Dos Equis
04-28-2005, 02:09 PM
Regards Team:
Kinda funny but true...... :-\
================================================== ==
Blow Up Your SUV! Do It NOW!!!
by Anonymous
This is not a rhetorical device. This is a sincere hope that even one person will kill their SUV before it kills us.
I'll confess right up front that I used to like SUVs a lot. Once upon a time,they were tough, purposeful vehicles, with plenty of sporting and utilitarianuses. The original, non-yuppie Land Rover was terrific for driving up thatdirt road on the Partington Ridge overlooking Big Sur, if you didn't drawsmall-arms fire from local growers who mistook you for the Pot Patrol.Four-by-fours were just right for hauling transmitter parts up icy mountainroads. The Hummer was just the perfect statement for our part of LosAngeles, where World War II is still very much in progress. Anyway, it waskind of a guy thing. It's just fun to sit up high, see right over Sentras andCamrys, and control a BIG vehicle.
Then the plague began.
The Bible says that plagues used to be mundane things like flies, rats,locusts, and frogs. We're way too high-tech for that. We are currentlyplagued by big, dumb, square vehicles, usually driven by big, dumb,square people, everywhere you look, or don't look because the goddamnthings block the view. I don't know what's worse -- that hardly anyonecoming out of American schools has even the slightest critical thinkingskill, or that the resulting fifty million yahoos all need 20-foot cars becausesome yuk in a cowboy hat on TV says that they do.
Now, a female friend of mine is fond of saying, "Come on, guys, there wasa woman's movement thirty years ago, get past it!" This, of course, getsright to the original cause of the sport-truck fad. It's all about castrationanxiety. Three or four women burned their bras half a century ago, andtwo whole subsequent generations of American males have reacted with amixture of machismo and sheer terror.
Let's face it. A lot of guys wanted the world to know they were rootin'tootin' two-gun shootin' GUYS. They couldn't really wear leather dildoes towork, so they did the next best thing. They started driving offroad vehicles,safari wagons, shit kickers, and ah-hah vehicles to work. They deckedthem out with ominous, threatening bumpers, pipes, nerf bars, batteringrams, brush screens, spotlights, gas cans, and everything else but acowcatcher and a 50mm cannon.
Where I live, the busiest auto store by far is a little hole in the wall calledDirty Parts. It sells every protuberance, accoutrement, dingdong,gimcrack, bell, whistle, and whizbang that anyone would ever want ontheir dick, oops I mean their truck. It's always busy, seven days a week. Itsells as many shirts, caps, and stickers as parts. It's a Scene.
Until about a year ago, that's all you had to know about the Californiasport truck phenomenon. At least two thirds of the time, it was safe toassume that a high ground clearance was making up for a psychologicallyperceived shortcoming somewhere else. We accepted it as another ofthose urban entertainments so freely given by the more chemicallyunbalanced fringes of city life, along with watching the ascending tracerrounds on New Year's, or going out to the drags at Pomona and watchingpeople trash some real machinery.
But then, sometime around late '98 or early '99, everyone else in theworld started buying the damn things. Before anyone had time to sayanything, sport trucks and SUVs were outselling cars two to onehereabouts. Yuppies wanted 'em. Families wanted 'em. Women, forChrissake, wanted 'em. Something was afoot, and it sure as hell wasn'tmagic.
Nope, not on your tintype. What it was, and is, is FEAR. Mortal fear. Fearfor one's life. Abject terror. Panic. The flight reflex. Plain, old FEAR.
The Balance Of Terror
Fess up; you're scared spitless driving these days. There are so manybig, dumb, lumbering, rumbling dinosaurs infesting the streets that drivinganything smaller feels like paddling a Cuban rubber raft through a USNavy supercarrier battle group.
What we see here is the classic egg-rolling paradigm of road safety. It'sthe intuitive, though pretty thoroughly debunked, argument that, if achicken's egg will break a robin's egg, then one had better show up withsomething an ostrich laid. If every city street looks like Road Warriors,then no one dare venture forth in less than 8000 pounds of cold, hardarmor.
Supermarket parking lots around here look like Safariland. Range Rovers,Jeeps, and Outbacks are lined up like the start of the Baja 1000. It's a bitunsettling to watch something out of Jurassic Park pull up, only for a99-pound yuppess to come bouncing out, burlap bag in hand. This hasgotta be fear. No sane woman counts brush screens and push barsamong her fashion accessories. Nope; it's an arms race.
