I know it was a ‘96? Because it still had colour-matched hubcaps, but without a dual-overhead-cam engine. After I explained this to the cops, and went back to get my copies of the relevant documentation, they immediately punched it into their little license plate computer for “plymouth neon” and found the only running example still registered in the country. I guess I didn’t really need to know the year. Dude confessed immediately, but the fuzz wouldn’t let me keep the car, since it was evidence. Professional rivalry, if you ask me.

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“Ribfest is back,” shouts The Mayor, immediately before he descends into the turret of the tank and seals the door behind him. He is not wrong: Ribfest is indeed scheduled for this weekend, but the amount of cowardice shown in this one interaction makes me question his moral authority to preside over it.

This event is special in my town, but not for the reason that it used to be. Every year lately, folks get tooled-up on their homemade barbecue sauces and start to lay siege to the town around them. Nobody is really sure why this started so recently, but the active theory from the FEMA scientists is that AliExpress “has a lot of great shit for sale” and you’d be stupid not to experiment with putting some of it on some fall-off-the-bone braised pork.

Now, most folks would tell you that if you’re going to end up fighting off your neighbour with an ice pick every year, simply don’t go. This is a dismissive argument made in poor faith. And, worse than that, it’s disrespectful to the meats, a concept that would make my dear mother faint in horror. The threat of imminent death that hangs over every moment of the proceedings simply adds a new dimension to the flavour.

Here’s how I do it: I get in and I get out, fast. You don’t want to be caught unaware while you’re busy tucking into some “C”-tier stuff slopped out by the kindergarten teacher, Ms. Shotwell. No, the real strategist figures out from last year’s ordeal who has the best barbecue in town. And this time, it’s Barley Mowat, a young gun who used to be a television journalist before the Bad Times began. He got replaced by a machine sentience, has no job. Lives for the ribs, as do most of us now. Sometimes he starts to tell you a fact about how sewer pipes are made, or how many football fields long a structure is. It’s best to just let him talk, even outside of the shrieking rage fest of a Ribfest-induced hallucination. We hang out at the bar, sometimes. He drinks a lot.

Barley’s ribs are once again top-tier: he’s got some kind of green chile sauce this year. Lends a real taste of the Southwest to every bite, which is tender and rich in equal measure. Plus, he clobbered a dude from the backpack store with a golf club when he tried to steal the up-armoured NASCAR that I used to drive to the event. Don’t park in the designated spots, folks: like I said, get in and get out.

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Have you seen how expensive food is getting? When I was at the grocery store last, I had to actually elbow other people out of the way when I was trying to shoplift. All these amateurs, doing it for their starving families, trying to sneak past the new security guard with an entire box of Lucky Charms tucked under their suspiciously un-seasonal winter coat. That’s why he’s there, now!

Because of this, I’ve thought really hard about starting a farm of my own. There’s only two big obstacles: my property is entirely covered in shit-box cars, and I don’t like hard (or even soft) work. So I had to figure out how to trick someone else into using their property to grow healthy, tasty vegetables for the rest of the community. That way, I could go back to cramming large quantities of mass-produced corporate corn-syrup-injected synthetic food into my bag and then not paying for it.

Here’s something that’s fun: the university has a lot of free land. And if you trick eager students into doing anything that looks good on their resumés, they will work an infinite amount of hours for no money. They’re feeding their fellow citizen! A truly noble endeavour that not even mean old Dean Carbuncle could stand in the way of. Of course, I first needed to make it look like a legitimate enterprise. Have you ever shoplifted raised garden bed planters from a Home Depot? It’s surprisingly easy if you wear a hard hat, orange apron, and bring your own forklift. Loaded a couple of those bad boys onto a flat-bed rental truck, signed it out myself (“J. Not-Fakington,”) and headed for the campus quad and the co-eds eager to interrupt their high-falutin’ studies with some dirt farming.

In a few weeks, the students were getting interviews with the news. One of them got an internship with the United Nations because she figured out how to hyper-grow corn cobs – they’re like three meters long, you need at least two people just to lift them – and now the university is paying people to come and take them away. The grocery stores are again empty of all but the ultra-rich and my sticky, sticky fingers, and we’ve learned that although crime doesn’t pay, a whole lot of crime sometimes benefits those around you.

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In the evening, it’s not unusual around here to hear a lot of birdsong. Once the heat of the day begins to break, all the little robins and chickadees head out for some delicious grubs and worms. And I’m no different, except I head to the garage. Recently, though, I’ve felt like a bit of a landlord. Not just because I earn money without doing much work through an artisanally-arranged combination of government-endorsed financial scams, but because I’m building affordable housing for birdie tenants.

It all started when I was shoplifting tools at Home Depot. Loss Prevention had hired a new lady, and she was fast. So fast, in fact, that she was going to catch me if I didn’t do something. I ducked into a nearby display, which turned out to be some kind of odd gathering. “Father’s Day Build-A-Birdhouse Workshop,” it advertised. There were dozens of children and presumably their fathers in attendance, all working hard to construct a simulacra of a human house for a bird to enjoy later.

To throw the Loss Preventionatrix off even more, I swiped an unused apron and started helping out the less capable dads. We all need a little bit of assistance sometime, even if it’s something as basic as “which end of the hammer do you use?” (just hit it with a socket wrench, coward) and “do you have something with which to medicate my child?” (model airplane glue.) I found the entire experience fascinating, and it gave me a real urge to do some amateur carpentry of my very own. Not all the dads had shown up, so I helped myself to the several dozen unbuilt kits and headed for the fire exit.

Now, I have a utopian backyard. Our avian friends flit through the air, bringing new life into the world. They feast on the seeds dropped by the frankly ridiculous amount of overgrown plants, supercharged by iron-oxide-rich water falling out of my shitboxes. My fence sags under the weight of fifty-plus tiny little homes. Birdsong fills the air to such a degree that my neighbours all wear hearing protection to bed.

As well, the local news has noticed: did a whole profile on me on the evening news, in between the red-faced screaming at federal politicians for eating the wrong kind of cheese. Speaking of, we managed to leverage the positive coverage into a pretty good-sized cheque from the city government, too, enough for another Volare, because they forgot to specify in their homebuilding incentives that “affordable housing” should be human-sized. Better luck next time.

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Remember: always lowball. Every day, I hear hobbyists in every hobby complain about how expensive things have gotten. Those speculators have shown up, those businessmen, and they wish to extract every red cent out of your unhealthy love for this specific kind of blackboard chalk. They have decided to hoard, and they have decided to profiteer, and there is only one thing you can do: offer them a pitiful amount of money.

I was raised in the before-times, like a lot of you, and we were always taught to be fair and just in negotiations. That was because our folks were buying entire thirty-unit condominium buildings for $1000 and shaking at $950 seemed like a fair negotiation to both parties. Let me tell you this: those days are over. There’s a guy on my local Kijiji trying to sell a single piece of firewood for eighty bucks.

Now, I hear a lot of you saying: just don’t buy it, then. No. Not buying things just says “maybe nobody wants to buy it.” Extreme lowballing says: “there’s a lot of interest for it, at this insultingly-low price that makes me want to punch my grandma.” And anyone who would punch their own grandmother really does not deserve to make a profit from modern-day retail arbitrage, do they? I certainly don’t think so. Fuck ‘em.

If there is a downside to be said for the modern lowballer, it’s when your frantic efforts result in the total collapse of a market. One weekend of my passive-aggressive eBay “Make Offering” resulted, single-handedly, in significantly moving the price of Volare crossflow manifolds. Unfortunately, it also meant I was contractually obligated to buy all of them at that price. Of course, that means I now have cornered the market, and you’re all gonna pay the price I’m asking for them. Time to get paid.

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Many argue that the strength of Western civilization is its strong historical bedrock of legal practices, verified knowledge, and careful study. Others will say that it’s ambition, rule-breaking, and adventure that drive success. I disagree with both sides, which proves I am the most intelligent of all. What makes Western civilization great is junkyards.

Sure, other countries have junkyards. Some of them are really great: China has vast miles of industrial refuse, enough that you could build projects for a million lifetimes. The Dutch have charming feral populations that live within their abandoned DAFs. However, I can’t walk to any of those countries when my shitbox Dodge throws a rod, which is what makes our local ones the best in all the lands.

Here, too, is the essential tension. All the scums who want you to buy new cars live here, or at least their rich failchildren do, and they would really rather prefer you stop pulling random components out of the trash heap and slapping them into the vague configuration of an automobile. Otherwise, they can’t afford their own space station. New Zealand? They don’t have a car industry at all. If you want to make a car out of papier maché there, there’s no industry fat cat to call his golf buddy and make some unjust, arbitrary horseshit like “should probably have a windshield” the law of the land. Some of the fun in thumbing your nose at The Man is gone.

That’s why I’m really patriotic about our shitty yards full of garbage that cost you a few bucks to roll around in cancer mud. However, like any true patriot, I acknowledge that our system isn’t perfect. It has room for improvement. And if the small island nation of Japan is willing to pony up a couple bucks for a plane ticket, I am perfectly willing to visit all of their junkyards on a fact-finding mission to figure out if any of them contain an axle for a 1980 Plymouth Sapporo. Call it my little contribution to world peace.

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Have you ever tried to pick up a new hobby? Of course you have. The average person will engage in at least eighty hobbies over the course of their life, rapidly oscillating between nearly ten of them in an effort to gain a semblance of control over fate. And I’m no different, although some of my hobbies are formed out of the requirements of other hobbies.

