Wisconsin Drivers ...

I have been fuming about this for months.  Planning to write it all, but never quite getting around to it.  At least I'll get it started today.

The vast majority of Wisconsin 'drivers' are moronic.  This is not to say they're stupid.  Many of them would prove to be quite intelligent if you yanked them out of the driver's seat as you threw them to the ground.  But that's beside the point.  They act in a moronic and inconsiderate manner.  I've come to the sad realization that it's hopeless to lecture them because even the smartest of them don't care.  That's right.  They just don't care to be any better.  For what it's worth, these are not isolated instances I recall.  Every one of these things happens in front of me every single day.

Let's start with cell phones.

HANG UP AND DRIVE!

I don't feel the need to generate a huge new rant about this.  It's been done so much better before, by other people.  Let's just say that I hate them.  I see people talking on them daily, in heavy traffic.  Wisconsin drivers are generally not bright enough to actually use the simple expedient (of which I would generally approve) of a Bluetooth device.  Even after I tell parents of my daughter's friends, point blank, "I do not want to attend your funeral.  Get a $20 Bluetooth and use it," they persist in driving with a cellphone slapped to their ears, driving with one hand and less than half a brain devoted to the task.  Not just sometimes; constantly. If our idiot governor wanted to make up a budget shortfall, all he'd have to do is fine cellphone use in cars.  We'd be swimming in cash.  I'm ashamed to say that one of my acquaintances even crashed into a police car, with lights and sirens, going through an intersection - because she was texting.  [The county wants some serious cash for that one.]

Continuing on, we have to consider the peculiar Wisconsin habit I call 'tethering'.  It's also reasonably well understood if you call it 'left lane blocking' or 'impeding'.  What it amounts to is driving along in the left lane of a multi-lane street or road at the same speed as traffic right beside you.  Here's what no one in Wisconsin seems to understand:

THE LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING OR FOR TURNING LEFT.

Not just on the interstate; EVERYWHERE.  It's the very reason multi-lane streets were invented.  If the intent of traffic flow were for everyone to proceed at the same pace as the slowest driver on the road, we wouldn't need extra lanes.  We could all go plodding along in one big slow line.  Wisconsin drivers prefer to go plodding along in TWO big slow lines.  It doesn't bother them in the least.  They are moronically oblivious to overtaking traffic.  Some of them even consider it their God-given right to regulate the speed of others by impeding them.  It is not; at least not until you're wearing a police uniform.  I drive for miles every single day on four-lane streets where the traffic seems tethered side by side in the adjacent lanes.  It only takes two clueless drivers to pull this off; and you can bet that, even if there are only two cars within several blocks of one another, this is what they'll be doing.  Neither will speed up or slow to change lanes or to allow others past, regardless of how many cars are piled up in the big parade behind them.  They nearly make my head explode.

Wisconsin drivers also have no understanding of how to turn onto a four-lane street.  My casual observations suggest that at least half of all turns they make are into the wrong lane (which should be the closest one to the road or drive you're turning out of, unless it's a clearly marked continuation of the lane from which you started).

USE THE FIRST LANE YOU COME TO, OR

STAY IN YOUR LANE!

Is this EVER enforced?  I heard the complaint of a newspaper writer here about a decade ago who got a citation for it.  But did it make an impression?  Apparently not.  This idiotic habit is so ingrained, it is regarded as a right by some.  I've had one moron in a minivan nearly run me over on a motorcycle as he changed lanes in an intersection, then claim it was 'his lane' when I yelled at him.

Wisconsin drivers have no understanding of how to turn - period.  I say this because of all the 'farmer turns' I see.  This is when a car or truck goes to the opposite side of the lane from the direction they plan to turn.  In other words, they veer to the left to turn right and they veer right to turn left.  The reason this is called a 'farmer turn' is because, if you're pulling a wagon with a steering front axle, you need to allow for the wagon's smaller inside turning radius on tight (90º or less) turns.  Here's your clue, Wisconsin:

YOU AREN'T PULLING A HAY WAGON!

You probably NEVER HAVE!

Your stupid Buick, Chevy, Lexus, Pontiac, or whatever,

doesn't even have a hitch on it!

If you drive up to an intersection with your car in the middle of the lane (or, God forbid, on the side of the lane toward your turn) and turn, YOUR CAR WILL MAKE IT!  You won't rip the left doors off making a left turn from the left side of the lane.  So why do you insist on putting your right side tires onto (or over) the lane stripes on the right?  Are you really that stupid?

Stop light etiquette.  No clues here, either.  Let's start with the lack of understanding of the color 'green'.  When you are at the front of a line of cars and the light facing your lane turns green, you are supposed to proceed into the intersection, even if you plan to turn left.  If the intersection is large enough, it's considerate to move out far enough that a second car behind you can also get into the intersection.  When the light changes and oncoming traffic clears, you may continue your turn.  You haven't broken any laws.  Look it up:

You are always allowed to enter an intersection under a green light,

as long as you can leave it immediately after, even if it means you won't leave until it's turned red.  That isn't your fault and it is not a traffic offense as long as you do it as quickly as you can, when you can.