Those who follow arms buildups, Cold War history, and the mutualassured destruction nuclear plan know what comes next. If every broad,wannabe, weenie, kid, and loser is gonna be packing one of thosegoddamn square things, then a weapon escalation is overdue.
The escalation, in this case, is the full-size, crew-cab, pickup truck. Theseurban Tyrannosaurs are 20 feet long, 7 feet tall, 6 feet wide, ideally withoffroad tires, heavy-duty V10 engines, and the gas economy of the QE II.They are well suited to hauling 50 bags of hog chow back from town, orhauling 10 drunk cowpokes back from the pokey. In a crowded city,however, they're just about the most wretched overkill ever devised byhuman libido. Mostly, they prove that total desperation is setting in.
Right now, where we live, absolutely everyone wants a full sized crew cab.They won't fit our 1940s garages, and so everyone parks them on thestreet. The street that is vanishing. The street that we can no longer seeacross. The street that can barely be navigated at all. The street thatvibrates day and night with great, roaring, earthquakes, as these thingslumber around the corner, belching awesome clouds of unburnedhydrocarbon from their 6-inch exhaust pipes, so weenie little guys can gethome from the market.
Worse, these things are butt ugly. They've got to be the ugliest vehiclesever designed. The designers should be tied up and forced to go down on600-pound pigs, or, even more horrible, to gaze upon their mutations fordays on end. Every hormone case around here wants their own visualassault vehicle. It's gotta be ominous black, or dark, pukey green. It'sgotta have pipes that sound like Indy®, and woofers that sound like thelocal rave. It's gotta have a jacked-up rear suspension, putting the 5-foottailgate right in your face. Mostly, though, it's gotta have a nearly opaque,tinted, rear window the approximate size and shape of an advertisingsignboard, which appears to be just what it's for.
Ad agencies probably can't believe their luck. Without a penny forexpensive media buys, they've been able to plaster the whole city withrolling promotions for shirt makers, skateboard shops, $200 shoes, $300sunglasses, X-Treme sports magazines, and a hundred other corporatepsychographics which the truly insipid have apparently confused withhaving a life. When the Youth Market isn't on parade, we'll most likely seeone of those weird, inscrutable icons of Calvin from the comics, pissinghappily on anything resembling the adult world. It's getting strange outthere.
Poor L.A.. It has survived fires, earthquakes, floods, riots, racism, hate,lousy government, worse schools, guns, boom boxes, rapmobiles, andbullshit, only to be done in by road terror. One watches these enormousvehicles rolling over curbs, taking out fences, and generally devastatingeverything in sight, and dreams of a life anywhere else.
This assault will probably hasten the next highway arms race. I figure we'llstart seeing tricked-out yuppie versions of those boxy, little airport busesany day now. You know the ones. They're seen dragging travellers,usually about 20 at a time, between terminals, or out to the car rental lot,or to the hotel. That's about the only place they're ever seen, but this willchange.
First, some dork with his Chevy Blazer® in the shop will drive one home.His kid will take it to some teenage culture meltdown in Huntington Beach,it'll be seen for two seconds on MTV, and within a week every kid in thesehere United States will want one for their very own. Parents, fearing thattheir families might become telegenically impaired, will all take out thirdmortgages to comply. The auto makers will catch on, and we'll see hoursof commercials and TV placements in which anyone with a remote claimto hipness shows up at high school in a 20-passenger conveyance withpurple stereo speakers the size of Marshall stacks, and every hot babe intown.
Following several thousand focus groups and market studies, makers ofairport buses will hit their stride, and transcend the teen market. Plain,square, little buses, formerly with plain, square, little names such asAeroTransit® or MiniBus® will become the hope of Mankind. They'll startcoming in six well-researched colors, and bearing the well-researchednames of famous mountains, lakes, rocks, and trees. Ads for theseFreedom Machinestm will start to appear all through the NationalGeographic, showing happy, prosperous yuppies taking 22 of theirclosest wine-club friends up some Monument Valley mesa, with nary aroad in sight.