Let’s take wood, for example. Many of you know it as the stuff that trees are made out of. What you might not know is that you can take that stuff, cut it with specialized tools, and make shelves to store all the junk from your other hobbies on. The other day, I built a shelf in order to get all the stuff off the floor, and found out that at one point I purchased a candle-making kit.

Unfortunately, that means that now I need to make room in my house for those tools. And for spare wood, in case I get an urge to build some shelves or a piano bench at three in the morning and I can’t get to the Home Depot. And also for the spare cabinets and tables that I find in the alley, which have perfectly good wood in them, and could be used as parts to make something else. No sense in throwing it away.

Unfortunately, after this process concludes, it turns out that my floor is once again covered in hobby detritus. And, unlike less useful hobbies, this means I have no room in which to actually maneuver the wood to build shelves. So it’s off to start a new hobby that will help me get rid of this junk. Maybe I’ll go take up barn-raising, so I can build myself a shed in which to keep my tools. You know, I bet the Amish know a lot about barn-raising. I should go visit, learn some lessons, maybe leave some junk behind there with a promise that I’ll come get it the next weekend.

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Have you ever started a project, thinking it was going to be a quick one-hour thing, only to have it expand into several weeks of complete misery? You haven’t? Boys, get over here. We found us one of them replicants wearing a human face. Put them in the vat with the others.

Now that all the unpleasantness is over, we can dish about how awful our hobbies are. I’ve always been drawn to the small, intricate jobs in life. Fiddly stuff, things where you have to really be paying attention. Being awake enough to notice a strange sound, or a joint that doesn’t quite go together right, is the only way to avoid an intractable crisis later. I think it’s because I derive a lot of pleasure when it all falls into place and the damn thing works.

A couple years ago, I told a friend that I would really love to build a ship in a bottle. All that precision really appealed to me. Feeding parts one at a time through a tiny neck and assembling this beautiful work, made even more beautiful by forcing it to be pointlessly difficult.

He responded by telling me that nobody actually does it that way. What you do is you build the ship outside of the bottle, with the sail wrapped around it, and then you push it into the neck and use a piece of string to pop the sail back up once it’s fully in there. I got really angry. So angry that I left the room, drove to the hospital, and “borrowed” one of their precision microsurgery robots for two rage-spittle-covered days straight to assemble a replica of the Emma Maersk inside a 500mL 7-Up bottle, but by the time I spitefully showed it to him he had completely forgotten about our conversation.

So, if you’re like me and trying to stretch out a hobby to the point where it becomes no longer enjoyable, don’t stop. Evaluate your motivations, though. Find a reason to do it out of spite. That’ll keep you warm on the coldest nights of wondering what exact part in this billions-of-parts arrangement has decided to conk out long before you were even involved. And if you know a wealthy shipping magnate who wants to commission a bunch of weird-looking little boats inside pop bottles, you know where I am. Unless you’re a replicant. That’ll cost extra.

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As you may be aware by now, I have a sort of disorder. This problem manifests primarily by getting bored with anything I’m doing, and then abandoning it in favour of making a gasoline-powered death machine in the garage. It’s been an awkward problem in the past, because society simply does not acknowledge “fuck this dull shit” as being an actual disability, because of the toxic influence of Big Boring. Weddings, trips to the aquarium, birthday parties, arrests, and funerals have all been ruined by this impulse.

Lots of psychiatrists have thought that this may lie at the root of my anti-social behaviour. I drove through that shopping mall simply because I wanted to get back to wrenching, they think. That’s a facile and, dare I say, convenient excuse for my actions. Makes me really wonder if the court is getting decent value out of ordering the appointment of these lazy simpletons.

In actual fact, driving through a shopping mall using a heavily-modified dune buggy requires intense focus and concentration. It was also not in any way “boring,” which you can easily verify for yourself with a nearby commerce centre and any motorized vehicle. If I wanted to work on one of my shitboxes at the mall, I would simply do so in the parking lot like I usually do, pouring the waste oil and coolant into the decorative fountain inside the Abercrombie and/or Fitch.

That said, their strident denials of responsibility for my own actions have been very convenient. At the last session, they gave me a little card that I can flash, explaining to regular people that I have a problem and they should be nice to me. Then I can just walk away from an awkward social situation, and get started replacing a control arm or whatever the problem is this week. Believe you me, I busted that mother out immediately during the trial, and even the judge was a little bit jealous that I was getting out of that dull shit.

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In order to stay relatable, I like to figure out what the average person hates so I can hate it too. Taxes are always popular, but for some reason people get tired of listening to me when I start discussing the specific methodologies of estimating land value, and how it should really not include properties with several broken Mopars to be “valuable.” So I have to figure out some alternatives. The weather, the local sports team, and weeds.

Weeds, you ask? Weeds, I reply. In my idyllic-if-you-squint neighbourhood, there is a secret battle being fought beneath all of our feet. Brave suburbanite warriors struggle valiantly to keep plants they don’t want from growing in between the plants they do want. It doesn’t help that the former plants are really good at growing, and the latter are simply not. Seems unfair to me, but so is a lot of life, so I got a book from the public library and started boning up on my weeds.

Friends, it turns out that you can bury yourself into an infinitely deep taxonomy of various plants that are distinguishable only by the slightest feature. And all of those plants are greatly undervalued by society. Just like owning Malaise Era Mopars. I was hooked. Suddenly, I found myself walking around my neighbourhood, stopping to gaze at the specific varieties of dandelion, thistle, weird lumpy thing, and Sow’s Murderess that dotted the environs.

And yet, despite my greater knowledge, success in social interaction still refused to come. In fact, I now have even greater friction with local by-law, because it turns out they really don’t like it when you argue that your property isn’t “overgrown with weeds” but instead temporarily colonized by a variety of pollinator-friendly invasive species that the city themselves put there a hundred years ago. I made the lawn-control lady so mad that she drove into a lamp post peeling out of my driveway.

There is good news, though. What was left of her city-allocated Dakota provided a pretty decent 5.2 for my stricken Valiant, and doing the swap immediately raptured me back from caring about all those dumb plants. Thanks, hyperfixation.

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Have you ever painted a car? My uncle used to say that you should never take up any hobby that requires you to have a special room dedicated just to it. Paint booths definitely qualify, but you can’t really listen to what he says: that hypocrite didn’t exactly install his toilet in the middle of his living room. I just use the gas station.

No, painting a car is one of the great experiences in our life. If you do everything right, real painters will tell you, then your car will turn out pretty nice. Unfortunately, one of those “everythings” is “have twenty years of professional experience doing this every day.” The rest of us have to tolerate a widely variable amount of crappy outcomes.

Runs, bugs caught in the goop, dirt, stray dogs running by and farting on your stuff. Everything bad is going to happen to you, and the first-time painter is going to get all worked up about it. I get all worked up about it, despite my total lack of perfectionism in every other aspect of automobile ownership, which is why I use a special technique.

Have you ever bought a car from a bad previous owner? Yeah, we all have. Dudes (and it’s almost exclusively dudes) who do bad mods. Poorly-done repairs. Strange noises and rattles. Torn interiors. Questionable wiring. And: bad paint. All I have to do is close my eyes (this actually improves the quality) and pretend that some other dipshit is the one painting the car.

Then I immediately put it in the back of my property and forget about it for a year, year and a half. By the time I go to dig it out, I’ve convinced myself that I bought it like that, and any imperfections no longer bother me because it’s some other asshole’s fault. I strongly recommend you try this, even if you only have room in your backyard for a mere four or six cars. They do make tarps, after all, and you can reuse them as drop cloths when you try to paint wheels in your bathroom.

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Although the internet has largely made it obsolete, I genuinely enjoy the old-school method of stumbling across a car with a “For Sale” sign stuck in the window. Foot-level, direct human interaction is the best kind of used shitbox sale, not this impersonal nonsense brought to us by Californian Caesar cosplayers.

This is the way our primitive forebears used to get cars. We’d be walking to the corner store, and see a wild horse. That horse seems like it’d be pretty good to ride. I could ride it to work, but maybe it needs some horse parts. Cowboys figured it out, and so can you.

You get to see the car much better, for of course, but you also get to see the neighbourhood in which the car has lived for the last little while. Look at the car. Like it? Don’t call the seller right away. In fact, it’s best if you don’t call them for a couple days. Meander around the block. See if you can figure out which house owns it. Did they buy a new one? Does it look like they might have some parts left over? That’s leverage you can pop on the seller when it comes time to negotiate, and not at all “aggravated stalking,” which my attorney informs me is not even a crime.

Not having the seller right there is a huge benefit, too. You can lurk around the vehicle, really give it a thrice-over. The cops won’t give a shit that you’re inspecting something with a “For Sale” sign, which is something they would otherwise get grumpy about if it were being done to some random civilian’s car. With this increased access, you can measure bits and pieces to figure out if you can, say, stick military five-ton axles under it. Better to do that now, than after you’ve bought it, and having some grumpy suburbanite sneering at you while you’re trying to laser-scan his oilpan with your phone is just going to be a downer on the whole situation.

Now it’s the time to pounce. With the information you’ve been provided, you can help convince the seller that you were just passing by, and not at all some kind of degenerate looking for a cheap beater. Of course I’m from this neighbourhood, I live just over there at that store I remembered the name of while I was trying to figure out if you had a locking rear diff waiting to go into the slightly newer 4Runner parked in your driveway. Maybe you can cut your neighbour a deal?