In fairness, I don't see this one every single day. but it happens often enough:

If it is obvious that you won't be able to proceed out of an intersection when you enter it (traffic is already backed up where you're trying to go), then you shouldn't enter,

regardless of the color of the light and regardless of the direction you're going.  There are drawbridges within blocks of my office.  These will stop traffic for several minutes at a time.  The dullards in this traffic think nothing of blocking crossing traffic by sitting in the intersections waiting.  At least, they do until I start blowing my horn at them from the side.  Think of every intersection as a train track and maybe you'll grasp the concept.  If you're in heavy traffic, you wouldn't stop your car on a train track, would you?  Well, act the same way even if it's only me and my Dodge coming at your side.

The other thing that I do at multiple lane intersections is consider whether someone behind me might want to turn right on red if I have to stop at a light where I have a choice of lanes.  I almost invariably allow them that courtesy - unless someone's already been a jerk to me and I can block them there.  I figure that's fair play.  Nobody else even thinks about this, so my intentional passive aggressiveness is not even noticed.  However, I DO notice it when some oblivious moron does it in front of me.

To their credit, there are very few Wisconsin drivers who are actively aggressive, so I rarely have to step up my game.  Since I've driven in most major metropolitan areas in the US and Canada as well as in such places as Rome and Mexico City, I can handle pretty much any level of traffic stress.  The big problems here aren't a result of conscious aggression; they're a result of a complete lack of thought devoted to the task - and that aggravates me and sorely tests my tolerance for incompetence.  OK; rant over - or at least paused for the moment ...

What We Can Learn From Jimmy Stewart

I hate politics.  That's a sad commentary coming from one with a degree in Political science.  I mean, the end of Dick Nixon's presidency in 1974 was just the end of a long depressing period, part of which I managed to spend living in D.C. as a disillusioned college student.  So I tried to lay off, ignoring most of it and voting for every losing presidential candidate until Bill Clinton's second term (OK; in all honesty, I missed voting entirely in 1992 because I was traveling.).  I really hated the Reagan-Bush years.


I spent the end of the Bush I administration working with the poor in Akron, Ohio.  I held a position as the coordinating attorney for the three county pro bono projects administered from the offices of Western Reserve Legal Services.  I also spent that time at war with our funding source - the Legal Services Corporation.  [LSC was enacted under Nixon almost as a follow-up to the Johnson administration's groundbreaking civil rights legislation.  It was a good thing to do and it was the right thing to do.  By the time Ron Reagan rolled into D.C., poor people were making some actual headway in securing the legal rights they could not usually afford to pay out of their pockets.  It was harder to simply evict by changing locks and it was harder to cut off their benefits with the misguided stroke of a pen because legal services attorneys were there to see that things were done properly instead of at the simple behest of those who had, or held, the cash.]  My office was perpetually under investigation by the LSC to find evidence that we were abusing the money entrusted to us to do our job.  The short term result was that many programs were put 'on probation' or had their funding suspended for transgressions of the endlessly-changing requirements.  Long term, Reagan and Bush were trying to abolish the LSC entirely, so every anecdotal bit of 'evidence' could be fed to Congress.  For a couple years, I played their silly games.  Finally fed up with it all, I did a simple cost-benefit analysis. What I found was that, for the single year studied, we had referred over 350 cases that averaged ten hours of legal work per case. That's over $350,000 worth of legal services, very conservatively valued at $100/hour for attorney time.  That was on a $62,000 budget.  The LSC 'monitors' (actually, a more accurate term is 'pecksniffs' - look it up) were amazed.  Extrapolating that over the 4½ years I was there, this single year's benefit was still $71,000 over what had been spent - and we did hundreds of referrals every year.  In the end, it was clear to me that Republicans hate poor people.  They want to disenfranchise them, take away their dignity and their few remaining human rights, objectify them, demonize them, and make them disappear.  But this doesn't prevent the Repubs from putting on a dog-and-pony show to use them.  As long as poor people still get one vote each, they have more votes than Georgia Pacific, General Electric, AIG, Citibank, and Exxon, combined.  That's a real sticking point with business owners.  They think their artificial beings (corporations) should get to vote, too.


The big shove to the right, by the fanatical splinter groups who regarded Reagan as some kind of god, made the Republican party completely immoderate, to the consternation of its most reasonable members.  Those members lost most of their voice then and it hasn't gotten better since.  After the brief and somewhat embarrassing (but actually harmless) respite of the Clinton administration, when The Shrub came along, I was well nigh furious at this.  First, Bush underhandedly torpedoed John McCain (the last Republican I might have supported), then stole an election, then was the lucky recipient of the largest terrorist attack on US soil ever, and proceeded to ruin the economy, but fell short of stripping everyone of all human rights.  He was too moderate for the right in that regard.  Apparently, so was John McCain who not only reinvented himself as George Bush II (with actual military service) but made the most stupendously stupid vice presidential pick since Thomas Jefferson ended up with Aaron Burr.  With no clear winners in sight, but one clear loser, the result was obvious.


What was not so obvious was how remarkably a Democratic majority and executive could fail so miserably to actually accomplish anything.  I mean, of the clearly delineated goals set forth in the election campaign, we have only health care insurance reform.  We are still at war (having moved the major conflict a few hundred miles northeast) and we still have prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.  Nothing else to show for this but frantic and feeble attempts at damage control for the idiotic financial transgressions of the previous administration.  "I am disappoint." [OK; after I wrote that paragraph, Osama bin Laden got snuffed, which is very cool of Obama.  Still, there's more to be done - somehow.]


