Via Slog… Geeze…if you want to see what the end of the world would look like…the island of “Gunkanjima” is probably the place to go…
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Wow. Check out the photos. Man…my cameras and I could have a grand old time there…
Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
Yes, yes…it looks like New England is getting clobbered right now. Yesterday NOAA was calling for freezing rain this morning here in Baltimore, but the freeze line had apparently moved north by late last night and right now we’re only getting our usual miserable cold wet drizzle. Good thing it’s not cold enough for snow though, or we’d be getting socked in too.
P.S.: I hear you had a very severe cold snap out there recently. Temperatures plummeted all the way down to…thirty-eight, was it? It must have been awful having to…you know…put on a jacket or something…
Somedays, it is my profoundest wish that the one true god turns out to be some refrigerator that washed ashore on some remote island in the pacific. And that nobody but the natives there, and there alone, worship.
Visualizing this made me smile. It gave me the warm fuzzies somehow. The creator of All That Is embodies one day as a refrigerator and washes ashore on some lost and out of the way island, where it’s venerated by the natives there…and by them alone. What a completely goofy…and yet evocative image that is…
Well I reckon Disney World’s out. Thanks for the warning about the crowds during Christmas week guy. And here I was wondering if they were even open then…
After Mitt’s wee tirade on religion the other day I found myself presented with a torrent of LDS history crossing my screen, some of which I’d never heard of before. A hat? I’m sorry…a hat? And this man is bellyaching about secularism being an invented religion???
Anyway…reading the LDS story of Elohim and his spirit children who live on a planet circling the star Kolob, it crossed my mind that you can tell which religions were founded after the invention of the telescope because they always read like bad science-fiction novels (praise Xenu), whereas the ones founded before the telescope read like planet earth is at the center of the universe, with a somewhat ambiguous heaven floating above it.
I think at the moment that Huckabee has it cinched in the heartland, and if he doesn’t get the nomination the base is going to be very, very upset.
Peterson Toscano is in town today, to do a performance of his Doin’ Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House at Goucher College, and I had a chance to hang out with him for a bit this morning. One of the things we discussed over lunch was fund raising ideas for Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary on the Memphis Love In Action protests, This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. I’m already in it for several grand, helping out in a way I’m not completely free to discuss, so between that and my new car I don’t have a lot of money to spare for a while and I explained this to Peterson and I guess his imagination is much better then mine because he suggested something that never occurred to me, but which should have because it’s obvious. I can help raise money for the documentary, by auctioning some of my artwork on eBay.
Not that I’m a world renown cartoonist or anything, but some of you may appreciate owning the original artwork to some of my political cartoons, and in particular the cartoons I’ve done about Love In Action. I’m also considering selling some of the original artwork to my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, but there’s a catch to that. The political cartoons really do look pretty much as you see them on the cartoon page. But all I can sell of the work I’ve done for A Coming Out Story is the final inks on Strathmore board. which look somewhat unfinished. All the cross-hatching and the word balloons for that one are done in Photoshop, after I’ve scanned in the inks. The exception to this are the first four or five episodes, plus My First X-Rated Movie which I did with my old dip pens. They’re almost completely finished cartoons, including the word balloons (which are empty because I just cannot hand letter anything).
The Mark and Josh originals are the same, except I do the coloring in Photoshop. What I can do with those is sell the original, along with a high-quality print of the final cartoon, printed to the same size as the original artwork so they can be framed side-by-side. 100 percent of the proceeds would go to Morgan to finish the documentary.
One other thing I could do, is auction off an original political cartoon, on any topic the successful bidder chooses.
I’m just in the thinking stages of this, so don’t send me any requests or bids on artwork just yet. But I wanted to float this out there to see how much interest there might be in this. When I get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted, I’ll ask the folks on my mailing list how interested they might be in owning some of the original artwork for the series.
Via Slog… Another reason not to check myself into an Ex-Gay ministry…
“A Consequence of Misuse of the Internet”
That’s how a New York judge has summed up this tragically effed-up mess, in which a 48-year-old man (who’d been posing as an 18-year-old Marine in online chat rooms) murdered his 22-year-old rival for the virtual affections of a middle-aged West Virginia mother posing online as an 18-year-old student.
The Associated Press untangles it all for you here.
You know…I’ve never lied about myself on the Internet…about my age or my looks or my income or anything. Not on the Internet, not on the few dating sites I’ve tried. I just don’t do it. Believe that or not as you like, but I’ve never even used a pseudonym. I’ve have always gone by my birth name online. It’s not rectitude, it’s vanity.
