Unsolicited product review: Meguiars Clay Bar

If you think "clay bar" sounds like a particularly repellent diet candy, I don't blame you.  It's actually for taking paint smears off your car, and it really works.  I actually posted about it once before, but this time I remembered to take before and after photos.

A few weeks ago my wife lightly scraped a concrete pillar in a parking garage while maneuvering to a newly opened ticket window.  The result was this nasty arc of gray on her deep metallic blue Miata.

yeccch

It looks screwed, right?  When you see that on your car your heart sinks, you just figure it'll be like that forever unless you pay someone with permanently blackened fingernails a grand to bolt on some new body panels.  But sometimes it's not so bad:

blue Miata here

Basically you buy this kit, and inside it there are "gray bars" (here actually white) in plastic bags.  You open one and knead it until it's kind of soft.  Then you flatten it out a bit, spray that squirt bottle onto the car, and rub the bar on it.  Rub it and rub it and rub it.  It took me a half hour or an hour of spraying and rubbing to do this, meanwhile stretching and folding the bar to get a clean surface.  There's other stuff in the kit too, like a soft cloth and some wax, but the clay and spray are the main things.

You do have to be careful not to get sand or hard grit in your bar, because if that grit happens to be at the surface of your clay while you're rubbing, it will scratch the daylights out of your clearcoat.  It's not too difficult.  Just wipe off the car with a paper towel before you start, and don't lay the damn clay down on the ground while you're working.  Put it in the little plastic box they gave you.  Easy!

Shenzhen travelogue 4: avoiding fiery death

Below is an email I sent home in the middle of the trip.

Oh hey I forgot to tell you, I almost got killed yesterday. We were driving to that vendor site and avoided an accident by inches. There was this tanker truck, I could tell it was empty by the way it was bouncing, and the driver was absolutely flogging it. The highway was three lanes each way, we were in the left lane. This tanker came up in the right lane going about 20mph faster than traffic, and moved into the middle lane to pass someone. But the smaller truck he tried to pass got into the middle lane too, to pass even slower traffic. Mr. Tanker was going too fast to avoid rear-ending the guy, so he laid on the horn, locked up the brakes, and drifted to the left towards us. We were about six inches on either side from being pinned between a concrete barrier and a semi, as the road with three lanes briefly had to accomodate four abreast, three of which were trucks. But in the end, there was no contact.

Our taxi driver was a pussy. He left too much following distance from the car in front of us, and he was constantly getting cut off. And he stayed in the left lane. And he should have seen (as I did well before the incident) that that tanker driver was dangerous and stayed the hell away from him.

Traffic in Chinese cities is anarchy, but it works. There's a system, it just isn't the same system that they teach in driver's ed and put on the signs and laws. Traffic on the freeways, on the other hand, doesn't work. There is too much speed difference between the slowest and fastest vehicles, slow vehicles don't stay to the right, and everybody is constantly changing lanes without looking behind them. There's a custom here that you're only responsible for what's in front of you. That's technically true in the US too, but people usually check their mirrors anyway to be polite and because they know the consequences of getting rear ended. Here they don't look first.

Winning the MPG/0-60 tradeoff

A friend of mine just bought a car.  He happily told me it gets amazing gas mileage and accelerates great from a stop.  I smiled and kept my mouth shut; I've seen the car's spec sheet so I know it's not fast, but why spoil his fun?  On the other hand, instead of pitying his misunderstanding, maybe I should envy him for successfully faking himself out:  he got the feeling of acceleration without paying for actual acceleration.

He traded in a giant American V8 sedan with some unholy level of horsepower.  I'd been in that car - driven it, even - and I know he liked the power.  His new car is a VW Passat TDI.  That's also a full-sized sedan, and not a lightweight one, but the TDI engine makes about half the horsepower his last car did.  It gets from zero to 60 about one second faster than a Prius.  So how is it that he's so happy about its acceleration?