As punishment, we (as in everybody, not just Democrats) got taken to the cleaners by slimy unprincipled jerks who were bought and paid for by the likes of the Koch brothers and their mega-rich industrial cronies who would like nothing better than to have a nation of English-speaking worker drones at wages lower than the Chinese at their disposal.  Yes; that's their vision of the future.  It has nothing to do with making life better for all Americans; it only has to do with making life better for THEM: a bunch of dried-up greedy old farts reminiscent of Lionel Barrymore's character, Mr. Potter, in It's A Wonderful Life.


People think that I'm pro-union because I hate Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers.  Not at all.  In fact, if I have a bias of any kind, it's against unions.  I think they've long since outlived their usefulness in the US and they've made our manufacturing base noncompetitive in the world market.  What I'm outraged about is the way that Walker and his minions have set out to remake Wisconsin in the mold of Stewart's nightmare community of Potterville.  If Walker isn't recalled next month, I wouldn't be surprised to see him indicted for some of the stunts he pulled in Milwaukee County - the same kind of stunts that got him bad press while still in college at Marquette (from which he was not able to graduate).  He is no less devious and manipulative than Mr. Potter, but he has worse script writers.  He seems to be perfectly comfortable waging war on the lower and middle classes while coddling corporate interests in the big national circle jerk of states vying for the last places companies relocate before finally fleeing the country.  Far from fulfilling his campaign promise of 250,000 new jobs, he currently leads the US in jobs lost.  Wisconsin can do better.


Too many simpletons believe that they can simply slash government spending to fix all the problems.  They don't take the time to figure out what ought to be cut - unless it's obvious that it's something they don't want to be cut.  A local city attorney told me of a disgruntled woman annoyed because she couldn't see anyone in the city assessor's office when she was there.  The reason?  The assessor's office now only has one employee, who is expected to do field work as well as administer the office.  Good luck having an office open 40 hours a week with that!  The same will go for all other government service cuts.  Someone will be annoyed and disappointed because, whether they realized it before, they used that service.


I don't have an ending other than a call for a return to compromise and civility.  The recall primary election is today.  I have seriously considered voting in the Republican primary for Scott Walker's opponent because, honestly, he couldn't be as bad.  But then I'd be sinking to their level - and I hope I can refrain from doing that.

Look Who I Found!

I ran for the city council when I was in college.  I must have been about 21 or 22.  I forget.  What I do remember is that the newspaper didn't get a 'candidacy photo' of me.  You know: the one with the nice smile, a tie, jacket, and white shirt standing in front of a bland wall.  We just didn't manage to make connections, so they pulled from their files a recent photo of me at a townhall meeting with, if I remember correctly, the new governor of Ohio or somebody like that.  I had hair down to my shoulders, a somewhat unkempt mustache and long sideburns, a white "Property of Kent State" phys ed t-shirt, and a blue denim button-down shirt worn open over it.  I was looking off to the side (at the guy at the meeting, of whom I had just asked a question).   Compared to the other neatly groomed candidates, I looked like the hippie-freak that I was.  So I lost - but not by nearly as much as I expected.  I mean, hundreds of people voted for me.

I also got some 'fan mail'.  It came in a crudely hand-addressed envelope and it was mostly printed matter.  It was hate mail from a 'John Bircher' who, among other things, made some rude references to me being a dirty Jew of some kind.  Naturally, having been raised Lutheran, I was a little surprised.  The printed matter included a little slip with a 'peace sign' printed on it and captioned "Footprint of the American Chicken".  [I don't care who ya are - that there was funny!]  There was other equally hilarious anti-commie and racist stuff meant to frighten me by the sheer weight of its neo-nazi American-ness.  I took it all to school and we had a good laugh over it.  This was clearly a real fringe element kinda' guy.

Another seriously marginalized nutjob constituency of the time was the Ku Klux Klan.  The US Department of Justice, among others, did a pretty good job of dismantling their institutional structure.  The leaders got put into prison and the assets all were taken away.  Much of the largest KKK organization went bankrupt.  They mostly quit blowing up things and burning crosses, although they're not above 'tagging' an occasional minority family's garage.

I bring that up some 40 years later because I see that those nutjobs are still around spreading their hatred and bile.  The thing is, they're no longer marginalized.  They have found a new haven in the Republican Party and their chief media outlet is Fox News.  They're painfully aware that their most open racism isn't generally tolerated, but everything else is, including the completely baseless hatred.  I was finally inspired to write about this discovery (I've been thinking about it a lot lately.) after stumbling over some stunningly insensitive and overtly racist remarks posted on a Fox affiliate station's website after Whitney Houston's death.  It would have been hard for anyone who's not a pure racist to write those comments, they were so vile and hate-filled.  Although the comments were all removed, another blogger preserved some of them here.

These commie-hunter racists and neo-nazis rail on daily about minorities and commies taking over the country and ruining it.  It's like having Senator Joe McCarthy back - only worse.  It seems they've gained relative legitimacy by calling it 'socialism' and 'Marxism' (because nobody really understands either - only that they're 'bad'), referring to illegal immigrants as an 'invasion', fearing Muslim terrorists around every block, and ultimately demonizing anyone who fails to agree with their world view of a pure white Christian English-speaking nation.  Now, they even have a convenient target in the White House.  The president gets hit with all of these descriptions.  Every last one of them.

