Category Archives: car stuff

On the padiddle

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Officially, a padiddle is a car, truck, or bug with only one headlight or one taillight. Urban lore has it that the spotter of the padiddle gets to kiss a member of the opposite sex, or some such nonsense that is dreamed up in the hormone addled brain of a teenager. I suspect that this is why teenagers love to drive around so much in the company of the opposite sex, praying, hoping that the maintenance schedule for most cars on the road does not include a yearly inspection of the lights, neither fore nor aft. All of which is very silly because teenagers don’t need a reason for kissing, but an ulterior, arbitrary occurrence of a padiddle is a wonderful ice-breaker for nervous, shy teens who don’t have a lot of experience getting the kissing business going. If you have read this far, you are probably smirking at your own first forays into good love. Urban lore, urban legend are the stuff dreams are built on. The dark intimacy of the back seat of a car can provide a wonderful opportunity for those first tentative experiences of a young adult who is neither child nor adult, occupying a liminal space after childhood, but before adulthood. Getting comfortable with one’s own sexuality and the accompanying physicality is a difficult, if not impossible, task, filled with bumps in the road, setbacks, detours, and the like. Rejection is a horrible, painful experience, but one cannot hide from their own identity. A slave to our own bodies and looks, we cannot control the avatars and caprices of the physical, social, pop world which would deem us handsome or ugly, attractive or repulsive. Perhaps the padiddle is Lady Fortune’s hand reaching out with a little help to the shy introverts of the world.

On the padiddle

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Officially, a padiddle is a car, truck, or bug with only one headlight or one taillight. Urban lore has it that the spotter of the padiddle gets to kiss a member of the opposite sex, or some such nonsense that is dreamed up in the hormone addled brain of a teenager. I suspect that this is why teenagers love to drive around so much in the company of the opposite sex, praying, hoping that the maintenance schedule for most cars on the road does not include a yearly inspection of the lights, neither fore nor aft. All of which is very silly because teenagers don’t need a reason for kissing, but an ulterior, arbitrary occurrence of a padiddle is a wonderful ice-breaker for nervous, shy teens who don’t have a lot of experience getting the kissing business going. If you have read this far, you are probably smirking at your own first forays into good love. Urban lore, urban legend are the stuff dreams are built on. The dark intimacy of the back seat of a car can provide a wonderful opportunity for those first tentative experiences of a young adult who is neither child nor adult, occupying a liminal space after childhood, but before adulthood. Getting comfortable with one’s own sexuality and the accompanying physicality is a difficult, if not impossible, task, filled with bumps in the road, setbacks, detours, and the like. Rejection is a horrible, painful experience, but one cannot hide from their own identity. A slave to our own bodies and looks, we cannot control the avatars and caprices of the physical, social, pop world which would deem us handsome or ugly, attractive or repulsive. Perhaps the padiddle is Lady Fortune’s hand reaching out with a little help to the shy introverts of the world.

