Backround Preparation of a Vegan Lifestyle

Driving produces less carbon dioxide than walking.  Like usual, I’m making a bold claim.  My personal hero, Carl Sagan, coined the refrain, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  This is why I nearly plagiarized my title from the blog that reported the NY Times article .

Here’s how it works: If you need to pop down to the store which is say, 3.0 miles round trip, walking will burn enough calories that drinking a glass of milk to replenish them will cause more CO2 to be emitted than if you drove a reasonably efficient car. 

The Times’ article cites a study done by Chris Goodall, a member of the British green party; he is an envirojunkie and author of the book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.  If Kyoto and the IPCC have taught us anything, it’s how meticulous these people claim to be with their research.  This is why I stole their graphic to your left.  In fact, The Pacific Institute, an environmental activist group, concluded that his facts actually check out.  Indeed a beefy study, applying every last dose of fertilizer and gust of cow flatulence.

Stolen from the Guy who Wrote the Damn Book.

It kinda backfired on Goodall’s agenda because his only point was that ruminant foods are more carbon-intensive.   He was chastised enough to rebut in his blog that no matter how you source the numbers, his conclusion still holds true.  He appears to be a stand up guy, no apologies when liberals deride him for ‘encouraging’ driving.  Of course not, there’s bigger fish to fry.  I say, let them give up heat before they lay scorn on my twin-turbo SUV.  Let them AMtrak to Florida  before sharing my lane.  Our ideaologies may differ slightly but when it comes to science, we must all agree on one thing.  The truth.

This is where PacIns picks up the fight, running around the truth while side-stepping the point with hymns like: Eat only what you grow and you can run to work and still be more efficient than than not going at all.  Or, the average American eats this and drives that, much different from the Brits, so sell your car.

The trolls pop up too, who think they’re so goddamn smart with mutterings like, “No one ever adds in CO2 in mining, smelting, and building cars.  I looked it up and its like 8 times worse and you forgot maintaining the roads too, duh.”  Helpful information for sure, except the study denotes driving instead of walking, not buying a car and then not using it.  Its only about people who already have cars rendering their point moot, but thanks.

Leaving only me to defend, much unloved by the media, the car.  I think its reasonable to say, if you aren’t picking your own food, there’ll be a tractor involved.  There’s also a delivery truck which needs maintained roads and loves high sulfur diesel.  Diesel or gasoline?  Your choice.   Also, if you’re a jogger (the healthy thing to be, i heard), I never met one who didn’t shower afterwards.  That’s a few extra showers a week plus a load of wash.  Does the average American have solar powered hot water?  How many never use a dryer?   Now we might be at eight times better for the car.  Or nine.

This is like capitol punishment or euthanasia, we can debate forever and only more absurd will the rebuttals become: 

Activist: The car will wear out its tires, those are carbon intensive. 
     Inactivist: Sneakers are worse. 

Activist: Fat Americans don’t need to replace as many calories. 
     Inactivist: Igneous rocks are formed from magma, equally not applicable to the article.

Activist: You’re contributing to pollution because more than CO2 comes out of a car.
     Inactivist: Offset by your contribution to the breakdown of the American family from the commuting hours you don’t spend with your neglected children.

Activist: You didn’t add in extra medical costs for outta-shape drivers.
     Inactivist: True.  Fortunately, the pedestrian has no safety cell and will die in most accidents whereas a car will save your life thus burdening Medicare.  Hence, the best and only green aspect of an environmentalist’s  world.  Their timely death.

Activist: Driving burns calories too, this is false math.
Activist: Cold starts are 100x less efficient, this is bad science.
Activist: Forget Walking.  Bicycling is 117% more efficient.

     Me: Carpool! Motherfuckers.

Carpool is one of those great words like nuclear power, its kryptonite to the tofu troublemakers.  No effective rebuttal exists.  A typical car holds five people.  You’d have to work out of your basement, never breed, eat your lawn, and drink rain to come close to the lifestyle efficiency of carpooling vs. non-driving.