Of course, all of this is nonsensical.  Muslims aren't socialists and Sharia law isn't Marxism.  Obama is a natural born American; he isn't a Marxist; he isn't Muslim; and he isn't about to seize all of the guns in the US by executive order before he leaves office.  In fact, Obama's even allowed weapons into national parks where they were previously forbidden, but this hasn't stopped the NRA's shrill daily denouncements.  Really, he's done nothing to deserve most of the hatred he's enduring - except be born black and be elected as a Democrat.  These two things apparently give license to the commie-huntin' colored-hatin' nutjobs to say anything they want without serious challenge - and with the full support of Fox News.  Their charges are both false and inconsistent, but they've gotten the duller constituents of the American electorate to go along with them because, well, you sure don't want to go defendin' somebody who's a Marxist socialist, do ya?  How can anybody question that a guy named Hussein is a Muslim?  Everybody knows all the Democrats want to take away your guns and make your women get abortions - don't they?

I have many good friends who are longtime Republicans.  I don't hate them and I hope they don't hate me.  One of the closest is the first guy I ever had a political argument with.  It was 1960 and he was a Nixon man.  I wavered briefly before deciding I was a Kennedy man.  Then we had a snowball fight over it right there by my parents' back porch.  After all, we were eight years old - and if I hadn't taken up a contrary position, there would have been no reason to throw snowballs.  In all the years since, as we grew and became politically aware and involved, we've never really been very far apart in our views.  I'm a little more liberal than he is, but not that much.  Conversely (obviously), he's a little more conservative than I am, but not that much.  I don't know about him, but I know I used to vote for nearly as many Republicans as Democrats.

Sadly, that's all changed because the Republican Party has been swallowed by its most vocal and most extreme hate-filled elements.  These headstrong Christian fundamentalists, racists, misogynists, survivalists, and anti-governmentalists (not all one and the same) have become the overwhelming voice of the Republican Party.  That voice demands a Christian dominated nation, closed borders, a legitimization of racist bigotry, control and dominance over women, a 'polite' society based on fear of the armament of others, and indiscriminately slashing taxes and benefits, regardless of the real effects on government services and our society in general.  They are completely unwilling to consider any sort of compromise.  They also actively hate anyone who doesn't agree with them.  It's a simple matter to find websites and pages-long 'Comments' sections where the most incredible hate-filled lies and invective are not only freely offered, but applauded by others who add their own insults.  This is both the symptom and the problem.

You know what?  If you want to hate me, then I am perfectly willing to hate you back - and I can be better at it.  One thing I can do is to help others like me to win the elections that you have convinced yourselves are 'in the bag' because you're too stupid or too stubborn to listen to reason.  While I seriously worried that the president wouldn't be reelected, all of you haters were so confident that it couldn't possibly happen that some of your heads literally exploded when it did.  Those candidates of yours that did manage to win have put on a show of endless embarrassments - which delights me because I hate you.  Unlike you, I try not to gloat nor do I join in self-aggrandizing liberal circle jerks over it, as you do for each perceived misstep by the current administration or anyone in it.  In fact, I have actually blocked more of my liberal friends' posts from my facebook newsfeed than I have conservatives'.  I'd really prefer not to have to verbally flay all those right-wing dimbulbs and honestly, hate is an activity that drains me emotionally.  Ignoring the nutjobs is so much easier than worrying that they will actually elect people who think like them so, for all of my true Republican friends: would you please kick these idiots out and take your party back from them?

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and What to Put Into Your Tires.

It seems that more people want to know whether to pay for a nitrogen tire fill than want to know the real answer, which is 42.  So since I've been embroiled in this debate far more times than I care to remember, I've decided to memorialize it here by cutting and pasting some of my more cogent thoughts on the matter.

I have attempted to list all of the supposed 'benefits' of nitrogen in tires and my responses, supported by scientific fact, to each of them.  If the comments warrant it, I'll add some calculations or examples.

1) Prevention of oxidation: Some suppliers and users claim that the absence of oxygen in the tire inhibits oxidation and hardening of the rubber. While that is true, it only addresses the inside of the tire carcass, not the outside. Tires oxidize and age primarily from the outside, not from the inside. If they oxidize inside, they use up the 21% oxygen in there and it is not replenished until you pump in more air (which, unless the tire was totally empty, will leave much less than 21% oxygen in the new atmosphere inside). The outside is constantly bathed in a 21% oxygen atmosphere, not to mention lots of other ugly stuff (sunlight, ozone, etc.) that will make them harden and crack. Tires degrade from the outside, not from the inside. The existence of pumped-up 30-year-old TRX (or 40-year-old XZX!) spare tires is proof of that. So as an oxidation preventative, the effect is real, but inconsequential.

2) Stability of pressure: A gas is a gas is a gas. Boyle's and Charles's Gas Laws are universally accepted as a physical/chemical fact. No gas, regardless of its atomic or molecular weight, behaves any differently inside a tire. While the mass might vary by a barely measurable amount (some gases are heavier than others), the pressure does not. For those who seriously care about weight savings, nitrogen's molecular weight is 28 amu and oxygen's is 32. However, given that air is 78% nitrogen in the first place, the average molecular weight of air is only about 28.5 amu - effectively the same as pure nitrogen. If somebody with a better engineering background than I have would like to calculate the interior volume of a typical mounted tire, I'll be happy to calculate the mass differences for a few selected gases.