On detours

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Are you where you always thought you would be? As a child I always dreaded those big orange “detour” signs which were always synonymous with “getting lost.” In the pre-digital age of gps devices, getting lost along your way was a pretty common phenomenon. The most common reason for detours is to allow road crews to do road work and for drivers to make it around the mess. Some detours are cut and dried simple, but others can really carry you out of your way, taking you into neighborhoods you’ve never seen before, giving you a chance to visit previously unknown scenes. Unexpected detours wreck your schedule, add miles to your trip, and raise nervous emotions of uncertainty. My childhood dread of detours usually meant the trip would be longer, and we would arrive later. No one ever tells you how much longer the detour is going to be, if there will unexpected waiting while other cars pass. At the same time, however, the detour might show you a new way to get where you are going. We are all creatures of habit, and we don’t like to have our habits disturbed, even if the old normal way was never that good in the first place. Detours always test the validity of what we hold to be true. Whether that detour puts you on a new road or it makes you second guess the route you have always taken, it makes you re-examine all of those old values that you hold so dear. If we could only stick to familiar scenes, avoid the unknown, stay in our cocoon, life would be so much easier, but then come the detours, those orange signs with black arrows sending us off into the great unknown, making us wonder if we are going to get lost after all. We think that we can plan everything out, that we can control every situation, that we know how the world works, what the future holds. The uncertain chaotic nature of detours dashes every plan, destabilizes futures, destroys the illusion that we are in charge. Detours delay our arrival at a final destination–home, the cabin, the farm, the office, a restaurant, church–giving us time to think about things, give us a chance to examine what we are doing. How many times have I sat behind the wheel of my car and slowly turned onto a detour, all the time wondering what was in store for me now, giving me a chance to think about things, giving me a moment to contemplate my journey, the automatic pilot won’t serve anymore. Perhaps there is nothing like a detour to put most everything in its relative place. What scares us most about a detour is the idea that we might not ever arrive at all, but will instead end up somewhere else, a new place where nobody knows our name. Maybe detours are less a detriment to our lives and more of an opportunity to do something new–learn a language, eat something new, climb a mountain, visit Dr. Johnson’s house, follow a dark trail, read an old book, have a drink with a stranger. Detours challenge our inherent fear of the unknown because we are so deathly afraid of change. Life is so uncertain that even a good detour cannot be planned. So we check our maps, look at time schedules, program the global positioning device, consult the internet for delays, construction, detours, and jams, but where the rubber meets the road, we still run into detours, which derail all our plans.

On detours

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Are you where you always thought you would be? As a child I always dreaded those big orange “detour” signs which were always synonymous with “getting lost.” In the pre-digital age of gps devices, getting lost along your way was a pretty common phenomenon. The most common reason for detours is to allow road crews to do road work and for drivers to make it around the mess. Some detours are cut and dried simple, but others can really carry you out of your way, taking you into neighborhoods you’ve never seen before, giving you a chance to visit previously unknown scenes. Unexpected detours wreck your schedule, add miles to your trip, and raise nervous emotions of uncertainty. My childhood dread of detours usually meant the trip would be longer, and we would arrive later. No one ever tells you how much longer the detour is going to be, if there will unexpected waiting while other cars pass. At the same time, however, the detour might show you a new way to get where you are going. We are all creatures of habit, and we don’t like to have our habits disturbed, even if the old normal way was never that good in the first place. Detours always test the validity of what we hold to be true. Whether that detour puts you on a new road or it makes you second guess the route you have always taken, it makes you re-examine all of those old values that you hold so dear. If we could only stick to familiar scenes, avoid the unknown, stay in our cocoon, life would be so much easier, but then come the detours, those orange signs with black arrows sending us off into the great unknown, making us wonder if we are going to get lost after all. We think that we can plan everything out, that we can control every situation, that we know how the world works, what the future holds. The uncertain chaotic nature of detours dashes every plan, destabilizes futures, destroys the illusion that we are in charge. Detours delay our arrival at a final destination–home, the cabin, the farm, the office, a restaurant, church–giving us time to think about things, give us a chance to examine what we are doing. How many times have I sat behind the wheel of my car and slowly turned onto a detour, all the time wondering what was in store for me now, giving me a chance to think about things, giving me a moment to contemplate my journey, the automatic pilot won’t serve anymore. Perhaps there is nothing like a detour to put most everything in its relative place. What scares us most about a detour is the idea that we might not ever arrive at all, but will instead end up somewhere else, a new place where nobody knows our name. Maybe detours are less a detriment to our lives and more of an opportunity to do something new–learn a language, eat something new, climb a mountain, visit Dr. Johnson’s house, follow a dark trail, read an old book, have a drink with a stranger. Detours challenge our inherent fear of the unknown because we are so deathly afraid of change. Life is so uncertain that even a good detour cannot be planned. So we check our maps, look at time schedules, program the global positioning device, consult the internet for delays, construction, detours, and jams, but where the rubber meets the road, we still run into detours, which derail all our plans.

