Almost all G-bodies came with 14 inch wheels, and most of the F-bodies in the local yards also have 14s. *Most* S-10 pickups have 14s... but today I found the later ones came with 15s. 1/2 inch negative offset, 15x7 - perfect for the Malibu.
S-10 4wds use an entirely different wheel, with close to 2" negative offset, FWD style. Sizes on both aluminum and steel wheels were 15x8, with the same offset. I picked up one steel wheel to do fitment on the RX7, which uses a 3-1/2" backspace 5.5" wide 13" wheel.
Astro vans are G-body variants, but they use the big-car 5-on-5 bolt pattern. I had been told the Astro and S-10 wheels interchanged, which was wrong, and I didn't think to check it for myself until today.
For the Malibu, I would have been just as happy to use B-car or Astro rotors up front, if I could have found any 5-on-5 axles to slide into the 7.5" rear end. The Astro rear is wider and asymmetrical; I didn't feel like disassembling a C-clip rear just to find out if the short-side axles would fit a G.
That done, I zipped by the used tire place to see about snagging a 215/50, 225/40, or 225/50 tire do fit up the RX wheel. If there were a pair of good ones, I'd snag them for the front of the Malibu. Alas, neither had any 15/50s... not even new, though one could order one in for $91. Uh.
So... Tire Rack's site sucks even on broadband, but I get it to cough up a list of 225/50 tires. HOLY SHIT! It's been a while since I bought any of those new, but prices have basically doubled. They did have a lowball Sumitomo HTR 200 for $66; still more than I wanted to pay for a single junk tire to verify tire clearances.
The BFG G-Force and Hoosier R6s have gone way up, too - both right at $200 each. I used to pay $140 for 275/40-17s in those models.
The RX has a pair of decent 185/70R13 tires in the back, but both front ones are toast. One's too weather-cracked to pass tech, and the other is 1/2" out of round and makes it impossible to drive the car over 45mph without major parts trying to vibrate off. I wasn't going to do the rear wheels until I swapped rear ends, but I can't see buying two more tires, then throwing them away later this year. So I already got a disc of steel to make a drill fixture with, and I'll make a jig to drill the axles and brake drums for the Chevy wheel pattern. The fronts aren't that important at the moment, but I already have the 12" Corvette brake bits and turned-down hubs to accept them, and those hubs need to be drilled to the Chevy pattern.
Of course, all three wheels I wanted were 200 yards back into the yard, and it was 100F when I rolled the last one out. I think I'm going to rest in the air conditioning for a while...
I thought it would be a bad third-rate SF movie; AB *likes* bad third-rate SF movies. Instead, it turned out to be one of the better movies I've seen lately.
It's a cop movie... except the bad guy is a body-snatching snake from Altair, who's into stealing Ferraris, armed robbery, and listening loud rock and roll. He's been on a several-state spree of killing and robbing, pursued by a fake FBI agent, who drafts a local police detective into helping out.
Lots of nifty cars (watch the background!), some reasonably good chases, rock and roll if you're into '80s headbanger stuff like Concrete Blonde, consistent plot, nice stable camera work, fair acting, and meticulous attention to small details. I'm sort of critical about things like that, and it was nice to see some post-production editing done by someone who actually *cared*.
Yeah, the cops-and-aliens thing has been done before, several times. But somehow, this turned out to be a good movie. Yeah, there were still some things I could nitpick, but nothing that damped my enjoyment watching it.
Today I yanked the insulaton out from behind the seat - the fuel pump is ahead of the left rear wheel - to find a place to drill a hole. Hah; there was a fat rubber bushing with the fuel pump wires running through it. I pushed the bushing through, dropped a few feet of fuel line through the hole, hooked one end to the pump, dropped the other in the lawnmower gas can.
Drive around a bit... yep, same problem. The fuel pump is croaking when it warms up. Jack the car up a third time, pull the pump - almost too hot to touch - and take it back to Auto Zone, where it came from.
I figure, April 1987. Or maybe 1986. When they were Auto Shack.
Wanda was behind the counter; their only employee who has been there more than a few months. In fact, she was the one who sold me the pump to start with; 20 years ago, she was the only female in a local auto parts store, and I remembered the sale.
No receipt, of course, and it's not in the computer... but she took my word for it, said the pump should have had a "lifetime" warranty when I bought it, and gave me another one.
Well!
