"With its rarity, diesel mill, stickity shift and amazing Frenchness, I figured it would have been deemed well worth that much."

I read it at npr.org or something. Anyway, Wikipedia has a list of European nations who have some sort of baseball league:

Probably, to some extent. I can't say at what level, but if they play baseball in France (a struggling semi-pro league), or Germany (they actually have a bundesliga for the sport), they probably play it in Russia.

Who's to blame for the orange and blue NY plates? Eliot Spitzer. If only he could keep his dick in his pants, we wouldn't have had Governor Paterson, the blind governor, who signed off on this travesty, presumably to help balance the state budget by making everybody get new plates at $25/set. This was later changed…

You forgot to mention, although you alluded to it, that this particular wagon isn't old enough to get past the DOT/EPA in the U.S. So unless you're Canadian, lots of luck getting it registered south of 48'30".

Wow, the Harlem Globetrotters can execute a double play.

Star Trek assumes a lot of things, kind of like Karl Marx did back in his day. Things like all Federation citizens will want to be useful in some way and fill available niches, or that the Federation can survive with everybody pursuing their own version of "self-improvement." Or that the attainment of rank alone…

You'd set off metal detectors. How is this a smart way to move something of high value? You do it like in the movies - make something innocuous out of the gold that nobody will think to check out, like the hinges on your briefcase and luggage.

Or he finds a reason to think you might (0.00001% chance) have asthma, or cancer, or some other godawful thing that MUST BE CHECKED OUT IMMEDIATELY by four or five different labs in different parts of town over the course of a month or so. I guarantee I wouldn't be going through any of this shit if I was on Medicaid.

But the cost of production usually goes down with increased automation, so it should balance out - in the Star Trek universe, maybe.

And then nobody will be able to get a Friday appointment.

Oh yeah! Minivans! That'd be fun to watch.

Weight classes would suffice. I guess if you want to race your '99 Accord (the dictionary definition of beige), you should be able to. You could restrict this class to four-banger automatics only.

Dogbert runs the Cloud - no thanks. What if some modern-day Guy Fawkes takes down the Cloud? Or hacks into it. Or infests it with viruses? Or some natural disaster happens? I want my stuff where I can put my hands on it.

I think either consumers or the government will make some kind of real spare tire mandatory. Once enough people get stranded out in the middle of nowhere with a can of Fix-A-Flat, I would hope there would be a backlash.

I would say the Bluetooth streaming unit will have a fairly short lifespan. People are going to start asking the question, "why do I need my smrtphone to hear music in my car?" Somebody (Apple, plz) is going to make a car stereo with a big enough (upgradable) SSD to hold all your music, and internal (upgradable) 4G.…

Seriously. You're not going to beat the 7-Series, etc., by being Lincoln.

Thanks a lot. Now I've got a splitting headache, and I was feeling a bit woozy for a minute too. I almost threw up watching that zoom in/out thing.