On the phantom traffic jam

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Today I was victim of a phantom traffic jam on interstate highway 35. By phantom I mean there were no wrecks, no single lane road construction detours, no weather hazards, no breakdowns, nothing. Nothing, yet south of Salado all three lanes of traffic came to a dead stop. The reason, of course, was the shear volume of traffic, the loss of a lane in Salado, and the narrowing of the final two lanes through an area of construction where some lane shifting occurred. It only takes one driver who slows down just a bit, maybe 2 or 3 miles an hour, which causes a wave to form in the following traffic. This ripple effect, which is characterized by stronger and stronger breaking by cars coming up from behind. The final result of this wave is that the traffic will eventual crawl to halt, and it can’t start up again until the cars that are stopped, start up again and allow a bit of space between themselves and the cars they are following. Overly aggressive driving and random lane changing only aggravate an already horrible situation. I was stuck in about ten miles of stop and go traffic that never got above five miles an hour until it left was just outside of Temple, Texas. After that, there were several slow downs at the traffic passed other construction areas, had to climb hills, cross bridges or navigate curves. All of these obstacles create hazards in the minds of drivers even when the lanes do not narrow and climatic conditions remain the same. Drivers perceive hazards even when there are none which causes them to slow down just ever so slightly, which is how a slow-down wave begins, ending in stopped traffic when the volume of cars is high enough. Traffic on a four-lane highway flows in a similar fashion to an actual fluid, so the backwards wave acts as interference in the flow of traffic, backing traffic up until it stops dead in its tracks. Today, Labor Day, was a bit of a perfect storm with everyone out on the road today, returning home, to school, or back to work on Tuesday. Part of the problem with I35 is that there is no other fast north-south artery between San Antonio and Dallas. The secondary roads are slow, filled with little towns, and plagued by a number of speed traps. If you are traveling north and south through central Texas, you will probably be on I35. Ergo, the volume today was very high, too high for the highway to handle in any serious way. Today’s traffic jam, which had nothing phantom to it at all, was very real and another symptom of an overused route that needs an alternative. The state keeps rebuilding and adding lanes, but today all of that construction was actually a part of why it became so dangerous and slow to all involved. The construction covers miles of highway, and all of it goes forward at a snail’s pace because in Texas you can work all year around–you aren’t trying to beat old Man Winter to the punch. The state of Texas will never be able to build enough highways to carry all of the traffic in central Texas, one of the fastest growing population centers in the entire United States. I don’t see planning, only patching. What barely carries the traffic today will be completely inadequate ten years from now, and phantom traffic jams won’t be a holiday weekend phenomenon, but an every day sort of thing, which means driving in central Texas will be exponentially that much more difficult.

