Got to be willing to be wrong

I don't know if it's going to last but the suns out! I'm ready to unthaw.

My first car was an Aquamarine 1968 Ford Falcon station wagon.



Above is a '69 and a much more pleasant color but you get the idea. The car was a gift from my Mom through my brother Dale. He gave her a different car and the wagon got passed on to me. I loved it. I was 16 and being a relatively good kid, could come and go as I pleased.

My friends and I took to calling it The Tank and it felt like one. It had a solid 289 engine and positraction rear wheel drive. The body was fairly straight and aside from the odd petrified French fry or chicken nugget, the interior was passable. My ride was huge with room for 6 teenagers and that was before we put people in the cargo area!

One of the strongest feelings that I carry with me from driving these older cars is a sense of safety. Cars prior to the 80's were, generally, made of solid steel and compared to today's cars seem indestructible. I can't count the number of times I've made a statement like "My current car vs. my first car? No contest, my Ford Falcon would crush one of these new plastic vehicles". The truth turns out to be something very different. The reality is our new technology beats the heck out of old solid construction.

In September 2009, for its 50^th anniversary the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety celebrated by performing their standard head on collision test between a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a 1959 Chevy Bel Air. The results were, well, startling. Here's the video (you may want to click on the video and watch it in a larger screen, some of the text gets cut off in the blog here).



With some thought it starts to make sense.  The technology put into the construction of the modern automobile is pretty amazing stuff.  Crumple zones, air bags, seatbelts, head rests are all things that contribute to why, as demonstrated in the video above, my 2010 Hyundai is so much safer than that old wagon of mine.

Why is it that we are so predisposed to believing that our modern way of living is so much less desirable than the recent past?  This way of thinking creeps into lots of places.  There's a huge push to return to natural food sources, stop using pesticides, and using hormones.  In this blog while questioning the "good" in technology I've encouraged people to tune out and have a look outside now and then.

Human's have an amazing ability to convince ourselves that if enough people say it then it must be true.  Hitler was unfortunately correct when he said "If you tell a lie long enough, loud enough, and often enough, the people will believe it."  It's good to have our assumptions challenged by things like the collision above. 

Here are a few thoughts about our recent past.  Life expectancy in Colonial America was under 25 years.  40% of children failed to reach adulthood.  In the early 20th century, that number increased to 45 years.  Today, thanks largely to advances in public health measures, and safer more abundant food sources, life expectancy is an average 67.2 years.

Before you start emailing me images of chickens in cages that are essentially two oversized breasts and a head, I'm not advocating injecting every grain of food produced with Methylethyldeath.  What I am saying is that we make frequent decisions, small and large, over things such as auto safety, food supply and climate.  Those decisions impact where trillions of dollars are spent and huge amounts of resources are applied.  With what's at stake I think it compels us to make sure that we are operating on a foundation of facts and doing our best to seek the truth.

As we go about choosing what products we buy and how we cast our votes perhaps it's worth the time to read up a little to make sure the truth matches the packaging. What does "all natural" or "organic" mean? Is there a single definition? What about carbon footprints and melting ice? If those questions just seem too daunting, here's one you might consider asking, "Who's profiting from what's being said?" It's amazing how often the answer to that question can be used as a measure of value in a statement.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Nice woofer you got there

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter. I was wow'd by the number of articles on the web news this year on the subject. From the significance of eggs, to the plausibility of a physical body resurrection and "how many Christians hold to that belief". I did so much head shaking over the weekend my neck hurt.

I live in a pretty quiet neighborhood. I wouldn't use the word sleepy. You still have to lock your doors and I don't think I'd live here without a burglar alarm, but compared to living in the city it's peaceful. Even out here though you will still get a "9x stereo" roll by and make our windows rattle. By 9x I mean a car with a stereo worth nine times the value of the car it's installed in.

Where do I start with this one? It makes my head swim.

What gives these rolling Eustachian tube cleaners their removal power is the subwoofer or "woofer".

These bass speakers will run the driver anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars. Being generally nerdy, I get the how of the mechanism but as hard as I try I don't get the why. I don't come from the generation that scowls at loud music. When I'm alone in the car I crank up the tunes loud enough that I can't hear my cell phone ring. In some of the cars I've owned turning the music up was how I solved most mechanical problems. When those wheel bearings started to make noise, "pump up the volume". Ok, so in the long run not the most economical form of automobile maintenance, but I'm not much for anything that doesn't come with a keyboard.

I considered that it may be the kind of music that says to the driver "what would really heighten my experience would be if there was enough base produced to occasionally cause one of my toenails to pop off". The only form of music I could think that seemed to fit was Rap.

I'm not a fan of Rap; in fact I don't really consider it music. I might put it in the same category as Beatnik poetry. Please don't hear me say that I'm making a stand against Rap as an art form or making a generally statement in opposition to all who create or listen to it. I'm the last person anyone should come to for input on anything that falls under the heading "art". I just don't get it personally.

Ok, back to subwoofers and Rap. In casual observation that loud thumping bass does appear to go hand in hand with Rap. The more I thought about it though the harder it became to be convinced that to call oneself a connoisseur required a "Womp-o-matic 200 Decibel Knee Krusher". Sure, I understand the adrenaline rush associated with a driving beat like that, but does having it loud enough to create a pressure wave that forces cars next to you on the freeway to go momentarily out of phase with the universe? Somehow I doubt that's a requirement.

It got me to thinking about similar things I observe, for instance, people with loud motorcycles. Again, I'm not a mechanical guy, but I can't imagine a scenario where any vehicle on a public roadway needs so much horsepower that coming in contact with a few pebbles might cause them to transition from "rolling" to "flying". Again, I appreciate enough oomph to get up to merging speed or to pass a slow moving vehicle (where it's legal), but I seem to be able to accomplish this without hardware on my car that risks cracking the pavement.

So yah, it's the cool factor. I get it, I really do. I've lived much of my life trying to get there. When I was younger I got frustrated because I never seemed to fit in with the cool kids. As I got older I started to think that what made those kids cool were the things they had. I chased that for a while. I don't have the physique or eye for clothes, so I tried collecting other things to get cool. It took me a while but eventually I saw folly in that.

My friend Dan puts the word "consumer" up there with some of the most reviled he's heard. I've seen his facial expressions change when it's used casually in a sentence. While I don't get quite to the places he does with it the discussions have caused me to change my thinking about how, where, and why I buy things. I probably won't be giving up my big screen but I do look at the value of placed on stuff and what that says about their owner differently than before. It's been a catalyst for some fundamental changes in the way I live my life.

What I want to say when folks pull up next to me, car windows flexing to the beat, wheel rims giving the illusion their car is still in motion, is that most of us are just annoyed by it. I'd hesitate to claim that most people reach a point where they stop chasing cool. My guess is that their definition of it just changes as they grow older, after all age is no guarantee of wisdom. Allow me however, to make a small suggestion before you upsize your subwoofer or put the next louder muffler on your car. As an experiment, take that money, and make a charitable donation. Maybe buy some food and drop it off at a local food bank. However you define it, try using that money to better someone else's life. My bet is doing that will make you feel cool, though it may keep you from looking the part. That's ok though, the feeling lasts longer than the look.

At the very least it may save us all some trips to the dentist and auto glass repair shop!

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!