My wife also drives a 2009 Corolla, and I find performance to be the least bad part of the car. What I find particularly offensive is the general fit and finish. It was February, and the economy was swirling around the bowl, and nobody was buying these brand new Corollas Toyota just came out with, so they had $1500…

Not just for aircraft, either. The Army puts it in all their trucks now. It's supposed to be better than diesel.

Find me a set of bows and a canvas for the back, and it's a deal.

The best part of the car, from a comfort standpoint, is that the heaters are REALLY good. It can be -30F outside, and the heater will have the interior of the car warm enough to make you sweat. That's important in the Northeast. The A/C isn't bad, either.

Well, my wife drives a '09 Corolla. Want to see an appliance car? The Camry has nothing on the Corolla. Think the '12 Civic is full of cheap plastic? You haven't driven the Corolla. BUT - you can get the base car with automatic transmission, standard A/C and a decent stereo. Unless you absolutely MUST have power…

Painted bumpers. Why, in God's name, are we painting the part of the car that takes punishment so the rest of the car doesn't have to? To support the Bumper Bully industry? To pay for body mechanics' kids' braces? Now they get scratched up from people heaving too-heavy items into the trunk, the aforementioned…

Maybe I'll be like the rest of the rich douchebags and buy a member of Congress. Failing that, I'll buy a few local school board elections and drag them, kicking and screaming, into a consolidation plan. Economies of scale FTW!

I got a good deal on lunch. Plenty of leftovers in my fridge.

That's it. I quit. Henceforth, I am changing my species affiliation to F. Sylvestris Catus. Meow, muthafukas.

It makes me kind of ashamed to be a member of the same species, let alone a citizen of the same nation, as people like these.

I had a red Mitsubishi Mighty Max back in the days. The local dealer had about a thousand of them on the back lot and they were perpetually on sale. Really fun little truck. Our toddler was seriously attached to it. He'd climb in the cab, stand behind the wheel, and pretend he was driving. One day, though, I had…

That's about where I was in 1997 or so. Then the impeachment happened in spite of the GOP getting their asses handed to them at the polls - during a lame-duck session, no less. That was it for me. I'm not going back.

Damn, forgot about the Kadett D. None of us enlisted folks had those. I had a C, with 1.1 liters and forty-odd horses under the hood. Taking it past 110 kph was a goosebump-raising experience.

Yes, the LeMans was a captive import of a captive import. They just started selling that particular generation of Opel Kadett in Germany in 1984. It was so much cooler and awesomer and more modern than the previous generation, which we brought to the States as the Chevrolet Chevette, a rear-drive subcompact that was…

Well, that's what GM does when they really don't want to do something they feel pressured to do. Do it really, really half-assed so they won't have to do it again. It's as if Homer Simpson was the CEO.

Except my old lady looks at me funny and implies that I'm a lightweight because she gets to salt her food (that I made) to the point of it being gritty and I don't. Saying things in a nice way does not always work.

Just refuse to eat it and pitch a fit. If you do it right, it won't happen again.

Have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy? That's why you should give a fuck. This is our country going straight down the tubes, where a cable channel once called The Learning Channel (most people who regularly watch this crap have probably forgotten what TLC stands for) puts such utter shit on the air.

1978 Chevy Impala station wagon. If you can parallel park one of those, you have truly mastered it. Later, I would take Dad's '71 VW Bug out and teach myself to drive stick.

The neat thing about bench seats was, and you used to see this in the movies all the time, you could get in the car from either end. This was particularly useful if you were parallel parked (you do remember how to do that, right?). You just opened the passenger side door, get in, close the door, and slide on over. …