On the phantom traffic jam

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Today I was victim of a phantom traffic jam on interstate highway 35. By phantom I mean there were no wrecks, no single lane road construction detours, no weather hazards, no breakdowns, nothing. Nothing, yet south of Salado all three lanes of traffic came to a dead stop. The reason, of course, was the shear volume of traffic, the loss of a lane in Salado, and the narrowing of the final two lanes through an area of construction where some lane shifting occurred. It only takes one driver who slows down just a bit, maybe 2 or 3 miles an hour, which causes a wave to form in the following traffic. This ripple effect, which is characterized by stronger and stronger breaking by cars coming up from behind. The final result of this wave is that the traffic will eventual crawl to halt, and it can’t start up again until the cars that are stopped, start up again and allow a bit of space between themselves and the cars they are following. Overly aggressive driving and random lane changing only aggravate an already horrible situation. I was stuck in about ten miles of stop and go traffic that never got above five miles an hour until it left was just outside of Temple, Texas. After that, there were several slow downs at the traffic passed other construction areas, had to climb hills, cross bridges or navigate curves. All of these obstacles create hazards in the minds of drivers even when the lanes do not narrow and climatic conditions remain the same. Drivers perceive hazards even when there are none which causes them to slow down just ever so slightly, which is how a slow-down wave begins, ending in stopped traffic when the volume of cars is high enough. Traffic on a four-lane highway flows in a similar fashion to an actual fluid, so the backwards wave acts as interference in the flow of traffic, backing traffic up until it stops dead in its tracks. Today, Labor Day, was a bit of a perfect storm with everyone out on the road today, returning home, to school, or back to work on Tuesday. Part of the problem with I35 is that there is no other fast north-south artery between San Antonio and Dallas. The secondary roads are slow, filled with little towns, and plagued by a number of speed traps. If you are traveling north and south through central Texas, you will probably be on I35. Ergo, the volume today was very high, too high for the highway to handle in any serious way. Today’s traffic jam, which had nothing phantom to it at all, was very real and another symptom of an overused route that needs an alternative. The state keeps rebuilding and adding lanes, but today all of that construction was actually a part of why it became so dangerous and slow to all involved. The construction covers miles of highway, and all of it goes forward at a snail’s pace because in Texas you can work all year around–you aren’t trying to beat old Man Winter to the punch. The state of Texas will never be able to build enough highways to carry all of the traffic in central Texas, one of the fastest growing population centers in the entire United States. I don’t see planning, only patching. What barely carries the traffic today will be completely inadequate ten years from now, and phantom traffic jams won’t be a holiday weekend phenomenon, but an every day sort of thing, which means driving in central Texas will be exponentially that much more difficult.

On [wearing] seat belts

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Just when you think that a debate is over, it comes back with a vengeance. I shouldn’t even have to write this note because I think the content is self-evident, but I would be wrong. Ever been wrong? I have. This summer I made my students buckle up on the bus in Spain because it’s the law–if the bus has seat belts, the riders must put them on or they might be fined, not the driver. Nevertheless, there are still older buses on the road in Spain that do not have seat belts and are not bound by the law because they were manufactured before the law was put into place and the bus companies are not required to upgrade their equipment. In a recent tragic accident seven people were thrown from a bus that went off of the road, and they were all killed. Two were also killed on the bus, but in general, those who stayed in their seats, lived. If those seven had had seat belts on, they would have at least had a chance at surviving the crash. Instead, they were thrown from the vehicle and killed. One would think that the lives of passengers would be more important than a few thousand Euro to install seat belts, or is it more complicated than that? Do we still not take seat belts seriously enough? I was required to use seat belts as a new driver learning how to drive. Yet, some thirty-five years later, I still read reports of people who are thrown from their vehicles and killed because they weren’t wearing their seat belt, which is both kooky and tragic at the same time because they don’t seem to understand simple physics–and I mean simple. Any object which is moving will continue to move in a straight line until it is acted upon by some other force. Ergo, if you traveling at sixty miles an hour and your vehicle stops, unless you are belted in, you will continue to move at sixty miles an hour, which means that you will be thrown through the windshield and into oblivion or the next life, which ever comes first. I find it both amusing and scary that people will brandish this argument against seat belts: I’m not going to let the state mandate my safety–if I don’t want to wear a seat belt, I won’t. At some point in their short lives, this attitude will be fatal. It’s just a question of when. Then there are the folks who say that they won’t buckle up because they might get caught underwater or in a car fire. Either of those two scenarios are so rare that these people will end up in the cemetery long before water or fire ever happen. Some people are just stupid and sloppy about putting on (or not putting on) their seat belts, and they die at some point as well. If you stay in your seat in the car, you have a great chance of living through most any accident that is not totally catastrophic. If the highway patrol have to search for your body in the weeds along the side of the road, well, forget it, there are no second chances in the game of life, mostly because it’s not a game. The real truth about seat belts? Buckle up and live. If the bus passengers had had on seat belts, they would have made it, most likely. In the meantime, there are lots of dangerous tour buses out there along with lots of dangerous and stupid unbuckled drivers. For Pete’s sake, buckle up, and even if you won’t do it for yourself, think of your family–they will most likely miss you when you are gone.

