...of crappy cars

I was sitting having a few wines with a friend the other day, she was telling me that her car was a 'piece of shit'.

For my part I tried my best to convince her that a car that started reliably, ran reliably, didn't cost a fortune in fuel bills and didn't cause you to have to walk to work was in my humblest of opinions, a whole load better than having to hoof it!

She was not persuaded to believe me but did eventually concede to it being reliable.

It not only reminded me of another story but made me remember many of the 'pieces of shit' cars I had owned.

There was the '69 Gremlin, the '74 Corolla, the mark 3 Ford Zephyr (three speed column shifter, only second gear was missing so it became a two speed consisting of low gear and high gear - imagine it.. I was either tearing the ass out of it in first or laboring it like a pinky old tractor in third!!! Oh yeah, that's right, and it wouldn't key start so you always had to park on a hill so you could roll start it and you always had to carry a minimum of three passengers, that way if you stalled on the flat you had plenty of push power to get started again), a communal 50cc scooter, a borrowed Honda City and last but not least a Nissan Bluebird 2 litre turbo automatic. Stylish motoring indeed!

There was one thing all of those vehicles had in common. Not only were they ugly in shape and color and entirely embarrassing to be seen driving, but it appeared the designers had also decided that something that disgusting must now last forever so that your shame might continue for many, many years.

To that end it seems they made the motors, gearboxes and running gear indestructible!

I lived with a bunch of guys once, there was about 5 of us living in a big old house in St Lukes and our house transport was the aforementioned 50cc scooter.

We utilized this pathetic excuse for mobility for one reason, namely, pot pickup and delivery. You see, cops hardly ever pull these puss ridden shitters over because generally they are only ever carrying Grannies, Asian university students or homo's so there was every good chance that if you were heading home with the house stash, that you would not get pulled over and possibly sprung.

Eventually over time we came to realize how incredibly tuff this little turd of a motorbike was.

We had a giant front yard approximately the size of the standard rugby field. One half of it was flat and well mowed but the other half had been let go and seemed to be littered with piles of "stuff" that the grass had simply grown over, it appeared that half our lawn was made of lumpy grass hillocks.

It was in this section that we built, 'the track'.

The 'track' was filled with muddy challenges, bone shaking corrugations and gnarly jumps. It soon became the scene for many a drunken 'time challenge' and even the occasional exceptionally drunken night time rally. The biggest of our bunch was a monster of a guy, 6'4 - 200+ pounds called Gary. I'm not shit'n you that poor little bike survived the track with Gary perched tenuously astride it. From memory the worst that befell it was the loss of the rear mudguard due to an overenthusiastic wheel stand attempt by one of the lads.

The crappiest car I have ever had the misfortune to drive was lent to me by a friend.

A red Honda City - oh revel in the glory of its awesomeness!!!

I think the fact that I could lift the back of it off the ground by myself could have been the reason I so despised the little horror. Driving this vehicle on the motorway was frightening, something akin to flying a spacecraft made from balsa wood and cling wrap through a meteor field!

Nonetheless this vehicle was, like all the other shitters of the world - indestructible!

One night, midway between travelling from my mate Johns place to mine I decided to prove the indestructibility of this little vehicle to him.

I bet him that I could drive the remaining five or six kilometers home without lifting my foot from the full throttle position...

...and so we went, stopping at red lights to sit beside our fellow road users with the engine screaming and us, with tears pouring down our faces laughing fit to burst .

Shifts between gears had the same effect on us.

It was during a particularly rough upshift into third, heading up the second to last major hill before home that something went wrong..

By wrong I mean the engine simply stopped - dead!

Oh fuck! Still quite a way to go to get home.

Damnit - I hadn't quite considered this possibility.

Oh well - out we get, up with the bonnet, hmmmmm give her a bit of a crank.

Whooooa sparks everywhere - cooool.

O.k looks like the main lead from the ignition coil has come out the top of the distributor cap. See if you can jam it back in there John and I'll just go and... CRANK THE IGNITION!

