This is a stupid question, the obnoxiously revealing opening question that is uttered by a voice on the phone when someone is attempting to persuade you to cough up money because you are a man who wants to have sexual intercourse more mightily or a woman who desires a more slender physique or a man who wants intercourse with a woman with a more slender physique, or possibly just someone of any gender in need of more money.
DC, unlike VA, does not do safety inspections - only emissions. So there's no reason for them to look at tires, brakes, etc. But for emissions, I'm seeing search results suggesting that the existence of an emissions problem (but not the specific nature of the problem) can be seen via the check engine light without connecting to a diagnostic computer. Since 1996, cars have been required to have a second-generation on-board diagnostic system (OBD 2) that monitors emissions.
Regarding "How are you doing today?" -- great old Doonesbury comic with Duke channeling Hunter Thompson, his answer to caller asking that lame question is, "You don't care, so get to the point". I find that response reliably knocks junk callers off script.
I drive a 20-year-old Saab 9-5 Aero (which has now entered the vernacular as a "classic") partially out of sheer cussedness, but more because of its appropriate-and-no-more, technology, and a Swedish commonsense approach to life in a sealed steel cocoon at 70 mph (that's my speed and I'm sticking to it). As those of you with only a passing interest in automobiles (as opposed to an interest in passing automobiles...at a leisurely 10 mph below traffic speed..."get on with it already"), may know, the Saab is technically an "orphan" car, since it is no longer being produced as a "Saab" (although a successor is [was ?] making use of a Saab platform) and its original parent company is no more, thanks to a series of bonehead plays and GM greed. The other thing to know about this one is that it only has 35,000 miles on it. Yes --- I do walk a lot. The guy who runs the now only repair shop in town that works on Saabs and stocks the parts (strangely, they are still being made) keeps asking if I ever thought about turning it into a planter, to which I always smile wanly. Have to keep humoring him for obvious reasons.
Dale, you are fortunate that your mechanic is still able to source any SAAB parts. Based on discussion with my local body shop, if either of my SAABs is in accident that requires replacement of body panels, the insurance company will total the car. There are no more unused replacement body panels available for any SAAB. Oh, you can look to a junkyard, but good luck in finding a body panel in a good enough shape to be re-used. I can tell tell you from hard experience that more than a few mechanical, and most electronic parts for SAABs are nearly impossible to find in new, unused condition. I've been to looking to replace the front brake calipers in my 2007 9-3. No one has any in stock. It took me 3 years of searching to find a used plastic end cover for the roof rails in that car. Mechanical parts for my 2000 9-3 Viggen are mostly unavailable. Your 9-5 Aero, being a limited edition car , is in a similar situation to my 9-3 Viggen.
Talk about being a glutton for punishment, I also have a 2005 9-2X Aero called derisively, the "Saabaru" and, as you know, Saab's first "attempt" at AWD, using the the re-branded and re-styled Subaru WRX imported from Japan --- that I continue to baby along. Just something about the Saab sensibility that still appeals (and the price of new cars).
I actually found Wayne & Shuster funny -- of course, I was a teenager watching them on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the only thing worth watching on that show was the comedians. I've always remembered a skit called "The Brown Pumpernickel," a take-off on "The Scarlet Pimpernel." In the book, the hero would leave a pimpernel (small flower) for every person he managed to spring from prison; in the Wayne & Shuster version, the Bad Guy rushed to the prison to find . . . a cell packed with loaves of pumpernickel bread. It was a great sight gag!
(I see that there's a video of this online, but I refuse to look at it because it probably doesn't live up to my 60-year-old memory of it.)
I was completely smitten with a young man when we were both college age, and he came to town to see me. I was already embarrassed to be driving my parents' old maroon minivan, but not as embarrassed as when I jumped out excitedly without putting it in park, and had to chase it several feet at the Huntington Metro Kiss and Ride.
Gene, I stand up and salute you! I don't think anybody in history has ever written "constant rock-hard Vesuvian erection" and "arms-length" in the same sentence before.