Bicycleuniverse dot something has a handy doohicky.  I set it here for a yearly commuting consumption of the average American male with a median efficiency and a Ford Focus.  The Focus’ EPA estimates aren’t quite the actual 40mpg I got when I drove down that road in the video for 3 miles at 30mph with no stop signs.  That’s why they’re called estimates.  And don’t balk about unfairness with my car already being warmed up because, let’s note:  Non-drivers are at max capacity here.  If you walk or bike with friends it’ll be Tour de France levels of pollution.

Next Time You Sneer at a Car, Recognize that the Wanker is You.

I’m not advocating the do-nothing attitude towards environmental complacency.  I’m stressing the dangers of confusing morality with efficiency and avoiding ‘common sense’ victimization duping us into false conservations that actually hurt the planet.  We thought we were so green picking paper over plastic.  We were wrong.

So what’s our conclusion with driving alone versus walking/biking?  The point is that at worst, it’s that close!  We should extrapolate this as moral responsibility to run-over any people or bicycles on a road without a marked path.  Or at least have your passenger whack them in the back of the head with your owner’s manual for their ignorance. 

You’ll also get home 10 times faster (provided you’re talented enough to snake your way past those yellows) which means more time with your children, making drivers better parents.  And remember, a chained-up curbside bicycle is legally trash.  Or eBay fodder as I like to call it.

P.J. O’Rourke once said, “A certain childishness is, no doubt, excusable.  But going about in public with one’s head between one’s knees and one’s rump protruding in the air is nobody’s idea of acceptable behavior…Can such people be trusted?  Is a person with so little self-respect likely to have any respect for you?”

Nevertheless, its not really a bold claim, is it?  To the educated it’s merely, specious.

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SuperCar Extravaganza DVD

A horrid drive at inconceivable cost, briefly punctuated by 1 or 2 amusing stats. One of these involves getting nowhere a few eye blinks quicker than a competitor.  Wow at the lackluster delights. If you want to save yourself from dropping 70 large at the same dealer that sells Aveos, get a forklift, put a Hemi in it, and stick a vibrator in your butt.  It’ll be nearly as fast, and just as safe. 

That’s my terse text opinion of the ZO6-optioned Corvette I drove for my latest DVD that you can watch below.  Then you can read at Youtube why I think my view seems in contrast to perhaps every Vette driver in the known Universe.  Also check out the dozens of riveting comments in the Q&A follow-up.  I did.  And I was riveted enough to spark this blog.

Apparently, my research on the latest 427 ci Corvette was plenty thorough in the olfactory department of intended drivers.  Among the dozens of facts presented,  a particular one stirred a biblically hot wind of dissension.   Clearly he’s incorrect, they must’ve carped, otherwise he’d be the first person in history to publicly present a proof of the C6 Corvette’s Ladder Frame chassis.

Understand,  a Ladder frame is what a tractor-trailer uses.  And a tractor. And a trailer. Its one of the oldest chassis designs in the world and it’s chief weakness lies in its wobbliness. Something tractors don’t mind. Trailers much either. They are also inherently less safe than uni-bodies, which comprise 99% of passenger cars in the world.   Here again, safety isn’t as much a concern for trucks as is the vehicles they crash into.

How can a car, touted by its parent as a world class SuperCar be designed with an antiquated truck frame?  GM calls it a ’spaceframe’. That sounds plenty modern.  Almost futuristic like its on the cutting edge of the engineering envelope.  And here comes that douchebag VanPala with his goddamn open-mindedness spouting smears without consensus.

Well, when we’ve been bamboozled long enough, its too painful to acknowledge we’ve been taken. Especially if the bamboozle has captured our ego. 

A persistent reader code-named, ‘Corvettably’, signed up just to entertain me with rumblings like, “The Corvette has one of the lowest personal injury claims. Sounds like a good safety record to me.”  Indeed. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with how the Corvette performs in a crash, and a lot to do with Corvette’s being driven less miles and less often than the average car.  He has ‘confused causation with correlation’.

 

Ladder frame chassis: C6 Corvette ZO6

Another of his musings, “The central section [tunnel] is more like the X-brace setup used by the Honda S2000.”  It shares a structure with a uni-body car therefore it can’t be a ladder, is what he was getting at.  Which is the common ‘Non-Sequitur fallacy:  failing to recognize alternative possibilities’.

