On My Hobbyhorse

Long time no blog, right? What can I tell you? It’s been a rough semester, and said semester is like, two weeks old? Hmm. So, second day of the semester, I’m driving home, minding my own business. I’m sitting still in traffic, I hear a crash behind me, and a split second later feel my head, neck and shoulders fly back into the driver’s seat. Yep. You guessed it! Some kid two cars behind me is buying me a new bumper for my car which I’ve had less than 6 months. I’m fine, thanks for asking. The car, I’m told, will be fine Wednesday. But in the mean time, I’m driving a rental. Now, I love cars. Always have. I’m a long time subscriber to Car and Driver thanks to the compassionate understanding of my wife. But, I usually have to read the reviews rather than actually getting to drive the cars. Unlike certain professors at my law school, I may not simply drive the Aston Martin DB9 if the Range Rover is in the shop. And for my non-Cumberland friends reading that last sentence, no, I’m not kidding. Now, since I’m driving a rental, I have the opportunity to provide you with a review of a late model center piece of American automotive engineering, the last of its line, the 2005 Pontiac Grand Am. So, with apologies to C&D . . .

You might expect that after 20+ years of building the Grand Am, Pontiac would, for its final offering, present a refined car, benefiting from years of experience, efficiency, and performance data. You’d be painfully, heretically wrong. Instead, the swansong for the GM workhorse Grand Am is a rolling explanation for why the American auto industry is on the ropes and gasping.

The first thing I noticed about the gold sedan while doing a walk-around looking for pre-drive damage was that the side ground effects looked convincingly like they had been kicked and bent under. The rental-boy doing the walk around with me was equally convinced we had found structural damage until the other side of the car revealed that the hideous indention was intentional. Otherwise, the body joints are haphazard, clunky, and tectonic. The plastic side panels of a Saturn in a sub-zero weather would be hard pressed to show greater body gaps. Overall styling is mostly un-offensive but equally unimaginative and substantially dated. How about the interior? Entry was provided by an adequate keyless remote, complete with the appreciated trunk release button. Get your highlighter out; I’m about to say some thing positive about the Grand Am: I found the trunk to be surprisingly cavernous. Now, keep in mind, this author owns a daily driver with a trunk admittedly designed to just accommodate a brief case and a bag of golf clubs, but little else, so my subjective definition of “cavernous” is probably skewed. Unfortunately, the interior accolades thus end. Opening the driver’s door is the first portent of things to come. Everything from the feel of the handle to the sheer weight of what one would otherwise regard as a smallish door belies the bloated weight of this car. The interior is slathered in yards of velour and acres of molded beige plastic, c.1980’s. The driver’s seat is spongy and more or less fails to even grossly approximate comfort beyond the notion that humans fold slightly in half while seated. The dash board appears to not so much have been designed as it was congealed. The manual pressure needed to activate the steering wheel mounted horn is roughly equal to that of the frontal impact which might be required to trigger to inflation of the drivers airbag system. The airvents appear to have bubbled up to the surface of the dash in nearly obscene configurations. The central instrument cluster, how shall I put this, appears to have been inspired by a trip to Hooters. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that it is exactly the size, shape, and proportions of the imprint that an artificially endowed waitress might make if she stumbled forward into a molten dashboard. Once you get past the 36DD instrument cluster, the sexy-factor of the interior ends there. The locations of the controls seem to have been determined by a committee of hemorrhoidal masochists rather than by anyone with a view toward intuitive driver-oriented placements. The only thing intuitive about this interior is that you will have to take your eyes off the road to find what you’re looking for should you desire to do anything other than steer. Even the tragically low-rent vinyl boot on the shifter serves little purpose in this life other than to obscure the indicators which might otherwise tell you into which gear you have inadvertently placed the transmission. The lines of sight to the mirrors are acceptable, although the inexplicable bottom curvature of the rearview mirror gives the sickening impression that you are missing something behind you. Legroom is commendable owing to the fact that the lower area of the driver’s compartment was designed by a bowlegged cowboy.

OK, so she ain’t the prettiest belle at the ball. I’m a driver who cares about performance. Cue the “driving excitement” music!

