Author Archives: electricrocket

Your mileage may vary

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steakums sent me this link, in our ongoing discussions about whether to minivan or not to minivan.

One commenter on this article said : I don’t know why everyone is opposed to SUV’s. I personally love mine, and it gets great gas mileage, contrary to the popular belief. I fill it up once a week, ($30-35) and I can go all week on one tank of gas. (I live very close to work).

Leaving aside the ignorance on how one measures “gas mileage”, this comment dredged up a pet peeve I have about discussing gas mileage. It bothers me to an extent, and probably irrationally so, when I ask someone how their gas mileage is on their vehicle, and they say “Great! It’s about 20MPG!”

While I’ll allow that 20MPG could be relatively “great” for a specific type of vehicle, say a Semi or a garbage barge, I can’t allow that it is empirically “great” for anything.

So, I’m offering an empirical rating chart for gas mileage conversations. You and yours may choose to adopt it, you may not. I offer it as a suggestion, and letting everyone know what I mean when I say “great”.

MPG                  RATING
0-20MPG              embarrassing
20-30MPG             poor
30-40MPG             acceptable
40-50MPG             good
50MPG-100MPG         great
100MPG+              awesome

These will have to be adjusted periodically for technological improvements.

And, of course, one can still use phrases with relative qualifications, such as “My minivan gets 35MPG, which is great for a minivan.” I’ve got no beef with that.

The Neat Germ

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So, yesterday, Rocketbro was out running errands and stopped by the do-it-yourself car wash.

When he got home, the outside of his car was so nice, he decided to do the inside… vacuuming and 409ing and so forth.

He was on such a roll, that he then proceeded to vacuum out Stacey’s car, thus destroying a local tourist attraction1.

Crazed and delusional to the point of losing his sense of self preservation, he went on to spit-shine the inside of my car.

Inside, his diligence guilted or inspired (hard to tell which) to knock out the Enormous Tower of Laundry whilst simultaneously baking a chocolate heart-shaped cake from scratch, and me to reorganize the pantry2.

All of which to say is I <3 my brother, and I'm considering somehow trashing his credit so he can't afford to buy a house and move out. 1 Atlanta’s Largest Collection of Dropped Goldfish Crackers.
2 Hey, I was sick. This was a big contribution for me.

Book Log – The Book That Changed My Life

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The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them Edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen

71 essays about life changing books. Many were interesting, some were funny, some I just skimmed. Several folks mentioned To Kill A Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye. Amy Bloom cited The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, which I dearly love and read again and again, so I shall pick up some of her stuff at some point.

If the internet comes back. Where is it tonight? Livejournal is working. Lots of other major sites aren’t. Weird.

But I digress.

This is one of the Xmas gift books, for which I thank her again, as it helped pass part of the time happily on my 3.5 hour flight back and forth to El Paso.

Book Log – Jennifer Government

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Jennifer Government by Max Barry

This book went on and off my wishlist a couple times. I heard about it somewhere as a witty Orwellian satire, and I added it. I later heard there was an online game based on the novel (http://www.nationstates.net/), which I signed up for and was bored by, and thus later I took the book off my wishlist. Then, it cropped up somewhere else as a recommended novel for its smart wit and satire, so I added it back.

I dunno. It was an okay read. There was not a lot of depth or originality to any of the characters. The alternate future was a bit outlandish (Privatizing the government? Just how would that work, and how is that not a paradox?), but with a bit of effort I was able to suspend my disbelief… like Cars: accept the premise, don’t think too hard about it.

I wasn’t bored by it, and early on I knew there wasn’t going to be any big payoff, so the ride was fairly enjoyable. Though I can’t figure out what some of the reviewers “laughed out loud” about.

Max Barry’s other books (Company and Syrup) look like more of the same. As one Amazon reviewer put it, “knee-jerk anti-corporate humor is occasionally funny…” I probably won’t bother.