On a Youtube video about the ZR1-optioned Corvette, I commented that ladder frames are inherently less safe [than uni-bodies].  A reader replied, “the Corvette has a 5-star safety rating.”  I emailed  ratings giver, NHTSA, who said they didn’t test the Corvette.  So I posted to the reader where he got ‘5 stars’ from.  My response, by having 6+ people click the thumbs-down icon, was spammed-out into deletion.  That’s not the scientific way.  That’s propaganda.  We need to be vigilant to people dismissing science simply because it doesn’t applaud their opinions.

In pickups, a  robust ladder is something of pride.  You see them at car shows stripped down to admire the beefy unidirectional beams conveying strength in towing and maybe some slight flexing for extreme offroad articulation.  But with sports cars, we want it light and stiff, and seeing it sitting there looking like a school bus is disturbing.

But strip it the GM way (remove only body panels, glass, and the interior) and you’ll be staring at what looks exactly like a Ferrari 599’s unitized ’spaceframe’ and nothing like a garbage truck’s ladder.  So, what’s going on here?

According to ‘The Race Car Chassis’ by Forbes Aird, we find that a Space-Frame can be best summed up as a structure with 4 properties:

1. Its composed of only straight-line elements.
2. All elements continually form planes of 3d polygons.
3. Every single element will only ever be loaded in either pure compression or tension.
4. All loads must enter/exit at junctions of 3 or more elements.

 

Space-frame chassis: 1954 Mercedes 300SL

If you are inconsistent with just one, you are not a Spaceframe. The Corvette (C6) is inconsistent with all 4.  In fact, so far as I know, only  a handful of roads cars in the world have ever had SF’s.  Some say all road Ferrari’s before the F360 were Spaceframes.  But again, they’ve mistaken the (four-tube) Tube-chassis for a SF, since they lack one or more of our above properties.  In minimal form, the Ariel Atom is a SF and in purer forms, the Lamborghini Countach and the 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing are SF’s.  The ‘gullwings’ weren’t there for beauty, but to cover the neccesary torso-high girder (upper chord) across all door openings.  Obviously impractical for road cars.

Space-frame chassis: Lamborghini Countach

What a term though! It sounds like the Corvette is some technological tour de force GM designed in outer space. Keep in mind, while the Corvette is by no means a SF, your patio umbrella is. There is a test too, called the ‘ball joint’ test, that’s consistent with my video.  But we can call it a SF if we want - of course then we must also extend this rubric to pickup trucks as well.

Wow, VanPala is now proclaiming a web of conspirators including Ferrari, Audi, and Honda among others according to Wiki, and (via Press Release) GM, Dana, and Alcoa,  as bare-faced liars.  Well, a ’spaceframe’ is one of those funny words like ‘liberal’ and ‘plastic’ that generically means so many things due to its over use, especially in marketing.  Its folk taxonomy.

Tube chassis: Ferrari 250LM

So, SF is idiom.  Further complicating matters, the guy who designed the damned thing (C5 Corvette), McLellan, calls it a backbone. Forget for a moment that the backbone chassis is so dangerous in side-impact safety dynamics that it makes the ladder look like NASA technology, it just has a ball-stomping ring to it, doesn’t it?  Like a fearless American counterpart to the monocoque.  If I’d designed something that badass sounding, I’d talk it up too.  Physics-wise, he’s lying.  However, Merriam-Webster defines backbone as, ‘a firm resolute character’.  Sure, I’ll go with that.

GM's 1983 Press Release on the C4's chassis: "Integral perimeter-birdcage unitized structure". Oh dear.

Not many will call McLellan on it since they’ll likely confuse the torque tube for the backbone. Porsche has been using torque tubes since the 928. Its good, it keeps some acceleration forces from being absorbed by the chassis. Its purpose in life is to control torsional loading as a suspension element and is by no means a load-bearing chassis component.

The only major chassis type left and that’s consistent with my DVD is the ladder frame.  You may find consistencies with uni-bodies like the Fiero.  But car chassis’ are hardly classified by structure, but instead by the way loads are channelled to the wheels. 

 

An interesting picture. Imbeciles will be tricked into seeing a rolling backbone chassis awaiting its body (on-frame), instantly proving VanPala wrong, a liar, and an idiot. Except, the robot is holding the wheels up and the upper suspension bits are dangling, awaiting the above ladder frame.