On [wearing] seat belts

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Just when you think that a debate is over, it comes back with a vengeance. I shouldn’t even have to write this note because I think the content is self-evident, but I would be wrong. Ever been wrong? I have. This summer I made my students buckle up on the bus in Spain because it’s the law–if the bus has seat belts, the riders must put them on or they might be fined, not the driver. Nevertheless, there are still older buses on the road in Spain that do not have seat belts and are not bound by the law because they were manufactured before the law was put into place and the bus companies are not required to upgrade their equipment. In a recent tragic accident seven people were thrown from a bus that went off of the road, and they were all killed. Two were also killed on the bus, but in general, those who stayed in their seats, lived. If those seven had had seat belts on, they would have at least had a chance at surviving the crash. Instead, they were thrown from the vehicle and killed. One would think that the lives of passengers would be more important than a few thousand Euro to install seat belts, or is it more complicated than that? Do we still not take seat belts seriously enough? I was required to use seat belts as a new driver learning how to drive. Yet, some thirty-five years later, I still read reports of people who are thrown from their vehicles and killed because they weren’t wearing their seat belt, which is both kooky and tragic at the same time because they don’t seem to understand simple physics–and I mean simple. Any object which is moving will continue to move in a straight line until it is acted upon by some other force. Ergo, if you traveling at sixty miles an hour and your vehicle stops, unless you are belted in, you will continue to move at sixty miles an hour, which means that you will be thrown through the windshield and into oblivion or the next life, which ever comes first. I find it both amusing and scary that people will brandish this argument against seat belts: I’m not going to let the state mandate my safety–if I don’t want to wear a seat belt, I won’t. At some point in their short lives, this attitude will be fatal. It’s just a question of when. Then there are the folks who say that they won’t buckle up because they might get caught underwater or in a car fire. Either of those two scenarios are so rare that these people will end up in the cemetery long before water or fire ever happen. Some people are just stupid and sloppy about putting on (or not putting on) their seat belts, and they die at some point as well. If you stay in your seat in the car, you have a great chance of living through most any accident that is not totally catastrophic. If the highway patrol have to search for your body in the weeds along the side of the road, well, forget it, there are no second chances in the game of life, mostly because it’s not a game. The real truth about seat belts? Buckle up and live. If the bus passengers had had on seat belts, they would have made it, most likely. In the meantime, there are lots of dangerous tour buses out there along with lots of dangerous and stupid unbuckled drivers. For Pete’s sake, buckle up, and even if you won’t do it for yourself, think of your family–they will most likely miss you when you are gone.

On yellow

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Perhaps there is no color odder than yellow. Okay, fuchsia, but I don’t know what that looks like. Sponge Bob, need I say more? Bananas, mustard, the middle light in the stop light for which no one stops, yield signs, taxi cabs, high-lighters, school buses, lemons, some butterflies, butter, baby chicks, corn, sponges, the sun. What I like are yellow cars that are of a yellow that is so strange that one must wonder what kind of good deal that person was offered so that they would buy that odd-looking car. I imagine that yellow is used to get our attention, and one will hardly miss a bright yellow Corvette as it roars by. People will often wear yellow raincoats–so they might be seen with greater ease? There are some naturally occurring yellows, lemons, for example, or apples, which seem healthy and normal and not at all strange. A yellow rose can be a thing of beauty and not the least bit odd. Dandelions are yellow, and they were always a sign that perhaps winter might be over for a few months and that the parka might be stowed away until maybe October. I do not own (nor should anyone) a pair of yellow jeans, bell bottoms or otherwise. Wasn’t the smiley-face logo yellow? (From the category, “Things I wish I’d never seen in the first place.”) According to the Beatles (a small ’60’s rock band from Liverpool–strange names and funny hair), traveling on a yellow submarine was really where it was at. I was never offered a ride, although my cousin Kent has a yellow Sunbird, probably one of his more forgettable automobiles. Of course, never eat yellow snow, a nice bit of advice and a catchy aphorism for those who live in snowy climates–Texans need not worry about this particular reference. Gumby was a freaky blue-green color and I have no idea why he made it into this note other than the fact that he is just odd in general.Some dish soaps are yellow, but blue or maybe green might be more appealing. I’m sure a marketing director somewhere has data on why yellow dish soap sells at all. Why “Yield” signs are yellow is an existential mystery that no one will ever resolve. No baseball teams, excluding the Oakland A’s, have contemporary uniforms that are purely yellow, although I think that the Pirates, and maybe the Padres, at some point in their history has had a mustard color road uniform–enough said on that subject. Baseballs are still white although faux-baseball, softball, is now played, occasionally, with a fluorescent yellow ball that looks quite unnatural and not at all like a grapefruit. Some pills are yellow so that you might distinguish them from the blue ones, or the pink ones, or the white ones, or the brown ones. There are one or two soda pops that are yellow, but I’ll pass on saying anything else about yellow liquids. Grapefruit are rather yellow, but I really like the pink variety better, sweeter, less bitter. Are canaries really yellow or is that a stereotype? Would you ever be caught dead in yellow shoes? Only if I was wearing yellow pants with the matching yellow suit coat. Yellow ties, on the other hand, offer some interesting possibilities. Why are the yolks of eggs yellow? My favorite color of pencil is a greenish blue, not yellow, although 99% of all #2 pencils seem to be yellow. A couple of more yellow things: stickies, legal pads, sunflowers, PacMan, daffodils, pollen, Tweety Pie, Big Bird, the Yellow pages, the leaves on some trees in the fall.