Answer:  it's a diesel.  Power is torque times RPM, and diesels tend to have a lot of torque but they can't rev to high RPMs.  So when the light turns green and you step on the gas, a diesel makes a deep HURRRRR sound instead of the higher pitch of a gas engine.  Psychologically, in your head you're expecting that deep tone to go along with lazy acceleration, but the diesel's torque accelerates you better than you expect.  It feels fast.

Car design involves compromises.  Quick cars tend to be thirsty.  My friend values fuel mileage, so he found a way to be happy with the acceleration of a fuel-efficient car:  he's fooling himself.  He probably even knows it, he's got an engineering degree.  But I'm not going to be a jerk and point it out, and risk ruining it for him.  I wouldn't want someone to pull a hipster move like that on me.

A Venn diagram: my next car

The problem with Corvettes is, once you buy one, you become a Corvette Owner.  A lot of people say the same about BMWs, but I like the cars so much I'm willing to let people assume I'm a jackass and learn otherwise later.

But seriously, the candidates for the bullseye position are:  (a) used Hyundai Genesis Coupe, or (b) rather-more-used Infiniti G35.

There are, of course, other circles not pictured:  Reliability, Wife Acceptance Factor, etc.

Return of the 125,000 mile curse

I like my car.  Or, I should say, I liked it.  I am not a superstitious person and there are very few inanimate objects I'll ascribe intentions to, but I think my car is trying to make me hate it.

My cars have what you might call a 125000 mile curse:  at that point they either break beyond repair, get totalled in a crash, or (rarely) get traded in while still functional.  I swore it'd be different this time.  My Mazda3 suits me very well, and it should be capable of 175000 miles if not more.  So when it reached 125k, I put $2000 into it to fix an engine mount and work on the brakes and suspension.  I thought that should keep the car on the road for another three years, at which point the inexorable advance of rust would claim it.

Almost immediately after the brake and suspension work, the squeaking and rattling came back.  Can I get from point A to point B?  Yes.  Enthusiastically?  No.  I have to admit that driving past people in a car that is audibly in need of repair makes me feel *bad*.  I can ignore that problem by rolling up the windows.  However, earlier this summer my air conditioning began to flicker on and off.

Two weeks ago my turn signal stopped shutting itself off after right turns.  The windshield wipers have been whacking loudly against the metal beside the glass for the last 40,000 miles.  The A/C is unreliable.  It squeaks like a bus and rattles like a coffee can full of rocks.  And the rust is spreading. 

And yesterday it wouldn't start.

It may be time to trade in this sled.

The mechanic says the only thing wrong is the battery, but I know:  it doesn't like me.  It wants to go sit in someone else's driveway.  Maybe I'll grant its wish.

The Chinese auto industry is exporting ... jobs

In a turnaround that makes me dizzy, The Truth About Cars reports that one of China's largest car companies is looking to build cars in Brazil and Russia.  What do they know that we don't know???

Let me get this straight.  The world goes to China to build stuff.  Heck, my company has plants there; I've visited them.  Virtually every automaker I can name is feverishly working to scale up production plants in China and establish joint ventures with automakers there.  On top of the cheap labor advantage, that old Henry Ford magic is creating a booming domestic market in China for the cars built there.  So why would a Chinese car company choose to manufacture anywhere but in China?

I can speculate on a few answers.  First of all, cars are heavy.  It costs money to ship cars to their buyers; putting the plants where the customers are reduces costs.  It also gets around import taxes.  Remember how expensive Hondas and Toyotas were in the 1970s and 80s compared to Detroit iron?  They weren't more expensive to build, they cost money to import.  Another reason for Chinese companies to build cars elsewhere is to avoid boom-and-bust cycles in individual countries:  if business isn't great in one part of the globe, another region might keep you in the green.  For example, right now, Chrysler's strong sales in North America are offsetting its parent company Fiat's losses in Italy.  For a contrasting example, Mazda is hurting because all its production is in Japan, where the high value of the yen relative to other currencies makes it a losing battle for them to sell cars overseas. 