The very next September, we'll see the first football game commercialwhere a rugged cowpoke drives up Mount Whitney in his tough, bold,adventurous, dashing, beautiful, 24-passenger Grand Teton®. From that30 seconds on, it'll be a done deal. Every man, woman, and child inAmerica will absolutely positively achingly and consumingly need anairport bus. This will be great for the economy. Think how much morecrap we'll have to steal from the third world to build and afford 30 million ofTHESE things. Think how many more wars we'll need for the damn gas.The future of capitalism is assured.
I can't wait.
Village Of The Damned
The sun rises, sort of, into the red, smoggy grunge only ten million lighttrucks can make, and another work day has dawned over poor, wretched,doomed L.A.. Untold thousands of off-road, 4-wheel drive, high-clearancevehicles roar to life, waking millions of neighbors. From Sylmar down toAnaheim, the 405 freeway fills with adventure machines, all capable ofcarrying 10 people straight up Pike's Peak, all adventurously carrying oneslightly groggy desk jockey to his cubicle. Everyone creeps along at thesame four MPH as the last tree-hugging holdout in his 1949,two-horsepower, Citroen 2CV. People, however, try not to see the freak inthe little car. He's not only paying a quarter as much for gas - howunpatriotic - but he's really falling down on the job of eating all the naturalresources in the world. You wonder how pinkos like that are allowed tostay here.
For fifty miles, on both sides of the clogged freeway, barely visible throughthe rolling clouds of carcinogens, we see hundreds of advertisingbillboards, the biggest ones allowed, nearly all showing rugged, masculineheroes in rugged, masculine trucks and SUVs, driving over rugged,masculine terrain in Alaska or Utah, in their chaps, vests, and 10-gallonhats. Back on the road, in the real world, we see thousands of unhappy,scared, insecure, debt-ridden, lung-damaged, UV-scarred, cancer-prone,rack-suited, latte-swilling losers, all in the same vehicles, off to anotherlousy day in their wretched Dilbert boxes, trying to hang on long enough topay for all their $45,000 machines and their $5000 per year operating costs.
We can see, however, that most of these people think the world and all oftheir trucks. It's their individuality. It doesn't matter that they're all beingindividual in exactly the same way. Hey, makes life simpler. Furthermore,we can tell that these poor souls like their off-road vehicles far too much toget them all muddy and yukky taking them off the road. Most of thesepampered show horses have never been through a mud puddle, let alonethe Amazon at flood stage.
Far as I can tell, it gets even worse outside L.A.. Everywhere you go,these giant vehicles are becoming the real population of America in theZeroes. They're the queen bees. They're the dominant species. We'vegiven in to them, and the 19th-century frontier mythos that sells them.They have us trained. We feed them, clean them, and put them to bed.We get diddlysquat, we pay through the nose, we hasten planetarydisaster, but we love every minute of it.
One look around proves that SUVs are the new luxury cars. Lincolnmakes one. Mercedes makes one. Cadillac makes one with a TV in theback. Beemer makes one with a pig nose. They're all driven by peoplewith business degrees from Stanford, but the government still considersthem tough working vehicles for buckaroos. Nobody's about to cramp acowpoke's style by holding these land yachts to the same pollution andmileage standards as boring, weenie, passenger cars. Periodically, someplanet-loving, whale-kissing, tree-climbing, flower-sniffing, liberal commiecreep tries to change this. Fortunately for American fantasies, however,there's no snowball's chance in globally-warmed Hell. The word goes outon Capitol Hill, auto lobbyists hurry to hushed meetings, and the world issafe once again.
Big tobacco has nothing on Detroit. Both seek to addict the public, stringthem out on tired movie fantasies, and take their money until they die.Meanwhile, our climate is falling apart, our glaciers are melting, our coastsare flooding, our air is opaque, and we're no happier than we were in the4-banger econoboxes of the 80s. Two hundred rich clowns in tailoredArmani suits are getting richer, and everyone else is getting dead. It'sobvious that we just don't have a clue.
The bottom line is this: If you're facing a 500-mile offroad rally, a long,dusty day on the back 40, or another 200 head to round up by sundown,Detroit has just your vehicle. Otherwise, you're a chump. You've beenhad. You're in heavy denial. You have to be, or you'd put an antitankround into old Dobbin while there's still a planet, a culture, and a shred ofdignity left.