Poor John - that shit really hurts.

So we threw away the stupid 'spark booster' which is some sort of magical device that plugs into your distributor cap and mystically makes a more powerful spark (what a load of rubbish) and stuck the lead straight into the dizzy.

What do ya know. One crank and she fired up again.

Foot straight to the floor! Engine screaming - off we go again! Yeehaa look out!

Well we got home and yeah, o.k. so she was running a little warm but honestly, I reckon that little car would have done that all day. Legendary.

So next time your hurling obscenities at your 'piece of shit' car just think about how many times it has let you down and left you to 'foot it' and maybe you might feel a little better about it's color or it's shape.

Currently listening to:

Supergroove - Postage

Cafe De Mar - Dreams

Alex had her braces fitted today.

Perhaps I'm showing my vintage by saying this but..

When I was at school getting braces was almost unheard of and those that did have them hated that fact and spent most of their day hiding behind one or other of their hands whilst blushing profusely.

The secondary school I attended was one of the largest in Auckland at the time but you could've counted the kids with braces using your toes.

When Alex was informed by the dentist that she would be sporting a mouthful of stainless steel for the next two years I thought she would be mortified - instead she seemed happily overcome with joy???

Turns out that braces have become the 'must have' fashion accessory for teenage girls and Alex was kind of tired of being the odd one out.

Dang - humans are strange critters.

Currently listening to:

The Beat - Industry

Rest in Peace Walter Tipuna Wawatai

Today marks the loss of a beloved family member. Our cat of 10 years died peacefully in his sleep last night.

I'm truly gutted.

He was my friend and a great source of comfort and peace.

Alex and I will never forget him so I guess in that sense he will never really be gone.

So gutted...

...of large butane bottles

Is it just me or have others noticed that whenever you attempt to show somebody how excellently awesome you are at something, it all goes pear shaped and lemon smelling.

I'm sure you know what I mean; 'Dad, look how fast I can ride my bike', 'mom, see how high I can climb up this tree'.

You know what I mean?

Well yeah, it happened to me a lot.

It still does.

At my high school we had several art classrooms. One of them was equipped with a large gas fired kiln. It was used for firing and glazing ceramics. It wasn't part of the classroom as much as it was only accessible through the classroom.

This classroom had a set of double French doors that gave the students access to a small courtyard and within this courtyard, the far corner of it, was where the kiln was situated.

Our art teacher was one of those strangely abstract women who seemed to be stuck in a continuous daily cycle of reinventing herself. Don't get me wrong she was a fantastically warm woman and we loved her dearly - it was just that her randomness always had you wondering who she would be when next she stood in front of the class!

The thing I liked best about her was that she held strongly to the belief that everything everyone did was just simply a form of artistic expression struggling to be let free.. To this end she saw the fact that I smoked cigarettes to mean that I was struggling with some sort of artistic self destruction that really only needed to be harnessed.

Anyway, one of the reasons I loved her, more perhaps than most, was that she would let me smoke out by the kiln in the courtyard during our classes with her.

It was during one of these highly irregular 'smoko' breaks and accompanied by one of my friends who also had a propensity for tobacco that I discovered two newly refilled gas bottles that had been delivered earlier that day. It appeared that the two being used to power the kiln were nearing empty and the replacements were ordered before the old ones actually ran out.

These bottles were not unlike the one sitting below your BBQ at home only they stood about 5 or more foot high and didn't have that guard thingy around the valve on the top, so they looked more like gigantic dive cylinders - I'm pretty sure I've seen bottles like this around recently so it must just be the ones for home use that have the guard around the valve - who knows.

I had learnt from experiments I had conducted at home on the gas bottle attached to the front of my parents caravan, that a most spectacular and self sustaining flame could be generated by opening the valve on the top of these bottles and applying a lit match to the valve outlet. In fact the bottle at home when newly refilled had managed a flame a good 7 - 8 foot long and I could only imagine what length flame we could get out of these freshly delivered monster bottles sitting so temptingly available in the art class courtyard...