I’ll not be posting much here over the weekend as I’ve got Thanksgiving dinner to go to with friends in D.C., and then my high school class reunion on Friday. Saturday I’ll be busy trying to get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted (you guys still remember that one?). So unless something comes up that I just Have to vent about here, I’ll be pretty quiet until next week.
Look at this graphic…is the dancer spinning clockwise, or counter-clockwise…?
Actually…she can be spinning in either direction. It depends on how your brain initially puts together the visual cues it finds. This from The NeuroLogica Blog, where Steven Novella debunks the notion that this optical illusion reveals left brain/right brain dominance…
Take a look at the spinning girl below. Do you see it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? I see it spinning counter-clockwise, and I had a hard time getting it to switch direction. Give it a try.
These kinds of optical illusions are always fun. What they reveal is how our brain processes visual information in order to create a visual model of the world. The visual system evolved to make certain assumptions that are almost always right (like, if something is smaller is it likely farther away). But these assumptions can be exploited to created a false visual construction, or an optical illusion.
The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.
The trick, once you’ve settled on a direction for the dancer’s movement, is changing your mind about it at will. It’s not easy at first…at least it wasn’t for me. Initially I saw her spinning counter-clockwise. It took effort, but after a while I found that if I view the image in my peripheral vision, I can train my eye, while not looking directly at the image, to see her spinning in the opposite direction until it "takes". Then when I look directly at her she’s now spinning in that direction. At first it took a while and a lot of effort, but after some practice I could make her switch pretty quickly.
Thoughts that crossed my mind as I was doing lawn work this morning….
Even if your property consists merely of 1 tenth of 1 percent of 1quarter of 1 acre, nine-tenths of your work around the house will consist of biomass control.
Ivy must come from some other planet. It grows even in a drought. The rest of your lawn could be dead, it could be turning to dust, and the ivy will still be growing. And it always grows in the direction you don’t want it growing toward, and will reliably ignore the territory you are willing to let it have.
Adjusting the anti-squirrel defenses on your bird feeders only raises the intelligence level of the neighborhood squirrels. You are not keeping them away from your feeders, you are training them to solve complex problems.
[Update…]
Bird spit is amazing stuff. That’s Spit, not Shit. Bird SPIT. Ever wonder how those tiny little nests made of nothing but small sticks and twigs manage to stay intact during a thunder storm? It’s the damn spit they use to hold everything together. The barn swallow nests in the parking garage at the Institute are amazing things…tacked literally on the concrete walls by nothing more then dirt and swallow spit. Never mind bird droppings, try cleaning a bunch of old seeds all stuck together by bird spit off the bottom of your bird feeders. It’s Work! If humans could spit glue like birds, we’d probably never have invented nails.
So I’m out of the break-in period, and taking the car a little more and more into its upper ranges. Bear in mind that for years, decades, I’ve been a stick driver and absolutely hated automatics. Also, that I’ve never owned a car with anything under the hood that could even remotely be called a high performance engine.
I’ve finally encountered the issue people are complaining about out there, with the new seven speed automatic down shifting too aggressively. But I’ve been taking Traveler slowly up and down the speedometer and tach and learning how it behaves and I think I know what the problem is. Most American drivers, especially drivers of my generation, learned on automatics that made you stomp down on the accelerator in order to down shift. You do that in this car and it will behave like it thinks you’re doing some kind of emergency maneuver and race down the gears when that’s not what you want. In this car, in normal driving, when you just want to rapidly pass someone or accelerate out of a situation, you don’t stomp down on the gas pedal. You have to back off your old habits a tad, learn to just firmly press the accelerator forward. The car will figure out what you want and down shift in a more normal manner. And then…trust me…that speedometer needle will climb like you won’t believe. The car won’t slam you back in your seat…it’s a luxury sedan not a Lamborghini…but the effect of the smooth urgency with which it takes you into loose-your-license territory is…amazing. At least to me. I guess that’s what high compression, plus variable valve timing does. Which is why it only drinks expensive premium gas. I’ve driven big V-8s that had less authority then this six. But they were 1970s V-8s. I can’t imagine what the engines Mercedes puts in its S class cars nowadays must feel like. Anyway…the transmission will behave itself, but you need a calm foot on the pedal. You don’t stomp the pedal down. Just ask it politely. It’ll deliver.
