Want to buy my SUV? It's great if you like unexpectedly running out of gas. And if you're a true resource-squandering American, you do.
I'm pretty sure that in order to maximize my resource use, I have to buy new.
Is one new one and one old one resource-intensive enough?
How depressing. Stupid Bay Bridge, causing oil spills. And commuters.
2: I'm going to buy another hybrid (used, natch) just to counteract your SUV.
6: well I'm going to hand-bathe six sea birds per Ogged SUV purchase.
8: I'm sorry, all the animals have been reserved for celebrities. We do have rocks. Thousands and thousands of rocks.
you mean we can't dunk the celebreties in oil?
But I'll bathe the ugly ones. Surely Susan Sarandon doesn't want to wash an oily pelican.
Is that where the elephant seals live? They can bathe themselves, I'm not going to even try.
Marmots, however, those things I could handle.
Surely Susan Sarandon doesn't want to wash an oily pelican.
You'd be surprised.
I did have to run to the bathroom during RHPS. What'd I miss?
Chinese sneak attack preview.
16: Oh noes! Someone needs to wash an oily merganser!
Just get me my dishwashing detergent -- I'm on it!
All those wanting to wash an oily Susan Sarandon, line forms to the right.
19: Peak oil is real! Peek oil, too, I guess.
I don't think that's a merganser. Its bill is too thick. It might be a Northern Shoveler.
It does appear to be a duck of some sort. At first I thought it was a gannet, but no.
Don't get distracted, people. I require, nay demand, washing.
23 --> 19. Tim Robbins is my ally in this fight.
Tim Robbins lovesscrubs all the oily duckies.
Oily ducky, you're the one
You make environmental catastrophe so much fun
Don't get distracted, people. I require, nay demand, washing.
Can it wait until after business hours, Merganser, because I've got to interview some candidates right now. Also, are you already oily, or should I bring some oil with me?
There you go again Ogged, with your "san francisco values." Don't you realize sea birds love being covered in oil? Or, to put it another way, clearly there must be a demand for oil-covered sea birds, otherwise the market wouldn't have provided them.
12: Only wash healthy marmots. Eschew sickly marmots. Plague.
And just think: as the oil spreads out and is diluted, its homeopathic effects will only increase! It's a silver lining, I suppose, that this disaster happened on the doorstep of the only city prepared to understand the threat it now faces.
Where can I send relief crystals?
I don't have any diseases, but this creepy orange guy has the right idea.
Tom, what is the homeopathic effect of oil? The development of rashes, or a single-resource extraction economy?
Thank you, Knecht. Bring a barrel of sweet crude.
Hey, we're thinking about buying a second car, and we need to offset the evil oggeds of the world. At this point we are pretty much only considering radical alternatives to mainstream cars. We currently have a Honda Civic Hybrid, which is good when the whole family needs to go some place, but our poor choice of neighborhoods means I also need a car just for me to commute in.
So far we've been looking at two options:
Something from ZAP, but only one of the cars that they have which are already in production, mostly overblown golf carts.
One of these
35: I'm living vicariously through other people, but if it's literally just for you to commute in, why not a Vespa or similar? Tiny and adorable, and it's got to have better mileage than even a Smart.
34: You're pretty sweet and crude already.
Rob, if you buy a Smart Car, I can honestly say that it will make me much more likely to buy a Smart Car becuase it will seem like a more normal thing to do.
Aerostitch. Seriously though, used Civic or Corolla with the small engine will use effectively the same amount of gas. Carpooling makes a bigger difference.
35: Tiny, adorable, dangerous (much worse than motorcyles), bad in the rain, and useless on freeway.
35: How far do you need to go, and how fast? Fwiw, the smarts cars are all over the place in toronto.
My commute is about 20 minutes if I take the highway, 30-40 minutes if I stay on regular roads. I am considering vehicles that I can't take on the highway, but I'm not real comfortable driving a vespa in the rain.
We've been trying to drum up interest in carpooling or finding a good public transportation solution, but both efforts are going nowhere.
25: I dunno, I saw one of 'em doing 70+ on the freeway a few days ago. Didn't look like fun, exactly, but it'll do it...
I want a Smart so bad. I drove one in Europe; it ruled!
Rob if it's carbon footprint that's bugging you why not get an old diesel and switch to the Scottish diet, if you follow?
Vespas are dangerous in the rain and get waterlogged. I knew a guy who had one and during the monsoon season he had lots of trouble getting it started and keeping it running.
Those Zap cars are pretty sweet. If they had, say, double the range, I might actually get one.
You could also pick up something cool used and install one of these kits.
