What’s Wrong With the Big Three?
This is the new Ford Fiesta. It has a 1.6 liter ECOnetic clean diesel engine that gets 76.3 mpg in the combined cycle. The available performance engine makes 113 horsepower yet gets mileage in the mid-forties. The Fiesta has side-curtain airbags as well as bags for your knees. It’s a well built, safe, and economical car.
If you lived in Britain, you could buy one. If you lived in Europe – or most other places in the world – you could have one. But Ford decided not to bring the car here. Instead we have the Ford Focus that offers one engine choice and worse fuel economy.
Why is this? The engines, including the diesel, could easily meet our emission standards. Add a few side-impact beams and US-spec bumpers (which the car might already have as far as I know) and voila!
But Ford has not done this.
Similarly, there is a GM vehicle sold overseas that might sell well here. Stand back – it’s the Chevrolet Epica.
Not too bad looking, and it comes with either a four-cylinder diesel or a six-cylinder gasoline engine. It’s the size of a Honda Accord, yet the diesel version gets about 46 mpg in the EU combined cycle.
So why don’t we get this car over here? Sure, the Malibu is impressive (and very well built) but the Epica would sell even better, I think.
Unfortunately, there are no interesting overseas offerings from Chrysler. Across the pond they sell the same shit as over here.
The fact is, not only can Ford and GM build high-quality economical cars, they’ve done it. The only problem is that we can’t get most of them here in the good ol’ US of A.
This post was inspired by this thread.
BONUS FIESTA FUN:
Jeremy Clarkson and Fiesta get chased through a mall by a black Corvette:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLhnLJl4TZA
Jeremy Clarkson and the Royal Marines do a beach assault in a Fiesta:
That first photo is photoshopped more than a Mariah Carey album cover.
Anyway, I already have bags for my knees. They’re called boobies.
@Jamie Sommers: Yeah, but it’s still a hot little hatch, you’ll admit.
And have you seen the Kim Kardashian airbrush kerfuffle?
I drove that car in Scotland and loved it. Fun, economical, and it made me feel like a man.
Cars again? I demand equal time for threads about musicals, dammit!
@flippin eck: You and me both.
Add together all the bandwith splurged on cars (yeah yeah you change the gear and it does stuff and shit and it’s painted blue pass me the wrench) plus Sport (yeah yeah you win you lose is anyone better off eat Cheerios you losers) and we could be talking major Phantom London/New York best original cast recording discussions plus musical uploads of Sarah Brightman and shit (had to get curse word in somewhere).
Airbrush me interested.
@flippin eck: @Benedick:
I hate to bring this up, but I believe your complaints should be lodged with HF. The inadequate application of the Aesthetic Fairness Doctrine on this blog can clearly be attributed to HF’s sporadic posting habits.
Just put up two fun Fiesta videos … damn I like that little car.
@Nabisco: Well right. I loved that car when I drove it in the land of my ancestors. Why couldn’t I drive it here in the land of my… whatever. Because it was too weeny to compete on the road with like a Bonneville powered by prayer?
It was zippy and nippy and turned in about the space you could hurl after too many pints of warm Brit piss beer.
@Benedick: And they probably rented you an automatic. Imagine how much fun it would have been to select your own gears.
@Hose Manikin: ooh I agree. When’s the last time we had a Project Runway-esque post?
Lefty?? Back me up!
@blogenfreude: I have seen that. What’s really shocking to me is how little they did to her. I’ve seen more fat removed off skinnier girls.
@Jamie Sommers: I hate it when women aren’t allowed to look like women.
Or we could have a thread about Science Fiction. Or the Amazing Screw-On Head ! The possibilities are endless.
I dared HF to liveblog Rungay, so don’t go looking at me.
@blogenfreude: Oh no, please, one is an adult, one can shift gears. It was a blessed stick shift carpricious love bug. I still dream of its turning circle. It was so tight. So very very tight. So very very very tight.
@Jamie Sommers: I agree. We need more ghey/vagina-American representation. We need fashion bitchiness, musical theatre, and hot boyz. And cocktails.
@Benedick: Sarah Brightman? You were, I pray, speaking in jest. She started out as a yelping teenager, whored herself to a hack composer to become famous, and as an adult has done nothing but screech and howl. She can’t sing, and, even after all these years, hasn’t developed the technique to disquise that fact under the guise of “interpretation”.
