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seat-safety-switch · 14 hours
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Nowadays, we have access to more manufacturing capability than ever before. Weirdos working in their basements can quickly order professional-looking products. A single drunken whim can activate a factory half a world away, to pump out something that would have been impossible for even the hardest-working hobbyist even twenty years ago. Sometimes you can do it at home.
Obviously, this is great. All your strange little joke projects can be near-instantly materialized into reality. You can add to the world's surplus of shit that nobody needs for mere pennies. Total nirvana, right? Wrong: the next thing you want is more capability. It's incredible what you can already do, sure, sure, but now I want to be able to laser cut aerospace-grade titanium in my living room.
This sort of tension between can-do spirit and can't-do reality is what has gotten us this far, however. Even now, there are sleep-deprived hobbyists working hard on making sure that I can fill my entire house with noxious gases and fine mineral particulate. They want to help me construct a toaster entirely out of an alloy that we once had to trick the Soviet Union into letting us buy to turn into stealth bombers.
This is what real progress is, not that false thing that happens outside my house, at the place called "work." Here, no manager is going to stand over me and tell me that an inert nitrogen-purged atmosphere is probably not the same thing as a shag carpet for the purposes of welding. Thank you, hard-working weirdos.
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seat-safety-switch · 2 days
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Are you sick of the weather? I sure am. Whenever the weekend and its glorious expanse of free time rolls around, outdoor conditions take an instantaneous dive towards "poopy." Sure, you could point fingers in all kinds of directions about this, but I know who's to blame: the weatherman.
When I was a kid, our elementary school got to tour the local television channel. Rather than educational, to young me it was terrifying. All these fictions that were drawn by my television set were just ordinary, mortal people like myself. People with vendettas. People who made mistakes. The weatherman could mis-read a number, declare the weather fantastic, and kill fifty people on the highway in the blizzard of the century.
It was then that I decided not to trust authority. Sure, it had been brewing for awhile. My parents were still going out and leaving me behind at home for weeks on end whenever a circus was even close to our town, hoping to finally break free of their pitiful office jobs and Wall Street achievement arcs and get into what was really important: carny life. While they were gone, a family services worker or police officer would sometimes drop by to make sure that I was okay. I'd lie to them, of course. Straight As across the board, officer. They're just in the toilet. Yes, both of them. Taco night went badly wrong. Do you have a fucking warrant?
Cops were one thing, though, and learning not to believe the weatherman was another. All these profitable corporations and beloved products on the commercial breaks were vouching for him, risking their reputations in the process. A better person would have been galvanized to create their own weather-predicting operation, saving lives with up-to-the-second forecasts generated by a cobbled-together home Doppler radar setup. Me, I just got real good at driving in the snow. It helped that Mom never noticed the dents and guardrail paint transfer on her Aries until I did.
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seat-safety-switch · 3 days
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I don't know if you've ever been to Paris before, but I recommend going. Normally, I would not have gone, but I made a really rich enemy on IRC and he spent a lot of money to have me kidnapped and brought to his home country. While I was there, I got to try a bunch of restaurants (they're hostage-takers, not barbarians) and came away impressed. Something was missing, though, and herein is my genius idea.
In Paris you can get any kind of food. Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai: and it's all good. All of it. You literally can't find a bad restaurant. At one point, I walked into a convenience store and got a plate of one-Euro nachos that made me cry at the beauty of the arrangement.
Everyone around me was taking this for granted. Having lived there for years, their quality threshold had crept invisibly upwards until nothing could impress again. They needed something to re-calibrate their sense of truly bad food. That's where I came in. After I got kicked out of the country, I decided to come back with some investor support. I can burn cereal, usually by roasting it gently with a blowtorch on the top of an old gas can. Investors were easy to find.
Our first week of opening was tremendous. Hardened Parisians were discovering their first taste of truly incompetent food. The novelty of it all had captured them. There's just one problem, though: after making an entire lunch rush's first of poorly-cut toast in reheated canned soup, my cooking skills began to improve from sheer experience. The complaints began to change tone. You got too good, they cried, you're not the same bad chef we once loved. Again, I was deported.