Having already dealt with gas before I was well aware of the need to strike the match first before opening the valve so after having told my friend to move to one side a little so I could show him something 'excellently awesome' I struck the match.

Now as I said these bottles were quite tall - or at least tall in comparison to us, so I actually had to reach up a little above my own eye level in order to put the match near the valve outlet and I couldn't really see what I was doing exactly.

Nonetheless I turned the valve on hard and waited for the stream of gas to ignite..

- nothing -

Hmmmm.

There was certainly the sound of much gas escaping, plenty of it.

Suddenly it struck me... idiot!

I was holding the match on the wrong side of the valve!

No worries, that side was clear of everything, we both shuffled a little to the left and I moved the match to the other side of the valve...

I still cant really remember the exact sound - it was more like a feeling really, much like the feeling you get from an excessively powerful sub woofer. I think that the ground might have actually shook.

There was a dull blue flash at the same time as the sub woofer feeling and then a very brief sensation of extremely intense heat on my face, neck, ears and hands.

When I opened my eyes I found myself looking at some strange brown fuzzy critter that was standing where my friend had been a couple of seconds ago, not only was this strange beast brown and fuzzy but most alarmingly it was smoking! Every part of it was smoking! The clothes were smoking, the socks were smoking the brown fuzzy head was smoking! There was even smoke coming off the eyebrows!

A little too late I suppose I turned off the gas valve.

Holy sheeeet!

"Man - that happened quick" was all I had.

"Fucking right!" was all my friend had.

His name was Malcombe Jones and he used to be shock blond - now it seemed there was only the shock left. Almost exactly half of his hair from the front to the middle of his head had gone a funny type of ginger and looked markedly shorter than that hair which remained his normal blond. His eyebrows and eye lashes were the same matching ginger brown. Being blond he had very light skin but this was quickly turning a majestic shade of puce. He looked for all the world like a cartoon character who had just had one of those little black round bombs go off in his face. In retrospect I suppose he had just had a bomb go off in and all around his face!

It took Malcombe a few minutes if that, before he started pointing at me and laughing. I suppose it was just the relief of knowing that we had just had a very near miss but we both started roaring with laughter.

As it turned out my hair, and not just half of it but most of it had changed color to rusty brown as well and I was sporting matching eyebrows and lashes all of which were smoking!

The worst of it was yet to come - when we rubbed our newly tinted eyebrows and hair it all fell off!

Inconveniently the wind had blown the smell of burning hair straight through the open French doors and filled the art classroom which, when combined with the explosive thump had brought our beloved art teacher and half the class haring outdoors and into the courtyard where Malcombe and I stood half bald, eyebrow less, scorched red and smoking.

Even more inconveniently another teacher of a less understanding nature had now appeared on the scene and after quickly appraising the situation sent both of our scorched asses off to see the headmaster. The headmaster upon listening to our tale proceeded to cane both of us and inform our parents of our indiscretion.

When I arrived home that afternoon I was treated to a rather sound tongue lashing from my mother and a bloody good hiding from my old man.

So to recap, we both now had hair that made us look like monks from an old fashioned Kung Fu movie, we had no eyebrows or eye lashes and our faces looked like we'd both fallen asleep in a sun bed. The headmaster had caned our bums till we couldn't sit properly and to add further insult to our injuries our dads had kicked our already highly tender and broken butts.

Could always have been worse I suppose but all in all, rather a grim outcome for a bit of "see how awesome I am" I thought.

...of electric fans

Today is officially the warmest day we’ve experienced this spring.

In my work place the heaters are being put away and the fans are coming out.

Hmmmm fans...

Several years back the company that employs me bought a shipping container to use as a radio resistant chamber. I shan’t bore you with the details, suffice to say after minor modifications we set this behemoth down in a far corner of our workshop and set up an emission measuring laboratory within it.