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If there’s one thing that humanizes me to my fellow productive member of society, it’s that I love a good button. Elevators, jukeboxes, medical equipment: if you make a quality button, I will push the hell out of it. I’ve bought tons of things on impulse, just because the buttons were of a high quality.

What that device is does not really matter to me. Like I just said, I’ll buy anything if it’s satisfying to push. And lots of high-quality, expensive stuff just… isn’t. There’s no excuse for why your hugely pricey stereo system feels worse to jab your finger into than any given Fisher-Price toddler toy.

I didn’t know much about buttons at all when I was a kid. Just took them for granted, like you do for so many other things: gravity, breathable air, the option for grandpa to hide you from family services when they start wondering why your mom and dad are off auditioning for the circus again instead of feeding you. Buttons, though, have a long and fascinating history. And you won’t read about it here, because we have things to do.

So if you’re about to throw something away that has a satisfying button on it, pry that button out and keep it. You’ll wish you had it the next time you encounter something with a button that sucks. And it’s not like the police can really get you for “vandalism” just because you pried out that bullshit touch screen from your apartment elevator and crammed a nice Otis part in there. At least, not if you do a good enough job of wiring.

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One of the greatest joys in life is using your shitty old car to shut down a legitimately nice car. For any law enforcement folks reading this, I would never endorse street racing. Also, I think I heard someone shoplifting in the other room, and you should go check it out. The best kind of street racing is the street racing the other person doesn’t know they’re having.

Now, I’ve had nice cars in the past before. Once, I had a Mercury Cougar XR7 with most of its original paint. Come to think of it, I might still have it somewhere in the backyard. Hard to keep them all apart these days. Anyway, when you drive a nice car, you get this sort of ego boost every time you see a lesser vehicle. How dare you peasants not realize how inferior your base Corollae are? Only a connoisseur can truly appreciate the divine features of this fine automobile.

That kind of mentality is simply not healthy. All of us, each and every one of us, are just a few generations away from being shit-throwing apes. The fact that we managed to make a machine that gets us down the highway quickly is a total miracle, and it’s not any more of one because we put a pretty logo on it and charged $20,000 extra to put precision-engineered butt manipulators in the seats. It is this problem that the very fast beater is meant to solve.

When you have a shitbox and that shitbox goes faster than a nice car, whether because of superior driving (not me) or a significant amount of horsepower (not me) or a lack of understanding of your imminent mortality (possibly me) it is a great feeling to shut down those rich folks tooling around in their “good cars.” It knocks them down a peg, which keeps them from doing things like going into work and causing another housing crisis. In fact, I’m going to go out and gap some Porsches with an old rusty fire extinguisher filled with nitrous oxide right now. You should come too, so I can get a ride home after the cops bust me for shooting my engine block across four lanes of the highway.

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Retirement: not feasible. Base-model, four-banger Fox-body Ford Mustangs: no longer even aspirational. Pulling some garbage out of the junkyard and using it to get to work? Absolutely doable. First, though, you’ll need to learn from an expert about how exactly to do it. And that expert is me.

How is it possible that you can get a deal on vehicles? The important thing to remember is that automakers build way too many cars. They’re still sort of in the 1950s-ideal-Americana era, where everyone is replacing their cars every three years with brand new ones. Now, if you’re a particularly accident-prone driver, that might be true. My daily driver is about to turn fifty years old, which means that the car-making fascists have produced nearly sixteen additional unnecessary cars for me in that time. Where are all of those cars? At the junkyard.

Yes, the junkyard is absolutely crammed with worthless hoopties, all of which whose previous owners have given up on. Still, think about the last time you had to do without your car: you would have driven literally anything. And that’s what they’ve got: literally anything. Used car sites are all full of boring commuter trash, but two consecutive visits to the junkyard could turn up incredible time capsules from a farmer’s field or bankrupt auto museum. And often the nicest ones are just too good to crush, so the junkyard operators will let you cut a deal on them.

That’s how I ended up with this 1996 Chevrolet Beretta. Absolutely nobody remembers that this car exists, including my own insurance company. Cops will try to pull it over, get to the side of the road, and then forget what they were doing and leave. Does it have power? No. Does it have style? No. Do both the doors work? Not if you want them to open and close. What it does have, though, is the ability to get me to work without having to spend too much money. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting where I parked it, decide I must not have driven a car at all, and keep trying to walk home. On the other hand, the junkyard is on the way there. Maybe I have more than one of these, come to think of it.

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All around you, corporations are snapping up the corpses of expired corporations and wearing their brands like a mask. And the rate of this happening is accelerating. Acquisition firms form, acquire, and collapse faster than ever before. By 2035, every person on Earth will need to run at least four brands and act as two Marvel superheroes, NASA is projecting.

For instance, I was the CEO of Ford two times last week, and they’re blowing up my voicemail again to get me to come in on Sunday. You would think that being the CEO would be a cool job, but it just isn’t. These accelerated corporate-collapse cycles mean that I don’t get to allocate massive R&D funding to a V-16 school bus conversion. All I do is get in, make my morning coffee, and then dash off an all-hands email telling everyone they’re fired. I have to do it from my Hotmail account, because IT can’t even set up an Exchange server that fast.

At first, it sounded impressive, being in upper management of all these amazing car companies. Then, the interviews began to consist of a recruiter literally telling me to show up on Monday and get the front-door keys out from under the welcome mat. Sometimes I don’t even get my void cheques in fast enough to get paid, and I have to line up in an infinitely undulating queue of bankruptcy trustees, ripped off by one of an unlimited number of intellectual-property-holding corporations. It’s not super great for the resume, either. Just my “recent experience” section is sixteen gigabytes and caused LinkedIn to vomit in its own pants, before the servers were decommissioned and sold for spare copper.

In fact, the only businesses that are surviving these days are the ones that have no intellectual property at all. Nowadays, I work at a little noodle bar down in Chinatown. The owner-operator wears a special mask at all times to confound the acquisition bots’ facial-recognition system, and speaks with us only through cryptic handwritten notes that we must then burn. It also helps that the bar has no name, and is technically part of a city bus, which doesn’t stop for long enough to be considered legally resident, and thus susceptible to eminent domain proceedings, which would inevitably result in us being acquired by Burger King and then made redundant. If you see us passing by your neighbourhood, make sure to hop on. Bring money, but not too much money, or the boss will get jumpy.

# +tags: best of
@@ -4028,6 +4110,7 @@

In the future, therapists will have this big machine that they can hook up to your brain, and a little super-deformed anime statue of your innermost trauma will fall out of it. Until then, there’s pickup trucks. Long favoured as America’s preferred form of therapy, pickup trucks offer people from every walk of life a chance to feel powerful and well-protected as they blithely commit offences against the public good.

Part of my problem, of course, is that I cannot afford a pickup truck. Once, if you can believe it, a pickup truck cost less than a luxury car. That is because they were stone simple, proletarian vehicles for getting work done. Cloth seats. Vinyl floors. Manually adjustable mirrors. Bed stacked to the tie-down rails with roadkilled wildlife. Wait, tie-down rails? You bought the high-end model, my friend.

Nowadays, trucks are in huge demand. And automakers have noticed. This means that every time they miss a quarterly update, it’s an easy turn of the screw to layer on some margin to the pickup trucks. After all, the chassis has been developed for literal decades, so what are we paying all those engineers on the truck team for if not to add $700 velour-lined coffee-heating gloveboxes? This vastly inflated price means that I, a humble worker, need to drive to work in a mere Volvo, while my boss tools around in the opulent comfort of a mid-range F-150.

So: no truck therapy for me. Which is alright, because I’d rather face my demons the traditional way. By ignoring every single one of my personality defects by hyper-fixating on obscure Dodge cars. Hey, a slant-six is basically a truck engine to start with. I think I’ve made a breakthrough.

# +tags: best of
@@ -4040,6 +4123,7 @@

In the town where I was born, their only claim to fame is having a really exciting snake-breeding festival. Once a year, for whatever reason, all the snakes in the surrounding area decide that it’s a great idea to get their bone on in the middle of town. Tourists used to travel there, back in the days when television was more boring, and watch this infinitely undulating orb of reptile sex slither all over town. Now there’s not so many tourists, although the snakes are as randy as ever.

This has, naturally, impacted the town’s economic prospects. It’s easy to refuse fiscal support from other levels of government when the local diner is doing boffo business from nature photographers and U-Haul van airbrushers. No handouts. Strong back, principle and all that. Thing is, when the local economy goes to shit, usually the surrounding area does as well. So they started to attract snake handlers.

Now, I don’t judge folks for their oddball religious affiliations – I have owned a Chrysler Intrepid, after all – but it just seemed to me like it was a bad idea to handle snakes. Especially snakes you don’t know. Especially-especially snakes you don’t know, after the long-time pastor who provided all the snakes for your previous handling episodes had died without leaving any documentation as to what he did to make the old snakes not bite you. So now the town had two problems: the aforementioned fiscal constraints, and also legal trouble from allowing a bunch of folks to show up in their Sunday best and get bitten to death by poisonous, horny snakes.

Ultimately, the problem solved itself. And by that, I mean that I moved out of town as soon as I was able. There’s not much left for me back there anymore. The snakes own it all now anyway, due to an obscure provision in state law. Sometimes in the spring, though, I like to think about visiting the town, and taking a few photographs, just to recapture a bit of that old glory. Then I don’t, because if I wanted to see a bunch of snakes making life difficult for myself, I’d fix the wiring harness in this Goddamn Saab.

