Three Days of Rain

Ahem...

Directed by yours truly.

Go here for directions.

My Car Committed Suicide

For those of you who don’t know, I drive a 1995 Toyota Celica. I like my car an awfully lot, due to its wide range of assets: Distinctive and fun without being flashy or extravagant. Handles like a dream, gets excellent gas mileage. Affordable, reliable. Red. Has a sunroof. And a respectable sound system.

It is also the first car that I ever chose for myself, which is a big step in any person’s life. The transition from parental hand-me-down cars or great-deal-from-Aunt-Fanny cars to This Is Mine cars is a substantial point in a person’s life.

And finally, I suspect that like my car because I have spent so much time in it. Since purchasing the Celica (used) in 1999, I have for a variety of reasons added 140,000 miles to its odometer. You become quite friendly with a vehicle in which you spend that much time, especially if you liked it a lot to begin with.

Here is a picture of my car (well, actually, one just like it) shortly after its birth:

Obviously, it no longer looks quite like that. You try jogging 192,000 miles and see how your personal aesthetic is affected. It does, however, look darn good for a car of its age and experience. The door-ding gnomes and rust monkeys have been relatively kind, and the interior is pretty decent, so it doesn’t feel terribly old.

At least not to me. Apparently the car and I have differing opinions about its reasonable life span. I see it as a car that can last me about one more year before I send it to live on a farm where it can play with other cars. Yesterday I discovered that the car is maybe a little anxious to move to the proverbial farm. I discovered this when, after leaving it parked on the slightly inclined street in front of my mom's house, I returned to find this:

My first thought was, “Oh dear God, I’ve killed my car.” I had obviously a) left it in neutral and b) neglected to put on the parking brake, a classic moment of catastrophic double stupidity. Such moments annually leave countless rednecks dead or injured. In my case, I had killed my car.

And then I (carefully) peered inside and checked the parking brake:

You’ll notice that said brake is engaged. Yes, I did leave the car in neutral (a 1-in-50 negligence), but expecting the parking brake to function is not too unreasonable and certainly not automocidal. The only possible conclusion: My car had tried to kill itself. Apparently, the ancient, beloved, road-weary vehicle had grown tired of the organ transplants, the ventilator, the life support, and the increasingly ineffective cosmetic surgery. The love of an owner was no longer sufficient reason to live. It saw its chance for freedom, disregarded its own parking brake, and coasted silently into the void.

And it was no small void, either:

(It is worth noting that this is a very steep angle, and seeing any vehicle on such a sharp incline is disorienting – almost troubling – in the same way that, say, a dog wearing pants would be. The mind is not trained to accept object A in situation B.)

See? Very disconcerting. And it's not even your car.

The tow truck arrived, the corpse was extracted, and found to be damaged thusly:

While not bad considering the gut-wrenching angle of impact, on such an old car these were fatal wounds. The semi-friendly people at Progressive duly informed me that the suicidal vehicle was totaled.

I am a little hurt by the whole episode, as I hadn’t realized that the simple pleasure of transporting me from here to there was no longer sufficient reason for my car to want to continue living. But I have to realize that it’s not about me. This is a cry for help, a desperate plea for attention. And I will be the provider of that attention. I’m not ready to let my old friend go into that good night, gently or otherwise. Total loss be damned, I’m going to take the insurance money and patch up the Celica. I shall raise it from the dead and show it that life still has joy and meaning. There are beautiful country roads yet to be discovered, perfect downshifts yet to be experienced, hairpins yet to be negotiated. Don’t worry, little car, I’m here for you! We’re all here for you, and we love you!

A Lot Of Small Things

I am headed into the wilderness of Michigan on Friday for a six-day backpacking excursion. As preparations (purchase and assembly of much gear) for this trip have been and will continue to take up a fair chunk of my time, I probably won't have anything to offer you until I return and write the obligatory "good golly nature is beautiful' post. Nature will, of course, be unfailingly beautiful, and I am looking forward to both seeing it and writing about it. In the interim, I have two things for you:

1. Go immediately and see the movie "Millions." I will write a review when I return, but the movie is going to be gone from the theatres soon (if it isn't already). I'm giving it an A-. It's one of the best movies I've seen this year. Go here for the preview first to make sure it's your type of movie.