Blow up your SUV. Do it now.
mankind, you gotta be kidding.
Kinda funny but true...... :-\
================================================== ==
Blow Up Your SUV! Do It NOW!!!
by Anonymous
This is not a rhetorical device. This is a sincere hope that even one person will kill their SUV before it kills us.
I'll confess right up front that I used to like SUVs a lot. Once upon a time,they were tough, purposeful vehicles, with plenty of sporting and utilitarianuses. The original, non-yuppie Land Rover was terrific for driving up thatdirt road on the Partington Ridge overlooking Big Sur, if you didn't drawsmall-arms fire from local growers who mistook you for the Pot Patrol.Four-by-fours were just right for hauling transmitter parts up icy mountainroads. The Hummer was just the perfect statement for our part of LosAngeles, where World War II is still very much in progress. Anyway, it waskind of a guy thing. It's just fun to sit up high, see right over Sentras andCamrys, and control a BIG vehicle.
Then the plague began.
The Bible says that plagues used to be mundane things like flies, rats,locusts, and frogs. We're way too high-tech for that. We are currentlyplagued by big, dumb, square vehicles, usually driven by big, dumb,square people, everywhere you look, or don't look because the goddamnthings block the view. I don't know what's worse -- that hardly anyonecoming out of American schools has even the slightest critical thinkingskill, or that the resulting fifty million yahoos all need 20-foot cars becausesome yuk in a cowboy hat on TV says that they do.
Now, a female friend of mine is fond of saying, "Come on, guys, there wasa woman's movement thirty years ago, get past it!" This, of course, getsright to the original cause of the sport-truck fad. It's all about castrationanxiety. Three or four women burned their bras half a century ago, andtwo whole subsequent generations of American males have reacted with amixture of machismo and sheer terror.
Let's face it. A lot of guys wanted the world to know they were rootin'tootin' two-gun shootin' GUYS. They couldn't really wear leather dildoes towork, so they did the next best thing. They started driving offroad vehicles,safari wagons, shit kickers, and ah-hah vehicles to work. They deckedthem out with ominous, threatening bumpers, pipes, nerf bars, batteringrams, brush screens, spotlights, gas cans, and everything else but acowcatcher and a 50mm cannon.
Where I live, the busiest auto store by far is a little hole in the wall calledDirty Parts. It sells every protuberance, accoutrement, dingdong,gimcrack, bell, whistle, and whizbang that anyone would ever want ontheir dick, oops I mean their truck. It's always busy, seven days a week. Itsells as many shirts, caps, and stickers as parts. It's a Scene.
Until about a year ago, that's all you had to know about the Californiasport truck phenomenon. At least two thirds of the time, it was safe toassume that a high ground clearance was making up for a psychologicallyperceived shortcoming somewhere else. We accepted it as another ofthose urban entertainments so freely given by the more chemicallyunbalanced fringes of city life, along with watching the ascending tracerrounds on New Year's, or going out to the drags at Pomona and watchingpeople trash some real machinery.
But then, sometime around late '98 or early '99, everyone else in theworld started buying the damn things. Before anyone had time to sayanything, sport trucks and SUVs were outselling cars two to onehereabouts. Yuppies wanted 'em. Families wanted 'em. Women, forChrissake, wanted 'em. Something was afoot, and it sure as hell wasn'tmagic.
Nope, not on your tintype. What it was, and is, is FEAR. Mortal fear. Fearfor one's life. Abject terror. Panic. The flight reflex. Plain, old FEAR.
The Balance Of Terror
Fess up; you're scared spitless driving these days. There are so manybig, dumb, lumbering, rumbling dinosaurs infesting the streets that drivinganything smaller feels like paddling a Cuban rubber raft through a USNavy supercarrier battle group.
What we see here is the classic egg-rolling paradigm of road safety. It'sthe intuitive, though pretty thoroughly debunked, argument that, if achicken's egg will break a robin's egg, then one had better show up withsomething an ostrich laid. If every city street looks like Road Warriors,then no one dare venture forth in less than 8000 pounds of cold, hardarmor.
Supermarket parking lots around here look like Safariland. Range Rovers,Jeeps, and Outbacks are lined up like the start of the Baja 1000. It's a bitunsettling to watch something out of Jurassic Park pull up, only for a99-pound yuppess to come bouncing out, burlap bag in hand. This hasgotta be fear. No sane woman counts brush screens and push barsamong her fashion accessories. Nope; it's an arms race.