China's extraordinary climb from an inward-looking land of half-starved peasant farmers to a modern nation with a middle class has brought with it a lot of surprises.  The Chinese leadership knows that their country cannot be a manufacturing economy indefinitely, no matter how good they are at it.  There is a growing emphasis on "knowledge workers" in the form of advanced degree programs at universities and other efforts.  And now, evidently, Chinese companies are willing to have other people build things for them.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Subaru R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Even H. P. Lovecraft could be terrified in the passenger seat of a Subaru BRZ.

from http://www.autoweek.com/article/20111202/CARREVIEWS/111209982

I want this car.  It's a stripped-down, affordable sports car:  light and tight, with rear wheel drive and modest horsepower.  What's wrong with other sports cars?  They're either too expensive or they don't handle well enough.  In most cases, the money goes into pointless horsepower.  The only exception to that is the Mazda Miata.

The public regards the Miata as a convertible "chick car", but I'll bet there are more Miatas with roll cages bolted into them than any other model of car.  There are *several* spec-Miata race series, several regional and national Miata racing clubs, and several aftermarket companies offering any kind of performance parts you care to bolt on.  It is precisely this community that the BRZ, and its cousin the Scion FT-86, hope to target.  And I love my wife's Miata.

Two Mazdas. Three, actually.

Yesterday Alice and I test drove two cars.  They were both stick-shift Mazda3 models, but they couldn't have been more different.  Or more different from the Mazda3 I already own.

We're looking to trade in Alice's Nissan 350Z (Esmerelda, aka the Bluebird of Happiness, aka the Barbiemobile).  On Friday she went to a dealer to test drive a Miata, but the car was sold - to someone in Minnesota - while she was driving there.  Miatas are hard to find these days.  But there was a loaded stick-shift Mazda3 on the lot, and knowing how much I like mine, she test drove it.  Why?  It isn't the car she wants long-term, but it would bring our costs down and eventually become my car when she does find what she wants.

That's how we found the first 3.  We went back together Saturday to drive it together.  This car was a 2010 sedan like the photo above, with every option they offer:  dual zone climate control, nav, heated leather, everything.  They redesigned the car in 2010, giving it a really goofy grille, but this car is dark gray so it's not obnoxious.  I loved it, and I'd be thrilled to have it as my daily driver.  But Alice felt conflicted.  Its suspension and power just didn't measure up to the 350Z.  So we walked away.

We walked next door, to an actual Mazda dealership.  Our hope was that they would at least have a new Miata that we could test drive.  And--I shouldn't have been surprised--they didn't.  But they did have a Mazdaspeed3.  This was a 2009 hatchback, pre-redesign, a much better looking car in candy-apple red.  Alice drove it and loved the suspension and extra power, but it didn't have any of the luxury features the other car did.  If what we bought was eventually going to be my car, the speed3 didn't suit me as much as the 2010, because honestly I don't care about power.  And the salesman's starting point of price negotiation was several thousand more than the other car.  Almost the sticker price of a new one.  We felt insulted.

That's our dilemma.  The 2010 has luxury and up-to-date technology throughout, and it's cheaper.  The 2009 has all the sporty character Alice wants.  The thing is, the speed3 is a boy-toy.  Driving a red hatchback wouldn't project the image she wants, so eventually it would be my car, and I'd rather have the other one.  So on Monday we're going to go back for the 2010 car.  She won't mind driving it for a while, and we'll have more time to find that elusive affordable sporty car. 

How your car gets from 0 to 60mph

Car guys talk about how fast a car can accelerate to 60mph.  Not that you ever get a chance to actually do that.  But if you've taken Physics 101, you should be able to predict a car's 0-to-60 time just by knowing its horsepower and weight.  It turns out it's a little trickier than that.  One day I got curious and figured out why.

In its simplest form, the calculation says that the car's power times the length of time it accelerates equals the car's kinetic energy at 60mph.  Kinetic energy is 1/2 the mass times that velocity squared.  We know the power, weight, and speed.  The thing is, this says my car should reach 60mph just 4.6 seconds after I floor the gas - and I can tell you it doesn't.  Most family sedans take eight or nine seconds, a sport/luxury car takes six or seven, a serious sports car will be down in the four to five range, and to get to 60mph in less than four seconds you'll have to pay six digits.