I looked out the window of the plane as it left De Gaulle, staring down onto the beautiful streets of Paris. Down there, I imagined, real gourmets were now eating food out of trash cans out of desperation to recapture what they had experienced with me. If there is one nice thing to be said, I now have two Michelin Stars here in my homeland of Canada, where my consommé-and-grilled-cheese recipe is now so much better than most of our restaurants that it made the Prime Minister Herself come and spit in my face for ruining the economy, before awarding me an Order of Canada. It's not the same.
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seat-safety-switch · 4 days
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In school, they taught us the basics of how to function in our civilization. Read, write, calculate a restaurant tip in your head. Really lucky kids got to discover a passion, whereas everyone else was promised to emerge a fully-fledged member of society.
One thing that school does not teach you is how to work on a car. It's not really relevant to their whole "thing," and even if you do take a mechanics' class in high school, they don't have enough time to cover everything in depth. They certainly don't have enough time to talk about what to do when everything goes wrong and you need to get to work in the morning.
That's why, in a time long past, there was adult education. You could enter your ass in night school, and figure out how to overcome the incompetency that landed you in this pickle. The government even subsidized it, to make sure nobody fell behind. Of course, that's all gone now, although you can certainly enrol in an expensive "learn to oil change" class at the continuing education annex, if you want. Or, you can figure it out like most adults do these days: on YouTube.
All this is going to come to an end soon, because we are launching the Seat Safety Switch Seducational School. You might think that private, continuing education like this is an overpriced scam. You might think that we're going to take your money and make you fix my shitty cars. You might think that our instructors are going to do less teaching and more yelling to hit arbitrary deadlines. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you. Sign up today and find out for yourself!
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seat-safety-switch · 5 days
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Snowblowers are the kind of tool that is born out of frustration. When you're out on the sidewalk, shovelling for the third time today, it can seem obvious that the best thing to do is to apply internal combustion power. And I agree: the best thing to do is to apply internal combustion power, in the direction of the airport, where you then use another internal combustion engine to leave this accursed province and go somewhere that's warm all the time and has cars that don't rust.
Barring that, though, snowblowers also seem like a good idea. You start the appliance, push it down the street, and all the snow becomes your neighbour's problem at incredible speeds. There's just one problem: snowblowers are a complex mechanical system that requires maintenance. In fact, their primitive small-enginey ways require more maintenance than a car, which is already well beyond the capability envelope of most so-called adults in the current era. Nobody knows how to rebuild a carburetor anymore, not when they can just spend another $600 to get another snowblower.
This means that in the spring, tons of snowblowers with dicky carbs, broken augers, or seized engines turn up on the curb or for a few pennies. These infernal machines let the owners down when they needed them most, and now the humans are getting their revenge. To me, it is shocking that someone would throw away a perfectly-good appliance just because it doesn't work at all in any way.
I like to scoop them up, give them a little freshening job, and flip them for a profit on the first week of a snowfall, when everyone is already sick of shovelling and wants to just buy something that makes the problem easier. Really, it's a public service. I don't want the sidewalks to be covered in snow because it makes it way harder for me to drive on them.
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seat-safety-switch · 6 days
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You know who's a gigantic nerd? Your doctor is a gigantic nerd. They had to go to school for, like, a really long time, study all these weird names, work in weird labs for free, and learn about all the parts inside a butt.
And people are complicated. You might think that there's a lot of kinds of car, but at least Dodge generally made all of the Darts the same. Differences between kids go way further than "line worker was a little drunk and swayed this way when he put the windshield wiper hose clamps on." You can't get a Haynes manual, you have to just have the experience.
Me, I'm more of a "hands on" learner, but medical school really frowns upon you opening up the patients. It's one of those union things, I guess. You have to put in your dues, read some dry political literature, before they let you get right in there. Even if you bring your own knife. Medical school wasn't for me, in other words, but I still admire the commitment to public service that is figuring out all the things that can go wrong on a relatively low-mileage, single-owner human body.
Which is not to say that I've given up the hobby. You might have figured out by now that I'm the kind of person who sees a couple little, minute, not-for-everyone details and burrows right in there. I'm going to go see my doctor next week, just to soak up the value of their experience in human longevity. Yeah, that was horseshit. I'm actually hoping they won't notice I'm using the nitrous oxide pump while their backs are turned.
