1kg of recycling
Saturday, June 28th, 2008I wish the Toronto Star would stop giving me their Saturday edition. I already get the newspaper, so the Star is recycled unread every week. If it wasn’t 50% car section, I might take a glance.
I wish the Toronto Star would stop giving me their Saturday edition. I already get the newspaper, so the Star is recycled unread every week. If it wasn’t 50% car section, I might take a glance.
Do-It-Yourself Logos for Proud Scion Owners - even if their rides do look like a Kleenex box on castors.
Jeremy Clarkson thought it would be a good idea to publish his bank details to show that the whole thing about identity theft was hooey. Not such a good idea.
U.S. crude fell 44 cents to $99.18 a barrel by 2:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT) after hitting a peak of $100.09 earlier in the day.
Can I just say that the road from Busch to Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the most gratuitously wiggly route I’ve ever driven?
Our route down from Kansas City was longer than I thought; place not blind trust in GPS routing, especially when you’re close to the edge of the maps you’ve uploaded. Due to one wrong turn on my part, we ended up in Overland Park, KS — rather than being on Hwy 71 all the way south. In future, I shall upload all the maps I need, plus all the states/provinces surrounding, so you don’t get that terra incognita/here be dragons feeling of falling off the edge of your wee scrolly map.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has done about as much as you can with the bare walls and gloomy spaces of an underground parking lot:


This is a small posting of thanks to the folks on the OCTranspo 95 Orleans bus who put up with my cluelessness and large luggage on the very busy rush hour transit. I got to Ottawa station quicker than any taxi, and for only $3. I’m a fairly seasoned TTC rider, and you wouldn’t see that kind of friendliness at this time of day in Toronto.
One of the side effects of Catherine’s Library Quest is that she digs through the sale books. She’s found a library getting rid of National Geographics for 25¢. September 1969’s issue, published when I was less than a season old, has a great and hilariously dated article The Coming Revolution in Transportation. It’s all hovercraft and personal transport pods (though none less than the Federal Highways Administration’s The Rambler cautions don’t blame the future when we read this article).
My favourite prognosis from the article is this one, on electric cars:
Electric cars should be common within a decade. They will be “pure” electrics, if batteries become lighter, more powerful, and longer lasting; otherwise, “dual-mode” vehicles—battery-powered in town but propelled by gasoline engines on cross-country trips.
It took just a little longer than this, and it sure wasn’t GM who brought the first ones to market, despite this picture of a hybrid Opel from 1969:

I don’t believe this … Green Car .com has named the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid 2008 Green Car of the Year.This gargantuan obesemobile has a 6 litre engine which gets a dismal 21 mpg (about 11 l/100 km in real money). But it’s okay, because it’s a hybrid! Well, bravo Chevrolet! Your greed and stupidity is killing us all.
Winter tires.
They are fitted now, but it happened to be chucking it down when I was changing them. No fun.
I had assumed that an admin here at work liked obscure Shakespeare plays when they called our server cressida. But I found the real reason when I noticed that the Richmond server is called rav4 …
Around Toronto today, I saw three Lamborghinis and five Ferraris. I think I saw fewer SmartCars, so as usual, smarts are in shorter supply than muscle.
I was looking to perhaps rent a hybrid for a longish business trip. My company’s preferred supplier, National, doesn’t do them in Canada, but does in the US:
Why do they get them, and we don’t? Don’t say there’s no demand; I‘d rent one …
In other words, we’re back from our holidays.
There was a full-on police manhunt in our neighbourhood last night. Between about 3:30-4am, a police car vroomed and screeched round the streets with its lights off. Maybe it was a manhunt, or maybe they just had their Starsky & Hutch on.
I was mildly incensed to see an ad truck tootling about downtown. What was even worse was that it advertised cleanourair.com, a site purporting to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.
Get this: the founding sponsor of the site is VisionAdz, a company whose sole purpose is to have ad trucks tootling about downtown, polluting our air and my eyes.
Bill Hicks was right about advertising types.
I saw not one, but two International XTs on the way back from Michigan. These are without doubt the most obscene vehicles on the road. Of course, neither were towing anything.
At least the Scion only offends the eyes briefly.
I’m guessing that “Hummer” brand cologne doesn’t sell too well in Glasgow, where a hummer isn’t an obscenely-proportioned vehicle, but merely someone who smells bad.

I think it’s supposed to mean “Never Low Enough”, but it’s hard to tell