I am working on grip, as well. I tried holding the band last night instead of looping it around my wrists, and I found it significantly harder to pull apart. Holding it moves it about 4 inches further from my body. I just did a quick torque calculation (computer programmer who started by studying mechanical…

I swear GM has apparently found the only source of interior plastic worse than what Chrysler uses. I’m kind of a Mopar guy, but I admit they can be pretty plasticky.

My only options within a 30-mile radius are Domino’s and two regional chains, plus gas station pizza (which is honestly pretty tasty at a couple of the local stations).

I feel really dumb now. I’ve been doing pull-aparts by looping a band around my wrists, but it can be hard to keep it there while I move my arms apart. Why in the world didn’t I think of just grabbing the band in my hands?!?

Those are trips they voluntarily disclosed, right? So they're listed on that site that makes disclosures available. Thomas didn’t disclose a lot of the trips he took and the expensive gifts he received. Which he was required to do by law, in many cases.

If he thinks about it honestly, I’m sure he’ll see that “cell phones don’t work in cars” is a completely unrealistic and unworkable idea.

The point is, I was already being as careful as I possibly could, but someone could still have been (illegally!) riding a bike down the sidewalk and in front of me. And you want to blame me for that unconditionally.

So who’s going to navigate on trips then? I guess we’re going back to paper maps?

which cell phone manufacturers could solve tomorrow with an over-the-air update restricting drivers to emergency calls and music apps when driving

I don’t think that can be completely fair. I was thinking about this just yesterday. When I turned right just past a large parked delivery truck, I went slowly and carefully, because my vision was blocked by the truck. But I thought at the time that if someone had been barreling down the sidewalk on a bike (not legal…

When I was a freshman in high school, I was on a group trip on which we took along stuff to make sandwiches for lunch. A friend and I were put in charge of the sandwich making. We decided it would be funny to leave the plastic on the cheese. It turned out, it was funny! This just seemed like a good place to tell the…

The PO of our house hung a bunch of wallpaper. Really, really badly. In the master bath I took down the mirror over the sinks, and behind it were two holes where medicine cabinets had been, but they wallpapered *over* the holes! Elsewhere, they cut around everything on the walls, like towel hangers, etc. It had to…

I don’t remember the exact date, but sometime in the next two weeks it will be 20 years (!) since I bought my SRT-4. It had 2 miles on it when I took it for a test drive, and it has 243K on it now. Such a fun car.

So that’s *your* Neon we saw in last week’s post. Very nice-looking car! I love that color. It’s like a saturated version of the color of chicory flowers.

Is that a Neon? That was my first thought, but then I thought something didn’t look right about it. I’m a lot more familiar with second gen than first, though.

It does have a huge amount of rear leg room and an incredible amount of space. But it can be pretty uncomfortable, especially for a road trip. I was on a media team one year that followed One Lap of America on the whole almost 3000-mile route. We were in an Element, and it was a long, rough, 10-day experience. A…

Yikes. I feel like I’ve been very lucky. One time a rear wheel came off a van that was approaching me from the opposite direction. It bounced across the road and into the ditch instead of hitting me. The van, of course, dropped and showered sparks like crazy. Amazingly the driver kept it going straight and stopped it,…

My wife and I discovered that some kind of spicy potato chips are great on a wide variety of sandwiches. Most recently I grabbed a bag of some limited-edition honey habanero Ruffles. I found them a little too spicy to eat on their own, but they were spectacular on a sandwich.

For the same reason stainless steel works, there are some other chemical reactions you can take advantage of. Rubbing a penny or other copper or copper-plated item should also work. The nickel ions in stainless steel and copper ions on the penny have the same +2 charge. Table salt with its +1 sodium ions, or something…

The factory that made Payday candy bars was in my little hometown when I was in highschool. The father of one of my classmates came to talk to our chemistry class one day about his job. He said he was a “microanalytical entomologist,” so his job was determining if the candy contained more than the allowed about of…