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3 Modern Things I Have Never Done

3 Inexplicable Things

…which most other people seem to have done:

  • Used a car’s embedded navigation system.  (Okay, I did try — once — to use the Tiguan’s navsys, but gave up after three tries and resorted to the phone instead.  To be fair, the VW system was very clunky — 2013 era — so maybe it has improved since then, but now I just use the awful Waze app to venture to Parts Unknown because I became familiar with it during the Uber Years.  And New Wife’s 2015 Fiat 500 has no such thing on its spartan dashboard.)
  • Bought anything from TEMU.  (A lot of Millennials and Gen Z kids seem to love this Amazon-like thing, but that Chinese factory-direct-to-user model… I trust it not.  Plus long delivery times, especially when compared to Amazon, and from what I gather, returns are almost impossible — “not worth the hassle” seems to be a common statement, and with that renowned Chinese build quality?  Pass.)
  • Bought or used any Apple product.  (My purchase of an Apple IIe computer back in 1982 doesn’t count, because it was the only PC available at the time, and I only used it for 6 months before dumping it for an IBM PC.  But the modern Apple products like MacBook and iPhone?  Not one.)

Feel free to add your list of “never used or bought”, in Comments.

Piling On The Misery

Bad News, Drive Time, Eco-Crap

Continuing the saga of electric vehicles (EVs), we learn about the fire risk.  An excerpt from the catalogue of catastrophes:

It is now, or should be, common knowledge that electric vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, bikes, scooters—under conditions of even low humidity or water damage, are prone to catching fire, owing to the unstable nature of the lithium-ion battery. As Chris Morrison writes at The Daily Skeptic, EVs are known to explode “with the force of a bomb blasting super-heated jets of flame, melting and decomposing nearby structural materials including metal and concrete, and sending vast amounts of toxic fumes into any enclosed atmosphere.”

Jammed into underground parking garages or packed in ferries, EVs are harbingers of almost unimaginable disaster—ecological and safety menaces to which the Net Zero fanatics among our political leadership are comatosely indifferent.

  “Willfully indifferent” is the more appropriate term, because as with all faith-based belief systems, danger is set aside as an acceptable risk provided that the goal thereof (in this case, Net Zero) is laudable.

My solution, which is that every time one of these EV things catches fire spontaneously we should toss a Greenie into the flames, would no doubt strike some as excessive.  Nevertheless, even the threat of such an action should shut these assholes up.

Classic Beauty: Lana Turner

Classic Beauty

After her very first movie role (in a bit part) at the age of 15, Lana Turner’s appearance in a sweater caused a critic to write that she “made a sweater look like something Cleopatra was saving for the next visiting Caesar”, and the nickname of “Sweater Girl” stuck.  And in the following decades, it was hard to find a movie that didn’t include her in the cast.  Here’s the look that started it all:

And the rest:

I think the reason for her popularity is understandable.

Fakery

Drive Time, Old Fartism, Resistance

In a post earlier on in the week, I said this:

I often wonder what car or cars I’d get to replace the Tiguan, and what’s interesting is that I’m having precisely the same feelings that I have with guns and watches: nothing of recent manufacture at all — especially given that all the cars without exception are loaded with electronic gizmos I don’t care for, or else gizmos that spy on you and/or could possibly be used to control your driving. In fact, the more I think about it, I’d probably have to go back to pre-1970s cars — fully resto-modded of course — to find a car that has not a single computer chip in its driving operation.

The problems with finding a fully resto-modded car are that firstly, nobody’s going to bother restoring your beloved ’82 Honda Civic or Toyota MR2 because sheesh it’s not worth the money.  Secondly, of course, is that the cars that are worth restoring were spendy to start off with (so just getting your clapped-out 60s model Whatever fixed up is going to cost you nearly as much as, say, a brand new 2025 Honda), and once you factor in the cost of restoring a Dino, the end price is stratospheric.

Think I’m joking?  Here’s one such example:

1972 Ferrari Dino 246GTS

And the price (linked):  $570,000

Look, I love me my Dinos, as any fule kno, but I draw the line at a car that was Ferrari’s “entry-level” model back in the day now costing as much as a brand new Ferrari.  As my buddy Patterson would say, “Fuck that for a bunch of assholes.”

However, there may be a couple ways around this little problem.  Let’s use the example of the late 1950s-era Porsche 356.

A properly-restored original 356 looks something like this:

1957 Porsche 356A

And the price (linked):  $325,000

LOL no way, Bubba.

But then there’s an alternative:

This one’s price (linked):  $69,500

“Wait a minute, Kim,”  I hear you say, “At that price, it’s not been restored, so it’s a clunker.”

Actually, it’s a hand-built… replica, with a new 2.3liter VW engine that provides a stonking 145hp (as opposed to the original 356’s 60hp).

“But it’s not a Porsche engine!”

Yeah, but those old 1950s Porsche powerboxes weren’t much to write home about, and to be perfectly frank, they actually sounded like VW engines anyway.  And the VW engine is less finicky and gets better fuel consumption.

And best of all, its VIN establishes it as a 1973 VW, not a Porsche, so your insurance payments would be… close to zero.

I know… $70k is still a chunk of change.  But it’s brand new, hand-built, modernized in all the right places (brakes, suspension etc.), and it looks exquisite (if you like that old Porsche 356 shape;  New Wife thinks it’s “ghastly” but I think it’s at least nicer-looking than the hunchbacked 911 which replaced it).

And there are plenty of cheaper options, with (probably) lower quality, but whatever.

Me?  I think I’d be quite happy to pootle around town in one of these.  No intrusive spying, no stupid electronics, no “convenience” features, and no airbags.

At my age, it might just be a worthwhile tradeoff.