The Cash for Clunkers program passed Congress last week, providing rebates for people who trade in old cars and purchase new fuel-efficient vehicles. Participants can receive vouchers worth as much as $4500. Of course, we’re advocates of DIY mechanics—car owners who tinker with their vehicles until the car’s last faint, faltering breath. This is the truly economical (and environmentally friendly) way to treat vehicles. A true clunker, by this reasoning, is one that is beyond even our capable hands. Here, then, is how to tell if your beater is a real clunker—beyond help and ready for a government bailout.
It’s wearing three (or more) different sizes of tire.
Your bowling ball keeps falling out of the trunk, even when the trunk lid is closed.
You need to add oil more often than you need to add gas.
Dogs don’t bark and chase after it.
You can only get country and western stations on the radio.
There are mushrooms growing out of the rear-seat carpeting.
You’ve gotten in the habit of leaving the jumper cables permanently attached to your battery.
There’s more than one bumper sticker holding the rear bumper to the car.
The color listed on the title is “Duct Tape.”
Your pine-tree air freshener is a twig from an actual pine tree.
When your CHECK ENGINE light comes on, you know from experience that you need to actually check to see if your engine is still there.
Your ignition key also works in your lawn tractor.
Driver’s seat upholstery is for sissies.
Your seatbelts are made from leather.
Your make, year and model isn’t even listed in the Blue Book.
Your teenager doesn’t want to install an iPod dock.
Your dog hides in the back seat instead of sticking his head out of the open window.
Parking valets tip you to park it.
Yugo drivers flip you off.
You never throw out a clothes hanger; you might need it to hold up your tailpipe.
"I would love to be able to say that I graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in medicine and be able to share my story," he says. "I have to dream because obviously my reality is horrible."
n the pantheon of awesome images of explosions, this has got to rank pretty high. Astronauts floating high above earth in the International Space Station snapped this shot of Russia’s Sarychev Peak volcano in the Kuril Islands busting through the atmosphere on June 12 (click image for full-size).
As NASA scientists M. Justin Wilkinson writes, conditions had to be perfect to get this shot — there must be almost no wind for the plume to shoot so high into the atmosphere undisturbed.
The white stuff at the top of the ash cloud is probably condensing steam. And that halo of clouds surrounding the eruption is what happens when a powerful explosion rips into the atmosphere — the shock wave literally pushed the cloud cover out of the way.
An emergency call for firefighters to respond to a traffic crash ended in a cautionary tale for everyone who cooks food when the firefighters got a second call to put out a fire — back at their own station house in Waipahu.
HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie.
From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.
After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.
The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie.
The animated movie begins with scenes showing the evolution of a relationship between a husband and wife. After losing his wife in old age, the now grumpy man deals with his loss by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, flying into the sky, and going on an adventure with a little boy.
Colby died about seven hours after seeing the film.
The Cash for Clunkers program passed Congress last week, providing rebates for people who trade in old cars and purchase new fuel-efficient vehicles. Participants can receive vouchers worth as much as $4500. Of course, we’re advocates of DIY mechanics—car owners who tinker with their vehicles until the car’s last faint, faltering breath. This is the truly economical (and environmentally friendly) way to treat vehicles. A true clunker, by this reasoning, is one that is beyond even our capable hands. Here, then, is how to tell if your beater is a real clunker—beyond help and ready for a government bailout.