I wasn't expecting her to warranty the pump, particularly without proof. And after 20 years... maybe they write that sort of thing off to customer relations or something. But it made my morning, anyway.
Soldered the connectors onto the new pump, installed... drove all around, the gauge sitting on 4.5 PSI, just like the regulator says to do. Cool.
> The CORRECT tax spread is the poor pay nothing. The middle class > pay a little, and the rich pay a lot.Yeah, I've seen that plan. Right out of "A Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx. Very interesting book, btw.
How about an absolutely fair system?
Take the national budget, divide it by the population, and everyone pays the same, from Bill Gates down to your three-month-old daughter (who benefits just as much as anyone else, and therefore has to pay, too).
What? You don't like that plan? When you start adding exceptions, you're headed down the slippery slope to a 30,000 page tax code...
"Carbs" is apparently media-speak for "carbohydrates", since any word with more than two syllables is beyond their target demographic.
Let's see... that's a piece of hamburger slathered with mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup, with pickles, onions, and lettuce, wrapped in foil-backed paper?
The reason sandwiches have a bun is so you have something to hold on to all the messy stuff with. I'm at a loss as to how you're supposed to unwrap and eat one of those bunless low-carb wonders...
> > I've never understood the distaste for assassination. Which is worse - > > sending agents in to kill a handful of men who we know to be evil, or > > sending in an army to kill that handful of men plus one hundred thousand > > who had nothing to do with anything?There were some Congressmen calling for the assassination of Adolf Hitler in WWII. That lasted precisely as long as it took to explain to them that it would be a tit for tat game where they *personally* would be the targets. Half a dozen Nazis ruled Germany, but there was all of Congress, the Senate, the President and VP and the Cabinet, the Secretaries of this and Directors of that, forty-odd state governors... close to a thousand people who'd have to have 24/7 protection. Nowadays it would be a status symbol; in 1942, it was unthinkable. [1]
Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated anyway. After the Gestapo got done with their retribution on the local population, there were Combined Operations officers shitting their shorts at the thought that somewhere, somehow, the Nazis might find out the assassins had been trained by the Allies.
[1] Harry Truman, in one of his several biographies, mentioned that he was "bothered" by people who wanted to talk to him or shake his hand when he went to the bank or about his errands, or was walking to the White House from Blair House, where he and his wife were staying while the White House was being remodeled. The President of the United States, walking all by himself down Pennsylvania Avenue, no Secret Service, no Marines, not even a flock of staff members. It was a different world then.
Before you get into an asskicking contest, you need to see if you can protect your own ass. Except at the very top, we can't. Or rather, it's not politically expedient.
> > They are gonna get sued just like McDonald's. And it will be by a > > class-action suit of 4' 11", 95# women's right's activists. They will > > be bouncing down the grocery isle and see the title "Hungry Man's > > Breakfast". They will ignore the picture of the 6'3", 265# construction > > worker and focus on the title. And get mad.That reminds me of high school, and cafeteria lunches. They had "student lunches" and "teacher lunches." Besides being crafted of organics closer to recognizeable foodstuffs than the mystery gunk in the student lunches, the teacher lunches contained more than twice as much food as a student lunch. But a 6'3, 265# student feetball player was not allowed to buy a teacher lunch, no matter how hungry he was, while the 4'11, 95# blue haired teachers would pick at their plate and then throw their uneaten food away.
Why? *BECAUSE*, that's why... that's the only explanation I ever got, anyway.
> > I still don't like the ideer of gettin' fingerprinted though.Heh, heh, heh...
LRPD has a new thing which an unlucky buddy discovered. Get a traffic ticket? You get fingerprinted. Right on the cop's copy. Don't want to give him your fingerprint? You go to jail, and they'll take them from you forcibly.
Don't forget that many employers are now using "biometric security", which usually means fingerprint scanners. Don't want to give them your fingerprints? The Labor Board isn't likely to sympathize.
My Arkansas driver's license has my right thumbprint on it. (failing posession of a right thumb, they have a list of acceptable digits, in descending order.) The fingerprint is a requirement, just like the photograph. No print, no license. But the license is "voluntary", and the driver's handbook has changed "right to drive" to "privilege to use the highways."
I can hardly wait for genome scanners like "Gattaca" or retinal scanners like "Minority Report." Nothing like cheap technology to refine the tools of oppression.