In order for the chamber to be completely free of any type of radio emissions we decided a refrigerated container would be best because internally they are completely lined with stainless steel. This combined with the outer steel casing provided us with a large room that was immune from even the most powerful of radio transmissions and rendered all cell phones useless if taken within it.

As you may or may not have noticed, refrigerated shipping containers come complete with their very own chiller units (rather like air conditioning units on steroids). The ones fitted to our container needed to be removed before we could put it into use as they allowed openings in the chamber walls that let radio signals in.

We stripped these chillers off and they lay about the shop for sometime before myself and our German design engineer took an interest in them.

The motors were large and completely waterproof and had fitted to them rather large (500mm) extremely dangerous looking, stainless steel fans.

It didn’t take us too long to figure out how to make them run and we were astonished at the absolutely phenomenal amount of air they could shift. They were immediately banned from the work place as the fan blades were completely un-guarded and spun at a ferocious leg chopping 4000rpm! If you cant imagine why 4000rpm of spinning steel is so dangerous try tipping your lawn mower on its side, jamming the throttle at full and grabbing the spinning blade – and it’s doing nowhere near 4000rpm.

I kid you not, the wind coming off these things would have a woman’s skirt off at 50 metres and being that I lived in a small, extremely hot and poorly ventilated house I figured one of these bad boys would be just the ticket at home where Occupational Health and Safety had no jurisdiction.

I clearly remember the day I took it home – I was ever so eager to show my overheated and sweltering flat mates and it would be hard to imagine a better day for a demonstration of my newly acquired ‘mega fan’, it was scorching!

I decided that it would be safest to situate the beast in a corner of the lounge so that nobody could approach it from behind and accidentally lose a leg or foot to the fan blades. It seemed obvious that nobody would be unaware of it when approaching from the front because the wind coming from the bastard nearly took you off your feet!

- Once when I was a small boy my friend and I were throwing sand balls at each other at the beach. Unsatisfied with the impact my sand balls were having on my friends head I decided I could have a much more telling effect if I simply put a big rock inside one.

The minute I threw that sand ball, the instant it left my hand, I wished I could have it back...

..and so it was as I flicked the mains switch on at the wall.

It’s hard to describe the order of catastrophic events that occurred given the degree of chaos that ensued the moment that switch was thrown.

It became obvious to me immediately that running these fans in an extremely large warehouse as opposed to a very small lounge room was an entirely different kettle of fish!

It seemed that in an instant, every ash tray in the room (‘there were many and they were all full’) emptied themselves into the available air space within the room, and I don’t just mean the ash, no - butts and all were being swirled around the room. The dogs howled and made a desperate bid for freedom adding further to the furor by knocking several housemates to the floor.

In the next few moments, while we were all temporarily distracted by the cigarette butts and ash in our eyes, the window drapes, conveniently bunched in the corner behind the monster fan were then drawn into the back of the ghastly monstrosity. The drapes were doomed from the moment the very tip of one touched the fan blade.

Being that the motor itself was very heavy and powerful meant the unfortunate drapes simply wrapped around the fan and motor shaft without unsettling or slowing the fan in the least! And so with a horrendous tearing noise the drapes, mesh curtains and curtain rails were torn from the wall and attempted to wrap themselves around the cursed fan. At this point there was so much shredded curtaining and pieces of curtain rod trying to spin around the fan that the fan had become larger than the motor that spun it and it crashed sideways to the floor and began galloping in frighteningly random circles around the lounge floor space smashing tables and tearing furniture into large chunks!

We fled.

Honestly, I was frightened.

My housemates on the other hand, were livid!

Thankfully the trashing ended reasonably quickly (albeit dramatically) in a burst of sparks when the fan managed to cut through the lead from the motor to the wall.

I was permitted to stay – but sadly my fan was banned (I was certain that with a little more experimentation it could be tamed, but my suggestion was not met with a great deal of enthusiasm).

I gave it to a friend who works as a car painter; he uses it to extract paint vapors from his garage and to this day nobody has suffered any injury,

yet...

