The Economy

I take full credit for luring Ragu into this threadjack. When it comes to the economy, we're all a dropped transmission away from disaster. Here's my tire place when I worked in Newark, it didn't look this nice 20 years ago but they fixed my flat.

 

A lifetime ago, probably 25 years if not a little longer, I blew a tire on the interstate. Put the donut on it and chugged slowly along to my sister's house. I got to her shithole little town town that's half in Ohio and half in Indiana, I went to a tire store. Told the guy what happened and he lent me a used tire for free, and put it on the car. Told him I would bring it back. He kind of shrugged, probably never expecting to see it again. But I went to my sister's house all the time. And once I had my new tire, the next time I was in town I gave him his tire. He wasn't open and the door was locked but he was inside and I made gestures and I said this is your tire. And he said Toledo? And I nodded. And that was that. I'm not exactly sure why he didn't just sell me the tire.

 

Discount Tire is notorious for breaking lug nut studs when they work on tires. It's so common they even have a form that you take to this repair shop, which regularly takes care of the repair. I know this, of course, because it happened to me in March of last year.

 

A few years ago I saw a UPS guy drive up to a repair place and get out with a tire wrapped in brown shipping paper. Just the sight of that struck me as humorous.

What's definitely not funny is Rubber, a recent feature length movie about "a homicidal car tire, discovering it has destructive psionic power, sets its sights on a desert town once a mysterious woman becomes its obsession."

 

Tire plugs are the world’s best invention. Back when there was still a lot of construction in my subdivision, I was picking up nails and screws regularly.

 

That movie is the worst atrocity ever committed to modern cinema. I don't just hate that movie, I hate it with a visceral passion that borders on homicidal rage.

Worst Movie You Ever Paid to See

 

Hey!

[Ron Howard voice: “It was a shithole.”]

 

It seems like we’ve solved all the old ways cars used to break down and replaced them with very specific, very sophisticated, very rare, but catastrophic failures.

Like cars driving themselves into people, catching on fire and the wheels falling off.

 

[Tweaking that scene in A Christmas Story ...]

Mom: This isn't one of those cars that the wheels fall off, is it?

Salesman: Naaah, that's them Toyotas ...

 

The new a/c condenser and compressor on my Civic (just back from the shop today) beg to differ.

 

Boudoir photography is booming as people strip off their pandemic sweatpants for tasteful nudes