Stand on the roof (bow) of a Corvette.  Your weight splits in two – channelled toward each perimeter rail where it splits again into four with no more splits till the suspension, i.e., standing on a ladder; which is consistent with a 2D structure. 

Stand on a Porsche Boxster’s roll bar.  Your weight splits in two - channelled toward the unibody where it splits infinitely and gets channelled diffusely to the suspension, i.e., standing on an egg; which is consistent with a 3D structure.

As I see it, the only smoking gun authoritative enough to quell the Vette bigots is a CAD/CAM machine. I tried to rent one. They said no.

I’m better off.  Before an audience, lay down a ladder, flat, and nail a wheel to each corner.  The vast majority should agree, a ladder frame appears before them.  But a few will see a unibody, a monocoque, a backbone, a spaceframe, or whatever google tells them to.

My detractors are already warming up their comments, accusing me of arguing this whole spiel without a providing a single link to ‘proof’ from an authoritative source.  Even if the Detroit Editor of Motor Trend Magazine used the term ‘ladder frame’ in a writeup of the C6 Corvette at the top left of page 65 of the February 2004 issue, that wouldn’t be ‘proof’.  That’s simply adding to my consensus.

‘Proof’ in the traditional fanboy zealot sense of googling some official car chassis database is a little hard to come by.  Nothing like that exists.  In fact, there is no such thing as proof of anything.  Physics deals only with successive approximations to the truth.  Fortunately, we have brains (most of us).  

Using critical thinking we’ve seen that looks can deceive.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Press Releases?  Useless. Public opinion?  Worthless.  And crucially, we’ve recognized some common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.

But don’t take my word for it.  I originally said, “The modern day Corvette uses a Ladder-frame chassis like a pickup truck.”  

Steve Wesoloski, GM’s Road Racing Group Manager in charge of the C6R Corvette race-car, said in an interview to Racecar Engineering Journal about designing a race car out of the (C6) Corvette ZO6, “Being a ladder frame, basically like a truck with the hydroform frame rails and some crossmembers, it is very tough to get the torsional stiffness.”

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There is no doubt about it, the fanatic iPhone frenzy is en fuego. People geekier than the under and over weight male who have never seen female genitalia Star Wars crowd, I call them iLosers, lined up around the corner 2 days in advance to buy an Ipod that’s been scotch-taped to a phone.

To give you an idea of the gravity of the situation, we need to have a look in the current marketplace.  On the left we have the white collar, corporate loving, can’t live without my Blackberry. On the right we have the the oldest and largest world standard of handheld operating systems, the Palm Treo with eleventy billion applications available for free on the internet. And in the middle we have the Razr: the smallest, cheapest, hip phone that’s so easy to use, even The Gimp can handle it.Somewhere in left field we have the iPhone. A cell phone that doesn’t ’push’ corporate email, doesn’t have a Palm operating system, is bleeding expensive, and can’t even tie your shoes. All from a computer company whose user base consists solely of artists, people in bands, and the unemployed.

But none of that matters because its so far out in left field that it’s a grand slam, it’s a hole in one, it’s the biggest single leap forward for mankind since the invention of beer. Let me just throw out a selection of tidbits: visual voicemail, dynamic predictive text, target adaptive keyboard, internal accelerometer, Mp3 Cover Flow, widescreen movie player, real web pages, and Airplane mode just to name a few.

You simply rub your fingers gently over it and, like a good woman, it responds to your desires. It interfaces with you so intuitively, so viscerally, that you’re left lamenting on all those years of thumbing stupid plastic wheels and writing with inkless pens like a idiot.

They’ve done away with that trivial and tedious feature, the keyboard, so they could fit the first ever high definition aspect video screen. Unless you need a keyboard, to which one pops up on the first ever optic-quality glass touchscreen. Then using its ‘advanced mathematical algorithms’, you can bang away a text faster than on even a desktop since it corrects all errors on the fly in real time, even names, places, and brands.

Corporate email? Who needs that when half of all emails in the world are solicitations for a bigger penis? Besides, the second you experience this thing you’ll want to quit that hopeless ladder climb and spend the rest of your life in mom’s basement with your iPhone watching that youtube of Al Gore claiming he invented the internet.