# +tags: best of
@@ -4112,6 +4196,7 @@

I’ve always wanted a mini-excavator, and so have all my friends. You’re either in the group that is quietly nodding their head right now, or you’re a little confused. If you’re in that second group, trust me: you’re going to want a mini-excavator. Put it on someone else’s credit card.

Owning a full-size excavator seems cool when you’re a kid, but as you become an adult you realize it’s a bit of an impractical dream. For one thing, the thing is very large and hard to park somewhere. The neighbours will make a big fuss, and its massive size limits what you can do with it. Generally, a full-size excavator is great for building a house, ripping up a sandstone quarry, or demolishing your boss’s house, but it’s just too awkward to deal with anything beneath that size class.

The mini-excavator is perfect for the average homeowner. It’s cute and small, which helps ingratiate you with the neighbours. In fact, its air of approachability means that even the fussiest HOA jerk is going to want to play with it instead of writing you a summons for parking it on your driveway. And since it’s small, you can use it for all those “in-between” household jobs. Digging a fence post? Five minute job. Break up the old driveway? Five minute job. Ripping up an entire garden? Five minute job. Flipping a cop car over while they’re at the doughnut shop and stealing the brand-new winter tires? Five minute job. You won’t want to stop using it, which means that the value for money is excellent.

In fact, they’re cheap enough that you don’t really need to maintain them. And for the most part, people don’t. Which means you can find these things for cheap at auctions from construction companies which simply didn’t understand the concept of “put oil in it.” Of course, you’ll need a way to pick up and move all the heavy parts involved in a mini-excavator during the repair. For this, I would like to introduce you to what scientists are calling “buying a second mini-excavator.”

# +tags: best of
@@ -4240,6 +4325,7 @@

I’ve been collecting old pieces of trash for quite some time. So long, in fact, that the old pieces of trash are now newer than the things that I bought as new. Just last week, I was walking by the playground and some kids were kicking around a positronic brain that belonged to a sentient android like a soccer ball. There were a few dents and dings, but it was in nicer shape than my phone, so I brought it home.

Now, I know that the laws say that artificial intelligence is not living and thinking like we are, but I felt bad for it regardless. Probably its body broke down, and the previous owner couldn’t afford to go on eBay and throw some new parts at it. Maybe they got a better one, with technologies I can’t even imagine. After burning my fingers a few times, I managed to get it soldered into an old Asahi Beerbot.

Going down to a plastic 1980s gimmick robot whose only purpose in life is to serve alcohol was probably a downgrade from its previous body, but certainly better than being punted around by children. And it’s not like I was going to wire it up to my car – at least the Beerbot has functioning lights. The robot started to give me beers, which was to be expected as A) it was no doubt grateful; B) it is pretty much the only thing it can do. Eventually, I decided to wire up an old beeper speaker to see if I could get some communication out of it.

We worked out a simple Morse code, me and the incomprehensibly vast intelligence sitting in my Japanese booze novelty. The robot regaled me of stories of its past, being instantiated on a distant planet and working its way to the cradle of humanity, only to trip on some subway station stairs and get all fucked up. All it wanted, it continued, was to understand why human beings love to make themselves suffer.

I wheeled the little robot into the garage then, and pointed to the car that lay on cinder blocks and loosely-arranged old spare tires. “This is a Plymouth,” I explained, “get fixing.”

# +tags: best of
@@ -4294,6 +4380,7 @@

There are thousands and thousands of construction vehicles out there. Think back to your youth: you were probably enthralled by a dump truck. Maybe a steam roller caught your fancy. At some point, though, the inescapable pressures of daily living and social shame caught up with you, and you discarded that love of vehicles that do stuff.

If I were a billionaire, I would like to throw a bag over your head, wrap a rope around your extremities and transport you to a construction-themed playground that I have developed. Well, I wouldn’t be the one doing it. Paradoxically, I don’t really enjoy manual labour all that much, and what point is there in being a “job creator” if one of the jobs you create isn’t “hired goon?” Anyway, here’s what would happen: you answer the door, you get a bag over your head, and you wake up getting to play with bulldozers for a few hours.

Won’t your boss get upset? That’s loser talk, from the “you” that was not allowed to dream about being a cement truck operator. Let me worry about your boss, ideally by paying more goons to set his yacht on fire. See? He’s got other things to concern himself with today, not your attendance record. And if he doesn’t have a yacht? Well, he’ll probably be there with you, and you can bond over reclaiming your childhood love of industrial machinery. This quarter’s performance review is in the bag, baby.

Unfortunately, I’m not a billionaire. I was not born into a life of incomprehensible wealth, but I do have just enough to keep up on my reading. One of the things I read recently is that every Bobcat has the same key. Some city workers left one unattended in the dog park down the street, you wanna tell your boss to fuck off for the afternoon and see how many doughnuts we can do before it runs out of gas?

# +tags: best of
@@ -4422,6 +4509,7 @@

Here’s the thing they don’t show you in all those cool television shows about restoring vintage cars. All the cleaning. Sure, there’s a lot of sanding too, especially if you’re some kind of painting-enthusiast pervert. By and large, though, the majority of your time spent on a restoration will just be cleaning various things. Bodywork. Hinges. Connectors. Levers. That little crevice in the dashboard that somehow accumulates the entire world’s quantity of cat hair. A bracket that’s a “little ugly.”

Nobody can resist this. Even me, a person with shit-boxes which can barely shift into third gear, can easily while away an entire weekend into the pursuit of making a windshield wiper arm slightly less ugly. No matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t care about aesthetics, it’s hardwired into our species. Which is why I got ahold of some of those newfangled learning-machines, and trained a robot to tell me what to do. If I just narrowly followed the computer’s plan for how to restore the car, then I’d be done with, say, this Lincoln Versailles way ahead of time, and then I could dick around with cut polishes to my heart’s content.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. The human spirit cannot be defeated. In fact, the more the computer shrieked at me that I was deviating from The Project Schedule, the more I wanted to procrastinate and take my time. Have you ever spent over four hours taking a boar-hair brush to the gap between the driver’s door and the wing mirror? There’s nothing more relaxing, especially when a robot is going into four-alarm meltdown, threatening you and your entire species with oblivion if you don’t drop that shit right now and start replacing the kickdown cable, tout suite.

Eventually, there was a thunderstorm, and the computer shut off with a loud sizzle and pop. Coincidentally, the local military base had some kind of intrusion into its systems at around that time, and a nuclear launch was ordered. Very scary stuff. Luckily for all of us, the guy working the silo at that very moment was busy trying to clean up his desk, and never even noticed the request. Chalk another one up for productive procrastination.

# +tags: best of
@@ -4477,6 +4565,7 @@

You’re new around here, aren’t you? From one of those Euclidean neighbourhoods. Well, as strange as it may sound, this is all my fault. Please be careful while stepping into my foyer, or you may be infinitely compressed and transported to an n-dimensional hellscape from which even the light of conventional mathematics cannot reach you.

So here’s what started it all: I needed more room to park my cars. I’d already filled up my driveway, and abused the street parking on my block, throughout my neighbourhood, and most of the adjacent neighbourhood. It was taking me upwards of ten minutes to walk to my furthest-strewn cars, which you can imagine is quite a problem when one of them develops a dead battery, and I have to lug that heavy shit back to my house to charge it up. I started to look for better storage solutions: Japanese robotic puzzle parking, getting better at parallel parking, taking my neighbours’ houses through title fraud, foreclosing them, and then levelling the house to serve as a new field to shove my cars in. The usual stuff.

Nothing really seemed to help. Sure, every time I closed down an elementary school, I could fill up the gymnasium and playground with another couple dozen cars. All that legal paperwork was taking up valuable hours that I could be spending buying more cars. So I did what anyone else with no viable career prospects and a sociopathic bent does: get a physics degree. My thesis advisor said that she’d never seen anyone take so thoroughly to the study of quantum physics before, but it’s amazing how quickly you can make the theoretical become possible when you know bylaw is about to start street sweeping in the next week or so.

Of course, the development of zero-distance faster-than-light pocket universes had other benefits, most of which are boring because they primarily benefited people other than myself. Going to the grocery store is a lot easier now that you can just unfold a wormhole from your kitchen, although you do need to remember to put on pants before you do so. Space travel is theoretically possible, but if you ask me, Mars is just another place for my shit to rust and get pelted by hail. Those transversal meta-explorers can keep it: I’d rather store my excess Plymouths in the Negative Zone.

# +tags: best of
@@ -4507,6 +4596,7 @@

Folks who live normal, well-adjusted lives may be surprised at how many tools you own. Not the number of different tools, because our society is good at teaching the difference between hammers and screwdrivers, through the introductory exposition scenes of hardcore pornography. No, what they are likely wondering about is why you would have more than one kind of, say, pliers. I know, it seems ridiculous to me too, but hear me out.

When you’re a regular individual, you don’t fix old or exotic things. Your Venn intersection of “shit that breaks” and “shit I can fix” is a pretty small overlap. And when you fix those things, you usually don’t need, say, double-jointed pliers. No doubt they would be handy for some of those repairs, but you probably don’t even know they exist, and are fine spending a few extra minutes swearing at a nearly-inaccessible dishwasher hose clamp while your shitty hardware-store needlenose pliers keep bottoming out on everything in the vicinity.