Okay, maybe a 323 or 626 mirror would work. I wandered down the aisles and found no Mazda products of any kind. Honda, Mitsubushi, Nissan, and Toyota, a lone Isuzu, but no Mazdas.
That's really weird...
The G&F range's only real peculiarity at the time was that they had pistols on the left side and rifles on the right; not that unusual, but if you wanted to shoot a pistol *and* a rifle, you had to pay $2.50.
With one thing and another, I hadn't been there in several years. I went back with a friend, and we came to a new 10-foot fence with huge signs, "NO LOADED WEAPONS" and dire warnings about what would happen if you brought any in. Felix stopped outside the gate, unloaded everything, and started shucking cartridges out of loaded magazines. Apparently even magazines were "LOADED WEAPONS." I was pretty pissed since I had the 32 and 50 round sticks for the MAC-11 loaded up, but I went along with it.
We pull in, and Felix gathers up all his stuff and starts for the range hut. I asked him what he was doing. Oh, they have to check in all the guns by serial number, and they decide if any as "assault" style, and you can't shoot those.
They want the serial numbers? Oh, *really*?
Really.
They had also gone to $6, with $2 per extra gun. I told Felix to go ahead, I'd read one of the Clive Cussler books he had on the back floorboard. He didn't understand what the problem was; I told him my bullshit limit for the month had been exceeded, and confronting them in person would probably result in the police coming out.
It's none of their damned business whether the gun is loaded, or what the serial number is, or how many guns I plan to shoot.
Thanks to the NRA most of the other ranges are now gone. With such friends we don't need any enemies.
Not long after she got out of the hospital, we were at a store and she was checking out the stuffed animals. She'd quit collecting them, but she always kept an eye on what was available. One of them was a giant stuffed alligator, three feet long. I bought it for her to replace the pillow.
Oddly enough, she wasn't bothered in the least by what anyone might think when she walked into a restaurant holding a stuffed alligator across her stomach...
Several are variants of "tender", such as "Tend-R-Ist."
I realize highly-paid focus groups and advertising consultants probably crunched spreadsheets and made detailed PowerPoint presentations showing all the hearty goodness people associate with the word "tender"... but when a hard crunchy food product becomes "tender", it means it's time to throw it away - a tender cracker is a stale cracker, and a stale cracker is garbage.
This is the same sort of thing that I saw a few years ago with the word "crossfire." Chevrolet had a "Crossfire Fuel Injection" on some V8 cars in the early 1980s. Then Plymouth came out with a car named the "Crossfire."
Again, I'm sure there were focus groups and consultants involved, but there no meanings of crossfire that are good. Crossfire is bad. Crossfire is when your ignition fires the wrong cylinder, which can lead to expensive estimates from repair shops, or "crossfire" in the military sense, where you wind up being shot at by both the enemy and your own people.
Maybe I'll start seeing "Dog Turd Sausage" or "Hummer Herpes Edition" soon. It would make just as much sense...
I guess you can tell when you're geeked out... it's when you've encountered "FSM" 20 times in a row, and each time you first think "Flying Spaghetti Monster"...
Going by with the cruise set at 70, the wetware comes up with "lasso" in answer to the arm-waving, and the pile of scrap metal morphs to a bunch of tubing, maybe scavenged from lawn chairs, being dragged around on skids. Two rednecks, playing rodeo.
Once the wetware coughed up "fake calf" my first thought was, "that thing would be a lot easier to move if it had wheels instead of skids." Then I thought, "that's a strange thing to be doing at a closed gas station after two in the morning. And the third thing was, "where's the freaking rope?"
There was plenty of light at the station, which is presumably why they were there, but if arm-waver-guy actually had a rope, it couldn't have been much thicker than package string. Even at 70mph in the dark I would surely have noticed...
Yes, I see some odd stuff out on the road.
The Kwik-Way is a different model from the one I already have, and not much interchanges. And though it's supposed to be "portable", that really means it has a lifting lug on the top, so you can pick it up with some kind of hoist - it weighs 180 pounds.
However, I know of a guy who has one of the little Van Norman boring bars he picked up from somewhere, with no tooling... and his main bar is an FN just like the one I just got. So we'll make a trade, and everyone should be happy.
Sometimes you just have to know enough of the right people.