Currently listening to:

Blips by http://blip.fm/DirtyUrine

...of thieves

It was with some degree of amusement that I observed the neighbors dog trashing some sheets and clothes that were hung on her owners washing line whilst downing my hot chocolate this morning.

Amusing because despite my yelling and jumping up and down on my deck and generally looking foolish flailing my hands and gnashing my teeth, the dog seemed only mildly interested but if anything was spurned on to even greater levels of destruction - to the detriment of the unfortunate washing!

I suppose I should have gone over there and made a more sincere attempt to stop the ruinage but the idea of the neighbors returning home for some reason to find me in their back yard with handfuls of their torn washing, running from their dog did not inspire me to act gallantly...

It did however; remind me of a little incident that happened many years ago when I was sharing a house with several friends.

There were fours of us (all guys) living in a lease property, sharing the rent, power, phone etc, etc. We had been living there for several months before we began to notice a sure and steady decline in the number of jeans and T-Shirts that we possessed. We finally twigged that one of us didn’t have a huge pile while the rest of us were in deficit and it was to our bitter disappointment we discovered that we were all less two or three pairs each and many more T-Shirts also.

It took us some time to deduce that our clothes were being filched from our washing line during the night and further investigations revealed that the thieves were coming over our back wall, through the vacant part of the section at the bottom of the yard and up to our washing line situated in the middle of the used part of the yard.

We decided collectively that the first element of our defense would be to clear away some of the vines and climbers that had over many years become greatly overgrown and thickly covered both sides of the back wall. This it seemed, allowed intruders to observe our movements while remaining virtually invisible to us from the house and also from casual onlookers or people in neighboring houses.

After this relatively simple operation we were delighted to find that underneath all of the overgrowth was a three line barbed wire fence at the top of the wall. Which, having now been freed from the entangling vines appeared as an impromptu second line of defense for our washing line.

The other lads however had got to talking about this one day while I was at work and arriving home one afternoon I was approached on masse to offer my opinion on electrifying the barbed wire fence. Being quite a lot younger than I am now the idea of an electric barbed wire fence fascinated and appealed to me...

So, using our combined ingeniousness we set about insulating the wire from the fence strainers using sections of garden hose and I was dispatched to the nearest automobile wreckers to obtain a cheap CDI ignition system from a car.

Using this piece of equipment as the fence energizer had the combined advantage of being both cheap and our intruders would be spared the need to touch the bare wire as the voltage and available energy from the ignition system would mean, coming to a distance within half an inch of the wire would see an extremely high energy discharge, straight up your ‘tender bits’.

We stashed the whole contraption complete with old car battery in a nail box and concealed it with a pile of the vines we had ripped off the fence and sat about for the better part of the night waiting to see if our efforts would be rewarded.

Nothing.

So I recharged the battery during the next day and set it all up the following evening.

Nothing.

And so it went for the next three nights. By the sixth night everyone had pretty much lost interest and I persevered only because I thought it would be a shame to give up now and have the thieves come back and rob us again the night we didn’t have the battery charged.

Sometime just after midnight on that sixth evening we were alerted by the dog, who until this time had failed to detect our ‘midnight shoppers’. She was whining and clawing at the back door and although we could hear nothing, her interest in getting outside attracted the attention of us all.

We armed ourselves with an assortment of ungainly objects (I had a rock...??? Oh yeah we were hard core!) and after letting the dog go first we made our way across the back yard.

Somewhere around the clothes line we heard the first sounds of a frantic scuffling and heard the dog growl and then howl and we were nearly bowled over as she came scuttling past us heading quickly in the opposite direction, tail tucked firmly between her legs, ears flat down on her head.

Generally speaking, people who take on snarling dogs within the dogs own territory should be approached with a great deal of caution! We needn’t have worried.

Two young men were trapped in the barbed wire fence and every second or so they would twist and writhe like a pair of synchronized monkeys in a tree. We assumed that the dog had attempted to bite the shoe of the guy closest to the ground and had shared a little in the energy that was making such beautiful blue sparks on our two captured crims.