2. A Lot of Small Things. Collected facts and observations from the last month or two:

A lesson in choices and consequences, brought to you by the police report section of the Daily Illini: “A 36-year-old man reported that money was stolen from his apartment at the 1100 block of West Hill Avenue on Monday evening by a woman who spent a night there. According to a police report, the victim said the suspect, who he did not know, stole the money from his bedroom. No arrests had been made at the time of the report.” Heh heh heh...idiot.

You know you’re searching through the Indianapolis Public Library’s history section when you come across titles like “Evansville, the Inland Wonder” and “Lost Bills: The Clown Prince of Vincennes.”

Occasionally, news headlines are brilliant, both because of what they say and of how they say it:
“Members of Bobby Brown’s entourage wounded in fight.”
“Neil Armstrong threatens to sue barber who sold his hair.”
“PETA accuses lab of punching monkeys.”

Yet another reason that I'm sad my football career never took off, from NFL.com: “In 1993, in the dawn of the salary-cap era, NFL teams paid about $1.2 billion, in today’s dollars, to players. In 2005, NFL teams will pay about $2.7 billion to players. Total monies disbursed to players are thus up 125 percent in just 12 seasons.”

Regarding the “Dukes of Hazzard” movie coming out this fall:
Great casting choice: Willie Nelson as Uncle Jesse.
Lousy casting choice: Burt Reynolds as Boss Hogg. (Boss: shrimpy, bald, rotund. Burt: Tall, hairy, slim.)

Two words that do not look right when spelled correctly: icicles and vacuum.

Do you watch “Lost” on ABC? Are you enjoying it as much as I am? Are you as concerned as I am that it might eventually devolve into an incomprehensible mess of plot twists, shadowy figures, unexplained happenings, and eternally prolonged and unsatisfying revelations? Or am I just having a flashback to the final four seasons of “The X-Files”?

I submit the following law for passage, with violations being punished by public spanking: If a public men’s room contains both a urinal and a toilet but doesn’t have a stall around the toilet, it is clearly a one-man-at-a-time restroom. All participants must lock the door when inside so as to avoid the deeply uncomfortable "entry and discovery" moment.

“A wildlife census taken by an ecologist at the University of Illinois found that the average 10-square-mile block of eastern [United States] forest contained 300,000 mammals: 220,000 mice and rats, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 fox, and 5 black bears.” That’s a lot of rodents.

Consider the following super-cool names:
Narain Karthikeyan
Jarno Trulli
Giancarlo Fisichella
Ralf Schumacher
Tiago Montiero
Rubens Barrichello
Kimi Räikkönen
Alexander Wurz
Viantonio Luizzi
These nine gents make up 38% of the drivers in the entire Formula One racing league, officially giving F1 the highest percentage of fantastic names per sports league in the world. Yes, even more than the NHL.

Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the world. Prove me wrong.

“But why did you guys break up? You look so happy in all of these pictures.”
“Everybody looks happy in pictures. If people don’t look happy in pictures, they never had a chance.”

I don’t like custom cell phone ring tones all that much, but I did hear a good one the other day: Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’,” just the “DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH, doo doo doo dooooo doo” and the repeat with the slight variation. Simple, recognizable, repeats well as a ring, and accurately reproduced by the limited audio capabilities of a cell phone. I heartily approve.

The title of the next paper that I submit to an academic conference will be “Punctuative Sigmoidoscope: An Examination of the Diseased State of the Academic Colon.”

This from “Scrubs”:
Patient: Why do I have to have my gall bladder removed?
Dr. Cox: Because you have gallstones.
Patient: Why do I have gallstones?
Dr. Cox: Did you possibly eat a large gall boulder and then fall on your stomach?
Heh heh heh heh…

For all you New Yorkers, I offer these three items from T. Allston Brown’s History of the New York Stage:

“On the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street was ‘Meade’s Midget Hall.’ In November, 1887, James Meade introduced General Mite and Minnie Aborn, two diminutive people, to the public.”

“Of course Brooklyn lurked far behind in the splendour of achievement.”

“I, therefore, most sincerely hope that those rude ‘Goths’ who have been, heretofore, in the habit of standing on the benches, spitting in the boxes and on the stage, to the infinite annoyance of the ladies, will hereafter discontinue the practice.”