My Black Brick

Guess this is what they do for fun in Norway.

I’m currently reading Matthew Crawford’s great book “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” and it’s making a good compliment to Doug Rushkoff’s Life Inc. While Rushkoff laments how our market-oriented culture disconnects us from the people and things in our everyday lives, Crawford goes beyond this by examining how engagement with the way things actually work can help us grow morally, spiritually and intellectually.

It’s been eye-opening for me to discover the joy of diagnosing and fixing my car. While budget considerations guided the purchase and maintenence of my 240, the satisfaction of repairing and enhancing the 17 year old vehicle make it more than just transportation. There’s a connection that comes from listening, feeling and problem solving that just isn’t there when the car becomes a mysterious appliance that can only be serviced by professionals.

Crawford speaks of the frustration of a car owner who brings his vehicle to the dealer for a repair and is informed that it just isn’t worth fixing. He’s unable to get to the nitty-gritty of the situation, because he’s being informed of the problem not by the mechanic, but by a “service representative”, another step of removal from the reality of the car’s problems. Crawford goes on to lament the feelings of impotence that arise from our inability to understand the workings of our machines, all in the name of the supposed freedom from worrying about how these machines work.

He brings up a great example of a Mercedes that doesn’t have a dipstick. Instead, when the car is low on oil a message appears on-screen: “Service Required”. While the car still has the basic, mechanical need of engine lubrication, the owner is divorced from this reality, and the simple process of adding oil becomes a trip to the corporate dealer to repair a mysterious ailment.

You can see an interview Matthew Crawford did on the Colbert Report, but you can get a better sense of his work by reading his feature in the New York Times Magazine.

Not sure what this Swedish Volvo ad is actually for. Maybe it’s for tires?

In high school I was in the “burnout” clique. But it wasn’t because of the rubber burned in my buddy’s 1974 Olds Cutlass; although that was fun too.

Jalopnik’s Commenter of the Day is “FP: Your Volvo is Awesome” for writing a lengthy screed about automakers pushing SUVs instead of designing decent wagons:

All automakers, save for a few European players and our own Cadillac, must be held accountable by the people for stopping production of wagons in favour of less-practical SUV-shaped ‘crossovers’.

The people shall not hold them accountable, flocking instead to these ungainly, less-versatile vehicles with no rear visibility. The Mazda6 and Focus were cut down in their stead by the ignorant masses who flocked to those criminally-named ‘sport-utility’ vehicles when times were good, and it is too late for them now.

Note to self: when passing in a race, try to avoid the telephone poles.

Looks like the jump didn’t kill this 244; the tree did.

Guy needs to either buy wheelie bars, or something other than a Chevette.

I wonder what this guy was like driving INTO this spot.

I read Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do earlier this year and it was an eye opener. He dissects driving behavior across a wide variety of situations, including lane merging, traffic signals, eye contact at speed, and pedestrian interaction. He sites numerous studies to analyse many of the misconceptions we have about how skilled we are at driving and how we deal with each other on the road.

From the NY Times book review:

Vanderbilt, who writes regularly about design and technology, cites a finding that 12.7 percent of the traffic slowdown after a crash has nothing to do with wreckage blocking lanes; it’s caused by gawkers. Rubberneckers attend to the spectacle so avidly that they themselves thenget into accidents, slamming into the car in front of them when it brakes to get a better look or dig out a cellphone to take a picture. (This happens often enough for traffic types to have coined a word for it: “digi-necking.”)

It’s now available in paperback, and I highly recommend it.

Some of the commenters on a Jalopnik “Cash for Clunkers” thread (C4C) were hoping for “Save the Clunkers” T-Shirts, so I put together a couple of quick images. They would be a 2-color silk screen, one black, one white. If anyone wants to produce these, contact me at boucher002 at yahoo dot com.

UPDATE: I posted a cleaned-up design of the van illustration to sixdollarshirts.com . Vote now!