Those who follow arms buildups, Cold War history, and the mutualassured destruction nuclear plan know what comes next. If every broad,wannabe, weenie, kid, and loser is gonna be packing one of thosegoddamn square things, then a weapon escalation is overdue.
The escalation, in this case, is the full-size, crew-cab, pickup truck. Theseurban Tyrannosaurs are 20 feet long, 7 feet tall, 6 feet wide, ideally withoffroad tires, heavy-duty V10 engines, and the gas economy of the QE II.They are well suited to hauling 50 bags of hog chow back from town, orhauling 10 drunk cowpokes back from the pokey. In a crowded city,however, they're just about the most wretched overkill ever devised byhuman libido. Mostly, they prove that total desperation is setting in.
Right now, where we live, absolutely everyone wants a full sized crew cab.They won't fit our 1940s garages, and so everyone parks them on thestreet. The street that is vanishing. The street that we can no longer seeacross. The street that can barely be navigated at all. The street thatvibrates day and night with great, roaring, earthquakes, as these thingslumber around the corner, belching awesome clouds of unburnedhydrocarbon from their 6-inch exhaust pipes, so weenie little guys can gethome from the market.
Worse, these things are butt ugly. They've got to be the ugliest vehiclesever designed. The designers should be tied up and forced to go down on600-pound pigs, or, even more horrible, to gaze upon their mutations fordays on end. Every hormone case around here wants their own visualassault vehicle. It's gotta be ominous black, or dark, pukey green. It'sgotta have pipes that sound like Indy®, and woofers that sound like thelocal rave. It's gotta have a jacked-up rear suspension, putting the 5-foottailgate right in your face. Mostly, though, it's gotta have a nearly opaque,tinted, rear window the approximate size and shape of an advertisingsignboard, which appears to be just what it's for.
Ad agencies probably can't believe their luck. Without a penny forexpensive media buys, they've been able to plaster the whole city withrolling promotions for shirt makers, skateboard shops, $200 shoes, $300sunglasses, X-Treme sports magazines, and a hundred other corporatepsychographics which the truly insipid have apparently confused withhaving a life. When the Youth Market isn't on parade, we'll most likely seeone of those weird, inscrutable icons of Calvin from the comics, pissinghappily on anything resembling the adult world. It's getting strange outthere.
Poor L.A.. It has survived fires, earthquakes, floods, riots, racism, hate,lousy government, worse schools, guns, boom boxes, rapmobiles, andbullshit, only to be done in by road terror. One watches these enormousvehicles rolling over curbs, taking out fences, and generally devastatingeverything in sight, and dreams of a life anywhere else.
This assault will probably hasten the next highway arms race. I figure we'llstart seeing tricked-out yuppie versions of those boxy, little airport busesany day now. You know the ones. They're seen dragging travellers,usually about 20 at a time, between terminals, or out to the car rental lot,or to the hotel. That's about the only place they're ever seen, but this willchange.
First, some dork with his Chevy Blazer® in the shop will drive one home.His kid will take it to some teenage culture meltdown in Huntington Beach,it'll be seen for two seconds on MTV, and within a week every kid in thesehere United States will want one for their very own. Parents, fearing thattheir families might become telegenically impaired, will all take out thirdmortgages to comply. The auto makers will catch on, and we'll see hoursof commercials and TV placements in which anyone with a remote claimto hipness shows up at high school in a 20-passenger conveyance withpurple stereo speakers the size of Marshall stacks, and every hot babe intown.
Following several thousand focus groups and market studies, makers ofairport buses will hit their stride, and transcend the teen market. Plain,square, little buses, formerly with plain, square, little names such asAeroTransit® or MiniBus® will become the hope of Mankind. They'll startcoming in six well-researched colors, and bearing the well-researchednames of famous mountains, lakes, rocks, and trees. Ads for theseFreedom Machinestm will start to appear all through the NationalGeographic, showing happy, prosperous yuppies taking 22 of theirclosest wine-club friends up some Monument Valley mesa, with nary aroad in sight.
