Tag: cars

On motorcycle-type things

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I have had the idea for several years now that in the unlikely event that I were to decide to become a Motorcycle Person, I would quite likely become a boring Motorcycle Person. I’d end up in one of those oversized, three-wheeled jobs with an oversized windshield and lots of places for storage– I think the technical term for them is “baggers.” The type, frankly, that if I spot on the road are likely to be driven by someone with a decade or two on me even considering my advanced age. The excitement/danger factor of riding a motorcycle doesn’t really impress me; in fact, it’s quite the opposite; I think I’d spend most of my time terrified of being run off the road by a car and part of the reason I’m more attracted to a larger, more stable vehicle is they just feel safer. I can’t ride a bicycle, remember; the notion of one that goes 70 miles an hour is not inherently attractive.

Anyway, I was driving home from work today and I noticed the person in front of me was driving … probably not that exact vehicle, but close enough for our purposes. He was, in accordance with prophecy, grey-bearded, somewhat portly, and wearing a full helmet, and while obviously I couldn’t get a good look at his face, he vibed as a guy in his late fifties or maybe early sixties.

As I was following him, I was musing about more or less exactly the same things I’ve been talking about in the last couple of paragraphs. I’ve not seen many of these things with the two wheels in front, which was kind of interesting, but I think I prefer the traditional style.

After a mile or so, a guy pulled up beside us. This guy was younger, helmetless, and riding a stripped-down crotch-rockety sort of thing that was more or less the exact opposite of the first guy’s bike, and in fact the type of thing that I’m absolutely certain I will never ride, because I will die.

The second guy said something to the first guy. I obviously couldn’t hear it or seem him well enough to read his lips, but his body language seemed more or less friendly and positive? The first guy, perfectly reasonably I thought, pointed to his helmet (which looked like the kind with headphones built in, so he was probably listening to music, too) and made a sort of sorry, dude, I can’t hear you gesture.

Bro went nuts.

Traffic is reasonably heavy on my evening drive, and so my guy on the trike managed to stay in front of the motorcycle guy mostly by just staying in his lane, and to be completely honest I’m not even convinced he was aware of the guy, since again, he had his helmet on and the guy was behind him. He was right to my right, though, so I got to witness a bunch of unhinged screaming and yelling and occasional attempts to get ahead of him. Eventually he found an opening, drove between two cars, and pulled in front of the guy, nearly clipping him in the process, then found a hole and got far enough away that I lost track of him. And other than the part where the dude nearly hit him, I really don’t know how much of probably two solid minutes of spittle-flecked raving the trike driver even realized was happening. Good thing the stupid bastard didn’t have a gun, I suppose.

Anyway, I’m keeping my car.

This is a metaphor, somehow, for something

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

So my car’s in the shop. It’s been intermittently reluctant to start; I haven’t been stranded anywhere yet but my wife drove me to work a couple of days last week and it’s been clear that something needs fixed before it gets worse.

Today we dropped the car off and I picked up a rental. It’s a black Toyota Rav4; perhaps not exactly the model being pictured up there, but close enough.

I absolutely could not get the radio to work. I sat in the parking lot of the rental place for a few minutes trying to make music happen, and when it didn’t, rather than going inside and asking about it or, like, reporting it as a potential defect, I just drove home, intermittently fiddling with the audio settings at stoplights and when it didn’t seem likely to immediately cause me to crash.

I got into my driveway, still sans music, and realized I’d forgotten to get the garage clicker from my car before dropping it off. I sent my wife a text to open the garage door and, hey, come meet me in the driveway too; I have a weird problem.

Then I fiddled for another couple of minutes, cut the engine and went to check the mail.

By the time I got back to the car my wife was outside.

“This is the weirdest thing,” I said. “I can’t get the radio to work.” I’d been able to play music from my phone, but still no radio.

I started the car and the radio came on immediately. Naturally, it was … startlingly loud.

The end.

In which my day is expensive and needley

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.

We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.

To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!

Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.

I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.

I mailed the postcards.

And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.

New hotness alert

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Mental note: it takes four hours to buy a car.

