Auto Show debrief

Yesterday my friend Neil and I had a good time at the Dallas Auto Show.  We rode the light rail to the convention center, avoiding all the traffic and parking hassles....easily worth the few bucks it cost, and we arrived ahead of most of the crowd.  Much to my delight and surprise the show was NOT dominated by Bubba trucks.  I was rather disappointed that there weren't any wild concept cars.  None.

Of course I was immediately drawn to the European exotics:

Like this 2014 Aston Martin Vanquish.

Of course I ordered mine "Well Equipped".

After gawking at this more proletarian Vantage ($150K) for a while I was invited inside the velvet rope and assigned my own personal advisor, Aaron Stephenson IV*. Before long I had one of his high-dollar catalogues and was calling him "Biff" and picking colors and accessories.  He's probably still waiting for me after I excused myself for a rest room visit.

Maserati Gran Cabrio

McLaren MP4-12C

The new, soon-to-be introduced Jaguar F-Type.

I didn't say there weren't ANY Bubba trucks there.  This was some kind of "wrap" treatment you can cover your truck with enabling you to hide from ducks and deer and such.

I'm not a big Range Rover fan, but I must admit the Evoque ($58K) was rather impressive.

There were some vintage oddities stuck over in one corner, like this Datsun 2000.  It was quite a screamer back in its day....

....as was this '71 Datsun 240Z.  As a college student I lusted for one of these.  ('Course, I lusted for all kinds of things back in my college days. ;)  As I didn't have $34 dollars back then, much less $3400, it became another of my lost loves.

Awwww, my little Fiat 500 Abarth.  Innit cute?  One of these days I'm gonna convince K it followed me home.

One thing I took away is that cars are getting ridiculously expensive.  A decent BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Lexus, Infinity, etc, is just more than I want to pay for wheels.  They're for those who want a "look at me" experience.  Or Lottery winners.

What I found was that Subaru and Mazda in particular have some quite good cars at very reasonable prices....mid-upper $20's.  Even Volkswagen's are getting pricey, although the new GTI @ $33K still seemed like a good value.  Chrysler products seemed way behind the curve, and poor GM seems to be in a continued slow decline.  Ford, however, had some good small world-class cars worth looking at.

The Geneva or Frankfurt or New York show it wasn't, but all things considered the Dallas show was worth the effort to attend.  Oh...and the "booth babes"?  Not a disappointment, either.  ;)

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On today's "to-do" list?  I asked K if she wanted to go to the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick's Day Parade and Alcohol Soiree, but she said she'd rather take a bullet to the head.  I guess that's a "no".   At this point I'm just hoping for lunch out.

Have a great weekend everyone.

S

*not his real name

Car talk

Today a couple of friends and I are going to the Dallas Auto Show.  At least that's how it's billed.  In years past it might have been more truthful to label it the Dallas Truck Show.  We'll see if our regional locomotive tastes have changed since I last attended.

I know there are some really fine cars in Dallas as I see them every month at our local Cars and Coffee event.  But those events are aimed specifically at enthusiasts, not for the masses.  The Auto Show has traditionally been where Bubba Joe and his "old lady" go to spec out their matching 'his 'n hers" Dooley's.

I remember my Dad loved his Cadillac's.  Back in his day you had "arrived" when you could buy a Cadillac.  That usually meant when you were at least well into middle age.  I called it an "old man's car", although never to his face.  I figured he deserved to have his fun, too, so I just smiled and gave him a thumbs up.

More recently Cadillac has tried to revamp its image by appealing to younger people, and based on its sales numbers I guess it has succeeded.  They established the hard-angled-crease theme as their design signature, rather reminiscent of the once supreme F-117 Stealth fighter.

See the similarity?  The only problem with this is the F-117 has long been considered obsolete, the last ones relegated to the desert aircraft boneyard years ago.  I guess GM didn't get that memo.

I'm sure there will be lots of Caddy's on display today, but I'm hoping to see something more exotic, too.  When I was in London a few years ago my timing just happened to coincide with the London Auto Show, so I went.  WOW!  It was an extravaganza, with makes and models and sights I'd never seen before.  

I keep hoping that maybe, just maybe, a little of that might somehow slip into the Dallas Convention Center.  A few models wearing something besides boots and cowboy hats would be appreciated as well.

Fingers crossed.  Back later with photos.

S

Hey buddy, can you spare a coupla thousand?

Is this real or just a remake of Revenge of the Nerds?  So far cyber-attacks have been just probing jabs looking to see if the perps actually have the capability to mess us up.  Will they soon go for the jugular?

A couple of days ago cyber-attackers shut down JP Morgan Chase's (I think it was JPMC) customer accounts for a few hours, meaning customers couldn't get to their money.  A few hours is no big deal, but what if that had been for several days or even several weeks?