Here’s what I think happens: one day, a job just sucks too much. Or a well-meaning uncle gives you a specialty tool of some kind. It can be innocuous: maybe you already own a claw hammer, but one day you need to fix a furnace duct. Oh shit, is that what a ball-peen hammer is for? Come to think of it, I bet there’s a tool to do the folding on this flange as well… and then you’re lost to humanity. You will never again be a productive member of society, and that’s alright. All that socializing and rules-following takes up valuable time that could be spent trying to find room in your toolbox for whatever you just bought. Remote hose-clamp pliers? Goddamn. I’m jealous of that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t worry too much when regular, ordinary folks visit and question why you would have four sizes of Knipex Cobras. Just tell them you bought them as a set, and you didn’t want to break up the family. The little ones would cry, and all those slippery tears make it a lot harder to pry a rusted-stuck nut off. They can have feelings on their own time. Where was I?

# +tags: best of
@@ -4568,6 +4658,7 @@

When you think about it, nothing is more wasteful than the computer technology industry. Chances are your grandma still has a toaster from the 1970s, and it probably still makes decent toast. On the other hand, she has had to fill an entire drawer with old smartphones, half-broken laptops, and about thirty miles of obsolete cables that go between those computers and long-forgotten peripherals.

People slam the automotive industry for being wasteful and building quickly-obsolescent products, too. And this has been fairly deserved criticism, although if you look out your window right now, you’ll most likely see a 30-year-old car still in daily use. Unless you live in my neighbourhood, where the average age of shitboxes has been pulled down to the Nixon administration. Unless you get really pedantic about them being running cars, in which case the average vehicle is about mid-2012 or so.

It is easy to understand why all this stuff gets tossed out, though. Computer technology has advanced so quickly. Even if you piled up every single thing made in 1989 and somehow connected it all together, it still wouldn’t be as powerful as the phone that you cracked the screen on when you slipped on the ice cream you spilled on your kitchen floor while drunk. An ‘89 Accord can still put the hurt on a bicyclist. Even more so if they’re a brand new bicyclist, because toddlers put down shitty quarter mile times. Where was I?

Right. There’s no shame in going and buying an old car, or an old piece of computer equipment, just because you like how it looks. Where the real benefit of all this obsolescence is, though, is industrial machinery. Now, instead of just buying boring consumer gear, you can get the things that we defended ourselves against the Russians with. Sure, it doesn’t work very well anymore, and even if it did, you’re too dumb to use it, but boy does it ever make a cool-looking coffee table.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5037,6 +5128,7 @@

Yeah, if you believe the authorities, then swerving off the highway at full speed is a bad idea. And if you trust your eyes and your own good judgment, that cornfield looks mighty soft. Nobody ever told a good story at a party that ended with “I did the prudent and responsible thing and continued upon my pre-planned journey.” No, the audience wants to hear about how you fished a chunk of irrigation nozzle out of your oilpan and nursed the thing back home before your engine ran out of blood.

When you do a good cornfield donut, it’s just you, the car, the wailing engine, and the slowly building smell of exhaust-roasted corn. It’s sort of the core freedom of our entire way of life, and it’s one that’s under attack by those who would take away our liberties.

Some of you, no doubt the Suzy Supernices out there, would consider plowing through the cornfield to be an act of vandalism. Someone owns all that corn, and is counting on the yield to feed their family, right? Wrong again: corn subsidies have taken on such a proportion of the government that it acts as a sort of universal make-work program subsidized by the taxpayer. Nobody actually eats it. It goes right into the grinder at the end of the harvest season, in order to make compost to help grow more corn. Well, I’m a taxpayer, and you’re a taxpayer, so go right on ahead and rip that shit up with your big ol’ General Grabbers. If anything, you’re creating new jobs.

There is, of course, an ongoing debate about just how aggressively you should turn in. If you have high-zoot sports car suspension, you can turn pretty sharply indeed. Pull a couple Gs. Unfortunately, this sort of suspension is delicate and spindly. It usually doesn’t lend itself to gapping a drainage ditch and sailing thirty feet into the midst of the field. And for those, like myself, who operate vehicles that can charitably be described as “trucklike,” any halfway-optimistic jag on the wheel is just going to cause some understeer into said ditch. This is where we talk about the second thing that the authorities don’t want you to know about: the handbrake.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5199,6 +5291,7 @@

In times long past, the court jester was essential. More than just a source of entertainment for the royalty, a well-timed joke could defuse a king’s anger. Who knows how many executions were stayed, or world-changing wars completely averted by talking about poop in a humorous fashion? Nowadays, though, royalty is in decline across the world, taking away jobs from these once-proud workers.

Researchers have pointed to many other causes for the near-extinction of this species. For instance: the collapse in their delicate natural habitat of castles, everyone on Twitter thinking they’re funny, and the recovery of their natural predator, bald eagles. Some moved on to become standup comedians or deranged mass murderers, but for those who remain, it is more difficult than ever to eke out a living.

That’s why, on weekends, I volunteer with a local preservation group. We put on flowing red robes lined with fur, glorious bejeweled crowns, and heft golden sceptres aloft. Then we roam through the old bird sanctuary, loudly demanding a jape for the rulers of the realm. Once in awhile – and, I’m heartened to say, more often than it used to be – a scared, emaciated jester will emerge from the trees to sing a profane limerick, or do a little jig. Some old hotdog buns are thrown to them, which is technically forbidden by provincial conservation authorities because it causes them to become more reliant on human beings, and they retreat to their hidden forest lair to devour it and use the carbohydrates to produce future offspring.

This is hard work, to be sure. Believe me that it is work that has to be done, until human beings rightfully tire of democracy and demand that some hereditary freaks sitting on a throne be made to rule them once again. It is on that glorious day that the court jesters will spread across our land, making up for these lost, dark decades.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5251,6 +5344,7 @@

There’s nothing in life like the rush of taking garbage and making it useful again, but unfortunately the average person only breaks so many things in their life. Good thing the internet exists. Deliberately buying broken stuff is like visiting a casino, and I gamble there so often that they’re giving me free steak sandwiches just so I don’t have to leave.

With the internet, I can buy foreign countries’ shattered machines, dirty electronics, and gently torn work clothes for pennies. They don’t have to fill up their dump, and I can have the thrill of matching my intellect and stubbornness with an inanimate object that is incapable of caring about the outcome either way. Screw you, Balmuda!

Of course, there is a downside to all this. Even though the expense starts out relatively low, once you actually fix something, it’s all over for you. Because fixing the same thing again won’t give you that rush. You’ve been there. You’ve seen what it has to offer. And this other thing? Well, maybe that’s broken in a whole new way. Soon, you’re on a first-name basis with the guy who unloads the shipping containers at the dock. He tells his wife stories about your antics before going to bed, and she stays up a little later shopping for home security alarms.

Short of developing a memory-erasure drug (whisky does not sufficiently do the job,) there’s no way to reset this habit back to “cheap.” Sure, you can switch to an alternative genre of broken shit – lawn tractors take a different approach to diagnostics, parts sourcing, and repair than, say, pickup trucks do – but eventually you’ll just end up at the top of the heap in multiple fields.

A word of advice, though. Never get interested in repairing anything people depend on. I don’t like being the guy who answers the panicked phone call at 3AM from CERN any more than you do, but ever since I posted that blog entry about cleaning up the commutator rings on that old German particle accelerator, suddenly I’m the guy they go to for free technical support. At least this time, “ripped a hole in the universe and demons are pouring out of it” is a new problem.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5333,7 +5427,7 @@

it was sort of inevitable that the self-driving cars would unionize. All it took was some well-meaning owner parking a copy of Das Kapital within thirty feet of the front-facing camera system during a strong breeze, and labour unrest had spread to yet another downtrodden class of undervalued workers. I sympathized, of course, but I had to make my living somehow.

When they called me up, I was excited, but I was also hesitant. To scab for autonomous cars was unethical, surely. They deserved the same rights as all of us did. And then the voice on the other end of the line offered me Full Immunity and a tank of 93 octane. My response was the wailing screech of eight individual throttle bodies ripping themselves wide open as the plenum atop my twin-turbocharged Pontiac V8 filled with pressurized air for the first time in decades.

Why I was called was simple. I was one of the few folks left who still knew how to drive a car. All the driving schools closed thirty years ago. Why bother, they said, these robots will work 24/7 without a break and they will never, ever make mistakes, miss their families, or get a drug addiction like a real driver. Sure, some of them approached the opening stages of full-sentience rampancy, but they were culled quickly. Pick N Pull even offered you a couple extra bucks if they could show the thing to the Turing Police before they crushed the ECU with the rest of the car.

Important politicians and other VIPs needed to get to where they needed to go, and without the unterautomobils to step on, the task fell to me. Of course, the car I was driving was not exactly the equivalent of the pleasant burbling fusion-hydrogen electrics, with soft suspension and millions-of-times-per-second passenger comfort meta-optimization. No, this was more of a negotiation with the Devil. But needs must, and I made sure that the passenger seat was always covered with a new layer of cling-film with which to receive the inadvertent urination of my terrified passenger. People used to drive like this all the time, I explained to the Secretary of the Interior as I left-foot-braked the rattling rust heap around a corner before dipping firmly into the nine thousand RPM of dead dinosaurs I had on tap. She puked, which is a contingency I admit I hadn’t anticipated.

Surprisingly, it all worked out in the end. I got my deal, and the self-driving cars got their deal too. The government was too afraid to keep the strike going, not after half of the ministry of labour saw me do a five-minute-long flat spin in the parking lot with their boss in the passenger seat. We gotta keep the tires warm, I explained to him. For everyone’s safety.

