Tuesday, December 12, 2006
After eighteen months I was forced to consider my foray into the lifestyle of luxury car ownership a failure. Just after Thanksgiving in 2004 I traded my red 1990 Toyota 4×4 for a black 2001 BMW 330 CCi. It was a gorgeous car. I really, really loved it. It was a sport model and a convertible. The car had every option you could get on a BMW at the time: heated leather seats, six-disc CD changer, the works. The engine purred like a kitten. It handled like a dream. It was, in short, the best vehicle I’d ever owned.
I loved it, but it had to go.
The only real problem with it was the tires. The tires and rims were so sensitive — and the I am so accustomed to driving a truck, and the roads between my office and my home are so often blanketed in construction detritus — that they kept getting destroyed. In a year and a half I had to buy eight $250 tires and five $750 rims! There was just no way I could justify spending more on wheels for my wheels than I was spending on the car itself. I loved it, but it had to go. While driving home from a 4th of July weekend in Palm Springs this year I had a blowout on the highway. It was 114° F and I was so upset I decided it was time to end it.
The next day I strolled into the Marina Del Rey Toyota dealership and traded my baby for a black 2006 Toyota Tacoma 4×4. I could only afford the base model, no bells or whistles. I’m really more of a pick-up man, I guess. I do seriously miss having an intermittent setting on my windshield wipers, though. :0(
Friday, September 15, 2006
After I shot a (pathetic) 51 at Penmar yesterday, I scooted to Nagao to grab dinner. On the way home, with five steaming cups of miso and several orders of sushi riding shotgun, I popped into the Brentwood Blockbuster because my girlfriend wanted to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin. My BB account expired sometime around 1998 so I had to buy a copy. The not-very-helpful Blockbusterista said that there were four used copies in the store, but he had no idea where they were, things weren’t alphabetized well, it wasn’t his “usual” store, and he could only sell me a new one for $21.99. Yeah, right.
Go buy a pair of jumper cables.
After spending a good twenty minutes browsing through stacks of dozens of copies of The Adventures of Pluto Nash and the assorted random not-very-good movies that always seem to be all that any BB ever has, I left empty-handed.
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Friday, March 24, 2006
More proof that people are strange (in case you needed some): There is a website dedicated to selling toy cars which have suffered toy accidents by crashing into toy (bonsai) trees.
The art pieces go for between $75 - $150.
People are — apparently — grabbing them like hotcakes.
CrashBonsai
Wednesday, October 9, 2002
This was never intended to be a “real” post. This was only a test.
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
A man in Connecticut rented a car and was shocked to discover a $450 charge for speeding on his bill when he returned the vehicle. It seems the rental company has GPS devices in their cars so they can track what the driver might do. Now … in general I think this is a pretty good idea. I’m in favor of using technology to do neat-o things like this. And if it was in the contract the guy signed before he rented the car, well, he’s got no one to blame but himself. I rented a car in Louisiana last month and got busted for speeding by an old fashioned police officer with a radar gun. I would have been in much bigger trouble, though, had the company been clocking me the entire time I had the car. I am going to have to remember to read all those little clauses and notes and tiny-print items on contracts in the future.
[* If you read this web page you are required to giggle and make witty comments about it to all your friends. You're also required to send me a birthday present. I reserve the right to, at any time, come to your house and eat any and all Sno-Caps I find. You may not retransmit this web page without prior written consent of Major League Baseball.]
Friday, June 8, 2001
Crime-obsessed South Africans have a powerful new weapon with which to stop likely criminals: the car flamethrower.
Monday, May 21, 2001
I can’t decide if I want to do this to my truck. What do you think?
Monday, March 26, 2001
This is a take-home test for AML 3124 from the fall of 1995. I might have not exactly addressed the questions as they were presented, but if I had wanted to be a journalist or a writer-for-hire, I never would have majored in English…read away…lemme know what ya think, too…
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Wednesday, October 11, 2000
Interesting conversations often take place in the car.
Monday, June 26, 2000
If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
So far this has been an excellent birthday. Unlike most everything I say or write, that is pointedly not dripping with sarcasm. I am, as many of you know, the dead sexiest computer geek in the world, so I was on-line when Bud’s internal clock rolled to 00:00:00 2000.06.26 last night. (I wanted to write something analogous to biological clock to refer to my computer’s digital timekeeping, but I couldn’t think of anything good. Does anyone else have an idea here?) At precisely 00:04 I got my first Happy Birthday IM!
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Thursday, June 1, 2000
Jason has been in link-finding overdrive lately. I keep telling him if he had a blog he’d be on the same level as zannah … Here he sends me news of The Future of SUVs.
After eighteen months I was forced to consider my foray into the lifestyle of luxury car ownership a failure. Just after Thanksgiving in 2004 I traded my red 1990 Toyota 4×4 for a black 2001 BMW 330 CCi. It was a gorgeous car. I really, really loved it. It was a sport model and a convertible. The car had every option you could get on a BMW at the time: heated leather seats, six-disc CD changer, the works. The engine purred like a kitten. It handled like a dream. It was, in short, the best vehicle I’d ever owned.