Category: Uncategorized

(Yeah, I know, it’s a pathetic title, but whaddaya want from me? It’s 5:30 in the morning after a sleepless night!)

Wee little Delaware had its very own auto show this past weekend, and I managed to eek out a little time for a walk-through. Susan took a bunch of pictures for me.

Nice Ferrari parked outside:

Just inside the main entrance were, among other things, a pair of Lotuses (Lotii?)

Sadly, after having a chance to sit in one, I’ve had to remove the Lotus from the List of Totally Impractical Cars I’d Consider If I Won The Lottery. I’d heard they were cramped and hard to get in and out of, but reading the words in a car magazine doesn’t convey the real sense of needing someone to lower you a rope to pull you out. Your buttocks actually rest fairly far below the door sill once you get in, so you have to do a kind of lifting sideways roll to extract yourself. There’s also a structural member that cuts into your foot space on the left and narrows rightward so your legs are sort of crooked and cramped.

Every car show needs a Viper, of course. The color of this one in the lighting provided made it look oddly understated, which is hard to do with a Viper.

The modern Corvette is far and away the best performance value in automotive history. Power and handling rivaling that class of vehicle know collectively as the “supercar”, but at a price that doesn’t sound like a mortgage on a pretty nice house. That being said… for some reason I have absolutely no desire to own one.

In the presence of a Ford GT I’m never sure whether to go with grunting sounds a la Tim Allen or Homer Simpson style drooling noises. I settled for prostrating myself before it and offering to sacrifice a goat to my new master.

Ah, the classics – in this case, in the form of a Shelby Cobra signed by Carroll Shelby himself.

This Porsche was notable mainly because it was apparently painted to match that guy’s shirt.

Among the more mundane new 2008 models on display was this Saturn Sky, which I kind of like even though it’s a Saturn, though I prefer its Pontiac Solstice brethren even though it’s a Pontiac.

A small show but a good start. I would like to have seen some of the concept cars that have been making the rounds at larger venues. I was disappointed particularly that the Camaro prototype wasn’t there. Sadly, I don’t know whether the show will be able to expand – I’m not aware of a larger venue locally that would lend itself to an indoor car show.

Before we left, the kids climbed into the drivers’ seat of a Rolls Royce. Aeryn (left) seemed content to wallow in luxury; Kate, on the other hand, was looking to take it to the parking lot to do some donuts.

Everyone’s favorite island despot has been having some health problems of late, but apparently he’s making a last-ditch effort to hang on until the Anna Nicole thing is over with so her corpse won’t rob his of all the attention.

Today I saw the following item on Yahoo! news:

… and for some reason I felt compelled to modify it:

I’m not one of those militantly anti-SUV sorts. I don’t need or choose to own one personally; I think a fair percentage of them are bought as status symbols rather than out of any need (says the guy who drives a Mustang) and there’s a subset of SUV drivers who need to realize their vehicles are not race cars, but in general I’m not going to think much of someone’s choice to drive an Explorer instead of a Camry. (Because it’s those damned Wonder-bread-mobile Camries that are truly evil!)

There are times, though, when it’s tough not to embrace the “SUV as the embodiment of selfishness” school of thought.

Last night was Halloween. I live in a suburban neighborhood populated by lots of families with young children and the weather was unseasonably warm yesterday, so the streets were full of trick-or-treaters. One woman in a full-sized SUV (bearing no handicapped tags or other indication that the driver had some physical impairment) felt it was necessary to drive, rather than walk, to accompany her children on their rounds. The kids would walk to a house, she’d pull up in front of it and idle until they were done. Pull up, idle, pull up, idle, pull up idle, all through the neighborhood. I leave open the possibility that she may have some legitimate, genuine reason for this behavior, but I think it more likely that her motivation was just sheer laziness. Laziness which, in this case, put a large, moving vehicle in the midst of swarms of excited, sugar-laden children.

I hope her kids didn’t wipe their chocolate-laden fingers on the leather upholstry on the way home.

Yes, Steve Irwin is dead, a fact that has been discussed to no end for several days now, starting late Sunday night when the news was first reported and reached someone in my WoW guild who shared it with the rest of us. Apparently so many people believed it to be a hoax that several news sites were swamped and were brought down under the deluge of web surfers trying to verify the story. It’s another celebrity death that will captivate the world for a news cycle or two, until the next bride runs away or some new clue is found in the Jon-Benet case.

Of course the loss will impact his wife and children for the rest of their lives in ways that can only be understood be people who have suffered similar losses. His death may also make the future of the various wildlife preservation initiatives he supported a little less certain. So please understand that if I seem a tad cynical over this event, my cynicism is directed at the media and public reaction, as opposed to the personal consequences it will have for those who were close to him.

BUT:

The man was a lunatic. Why does his death come as such a surprise?

(“Elvis is dead? No, it can’t be! He took such good care of himself!”)

Had he survived his encounter with the stingray, the voiceover on the documentary would very likely have gone something like this:

“The stingray is normally a docile crea-cha, but ‘e can get right nasty if you scare ‘im. So Oi decided to swim up to this buggah and poke ‘im with a shahp stick…”

A friend from out west offered what seems to me the best summary of the situation I’ve yet encountered:

“It’s like hearing Wile E. Coyote died!”

Hopefully more entries to come in the near future instead of these once-a-month-or-so blurbs. There are a number of minor items I’ve been meaning to post about, so maybe in the next couple of days I’ll throw together a big multi-subject entry.

Seeing as this is the first entry in my first blog, I suppose I should write a few introductory words.

I’m Don, and this is my blog.

There. Phew! Glad that’s over with.

“What?” you may ask. “You mean that’s it? That’s your big intro?”

Yeah, well, I figured nobody who doesn’t already know me will ever visit this page anyway, so why bother with anything too lengthy?

What’s that? You say we don’t know each other, but you’re here anyway? Hmm… you must have a lot of free time on your hands to have wandered your way over to this obscure little corner of the net.

Alright, just for you, I’ll share a bit more about myself and the purpose of this blog.

There’s a “Lloyd” after the “Don” part of my name, with a middle initial “R” crammed in between ’em. I’m the second of recent vintage to carry that particular name, leading to the abbrevation D.R.L.2. Now yank out the punctuation and crunch it down into trendy lower case, and you’ve figured out the grand, mysterious inspiration for the name of this site!

I’m a computer geek, gaming geek, SF and Fantasy geek, gadget geek, Ren-Faire-going geek, and, er, car geek, if there is such a beast. My geek specializations include online gaming addictions and all things Tolkien. Non-geekly activities include having an actual wife and children. These days I follow politics a lot more closely than I have in the past, not out of any real passion for the subject, but from some combination of senses of civic duty and (more often) morbid curiosity. So all of those subjects, and whatever else may be suggested to me by the voices inside my head, are fair game on these pages.

Why blog at all?

Well, it boils down to this: I like to write. I like to think I have at least some talent in that particular field, because a while back I wrote a book and found a publisher willing to print it and promote it without me sending a check for services rendered. I even made a few bucks on the deal, which I suppose makes me a “professional”.

Where was I?

Oh, yes: I like to write, but I just don’t do it often enough. Several books-in-progress languish on my hard drive, largely neglected in the face of work, family, and that @%#%^#! World of Warcraft. My hope is that creating this blog will inspire me to actually sit down and put words to paper (in the virtual sense) on a somewhat regular basis, which will theoretically serve as a) good practice and b) a way get the ol’ writin’ juices a-flowin’ again and get back to work on those larger projects.

So that’s it for my big intro. Next time… something else entirely. Maybe. Who can tell?