I’ve never owned a car before, that was actually and seriously designed to be driven at speeds above 100 miles per hour, and taking Traveler up the speedometer makes me feel like I’m suddenly in a completely different world now. The car is way too comfortable for my own good at speeds well in excess of anything you’re legally allowed to drive on any highway in the lower 48. You know you’re going fast, it just doesn’t feel like you’re driving beyond the limits of the car, or even close. Road noise is minimal, the car doesn’t feel squirrelly, but tight on the road and perfectly, happily content. If anything, it feels like it’s waiting for me to ask it for more. That’s scary. I feel like I really need to take a course in high speed driving. There are places that offer it. Not that you’re supposed to be doing that on the highways, or that I plan on doing that. Even if it were legal, American driving habits would make an Autobahn here much, much too dangerous. But like Stan Lee said, with great power comes great responsibility. The tires may be rated for those speeds, but the driver isn’t. That’s a whole different kind of driving. I need to learn it.
I’m getting a tad over 25 miles per gallon average. It’s not awful, but not great either. I’m used to getting in the low thirties, and that’s on regular. Now I have to buy premium and while my bill hasn’t skyrocketed, it’s something I have to pay attention to more now. Figure my total gasoline expenses have about doubled. But as work is just a mile down the road, even if I drove it all the time, which I don’t, my gas bill was never all that much to start with. Right now my usage is high because I’m still in new car love and I’m busy driving Traveler here and there after work just about every day, just for the shear pleasure of driving it as well as the practical matter of getting to know it. At some point that’ll taper off and then the big cost will be when I take it on road trips. This year my drive to Memphis, Topeka, Portland and Oceano and back cost me about $725 in gas. Double that isn’t an easy figure to swallow all in one go. So I have to make a point to save up for it. I put a hundred bucks or so every month into a road trip kitty and I can still do them. But I just can’t petty cash my gasoline anymore like I used to be able to. Now I have to pay attention to it. I have three savings accounts scattered here and there that I’ve just been putting random spare cash into. I’ll make one of these my road trip kitty and then just use it for road trip gas and miscellaneous expenses.
The delight of blogging is when you find someone smart, really smart, whose mind just likes to roam here and there. Saw this today on Brad DeLong’s blog…
Abraham Lincoln at the 1859 Wisconsin State Fair:
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm: A few men own capital; and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital, hire, or buy, another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class — neither work for others, nor have others working for them. Even in all our slave States, except South Carolina, a majority of the whole people of all colors, are neither slaves nor masters. In these Free States, a large majority are neither hirers or hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons and daughters — work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, labor with their own hands, and also buy slaves or hire freemen to labor for them; but this is only a mixed, and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class. Again, as has already been said, the opponents of the "mud-sill" theory insist that there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. There is demonstration for saying this. Many independent men, in this assembly, doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost if not quite the general rule.
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. I have said this much about the elements of labor generally, as introductory to the consideration of a new phase which that element is in process of assuming. The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated — quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small per centage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive. From these premises the problem springs, "How can labor and education be the most satisfactory combined?"
By the "mud-sill" theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be — all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. Those same heads are regarded as explosive materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as far as possible from that peculiar sort of fire which ignites them. A Yankee who could invent strong handed man without a head would receive the everlasting gratitude of the "mud-sill" advocates.
But Free Labor says "no!" Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands. As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth — that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education…
Thus the first republican president makes a slam-dunk case for universal education. Stand this man beside the entire republican lineup of presidential hopefuls and you see how far the republican party has declined. But most of that decline has come about since their moses, Ronald Reagan. They’d ride Lincoln out of the party on a rail if he was running today. Re-read that second to last paragraph and tell me that’s not precisely the attitude and policy of the republican party today.
It probably wouldn’t take Lincoln very long to determine the root cause of the republican decline either. Again, from DeLong’s blog…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
That pretty much hits it on the head. There is no abandonment of the democratic party by white males now and never was, except in the south, and Lyndon Johnson saw that coming the day he signed the voting rights act. When you look at the history of nearly all the right wing moral crusaders, from Jerry Falwell on, it becomes even more clear. They’re nearly all southerners, and nearly all of them started out as passionate segregationists. It was loosing their school’s tax except status over racial discrimination, that drove the religious right into politics. They only picked up on the abortion issue and the homosexual menace when they saw that those issues motivated the rubes and drove wedges into the democrat’s grassroots. But it wasn’t about those issues. It was never about those issues. It was always about race.
Lincoln would probably understand right away what has happened to his party, if not why it happened. And he’d probably weep for it, and for America.
Good Initial Reports On The C300 – Cars I’ve Owned
So far, everything I’m seeing on the reliability of the new C class is good. This owner’s review on the Mercedes Benz Club of America C-class forum was especially heartening, since the man seems to have done the kind of long distance road trip loop I love doing…
We left Vancouver WA…went first to San Francisco for a week…then Las Vegas, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, then Monument Valley, Albuquerque, picked up the old Route 66 road through Kingman AZ, to San Diego…back to SF, then Sacramento…then home on 9/24.