On shifting (gears)

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I have been shifting gears for over thirty years now, and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon. I learned to shift with a small three speed in a Chevy Vega. Not a great car, but it was strangely reliable and very serviceable, not at all like the complex machines of today. You could actually identify things such as the carburetor, spark plug wires, air filter without have a degree in mechanical engineering. That little green car gave me an entire education in the physics of motion, acceleration, inertia, force, mass, and velocity. The car was ugly but the lessons have stuck with me for decades: don’t shift down in snow going down a hill unless you want to spin the car completely around a couple of times. Top speed in that car was about 70 mph which was probably a good thing for a young man just learning to drive. I learned to start the car from a dead stop on a hill and not kill the engine. The complex interplay between accelerator and clutch, shift stick, foot, and brake is like a small well-timed ballet of small, intricate movements that all culminate in putting the vehicle in motion. You can explain it to someone, let up on the brake, give it some gas, and slowly begin to let out the clutch. You can explain it to someone without them having the slightest idea what this ballet is really all about. There are three secrets that someone needs to know and practice: getting the vehicle in motion, know when to shift up, and know how to shift down to get around a corner or stop the vehicle. My second vehicle was a small four speed, very underpowered, but also very utilitarian–a Chevy Chevett. Having a manual four-speed clutch actually made the car very drivable even though it was underpowered. Since I could control which speed in relation to each gear speed, torque and power could be used more efficiently–automatics waist a lot of their power shifting up too soon, and I could always shift down if the situation demanded, except if it was snowing. In slippery conditions a manual is always safer since you can control the slip of the wheels with greater ease. I later graduated to a very average five-speed built by Ford. Again, very under-powered, but gas economy and a manual transmission go hand-in-hand, and an automatic transmission in the Ford Tempo would have been a disaster. Now I drive a six-speed with a very nicely powered turbo engine, I shift gears so automatically that I don’t even think about it anymore. Whether it is an illusion or not, being in control of a car’s gear box is a whole lot more comforting than leaving those choices to a bunch of arbitrarily preset algorithms that a bunch of engineers decided would be most appropriate for the average car in an average set of driving circumstances. The problem is that roads, streets and highways are never average, never completely predictable, and never ideal. That’s why it is the driver’s job to know their vehicle and how it might react in varying climatic conditions, road surface variations, geographic variances, and cargo, which will always change the way a car interacts with its engine and gear box, and an automatic transmission, no matter how good it is, can never be more than just average. Learning to shift gears may be the most important skill you ever learn.