3) Dry gas: Another claim is that nitrogen, as a dry gas, makes the pressure more stable because there is no water vapor in it. This only matters when the water changes states. Frozen or liquid water (doesn't matter which it is) in the tire at normal pressures must vaporize to increase the pressure. That is only going to happen above 100ºC - but wait. That's only at normal atmospheric pressure at sea level! Tires are at least twice that pressure! So the boiling point of that water increases dramatically. Even if you could manage to get your tires hot enough to boil any water in there, it is likely to be an inconsequential amount affecting the pressure very little. Besides, there's a very simple solution to this: dry air. Anybody can put a dry air filter on a compressor line for about $10. That's a lot better than 600 times that for a dry nitrogen generator.

4) Less migration through the tire carcass: Nitrogen is a smaller atom than oxygen. That, too, is true. So nitrogen suppliers would have you believe that oxygen leaks out of small holes that the nitrogen can't get through. Now, let's remember that oxygen and nitrogen don't exist in the atmosphere as individual atoms.  They exist as pairs of atoms in what are called covalent molecules.  Oxygen's covalent radius (size, when bonded to another atom of oxygen) is 73 picometers (pm). Nitrogen's covalent radius is 75 pm. BFD. When you recall that a molecule of either nitrogen or oxygen is somewhat dumbell-shaped (consisting of two of those covalent radii) and that gas molecules simply bounce around anyway, any 74 pm-sized holes in the tire would block most oxygen molecules as well. Even if an air-filled tire lost all its oxygen, that would be only 21% of its fill. Refilling it with air would leave it at about 4.4% oxygen (21% of the 21% of gas replaced), so if you really did have a bunch of pesky 74 pm holes letting all your oxygen out, two air refills would give you a fairly pure nitrogen filled tire (less than 1% oxygen). Tires lose air because they leak gases, not a gas.

5) Nitrogen is inert: Pure unadulterated BS. Nitrogen is one of the most plentiful active elements we know. Life would be impossible without it. Ever heard of 'amino acids'? The 'amine' is hydrogen and nitrogen. Ever heard of 'nitrous oxide'? Nitrogen & oxygen. Either a 'shot' of horsepower or an emissions headache (NOX). Plants cannot survive without nitrogen. High explosives are largely nitrogen compounds - like the ones that blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The only thing nitrogen isn't is flammable ... or a lachrymator.

6) Nitrogen keeps the tires cooler.  I'm at a complete loss to understand how anyone could believe this.  I'm definitely waiting for someone to come up with even the slightest piece of evidence that it's true.  Nitrogen doesn't conduct or reflect heat any differently than any other gas.

The bottom line is that a nitrogen generator costs about $6000. If you've been dumb enough to buy one, you need to convince other people that you were smart in doing so; otherwise, you'll never amortize the thing. So those who try to sell the 'benefits' of nitrogen are very earnest (if not desperately so) in their pitches and they probably really do believe all this made-up stuff. If it's free, go right ahead. Put nitrogen in your tires. It won't hurt a thing. Just don't believe that it makes the slightest measurable difference.

Understanding Beemers on the road.

We have to start out today with proper definitions of terms.  I have two generally operational BMWs:


I drive a 'Bimmer'.  It is a 1987 535is BMW automobile also known as The Kelvinator.

I ride a 'Beemer'.  It is a 1978 R100RS BMW motorcycle also known as The Motorsport.  This vintage of BMW bikes is known as the 'Airhead', named because the heads (and engine) are entirely air cooled.

Notice the difference in the words.  Short 'i' sound - BMW cars; long 'e' sound - BMW bikes.


So a week ago, I drove my Bimmer to Pittsburgh for a BMW event.  It was the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix, held in Schenley Park in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  What actually is going on is that a bunch of separate events by different car clubs and groups is held, centering around a handful of races through the park by vintage ('old', 'retired', etc.) race cars.  It is a charity event that raises a significant amount of money for autism and has been around for awhile.  This was at the height of the summer's late July heat wave and my air conditioning is somewhat - shall we say, 'marginal' in the car, so it was a pretty miserable time most of the weekend.


I set out very early Friday, clearing Milwaukee before sunrise.  At the time the sun was coming up, a nasty thunderstorm was coming down.  It was also the time I was thinking about a quick stop for a Kwik Trip donut and coffee for breakfast.  As I headed toward the exit ramp, up ahead, through the heavy downpour, I could see a taillight.  Just one, going on down I-94 ahead of me.  That meant it was a bike, a guy probably getting very wet, and a hardcore biker who wouldn't be stopped by a mere frog-strangler of a rainstorm.  In other words, probably a BMW rider.


It rained heavily all the rest of the way to the north side of Chicago.  I was thinking how glad I was that I was not that biker.  As the day went on, it got hotter all the way across Indiana.  By the time I hit the Ohio state line, it was above 95º and the car's a/c was fading fast.  I decided it was a good time to just stop and take a break at one of the excellent rest stops on US 30.  I was looking for a shaded spot but in the middle of the shadeless lot, I saw an Airhead.  Blue with white bags and seat, I was intrigued by it, so I pulled in beside it.  I could see a guy sitting back under one of the picnic table shelters and I yelled, "Izzat yer Airhead?"  "Yep!" he replied.


