Unsought Input

I have to laugh at Brendan I. Koerner’s recent article over on Slate arguing that manually shifted transmissions are better for the environment than automatic transmissions. While in a sense, he answered the question correctly (though not completely, as Martin Schwoerer argues over at The Truth About Cars: Koerner completely disregarded the fuel efficiency of a spate of new transmission technologies – CVTs, DSGs and automatic clutches among them – that have cropped up in new cars over the last several years), he missed the entire point.

Sure, buying a manual trans car may be better for the environment, but what’s best for the environment is not buying a car at all, and if you do have to buy a car, it’s still best not to buy a new car. Regardless, Koerner’s suggestions seem to come back to buying a brand-new car. Only once does he seem to say otherwise:

This calculation, however, doesn’t include some less obvious benefits of manual transmissions. The brake pads on stick-shift cars, for example, tend to wear out less rapidly than those on automatics. And manual transmissions are relatively cheap to fix and replace, so you can wait longer to buy a new vehicle. Manufacturing auto parts is energy-intensive, so anything that can be done to curb their production has to be a plus.

Bingo. Study after study shows that just as many pollutants go into the atmosphere during the manufacture of a vehicle as during the vehicle’s lifespan once it leaves the factory. But at no point do we hear Koerner or any of the greenies advocate buying a used car. Instead, in marketing-fueled America, the message is to buy green – whether it’s Toyota’s emphasis on hybrids, Chevrolet’s emphasis on E85-powered cars or any number of consumer products (shrink-wrapped in plastic and entirely non-biodegradeable) that claim to be better for the environment.

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I started hearing it this morning, but I guess I should have expected it. With news of the Indians being one win away from the World Series, apparently Fox executives are worried about a “flyover” World Series between Cleveland and Colorado. Boo freaking hoo.

I’ll concede that the potential viewing audiences for a Red Sox-Cubs or a Yankees-Dodgers series could be more numerous than an Indians-Rockies series, just by dint of sheer population. And I could argue that the viewers that matter – the real baseball fans – will watch a World Series no matter who’s playing. Even if it were Florida and Toronto. The only benefit to a coastal series is that all the hangers-on – the girlfriends who wear pink Red Sox caps – might tune in. But if the ads are directed to a hardcore baseball fan, then what good do you think they’ll do for an audience of hangers-on?

But the real problem here is the bigotry of geography. I’m a meat-and-potatoes Ohioan, regardless of where I live. Any time I hear the term “flyover state,” it incenses me more than these East Coasters can understand. I’m proud of where I grew up, and I take particular pride in the success stories to come out of the Midwest. Such as this year’s Indians team. Nevertheless, East Coasters – particularly New Yorkers – feel compelled to treat the vast majority of this country like a third-world hellhole.

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Had to rebuild my desktop at work this morning, which meant re-installing the RAW Viewer. Why Microsoft never saw fit to natively support RAW files in XP is beyond me. Then there’s the whole “Windows Genuine Advantage” validation routine they make you go through to actually download the viewer. But that’s another post for another day. I found something interesting while downloading the viewer from Microsoft’s website:

See it? No? How about a closer look:

Lookie there – the Firefox logo on the Downloads pane. So whoever wrote up the downloads page didn’t check their browser before grabbing their screenshots.

At one point, I followed the statistics of how many people used first Netscape Navigator, then later Mozilla, then Firefox. At one point, I watched closely what market share they had versus Internet Explorer. Lately, it seems all those figures are up for debate and scritinizing. But it sure says a lot when Microsoft’s own employees prefer the competition’s browser.

I could turn this into a simple review of Knocked Up. I could say that, while funny, well-cast and full of Katherine Heigl hottness, its needless and mostly uncritical obsession over celebrity culture (and the repeated celebrity cameos) dulls it faster than an evening watching C-SPAN. I could point out the major disconnect of the main character’s obsession with celebrity nudity with the fact that we never get to see any of Katherine Heigl’s naughty bits, despite two sex scenes and a tub scene. I could list all the ways that Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen and all the supporting characters are interconnected in such a way to make Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon devotees cream their jeans.

But no, the reason Knocked Up has me swearing off paying $8 for a theater ticket and another $8 for popcorns and sodas (yeah, things are cheap here in Vermont sometimes) is because I’ve already seen it. Sure, it’s a largely original movie, and I’m not going to claim Apatow stole the ideas for it from an previous work (barring, perhaps, the Miracle of Life, that sex-ed film we all had to watch in the eighth grade). But if you’ve seen just one trailer for the comedy, then you’ve seen the whole damn movie.

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Lee A. Iacocca’s recent book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, has received a good amount of press this past week, all centered around one specific passage:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

Makes me want to read the book.

Though, of course, all the blogs I’ve read covering said passage have just left it at that. They might make some sort of comment about Iacocca’s personality, or what he said about the current crop of domestic auto executives, but they don’t really go in and dissect what he said.

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News broke a couple days ago about California Attorney General Bill Lockyer suing what he calls “the Big Six” – GM, FoMoCo, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Nissan North America and Honda North America – for “contribut[ing] significantly to global warming, harm[ing] the resources, infrastructure and environmental health of California, and cost[ing] the state millions of dollars to address current and future effects.”

