This car embodies “bun on a plate.” As for a greenhouse, if you want one of those, take a peek at a ‘81 Honda Civic Wagon. Now that’s a greenhouse.

The ‘80s called.  They want their salad spinners back.

We have a relative who sends applets and cotlets as a Christmas present every freaking year.

Back in the mid-‘80s, one place I worked for had word processors (I can no longer recall the manufacturer) that had full-page screen displays (CRTs, of course; there was a one-line plasma—I think—display on the keyboard that showed embedded formatting symbols). These were extremely useful for formatting documents in…

I have begun my purge.  I have a couple dozen books on my nightstand--mainly novels that looked interesting.  I am not buying anything new, paper or digital, until I have gone through these and taken each to the local used book store.  The volumes from law school are largely worthless and have been disposed of (said…

It’s the reason Spouse bought a CX-5.

Interestingly—on the “merch” side—Cinerama films generally came with a photo-essay book you could buy, dealing with various aspects of the film. While I was too young to remember anything like that w/r/t Grand Prix, I did for many years have the photo-book-thing from 2001: A Space Odyssey  and another (less successful…

Paperback novelizations were remarkably popular when movies were confined to theaters. I recall reading novelizations of Star Wars and Alien, and this would have been a decade and more after Grand Prix was released.

The reason is that, in those days, you couldn’t just see the movie again. Seeing a film counted on it…

Just came by to leave this:

Not necessarily. I was having almost exactly this kind of problem (two week pressure drops) and finally took it to a tire place that found a nail (which I hadn’t). Modern tires appear to seal up around injuries pretty well.

I can see that distinction (I was responding more in the “music is science!” “No, it’s art” vein). But I think one part of where I’m coming from has to do with the fact that instruments are (until recently) analog devices, and so you run into things like the typical guitar tempering problem. The math is right, but the…

Looks a lot faster than my late father’s Amphicar, but I’d kind of worry about all those vents...

Yep, Bluto always was difficult at parties.

That’s an interesting argument. I would argue that it’s a bit of both. In my youth, I had a girlfriend who was a fantastic pianist—in the technical sense. But the music she played had no soul. Mathematically precise, but missing something.

I’ve heard much less technically proficient musicians produce soulful music.

The…

I learned to love coffee with sugar and cream because that was how my dad his. When I was three or four, he would give me a spoonful, and I loved it. Then, at 13, I was diagnosed with T1 diabetes. This was right around the time cyclamates had been taken off the market, so it was saccharine, and that sucked, so I…

I don’t know. I rode single-bolt-mounted center-pulls in the late ‘70s through the mid ‘80s and they were a piece of cake to set up. What I think finally did them in was the need for a yoke, yoke cable, and cable stop. Sidepulls did away with all that by virtue of putting the cable stop on the brake body rather on the…

I was going to say “organize?” But that’s just me.

When I was in college (‘70s) there were a number of series that got used in history classes, and I would happily group those volumes (all yellow and the same height and width, as I recall) on a shelf. In law school, lots of books have bindings similar to one another,…

To my eye (admittedly, I spend no time at all on TikTok), these look less like pranks than like very bad acting on the parts of all parties. Totally scripted.

Amen to that. Back in the ‘80s, I saw a CP/M machine equipped with (IIRC) 1 MB of static ram storage (most machines at the time had no more than floppy disk storage and many if not most used an external terminal for I/O). I told myself then that some day, I would own a machine like that.

The SSD thing is absolutely true. The first time I did this was in one of the near-generic Acer netbooks (safe to experiment with—my son had taken it to college and flipped it off his bed, so it was considered a corpsicle) and the change was amazing. With the SSD the machine was faster, nearly silent, and used less…