So you know what you know in your head

[austin_dern]

The car verdict, by the way, came down to there being some problem with something around the radiator somewhere. I'd give more exact details but I got the original description over the phone, from my extruded office product location, and really I just knew from the way the guy was working his way up slowly to describing what the price would be that it was going to hurt. If you've got a mechanic who generally likes you then you know the sort of easing into the awful news that I'm talking about.

While I had the car up at the nice-but-really-too-distant mechanic's, I also asked them to look at the rear wheels. This was because of the problem I alluded to when driving with bunny_hugger, which was that when the car goes over a bump the car sometimes, not invariably, shudders as if it's been kicked by a giant and is trying to fly off the road. Maybe it's not that great a leap but it is unsettling. I had described it as being the shocks or something, prompting my father to do an odd ritual of pushing on the trunk and showing the car rocked up and down and therefore the shocks were fine. Maybe, but I know what it feels like to drive it. So I asked them to look at that while they had the car, and they did, and that was the other part of what the mechanic was working his way up to describing.

The diagnosis for this was the rear struts, and for something that has to be replaced alongside the struts, and so the estimated cost for parts and labor --- five hours, incidentally, although to be nice to me they were only billing for four and a half --- comes to just shy of $700, which is the sort of neighborhood I'm embarrassed to be around. So while this past year of car ownership has been much more incident-free than the first one, it's come roaring back in expenses in a big way, and what do you know but the home page for the office's web browser but that it's featuring the monthly Cheapest New Cars articles.

Trivia: On 12 February 1946 DuMont broadcast the first live telecast from Washington to New York City since the days of mechanical television in the late 1920s. Source: The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television, David Weinstein.

Currently Reading: 1939: The Lost World Of The Fair, David Gelernter. This seems to be a book precisely designed to irritate me: I want to read about how the fair was organized and run, and more than half the book is spent in the ``viewpoint'' of characters who are fictional. He claims the attitudes and impressions and such come from actual interviews, but then, of who? Particularly when much of the book goes into moderately cranky whining about ways society was better then [ in certain aspects, I should make clear, and Gelernter is careful to say it certainly wasn't better in all; in fact, one theme of the book is the assertion that modern times are in broad sweeps what the utopian visions then were ] what with its rules and customs and hats and now there's all this political correctness and nobody has visions of things that are going to really change lives just silly stuff like this internet hoo-hah and aah you kids why are you on my lawn ... sheesh. If you want to write a novel set at the World's Fair, fine, do that, but don't make it your supposedly nonfiction book.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

America in the 1930s (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/front.html) has some good information about how the Fair was organized, and the background of the times. Time magazine had a nice article on Grover Whalen (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761184-1,00.html), whose creation the Fair really was. I took a certain amount of inspiration from his example in organizing Morphicon.

Personally I found the Gelemter book enjoyable, but I knew the background already. It really is just a weird sort of novel, yes.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Yeah, see, the sort of Fair book I was really looking for was like Devil In The White City, with plenty of detail about how far behind the planting of flowers was and who figured to add in some swans to the reflecting pond. I loved the detailed descriptions of exhibits and how the machinery worked but there wasn't enough of that by volume.

[moxie_man]

$700 to take care of the leaking coolant and rear struts and other work back there (and possibly an alignment, which is normally done whenever the shocks/struts are replaced)?

Count your blessings 'cause you got off dirt cheap! Nearly a year ago, I needed to replace the shocks/struts in the Stealth Lemon. It was originally equipped with air shocks. Because it's 15 years old, I opted for less expensive regular shocks/struts. I was still out just over a grand. If I had gone with new air shocks I'd have been out another $400-500.

Cars aren't cheap to maintain anymore. What we drive these days are not the vehicles our parents grew-up with.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I do appreciate that I'm getting a relative break on the car repair prices. That's the side of things that make this car place worth going to even though it's an hour away; we've been going there for years and nearly all repairs come to $150 between parts and labor. It's just the exceptional case like this that stands out and forces me to sit in a quiet spot and whimper some.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

and what do you know but the home page for the office's web browser but that it's featuring the monthly Cheapest New Cars articles

Forget new cars. If you want to get something else (and I understand you're going to try to keep your car for now, which is probably a good idea since it hasn't given you all that much major trouble before now), get a certified used car like I did. It's like having a new car, but cheaper. I'm so very happy with mine even if it was hard to go back to having a car payment.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Still, the thought of a replacement car is not a bad one, and when I do things like take my time driving the Toyota Something and noticing how pleasant it is driving a car that doesn't rattle, and the motor is quiet enough that you can honestly not be sure it is running, and the rear view mirror is actually connected to the rear view mirror controller, and there's a built-in CD player soI don't need this thing sitting in the passenger's seat with the cable running to the cassette deck ... well, it all makes for a compelling argument for a replacement car, one without broken things.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I actually wish my car had a cassette deck. It would be more useful to me than the CD player, because I could stick an adapter in it to listen to my iPod instead of trying to use the FM transmitter I have that's only listenable if I drape the cord over my arm to boost its antenna power. (Oddly it worked quite well in my old car.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The cassette deck is convenient for plugging in accessories like that. I'm so used to audio books from the library that I never started to think about using my MP3 player in the car.

One of my co-workers has a relatively newish car with both cassette and CD, which I didn't know was offered after about 1998.