The iPhone is jam-packed with nerdy techno-wizardry combining every device you could or should want and merging it with such sophisticated elegance that it could well be fueled with frappuccino. So cool and clean, a silver and black art deco world of discrete sculpture that makes even me look as cool as Bono. Technically it is a phone, yet it just isn’t.

Using it is literally like stepping 100 years into the future. As of June 29, 2007, all Blackberry’s and Treo’s are officially dinosaurs. But you know, by next Tuesday we’ll have the Appleberry and the Treo 8000 with glass this and myspace that in a vainglorious struggle to compete by adding cool features with flash names to the same old same old.

Where we arrive at Ford Motor Co. Recently, they wanted to compete in the premium-luxury-sporty-suv market with the Porsche Cayenne and the BMW X5. But they didn’t have enough money to do the job properly. So they took their Land Rover Disco 3 chassis and added the body from their Range Rover and the engine from their Lincoln LS.

But that combination nearly killed all occupants on impact, so they added girders to the under-sides. But all that weight slowed it down, so they installed the supercharger from their old Jaguar XJR.  Which emptied the coffers leaving no money to tune any sporty-ness into it. 

So what’d they do?  They named it the ’Sport’.  Leaving it with less athleticism than Michael Moore and with a ride like that which a Buick salesman would call, ” dreamy”.

Likely, you’re thinking it’s a half-ass’d attempt to get a new vehicle to market as quickly and cheaply as possible. And you’re right. Yet I noticed that while the ‘Sport’ does have spin control, their website does not:

– …it delivers awesome power for a thrilling and involving drive.

Power without control tends to be like that. Car and Driver as always, was equally firing from the spin zone:

– …Stomping on the gas pedal will give you a healthy shove in the back.

And your wallet. But 10 out of 24 paragraphs of their review contained superlative references to the abundance of power in a supercharged vehicle whose 0-60 time of 7.2 seconds makes it no faster than a Honda Civic Si. The brochure was particularly interesting when it referred to Ford’s idea of blending performance with style:

– …it looks like it’s moving even when it’s standing still.

I get the points; optimism. But I’m a realist, which is why my latest DVD, HEAVY METAL, charts my quest, or conquest, to find the best suv, of all time. It is of course spin-free, but surprisingly, out of a selection of 17 very popular suv’s, only 2 are any good at all with one being astonishingly good and the rest being quite horrific in a Nick Lachey’s talent kind of way.

The 2006 release turned into 2007 due to no fault of my own. Apparently there is a law against shooting up a car with a machine gun no matter how awful it is to drive. Target practicing on private property is legal in just about every jurisdiction in America.  Except where I was.  So 26 hours of community service later and now it’s out.

Resulting in almost two hours of manly, ball stomping automotive action for the price of only one.  Wait, that’s not true. You get it for the price of free! Understand, I have a problem with current copyright laws. The way I see it, it only help the rich get richer and the expense of the poor.

So what’s Al Gore doing in the title? Well contrary to popular belief, CO2 does NOT drive climate, whatsoever. Yet driving Hummers and Range Rovers and other great symbols of American freedom may soon be outlawed thanks to legislation sparked by Mr. Bore.

Well at least thanks to Judge something or other, I can now get back to regularly not updating my website.

Its the Sun Stupid.

Your ability to live is now threatened. Antarctica is dissolving, the Penguin is doomed, and it’s now so hot out that Al Gore had to shave off his beard. The former veep gives us a curt, conclusive and even frightening prognosis in his new eloquent documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” — essentially a slideshow where he bangs on about global warming in front of a live studio audience.

Apparently since his close call with Dubbya, he’s been a man on a mission — becoming the Michael Moore of CO2: Lugging his iBook around the globe giving away hundreds of free pie-charted Powerpoint presentations to any green bean who’d listen.

Within Al’s prognostication there is irrefutable evidence, there is conjecture, and (with the touching bit about his son’s near death experience inspiring his courageous yet emotional environmental activism) there is even poetry. But it’s more scare-mongering than scary. It’s more red-herring than red-alert.

