Scenes From An Autonomous Record Lot

Hello again, Nate. In all seriousness, once again some real world realism from a man of solid experience. In reverse order, I haven't even seen any Tesla charging stations in the Philly suburbs. In south Jersey the quick left at a light is quite common, helpful to overall traffic flow, and seldom if ever complained about. Just a mass response to the lack of availability of left turn lanes. Driving around the Boston area the fall and winter of the great East Coast Blizzard (around 95) was a scary thing. Never once saw much intelligent driving and a whole lot that wasn't. Ironic given the high concentration of top level universities. Never heard the term milk stops before. And I always factor in the change in velocity of the car on the cross street. If I don't see signs of a South Philly stop, that is if I see signs of merrily running the stop sign, I take the full stop, just in case. I tend to speed just as much as I feel I safely can (accident-wise and ticket-wise) in order to save some time. It also keeps me more alert, and less subject to highway hypnosis. Plus I can more easily position myself away from packs of traffic. Re: chronic pain...everything you say is true. What I have to try to teach my son, repeatedly. Good to hang tough, but you need to know when it stops being manly and a hardman, and when it becomes a case of neglecting to get needed medical treatment. And the doc who put me on Oxy's back around 2000 was happy to introduce me to them, and to keep on upping the dose, until it was time for him to shut me down. Then he wanted to go from eighty to zero in record time, so to speak, and I was hurting more ways than one, literally, for a while. Now when I need pain relief for severe pain (in NJ it has to be called chronic and intractable to get an Rx, unless you are dying), I opt for other choices, as effective and less addictive, though of course they all pull you in. ("Just when I thought I was out, they pull me right back in.") As you note, mind control can go a long way, but you have to be careful that you are not just letting a chronically declining situation get worse. But there have been times that I know of when meds were given too freely, and other times when one was left to suffer because the doctor was more concerned about risking his DEA narcotics license than he was about making sure that the patient didn't suffer needlessly. But that is another whole story...as Bill Crystal says "don't get me started..." The Metropolitan stories were interesting. Though of course some people only care about straight line acceleration. To me, though, a really good sleeper should handle both straight line shots and canyon carving. My lightly tweaked 76 Rabbit, with intake/exhaust mods and suspension mods, could embarrass whaletail Porsches in the hills of Vermont. Probably not a nice thing to do, but psychologically satisfying when I was younger and trying to impress women who liked thrills and adventures. Yeah, I hope you can make it out this way. You are always welcome. And there is a small chance I might get out your way in the next year or so, but too early to tell now. My best friend for decades lives in the Bay Area and spends the winters in Baja California, and recently has taken to driving down and back. I may run down with him next fall, and fly back to the East Coast a couple of weeks later. We would be coming right through the SoCal area if I do. You sound like the kind of person I am glad to know is in the world. Where I have been before, the phrase is "good people". Take care and have fun.

Good evening/morning, as the case may be for you. We seem to have a lot of things in common, Nate. Ditto for me, first one's on me. More likely to be a Coca-Cola for me, unless the coffee is really good. Just not Starbux, please! Jackie Mason was right "the coffee is not dark roasted! Their coffee is BURNT!". We have enough in common that we could have gone to different schools together, as the saying goes. Never heard of or saw a Divco truck, though I am old enough (plus by virtue of places I have lived) that I remember milk delivery trucks, as well as seltzer bottle trucks. I too have seen and known of too many dead from dope...usually H or downers, but other ways as well. I don't consider herbs to be dope, and especially don't think they should be locking people up for it. But Neil Young's song about the needle and the damage done pretty well sums up the other stuff. I have an Rx for a bit of M for chronic back pain, but only take enough to get a night's sleep when my back is bothering me badly. And after my experiences with Oxies after a severe accident, when they were new and the doctor assured me that they weren't very addictive (he either lied or was horribly misinformed) I will never take another one of those. I suspect that if you were in S. Philly when the main drags were bumper to bumper, and the local streets ALL have four way stop signs, going for miles, you might be tempted, not so much to floor it between stop signs, as to make the rolling approach to the sign, in essence going from 5mph to 15 or 20, back down to 5, etc., rather than hitting full stops. I have seen people get T-boned in DC even when making full stops, waiting their turn, and then having some bonehead either run their sign or stop, then try to speed up to intimidate someone else into stopping even though they have the right