Tempting as it was to leave them both there making funny noises and flexing like a pair of retarded bodybuilders we started to worry that they could end up badly hurt. There was already an odd smell of burnt hair or flesh and also the ozone smell you get after a big electrical storm. I disconnected the battery while my flat mates informed our hapless criminals that if they tried to make a run for it we would light their dumbasses straight back up again.

I guess it was a testament to the pain they must have been through because as soon as I turned the fence off and they could speak properly they started pleading with us to never turn it back on again. They were a little cut around the legs and hands from the barbs in the wire and both seemed to have bitten their tongues or cheeks and were bleeding slightly from their mouths.

Such had been the extent of their writhing and struggling that we had to cut them free and so destroy our beloved fence.

Under the threat of much violence we tied their wrists with sticky tape and dragged their now very sorry asses back up to the house where we gagged them with more sticky tape and applied even more tape to their legs. When we felt that escape would be impossible we heaved them into the bathtub one on top of the other, removed their gags and questioned them about our missing clothes. Having recovered a little by this time they became adamant that this was not their intention and that they had never been over our fence or into our yard before.

Collectively, none of us was convinced; they had attempted to come over the fence in exactly the same place that we had deduced somebody had been over before. I went back down to the bottom of the yard and recovered the nail box with our DIY fence energizer and battery, took it back up to the house and put it down on the bathroom vanity where both of our would be thieves could see it.One of the other lads put the plug in the tub and turned on the tap…

Nobody had said a word during this process but the intention was apparently clear enough and the confessions were readily forthcoming! They admitted to stealing from us on several occasions and had hocked our gear off at one of the local op-shops. Disgusted, we re-gagged them and locked the bathroom door.

For some time we considered calling the cops but I was unsure how we might fear in a legal sense with regard to having installed a barbed wire electric fence which by no means came anywhere near fitting the legal safety requirements that local councils dictate in their by-laws.

What we decided on in the end was the old ‘scare the shit out of em’ approach, so two of us took the ‘good guy’ role while the other two took the ‘badass’ approach and we staged an argument complete with scuffling and apparent pushing and shoving outside the door of the bathroom.

The ‘badasses’ tried to convince us that we should just break a spade over each of their heads and bury the bodies down in the vacant overgrown part of the section where nobody would ever know.

We, the ’good guys’ tried to reason with our counterparts saying that these guys would no doubt be missed, that others were bound to know what they had been up to, inevitably sending trouble our way and that we should just call the cops and be done with it.

We let this to-ing and fro-ing continue all the while knowing our sneaky little friends could hear every word. We culminated the argument with a shouting match that saw the ‘badasses’ storm off, apparently pissed with us for being so soft and leaving the house in a huff.

The two of us remaining went back into the bathroom – un-gagged our pair of thieves and asked them for their names and addresses, the address they gave us was only two streets away from ours so it seemed to add up. We dragged them outside one at a time and released them, telling them that they had 30 mins to get home and make anyone else in their house aware that the police were on their way.

We never called the cops – tempting as it was, common sense prevailed and we figured we would probably be the ones in the most trouble.

But hey, we never lost anything else off the washing line for the remainder of the time we lived there and I always wonder if those two chaps ever stole anything again – EVER!

Currently listening to:

The Black Crowes – Shake your Moneymaker

http://blip.fm/jennyleepenny

...of lessons

I have meandered through my life gathering qualifications as I go.

To date I am a reasonable mechanic, a trade qualified electrician and a trade qualified television, radio and consumer electronics service person.

By profession I am a reasonably talented electronics engineer.

My trades have taught me a great deal about dealing with other people.

My profession has taught me even more about dealing with myself.

Some of the important lessons have been,

1) Consider - everything

2) Never overlook - anything

3) Allow for outside, above and beyond all that you have considered.

But the most important of these lessons has been:

4) You can never forsee everything!