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seat-safety-switch · 7 days
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Everyone in my town has been 3D-printing dogs lately. Even though although the local shelter isn't particularly happy about it, I've never seen my neighbours so cheerful. It turns out that all we needed to stop obsessing about our inevitable glum oblivion from ultra-capitalism is a button you can press to make a puppy come out.
Sure, a lot of houses are up to their metaphorical yin-yangs in dogs. Who can blame them? The most intriguing thing in our lives is the "new." What colour of puppy will come out next? What happens if I spin the breed selector with my eyes closed? Can this thing print food for the several dozen very hungry animals now occupying my workshop area?
I'm not the kind of person to neglect anything. Well, except for my cars, house, yard, health, employment status, and environment. Dogs, though, I'll take care of them no problem. So I've been going around to the neighbours and scooping up their unwanted, extra dogs. What am I doing with them all? Horsepower. Er, uh, with dogs. You know what I mean.
I got the idea when I watched one of those nature documentaries. Some dude up north was using a bunch of dogs to pull his sled through the snow. It seemed a little dorky to me, but it also greatly appealed. You see, I didn't have any running cars. The last of my Diplomats was busy bleeding out on the driveway, with a hole punched in the engine about the size of a grocery store budget coconut.
Sure, the puppies don't have much pulling power individually, but if you put about sixty of them in front of the car, then you can get perilously close to breaking the playground-zone speed limit. And yes, there isn't much in the way of control: they're young, they haven't been trained, they incessantly yap, and there's a lot of poop on the front of my car now. In terms of getting to work on time? I also don't do that. When I do show up, though, everyone is so happy to see the puppies that they barely notice when I turn around and immediately start heading home after feeding my canine propulsion units the contents of the break-room fridge.
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seat-safety-switch · 8 days
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In Canada, we're famous for our bilingualism. Sure, there's other bilingual countries out there. Some might even be tri- or quadrilingual. We don't know, and our media doesn't tell us. All we do know is that when you pick up a cereal box from the shelf, you get to learn what the French name of the cereal is. It's Cheerios. Couldn't have guessed that.
All this means that, throughout your life in Anglo Canada, you are constantly getting a subliminal reinforcement of French. One day, you discover that you can actually read a reasonable amount of the microwave installation instructions despite having pulled the wrong manual out of the box. Shortly after that, you begin to feel a curiosity for this mysterious other culture. And by that, I mean you want to go buy a French car.
Unfortunately for me and my fellow Canucks, options for French cars are few and far between. The overwhelming hegemony of the Americans mean that the absolute weirdest stuff we get is made in Romania under contract to Germans using Japanese robots. Why do we not have Citroëns? There is no valid reason, other than the fact that they went nearly bankrupt the last time they tried to sell their cars here. That's not supposed to discourage you, silly, General Motors has gone bankrupt three or four times while I've been writing these sentences!
So, if you're out there, French automakers, please bring your weird cars to my country. We can go get a steamé and a Pepsi, and we can find out if the interior of your car holds up well to poutine gravy stains. It probably doesn't, but that's okay, I'll still take the depreciated Francomobile and enjoy opulent luxury comfort on my way back to my home province, where the only French we use is to incorrectly pronounce the phrase "croissaint-wich" at the airport Burger King.
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seat-safety-switch · 9 days
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You can learn a lot about how something was built by watching it break. At least that's my excuse for watching over a hundred hours of YouTube "gone wrong" videos instead of actually getting any work done this week. Take, for example, the collapse of a bridge. If you'd never seen one crumble to bits and drop into the water, you wouldn't know they're made out of steel rebar with concrete poured over top. Any bridge you try to make without that knowledge would totally suck ass. In a way, that bridge gave its life so that others could live. Thanks for your sacrifice, bridge.
Among my friends who are especially productive – "capable," if you will – they get into these little funks where they get depressed about not being able to finish their projects. What they do then is create a little tiny side project, small enough that they can start and finish it quickly, and then reassure themselves that they can actually get things done. Even if those things are a little pipe cleaner kitty. Absolutely adorable, and confirms their place as creators of the universe. Destroying things is the same deal for me.