Few vocalists can make me physically ill. She is one of them.
@Benedick: Where is your play now, Mr. Benedick?
@Benedick: Has it opened in Balmer or have I forgotten the schedule already?
I am in a dark midnight of the soul period. April is the cruelest month, and its come early for me. The old gang doesn’t come around anymore, stinque after dark has not had that frisson in months, the horror of work, Adam’s curse, weighs on me even on the weekends, I grow old, I grow old, a pair of ragged claws skittering across the bottom of the sea and all that. Airplane crashes are the only thing that cheers me up lately, I am now an expert in the problem of pilot induced oscillations in MD 11s. My professional life is twisted around the problem of auto manufacturer’s deliberately withdrawing floor plan financing from small dealerships, forcing them out of business, they call me, and say, is there anything I can do, and I can only phumpher sympathetically.
I have a coworker who sits in the office next to mine, he is a young-ish man, but morbidly obese. Every day he brings to work a half-dozen hard boiled eggs, and around 9:30 he eats them all, as his mid-morning snack. He places three sheets of paper towel on his desktop, he puts the eggs on one, as he eats them, he puts the shells on another, and puts the yolks on the third. He thinks this is healthy because he doesn’t eat the yolks.
At lunch, he goes to the salad bar at a nearby supermarket, he puts a layer of lettuce in the bottom of his clamshell container, then piles it high with ham chunks, cheese chunks, and chicken breast chunks, then buries it all beneath a solid layer of bacon bits, and then ladles on french dressing. He is eating healthy, you see, its a salad.
This makes me so sad.
As does hearing my coworker on the other side say the same exact humorous greeting to everyone, every single day, for 5 years now, along the lines of “did you order this weather, ha ha”. This makes me sad.
I has a sad.
@Promnight: Cut it the fuck out!
No shit, man! The fat guy is a meal for *you* when the shit hits the fan! A lot of us don’t have easy prey like that sitting around waiting to be slaughtered, barbequed and consumed when the days of Cannibal Anarchy roll around. Consider yourself singularly blessed. Remember, America is a free country and you are free to quit that gig at any time, kidnap and slaughter your coworkers and put the meat in deep freeze to eat when the power fails, the lights go out, Cannibal Anarchy descends and hundreds of millions of criminally insane cannibal neonazis (anyone who voted for McCain) are running rioting in the streets consuming everything in their path.
@Ewalda: Motherfucker eats those eggs for an hour every morning, man, its driving me insane.
I push paper, its so fucking meaningless and pointless, its boring and painful. But I could stand it if there was one single soul there at work who was someone I could talk to, who was, well, cynical like me, so we could make a joke out of it, but no, they are so depressingly earnest, they take it all so seriously, and they have all been working together for 20 years, and there are only 10 of us in the office all together.
Sometimes a herd of dear will walk by the building, or my boss will bring in a lamb, or, once, we found a tiny spotted faun on the lawn in front of the building just crouched on the lawn, those are good days. Or we will find a praying mantis on the bushes near the picnic table, thats good, they are so alien.
@FlyingChainSaw: You know whats bizarre? His wife is a total hottie. But I only know that because he has her come and drag the kids in once a month and everyone has to come out and coo at the little ones. I hate that.
@Promnight: Time to get a radio and start working at 4am so you can leave at 2pm. Then you won’t have to listen to him blasting egg farts and inhaling dramatically all afternoon as he gets high on his own egg-inspired flatuence.
@Promnight: Oh, well, he might have 15″ of wood. He just lays back, eating chips while his wife bounces up and down on him, shrieking herself into a coma all evening and into the morning. Fair deal.
@Ewalda: Dearest. Sarah Br. Yes a joke. Since she is the nadir of musical theatre.
@Promnight: @Ewalda: Play has run its allotted span in San Francisco and will open in Baltimore in April. Then on to Sarasota. And now it looks like Rochester. Meantime, I am very big in Germany and Sweden. Other productions proliferate: one is running in St Louis as I type.
@Promnight: You sound like you’re miserable at work and I feel for you. But you are you and hopeless losers who populate your building of employment do not define you. So, as ewalda said, Cut it the fuck out!
@FlyingChainSaw: Oh, this is why you are a genius, and have an artist’s awareness of the details. I said nothing of his breathing, you did not have to be told, the asthmatic wheezing, and thats when he is well; he is not often well, 8 times a year he is out for days with a respiratory infection of some kind, and for weeks before and after, he blows his nose constantly in long, extended, braying-elephant-like episodes. You could run the 40 in the time it takes for one of these gigantous honking explosions to run its long course.