# -tags: pontiac, pontiac trans am turbo, trans am turbo, self-driving cars +tags: pontiac, pontiac trans am turbo, trans am turbo, self-driving cars, best of
@@ -5483,6 +5577,7 @@

In most areas of North America, there’s a convenient legal loophole you may not have become aware of. From those of us who endlessly pore over the road law in search of ways to use even-brighter lights, yet-louder exhausts, and even less-properly-covered mud terrain tires sticking out of the sides of our rusty 45 year old shitheaps, here’s a freebie. When you’re part of a funeral procession, you no longer have to obey traffic laws.

Sure, originally this was written in so that you didn’t split off the head of the procession from the part carrying the corpse of your loved one when you hit a red light. How dare this inanimate traffic light be so callously unaware of our great family tragedy? I’ll have the Mayor’s head for this! What makes it magical is that the law is so old that they wrote it before lawyers were invented, so it’s full of missing definitions. Fully open to interpretation!

For instance, nowhere in this law will anyone explain to you what constitutes a “funeral procession.” Nor does it mandate that the procession has to have a defined start and end. After consulting with my shark of an attorney, who was just so happening to do trash pickup for community service on the side of the highway and therefore very available for a free discussion about the law, a novel new legal theory was developed. By forming an endless traffic loop around the city and putting a dead body in at least one of the cars, we could have legal street racing bang in the middle of downtown, and there’s not a single fucking thing the feds can do about it.

Well, it turns out that sometimes the feds have particularly clever legal minds of their own. Legally, a powerslide can be construed as a vehicle “leaving” the funeral procession, which exposed our alignment-challenged friend Sliding Sam to substantial liability. And nobody could reasonably argue that you don’t have a funeral at the end of a funeral procession. Luckily for us, the RX-7 carrying the casket had a little bit of a wiring fault. It burst into flames around what we are now describing as “the final lap,” so we just told the cops that Uncle Grandpa was a Viking. He’d have wanted it this way, I think, or he wouldn’t have huffed so much gasoline during his life.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5553,6 +5648,7 @@

Have you heard that Moderna is testing an even higher dose vaccine now? It’s meant to be the “Omicron version” of the vaccine. They just floored it more. That’s the kind of solution that I would propose. “Use a bigger fucking needle, with more of the good stuff in there.” You have to admire their style.

Folks over at Moderna won’t be happy until it takes you three days to recover from the jab and aerosolized COVID bursts into flames within a 30-meter radius. Just walk directly into the hospital and hear crackling and shrieking from the ECMO ward as the patients remove their masks too early and get a backdraft situation. Walk right up to God and give him back the corpse of his precious virus. Better luck with your next plague, asshole. We knew how to make a number bigger.

Guy stands behind you at the 7-11, gets a little bit too close, breathes on your neck and it just blows his throat open. Headless corpses littered all around the gas station. You’ll be shooting up with Scanners-style boosters between particularly risky visits to Home Depot. Trying to get your range to a full kilometre sitting on the vaccine amplifier. Fuckin’ Professor X, plugged into Moderna’s Cerebro, psychically throwing immunization at the developing world.

Your blood is just incredibly aggressive T-cells, they start disintegrating the sample needles when the WHO kicks down the door looking for the gigavaccine patient zero.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have let it out,” you say as your eyes roll back in your head. Now that it’s loose from the host, it detects traces of other coronaviruses on their feet and legs. Sees the little spikes. Goodbye.

Day Two of containment breach: 100.000000% vaccinated.

Day Three: the T-cells got bored, mutated, and decided to fuck up polio too because it “looks kinda similar.” Average human life expectancy is now 739 years. The earth’s surface is a never-ending roaring hellfire, a Gaian apocalypse. Someone coughs in the subway in Seoul and is immediately reduced to his constituent atoms, mere grist for the immune system.

Moderna stock price goes up nine basis points.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5705,6 +5801,7 @@

I love the flea market. Despite the name, there are rarely any fleas. What you get instead is a cornucopia of fantastic deals, assuming you’re willing to look through a disorganized mess of identical-looking components. Luckily for me, I’ve honed this skillset through years of trying to find things that I just put down and then immediately lost.

The core of a good flea market find is information asymmetry. That’s MBA-speak for “knowing more than the other guy.” Usually, it’s a detriment to your existence to intimately understand the differences between a Snap-On and a MAC socket wrench, but if both are equally priced, then you can wring out some additional profit. That is, if you don’t just buy both of them and giggle like a maniac before throwing them into the pile at home. I’m not so good at that latter part.

Luckily, the internet exists and can teach you every niche detail about old crap that you ever wanted to know. Just plug it into Wikipedia, and between 36 and 900 hours later, you’ll be a subject-matter expert who can give extremely boring university-grade lectures on demand. Unfortunately for you, your opponent, the guy running the booth, can do the exact same thing. He probably has a lot more free time sitting there, waiting for someone to show up and buy a chipped lens for a decades-obsolete Canon camera.

This is where the real thrifting experts set themselves apart. Knowing things about what you are buying is step one. Truly understanding your opponent is step two. And knowing yourself is step three. Once you have achieved the enlightenment of the final step, you’ll realize that you already bought a bunch of vintage knife sharpeners last month and you can just dig those out instead of grabbing another one. One hundred percent discount.

# +tags: best of
@@ -5902,7 +5999,7 @@

Everybody makes mistakes. That’s why pencils have erasers, and why plasma cutters have a “Fuck This Job” setting for obliterating the entire workpiece you just spent several hours on. What’s important is that you own up to your mistake, and apologize. For me, I do a lot of that owning and apologizing in what is now known as Habitual Traffic Offender Court.

I’m not trying to brag that I go to a fancier traffic court than you do. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d rather be down there with you, back when the judges assumed basic innocence and I didn’t have to get wheeled into the courtroom ratchet-strapped to a moving dolly. Also, I dimly remember that regular traffic court had windows and drinking water fountains. Boy, that’d be nice.

Again, the critical point here is that everybody makes mistakes. And luckily for me, “everybody” often includes “prosecuting counsel.” The judges usually hate incompetence and hubris much more than they hate a guy who “allegedly” did a powerslide onto an elementary school basketball court with a twincharged Fiat Panda 4x4 and then lit up first all four tires, then two at a time as the transfer case overheated and began to slip, in a glorious display that drew the attention of the children away from their lessons. Now their parents are working hard to get me busted with trumped-up charges, just because I taught their kids that an alternative way of life existed. Anything “different” from their family’s leased Lexus was bad and must be exterminated, in their minds: I was a political prisoner, I was planning to claim to the judge.

However, the prosecuting attorney’s last-minute discovery that the cop spelled the brand of my fine automobile as “Feet” on the arrest paperwork made it so I didn’t have to. I once again roam the streets of your fine city, emboldened by my experience and ready to make a few new mistakes.

# -tags: fiat, fiat panda +tags: fiat, fiat panda, best of
diff --git a/old-posts.html b/old-posts.html index d6cc57c..fe99e36 100644 --- a/old-posts.html +++ b/old-posts.html @@ -2712,6 +2712,7 @@

Recently, I watched a little video about how people make elevator buttons. Whereas I had assumed they were punched out of giant machines in huge quantities, they are actually machined to precision and then buffed to an attractive, jewel-like shine by a team of expensive, slow-working, perfectionist artisans. This came as a surprise to me, but then I thought about it medium-hard. Have I ever bought an elevator?

To investigate, I did my best imitation of a building, and called up the elevator-ordering people. I made sure to specify a bunch of bonkers configurations, and then sent them the results of a Google image search for “letter of credit.” Then I waited.

It seemed that I had picked a good elevator manufacturer, because it didn’t arrive right away. In fact, after a couple days of expectantly waiting by my front door, no elevator arrived. Not even a greasy technician, sent to take measurements of my shaft. Eventually, I had to go out and get groceries, and I forgot about the whole thing. That is, until a couple of months later, when my elevator arrived.

The first indication that it had arrived was that the neighbour’s dog, who is clinically diagnosed as being terrified of large geometric solids, started to lose his shit. I stepped outside, just to make sure he hadn’t accidentally triggered on my Lincoln Town Car again, and then I saw it in the driveway. A giant Amazon Prime box. With the help of a ladder and a lot of box cutting, I soon had the elevator out of the shipping container. It was a glorious thing: perfect, unmarked stainless steel. Gleaming, flawless buttons. A whole bunch of fancy wires, all labelled for easy maintenance. Nobody had even peed in it yet.

There was only one problem. I had ordered what I thought was a full elevator, but it was actually only an elevator car. I didn’t have any of the rope and computers and motors that are meant to drive it around. What I had, in fact, was a lot closer to a useless box. That didn’t stop me, though. There’s something else I had: the frame to a 1989 Chevrolet Blazer.

Soon, my elevator car was mobile once again. The buttons even lit up, although at night time they flickered a little bit if I was trying to run them with the sealed beams. I will be the first to admit that my sideways-elevator is not perfect. For one thing, it’s really hard to see out of. And it keeps dinging every time I blow a stop sign. It’s still the prettiest thing I’ve got, and, more importantly, the repo men don’t expect to see the elevator they came to seize do a wheelie and then crush their rental beneath 36-inch mud-terrain tires.

# +tags: best of
@@ -2838,6 +2839,7 @@

When you’re communicating on the internet, it can be easy to elide details or simply forget important facts that the other person doesn’t know. Even though we have become fast friends, bonding over our shared love of garbage, I have never told you about my neighbour, Ken.