I walked back and sat down beside him.  I pulled out a picture of mine and showed it to him.  He was an old school hardcore biker.  Big beard pulled into a tie below his chin.  Work boots. Worsted work pants.  T shirt and head rags.  All good for protection and some heat dissipation.  But once the temperature and humidity hit those levels, there's no cooling effect from being on a bike.  Moisture doesn't evaporate and hot air doesn't remove any heat, regardless of how fast you go.  It's like being in a blast furnace.  I told him I was really glad I wasn't him riding in that heat.


We introduced one another and I asked him where he was headed.  "Mid Ohio," he answered.  To the vintage bike races there.  He figured he was about 90 miles away and I agreed.  He hadn't been there in a number of years, so I told him he'd love that 30 was new the rest of the way.  There would be no two-lane slogging through little s***holes like Crestline.  Four lanes, divided, and light traffic all the way - but hot.  Then, I asked where he was coming from.  I hadn't noted the plate on the bike. "Milwaukee."  "Hey, wait; was that you this morning ...?"  Yeah; it was.  He'd had an entire state to dry off, so it wasn't too obvious by then.  Wow.  It's not often that I get to pity the same guy twice in a day for two such totally different reasons.


As we got up to leave, I offered him a bottle of ice water from my cooler in the back seat.  He'd been drinking from a one liter metal water bottle and he tried to refuse.  When I insisted, as we walked toward the rest stop building, he said, "No; I can fill this up at the bubbler inside."


I stopped and turned to him to look him in the eye.  "No," I said firmly.  "There is no bubbler inside.  This is Ohio.  We have 'drinking fountains'."  As it dawned on him what I was saying and he started to grin, I added, "Besides, mine is colder."  So we went to the car and he got a cold one.


I hope you had a good time at the races, Jim.

Riposte to Jalopnik's "Renting a car sucks"

Some poor sap went to Wichita (it appears) to rent a car for a family wedding - reminding me of my own rental car nightmares over the years.


One of the earliest was for an unknown reason.  It was in Akron, so it was probably when I had a wrecked car in for bodywork and had an insurance-provided rental.  However, that did not cover the fuel charges.  As an inexperienced twenty-something, I hadn't learned about this scam when I went to turn in my car.  The Edie McClurg clone sweetly informed me that I owed them something like ten bucks for fuel.  "WHAT!?"  (This was when gas was around $1.25/gal.)


Agent:  "We put almost three gallons of gas in your car."  And only managed to spill about half of that down our drains.
Me:  "That's over $3 a gallon!"
Agent:  "Well, we're not in the business of selling gas."
Me:  "Obviously not, at those prices.  In fact, you're lucky to be in business at all.  I won't be back."


I think that was National.  I haven't been back.


Toward the end of my Akron Years, I was to fly to Salt Lake City for a legal services conference held at the Snowbird resort up in the mountains.  I figured it'd be fun to drive the mountain roads, so I checked on rental cars with Hertz, who provided "fine automobiles from Ford".  The phone call went something like this:


Me: "Can I reserve a Mustang for <date> at the Salt Lake City airport?"
Hertz agent:  "Yes sir.  Do you want the four cylinder or the eight cylinder?"
Me:  [This is rhetorical, right?  Who in creation would want to reserve a 4-cylinder Mustang?]  "Eight."
H.A.: [Words to the effect of, "No problem."]


So I was pumped.  As I flew out with the other lawyer, we talked about how cool it'd be to arrive in a Mustang, assuming I hadn't killed us both on the drive up the mountain.  On arrival, I headed to the rental counter.  [Time to plug in the Edie McLurg character again.]  This is the edited version:


Me:  "Hi.  I reserved a Mustang."
She:  "We don't have any Mustangs."
Me:  "WHAT!?  I reserved one!  I have a confirmation!"
She:  "We never have Mustangs here.  During ski season, we get Explorers, but we never get Mustangs."
Me:  "What about my reservation?"
She:  "I can put you in a Tempo."
Me:  "No you can't.  I can ride the damn shuttle bus up the mountain."

The Mustang I didn't get.

A few years earlier, I'd had my first foreign rental experience in Mexico.  Merida, to be exact.  This was a trip to the Yucatan with my wife and a good friend, Ed.  We flew into Merida and picked up a blue Renault 12 there.

El Renault.

It was a 4-cylinder 4-speed, but it never felt like it was running on more than three of those cylinders.  It was a real piece of crap well-suited to its environment of crap maintenance and crap fuel.  At least it never left us stranded.

In contrast, my first rental car in Europe was brilliant: an Alfa 155.  A 4 cylinder 1.6 liter 16-valve five-speed sedan in metallic red. [* None of these photos are of the exact car I rented, but they are representative of year, make, model, and color.]

The Alfa I loved.

We drove it from Rome to Sorrento; then down the Amalfi Drive to Salerno and back up through Benevento and more.  Italian gas jockeys complimented me on it ("campione del mondo!") and it was the only rental I ever paid to wash so that it looked great.  It topped out at 215 km/h on a slight downhill while drafting a Rover on the Autostrada.  [Only after I returned did I discover that the Italian national speed limit is only 140 km/h.]  It was like an autocrosser for the four hours of the Amalfi Drive, not getting above third gear for much more than a minute the whole time.  If I could have brought it home, I would have.