Upon twisting the key in the ignition, passengers are greeted by a cacophony of metallic gurgles and asthmatic whirring mildly reminiscent of what one might expect from pre-glasnost Russian military transport. Tip-in on the gas is spongy and requires interminable attention to keep the beleaguered engine from succumbing to the unmitigated heft of the vehicle it has injudiciously been conscripted to haul about. Shifts from the four-speed automatic are pronounced and evoke depressed noises from the strained engine during normal acceleration, replaced by shameless engine thrash upon flooring the beast. Test numbers are not yet available due to wet pavement conditions. However, the front-wheel drive is all too happy to allow the outside wheel to spin into under-steer when trying to launch the car free from the tyrannical grip of inertia.
Wait a minute! I thought Pontiac was GM’s excitement line!? Maybe it’s in the handling? Nope. Remember going to the playground as a child and riding on those little horses which were mounted on those huge industrial springs? Ok, that is roughly the feel of the suspension. Fly over any speed bump you wish! The springs are as flaccid as, well, let’s be honest, you don’t need a simile to accent how flaccid this suspension is! Take any curve and this car will generate more body roll than a Girls Gone Wild commercial. Overall, the handling is as stable as a drunken sorority chick after a nasty breakup. This makes for cornering as forgiving as the dictator of an Islamic republic. Braking is less than memorable, and besides, I’m running out of derogatory similes to invoke in the pillorying of this rental.

The body shop called last night to tell me that my Honda S2000 would be ready on Wednesday. I cried a bit, asked to speak to a Honda Emotional Health Counselor, and decided to take this thing one day at a time, provided there won’t be too many more days left which I will have to take. Give me four wheel independent suspension on a racing derived chassis with a respectable weight to horsepower ratio or give me . . . well, something besides the sweet euthanasia of the Grand Am.

Lazarus? Is that you? What's that smell?

Hi all! Classes are SOOOOO back in full swing. Would love to tell you all about it. Would also love to not bore you to tears with it. Oh, the dilemma! Anyway, just wanted to alert you that the long-dormant Job 10:4 blog is back up and has a new post. Soon as my Comment for Law Review is done, hopefully life will return to a meaningful endeavor, and I'll blog again. Lord, Speed the day!

I Can Stop Whenever I Want

I’ve been to a casino before. Couple of times, actually. Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Biloxi. Been there. And I’ve even dropped a couple of dollars in a slot machine. And I can honestly say, it doesn’t do a thing for me. Nothing. For me, playing slots is like seeing a cop on the side of the road flick on his lights while I’m on the interstate: there may be flashing lights and loud noises, and there may be a lot of adrenaline involved, but I can’t shake the sinking feeling that I’m may lose some cash on this one. So, I’ve never understood the impulse that drives people to casinos. Until this week.

See, this is the week that my school posts grades. I’d love to say that this is the “day” that my school posts grades. That would have been Wednesday. As it is, this is the week my school is SUPPOSED to post grades. And that means that for close to 72 hours, the Cumberland School of the Americas (if you get that joke, I’m very impressed) has trickled a grade here and there, careful never to completely disclose any one student’s complete slate of marks. Where does that leave me and the rest of the detainees? Oh, we live a shadow existence. Like a geriatric chain-smoking wheelchair-bound oxygen bottle toting blue-haired slot machine jockey, we sit, put in the password, and pray to come out a winner instead of pathetic grade obsessed approval junkies who know that checking the school web any more than every 15-20 seconds signals the advent of some very unhealthy neuroses. I only have one grade left to go: Constitutional Law I. That’s right. I start Constitutional Law II on Monday but on Friday still don’t know if I swam, treaded water, or went swimming less that 30 minutes after eating a big meal in my first effort at this kind of important bit of my legal education. I’m pretty sure this is a violation of my 8th Amendment rights. And if you got that joke, shouldn’t you be checking your grades right now? I hear Payment Systems may have been posted. Suckers.