Stats: 4750 miles covered [the car now has exactly 5000 miles on it], 26-28 mpg at freeway speeds, temps ranged from 40-115F, altitudes to 9000 feet.
Roads: Everything from Interstates with 75 mph limits [and actual speeds of 85], to back roads with pitted surfaces and extreme twists for miles at a time. Really smooth pavement was rare; back roads in AZ and NM were sometimes very rough. These observations are important to the next point…
The Car: Absolutely fantastic. The best part about the new car is the ride / handling compromise – very absorbent ride over every kind of surface, but handling that is noticeably better in every way over the W203. Another improvement is the larger trunk…we got everything we needed inside, and it is more useable than the previous generation in this respect. Great seats [nothing new here], very quiet, and the quickest car we’ve ever owned – passing is easy, and speed changes are mostly a matter of just thinking about it. AC was really tested during the SW part of the trip – we saw 115F in Vegas, and never less than 95F for nearly two weeks. Coolant temps never budged over 90C, the cabin was always cooled instantly after a hot sun soak, and so far the car has used no oil at all. And it’s tight – no noises inside, no squeaks or annoyances.
Issues: None. That’s right, everything works. Our car was built in Bremen in June, and carries a serial number in the 17xxx range. I knew we were running a risk – so far, so good.
Other misc observations:
-Didn’t think I’d care about the satellite radio, but now we’re hooked.
-The cruise control has a feature that I’ve never encountered on an MB before – if you speed up temporarily using the pedal, when you ease off, it doesn’t just coast back to the set speed [like every other car we’ve ever owned], but will actually apply the brakes gently to resume the old speed. Disconcerting at first, just something to get used to.
-The grade logic in the transmission is superb – whether going up hill or down, it was always doing the right thing – no hunting, and providing just the right gear to minimize brake use on down slopes. Very impressive.
Summary: The BEST CAR EVER in our household, and I’ve owned 54 cars total since 1962. DB has its act together again.
("W203" is a Mercedes chassis ID. Apparently Mercedes folk like to identify the cars by chassis number over model designation. I reckon that’s because Mercedes will make these not-so-minor changes in a model designation from time to time. The new c300 is chassis W204.)
This is the kind of driving I intend to do with this car myself, and a few of his observations match with mine so far:
The 7 speed transmission always seems to be right on the mark, regardless of the road grade. I’ve read complaints about it downshifting too much, but I’ll just bet those are coming from folks who have theirs set on the "Sport" program and not "Comfort" The "Sport" shifting program should be more aggressive. I’m still in the break-in period, and Mercedes says to only use "Comfort" for now, but "Comfort" is fine. The shifts are so smoothly done I have to watch the tach to know they’re even happening, and they happen at exactly the right moments. I’ve not felt the car straining to accelerate even once, and the downshifts are barely felt if at all. Acceleration just happens.
Road handling is way beyond any car I’ve ever owned. The ride is smooth, and yet you never loose the feel of the road, or what the car is doing. I’m not in a position to be pushing it yet, but it seems to take corners really nicely. I’ve driven it down a few windy Maryland Piedmont backroads and never once have I lost that solid Mercedes sedan feel in a corner or turn, no matter how much the road is undulating. It is a pure joy to drive. But then…it was made for the Autobahn after all…
I encountered the same cruse control behavior he did, when I accidentally turned it on while trying to signal a lane change. That’s all too easy on a Mercedes because the cruse control lives on a stick on the steering wheel close to the turn signal stick. They’re easy to confuse at first. I didn’t realize I had the cruse control on until I started down a hill and felt the car start breaking a tad to maintain speed.
And I know about how wonderful Satellite Radio is while long distance driving. For local driving it probably wouldn’t make much difference to most drivers. But when you’re crossing large swaths of countryside, its nice, really nice, to have a constant signal on a station you like. Plus, unlike Clearcut Clearchannel damaged broadcast radio, satellite radio has a variety of music that’s always there. You like bluegrass? There is a bluegrass channel. You like Techno-Trance? There’s that too. Classical? Yup…several different flavors of it. And so forth. Plus…Sirius has a gay channel. You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to have a gay channel to listen to, while you’re deep in red state territory, and the only thing on the broadcast dial is hate, hate, and more hate.
I’m taking a trip to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Saturday to visit an old friend. I’ll get a chance to let the Nav system direct me somewhere and give the car its first little road trip weekend. I’m halfway through the first thousand mile break-in period, and by the time I get back the car should be ready for its complementary thousand mile check-up.
