God as ticket taker; and I gotta buy a new car

I spent the weekend in wicked, wild Baltimore doing tittillating tax accounting. And yes, tax accounting is just exactly as much fun as you think. Fortunately, Friend JC is a total whiz at it. Me being a country bumpkin, and that being (to me) a hell of a big town, I've quite a few notes from which to write a little essay or two. Not much this morning, though.

Tim came home from a midnight shift in a very rural station at 8 AM. A 30-something with an acute infectious illness arrested, and they worked it a long time. As most such events go, it ended with a transport to the morgue. He was fairly upset, because it's just not an understandable thing in the Universe to see a young person otherwise healthy get on the train. But as I reminded him (as we were driving back from the auto repair shop - he hit a curb on the ice and bent a rim), when God punches the ticket, you're staying on the train.

In a bit of an outing, we went to something called a "car show" at the Civic Center downtown Saturday night. This was essentially a multi-manufacturer car lot, indoors and carpeted. However, this was a concentration of advertising and marketing, and I finally got the message which, upon reflection, is the one which car manufacturers have been trying to get through to me for years. I have concluded that if you buy a new car, you immediately will be wrapped in the embrace of a Beautiful Young Person (gender your choice), who will ignore your poor dentition, questionable personal hygiene and lack of intelligent conversation, and who will then proceed to screw your brains out. Moreover, if you buy a convertible, and you are a guy, they seem to guarantee that your penis length will increase by at least 30%. I conclude all of this from the knowledgable salespeople who were in attendance. They were all Beautiful Young People. I would have thought that older, scarred and stained shadetree mechanics would have known more about automobiles than they do, but apparently that's not the case. Surely, the manufacturer's selected only the most knowledgable people to represent their wares. The Beautiful Young People gushed about the cars and trucks, cajoled, coyly smiled or manfully strutted, and showed absolute interest and affection when answering the questions of idiots. Dear me. We got downtown in JC's "new" car, and I thought that it was nice -- a 1990 model in perfect condition, immaculate, acceleration out the wazoo, and very comfortable on the road. But it wasn't purchased new, so the Beautiful Young People weren't on the job. How sad!

There were couple of odd things, though. The Cadillac display touted a new "green" engine, called the "Partial Zero Emission Vehicle" engine. How's that again? Partial zero? Would Clorox sell if it made your clothes "nearly whiter than white"? How about if I could get a result of "mostly not guilty"? Well, these are sophisticated folks, so perhaps "partial zero" is a new wave of technology. Also, several vehicles had small LCD screens mounted right outside the driver's side window, connected to cameras of some sort which showed the view behind the vehicle. What a marvelous idea. Hmmm - Although if you wanted to save a little money and have a more fool-resistant system, I guess you could mount a mirror there. Nah, for reasons that my mind cannot fathom, the camera's got to be better. Oh, and none of the vehicles had knobs screwed onto the gearshift levers. Perhaps that's an option.

Mizpah.

R