I rarely have enough cash on me to buy a cuppa coffee at Fourbucks.  I pay my bills online and use my debt card for purchases around town.  If my bank's computers turned turtle for more than a few hours I'd probably be on the corner with a tin cup begging for lunch money.

I think I'll pull out a few hundred bucks at least and keep it under my mattress.  That should at least buy enough kibble to keep us going a while.

Speaking of banks, it looks like the movement to break up the biggest of them is gaining momentum.  Dallas FED President Richard Fischer is rallying support from all quarters to possibly put hard caps on their size.  JP Morgan Chase might soon be three:  JP, Morgan, and Chase.

"Too big to fail" banks will soon be small enough to fail and "Too big to jail" bankers will soon be know as "Inmate 95686532".  It looks like my work here is almost done.  :)

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It seems Catholics have 'em a new Pope.  I kept waiting for the call, but it never came.  I knew I was a long shot at best, considering I'm not Catholic.  That's OK though.  No hard feelings.  In fact, it seems like this guy might be a good one.  He eschewed the traditional Cardinal's mansion in Buenos Aires and instead lived in a small apartment on the outskirts, and rode his bike or took mass transit to work every day.  Even traveling to Rome for this conclave he made the 13 hour flight in a coach airline seat.  (That's coach, not Coach.)  I find that rather refreshing.  

I'd like to see some of our high-flying TV evangelists do some of that.  Ha!  That would definitely qualify as a miracle!

Counting down to the weekend....

S

I'd like to shoot the nerd that invented 'texting'

Once again I must aire my oddball opinion and say I do NOT get the allure of texting.  Isn't texting just an updated version of the telegraph?  Didn't Alexander Graham Bell make the telegraph obsolete a century ago?  Why are we moving backwards?

If you disagree, tell me:  Can you text as fast as you can talk?  If you can you have freak thumbs!  Are we as a society so....so intimidated by the human voice that we'll go out of our way and take 3 times as long to convey a thought via texting vs. the telephone?  

Yesterday I asked my brother if he had heard back from ______?  We needed an answer pronto. 

He said, "If I don't hear from him soon I'll text him."

Oh bull crap!  I made one phone call, asked one question, got one answer, in one minute.  Sheesh!  It ain't rocket surgery, people!

If we don't use our muscles they'll atrophy.  If we don't use our voices will our species soon be able to do nothing more than grunt and squeal?

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My daughter Andrea had a beautiful baby girl a couple of weeks ago.  She sends out a daily photo text to all her friends and family showing us Reese's progress.  Cool.  Except about 10 seconds after she sends it my phone starts going ding...ding...ding...ding...  Everyone she sent the photo to starts replying, "Oh, she's so cute" and "She's getting SO big", etc.  

Now I'm paying for 20 incoming texts, and I don't even know most of these people.  (And don't even think it....the last thing I want is 'unlimited' texting.)  I finally asked her to send me my daily photo privately.  There may be a setting where I can opt out of seeing all the replies, but I'll be damned if I can find it.

Hey, there's a thought....I wonder if I can opt out of text messages altogether?  Then, if someone wants to talk to me, they'll have to TALK to me.  That will save us both time.

S

Dumpster diving and personal grooming....

Today whatever creative gene I might have has taken a holiday.  I can find nothing remotely interesting to write about.  About the best the news could prompt me with was this:

"Houston Homeless Man Given Ticket For Dumpster Diving For Food."

Really?  It probably cost the City of Houston $20 to write and process that ticket, and of course they'll never see a dime of the fine anyway.  They should have just bought the poor guy a ham sammich and a tea and saved the taxpayers $15.

But it gets worse.  This is what I've chosen for today's blog topic:  Hair removal.  Specifically MY hair removal.

My daily dress might resemble the attire worn by the guy in the story above, but I do like to be well groomed.  I'll sometime purposely not shave on a Saturday, just because I can, but never two days in a row.....no, no, no! 

Here's where you might want to tune in to Celebrity Ironing on cable channel 796 instead of reading further.  Today was "ears and eyebrow day". 

Because of my f__ked up left eye (retina problem years ago) and now my watery right eye (tear duct damage after skin cancer surgery on the side of my nose), my "detail" eyesight needs some help.  It's hard to shave in the morning while standing 3 feet away from the bathroom mirror, so I went out and bought myself one of those lighted magnifying mirrors women use to put on their makeup.

It works GREAT!  Maybe a little TOO great.  I put it on top of our chest of drawers in the bedroom so it's at about my eye level. Turn it on, stand about a foot away, and I can see every little hair that's even thinking about popping out.   A few swipes with my Norelco and I look semi-Homo Sapien again.