There is no definite proof of global warming. No one can say for sure just what is causing the rise in temperature. But there is an inescapable fact. Carbon dioxide is indeed increasing, due partly to man’s burning of fossil fuels and Al Gore’s damp exhalations complaining about man’s burning of fossil fuels.

What Sheikh Mohammad Jihad is doing by pumping useless dead dinosaurs out of the desert for us, is not only making our lives better and more convenient by fueling our Range Rovers and Hummers and Ferrari F430 Spiders with F1 paddle shifters and carbon ceramic brakes, is fueling nature.

Like your 10th grade biology teacher taught you, carbon dioxide is plant food! Plants can veg-out all they want since there’s no limit on how thick forests and shrubs and Poison Ivy can get, and they’ll never suffer from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or high charge card rates at Lane Bryant. Think of Central park as a fat lady who works doing inventory for a blind Häagen-Daz store owner.

Future outlook for a booming snowboarding business on Kilimanjaro may be bleak, but don’t blame it on the car or my excessive use of Tag body spray. Blame it on the Taliban, blame it on Dubai-Ports, or just blame good ‘ole Al Gore because global warming is a myth. Or, you could just condemn the Sun. Guess what decade the Sun has been at it’s hottest in the past 1000 years. This one.

But I personally blame the Toyota Prius. You see it’s a hybrid car meaning it is powered by electricity and gasoline simultaneously, or alternately, or not at all. It runs on the electric motor in intense traffic like New York City when illegal immigrants are protesting their right to free healthcare and income tax exemption. Also, in Atlantic City after a Clay Aiken concert.

Once the batteries are drained or you hit 20mph or floor the damn thing because it’s slower than continental drift, the gas engine, which has the power of a Cuisinart, kicks in to help out and charge the 38 batteries so you can make it to the nearest hospital to deliver the little kid you just hit when she ran into the middle of the road to get her ball because she couldn’t hear you coming since you were using the silent electric motor to save the skiing industry.

Now at this juncture, Greenpeace types in hippie sandals will point out that the Hybrid’s main purpose is fuel economy and that the Prius gets a fantastic certified 60mpg. Which is almost as fantastic as the certified 78mpg that the VW Lupo Diesel gets. Sure, the Lupo may not be applicable since it’s only available in Europe, but only in the same way that the Prius’ mpg isn’t applicable since the EPA test gets skewed when it’s applied to Hybrids. Even Toyota themselves say that most drivers will get about 20% worse mileage than the ratings would suggest.

It’s no surprise that at $10/gal, half of all European cars are diesels. But here, even at our new $3/gal rate, they’re still rare mainly because of their perceived Britney Spears syndrome: noisy, dirty, smelly, and nasty. However, the EPA has all but eliminated sulfur in diesel starting this June and with the latest diesel technology, the air coming out of the car will be almost cleaner than the air going in. Plus, they’re now quieter than a Mexican crossing the Rio Grande.

And there’s more, the Mercedes E320 TDI (diesel) has more torque than a Porsche 911S and travels 780 miles per tank. Diesels typically get 30% better fuel mileage than their gas brethren and you never need to worry about the stupid battery pack — As any Nokia user knows, after a year or so the nickel-metal-hydride bit doesn’t last nearly as long as it used to and a new one usually costs more than the phone.

The simple fact of the matter is this. Hybrids don’t get any better mileage than Diesels, you pay a larger premium for them, and diesel is about $.20/gal cheaper than cheap ‘regular’. But the worst thing about all Hybrids is that they have two engines! So think of all the factories that have to be built to make the second engine and it’s batteries and how much fuel they’re consuming.

I wouldn’t mind if some eco-freaks want to indulge their lust by trundling along at 55mph and 55mpg in the same way that I like to indulge my lust by blowing by them in my Porsche Cayenne Twin-Turbo V8 SUV at 155mph and 5mpg, sucking their Cough If You Hate SUV’s bumper stickers off with my wake turbulence.

But wearing the hybrid hat just because you think you’re going to bring back the Dodo Bird or fix the hole in the ozone layer or for some perceived virtuousness is nothing more than ignorance. Hybrids are just car firms cashing in. Buy a VW Jetta TDI. You’ll get better mileage and you’ll save Chilly Willy.