About 1/3 of the books are listenable. That is, they have no technical problems that make it impossible to make sense of. Of the rest:
A) the mumblers. Some of it may be very low recording level, some is obviously someone with the mike too far away when they're talking (because it'll get louder on occasion as they reposition the mike), or because they DON'T FUCKING MOVE THEIR LIPS WHILE THEY'RE TALKING. mumble, mumble.
B) the shriekers. These are the ones who start off mumbling, so you crank the volume up, and then they either start screaming or move the mike closer, because they'll try to blow the cones out of the speakers. The volume just yoyos madly up and down. After a while I get tired of stabbing the volume control.
C) the digital freaks. Some of the audiobooks have been done, best as I can tell, by generating a word list of all the words in the book, then paying someone to say each word. Then they tag the mp3s to the text string and make the output file. All. The. Words? Are. Separated! By. Dead. Air. AND. The! Volume. And... Inflection. Are? Bizarre. Queerly, the introduction almost always has "Read By (some plausible-sounding name).
D) the other digital freaks, These use word lists like C), but sometimes with ordinary strung-together speech here and there, usually when doing different "voices." However, even that is run through some kind of filter that sounds like the Squelch From Hell.
E) the regionals. These are the ones with the Bronx or West Virginia accents so thick you could carve them with a chainsaw, the ones who apparently have severe sinus infections, the ones with smoker's cough (can't they edit that shit out?!) and the Phlegm Monsters, where you just want to scream please, God, just yack that shit up, come on, you can do it... argh!
A), B), and E) make me skip to the next audiobook; there's no way to listen to them. I can put up with C) or D) for limited amounts; I can take an hour or so, then I have to quit for a while to put off the headache. Unfortunately, there seems to be a *lot* of C) and D) out there.
I'm really glad I didn't have to pay $39.95 to $59.95 for that kind of crap. As it is, they're a waste of CD-Rs. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know what you had until you broke the shrinkwrap, and after the dozenth return you'd probably become persona non grata at your local store.
Sometimes you get one of the computer-generated voices. These are often done from Gutenberg or scanned texts. The software actually does a reasonable job most of the time. It's definitely not a live human speaking, but it's generations beyond the old "drunken Swede" stuff. When it runs into a word it can't figure, it'll just spell the word. Hey, fine with me. It's a hell of a lot better than the computer-squelched stuff.
Every now and then you'll get someone who is pretty good; some of the older stuff used people like Darren McGavin or Elizabeth Montgomery as readers. Sometimes the author will read; some of them are fairly good. There seems to be a smallish pool of readers who work for most of the publishers; unfortunately, many of them are mumblers or shriekers, and I'm coming across more and more of the digitally-mangled stuff. It must make some kind of sense to *someone*...
Since it was only 101F I pulled the bike around back, stripped off all the bodywork, tank, ignition coils, and other bits, then took out the two dozen valve cover fasteners, spark plugs, and the oil supply pipes, removed the valve cover, and checked the valves. Suzuki spec was .004-.006 on the intake, .007-.009 on the exhaust. I had a couple of intakes at .004, a couple at a loose .006, and a couple of exhausts that were probably .011. I set all the intakes to .005 and all the exhausts to .008. I didn't find anything loose, worn, or damaged. It's hard to believe a couple thousandths extra on the exhaust side would cause so much commotion, though.
> "Do or do not...there is no 'try'" > -Yoda-Which, if examined semantically, translates to "if there's any chance of failure, don't even bother."
Adherence to that philosophy is probably why that particular Jedi master spent his time hiding out in a swamp instead of doing something useful.
Since I first brought this up some years ago I've gotten many angry comments from people who interpreted Yoda's comment as something positive... but it's not, no matter how it was used in the movie.
"Try" is all anyone can do, even if it's something you've successfully done before. There's always the chance something unexpected can bite you in the ass, but that's no excuse to just give up because you might fail.
So I pick up two loaves of bread, one at $1.50, which I thought was pretty high, and one at $2.39 (raisin bread). At the checkout line they wanted my papers. No Kroger card, you pay extra. Another reason I don't normally go in there. Rings up as $5.97.
That 5% surcharge apparently grew a bit. They *really* want my demographics... I refuse to carry any more crap around than I have to, and that includes their "Kroger card." I'm guy guy who cleans his wallet out weekly, and periodically removes unused keys from his keyring.
I stood there and steamed for a minute, decided I still didn't want to drive across town, and forked over $6, with three cents change.
Bastards.