So why is acceleration so inefficient?

http://www.automobilemag.com/reviews/lexus/0710_2008_lexus_is-f_dyno_chart/index.html

First, "horsepower".  When they say a car like mine has 156 horsepower, it's not all available on demand.  You only actually get that when the engine RPM is high - see the red power curve in the graph above.  So even if you floor it, you have to wait until the car speeds up to about 30mph before you're at full power.  And then of course it shifts into the next gear.  So in the process of going from 0 to 60, on average 30% of my car's horsepower is unavailable.

Second, friction.  There's a difference between the amount of horsepower the engine puts out and how much power the wheels actually put down to the road.  Manufacturers put the engine number in their brochures - partly because it's a larger number, and partly because it's a lot easier to measure.  In the example above, the Lexus IS-F is rated at 416hp but delivered only 333hp to the wheels, a loss of 20%.  Friction takes 10-25% of the power produced by an engine - more for AWD systems with automatic transmissions, less for two-wheel-drive stick-shift cars.  My car is a front-wheel drive automatic, so I'm assuming it's fairly efficient.

Finally, shifting.  The car can't accelerate while the transmission is between gears, and no car can get to 60 in first gear.  Those six-digit cars can shift in one or two tenths of a second, but I figure most cars take closer to half a second.

Add all that up, and the calculation says my car goes from 0 to 60 in a much more realistic seven and a half seconds.  In fact, Car & Driver magazine actually measured it, and got 7.4 seconds.  Not bad for a back-of-the envelope scribble!

Spring Cleaning, car care edition

Every Spring the sun comes out and I notice how filthy my car is.  This year it was especially bad because I'd damaged the poor thing.  So in addition to the usual wax-and-vacuum, I decided to touch up the paint and headlights.  I bought two kits, both of which basically involved polishing the surfaces.  I know a lot about polishing from my days as a metallurgist, so read on.

Field Test 1:  "Clay Bar"
Body shops and detailers swear by clay bar, which seems to magically erase dullness and tar flecks off of the outsides of cars.  It's better than soap but it's not paint - it can't fix scratches that go down into your car's paint job.  In my case, I had a huge smear of beige paint on my front passenger corner (more on that later) which looked ridiculous and could be seen from a mile away, so I figured I'd try it.

I am pleased to report that Clay Bar really works.  The clay bar itself is like a sticky putty. It's full of a very fine abrasive. The kit I bought (Meguiar's) came with a spray bottle of lubricant (mostly water). You work the clay bar until it's pliable, spray the lube on the car, and rub the bar wherever you're trying to clean something off. It very slowly removes everything on top of the clearcoat, basically by a polishing action. The clay bar doesn't seem to get used up, you just stretch and fold it to expose a clean area.  

(How does it work, technically?  The clay conforms to the surface, which reduces the pressure on the smooth clearcoat you don't want to damage.  But anything sticking up, like a fleck of tar, gets pressed into the clay.  It is, in wear science terms, an asperity.  The higher pressure between the abrasives in the clay and the asperity causes the asperity to wear down faster - eventually leaving nothing but the clearcoat.)

For me, it worked flawlessly. I went from having a huge ugly damage spot to like-new. It took about an hour. Unfortunately the temperature was in the mid-30s, and you have to work with your bare hands, so I had to go inside and run hot water over my hands a couple times to keep from getting frostbite. But it was totally worth it.

(How did I get that smear of beige on my car? I ran into my own garage. I had just been fitted for contact lenses for the first time in 20 years, and they wrecked my depth perception off-center. I just grazed the wood, so the body panels didn't get pushed in enough to be dented. There were just a few fine scratches at the high points of the panels where the clearcoat was damaged.)

Verdict:  awesome.  When it gets warmer, I'm going to go around my whole car with it.