Nothing gets the old creative juices going like turning a perfectly good automatic transmission entirely into neutrals, for instance. It gets other juices going, too, but that's a problem for the highway cleanup crew to worry about. Once I've been freed of the constraint of "this car needs to run right now," then things can get kinda weird. Maybe I want to put a manual transmission in, push an extra pedal. Perhaps I want a Lenco drag-racing transmission, and I need to come up with a disguise so I can trick the guy at the swap meet into giving it to me ("Lenco inspector," I'll bark, "hand 'em over.")
So take it from me. If you're feeling stuck on a project, or otherwise uninspired, go recklessly destroy an object of actual value and watch that sucker fall apart. Holy shit! Did you know springs are in these things? I better save each and every one of these springs just in case they come in handy later. I'll probably need to build something to organize them...
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seat-safety-switch · 10 days
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Glues! You might not be aware of it, but adhesives rule the world around you. No matter what two objects you want to stick together, some egghead in a chemistry lab has worked out an elaborate concoction that will do so. Now you just need to figure out which one it is, and also read some instructions for the first time in your life.
I've never liked glues, probably because of the aforementioned "read the instructions" thing. They either set too fast or not at all, and they make a sticky mess when you knock them over onto your precariously-balanced workbench full of other failed projects. For me, the correct fastener was a bolt, or a rivet, or if you put a gun to my head some kind of stupid finger-pinching clippy thing that would work twice and then break forever.
Nowadays, things are going in a different direction. Fasteners vibrate and come loose. Bolts would rather not stay bolted, if it's all the same to you, pip pip cheerio, sorry about your axle there chap. They also cost money, which bosses don't like. So, automakers and engineers use more glues. Glob goes here, then job goes here. This means that, whenever something else they make breaks, you're going to be spending all afternoon slowly heating up and forcing apart some sticky mess. As a cool bonus, it will also fill your work area with deadly fumes.
What finally turned me in favour of glue? The local autobody shop had to throw out a whole bunch of autobody epoxy. This stuff is hyper-sticky, meant to glue whole cars together. All I had to do was pour it into their dumpster, and then back my rusty shitbox of a daily driver in there. Sealed up all the rust holes, and probably permanently entombed some of the trunk mice in there as well. No more wet feet! No more poop in the glovebox!
Sure, when it comes time to change the rear tires, it's going to kinda suck to get them off the wheel. Hey, wait, when they pop a hole in them I can probably just fill them up with glue too! What idiot ever thought to put air in tires in the first place? Get with the modern era of industrial adhesives, suckers.
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seat-safety-switch · 11 days
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Nothing is worse than the ninth or tenth weekend of a really grody rebuild, getting ready for that first crank, and not even getting spark. It’s in times like these that I turn to prayer, and “prayer” is my little nickname for the 36-inch pipe wrench that I use to smash things when I get pissed off.
When you ask experienced, professional mechanics about the techniques they use, everyone says they use logic and deduction. For most jobs, sure. You walk the problem, figure out which of the requirements is missing, and you walk that problem in turn. It’s easy when it’s someone else’s car, and you don’t really have that much invested in the car.
Emotionally, a project car is different. You’ve sacrificed a lot of money, weekends, and potentially even relationships to make this stupid thing run. You’re at the top of your game in terms of skills: simple mistakes are accounted for with rigorous checks, and you’ve been through enough dumb failures in the past to know what to look out for. Plus, you told all your buddies that you were gonna get this thing to crank over sometime before Hell freezes over.
When things go wrong, it’s easy to get super angry about it. Although it’s childish, my favourite technique in this situation is to chuck tools at the garage door. It’ll take a beating, and the dents don’t show that bad on the outside, so people visiting still think you’re sane. Most tools are highly resistant to being thrown (most of my favourite tools are found on the side of the road after other, better mechanics left them in the engine bay before taking a drive.) Once you’ve let the baby rage out, you can then have a focused head to consider the actual problem.
You guessed it: it’s some simple, dumb-ass mistake. You forgot to plug something in, or there’s a micron of dirt on a contact surface that’s keeping the thing from working. Now that everything is running fine, you can immediately discard any lessons from this embarrassing struggle-fest and crow to all your friends, including any of them who just saw you hurl a 3/8″ box-end wrench at a lawn gnome, that you are the best mechanic on the planet. Until it stumbles and dies when you put it in gear.