The very next September, we'll see the first football game commercialwhere a rugged cowpoke drives up Mount Whitney in his tough, bold,adventurous, dashing, beautiful, 24-passenger Grand Teton®. From that30 seconds on, it'll be a done deal. Every man, woman, and child inAmerica will absolutely positively achingly and consumingly need anairport bus. This will be great for the economy. Think how much morecrap we'll have to steal from the third world to build and afford 30 million ofTHESE things. Think how many more wars we'll need for the damn gas.The future of capitalism is assured.
I can't wait.
Village Of The Damned
The sun rises, sort of, into the red, smoggy grunge only ten million lighttrucks can make, and another work day has dawned over poor, wretched,doomed L.A.. Untold thousands of off-road, 4-wheel drive, high-clearancevehicles roar to life, waking millions of neighbors. From Sylmar down toAnaheim, the 405 freeway fills with adventure machines, all capable ofcarrying 10 people straight up Pike's Peak, all adventurously carrying oneslightly groggy desk jockey to his cubicle. Everyone creeps along at thesame four MPH as the last tree-hugging holdout in his 1949,two-horsepower, Citroen 2CV. People, however, try not to see the freak inthe little car. He's not only paying a quarter as much for gas - howunpatriotic - but he's really falling down on the job of eating all the naturalresources in the world. You wonder how pinkos like that are allowed tostay here.
For fifty miles, on both sides of the clogged freeway, barely visible throughthe rolling clouds of carcinogens, we see hundreds of advertisingbillboards, the biggest ones allowed, nearly all showing rugged, masculineheroes in rugged, masculine trucks and SUVs, driving over rugged,masculine terrain in Alaska or Utah, in their chaps, vests, and 10-gallonhats. Back on the road, in the real world, we see thousands of unhappy,scared, insecure, debt-ridden, lung-damaged, UV-scarred, cancer-prone,rack-suited, latte-swilling losers, all in the same vehicles, off to anotherlousy day in their wretched Dilbert boxes, trying to hang on long enough topay for all their $45,000 machines and their $5000 per year operating costs.
We can see, however, that most of these people think the world and all oftheir trucks. It's their individuality. It doesn't matter that they're all beingindividual in exactly the same way. Hey, makes life simpler. Furthermore,we can tell that these poor souls like their off-road vehicles far too much toget them all muddy and yukky taking them off the road. Most of thesepampered show horses have never been through a mud puddle, let alonethe Amazon at flood stage.
Far as I can tell, it gets even worse outside L.A.. Everywhere you go,these giant vehicles are becoming the real population of America in theZeroes. They're the queen bees. They're the dominant species. We'vegiven in to them, and the 19th-century frontier mythos that sells them.They have us trained. We feed them, clean them, and put them to bed.We get diddlysquat, we pay through the nose, we hasten planetarydisaster, but we love every minute of it.
One look around proves that SUVs are the new luxury cars. Lincolnmakes one. Mercedes makes one. Cadillac makes one with a TV in theback. Beemer makes one with a pig nose. They're all driven by peoplewith business degrees from Stanford, but the government still considersthem tough working vehicles for buckaroos. Nobody's about to cramp acowpoke's style by holding these land yachts to the same pollution andmileage standards as boring, weenie, passenger cars. Periodically, someplanet-loving, whale-kissing, tree-climbing, flower-sniffing, liberal commiecreep tries to change this. Fortunately for American fantasies, however,there's no snowball's chance in globally-warmed Hell. The word goes outon Capitol Hill, auto lobbyists hurry to hushed meetings, and the world issafe once again.
Big tobacco has nothing on Detroit. Both seek to addict the public, stringthem out on tired movie fantasies, and take their money until they die.Meanwhile, our climate is falling apart, our glaciers are melting, our coastsare flooding, our air is opaque, and we're no happier than we were in the4-banger econoboxes of the 80s. Two hundred rich clowns in tailoredArmani suits are getting richer, and everyone else is getting dead. It'sobvious that we just don't have a clue.
The bottom line is this: If you're facing a 500-mile offroad rally, a long,dusty day on the back 40, or another 200 head to round up by sundown,Detroit has just your vehicle. Otherwise, you're a chump. You've beenhad. You're in heavy denial. You have to be, or you'd put an antitankround into old Dobbin while there's still a planet, a culture, and a shred ofdignity left.
Blow up your SUV. Do it now.
mankind, you gotta be kidding.