Field Test 2:  Headlight lens restorer
I didn't know there was such a thing, but I'd noticed my 2004 car's headlights were pretty cloudy.  Like a fish that's been laying on the ice too long.  So when I saw a kit made by Turtle Wax next to the clay bar, I picked it up.  It was not an unalloyed success. 

The kit is a five-step process.  The instructions say to try Step 1, a fine polishing paste, and if it works for you, stop there.  When I rubbed on the paste using an old T-shirt, I could see a lot of brownish junk accumulating on the white cloth.  After one or two applications, the shirt stayed clean - and my headlights looked a lot clearer.  The general haze was gone, though there was still a blotchy mottled look on the part where the lights shine through.  The other four steps are basically sandpaper - you start with coarse grit and work your way down through the finer sandpapers.

(How do you polish a rough surface?  This process is familiar to any metallurgist; it's used to examine the internal structure of processed metals in a microscope.  You start with coarse grit and with each successive grit you rub at a right angle to the last, so you can tell when the finer scratches have removed all the deeper ones.  In metallurgy, the finest sandpaper is followed by slurries of even finer grit particles suspended in water to produce a mirror finish.)

This works great, except, of course, when everything is covered with a milky haze of ground-off plastic debris.  I can't tell you how many hours I spent in grad school polishing bits of metal, and I still screwed this up.  For the layman, there's a strong chance that it would actually make the headlights worse.  Hell, I didn't even manage to sand off the blotches I was trying to get rid of.

I was so alarmed by the way the first headlight looked after I'd gone through all the sandpapers that I only used the paste on the second headlight.  The final step is a cloth saturated with some kind of plastic-coating liquid.  You wipe this cloth on the headlights and it fills in the fine scratches and seals it with a smooth surface.  This was a huge improvement; it made the scratched headlight look clear again. 

Verdict:  Do the headlights look better?  Yes.  Good enough for me?  Yes.  Perfect?  No.  Would I do it again?  Probably not.

The truth about writing

This article in The Truth About Cars is full of truth about writing.  Writing nonfiction for blogs, for newspapers, for trade journals, you name it.  Read it and understand authority, understand getting paid for criticism.  (Or at least how not to.)

The backstory is this:  On Thursday, the Detroit News published a negative review of the Chrysler 200.  Yeah, the car in that Super Bowl commercial.  A Chrysler dealer called the paper to complain.  They watered down the online version of the story.  The writer, the paper's auto critic, resigned in an unplanned fashion.  Jalopnik broke the story.

TTAC's wrapup talks about why the newspaperman wrote what he wrote.  Along the way, they touch on some of my favorite tropes:  why hipsters suck (car critics who heap disdain on all new cars are not credible because they're predictable), why shills suck (car critics who heap praise etc etc predictable), and why Jeremy Clarkson is so popular.

It's tough to be neither a hipster nor a shill if you're not Jeremy Clarkson.  You know who he is, right?  I found out on a vacation to London, where during an afternoon siesta with (ahem) a bottle of champagne in our hotel room, we turned on the TV and watched, of all things, the entirety of a car show.  It was Top Gear, and it was informative, hilarious, and even penetrating.  Jeremy Clarkson is one of the hosts of Top Gear.  He is arrogant, occasionally obnoxious, and enthusiastic with both praise and scorn.  His expectations are high, and when he's delighted, he lets you know.  But Jeremy Clarkson gets to drive Ferraris--hell, he gets to own Ferraris--side by side with Smart cars and other city-only vehicles that are one short step of mechanical sophistication above a golf cart.  That, and he's utterly bent.  That's why he's popular.

Anyway, read the TTAC piece.  Nod, and say 'aaahhhh, yes'.

Car geekery part 3: automatic transmissions with clutches

As much as I like cars, there aren't too many technical innovations in them that I'd be willing to pay for. An exception is what I'll call an automated manual transmission. Once a rarity (think Ferrari F1 cars and BMW M3s), they have slowly approached my price range (Audi/VW DSG, still not there). But lo and behold: this year we get a dual clutch automatic transmission in the 2011 Ford Fiesta ... for about $14k. This is a car I'd actually consider buying.