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seat-safety-switch · 12 days
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Now that the forces of gentrification are at work in my humble community, I'm seeing all kinds of new people on the streets, when before it was just catalytic converter thieves. Community organizers, politicians, joggers, and dog walkers. It's that last one that really gets my goat.
You see, it's one thing if you walk a dog all the way from one place to the other. This new breed of dog walkers, though? Loads up their car with the dog, and drives approximately two blocks to the dog park to let them out. I got a real problem with that. That doesn't build sufficient oil pressure. It doesn't put enough heat in the engine. It's hard on the bores and the bearings and the cams. You're also beating the shit out of the battery starting this whole mess without letting it charge fully in this weather. It makes me sad.
Sure, if you're one of those hippie types, you can also argue that the cold-start emissions and low distance-to-fuel-spent ratio ratchet us ever closer to an irreversible climate apocalypse. That's true, sure, but the bigger problem is that it reduces the supply of viable junkyard engines I'll have to pick from in just a few decades. It's already hard enough trying to find iron block engines without excessive bore scoring; as soon as I start trying to throw Toyota 2GRs into my ancient Plymouth, it's going to be oil-burning city because all y'all couldn't be bothered to walk an extra two blocks with your dog.
Let's all try this again. When you walk your dog, walk your dog. He, she, or they are not gonna suffer from a few extra minutes of walking to bookend the five minutes of limp frisbee-tossing that you're going to treat them to at the dog park. It's better for the environment, and it's a lot better for the most important people on Earth: scavengers of long-destroyed internal combustion machinery who are too cheap to pay for a machine shop to clean up a two-hundred-dollar junkyard block.
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seat-safety-switch · 13 days
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There's nothing more honest than working on an old pickup truck. Unlike today's pickup trucks, old ones are basically just a chunk of steel bolted to an engine and an axle. Anything you can do to them is basically in the spirit of the original factory workers, even more so if you're drunk and/or high on things that aren't futuristic research chemicals. They hadn't invented those yet.
Now, you might also think that old pickup trucks are expensive. Sure, running and driving ones with all of their body panels have been enjoying a resurgence lately. With all the cool old luxury cars, muscle cars, shitty jeeps, and base-model commuter cars hoovered into the selfish grasp of exploitative capital, it's only a matter of time until they come for the humble, working man's pickup truck that was abandoned at the bottom of some farmer's field when the distributor finally exploded, now getting shot at periodically by his grandkids.
There's a lot of old trucks out there, because "old truck" used to mean "vehicle I grudgingly drove in order to accomplish actual work." The moment they stopped being reliable, they were gotten rid of, or relegated to chicken-coop duty. And, back in the day, there were more people who did actual work than there were folks who pushed spreadsheets around.
Supply is on your side: you can still get a deal. And if your standards are low enough, the range of "a deal" becomes very wide indeed. If you ask professional car restorers and collectors, they tell you to get the "best truck you can afford." That makes sense: if your goal is to end up with a working or at least semi-attractive truck, you'll spend less money and maybe fewer divorces starting with a 5/10 rather than a 3/10. Me, I'm not that picky. I'll take a 0.5/10. I'm all about the process.
All this is to explain why I just came home with a 1952 Mercury M100 pickup truck that consists mostly of the serial number plate and the rear axle (which is seized.) I figure I just need to sit on this thing for a few years longer, until prices really go nuts, and then I'll be able to sell it to someone whose business card says "Excel Astronaut" for the approximate price of a two-bedroom condo. And in the meantime, I'll have a cool project to work on that I don't have to worry too much about. If you help me get this chicken out of here, I'll cut you in on the deal.
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seat-safety-switch · 14 days
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"I hear there's a whole crew of eager young faces out there just ready to ride the rapids!" hollers our rafting guide, a man who I would later discover from the TV news was actually named Ralph. This man continued to give us a short-form version of his life story, before instructing us on the proper way to wear a life vest (or "personal flotation device," if you're German.) The tourists around me oohed and aahed and snapped pictures, enough to be already halfway through what, in a simpler time, would have been a roll of Kodak film.