of way. Had a taxi drive do just that to me one time, in my Thunderbird. The accident was totally avoidable, and I suspect he must have been looking for a workman's comp claim (can I still say workman in America?). My best friend, who is the guy who cycles between the Bay Area and Baja California, and I used to run in the fast lane of life when we were in and around college. We lost touch for a variety of reasons, and got back in touch three or four years ago. Ironically, both of us had stopped doing things to ourselves that will remain unnamed here, as well as giving up the bottle. He stopped drinking about eight years before I did, is still with the same wife he had way back (I didn't settle down though for another twenty years), and he too has one son, though his is eight years older than mine. My best sleeper was a 76 VW Rabbit, purchased new. The EPA said the cat converter could go, along with a leaner main jet, .15 => .125. Problem was, the car skipped like mad around thirty five in third, around 55 in top. As you would expect, when you reduce backpressure and then lean it out further. Since this involves some diciness as to procedures, let me just say that somehow it ended up accidentally get a Dasher .175 main jet instead.`Since this was during one of the great gas shortages, my car got lots of crappy gas from the Brooklyn gas stations, where the rainwater ran down hill for blocks, and then into the stations' tanks. So I had a lot of practice doing teardowns and rebuilds of the carbs anyway. So I must have accidentally taken a larger jet out of my toolbox, as it would have been illegal to knowingly do so. But the car no longer skipped, AND the mpg went up about 2mpg. So, being a rational man, I was forced to conclude that I must have found the jet the EPA intended for me to have. However, now the car would backfire like a two stroke motorcycle every time I downshifted when the revs were up a bit. And I mean LOUD backfire...the kind that people looked around, and war vets would start to dive for cover. Obviously that would never do. Turns out the legal cat delete left the wider diameter pipe in place, leading to the backfire. So one time when I was in northern VT on vacation, I asked about replacement downpipes, and was told that the Canadian Rabbit downpipe was a straight pipe. Since it was legal to install in Canada, my backfire disappeared shortly thereafter. After that, I could and would run my then boss down Lex Ave in Manhattan on Saturday mornings, when we left work after any of our halfday workdays. Road went from three lanes to two about a quarter mile from where we would park on the street. His new Beemer just couldn't come near to keeping up...didn't know what to say when I swore, truthfully, that there was nothing but VW parts in my Rabbit. I added front and read anti-sway bars, and the car would corner like crazy, as well as having some wicked thirty to fifty and fifty to eighty times. The story is a bit on the long side, but I figured you might appreciate the engineering details. Those carbed Rabbits were some of the best cars VW ever made...easy to maintain, fast, good mileage and fun to drive, once you put sway bars on them, got the cat converter legally deleted, and then fixed the remaining issues. And I too have told docs and nurses to stuff their plans, when they started using me as a guinea pig...had one doc, a real pill pusher type, who tried to put me on high blood pressure meds in my thirties, with a BP of 140/80, when I was under a lot of job stress. The side effects are nasty, the high BP was likely to go down once I quit that stressful job, but the company was pushing the treatment, and the doc was going along with the plan. But not me...got a second opinion, changed jobs, and my BP came down to 120/70 w/o the severe and long-lasting side effects. My brother in law, who is an MD, says they even have a name for this, "old geezer syndrome", old geezers like me who only seek medical help when something is seriously and obviously wrong. Though I do make one exception...get routine physicals to be on the lookout. But my doctor doesn't reach for the prescription pad any and every time I come to see him about something. Which is one of the main reasons he is my doctor. My passing strategy is similar to yours...first pull up a few car lengths behind the guy crawling in the left lane. Then a couple of left turn signals, like the old M-B autobahn commercial. Then a couple of horn toots, and finally a couple of headlight flashes. If none of those budge the dinosaur, I cautiously move right, then pass, assuming there is a right to move to. Though thankfully most people aren't THAT oblivious. Still, they exist. I never knew the Metro had an MG suspension setup. Must have made for a lot of interesting possibilities. Another nice sleeper I used to see around, many years ago, was a very stock looking '40 Ford coupe. Only it had one of the 190 advertised HP Jaguar engines in it, mounted so cleanly that it looked stock. The actual HP was much higher, which is why swaps like that were popular in the old Gas class at the drags. The guy cleaned up at the strip and at the shows. But nary a sign that it had been hotrodded. Wish I weren't almost completely retired...I would love to beef up my 97 Grand Marquis. Still, it is fun to drive stock (but with a tuned chip...old habits die hard.) Hasta la vista...hope our paths cross IRL. --Volando