What is an automated manual transmission? You can think of it as a stick-shifter with the addition of a computer that can shift for you. How is this different from a conventional automatic transmision? In a car with a stick, there's a solid mechanical connection (through a clutch plate) between the engine and the wheels. In contrast, a conventional automatic puts the engine's power through a fluid connection (the torque converter). They're called "slushboxes". Think of sticking a spoon in a jar of honey and twisting the spoon to spin the jar. The drawbacks are delays, inefficiency, and less sense of being connected to the road.

Inefficiency, yes. Fuel economy is everything these days. Everybody knows manuals get better gas mileage than automatics--they're lighter, they don't waste power churning fluids, and they have more gears to choose from. Nonetheless I was startled to see the EPA estimates for the Fiesta:

Manual: 29 city/38 highway
Automatic: 30 city/40 highway

Um, what? The automatic gets BETTER mileage than the manual? Yes - it's doubtless heavier but it has one more gear.

On the downside, apparently you cannot choose what gear to be in, so you can't downshift in preparation for a passing maneuver. I think I'm OK with that. What I really want is the immediate response. I hate pushing the accelerator and waiting for my car's automatic to raise the engine revs and tighten the torque converter before I start to accelerate.

Jalopnik thinks very highly of this car, despite it only having 120 horsepower. It's light and has a great suspension, which is actually a lot more important to me than the powertrain. I know from experience that having more power just makes me drive like a jerk. What I enjoy is being able to go around corners without slowing down. This could be my next car.

Previous car geekery: part 1 and part 2.

"Buy American" echoes through the decades as "Buy Local"

I've always had a vague distaste for calls to "buy American", but in the 2010s, "buy local" feels more like a hip, spunky way to strike back at the Wal-Marts of the world. What's changed - the details? Or me? Or are these two movements not really fundamentally the same like they appear to be? When I was a child in the 1970s, Japanese cars were becoming more and more common on American roads. They were more fuel efficient in a time of escalating emissions controls and gas prices, and they were far more reliable. I remember my mother complaining that she would love to buy a Honda, but only a GM dealer would take her awful GM car in trade. The backlash--imported cars being scratched with keys and hounded in traffic--sounded hollow. It was the petulance of labor unions who had abused their power and finally had real competition. It was asking for permission not to improve in the face of clearly superior alternatives. I had little sympathy.

Thirty years on, we're coming to realize that something is lost in global trade. With our eyes on global warming, it seems irresponsible to ship fresh strawberries across the ocean so we can dip them in chocolate with Champagne on Valentine's Day. People are thinking about reducing their carbon footprints. Those strawberries are dissatisfying anyway - hard and tasteless, they're like decorated styrofoam replicas of the produce I enjoyed as a child. Today's grocery store tomatoes, too, are engineered for travel and yield rather than taste and nutrition. The local food movement points out that buying heirloom varietals closer to home gives you fresher food and keeps your money circulating in the local economy.There's that word: economy. Wasn't that what the "made in the USA" thing was all about too? Well, yes, on a different scale with different competition. Choosing an American-made car in 1980 did help the US economy: it preserved jobs and kept profits within the country. (Longer. Eventually the money leaves, for example when one of the dealership employees buys an imported television.) And unfortunately buying American cars was not always in the economic best interests of individual consumers. For my young mind, the argument was also a little too abstract. "Buy local" is more intimate: these are your neighbors. You may meet the farmer in person, or have acquaintances in common. The owner of the coffeeshop on the corner lives in your city, his children attend the same schools as yours. And the benefits are palpable. Try those juicy, perfumey strawberries.

Much of the difference is attitude. American-car zealots were self-entitled bullies thirty years ago. Localist movements win converts with energy and enthusiasm. With "time management" giving way to "energy management" strategies, consumers are looking to do business with people who energize them. It's personal.

Jalopnik: car hipsters.