But you knew, you knew without a word from me.
Whats so awkward is that he is an absolute prince of a human being. Awkward and embarrassing and often so inappropriate, but he is the milk of human kindness, he is hardworking and helpful, organized and always cheeerful and chipper. A sweet, good soul. Lends you lunch money, always ready to help, has never said an unkind word about anyone, ever, that I have heard. A committed Obama supporter, organizes our charity drives. A saint.
But so dull, so earnest, so unbearable.
I had sushi for dinner. Now I want me some hardboiled eggs. Salt. Pepper. And good beer. Mmmmmm.
@Ewalda: There are those who know me for my egg sandwiches. Something about a couple of quick fried eggs with grated cheese on buttered toast. Really, that and a cold beer can hold a man for a day of work.
@Promnight: All things considered, it sounds like you lucked out. You could have a boss coming into your workspace on the hour, howling commands, demanding you listen to his bizarre lectures on the life of the company and your role it in it, showing you pictures of a guy in Mumbai who will take your job for 10 cents on the dollar and making vague allusions to people who gladly offer oral sex to to their managers to maintain their jobs and keep up the mortgage payments on their homes.
@Benedick: Can I help you write a libretto one of these days?
@FlyingChainSaw: Now THAT would be a collaboration worthy of at least a Tony, if not a Pulitzer.
@FlyingChainSaw: Yes, taken as a whole, life is good.
@Promnight: Didn’t you mention that this gig pays extremely well? If so, enjoy your angst. I’m about to cash in a second retirement account to pay for sick cats and unemployed boyfriend, while hoping the small business where I work doesn’t go under or that I don’t get cancer or something since I have no health insurance. On the upside, I’ll be dead from the stress inside of 10 years, so I won’t need the money when I’m old.
@Mistress Cynica: I smile. Money ain’t all its cracked up to be. As an addiction, its probably worse than heroin, for making you so dependant on it that you can’t live without it, and that makes you more of a slave than ever to the soul-killing slavery you sell yourself into to get it.
@Ewalda: Here’s a start: an arsonist is being haunted by the ghosts of all the people who’ve died in the buildings and factories he’s torched. He hasn’t slept in 7 years and exists on a diet of speed, vodka and cigarettes. He falls in love with one ghost, who visits him from hell to tell him she doesn’t forgive him and that she is organizing a crew to kill him in a fire and drag him to hell, too. He hates himself so deeply, he finds relief in her plan for him and sets about burning buildings he is not even paid to torch to inspire her and her collaborators to release him from his earthly torments with all alacrity.
@Promnight: Start sending some to Cyn and Me. Think of it as a mitzvah. It’ll make you feel better.
@Benedick: Baltimore, really? I might have to come to that.
@mellbell: Baltimore is a Stinque.com kinda town.
@FlyingChainSaw: By which you mean that you will also be in attendance?
@Promnight: The only people who think money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be have enough of it. As Ewalda says, if you need to get rid of some, keep us in mind.
@Mistress Cynica: @mellbell: @FlyingChainSaw:
Whats this about Baltimore? Can I come? And Mrs. Prom? I want to see Benedick’s play so bad, and to meet you all.
@Promnight: @mellbell: @FlyingChainSaw: I’m probably repeating myself, but I saw the show in SF. An entertaining night of theater, must not be missed, and pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
@Promnight: Get your egg fart breathing ass out to Santa Monica CA next Wednesday April 1 for a Stinqueout with me, Dodger and Tommmmmmcattttttt (say it like “Spaaaaacce Ghoooooost and it sounds really cool). Various SOs are expected to attend. Mrs. RML does not wish to be called Mrs RML at the event, btw.
@mellbell: I’ve got stuff heating up in DC that could take me down there to consolidate some things Which would put me in striking distance of Bal’murr. What are the dates of the show?
@FlyingChainSaw: Previews April 24-29, opens April 30, runs through May 24.
@redmanlaw: Warning heeded.
@Mistress Cynica: This is my plan also, except that I hope to die in court after ripping the face off (metaphorically speaking) some lying sack of shit industry witness: “On the upside, I’ll be dead from the stress inside of 10 years, so I won’t need the money when I’m old.”
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