No Fun Stuff on Planes

I was checking out Transportation Safety Administration’s (TSA) website for travel tips which has an interesting and comprehensive list of items NOT allowed on airplanes anymore. Ok, so i’ll have to leave my ‘box cutters’, ‘razor blades’ and ‘meat cleavers’ at home. That probably wont be a problem.  But I cant bring my ’spear gun’? Nor my ‘realistic replica of firearms? That sucks because I often like to take my ‘realistic replica of firearms’ and pretend I am Aston Kutcher and shoot myself twice between the eyes.

Even if an item not on the list can be confiscated if they feel it might pose a threat. So you can forget about bringing your new Stella perfume by Yves Saint Laurent since last someone got theirs impounded because the bottle is shaped like a hand grenade.  I mean no matter how fast you pull the applicator and no matter how far you lob it, it will still never blow up.  However, it scares timid people and thats a safety issue.  The only real threat I think is that everything will end up smelling like roses and wood.

Some people have tried to bring some seriously ridiculous items on board recently. Like a hammer. Where could you possibly be going where you’d need a hammer right away? At JFK a few years back, someone attempted to get a weed cutting machine past security.  For a moment let’s just forget about the comedy and picture this guy trying to break down the cockpit doors with a weed whacker.  I really wouldnt mind all that much as I could use a good laugh especially as the nylon spool tangles on him. Unless of course he has the weed thrasher , then it would definitely be dangerous. Not that it matters though, this guy was caught with an electric one.

The funniest item ever that someone tried to get aboard has to be a chainsaw.  Ok, so that thing would surely fuck things up in a plane, but how far did he think he would get with it? So he is stuffing a chainsaw into a dufflebag assuming he won’t get caught? I would have love to have been there to see the look on the guards face as he watches an xray of a chainsaw go by on the monitor.

Fortunately safety razors are allowed.  So I can touch down with freshly shaven balls, thank god.  Nothing in life I hate worse than arriving with stubbly gonads.

Top 9 Best Drinks:
9. DNL – Yes, Dee-En-EL. Turn the bottle upside down and, I’m not joking, it spells 7-up. Because this is the direct competitor for 7-up. Or Sierra Mist. It’s get confusing because 7-up isnt owned by Pepsi any more. well they do in Canada and Mexico. Ok, here’s the simple explanation: Pepsi makes Sierra Mist, Coke makes Sprite, and DPSU (drpepper/sevenup) makes 7-up now except in Canada and Mexico where Pepsi makes it. So now that  7-up and upside down 7-up are still made, there are new bottling and distribution relationships.  OR, another way: DPSU was created when the American government blocked deals allowing Dr Pepper to go to Coke and 7up to go to Pepsi in the 80s (7up outside the US was acquired by Pepsi and the majority of Dr Pepper outside the US is owned by Coca-Cola). The fact we’re seeing innovation now shows this was a good idea and very forward thinking on the part the FTC. And this stuff is tasty.  Think less like 7up and more like the late Surge along with the scent of the taste of green life-savers.