I like cars, and I like to read and talk about cars. As much as I love Jalopnik, Gawker Media's car site, I'm saying this here because it goes to the core of who I am: I have no time for anyone's haughty ridicule or righteous indignation. Jalopnik has unfortunately become a car hipster site.

What do I mean when I say hipster? (Note: I have not actually visited that link, for reasons that should be obvious.) Think of the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. Or there are film critics writing today who arguably hate films. They heap praise on film noir but have nothing positive to say about anything current and widely distributed enough for you to have a chance to see it.

Perhaps most familiar, music hipsters are fans who'll tell you your favorite band sucks, and argue amongst themselves whether any band could ever be as great as Pavement was.

Stan Lee, film noir, and Pavement are all great, but that doesn't mean that everything else is worthless. To say so is to gradually suck the joy out of the lives of those around you.

When Jalopnik wrote the Awesomeness Manifesto, I applauded their commitment to staying true to what they love. I assumed they'd soon be writing three or four posts a day instead of the usual twenty or more. Not so: they kept up the pace. Instead of describing a mediocre car as being better than the others in a class that's not to their taste, we got these snarling dismissals:

"2011 Infiniti QX: everybody point and laugh"

"The most ridiculous Lamborghini spoiler you'll ever see"

"Porsche Hybrid 78mpg ... Yeah, Right"

I won't quit reading Jalopnik over this, but I had to get it off my chest. They're at their best when they write about the 24 Hours of Lemons, or the Texas Mile, or even the "carpocalypse" the industry is going through. There's enough love there for me to scroll past the hate.

Road hypnosis: Quiet.

From an excellent short piece in Esquire about driving west across North Dakota:

Squinting into orange, I thought about those things that we never let ourselves think about — those things that we actively defend ourselves against thinking about by having so much other stuff to look at and listen to.

We actively defend ourselves against thinking. Doesn't that speak volumes? Sometimes the messages that bubble up from our own minds are unsettling, even painful: will this path take me in a direction I want to go in five years? Am I being genuine? Am I avoiding doing something I'd really enjoy just because it would look stupid or cost too much? What am I earning this money for, anyway? Our possessions, our music, our booze, and yes, our Internet - all these things serve partly to protect us from the pain of these questions.

In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer goes into some detail about how he brings together groups of people in ways that help them hear what they're thinking. Not what each other are thinking - each individual strives to hear their own motivations and fears. I've written a series of posts here about how I try to use quietness for that purpose. It's my war against myself - a struggle to consciously push aside all the distractions I've put into place to cover up my subconscious. I'm pretty sure it's what Kundera was talking about when he wrote about slowness. (Hi, Matt!)

I'm not sure if driving would work for me, but it certainly did the trick for Chris Jones.

via Jalopnik

Imbalance

For the past couple weeks I've felt my creative powers retreat. Instead of pulling abstractions out of my observations, I've just observed and moved on, amused. It's happened before. It's an imbalance between RSS feeds and this blog, a correlation between reading more and writing less. I wonder which is the cause and which the effect, or is there a hidden cause?

I've discovered several fun new RSS feeds. Sensing the imbalance, I've also begun to cut some I'd like to follow. But TV lovers know they can't watch every show they'd enjoy. Same here: the Internet is functionally infinite. Several of the feeds I've come across lately are very time-consuming. Consider, as an example, jalopnik.

Jalopnik.com is about cars. All about cars - new models, classics, obscure niche cars, racing, customization, the lot. At over a dozen posts a day, if you're a car guy, Jalopnik will give you all you can handle. In fact, I'm tempted to say that you definitely are a car guy if you keep coming back to Jalopnik. I get Car and Driver and Road & Track in the mail, but that's only once a month. Well, problem solved.

Jalopnik is a Gawker Media site. As Scott Rosenberg noted in "Say Everything", Gawker works their bloggers pretty hard. Here's what you have to do to make a living at blogging: repost press releases with commentary; go to trade shows and post picture galleries of the displays; build a community by moderating and contributing to comment threads; solicit input from your readers in the form of photos and stories; write a long article maybe once a day; and above all, project enthusiasm relentlessly. Whew! I don't read through it all--I couldn't, even if I wanted to or felt I should--but I appreciate the flood of information.