A little history…
My first car was a blue 1973 Ford Pinto. It had no name in my mind, other then just Pinto because the model name seemed just right for that car. It was small, it was cute, and I loved driving it. I was fresh out of high school and working various fresh out of high school kid jobs. At $1997.48, the Pinto was barely affordable. At the time, one of my uncles owned a Mercedes diesel sedan and it was a marvel. Solid in a way none of the U.S. made cars of the 1970s could even come close to being, and yet agile on the road. It boasted safety features the U.S. automakers kept insisting would kill their business if they had to put them on their own products. I was a little teenage geek: where the other guys were all about Corvettes and GTOs, I was about my uncle’s Mercedes-Benz. Everything about that car made sense to me. But the pricetag for even the least expensive ones was well beyond what a teenage stock boy could afford. So I just dreamed…
I ran the the Pinto for 135 thousand miles and took fanatical care of the engine to get it there. But after ten years of driving it, everything but the engine was starting to come apart. By 1983 it was ready for the junk yard. A friend offered me his mom’s old 1974 Chrysler Imperial for 500 bucks and I snapped it up because in 1983 a 500 dollar car was about all I could afford. It had a 400 cubic inch V8 and was so damn huge the dash had two ashtrays in it. It could hold four in the front and four in the back bench seats easily, and maybe another six in the trunk. It also had a big ass hole in the floor under the driver’s seat that I could look down at and see the asphalt going by. I named it The Blue Whale.
A reckless driver in a little Ford Capri hit me head on while I was waiting to turn at an intersection, and while I was grateful that I had that massive car around me when it happened, that was the end of The Blue Whale. I was into hard times then, and could not afford to replace it. I did public transportation to and from whatever work I could find for another four years or so.
Then in 1991 I got some work as a software developer. The only problem was the job was in Baltimore and I was in Rockville. The agency I contracted through rented me a car for a couple of weeks until I got my first paycheck. From a friend of a friend I bought a huge white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon, another $500 junker. It had 240 thousand miles on it, having been owned by a lady who drove it all over West Virginia for her gumball business. I named it The Great White because Moby Dick just seemed obvious. It had another big ass V8 engine with a collapsed lifter in it somewhere that rattled loudly. The fabric on the inside roof was hanging down partially blocking my view out the back window, and eventually I just pulled it all off. Thereafter the layer of foam between it and the roof started flaking off and I’d have a hair full of it by the time I got to work. For about two years The Great White got me to Baltimore and back from the basement room I was renting in Wheaton.
Then in 1993, more confident that I could keep earning a living doing what I was now doing, I moved to Baltimore, into my first apartment ever (I was 38 years old). I was feeling so confident in my income as a software developer that I bought my first new car since 1973: a little green Geo Prism. I named it Aya. Aya was a champ, took me to California three times and carried me over two-hundred thousand miles and never once left me stranded anywhere.
By 2005 I was ready to step up a tad, and decided to go for a slightly bigger car, and more bells and whistles. I bought a black 2005 Honda Accord sedan with all the trimmings and named it Beauty, because it was so damn beautiful. Beauty carried me to California twice, and was, before now, the best highway car I’d ever owned. I could drive that car for hours on end and never feel tired. Just last July I put over eight thousand miles on it, driving first to Memphis, then to Topeka, then to Portland, then to Oceano California, and back through the southwest to Baltimore.
I fully intended when I bought Beauty, to own it as long as I’ve owned every other new car I’ve ever bought, which is to say until it had absolutely no trade-in value whatsoever. But a friend of mine bought himself a very lovely Acura TL, and it got me to asking myself if I was ever going to get around to going for the car I always wanted or not.
All these years I would occasionally peek into a Mercedes dealership and steal a look at the cars…particularly the low end sedans that were at least theoretically affordable. Someday. Maybe. I would get a brochure and take it home and spend hours looking at it. Two weeks ago, my Honda paid off, I peeked into a Mercedes dealership again, sat down in one of the new c300s, and thought…I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
You don’t want to be going right back into debt again over a new car so soon after you’ve paid the one you already have off.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
Your car only has 47 thousand miles on it. Buying a new one now would be a total waste of money.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
You could get ten more years out of the car you have. Easy.
But by then I might be too old to enjoy driving a Mercedes. I’m 54. In ten years I’ll be 64. And then the argument will be, can I afford to be borrowing money on a luxury car when I’m that close to retiring.
You don’t need it. Put it away for retirement. Put it into the house. You just don’t need a new car.
I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?
I stressed over it for two weeks. Then I did it. I’ve named it Traveler. One ‘l’…so as not to be confused with Lee’s horse. I am no admirer of Mr. Lee and his Lost Cause. The name just came to me as I was sitting in it and thinking about all the places we would go. In German its Reisender.
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