Neanderpundit

Did several hundred miles (and a couple tanks of petrol) yesterday, and the driving it was the suxxors.

I don’t know what the actual wind speeds were, but you could tell the full semis from the empty., the empty ones kept trying to take off.

Once, on a bad off-camber exit ramp with the cruise in the neighborhood of 70, I felt the right rear pick up and the transfer case whine to redirect power to the front while the sploder tripodded.

Later, picking pieces of the drivers seat from my rectum, I figured the crosswind had to be in the neghborhood of at least 60, a calculation I arrived at by the inverse amount of insoluble fiber that was coming out of that seat cushion multiplied by the size of the hole my asshole had chewed in the seat leather.

to go back to driving a stick, especially when you spent so many miles doing it.

Today, on a long day trip, I reached for the… coffee cup, to downshift, about forty times.

Rowing a clutch back and forth to work doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but I did it for a quarter million miles and the roads werent’ as good then as now. Maybe I’ll have to go back. They even made a Sploder with a 5 speed, though the clutch is stiff as an everclear milkshake. Now all I need to do is drive a Passat for a while, if I can do the Passat diesel and the clutch is as nice as the Jetta, I may have something worthwhile.

is still a good read, all things said. I just did the three Smiley books, and they’re everthing they always were. I’m tickled to have reread them.

There’s a good deal of subtlety in what those clever Circus folks did. I know there’s a lot more electronic shit going on now, and it has probably replaced the subtlety of that earlier time. But those skills, if you can develop them yourself, still work.