Why was I engaging in this pursuit, one which was not just dangerous but without the involvement of any motorized transportation whatsoever? Simple. I had gotten a free ticket from a coworker who "couldn't make it," and I had heard that there were some old hoopties crashed in the forests around the white-water rapids.
See, way back in the era when old cars were new cars, there was no good way to recycle them. Tow truck technology was in its infancy. Junkyards were just called "yards." And China hadn't been invented yet. Or it had, but they were probably also busy building their own new cars and didn't want to take some idiot's old Ford Business Coupe off his hands. So folks just left that shit on the side of roads, in forests, or pushed them off a cliff and watched what happened before driving off in their new car. Tragic, I know, but it means that lots of perfectly good running gear is all over this part of the country.
Ralph led us out on the water. He was pretty good, except for the part where he kept yelling at me to perform manual labour for which I was receiving no compensation. After a couple hours into the trip, I had seen no cars whatsoever and was beginning to lose hope entirely. I was damned to be stuck on this orange pool toy as we shot down the water in order to be rewarded with yet more water. Thrilling though it may be to some people, I was perfectly familiar with going dangerously fast and getting uncomfortably wet from any daily commute in my harem of rusty cars.
That's when I saw it. Anyone else would have easily missed a glimpse of the fender of a 1929 Chevy International roadster. I pulled my backpack off, discarding my oar to do so, and retrieved my homemade grappling hook from within. With a quick burst of compressed air and a not-so-quick burst of nitromethane-fuelled Sanden air-conditioning compressor exhaust, I was flown from the piteous grasp of Mother Kinda-Wet to the warm embrace of Mother Earth. And boy, did she ever have that fender. Not much else, of course, but if you squinted, you could kinda see part of the headlight was now being adopted by the accumulated moss.
After guessing the vague location of it, I dug in and left with my quarry: one extremely rusty, pig-iron "Oakland" vee-eight engine. It was really light, because almost none of it was left, which is good because I had a long way to walk home. A chipmunk kept me company along the way, probably because he used to live in #3 before I picked up his whole sub-development.
As for the other occupants of the river rafting tour, I'm told that at least half of them, perhaps deluded by hours of direct sunlight and lack of access to proper nutrition, believed my sudden escape was actually proof of my having been abducted by angels. I rolled that into a few other paying gigs upon my return to civilization, but it didn't really do much for the fleet. Tax-exempt crooked megachurches have very strict rules about only buying new cars.
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seat-safety-switch · 15 days
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Most small towns have a museum. Sure, they might not be ornate, enormous buildings filled with art. Once you pass a certain amount of people there's going to be some kind of hoard of historical items. We just naturally want to be able to tell future folks that we were here, that the things we did mattered, and here's where we came from, as evidenced by this old plaque, and a blurry photograph of the lady who got mysteriously murdered on this very night exactly 100 years ago.
One thing that almost all of them are lacking is a suit of armour. See, suits of armour are a big thing in museums in cartoons. Whenever you see Scooby-Doo investigating someone stealing t-rex bones, those crazy teens always somehow manage to end up over in Late English Medieval History and hide in a suit of armour. This is probably because suits of armour are fun for cartoonists to draw, and extremely time consuming for local, small-town cranks to fabricate.
Me, I live in a big city, and that means the museum has some very strict standards for what it accepts into its collection. Items have to be "historically significant," or at least not some random garbage that I welded together. They've got a suit of armour. It doesn't come from here: the museum has it because the queen gave us one when she visited. It's part of our history, sure, but only by accident, in the same way that you can't throw away an ugly vase from your mother-in-law because she expects to see it every time she visits on Thanksgiving.
A couple miles outside of the city limits, though, is a small town that I frequently visit. There's many reasons: it's close to affordable rural junkyards, the people are generally friendly to random folks showing up and pretending to have been invited to the barbecue, and the sheriffs are too busy ripping by on the highway to stop in and write exhaust tickets. Their museum fucking sucks, though. It absolutely rots. For starters, it's more of a "drinking hall" than a museum. Any mementoes of the town's last couple of centuries are just loosely nailed to the wall, without even an explanatory label stuck into the picture frame explaining who these ancient folks are. They needed a docent.