Other than that, all’s well. I am officiating at a law school friend’s wedding this weekend here in Mobile. Sunday I’ll try to figure out how to pack my brief-case-sized trunk with the crap I need to carry back to Birmingham. I need one of those Chinese guys who magically fit artificial Christmas trees into those little boxes and defy all laws of space, time, and physics by getting the strings of lights into those even tinier boxes. Maybe they could figure out how to get a suit, a week’s worth of clothes, a guitar, an amp, the Xbox (non-360), my computer, a cocktail shaker, a jar of olives, a few books, my shoes, and a semester’s worth of fear and loathing into the trunk of my S2K. Oh, and none of that can really go up front, cause that’s where Butters sits. Having a two seater forces one to embody the philosophy: “Live simply that others may simply live.” Or something like that.

Hiatus Interuptus

OOooohhh the holidays! Such a special time! Now that they’re done, it’s time to clean house, take inventory of the blessings of the season, and schedule a double session with a therapist. Here’s the wrap up (no pun intended, wanted, or avoidable)! I engaged in all my personal favorite holiday traditions: I drank low-fat eggnog. I love that stuff. Loveitloveitloveit. I caught the Charlie Brown Christmas special. I bought some mixed nuts, spread out some newspaper on the floor, and cracked ‘em. Personal favorite: Brazil nuts. Super yummy. Least favorite: walnuts. They leave that weird dry feeling in your mouth. I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I cried promptly, on cue, when George Bailey read the inside of Clarence’s copy of Tom Sawyer. I bought a Hallmark Keepsake Ornament. I spent an inordinate amount of time giving a rip about the grades I still don’t have even though I said I wouldn’t. Good times. Good times.

Then there are the not so traditional things that happened.
Top Ten Really Jacked-Up Things That Happened to Me Over My Christmas Vacation
10. I had a pelican almost hit my car while I was driving up I-65 in Montgomery.
9. I went five consecutive days without internet access.
8. I watched a convenience store clerk stutter sharply while studying my face to see if it was ok to wish me a “Merry Christmas.”
7. I had a “Bama Fever/Tiger Pride” employee at the Eastdale Mall in Montgomery, Alabama almost refuse to exchange sizes on two T-Shirts (his and hers matching, of course) because I walked into the store with the shirts WITHOUT having first placed the shirts “in a bag. I mean, how do I know you didn’t just walk in and pick them up?” Well, let’s see. That can mean one of two things. That harpy little retail shrew either thinks I’m so stupid that I shoplift the wrong size OR that plastic bags can magically keep me from walking in with an empty bag only to throw merchandise (of the wrong size) in the bag in an effort to inefficiently shoplift $42 in merchandise. Right. Oh, I got your magic bag. I got it right here, sister.
6. I attended a backyard bonfire/cookout/wake in honor of the next door neighbors’ cat.
5. Did some Christmas shopping with the top down!
4. Ran into a guy I went to college with over 10 years ago. Where? Starbucks. Is there anything that magical brew can’t do?
3. “Enjoyed” a conversation with my uncle at a family Christmas gathering in which he professed that in-house counsel at his place of employ had told him that he’d learned so much about the law through his experiences in drafting contracts that my uncle could probably pass the bar without the nuisance of going to law school, you know, if the state would allow it.
2. Received not one BUT TWO DVD copies of “It’s a Wonderful Life” to replace my tired VHS copy. Ok, I took one back for a gift card at Wal-Mart.
1. I made a few New Year’s Resolutions!

My Top Ten Amended New Year’s Resolutions!
10. I’m going to lose 20 pounds in the British lottery.
9. I’m going to stop smoking my tires in the law school parking lot.
8. Every morning, I’m going to jog my memory.
7. I’m going to start working out how to pay off my student loans before I die.
6. I’m going learn to love salad toppings on my hamburgers.
5. I’m going to start waking up earlier on days when classes start earlier.
4. I’m going to stop procrastinating about 6 hours before each project is done.
3. I’m going to volunteer my time to help children shut the &$#* up in public places.
2. I’m going to cut down on coffee that I have to pour out because I let it get cold before I can drink all its inky blackness into my waiting soul.
1. I’m going to study harder than people who don’t study as hard as me.