The next time, I got stuck with a 'leftover' 1.4 Golf at the Frankfurt Flugplatz.  They claimed they had no reservation for me and, to get me out of their hair, they 'found' this one.

The Pope had a Golf - only his was cooler than this.

Boring silver with crappy nearly smooth Firestone tires, we drove it through an 18" Alpine snowstorm.  Through closed passes.  Nearly rear-ended an Opel turning left because of the tires.  Managed to see 190 km/h flat out at redline in fifth gear on the Autobahn on the way to München.  It could have done more, but I figured it was bad form to puff the engine in the rental.

This last time, although it was larger and more powerful, I was unhappily ambushed.  I had reserved a car.  It was to be a compact with a manual transmission.  When I got to the counter, a pleasant young man waited:


Avis Guy:  "I know that you reserved a manual transmission car.  Would you mind driving an automatic?"
Me:  "Yes, I would.  I reserved a manual and I want one."
AG:  "Well, I can give you a manual, but it will be a larger car.  I won't charge you the difference."
Me:  "What's the catch?"
AG:  "It's a Renault."
Me:  "Crap; you're giving me a FRENCH CAR?"
AG:  "At least it's black.  Not as ugly as all the silver ones ..."


Oh, hell.  So I took it.  After signing things, he handed me a key ring with a big plastic card on it (with the usual 'lock-unlock' and 'panic' icons on one side of it) and an Avis tag.


Me:  "What's this?"
AG:  "That's the key.  You put it in the slot and push the button to start the car."
Me:  "O-o-o-o-okay-y-y-y ..."


So off we went to Space 29.  Along the way, we saw the metallic lime green Opel Astra we probably would have had otherwise - dammit.  We threw all our stuff into the roomy hatch and climbed aboard the black Renault Scenic.

Yeah; it looks like a Pontiac Vibe on drugs.  One of the most relentlessly annoying vehicles I have ever had the displeasure to drive.  It started immediately with a seat that was virtually impossible to adjust to be comfortable.  I settled for 'kinda' close' because I wanted to get on the road.  Then I looked for the slot.  Nothing on the dash.  Nothing close to the 'Start' button.  After a minute or two, I located it lurking, classic Saab-like, just behind the shift boot.  The dashboard (which, annoyingly, is in the center of the car, not in front of the driver where God intended it to be) came to life.

Renault Scenic cockpit.  That onboard nav system?  Forget it.  Didn't have it.

I pushed in the clutch and pressed the button.  The engine came to life instantly.  There was, however, a problem.  The parking brake was on.  I searched in vain for a lever, a pedal, the owner's manual, anything to offer a clue.  For a full two minutes.  Maybe more.  Finally, I spotted the big wide power window-like switch visible to the upper right of the shifter.  A 'P' in a circle and a red light on it.  That was it.  Pushing and pulling did nothing.  Cursing didn't seem to work, either.  Finally, my wife suggested I step on the brake.  I did.  I pulled up on the button.  A light electric whirring sound came from the rear and "Voila!" we were free to go!  Forty feet down the parking garage, I realized I hadn't a clue where I was going - and the nav system was in my luggage ...


Suitably 'navved up', we hit the road for Innsbruck.  Along the way, I discovered:

1. how annoying it was to have silver-outlined vents reflecting off the window around the mirror
2. that the gearbox was a six-speed, not five
3. that the Scenic is at least usable in the "2M" lane [that's 2 meters wide - on Swiss highways under construction]
4. that the seat still sucked
5. that it was no fun at all to drive

What I would not discover until the following day was the cruise control on/off switch (on the other side of the shifter console - logical, right?) and not until days later that the dash was switchable to at least give me a tachometer in addition to a fuel gauge and speedometer.  It handled dreadfully on the mountain roads I'd so eagerly looked forward to.  It was so dull on the Autobahn that I saw 170 km/h and didn't bother going any faster, usually running at 150 or less.  It was a transportation appliance - and I hate that.

As rental cars go, I don't often have one.  When I do, it's usually unpleasant.  So don't come whinin' to me if yours sucks.

My friend Pink.

Coming off a miserably hot trip to the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix/BMW 5er Fest, I figured I'd be writing about that by now.  Instead, as I sat in a Bob Evans restaurant checking facebook halfway across Indiana on the way home last night, I saw the news that Pink had died the day before.  I also saw that at least one other classmate didn't recall him, so I figure it's my duty as his old friend to fix that.


During elementary school, I was lucky to have two best friends.  Everybody who knew me in those years also knows Homer.  Aside from the name, Homer was and is a unique character and we are still good friends today.  Pink was the other one.  These two were polar opposites in just about every imaginable way.  While Lee Richards served as my second mother and Homer a spare brother (with whom I got along better), if I wasn't at Richards' with Homer, odds are I was somewhere with Pink.  I don't remember exactly when I met Pink.  It had to be by the third grade because I remember rejoicing with him when we both found out that we'd been assigned to Central School's resident 'hottie' (Mrs. Patterson) for the fourth grade.  