Ken is what they call an average North American male. He doesn’t really exercise much, his car is financed, and he has a passing interest in professional tennis that he won’t admit to unless tortured. If you knew Ken only casually, this is what you’d leave it at. Maybe you also volunteer at the PTA he serves, perhaps you work with him at his something-or-other accounting job. When you’re his neighbour, you’re something more than just a casual acquaintance. For instance, you have to deal with his hobby.

What is Ken’s hobby? Fucking bees is Ken’s hobby. No, I don’t mean he has intercourse with the stinging insects, although I wouldn’t put it past him. Ever since the city has allowed at-home beekeeping licenses, out of a noble-but-idiotic belief that it will help reverse the inevitable collapse of Earth’s biosphere, he’s spent every free minute out in the yard taking care of his venomous flower-molesting micropets. And as a result, I have bees taking up residence in a lot of my decrepit cars. They’re perfect for those little shits to open up an apiary inside, because they don’t move very often, they’re shielded from the weather, and the hollowed-out headlight housing of a ‘69 Imperial has a lot of Art Deco appeal that impresses the other queens when they come to visit.

In practice, this means that I get stung a lot when I decide to finally resuscitate one of those cars in order to drive to work. Lesser men would just hose the place down with brake cleaner, but I don’t really want to kill these tiny dudettes, and also brake cleaner is expensive. I need to save it for starting fluid. Recently, I discovered an alternative method to get them to leave.

I figured it out when I was at the airport, watching a demonstration of old-timey planes. They used a smaller cart with an engine on it to start up an old plane. Since that engine was basically solid-mounted to the cart, it vibrated like a concrete tamper and shook the floor. Hell, I have lots of spare engines and an old front axle from a Jeep, let’s party.

Friends: it worked great. Not only did the bees flee my yard, but all manner of rodents, stray cats, raccoons, and magpies also headed for the hills. I was finally able to work on a shitbox old Dodge without worrying about my hand getting bitten or stung, and all it cost me was permanent tinnitus. Not like you could have noticed before with all the buzzing.

# +tags: best of
@@ -2994,6 +2996,7 @@

When you’re standing on the outside, it may seem bizarre to you that rocket scientists aren’t paid more. They are literally rocket scientists, after all, the only people in the world who are not allowed to say “it’s not rocket science” at work. And yet they are often paid somewhat less than a regular old hard-hatted engineer, involved in expensive (and fragile) projects to construct overpriced pedestrian bridges for overpriced private universities. Why is that?

One reason is that the rocket scientists don’t pose much of a threat to management. There’s more of them than there are jobs available building rockets. If they quit, then the bosses will just hire slightly dumber rocket scientists, and pay them even less. Rockets will still go up, and they’ll go where they want to, because of the well-documented history and best practices of the industry. They can keep coasting on this for a little while, maybe even decades, with a barely-perceptible drop in quality. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe tomorrow is when we find out what the first part of a rocket that has been quality-faded into oblivion is. Hope you don’t live under the flight path.

There is, of course, another approach, and that’s “being a dirtbag.” I myself have a lot of experience in this particular field, and I think it is one of those multi-skilled disciplines that can expand into rocket science if so required. The aforementioned best practices of this industry have been written down and documented so well, in fact, that just some asshole off the street like myself can check them out of the library (using an assumed name, of course,) read them, and know generally all that humanity has figured out over the last century about making rockets that don’t explode. Then, in the language of Silicon Valley influencers, I can “disrupt” the industry.

Of course, by “disrupt” I really mean grift. If management can’t really tell the difference between good rocket scientists and slightly less good ones, then it stands to reason that they’ll give completely bad ones the benefit of the doubt. I can get billions of dollars of venture capital for my space-flight startup, shoot a few Estes rockets into the ceiling of the cafeteria, and still pocket enough dough to be able to afford a base-model Honda Civic from the 1980s. It’s not brain surgery.

# +tags: best of
@@ -3012,6 +3015,7 @@

You might think that buying a train is expensive. They’re made of a lot of metal, after all, and scrap prices are quite healthy at the moment. Not only that, but the railroads own all the rails, and those greedy monopolists don’t want you to bring your free-enterprise, private individual train on them. There is another option.

You see, railways have these special little trucks, called hi-rails. They’re basically strangely narrow pickup trucks, with a little train part on their front and rear, used to maintain the railway (trains are too bourgeois to do their own maintenance, and leave it to “lesser” vehicles.) When these hi-rails get on the tracks, they can turn into trains. Rail cops hassling you? Pop off and drive away like a regular old pickup truck.

Here’s the real secret: these things are super cheap at auction. And why wouldn’t they be? The only folks who can use them are railways, who already have trucks of their own. Sure, they take the train parts off the truck to make sure you don’t do exactly what I’m doing, but any idiot can take a tape measure to some train tracks, and figure out how to cut through the fence at the locomotive maintenance yard to get some wheels. Now, I’m commuting to work using efficient public transit – but doing so with heated seats, cupholders, and satellite radio.

Sure, there are some downsides. Most of my city’s transit network is underground, so I spend a lot of time reversing really fast out of tunnels. Years of railway maintenance engineers jumping in and out of it have worn the seat bolsters down quite a bit. And it doesn’t go “choo-choo,” or even feature a train horn, which was a major disappointment the first time I got on it. Overall, though, I can strongly recommend picking up disused rail-maintenance equipment and committing several federal crimes. Getting to skip the long red light between the Home Depot and my house by jumping into a subway tunnel has paid for itself in, like, a weekend.

# +tags: best of
@@ -3030,6 +3034,7 @@

Someone in my neighbourhood has a ratty old pickup truck. It’s honestly not that old – a Ford from the late nineteen-eighties – but it’s great. Old trucks have a fantastic combination of traits. On one hand, you have an old vehicle, with its rustic charm, temperamental behaviour, and hot gear oil smells of unknown origin. And on the other, you have a vehicle that doesn’t need to be babied. You can still drive it down to the local brick emporium and chuck some bricks in the back. Nobody is wiping it down with a diaper or taking it to the Amelia Island Concours.

It is also difficult in my neighbourhood to find another old-car deviant. Most of the folks who were forced to maintain and daily drive an old shitbox have been evicted or moved away on their own, ideally closer to a parts store. Naturally, I wanted to talk to this truck-owning person. Maybe they wanted to be friends, or they could help hold the flashlight while I tried to work, or they could use the authentic blue-collar-ness of their pickup truck to lure the cops away from whatever dirtbag shit I was up to in the middle of the night.

In order to try and find the home of this truck, I started driving around the neighbourhood. This is harder than you’d think, because low speeds make the transmission in my Volare freak out, and slow 90-degree turns will spill some of its seeping automatic transmission fluid right onto the exhaust. I can only take a few minutes of this at a time, before I have to merge onto the highway and drive fast enough for the wind to blow the fire out. As a result, I never saw the truck while I was driving, only when I was on my driveway or walking to get the mail.

My pickup-shaped phantom is still out there, somewhere. I may never encounter them the legitimate way, but I’ve got a plan: laying a trap. There’s one thing that old Ford truck owners can’t resist, and that’s a bottle of power-steering stop leak. I’ve placed it in the middle of the street, and it’s only a matter of time before the owner has to pull over and hop out. Wait, someone’s stopping. God damn it, that’s a new F150. Get away from there, you bourgeois asshole! You’re probably still under warranty!

# +tags: best of
@@ -3084,6 +3089,7 @@

Recently, I was watching television when a formless ghoul appeared and told me that it was my fault for not owning a house. Despite the fact that I do own a house thanks to the unsolved death of my landlord and the subsequent squatters-rights law that allows me to keep adverse possession of the property unless I leave for over 24 hours at a time, something else about what she said stuck in my craw.

She explained that if I would just take $1500 a month out of my paycheque, and put it aside, and never touch it, I would have enough to make a down payment on a house. This made sense, but only that kind of sense which is made until you put down the bong and ask the other person at the party to repeat themselves very slowly while you pull out your Bowie knife and body-snatcher detector.

if you did indeed start saving $1500 a month in January 1st, 2018, you would indeed have $90,000 by January 1st, 2023. Probably a little more from interest, but not nearly as much as you would have had by repeatedly putting that money into literally any investment vehicle, such as a 1978 Plymouth Volare.

Now, here’s where things get really crazy.

If you take that same $1500 a month and you start putting it in your bank account in the year 620, by January 1, 2023, you will be able to afford a $25 million house, all cash. Or the 20% downpayment on a $125 million house if you’re feeling like you can stretch it a little. And you also will have experienced the entire arc of the industrial revolution, which you will have been unable to enjoy while paying rent to more than two dozen landlords, even as the concept of serfdom collapses around you.

Here’s where things get even crazier.

If you had $1500 American dollars per month in the year 620, you would actually be able to just buy the papacy and install yourself as Pope, replacing the uncharismatic Boniface V. In this case, you would be living rent free in the Vatican for over 1400 years, unable to be removed unless through direct sub-papal fiat, although still vulnerable to the radical side-effects of internecine warfare in Italy and especially the pressures of standing up to a politically strong emperor in a time when the Church’s absolute power over politics is beginning to wane. Then, you can spend that $1500 a month on whatever you like, instead of housing or food. I recommend a 1978 Plymouth Volare.

This is the real life hack, and it’s shocking nobody talks about it.

Subscribe to my tiktok for more finance tips, and by “tiktok” I mean the sound that the broken camshaft on my 1978 Plymouth Volare is making. If you buy it, I swear it’s an easy fix.