Song ? Has to be the wonderful Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." And then anything, absolutely anything, sung by the glorious Eva Cassidy, cruelly taken too soon. Adele's "Someone Like You," and the other "Someone Like You," from the musical, "Jekyll and Hyde." "Stairway to Heaven," Led Zeppelin (and especially the spectacular Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart/Jason Bonham Live at Kennedy Center Honors version from 2012); "Woodstock," Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; "Try," Janis Joplin (come to think of it, anything by "Pearl"). Too many to list.
Sally --- Really, there is no "best" song in 60+ years of memorable ones. Obviously highly subjective. If I absolutely had to pick one, it would be the first on my list "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."
Yes I love that song and fortunate enough to see her perform at the club on Capitol Hill many years ago. Right now I’m having a Tina Turner nostalgic trip, and What’s Love etc always struck me.
Her anthem. A great song, and one she reportedly initially turned down because she thought it was too big a departure (as written) from her then signature R & B/rock. And she also had re-signed with her previous record label (thanks to David Bowie) which had dropped her, and was concerned about going in too different a direction musically. But music producer Terry Britten reworked it to fit her style and the rest, as they say, is history. Fortunately her music lives on.
I find responding to "Hello. How Are You Doing Today?" with the earnest mention of concern about a recent bowel movement and asking what the caller thought about it, tends to quickly end the conversation. Usually before asking their opinion. More usually on the utterance of "bowel movement."
I use "How are you doing today" in the start of many work phone calls, especially if they are inbound, as a brief delay for when I'm trying to view a customer's record or some other relevant documentation. It gives me a few seconds to see where we are in the process or where we last left off. If the records software is being slow, we then go to inane chatter about where we are in the work week. It's also very useful to disarm someone calling with an immediately hostile approach.
"Well, the obvious one is “Born In The USA.” Also, “Hallelujah.” Also, not songly but literarily, “The Ugly American.” - I would add any politician using Born To Run.
The mention of funny captions immediately raises the question: are men funnier than women ? To be clear, that's "funny" as in amusing, not odd. Some research I came across the other day highlighted the still widely-held stereotype (and by women as well, btw) and cultural trope that men are, in fact, funnier. The meta-analysis, or review of multiple studies on the same topic, from a few years ago looked at 28 research efforts involving slightly more than 5,000 participants. Subjects were told to create gender unidentified humor output (cartoon captions, for example), which was then subsequently assessed for "funniness" by independent raters. Not unlike Pat and Gene's Really Swell Invitational. This "study of studies" found that 63% of men were funnier than the average woman.
The review also found that apparently women tend to look at a sense of humor in a partner as correlating with intelligence. On the other hand, uncomplicated creatures that they are, men prefer a partner who simply laughs at their humor. No mention of whether this includes polite laughter. And once the researchers were on a roll, they determined that there was even an evolutionary aspect to yukking it up --- claiming that men likely had to compete harder with other men to impress women with their sense of humor as part of the mating ritual. So presumably not only were you expected to come up with a side of mastadon, you had to come up with a funny thing that happened on the way to the hunt.
The answer for why the "double U" (and why not the more visibly appropriate "double v ?") in "answer" is in its Germanic origin (or what we think the Germanic branch language looked like). As for the "w" itself --- the Roman alphabet didn't have a "w" or a "v" so the sound was approximated by a double "u," which was then eventually incorporated into English for the "w" symbol. And thus ends another episode of "You Don't Say ?!"
Best song since 1960? The first thing that popped into my head was Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick Walk on By. Then Stevie Wonder, My Cherie Amore. Too many good songs, too many years to settle...so why rank them at all? What if we pop in the earbuds, or crank the stereo, or hit play, and listen to the music!
Hey, Invitational fan who doesn't like the results of the New Yorker caption contest: WE just happen to have a caption contest coming up this very Thursday!
Gotta tell you, though, that several Invitational Losers have won the New Yorker contests, sometimes more than once; they include Jay Shuck, Gary Crockett, and Carol Lasky (who also has done well in Invite caption contests). But those other people who enter -- yeah, bleah.
Actually, I think it's because they tend to go for a very short-form caption: When it's great, it's truly great; when it's not, it can just lie there.