A used Honda Insight would be pretty sweet.... close to 70 mpg. Or you could wait till 2009 for the Honda Fit Hybrid.
I have the Civic hybrid too, and I love it....
get an old diesel and switch to the Scottish diet
My daughter wanted me to do this with our old diesel, but she Who Must Be Obeyed did not want the car smelling like french fries all the time, lest it be too tempting.
The A's should move to San Jose and then put their AAA team in Fremont. The Giants' AAA team can be in Oakland. Everyone wins!
42, 48: I have no real sense of the practicalities. I just think they're way, way cute.
But to turn lemons into lemonade, another good idea would be to use the A's soon-to-be-vacated Oakland stadium as a refugee camp for oil-covered sea birds.
Meh, this actually has made me tear up a few times. Fucking-A.
51 Seconded. My Civic hybrid rocks.
We love our hyrbid civic. The Insight was even better, but we had to get rid of it when we got kids.
Is there a hybrid wagon? Our 1995 Taurus wagon is still trundling along fine, but I figure it's going to drop dead someday.
Lizard: The hybrid civic might be enough space for you. It works for our two child family.
I thought people in New York City didn't need cars.
LB The toyota hybrids have more space than the civics (and a bit better efficiency). I don't know about the camry's, but you can load a fair bit into a prius with the rear seats down.
camry's should be camry's trunk.
62: Family in Upstate NY, no mass transit way of getting to outside Elmira without one, and we did the math on renting cars four times a year, and owning one came out cheaper. We probably don't put ten miles on it most weeks -- it sits in a garage. But if we're going to have a car, we need space for two kids and a mediumsize dog, which puts us into wagon land.
The visibility in the Prius really sucks, though, because of the spoiler-type thing that bisects the rear window.
66: Depends on the year, but yeah, I know what you mean. Also somewhat depends on your height, I suspect. It's actually big enough to seat 5 though, which is why I mentioned it.
35" Is a bike too far-fetched an option? I bike 45 minutes to get to The University. Great excercise and great transportation. And the satisfaction of wizzing past cars in the morning traffic is uncomparable to any other.
Is there a hybrid wagon?
Lexus RX330 is a wagon-like SUV (unibody construction) available in a hybrid.
That would a pretty expensive car for the amount of driving you do.
I love my honda. I wish I could bike or use public transportation, but I cannot in this area. The kids also prevent that. (We do walk many places from home.)
I had a BMW for a while, but I was uncomfortable being a BMW owner.
I had a BMW for a while, but I was uncomfortable being a BMW owner and I have missed it every single day since I got rid of it.
I'm figuring if the Taurus lasts a while longer, we can get a hybrid used pretty easily. Maybe.
I found one route where I can take a 15 minute bus ride, followed by an hour bike ride. But the bus only runs three times in the afternoon, and the ride will become increasingly unpleasant as the cleveland winter sets in.
traveling purely by bike takes an hour and 45 minutes, and has to include at least 15 minutes worth of riding someplace where bikes really really shouldn't be going.
The Smart car actually doesn't get such great mileage. Why they don't make an electric one is beyond me.
I say buy something old and light and convert it to electric. A fun family project!
73: I know a couple who bought a used one this year, fwiw.
I want to get a big truck and a Smart car so I can park my Smart car in the back of the truck.
You could get a folding bike and keep it in the Smart Car.
I'd probably get Yaris before a Smart Car. Mileage is almost identical, and the Yaris is thousands less.
Argggh. My father works his ass off for thirty-five years to keep the Richmond refinary from blowing up or spewing all over the place, and some South Korean fucktards who can't read a goddamned radar machine fuck the whole place up in a hour. I know every single beach in those pictures.
Oh, and cleaning that cute merganser won't save it, sorry. It's probably already poisoned from the chemicals in the crude.
In the interest of ornithological accuracy, I should point out that the 'merganser' remark was a play on the commenter's pseud. It's definitely not a merganser. Cryptic Ned suggested a Northern Shoveler; I'd guess maybe a Canvasback. Not surprisingly, a thick coating of crude oil hampers bird identification.
Were any coots threatened? That would be tragic.
So is this spill front page news on the west coast? Because this is the first I've heard of it, here in the east....
It is here in SF, at least.
And they were just talking about it on the chunk of BBC radio that's picked up here. It's embarassing, but having been raised on Terminator and Running Man, I do get a bit of kick out of them saying "Governor Schwartzenegger".
(not enough to vote for him.)
Effect of oil spills on coots.
Nothing specific about the recent SF spill, but apparently are among the toughest of birds in this regard. That's a real load of my mind. The coots will survive, even if no one else does.