This is the second time that one of us has bought a new car and we have been so starving afterwards that the only possible response was to get to the nearest fast food restaurant as fast as possible, thus the official New Car pics being taken in the parking lot of a fucking Taco Bell. My wife had her car totaled for her a couple of weeks ago (no injuries, thus my lack of mentioning it here) and after some intensive research decided on a 2024 Honda CRV hybrid, with many bells and whistles and lots of exciting features we’ll forget about and rediscover a couple of years down the road. It’s pretty. I didn’t spend a lot of time in it other than the test drive, so we’ll have to schedule a road trip somewhere soon. I was never a huge fan of the Honda Fit that just got wrecked, so while my wife’s car isn’t really a huge thing in my life– it’s her car– it’s nice to think that I’ll fit in it properly if I ever have to drive it.

But anyway. I have survived to Spring Break, and I even survived getting picked up from work and spending four hours buying a car and then filling myself with Taco Bell, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be dead in an hour, so I’m going to bounce. My brother and his family are going to be here tomorrow, apparently, so a smart person would start doing at least some light cleaning right now.

I never said I was smart.

Well, that’s new

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography2 Comments

A handful of observations about this car, which I unintentionally followed for several miles (I swear, we were just going the same way!) on the way home from the comic shop today. 

  1. That for my entire life until today I had never seen a vehicle claiming to be “powered by bitchdust,” and yet this was the second car today I saw with that sticker on it;
  2. I feel like there have to be better/safer ways to advertise your onlyfans and your Snapchat; I would be genuinely worried if someone pulled my OF from my rear window, which is literally impossible to see without seeing my license plate, and then decided to subscribe. At $45 a month, no less– no amount of porn is worth $45 a month. 
  3. Shut up, of course I went and looked. Like most OnlyFans accounts, there’s literally nothing there if you don’t pony up for a subscription.
  4. I don’t know anything about Snapchat, but I can’t even confirm that account still exists (I think it’s “janelbriann25,” but I also tried “janelbnann25” just for the hell of it) without an account there and I don’t have one.
  5. Does that sticker on the top left say “Cock” or “Clock”, (or something else?) and either way, why does it look like that? Is that just a logo for something that I don’t recognize? (EDIT: It’s “Glock,” as in the gun, and that’s a fucking terrible logo.)
  6. I want to find whoever decided that “Milf’n” was a way to spell something and not “Milfin'” (how old are these kids? Are they old enough to recognize their mom has an OF? God I hope not) and feed them to something large and angry. Ending words with ‘n should be punishable by death and enforceable by anyone who actually has acceptable grammar.

Anyway, this ends today’s edition of Judging Strangers By Their Cars. How was your Wednesday?

In which I can change lightbulbs

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

It’s always fun to discover that something you thought might have been complicated was, in fact, an easy job. Last week a man pulled up alongside me at a light, tapped his horn, and waved for me to roll my window down. I took a moment to think about whether I had any bumper stickers or other adornments on my car (I don’t) and went ahead and rolled the window down. He let me know that I had a brake light out, a fact I was completely unaware of, and then wished me a merry Christmas and sent me on my way. 

Have you ever replaced a bad bulb in a taillight? I never have, nor to my recollection have I ever actually had the plastic outer casing on one break in a way that would require it to her replaced. I think maybe the Escape had a crack in one of the taillights but that was one of that car’s most minor issues and I never bothered to fix it. I wasn’t even sure who to go to about that; I know the oil change places will check your lights for you, which implies that they’d swap the lights out if needed, but I’d never had to have it done.

Turns out it’s super easy. On my car, there are four bolts holding the taillight cover in place, and once you remove those (just a screwdriver, nothing complicated) you can easily pull the cover off; it’s being held in place by three plastic tabs in addition to those bolts and takes a touch of wiggling until you know exactly where they are, and after that it’s just a matter of removing the bulb (twist a plastic thingie to pull the bulb out of its housing, then remove the bulb via a very similar motion,) testing it, and putting everything back together. I had a little bit of trouble getting the new bulb to seat properly but I was able to replace both brake lights in maybe 20 minutes even with that slowing me down. The second one didn’t need replacing but the new LED lights came in a four-pack and since I was replacing incandescents I figured I might as well swap them both out so that they matched and to keep myself from having to do it again in the near future. 

In short, if your brake lights go bad, at least look into replacing them yourself; having done this once I’m never going to even consider paying someone to do it in the future. I can easily imagine cars that are a bit more complicated, but I suspect on most passenger vehicles it’s genuinely something you can do with no particular mechanical skill. 