Pink was an only child of working folks.  He'd gotten his nickname from his mother, who simply described how he looked as a baby.  For that matter, he was always on the pink side because he was freckled, so he went with it.  'Alan' was a little too bland for his taste anyway.  The Affolters lived in a small single story house on Second Drive.  I spent days there.  Anita was my chain-smoking second mom.  Bob wasn't usually home because he was working (Joy Manufacturing, I think), but I remember him as a rough and good-natured guy who also sucked down cigarettes like they were candy.  They were always generous hosts, even if I was there daily.


Early on, Pink and I fished.  I don't think we ever fished anywhere but the Tuscora Park lake.  We never caught anything worth catching, but we fished anyway.  If we felt adventurous, we'd take a big hike out north of 'The Lagoon'.  At the time, this was a nearly impenetrable wilderness of thorns and briars.  It would take us hours to go a half mile and generally no one knew where we were nor when we'd be back.  Sometimes, I was sure we'd never get out, even though we never left that small valley.  If we weren't fishing or hiking, we were playing with toy soldiers, airplanes, and tanks.  We fought every WWII battle over and over in his living room, in his bedroom or in his yard.  OK; maybe not the Italians.  I guess neither of us knew the Italians had been involved at the time.  I do remember that the battalion on the sofa was rarely defeated due to the difficulty of scaling the front. Things were more even when the battleground was the hedge out front or the abandoned ruins of my sisters' Flintstones city-mounted-on-a-board.  While we argued over our respective casualty counts, it was an academic exercise, and we never really fought.


Later, we started building models.  First it was warplanes (so we could attack the infantry and armor, of course!) and later cars.  Pink was my motorhead friend.  We both liked Pontiacs and Fords while he occasionally strayed off to build a Chevy.  We spent hours at LaFountaine's basement (back around to the right corner) downtown, and at Dale's Hobby Shop, a block east, pondering our next acquisitions.  We spent days on end gluing, painting, and customizing in his bedroom.  In the end, I don't think either of us built much of anything to be proud of, but we'd enter them in contests anyway and one of us might snag a ribbon.  We drooled over the latest and greatest drag racers in the magazines we shared.  We 'bench raced' for hours, although neither of us was old enough to drive yet.


We played sports.  Football, baseball, and basketball.  Day-long games.  Wherever we could find a venue, we played.  While it was often at 'Krieger Field' at the corner of Second and Park, it was nearly as often in the big open field next to Pink's house at the corner of Dort Lane and Second Drive.  To this day, I don't know who owned it, but we were always there playing baseball and football - mostly because there were no windows close enough to break, as there were at my house.


The other players almost always included Tom West, who lived around the corner on Dale Lane, and Dick Avon, another half a block away.  Tom's older brother (Ed?) and a couple of his friends would occasionally join us and then we felt like we were playing with the pros. While Pink and Homer were my best friends, we were rarely a threesome.  Homer and Pink had completely different interests which rarely, if ever, converged.


John Kennedy was killed when we were in the sixth grade.  At 11 and 12 (I'm a few months older.), we felt the shock of the nation, but we weren't quite old enough to completely know why.  After the added sensation of seeing Lee Harvey Oswald killed on live television, we got together the next day (Sunday) instead of watching the funeral.  I remember it was a bright and not-too-cool day for the season.  One of those 'high contrast' days.  We were sitting on our bikes on Lake Street in the park, looking out over the lake in the early afternoon.  We speculated whether the funeral was over.  Pink said it must be, because 'Catholics can't have Mass after noon'.  I had no clue, so I went with that (later finding out it hadn't been the case since 1956).  I have no idea why that sticks in my mind all these years later.


When the British Invasion washed over us a few months later, we were both caught up in this 'new' rock & roll, but we ended up as contrarian fans of the patriotic-themed Paul Revere and the Raiders.  We played records for hours in Pink's room (neither of us played an instrument although I took some abortive keyboards lessons for which I never practiced - because I was off playing with Pink) and we competed to see who could come up with the newest stuff the soonest.  I clearly remember him telling me about the Raiders' "Spirit of '67" in his hands before I knew it had been released.  Then I went to his house (it was Christmas Day, or the day after) and we nearly wore it out playing it.  We like The Grassroots and The Buckinghams a lot.  LaFountain's was the place to shop 45s and LPs.  Right inside the east entrance, to your left.  There they all were.


Pink was also my horndog guy friend.  We regularly talked about the girls we thought were hot.  Turned out Pink was a 'boob' man and I wasn't, so we never faced the prospect of fighting over any women either of us might hope to attract.  Not that either of us had a clue how to do that anyway, in spite of the fact that we'd stealthily read Bob's haphazardly-hidden Playboy magazines when we got the chance.


It wasn't long after that that we diverged.  Pink became 'one of the shop guys'.  He'd never been much of a scholar and there was no real expectation for him to be anything but what he was and what he became.  He was going to start working right out of high school and I was going to be headed to college.  My friends were different than his by then and, although I'd always been a kind of 'in between' type, I gravitated more toward the college prep kids and he went the other way.  That was it.  I rarely saw him through high school and only a handful of times afterward.  The last time, he was planted on a bar stool like he'd grown there and the decades of sitting drinking beer for hours every night showed.  Pink was never slimmer than 'stocky', even as a child, and he was by then 'morbidly obese', to use the kindest term.  I figured then he wouldn't be around long because he seemed to have no real inclination to change.  We talked briefly, we shook hands; and then I moved on.  We never stopped being friends, but we never continued to be, either ... and maybe that's why I'm saddened  to hear he's gone.