Top Gear USA

Well. Top Gear US sucks in a way I thought was previously impossible. Three blocks of wood who can't read a script and aren't funny. They have zero chemistry together, and all they're doing is copying TG UK almost segment for segment, stunt for stunt. They did a Viper vs. a Cobra helicopter tonight which was a direct copy of when Clarkson went up against an Apache in a Lotus Exige. Only on Top Gear USA it was neither funny nor exciting.
They previewed a segment showing one of them in a car sealed up, filled with water, being driven on their track which is obviously a copy of Top Gear UK's episode where they were trying to prove that British Leyland cars weren't crap. Presumably from the same show, last night they showed a clip of one of the presenters hopping out of a car with a lousy handbrake on a hill - a direct copy of Hammond doing it. I think they even choreographed the way he got out of the car to try to be identical.
Their main driver, Tanner Foust, is all kinds of gay - the only thing missing from the show was his boyfriend. The fat bearded presenter is just objectionable in every way possible. (who the heck calls their kid "Rutledge"?) And I think they chose the third guy (Adam Ferrara) because his last name sounds like 'Ferrari'. I've no idea who he is but he made the other two look talented. None of the three of them have any excitement in their presentation. The scripting was so bad that at one point, Faust jumped ahead making a complete hash of the joke they were trying to tell.
Even the interview for star in a reasonably priced car was appallingly artificial and wooden - I think even Buzz Aldrin was reading from a script. And badly.
Top Gear USA sucks so badly I can't even find a metaphor for it. Clarkson needs to grab one of his guns and come over here and put this show out of its misery.
Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Why I dislike auto lights

In keeping with the light-oriented blog post last month, whilst following a GM something-or-other this morning (one of their line of staggeringly crappy SUVs), I was reminded why I dislike automatic headlights. You know - the ones that turn themselves on and off. It was a particularly crisp morning with stark morning sun and deep shadows. Every time we all stopped at traffic lights that were in the shade, the GM's lights came on. As we moved off into the sun, they went off. As we got stuck in slow traffic and went into shade, they came on again. Sun, off. Shade on. All the way to work.
It was daylight all the way - no need to have any lights on at all, yet in their infinite stupidity, GM's engineers decided that merely driving into the shade was reason enough to turn on this particular vehicle's lights.
Genius.

God is not your co-pilot

As an atheist, I have a really big problem with religious groups who have the opinion that their chosen deity will protect them no matter what. Worse, they believe that when it's "their time", then that's just the way it is. This is especially true when driving, and living in Utah as I do right now - it's a really big problem. Actually, it's compounded by the criminally easy driving test, but the local religion here I'm sure has a lot to do with the appalling standard of driving. People drive around in a daze, believing with all their being that their God will protect them from harm. "God Is My Co-Pilot" is a bumper sticker you see a lot around here and I don't think they're joking. That is what makes them a danger to every other road user, because in a car it translates to "I can drive however I like and it doesn't matter". Drifting through red lights whilst texting. Stopping at green lights. Turning left from the right turn lane. They do this under some misplaced sense of self security and if they die as a result of their criminally lax driving, they just assume it was their destiny. The rest of us? We don't count - even as an atheist, if I die because some Mor(m)on sideswipes me in a truck whilst he's texting, in his opinion, his God determined it was my time to tie.
Blindly following these sorts of lifestyles puts everyone else in danger and there's no way to redress the balance.
So if you see a religious bumper sticker, steer well clear of the vehicle because their chosen deity might have decided your time is up.

ScanCafe - the cost of no hassle.

I have a wicked flatbed scanner. The thing is amazing. It scans everything. However, when it comes to scanning old film negatives, as you can imagine, it's incredibly time-consuming. A colleague of mine put me on to a company called ScanCafe - one of an increasing number of companies who will do the donkey-work for you. There's a few others, but ScanCafe is massively undercutting them all right now, with discounted rates and Christmas sales. They're a full 15c per negative cheaper than their nearest competition, and that includes shipping and tracking. You send your stuff to an amalgamation centre in California, and from there, palettes are UPS'd to their scanning facility in India. Get this - everything is hand-scanned, and they're still cheaper than the US competition. I think the difference is that the guys in India are probably pleased to be providing a service whereas their US counterparts probably see it as one step up from flipping burgers. ScanCafe ask you to estimate the number of negatives up front, and charge you 50% when you order. When your scanning is complete, they publish albums in your account online so you can accept / reject each image. In the end you only pay for the ones you keep as long as it's 80% of the order or more. In my case, if I take every scan, the total cost to me is $257. Sounds a lot, right? Lets see you sit at home and hand scan 1000 negatives (the size of my first order). For me, $257 is the cost of no hassle.
I'll let you know how it goes, but right now, there's a sturdy box UPS-ing its way to their amalgamation centre with my first batch of negatives in it.
Their site : ScanCafe. If you sign up and order before November 8th, there's also a 20% discount coupon : LAST4XMAS.

Why do people still use Jiffy Lube?

You might as well ask the same question in England: why do people still use Kwik-Fit? I ask because of all the people I know who've used Jiffy Lube here in the US, and Kwik-Fit in England, only one has anything good to say about them. The rest are horror stories ranging from the mildly funny to the litigious. For example one of my wife's friends recently went to a Jiffy Lube for one of their "signature" oil changes. The next day, her SUV was parked in our drive and I commented that it was leaking oil. The colour drained from her boyfriend's face as she said "Oh - I took it to Jiffy Lube yesterday". After some not especially complicated diagnosis, it turned out they never bothered to tighten the oil filter when they put it back on, so it had been spewing oil all over the inside of her engine compartment.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of, or directly experienced this level of service from these places. Apart from anything else there's the up-sell scam they all run. You know the one - where everything was fine when you took the car in, but after the oil change it now miraculously needs new wiper blades or CV boots. When we lived in England, I even experienced one of these places that cut a friend's brake lines so that he couldn't leave the shop without paying to have them all re-done. The litigation on that one found them wholly responsible because they were caught doing it on their own surveillance cameras.
Countless news programs have exposed these places for everything from scamming customers by charging for work and not doing it, to deliberate sabotage, to just making stuff up. Their staff are generally clueless too. A colleague of mine suffered from a catalytic converter theft a couple of years ago. He trailered his truck to the nearest one-stop-shop and their first question was "are you sure it had a catalytic converter in the first place?" followed by "are you sure it was on there when you drove home last night?". (in case you're not mechanically inclined, every car has had a cat for decades, and most modern cars simply won't drive with a chunk of the exhaust missing because of the lack of back-pressure. Oh and the noise would have given it away, obviously).
I just can't fathom why anyone still uses these places.

A competition for you

This week's blog post is a short one with a quick promotion - not something I do very often. Anyway, one of my site sponsors is having a competition and if you're in the UK there's some decent prizes to be had including holidays, 20 grand in cash and a new Mini. Click through and take a look. Normal blogging service will be resumed next week :-)