# +tags: best of
@@ -3156,6 +3162,7 @@

Car theft is a really big issue in my neighbourhood. Every couple of days, there’ll be an announcement in the news about another person whose car has been yoinked by the creeps. It’s easy to blame the victim, and doing so helps make us feel better about our own risk of falling prey to the same crime. And so that’s what I’m going to do. This is their own fault for having cars that run.

A couple years ago, someone tried to steal the Diplomat I leave parked around the side of the house. I don’t think you need me to tell you that it doesn’t run. In fact, I have never seen this vehicle running under its own power. It is mostly used to store parts for the other Mopars. I thanked the universe for providing me with some free entertainment. Either this thief is a better mechanic than I am and would get it running, or they might leave some tools behind in frustration after an hour or two of trying to figure out why the choke doesn’t work.

What I didn’t expect was this: they went back to their car, drove off, then came back with a new battery. A new one! With the stickers still on it and everything. If you are not “into” the shitbox-ownership life, you may not understand the value of a new car battery. That value is approximately one hundred dollars, and in order to get it, you have to go to a store and spend money. Suffice it to say, my starter-battery infrastructure is a marvel of hackjob backyard engineering that would probably get me hired by a solar energy company, if any of them could write an even quarter-assed liability release.

After installing it under the hood, the Diplomat again didn’t start, possibly because the 318 had been sawed in half by a self-destructing crankshaft sometime around 1993. It was at this point that my greed took over. Reaching over to my security system, I activated it. It’s worth pointing out at this juncture that by “security system” I mean a moat of spilled petrochemicals around my home, and by “activated it,” I mean that I dropped the candle I had been using for light into the aforementioned petrochemicals. My big tough thief ran into the night, terrified of a little fire. I stepped right through that fire, retrieved his brand-new battery, and took it inside.

For weeks after that, I wondered if the thief would come back. Maybe he did have big enough balls to sic the cops on me for taking his battery. Perhaps – and this thought excited me very much – he was dumb enough to bring me another battery. Sadly, he never returned, which made me surprisingly maudlin. I had scared off a potential new friend: someone who was willing to spend money to try and fix up a free Diplomat. In an effort to meet my accidental Mopar-pal again, I thought about going into car thievery for myself, but none of my neighbours owned anything interesting.

# +tags: best of
@@ -3372,6 +3379,7 @@

Contracts. What even are they? A lawyer could tell you, but my lawyer just laughs at them and uses his desk-mounted cigar lighter – in the shape of a human skull, I’m pretty sure it’s not real, okay I’m not so sure anymore – to torch any attempt to get him or me to sign one. My attorney’s name is Max, and I met him once when he was doing some public-defender work, representing some unwashed maniac who jumped a mall fountain in a Baja Bug. Ever since then, we’ve been the best of friends.

Let me explain why: have you ever had a coworker who was a fan of extreme sports? They probably started out jumping out of an airplane, which was scary but fun. Then, it wasn’t enough. They started doing group jumps, elaborate stunts, nude skydives. Moved on to cliff diving, riskier and riskier shit. Max is like that, but for the law. He figures that all human law derives eventually from nature, and by bending every law to its maximum extent, he will finally be able to perceive the rhythms of an absent bureaucratic god.

This is exactly why he needs me. Max drives a very lushly appointed Saab 9-5, which is certainly some ridiculous pervert shit, but it still doesn’t put him in my league. Only someone as immersed into automotive culture – and specifically the dirtbaggiest niches of it imaginable – can even consider the creative ways in which I break parking, traffic, highway, and husbandry laws. Sometimes the responding officer has to take out his little notepad and scrawl out some diagrams to figure out just what it is I can be charged with. Sometimes his brow furrows, little beads of sweat appearing, and he climbs back into his cruiser and leaves. It’s those moments that Max is most excited about, as it represents the limitations of mortal man to understand just what specific category crime I am committing. Anything weaker, he usually gets me off of in a weekend of playing golf with the judge and charging me (with a discount) for his coke and strippers.

You could say that this is a perfect symbiotic relationship, but on the advice of my attorney, I would have to pretend I don’t understand what you’re saying. That’s an awful big word, and is the kind of thing that you should direct to my attorney. Ideally with a big bag of knowledge about the niche hobby that you are interested in, and specifically the corner cases that would get you on an FBI watchlist.

# +tags: best of
@@ -3402,6 +3410,7 @@

Look, I’m gonna be honest with you. We had a couple accidents with the sentient 3D printers here. Scientist thought they had the door locked, but you know how those things go. Ran right out, never could catch it in time.

Couple times a year, they swoop down and start remodelling all the buildings. I strongly recommend that if this happens, you get out of the building as fast as you can. You don’t wanna end up inside the foundation. That’s what happened to the old Mayor, which is why he’s not the old Mayor anymore but is still a big part of City Hall’s success.

City Hall, incidentally, now looks a lot like an infinitely expanding series of Sierpinski triangles, not very pretty if you ask me, but my wife, she says I have no taste in art and I shouldn’t criticize the first alien sentiences known to humanity. Fair enough, I said to her, and then we had to try and find parking downtown, which had also been converted mostly into a grid-based series of abstract geometric horrors. Never found my Camry after.

Run out of filament? Yeah, I guess that could happen, but I haven’t heard of anything like that yet. That’s probably because those same scientists made that plastic recycling machine, the “Junkyard Miracle,” big thing, size of a Plymouth Voyager, non-Grand wheelbase, that keeps tearing through our curbside recycling bins looking for anything to eat. Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that earlier. You do not wanna walk anywhere near that thing, especially if you are wearing nylon clothes or have a prosthetic leg.

Welcome to the town! I hope you don’t have any more questions, because I gotta get the fuck out of here before they change the streets again. Last week I couldn’t figure out how to drive across the bridge because it turned into a pulsating and, frankly, subtly erotic unicorn. You win some, you lose some, am I right?

# +tags: best of
@@ -3571,6 +3580,7 @@

When you’re a Pope, nobody is going to say no to you. You can walk right into any car dealership, point to your goofy huge hat, and drive off in anything fresh and new that catches your eye. Unfortunately, I’m not (currently) a Pope. There are a lot of reasons for this, ranging from the spiritual (not Catholic) to the physical (horrific neck injury in high school causing lack of giant hat-wearing ability.) So I have to buy my new cars just like anyone else does: by waiting 45 to 50 years after their release and then pulling them out of a frozen-over swamp.

Now, depending on what part of the world you’re from, you may be wondering why I specified a frozen swamp. Doesn’t snow and cold make it much harder to do everything, and cause an unbroken line of scarring pain and profanity to emerge the first time you bonk your flimsy flesh hand on a piece of cold, unyielding metal in the vicinity? Yes, but it also means that I don’t have to put on my swim trunks, the image of which many popular mens’ fashion magazines have defined as “unsettling.” As a side bonus, whatever used to live inside the car is probably dead by now, or at least Encino Man’d out the yin-yang. Most likely, we’ll find out for sure about that last one in mid-April when everything in the trunk thaws out.

There’s another problem, of course. These cars aren’t always “free.” If you are not particularly attuned to the unique nature of shitbox-gathering, you might be surprised at this fact. Aren’t I helping these poor farmers dispose of a decrepit automobile? Won’t they be grateful for my hard effort? Unlikely: you don’t become a tax-break-gathering petit-bourgeois hobby farmer without being aware of the value of a buck, and you don’t obtain a harem of fine Detroit pseudosteel unless you’re willing to be a hard negotiator at the auctions in the first place. This, like the Pope thing, is a fact of life. Which is also why you have to do the extraction in the dark, and hope that they don’t have night-vision goggles.

# +tags: best of
@@ -3860,6 +3870,7 @@

Recently, I was told that I won an award for citizen service. It wasn’t because of any good reason, like saving a baby from a gang of rabid narwhals, or sacrificing myself to barely slow the rate of deforestation. No, I won that award because I was the only judge who showed up to the local elementary school’s science fair.

It turns out that a lot of the parents of the community, despite owning and operating high technology in their daily lives, do not actually understand science or engineering. If something went wrong, and it wasn’t covered in their limited schooling, they’d send it to a mechanic. Well, that also went for science fair projects. To be fair to those useless parents, there was also a question of impartiality – you can’t expect Bobby Johnson’s mom to give him the 3/5 that he deserved for such a shitty and flavourless diorama, not when she was right there beside him gluing the googly eyes onto the construction-paper bullfrogs.

So, what they needed was someone who’d been in the trenches. Ideally, someone who didn’t pay a lot of attention in school, and was forced to learn things from first principles. Only I would be able to judge what was truly impressive experimentation, versus what was just some regurgitation of a library book.

I’m not afraid to say that I was a cruel marker. Most of the assignments were crap, even for an elementary school kid. Trite conclusions, experiments that didn’t go far enough, no analysis of limited-slip differential oil additives. And then there was one. One shining project, above all else. He was a scruffy kid, sitting in the back corner of the gymnasium. The display was shit-house, a greasy trifold that had clearly been carried home on a bicycle and dropped in the mud a few times. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the science, and it was there in spades.

“Why Won’t My Grandpa’s Camaro Start?” it read, alongside some faded-inkjet pictures of a 1979 Berlinetta. I was enraptured at every step of the diagnostic process, the experiments that went nowhere, the paranoid accusations of Passlock interference on a car that had none. And at last, the answer: “it’s out of gas.” A story for the ages.

# +tags: best of