> > A SV motor was always the cheap option, > > mechanically simple and cheap to manufacture.Possibly true, back when labor was only an incidental expense, but a side-valve block is substantially more difficult to cast and machine than a simple block and detachable OHV head. The pushrods and rockers for the OHV are small high-volume bits, inexpensive to make by contrast.
All of the earliest engines were OHV with pushrods and rockers; flatheads didn't come out until later. All this stuff hung out in the dust and dirt; you squirted oil on the bits before you started the engine, some of which you got back on your clothes or engine compartment, the rest making nice abrasive oily mud all over the engine.
Flatheads, by comparison, put all their naughty bits down in the crankcase, thoroughly lubricated by splash or throw-off from the rods, and protected from rain and dirt.
Flathead motors were also quieter than OHVs; all that wobbling valvegear ticking and clicking was reduced to one clearance area between the cam and its follower, and since that clearance was virtually constant across the engine's entire operating temperature range, it meant the engine was just as quiet cold as it was hot. When you could see the engine from the driver's seat through the louvers in the hood, this was a little more important than today.
Later, of course, the OHV guys ran the pushrods through the block or hollow tubes, and invented the valve cover, so OHV engines could be as oil-tight as the flatheads.
She claims she thought it was a generic map pattern and didn't know it was a particular city, and claimed she had no idea about Whitechapel's history, despite having seen every Jack the Ripper documentary ever made.
I guess she'll find some Hannibal Lecter sheets next...
I dunno, it was just strange listening about someone whose name kept coming out as "M'Goatse" or "F'Goatse."
If "goatse" doesn't mean anything to you, this is one of the few cases where ignorance really is bliss, or at the very least the lack of an instant hurl reflex.
> > I simply don't understand atheism. Everyone has been afraid of > > something at one point or another in their lifetime 8-). [notice this > > statement is very tongue-in-cheek.]A whole bunch of people are going to be surprised if they kick off and meet Charon or Damballah-Wedo instead of one of JVH's variants.
Charon's fare was two coins; the custom of putting pennies on the eyes of the dead lasted at least into the 19th century in the USA.
> > Makes the bumper sticker that blathers on about "next time you yadda > > yadda try walking on water" seem especially sad.Yeah, well, walk on the water, walk by the water, who cares? Nowadays we don't have to walk; we have Jet Skis and dune buggies.
And for turning water into wine... any homebrewer can do the same, albeit with a bit of equipment and some time. Loaves and fishes I dunno, though the Weekly World News still reports spontaneous rains of fish, frogs, and AOL sign-up CD-ROMs often enough.
We went in, I looked around, and it was really odd... took me a few minutes to realize what it was. I felt like I was in a flea market. Everything was kitschy fake-Victorian with gingerbread and dark stain. There were some *horrendous* examples of grotesquerie, such as fake-antique chests-of-drawers that were really bathroom sink/cabinet combos. And it went downhill from there...
We did find an appliance, got a ticket, and went around back to pick it up. Guard shack thing, yeah, those are common enough nowadays. The store wasn't busy at all - we were the only ones in the checkout line - but it was busy in back, with a dozen 18-wheel trucks, half a dozen forklifts, and a couple of pickup trucks busily moving stuff from the main building to and between several detached storage buildings. There were at least six people wearing security guard uniforms, but most of them were driving forklifts or pushing carts. Plus another half dozen people in store uniforms, doing the same thing. It looked like a whole lot of activity considering nothing much was going on in the main store.
How about a computer voice reading off the source code to the Linux kernel by streaming audio?
Just type it in as it comes, and eventually you get a kernel...
> The 'head in the sand' attitude kinda' that some have does bother me. A lot. I > did not say that 'we' caused this. Or that 'we' can fix this. Or that it night > even happen. Or that it is time to panic. But It is time to consider it. Don't > you think so?We could consider the problem of vampires, or Chinese mind-control chips secretly implanted in the heads of Hong Kong residents, or that the sky might fall down. And some people consider topics like those *very* seriously.
However, "global warming" is right there in the same pot. It's faith, not science. At least, not science-as-we-knew-it; modern "science" seems to be mostly wishful thinking. Yes, there are references to vampires all throughout history, but that doesn't make them real, nor does it mean that I ought to carry garlic and a cross "just in case."
Progress being what it is, five kills in modern America would barely bring you into the news nowadays, much less up into "serial killer" territory.