Pundits jumped on the news immediately, calling it the next Big Tobacco lawsuit. But I think that Lockyer, if he’s so inclined to believe his state’s fascination with wheeled transport is doing it some harm, could have found a better target.

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About two years ago – or so goes my hazy Internet memory – GM jumped on the corporate blog bandwagon with the FastLane blog. Good, we gearheads mused, words straight from the GM peeps themselves. The FastLane blog promised to be Bob Lutz’s less-than-PR-polished rants about the auto industry, giving it to us straight from the horse’s mouth.

(Not to shirk other major manufacturers, but DaimlerChrysler seems the only other one to have even tried a blog, and they’ve opened theirs solely to automotive media, a decision that drew a firestorm then and still irks some blogorati).

We knew they wouldn’t necessarily be telling us the things we wanted to hear – advance product announcements, straight talk on product changes, clear rationales for dealing with health care costs. But we figured, with as much as GM’s got going on, they’d have some decent material to feed us.

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I support Arnold Schwarzenegger for president.

Not for his stances on immigration and naturalization. Not for his environmental policies. Not even for his Republican politics.

No, I support him for his ability to exclaim, “Let’s kick some eyyy-aaahhh-sss!”

Think about it. In the most idealized world, all of our conflicts are resolved not by boy-faced young men with their entire futures ahead of them and little stakes in the actual conflict. No. Much like the Two Tribes music video, in the idealized world, we have our leaders go at it. Mano y mano. Fist-o y face-o.

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I don’t know Bernie Sanders. Nor do I know Rich Tarrant. I do know I’ve heard just about enough out of the latter’s mouthpieces and not nearly enough out of the former’s.

While watching a little of the tube last night, I caught a Tarrant campaign ad that jumped down Sanders’s throat for “…voting against [a] crackdown on child pornography…” It then flashed a real quick excerpt of some bill that Sanders voted against and included a Vermont housewife frowning and making like Sanders had voted to forcibly anally penetrate every little 13-year-old in Vermont.

Right then and there, something seemed a little wrong to me.

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…is that there remain too many unanswered ethical dilemmas, and I don’t see anybody trying to answer those questions. In fact, I don’t see anybody even trying to pose the questions themselves (disclaimer: I’m not really looking), so I’ll get the ball rolling.

* What if I clone myself and he has sex with my girlfriend? Did she just cheat on me? But how could she cheat on me WITH me? Is this similar to having sex with someone who has multiple personality disorder?

* What if my clone and I have sex with my girlfriend at the same time? Is that a threesome or a twosome?

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News broke today out of a German conference on male illnesses that heated seats – a popular option in luxury cars for the last decade or so – may be to blame for reduced sperm counts (via) and may do even more damage than tight pants.

Ha ha. That’s a funny story, you may think. But you’re wrong! This has many implications, reaching down to the class warfare level, and could drastically change the socioeconomic landscape.

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This one ought to get all you nerdwads’ Spider-Man undies in a bunch. Apparently, CBS Paramount plans to rejig the original Star Trek with new CGI graphics and a new main title sequence – a la George Lucas’s re-release of Star Wars Episodes IV, V and VI. The revamped episodes will appear on HDTV this fall.

A lot of good chatter on the subject, as usual, over at Slashdot. I tend to agree with whichever of those pasty-skinned monitor monkeys argued that the whole shame of this is that we’re losing an artifact of cultural history. It’s as if every Model T were modified into a street rod today, rather than keeping a few original or restored. Sure, we might view them as obsolete today, but to rewrite or cover up history in such a way does a disservice to us all.

But I’m also (unsurprisingly) disappointed that fresh, intelligent, imaginative, original programming so seriously lacks from mainstream media that, rather than attempt something new, they simply rehash their successes of old. It’s why we have “reality” TV, celebrity gossip columns and sequels sequels sequels.

Perhaps it’s just time to turn off the TV.

I’ve never been one to wave the flag. Yes, maybe I take living in the United States for granted sometimes, but if you play the cards you’re dealt, you don’t whine when you get a couple aces.

But reading Daniel Howes’s article in the Detroit News today about Washington’s attitude toward Detroit’s number one industry has me thinking about some recent comments by Bob Lutz, GM’s main product man and a longtime employee of the global auto industry. Lutz – born in Switzerland, I might add – gave a rousing speech defending the concept of “economic patriotism” and noting that we as Americans simply suck at it.

Who more exemplifies how economically unpatriotic we are as Americans than big man George Bush himself, who, as Howes mentioned,

won’t meet with the bosses of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler Group. But he’ll sit astride a Harley, visit a Nissan truck plant, herald the Toyota engine that won the Indy 500, campaign for Republicans and then have his press secretary swear there’s no snub of Detroit.

Sure, he drives a big ‘ol pickup at his ranch in Texas and Cadillac builds his limos, but those press opps mean nothing when he won’t say carburetor to Rick Wagoner, Tom LaSorda and Bill Ford.

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