You can, by the way, both help cull the New Yorker entries (by rating each one "funny," "somewhat funny," or "unfunny") and vote on one of the three finalists.
When it comes to The Invitational, of course, the Czar and the Empress will continue to confer their decisions autocratically.
This happened when I was just learning to drive, so I hope that fact will encourage compassion. I grew up in Los Angeles, in a very hilly area known as Los Feliz/Silver Lake. Our garage was (still is) situated up a narrow, tightly curved driveway. The garage was parallel with the road, and if you were coming south down our street, the car had to essentially make a hairpin turn up a steep grade and face the exact opposite direction in order to pull into the garage. I was driving my mom's Volvo home. I pulled about 3/4 of the way up the driveway, put the car in Reverse to straighten out a bit, clicked the button to open the garage...and then forgot to put the car back in Drive. I gunned the gas pedal to get up the rest of the hill and slammed the back of the car into the retaining wall. Very little damage done to the wall, but much damage done to the car. And repairing a Volvo is, it turns out, really expensive.
My first car was a 67 Volvo. I called it a vulva and apologize to all women for that. When it needed a new transmission, I just gave it away because the cost of the repair was greater than the value of the car. I was 19.
Many, many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was young, I had a live-in girlfriend who had a volvo. And SHE had an elderly European friend with a heavy Germanic accent, who unfailingly pronounced it "Vulva." I found this out one day when she first acquired the car, and told him about it. "You drive a Vulva?" he replied? "No," she answered. "I own it, but Don usually drives it." I totally lost it. Neither of them knew why.....
Gene, do you recall the marketing stickers Volvo handed out in the early 1980s that read "I love my Volvo"? Well, somewhere around 1983, I was visiting a colleague at a middle school in Arlington, VA. In the teacher parking lot sat a Volvo with the sticker on its back bumper. When I got closer, I say that someone had used a stroke of blue paint to turn the first o in "Volvo" into a u, and stroke of white paint to turn the second o in "Volvo" into an a. I thought it was a stroke of genius.
DC, unlike VA, does not do safety inspections - only emissions. So there's no reason for them to look at tires, brakes, etc. But for emissions, I'm seeing search results suggesting that the existence of an emissions problem (but not the specific nature of the problem) can be seen via the check engine light without connecting to a diagnostic computer. Since 1996, cars have been required to have a second-generation on-board diagnostic system (OBD 2) that monitors emissions.
Regarding "How are you doing today?" -- great old Doonesbury comic with Duke channeling Hunter Thompson, his answer to caller asking that lame question is, "You don't care, so get to the point". I find that response reliably knocks junk callers off script.
I drive a 20-year-old Saab 9-5 Aero (which has now entered the vernacular as a "classic") partially out of sheer cussedness, but more because of its appropriate-and-no-more, technology, and a Swedish commonsense approach to life in a sealed steel cocoon at 70 mph (that's my speed and I'm sticking to it). As those of you with only a passing interest in automobiles (as opposed to an interest in passing automobiles...at a leisurely 10 mph below traffic speed..."get on with it already"), may know, the Saab is technically an "orphan" car, since it is no longer being produced as a "Saab" (although a successor is [was ?] making use of a Saab platform) and its original parent company is no more, thanks to a series of bonehead plays and GM greed. The other thing to know about this one is that it only has 35,000 miles on it. Yes --- I do walk a lot. The guy who runs the now only repair shop in town that works on Saabs and stocks the parts (strangely, they are still being made) keeps asking if I ever thought about turning it into a planter, to which I always smile wanly. Have to keep humoring him for obvious reasons.
Dale, you are fortunate that your mechanic is still able to source any SAAB parts. Based on discussion with my local body shop, if either of my SAABs is in accident that requires replacement of body panels, the insurance company will total the car. There are no more unused replacement body panels available for any SAAB. Oh, you can look to a junkyard, but good luck in finding a body panel in a good enough shape to be re-used. I can tell tell you from hard experience that more than a few mechanical, and most electronic parts for SAABs are nearly impossible to find in new, unused condition. I've been to looking to replace the front brake calipers in my 2007 9-3. No one has any in stock. It took me 3 years of searching to find a used plastic end cover for the roof rails in that car. Mechanical parts for my 2000 9-3 Viggen are mostly unavailable. Your 9-5 Aero, being a limited edition car , is in a similar situation to my 9-3 Viggen.