8. The Fridge Pack -  Yes, not a drink but cardboard.  And cardboard never tasted so good.  Or at least has never been this convenient.  Any canned beverage from Coke in a 12-pack come with this invention so amazing the guy from Oxy-Clean should be on TV right now trying to sell you a few dozen.  Since Coke are out of flavor ideas at the moment (thank god) they have cleverly changed the shape of their 12-packs to use your fridge space very efficiently and it also includes a built in dispenser. WOW! I was going to buy Pepsi this week, but the allure of specially shaped cardboard was too much to pass up.
7. Sierra Mist- Good copies are still better than bad inventions….Take 7-up, add sprite, subtract 7-up and you get ‘the mist’. The exact same molecular composition as Sprite.  And I dont like Sprite but I love Sierra Mist. Must be the funky graphics on the can.
6. Coke – Everybody loves it, but you can’t dig for it like water and I’m bored of it so lets move on.
5. Dr. Pepper – Nicknames(by me): D.P. & The Doctor – excellent alternative when Coke and Pepsi get boring. Has just as much history too – yes, Dr. Pepper invented it AND….it was invented BEFORE Coke! It’s actually so popular that there are more than 20 generic imposters: Mr. Pibb, Dr Becker, Dr Cheaper, Dr K, Dr Joes, Dr Perky, Dr Select, Dr Shasta, Dr Skipper, Dr Slice, Dr. Star, Dr Thunder, Dr Whatever!
4. Vanilla Coke – Ahh, vanilla infused cocaine, sweet and dangerous at the same time. Now about the taste…. I’ve always liked ‘Captain & Coke’ and this is that sans alcohol. Two enthusiastic thumbs up!
3. Mikes Hard Lemonade, Bacardi Silver – Refreshing like lemonade, cloudy color like Fresca, and gives a better buzz than beer. Hey, it even has the respect of a manly drink (at least in the summer) unlike the burgeoning sissy wussy girlie drink portion of the alcoholic beverage display.
2. Water – There are so many ways to get hold of it. You can draw it, pour it, dig for it (just not under the outhouse!) or simply dig it.  You can get it from a well, a tap, a source, a fountain, or a stream.  You can drink it straight up, out of your hand, from a glass, a bottle, a jar or a container. Soft water may have the disadvantage of containing only minute quantities of magnesium, whereas hard water might be bad for your favourite sweat-shirt… But all in all, NO WATER – NO LIFE. So get a life, care for your water and drink it down.
1.  Blue by SKKY Vodka – Tastes like Pinot Grigio and sprite without bubbles. I like it.  But it really belongs at no. 7. However, since their advertising for this product’s promotion includes alleged degradation of women, I am putting it at number 1.  I also will be consuming a lot more of it to help them make up for the boycott. – The current ad in question is titled “Skyy Blue” and depicts a woman’s rear as epicenter with legs spread. A man is shown between her legs with a bottle suggestively erect. Personally, from looking at it, I’d say it’s degrading to men. But hey, I’m happy either way

Beautifully Written.

Well the latest iteration (11th edition) of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary was released last week. Though I am almost finished reading it, I can tell you so far that this book really kicks some serious ass!

Let me show you some examples of what I am talking about…Here are some of this year’s NEW words.  No, I am not making these up:     

• Dead presidents noun plural (1944) slang : U.S. money in the form of bills; specifically : DOLLARS
• Brewski noun [2brew + -ski, suffix in Slavic surnames] (1978) slang : BEER
• Killer app noun (1988) : a computer application of such great value or popularity that it assures the success of the technology with which it is associated; broadly : a feature or component that in itself makes something worth having .
• Golden handcuffs noun plural (1976) : special benefits offered as an inducement to continue serviceexample: When you call T-mobile to cancel because your cell service is worse than paper cups and string, and they say you’re under contract. But they offer you an extra 500 minutes a month. So you hang up the phone thinking what great cell service you have until the next time you try to use it-Golden Handcuffs. 
• Phat . . . . adjective . . . . [probably alteration of 1fat] (1963) slang : highly attractive or gratifying : EXCELLENT And I’ve been using this word since 1994-9 years before it became a real word. THATS HOW COOL I AM!
  

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  Now my Recommendation for next years edition:     
• Napster noun (1999) 1. A concept where people steal cd’s,dvd’s,and software from other people over the internet and its completely legal if you are friends with them. usage: I napstered Terminator 3 from my buddy ‘Ilkelilboyz69′ 2.Any free app that upon download, conveniently loads 6 secret spybots onto your harddrive, changes all your port configurations to wide open status, probes your hardrive to put ALL your files freely onto the internet, while at the same time allowing virus’ free rides into your registry where you’ll never find them. All this in exchange for some software and dvd rips that’ll be lost anyway when your computer turns YOU into its mouse and forces you to reformat. i.e.: Kazaa
• Bull Market noun (2000) Any of a series of completely random market fluctuations that makes the inexperienced investor think he’s an economic genius.    
• Billymays (1995) noun A person who can sell anyone things they dont want or need and that never should have been invented in the first place while actually making them feel good about it.  But ya gotta call now…And I’ve been using this word since 1994,9 years before it became a real word. Thats how cool I am.

Footnote (Oct/09) : This was my first blog ever.  I was doing it back when they were called webblogs.  Yup, always cutting edge at Autostream Films.  That being said, all of my recommendations are currently deceased as we knew them.