I've also begun reading books again. I think that happened when I cancelled my subscription to the New Yorker. Books, blogs - it's consumption. I guess it's a good first step that I hear the little warning bell to tell me I'm only consuming, not creating. I'd like to keep my balance better, but nobody's perfect. I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I'm just going to try to improve.

100,000 Miles

My trusty Mazda just turned over 100,000 miles. Other cars I've done the same in:

• 1995 Acura Integra
• 1993 Honda Civic
• 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale

(One of these things is not like the other....) This is four of the ten cars I've owned in the last 20 years. Wow, that's a lot of cars. And a strong tendency to buy used cars with high-five-digits mileage.

Is your car angry or happy?

I'd like to call your attention to the redesigned front end of the 2010 Mazda3. I drive the previous version, and I like it enough at 100,000 miles to consider buying a new one down the road. But this ...I don't know if I could handle it.

First, my car:

And now the new car, "smiley":AUUUGGH!

Why is this so strange? Like pop music(*), cars are rarely happy. When cars are anthropomorphized, they're usually made to look angry or aggressive. Consider sports cars like the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, BMW M3, Dodge Viper, etc. Grr! Maybe people want their cars to scowl so other drivers will be warned in advance of their intentions. Driving is packed full of nonverbal communication, at least if you do it consciously. One reason people sink so much money into cars (hands down the worst investment you're making) is to keep their image consistent with the rest of their driving style.

But Mazda has done this before. The first-generation Miata had a cheeky smile. Now that I think of it, the happiest pop music in my collection is also Japanese. The genre is called Shibuya-kei, and its atmosphere reflects the optimism and energy of post-WWII growth.

Maybe the reason there are so few happy-looking cars, and so little happy music, is the myth that happy people are stupid. Walk around at work smiling and someone may hand you an extra task. Drive a seething red mask and maybe people won't cut you off. Good luck with that.

(*)Pop music: Remember grunge? Emo? Punk? Now try to think of a happy pop song. If you can (OK: the Pelican West album by Haircut 100), then try to think of a happy pop genre. BZZT, time's up.

Make-ism: why being able to fix things matters

In the last week or two I've fixed my own garage door, installed rear shocks on my car, and replaced my house's hot water heater with the help of a friend. It'll sound cheesy, but the sense of empowerment I got from it stands in sharp contrast to the frustration I feel about, say, my phone.

I bought a house that didn't need work--not because I couldn't, but because I'd just spent four and a half years working on another house. I used to do my own car repairs too, but that was the 80s.

Now my phone ... damn. I won't bore you with a list of my grievances against it. The fact is that things do go wrong, and I can't fix them. It's immensely frustrating to rely on something and be helpless when it won't perform its function.

The economy crashed. My position on the time-money continnum shifted. So when my house broke, I fixed it. When my car broke, I fixed it. I'd been thinking about paying more per month for a new car just so it wouldn't need repair, but now I feel like I can keep driving this car even if my commute keeps scraping the suspension off the bottom of it. I feel empowered. I might actually prefer to own things I know I can repair.

So what about my smartphone? Make would tell you that if you can't open it, you don't own it. I'd extend that by saying that if you depend on it and you can't support it, it owns you. Maybe I should reduce my dependence on my smartphone: find another way to do the "smart" functions.

I'm thinking that the loss of convenience would be far outweighed by the added peace of mind.

Car repair phase 1 completed

Above top: old rear shock. Bottom: new rear shock.

I haven't worked on my own cars in a while, but when the Mazda's shocks crapped out (it was long before I drove it around full of firewood) I heard installation of the rear ones was easy.

And it was easy ... once my cordless impact wrench recharged. It turns out that any bolt that spends five years pointed at a car tire isn't going to come off without a fight. But yeah, two bolts on top, one big one on the bottom, and out they came.