Talk about being a glutton for punishment, I also have a 2005 9-2X Aero called derisively, the "Saabaru" and, as you know, Saab's first "attempt" at AWD, using the the re-branded and re-styled Subaru WRX imported from Japan --- that I continue to baby along. Just something about the Saab sensibility that still appeals (and the price of new cars).
At least it's not that abomination known as a 9-7, aka, a bastardized Chevy Trail Blazer.
Yes indeed. Btw --- have you tried https://saabparts.com/us/
I actually found Wayne & Shuster funny -- of course, I was a teenager watching them on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the only thing worth watching on that show was the comedians. I've always remembered a skit called "The Brown Pumpernickel," a take-off on "The Scarlet Pimpernel." In the book, the hero would leave a pimpernel (small flower) for every person he managed to spring from prison; in the Wayne & Shuster version, the Bad Guy rushed to the prison to find . . . a cell packed with loaves of pumpernickel bread. It was a great sight gag!
(I see that there's a video of this online, but I refuse to look at it because it probably doesn't live up to my 60-year-old memory of it.)
I was completely smitten with a young man when we were both college age, and he came to town to see me. I was already embarrassed to be driving my parents' old maroon minivan, but not as embarrassed as when I jumped out excitedly without putting it in park, and had to chase it several feet at the Huntington Metro Kiss and Ride.
Gene, I stand up and salute you! I don't think anybody in history has ever written "constant rock-hard Vesuvian erection" and "arms-length" in the same sentence before.
ISWYDT
Song ? Has to be the wonderful Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." And then anything, absolutely anything, sung by the glorious Eva Cassidy, cruelly taken too soon. Adele's "Someone Like You," and the other "Someone Like You," from the musical, "Jekyll and Hyde." "Stairway to Heaven," Led Zeppelin (and especially the spectacular Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart/Jason Bonham Live at Kennedy Center Honors version from 2012); "Woodstock," Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; "Try," Janis Joplin (come to think of it, anything by "Pearl"). Too many to list.
All good songs but the question was THE best song.
Sally --- Really, there is no "best" song in 60+ years of memorable ones. Obviously highly subjective. If I absolutely had to pick one, it would be the first on my list "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."
Yes I love that song and fortunate enough to see her perform at the club on Capitol Hill many years ago. Right now I’m having a Tina Turner nostalgic trip, and What’s Love etc always struck me.
Her anthem. A great song, and one she reportedly initially turned down because she thought it was too big a departure (as written) from her then signature R & B/rock. And she also had re-signed with her previous record label (thanks to David Bowie) which had dropped her, and was concerned about going in too different a direction musically. But music producer Terry Britten reworked it to fit her style and the rest, as they say, is history. Fortunately her music lives on.
I find responding to "Hello. How Are You Doing Today?" with the earnest mention of concern about a recent bowel movement and asking what the caller thought about it, tends to quickly end the conversation. Usually before asking their opinion. More usually on the utterance of "bowel movement."
I use "How are you doing today" in the start of many work phone calls, especially if they are inbound, as a brief delay for when I'm trying to view a customer's record or some other relevant documentation. It gives me a few seconds to see where we are in the process or where we last left off. If the records software is being slow, we then go to inane chatter about where we are in the work week. It's also very useful to disarm someone calling with an immediately hostile approach.
“Hallelujah”
I answered that I couldn't nail it down, but if forced to nail it down, this would be my answer.
"Well, the obvious one is “Born In The USA.” Also, “Hallelujah.” Also, not songly but literarily, “The Ugly American.” - I would add any politician using Born To Run.
The mention of funny captions immediately raises the question: are men funnier than women ? To be clear, that's "funny" as in amusing, not odd. Some research I came across the other day highlighted the still widely-held stereotype (and by women as well, btw) and cultural trope that men are, in fact, funnier. The meta-analysis, or review of multiple studies on the same topic, from a few years ago looked at 28 research efforts involving slightly more than 5,000 participants. Subjects were told to create gender unidentified humor output (cartoon captions, for example), which was then subsequently assessed for "funniness" by independent raters. Not unlike Pat and Gene's Really Swell Invitational. This "study of studies" found that 63% of men were funnier than the average woman.
