Yeah, but don't you still hate being patronized?

Be middle-aged. And male. Your salesweasel will be far less likely to assume you're a schmuck if you don't look like one. Twenty-somethings, women, and old people are considered easy marks.

And then there are cities not called New York, where there are no subways, the buses run intermittently, if at all, and don't go where you want to go in any case, and a tiny little runabout is just the ticket.

At least I can see somebody pulling up to my house in a Cadillac Whatevertheycalledit pickup truck ten years from now, old, battered, and carrying whatever it is plumbers or roofers or appliance repairmen carry in the back. Got it for a song at a vehicle auction. Not much call for luxury pickups what with nine…

Just like the Dodge Caliber tried to be some kind of SUV, and failed miserably and spectacularly at the same time.

WTF is that?

Has Pixar ever made a bad sequel? They even pulled off the trifecta with Toy Story 3, which was better than the original. How about that?

Naw, a DC-3. Who is a big Lynyrd Skynyrd fan.

How much is a first class stamp in Germany?

I don't know, they're pretty good at going over to other people's countries and killing them and blowing up their houses. They're also pretty good at delivering the mail, building highways, and any of a number of things that just wouldn't happen if left to the so-called "free market." Go to Germany, hop on a train,…

You all in "Middle Amurka" can GFY.

Tom Hanks started out in a cheesy 70s sitcom where he dressed up as a woman (unconvincingly) in order to score a cheap apartment.

And I bet she thinks, as I do, that there should be a floor on gas prices, enforced by the government in the form of higher taxes, the proceeds of which going to public transportation, whether the Tea Party likes it or not.

She played Janet in Rocky Horror Picture Show.

No, the real fun is finding out your cats like to practice catch-and-release. In your house. And most mouse traps you find in the store nowadays are what I call PeTA-approved. Totally useless. A good trap should go off if you stare at it hard enough. Mouse body weight is measured in grams, after all.

That works too, although I think the little fecker will suffocate long before he starves to death.

54% over 47 years is hardly considered investment genius. You could have done as well...better, actually...with U.S. Savings Bonds.

Body on frame gets straightened? Really? Cab companies go to that kind of expense to keep their cabs on the road? Really? That's news to me. I thought they just beat the things to the point of failure, and the real issue was how many hundreds of thousands of miles it would go before reaching that point.

We own both a Corolla and a Civic. We both agree that the Civic is miles ahead of the Corolla in overall quality, although the Corolla has some features that are available on even the base model that you have to go uprange on the Civic to get. While the Corolla is probably better around town, the Civic absolutely…

Funny, my Civic seems to be quite responsive. Impressively so for a car I bought for seventeen grand brand new. And it still uses the old hydraulic power steering (for what it's worth) rather than the newfangled electric power steering that most newer type compact cars are using (which gets you about 2 MPG, from…