Comments on: The tyranny of choice.

By: basset

basset — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:15:18 +0000

AM General Postal Jeep… made in Elkhart in a former Studebaker truck plant, that pretty much says it all right there. some of the early ones even have leftover Studebaker steering gear.

and, of course, there’s a Checker connection… saw on one of the Checker-history sites last night that they used Studebaker wheels and brakes until 1969, which is pretty unusual considering that Studebaker quit making cars in the USA at the end of 1963. I guess Checker bought a powerful load of Stude parts and just took awhile to run them out.

By: joodyb

joodyb — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:19:40 +0000

mea culpa for the stale gas-price citation. yikes. that was only 3 months ago!

By: LAMary

LAMary — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:39:30 +0000

We’ve got outposts of the UK chain Tesco’s here now, called Fresh and Easy. Fewer choices, good prices on most things, and good quality on items like produce and bread. They started off kind of rough, but they seem to have figured out their market.

By: Marie

Marie — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:14:29 +0000

I recall a childhood trip to McDonald’s with my grandparents, my brother, and my sister. My grandpa — notoriously cheap — charged up to the counter and said, “I’ll have five Big Macs and five waters” without asking any of us what we wanted.

My ordering style has always been that of Sally (ie. Meg Ryan’s character in “When Harry Met Sally”), so at the time, I was disgusted. A Big Mac? With a pickle and mustard? Yuck! I wanted Chicken McNuggets! (With honey, not ketchup!)
Some days when I’m stressing over choices, I think of my grandpa and tell myself to just order something already, dammit.

The downside of our small midwestern town is that my grocery shopping options are 1) Big chain store with too many choices and 2) Slightly smaller big chain store with almost as many choices. As a decision-challenged person, I’ve found I have to set a time limit for my grocery shopping or I’ll be at it all day, debating — buttered-top wheat bread? whole grain? split top?

To Kate: I would have laughed, too.

By: LAMary

LAMary — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:56:30 +0000

I find listening to baseball on the radio while doing some mindless chore very soothing. The time spent cleaning grout or scraping dead leaves out of gutters moves along much faster with a ball game in the background.

By: Sue

Sue — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:44:10 +0000

“Baseball is sorta my life’s passion, but TV does it no justice…ya gotsta B there.”
I disagree, Dexter, TV is very good for watching baseball. I love watching the players up close; I swear some of them are as gorgeous as dancers. And how can you make fun of some of the batting stances, and wonder why the batting coaches don’t smack the players for said stances, without that over-the-pitcher’s-shoulder view? Big view, maybe you do have to be there, but the small beauty of baseball is wonderful to behold up close. But then I was brought up on WGN baseball, which was doing it right decades before anyone else.

By: LAMary

LAMary — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:37:35 +0000

Hundred dollar fillups are not the future here. Cheap gas is 4.55 per gallon. More common is 4.75. My beetle takes 58 dollars to fill up. It’s amazing how long you can make a tank of gas last if you have to. We’re getting our money’s worth from our bus/train passes these days.

By: coozledad

coozledad — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:18:28 +0000

Thank you, Nancy. I’d wear out my welcome pretty quickly once folks noticed how fast the alcoholic beverages were disappearing.
I’ve actually been trying to email you some photos of the farm and its denizens, but have failed. You can see some here:
http://rurritable.wordpress.com/
and http://www.flickr.com/photos/2876709@NO4/
Please forgive my blogwhoring.

By: nancy

nancy — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:03:41 +0000

You should live in Detroit, Cooze. You’d be the hit of every backyard cookout with stories like that.

By: coozledad

coozledad — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:52:40 +0000

Yeah, Nancy: I’ll wind up driving the Subaru till it falls apart. I’ve had a “project car” before, and it was both hideous and dangerous. It was a 74 AM General Postal jeep.
I bought it at auction for $200.00, and was thrilled with it. The only thing that appeared to be wrong with it was a squeaky water pump. I sprayed some WD-40 on that sucker and fixed it right up.
The plan was to paint it a sort of milky forest green, and add wooden paneling to the sides, a luggage rack to the top, and chrome plated safety flooring to the dashboard and floor.
But plans change, especially when you don’t have a pot to piss in. I wound up giving it a dusting of Massey-Ferguson Red with my Wagner Power Painter (taking special care to avoid getting it on the tires) and fashioning a luggage rack from some galvanized pipe. When I first drove into the parking lot of the post office where I worked, the station manager nearly shit himself.
Soon, problems began to present themselves. I took a curve a little quickly one day, and the sliding door slid off its track and spun into a customer’s yard. He stood on his porch spitting while I rehung it. Not long after that, the neutral safety switch started to fail. I first noticed this when I’d stopped on a long stretch of dirt road to take a leak. I’d just started to relieve myself when the jeep put itself in reverse and began backing down the road. I ran leaking after it, and just manged to throw myself behind the steering wheel by grabbing the support post of the windshield.
That’s when I knew the sonofabitch was trying to kill me.
Things went downhill from there. After a local mechanic claimed to have fixed the safety switch, I was loading it in the parking lot one morning. I left it running while I stepped in the office to pick up my accountable mail, and I’d just gotten back on the dock in time to see it pop into reverse, cross the parking lot, and clock a city carrier’s Honda Civic.
I jumped up and down and pulled at my hair and said things, I’m afraid, and became part of the oral history of that office from that day forward.