It’s ugly, but it gets you there

I come from a family with no shortage of car fanatics.  My dad has been turning a wrench since his teenage years, and continues to be the person we all turn to when something breaks.  My two brothers have followed in his footsteps, and frequently can be found assisting him in the garage on a Saturday afternoon.  I’m somewhat of an exception in that I haven’t ever really gotten into cars as much as they have (I can do some basic maintenance tasks, but not much beyond that,) although I do enjoy auto racing, another popular pastime in my family.  In fact, just last month we all went down to Utah to go see the American Le Mans Series race at Miller Motorsports Park.  If you have any interest in auto racing, I would highly recommend getting out to see an ALMS race at some point.  In addition to seeing a variety of different race cars (everything from open wheel racers in some of the support series that follow ALMS around up to the cutting edge LMP cars)  everyone who attends the race gets open paddock access, which lets you see all this stuff up close, and really get a feel for just how much work truly goes into running a racecar.

 But I digress.  Needless to say, with all the gearheads around the family, I have to drive something really cool, right?  Well, now I do (I’ll get to that in a minute) but up until this weekend, not so much.  For nearly the last ten years, my daily driver has been an ‘84 Toyota Camry.  From this picture (after the jump,) you might guess that this car is actually in pretty good shape:

Come on Down

As you might have heard Bob Barker’s final episode of The Price is Right was aired this morning, marking the end of a career of 50 years spent in television (and 35 years on TPIR.)  Since it’s kind of hard to not notice somone handing out cars and appliances on national TV for 35 years, I suspect there are very few people in this country who don’t know who Bob Barker is (although there might be a few who asked themselves “Wow, is he still around?” when they heard of his retirement.)  In my case, The Price is Right with Bob hosting the show has been around for as long as I have (and several years more.  By the time I managed to show up, Bob had already been dishing out fabulous prizes for nearly six years. )

Stuff for the Bachelor’s Kitchen

Note:  One of the things I intend to do with this blog is to collect some of the posts I make to the assorted message boards I read into one place.  This is one of those posts, which comes from a post made on the Chowhound.com boards.  I will make a post that describes what you’ll find here in a little more detail later on, but I do make something of a hobby out of cooking, and intend to include a fair bit of material related to that on here.

 This thread on chowhound.com asks what cookware a bachelor should equip their kitchen with to prevent starvation, and to possibly impress a lady who might come along.  Since I have a bit of experience with the subject (the cooking part, not the lady impressing part,) I came up with the following list of items that my own kitchen is equipped with.   Note that most of my pans came from a Wolfgang Puck stainless steel set I got for about $100 at Sam’s Club that has thus far served me well. 

Digging Up Ancient History

Let’s face it. If you’re living on the cutting edge of technology, you’re probably going to be left bleeding every once in a while. In an era where computers are often obsolete before they even leave the box they are shipped in, and software release schedules are so rushed that even the release versions seem like all they’re missing is the word “beta”, one can feel like they’ve fallen head-first into a Salad Shooter(tm) at times. If the computers themselves are really that bad, it’s a wonder that anyone would even THINIK of surfing the Internet. Strangely enough, millions of people dive head-first daily to surf the 500-foot tidal wave laced with used syringes, landmines and insurance salesmen that everyone, strangely enough, seems to think is some sort of 12-lane highway. If only real life made this much sense…

It was with this paragraph sometime back in 1996 that I opened up The Sledgehammer, my first long-forgotten attempt at writing a weekly “column” on the Internet that lasted for about two years and 78 “issues” before I let it slowly rot into oblivion…  Or at least I would have done so if not for the fact that someone decided that it would be a good idea to try to  back up the entire Internet and save my little forgotten piece of Web 1.0 for time and all eternity.