So yeah. I changed two lightbulbs today. Yay me!

I had five little bits of adulting I wanted to do around the house today; this was one of them, and as of 6:44 PM I’ve completed two others. We’ll see if I get to the last two jobs or if my PS5 and the book I’m reading eat up the rest of my night. My wife reminded me this morning that I have most of two weeks left to Accomplish Shit so I don’t need to get too far ahead of myself just yet. 

In which I plan for the future

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot lately. I am, to be clear, perfectly happy with my stupid little Alien Green Kia Soul– it is a comfortable drive and the car is reliable and gets me where I want to go. I’ve had to replace the tires and the battery since buying it, as well as some brake work if I remember correctly, but nothing that doesn’t fall squarely under routine and expected maintenance, although I suppose I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of warning that the battery was about to shit out on me.

The plan has always been to hold on to this car until my son is old enough to drive and then to give it to him. He’s 12, so that’s still four years off, and I feel confident that the car still has a good 8 to 10 years left in it at least, assuming that everything doesn’t suddenly fall apart at once. So I am not in any meaningful way in the market for a new car right now, and that’s not going to change, absent some sort of disaster that requires me to get a new car.

Anyway, point is, at the moment all of this is purely theoretical. However, I find, the more that I think about it, that I really want my next car to be a Nice Car. And in looking around and trying to decide on what I mean by “Nice Car,” I’m discovering that most of what I find myself idly looking at ends up around the $45-55K range.

My current car cost me $16000 and is the most expensive vehicle I’ve ever owned. So this would represent a bit of an upgrade. I’m literally considering going from a Kia to a Lexus or a Mercedes.

Will I be able to afford it? Maybe. It’s gonna depend on how good I can be with my money once I murder all of my non-mortgage debt during this school year, which– again, knock on wood, absent any disasters– feels pretty thoroughly doable, especially now that I’m getting paid for this overload.

(My first post-overload check is tomorrow. Am I excited? Hell yes.)

So, he said, having taken six paragraphs to get to the fucking point, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot, and I’ve been paying closer attention to the cars I’ve been driving past while I’ve been on the road, and just kind of noticing what I notice, if that makes any sense and I hope it does.

And in the process I’ve been wondering about car logos. How many of these do you recognize?

Some of them have words in them, of course– you’re not going to screw up Ford or Volvo’s logos, and some of them have pretty clear letters in them, although the H in the Hyundai logo is pretty stylized, and the L in Lexus’ logo in the featured photo could probably be mistaken for an ordinary acute angle. But at least half of those don’t have any clear connection to the name of the company they represent.

The point: Why do car companies use logos like this, and — to my knowledge at least, and I’m willing to be proven wrong — no other category of corporation that I can think of? I mean:

With only a very few exceptions– Windows and Shell, and Shell’s icon is a shell— there’s damn near nothing on there that doesn’t have at least some text in it. Computer companies, maybe might be more likely to use abstract logos, but not as rigorously as car companies do. So what’s the deal here? Why are car companies, specifically, so likely to use such abstract logos? I mean, every company has a story behind their logo, and I admit I didn’t notice the T in the Toyota logo until reading about it today, but I can’t find any reason why cars and more or less only cars tend to use wizard sigils instead of readable logos like a sensible company.

I need a historian of marketing. Help me out here.

Oh COME ON

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

September has been a deeply shitty month, all told; this week my son got sick again (not COVID this time, something intestinal) and my wife’s car decided it didn’t need to stop any longer, but I figured that was probably the end of it, what with it being both Friday and the 29th and all. But no! This morning my car decided not to start, so I missed another day of work because we couldn’t figure out a way to swing it with just one car, so a tow and a rental later and I’m already out nearly $500 before my car guy even looks at the damn thing, which they won’t have time to do until Monday at the earliest.

At the rental place, they asked me if I wanted the optional “you can actually set the fucking car on fire and then just return the steering wheel and not pay for anything” insurance, and I started to say no, like I have every time I’ve rented a car, and then thought some more about the month we’ve had and said yes instead. I literally did not complete a left turn out of the parking lot before discovering that my new rental vehicle had way bigger blind spots than I thought and nearly having an accident. Someone else laid on their horn at me at a point later in the drive, and for the life of me I don’t even know what that one was about.

I may not get out of bed tomorrow.