Trouble is, I can also see every little hair that's beginning to grow in places hair shouldn't grow, like ears, too.  What's with that?  To me, hair growing out of a man's ears is the opening salvo of Little Old Manhood.  

But you know what they say, "Behind every man with hairy ears stands a woman with a pair of tweezers."  What?  Nobody says that?  Well, they should!

Today I called in K and her set of essential grooming tools and she plucked me clean.  Eyebrows, too.  I had a couple of stray eyebrow hairs that clearly had a man-crush on the late, great Andy Rooney.  Gone!

A little snip time on my moustache and goatee (technically I think that's called a Van Dyke) and I'm ready to face the world.  Now I just need to spruce up the wardrobe a little.  That'll have to wait until Tuesday, though.  I'm pacing myself.  ;)

S

Payback is SWEET!

I'm pretty sure K took a nasty bump to the head.  While I didn't actually see the incident, the evidence is overwhelming, Exhibit A being that she has begun to throw away perfectly good food.

Yesterday at 11:30 I was scheduled to be part of a focus group.  Knowing this would interfere with my customary mid-day solid fuel replenishment, I had made a mental note to finish off my last few pieces of jalapeno and cheese summer sausage specially made for me by my friend David @ David's Meats.  

This stuff is awesome!  Just enough jalapeno to light you up, yet stop short of spontaneous combustion.  So before I left I opened the refrig looking for my butcher-paper-wrapped carnivore's delight....and it was GONE!  Poof!  Vanished!

As I was digging furiously through the refrigerator hoping that it had just somehow been misplaced, K asked me, "Whatcha lookin' for?"

"My jalapeno and cheese summer sausage.  I was gonna eat a few slices now to tide me over until after my focus group convenes."

"Oh....that.  Yeah, I threw it out."

"YOU WHAT?"

"I threw it out.  It had turned green."

*as I bit a chunk out of my tongue*  "Umm, sweetheart....I'd been saving that for my quickie lunch today.  And besides, it hadn't 'turned green'.  That green stuff you saw was jalapeno.  It's supposed to be there."

Later in the day K added insult to injury:  "OK, I have to confess....I didn't actually see green stuff growing on your summer sausage.  I just assumed that since it had been in the refrig more than a couple of days it had turned green.  Sorry."

"Assumed?  You just assumed....?"

"I just said I saw it there because I thought you'd yell less if you thought it had actually gone bad."

I'm thinkin' she owes me.  BIG time!  Wonder where you can rent a French maid's outfit for an evening.  *wink*

S

Some things change, and some things never seem to change

Students today seem by-and-large to be more conscientious about their studies than my friends and I were back when we were in school.  This is a good thing as success today takes more study and knowledge than it did 40 years ago.  "Hard work" went a lot further then than it does today.  Now "working smart" is more important, IMO, than "working hard".

Yet there will always be a few dunces who are stuck grasping at straws on test day.  The headline in USA Today read "Nineteen buses found with flat tires on test day."  It seems one (or several) students weren't prepared for their tests, so they just sabotaged the school buses.  Flat tires = no students = tests postponed.  Ta Da!

Flashback:  Murdough Hall, Texas Tech University, 1970.  My good friend and I had a big _______ test the next day.  ( I can't remember the subject.)  Typical for us, we had managed to do just about anything/everything except study for that test.  We would rather spend 4 hours planning and executing a clandestine dumpster dive than actually studying for a test.  (I never said we were very bright.)  

Our only chance was an all-nighter.  Things went well for the first hour or so, then we got bogged down arguing the case for Ginger vs Mary Ann or something equally ridiculous.  By about 4 am we realized we were just plain screwed.  Too much to learn, not enough time left to learn it.

Then we remembered the campus newspaper story a couple of weeks earlier about a bomb scare....the building in question was cleared, the students affected sent home.

You see where this is going.

Our plan was hatched:  We would use a pay phone a few blocks off campus and call a bomb threat in to the KK (Kampus Kops). We would put a handkerchief over the mouthpiece of the phone to disguise our voice.  (That's what all the bad guys did on TV.)  Then we would arrive at our building just as it was being evacuated.  Test delayed until Monday.  *back slapping, high-fiving*  Disaster averted.

Except for one little thing.  In my mind Fred (not his real name) would make the actual phone call, while in his mind I would do the deed.  This led to an argument as we stood outside the phone booth because neither of us wanted to spend time in Leavenworth in the event the handkerchief-over-the-mouthpiece trick failed and we were caught.

As things turned out we showed for the test, dutifully bombed it (pardon the pun), yet somehow still passed the course.  Lesson learned:  We were both chicken to the core.

Postscript:  I managed to somehow mature, marry, have a family, and lead a criminal-free life.  "Fred", however, later went over to the dark side.  He became a very high-ranking Republican leader in our state House of Representatives.

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Have a great weekend everyone.

S