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Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Wil's way 
Look up by looking down
| | You can find where this is by looking here. |
Form, 1; function, -5.
| | I knew the fantasy was flawed when the kid said he couldn't see out the back window, a small wedge of glass the size of a porthole that also didn't open. |
| | I had my suspicions about the car when it took me half a minute to figure out how to wedge my ass into the front seat, then another two minutes to fail moving the headrest into a position that didn't seem to force my head forward. |
| | Disapointment spread when I found door pockets no larger than the ones in my pants, a trunk with an opening so small that inserting a suitcase was like performing a birth in reverse, and a radio identical to the Ford Focus I usually rent, except it wouldn't play the MP3 disks filled with podcasts that I had burned for the purpose of playing on the 400-mile trip I was about to take. |
| | The bummer at hand was none other than the new Ford Mustang, which Budget rented me because they were out of Ford Focuses, which are the onlly cars I like to rent. |
| | No doubt: the car looks hot, especially in red (which may be, from what I see on the Web, the only color it comes in). If I were a cop, I'd be tempted to arrest it right there in the driveway. It has the bulgemobile styling that's currently in vogue, with side windows so narrow you can clean them with the single swipe of a squeegee. Also the huge tires, the hungry-looking snout, the spoiler, the growling engine sounds — not to mention the aggressive advertising campaign. |
| | So, all the bummers withstanding, I was looking forward to driving the thing, because this was clearly a Mean Machine. |
| | Handling was quick and balanced. Braking was firm and secure. Acceleration was somewhat quick, although stomping on the gas tended to double the revs without increasing the speed. Not much, anyway. I'm guessing that, in the rental car tradition, this is a model defaulted with the smallest available engine. |
| | Sooo... I was almost starting to like the thing, a little, when I noticed it was about time to get gas. The needle wasn't quite down to the E, but close. Then the car chugged, died, and coasted to a halt at the top of the Ralston exit on 101, south of San Francisco. |
| | Fortunately, there was a Chevron station about fifty yards down across the landscaping, on the access road. But the guy there told me they didn't have a gas can to loan me. A call to AAA was shunted to the Cingular billing office, where I spent half an hour working out an address change failure that resulted in an unpaid bill and suspended service. After that, AAA came and I drove down to the can-less Chevron station. There I found none of the gas nozzles, all of which featured those fat gas fume recovery sleeves, would allow the gas to flow without being cut off. The guy at the gas station finally came out, tried to get the pump nozzles to work, and gave up after, fifty cut-offs along, we had moved about four gallons of gas into the tank. The problem, he explained, was Mustangs. "Some cars you just can't fill from pumps like these. The Mustang is especially bad." |
| | This is going to be my car for the next three days. If it needs any more bad PR (a subject I'm here to talk about tomorrow), it's a good bet I'll pick up where I leave off today. |
Pissers
| | A mens' room. Four urinals, three stalls. Guy comes in, passes all four urinals, walks into a stall, leaves the door open, unzips his fly, and pisses in the crapper without lifting the seat, perhaps because he thinks his dick is a machine gun and he can both produce and shoot the yellow bubbles in the water without soaking the seat. He shakes off, raining bits of piss all over the walls, the floor, the seat, the toilet paper, and those horseshoe-shaped sheets of perforated paper that keeps your skin off the seat. Then he zips up, washes his hands, and leaves. |
| | Now, I can understand having some kind of Thing about not pissing in a urinal. Whether it's peer pressure, or beer pressure, or whatever, some men have sphincters that can't open, regardless of backpressure from the bladder, at a urinal, in the presence of other men. It's almost autonomic. Nothing voluntary can overcome it. They stand at the urinal, thinking about running water, counting down to zero, whatever it takes to untie the drawstring, and ... nothing happens. Their only choice is to stand there for half an hour, like a geezer with a bad prostate, or go in a stall. |
| | But: why piss all over the place? Why not lift the seat? Don't these guys ever sit on the damn toilet? Do they like sitting on somebody else's pee? |
| | These questions come to mind for two reasons: 1) because I just witnessed exactly that scene, in a mens' room here at a nice hotel in San Francisco; and 2) nobody ever talks about the problem. |
| | So I'm thinking... a substantial percentage of men A) only piss in stalls; and B) don't lift toilet seats. If you're one of those guys, and you blog, can you please explain your position, so to speak, on this issue? |
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