All this is to say that it really wasn't that hard to weld together a suit of armour. I had a lot of leftover bicycle fenders from the big internet company that went bankrupt. Burying the suit of armour, waiting a few weeks, and then digging it up was way more work, especially since I had to work silently so as not to arouse the suspicions (and indirect fire) of the good townspeople I was about to scam. Scam them I did, however. If you're in the area, come on down to the local museum. You can tell which one it is by the old, leaking Plymouth parked out front, in the "reserved for docent" 24/7 parking space.
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seat-safety-switch · 16 days
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Among all car people, there is an eternal dream of the "barn find." An uncommon, valuable, storied, or just very nice-condition car is found in a barn or shed. Some hoarder decades ago decided to take it off the road, where it did not fall victim to the ravages of weather. And you just happened to be in the right place and time to take advantage of that hoard, ideally for very cheap or even free.
Friend, that has never happened to me. Sure, I've had lots of free cars. And I've rescued lots of cars from collapsing barns. None of those, though, could be called a true "find." I still hope, though. Every time I'm out in the country, driving past a barn, I crane my neck and gawk, in the hope of seeing a shed door cracked open. Is that a low-mileage 1980 Pontiac Trans Am Turbo in there? No. It's just a horse.
When it comes to finding stuff, there's no perfect technique. You have to make your own luck in this hobby. Everyone I talk to knows about my specific automotive perversions. Well, they already did, but the intent is that if their cousin's uncle's grandpa's nephew's half-sister finds a blown up Galaxie in her deceased dogsitter's acreage, then she knows who to call to tow it away. Okay, sure, the "intent" is that I can't shut up about old shitbox cars.
So, will I ever get a barn-found crapcan of my very own? There's no way of knowing. I do get calls, however, but they're usually for useless antiques, like priceless art from famous dead people and Faberge eggs. You can't even use those to plug a leaky radiator, talk about worthless.
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seat-safety-switch · 17 days
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Something about the way that Big Business likes to operate in this country rubs me the wrong way. They stride into little, upstanding communities and push them around to get a slightly better deal on extracting our precious, non-renewable natural resources. Only pollution and human misery is left behind. For a brief, shining moment, I was the solution to this corruption. And then I kind of let things go to my head.
Running for office is easier than you'd think. All you need to do is get signatures of a hundred people. An afternoon at the mall, asking folks to save the endangered Pacific African Grey Rhino, will just about do you. Of course, there's also the filing fee, but I managed to distract the lady working the counter at City Hall and transfer the cheque from another mayoral application to mine when she wasn't looking.
Quite why I fell out of favour with The Mayor is between him and I. We go way back, and it would not reflect well on my upbringing to reveal our private feud in public. Not like it stopped him, though, as he blabbed to every talk-radio host, morning-news talking head, and local newspaper about how awful I was. They just laughed, thinking that nobody could be that bad, and surely it was some kind of desperate lie, another sign that he had lost touch with the common man. Such embellishment did get my name in the public ear, and I won in a landslide after promising to double speed limits (that's all it takes.)
From day one, I went about kicking all the huge-capitalism greedheads out of my city, mostly because I got tired of them driving their Porsches slowly on my newly speed-unlimited corners. Big lawsuits were launched, rich folks ejected into the nearest river. I was on the news every day in my stained coveralls and greasy sweater, adding further credibility to my regular-dude motif. If you were some kind of crank weirdo who liked to tell other people at the bar what the government should do, then I was your representative. And crank it I did. Wait, that came out wrong.
After about a week of this, I think the big business monsters got together. They went to their little gangster restaurant and they decided the best way to get rid of me would be to catch me up in a bribery scandal. Didn't work: I took the bribe and bragged about it to the news. That bribe? 2005 Dodge Neon, with an un-torn drivers' seat and only about 180,000 km on the odometer. Mint. They did their homework. The problem was that I now had a fancy new car, which I had effectively stolen from rich people, but I didn't want to look rich, so I didn't drive it to work.
The problem is that I slowly became paranoid. As with my forebear, I lost touch with the common man. I began to fear that they were going to steal my Neon – my retirement fund – while I was at City Hall, doing stupid mayor stuff. Soon, I lost focus on my work, and I slipped in the polls. There was only one thing left to do: stop coming to work for a few weeks and don't answer the phone. Works every time!
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