The review also found that apparently women tend to look at a sense of humor in a partner as correlating with intelligence. On the other hand, uncomplicated creatures that they are, men prefer a partner who simply laughs at their humor. No mention of whether this includes polite laughter. And once the researchers were on a roll, they determined that there was even an evolutionary aspect to yukking it up --- claiming that men likely had to compete harder with other men to impress women with their sense of humor as part of the mating ritual. So presumably not only were you expected to come up with a side of mastadon, you had to come up with a funny thing that happened on the way to the hunt.
The answer for why the "double U" (and why not the more visibly appropriate "double v ?") in "answer" is in its Germanic origin (or what we think the Germanic branch language looked like). As for the "w" itself --- the Roman alphabet didn't have a "w" or a "v" so the sound was approximated by a double "u," which was then eventually incorporated into English for the "w" symbol. And thus ends another episode of "You Don't Say ?!"
Best song since 1960? The first thing that popped into my head was Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick Walk on By. Then Stevie Wonder, My Cherie Amore. Too many good songs, too many years to settle...so why rank them at all? What if we pop in the earbuds, or crank the stereo, or hit play, and listen to the music!
Hey, Invitational fan who doesn't like the results of the New Yorker caption contest: WE just happen to have a caption contest coming up this very Thursday!
Gotta tell you, though, that several Invitational Losers have won the New Yorker contests, sometimes more than once; they include Jay Shuck, Gary Crockett, and Carol Lasky (who also has done well in Invite caption contests). But those other people who enter -- yeah, bleah.
Actually, I think it's because they tend to go for a very short-form caption: When it's great, it's truly great; when it's not, it can just lie there.
You can, by the way, both help cull the New Yorker entries (by rating each one "funny," "somewhat funny," or "unfunny") and vote on one of the three finalists.
When it comes to The Invitational, of course, the Czar and the Empress will continue to confer their decisions autocratically.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/contest
This happened when I was just learning to drive, so I hope that fact will encourage compassion. I grew up in Los Angeles, in a very hilly area known as Los Feliz/Silver Lake. Our garage was (still is) situated up a narrow, tightly curved driveway. The garage was parallel with the road, and if you were coming south down our street, the car had to essentially make a hairpin turn up a steep grade and face the exact opposite direction in order to pull into the garage. I was driving my mom's Volvo home. I pulled about 3/4 of the way up the driveway, put the car in Reverse to straighten out a bit, clicked the button to open the garage...and then forgot to put the car back in Drive. I gunned the gas pedal to get up the rest of the hill and slammed the back of the car into the retaining wall. Very little damage done to the wall, but much damage done to the car. And repairing a Volvo is, it turns out, really expensive.
My first car was a 67 Volvo. I called it a vulva and apologize to all women for that. When it needed a new transmission, I just gave it away because the cost of the repair was greater than the value of the car. I was 19.
My wife's Volvo has the same name. And our Porsche hybrid is Hymie. I'm not going to tell you what my Corvette's name is.
If you lived in New York and called your car a vulva, you are lucky that Trump didn’t grab it.
Many, many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was young, I had a live-in girlfriend who had a volvo. And SHE had an elderly European friend with a heavy Germanic accent, who unfailingly pronounced it "Vulva." I found this out one day when she first acquired the car, and told him about it. "You drive a Vulva?" he replied? "No," she answered. "I own it, but Don usually drives it." I totally lost it. Neither of them knew why.....
Gene, do you recall the marketing stickers Volvo handed out in the early 1980s that read "I love my Volvo"? Well, somewhere around 1983, I was visiting a colleague at a middle school in Arlington, VA. In the teacher parking lot sat a Volvo with the sticker on its back bumper. When I got closer, I say that someone had used a stroke of blue paint to turn the first o in "Volvo" into a u, and stroke of white paint to turn the second o in "Volvo" into an a. I thought it was a stroke of genius.