regfootball

Vince Burlapp's web site has some new pics up of the Buick Regal in black. OK, I'm sold.

you and he would be like peas and carrots.

yeah but its not as you say. leave the clunker out of it. if said car could be bought MSRP for 18, and 2 months ago it was sold at 13,500....but now the same car is 15,500........it means they are holding prices higher. whether you have a clunker is immaterial. then it just means the clunker is a come on to generate showroom traffic..the govt is assisting in padding profits.

well i'm glad someone acknowledged that. that's about all my thoughts produced.

04? you think something is amok?

but they wont even drive an American car. hilarious.

kudos all around. sounds like a lot of great things in the works.

So by my estimates we use 7 billion gallons of gas each year. Just curious if we even used half of that to make electricity if we could get more mileage out of our cars that way. i know its a lot of practicality issues. I am just thinking, if in the end if we can actually produce more electricity burning that gas to make it. since we're intent on burning it anyways.

well, to go from a 15mpg vehicle into a 40 mpg vehicle kind of illustrates what can be done with it. But this is just a band aid. it temporarily eases consumption to appease the greenies / gore freaks and the leftists who want to steer policy to only wanting you to drive small $h!boxes. it does not address any of the problems of foreign oil sourcing or the advancement of alternate propulsion. its not my fault though. People got caught up in the PR campaign that was global warming.....and the financial scam that was 'gas shortage' - AKA 4 dollar gas. And in the end the government spends a billion and leaves us all with more of a tab we can't pay. I am most pissed about this. My tranny is going bye bye on the aztek. If i had gotten the AWD version it would have qualified for clunkers. I got the FWD and its not available. So with an about to be toast tranny, my car has no value. At least with clunkers, a nice 4500 reward would ease the decision making for me. Smoke and mirrors though. If you look and learn, the incentives 2 months ago were far better.....like 2, 3 grand better on some vehicles. Now GM for example has less incentives, as they are letting the govt make up the difference and then some. It basically becomes an auto industry subsidy. I am not totally against it. At least they didn't funnel the money to national public radio or something vile like that. At least GM and Ford provide jobs and make stuff instead of cultivating an irrational set of priorities for its listening base (i.e. green at all costs, etc. yada)

My Five Hundred and Taurus X both have the Pirelli P6. Decent in snow. Not soft, not hard. A little noisy in the 500, not so much in the Trex with more sound insul. Wear seems good. I had 45k on teh 500 when i turned it in and it still had some tread left. my interest is now piqued on the assurance tires.

yeah, true. batteries are the key. but how much fuel do we use in the US each year? like 2 billion gallons? i wonder how much electricity we could make with that.

i guess i meant why not power our electric generation plants with fuel. then, we eliminate the need to manufacture and produce IC engines, gas tanks, etc. in cars, saving lots of resources too. we could potentially lighten our vehicles too to really make them more efficient. of course, the notion of home generators is intriguing if combined with solar assist and stuff. food for thought. but then you would have to deliver fuel which is inefficient. if we did not have gas stations, we could reclaim the land for other use and not spend so much resources on making fuel lines and tanks. my angle here is if the car itself can be simplified, and the distribution of the energy and the materials produce to make it work can be reduced.....

yeah. even grass fed beef is better. high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than aspartame IMHO. we subsidize ag though, so it never becomes outsourced, like all our other industries. big money would start growing all our food overseas and then other countries would have us by the nuts. conspiracy theory. there is a 'consortium' of sorts sponsored quietly by the big ag mafia in this country and the world that seeks to manipualte the genetics of food and its distribution to keep the third world man down. they keep all the master seeds and genetic control like up in iceland or some remote freaking place. they are trying to breed foods that require the distribution of the genetic material to be controlled by 'the man' (apparently includes the ag conglomerates and folks like the rockefellers and stuff). i gotta find that book, its on amazon. some web sites about it too. there is a new burger chain here called SMASHBURGER that is supposed to be the bomb.

So GM will be putting IC engines on the volt. So it still periodically has to burn some gas. Nearly all our cars in this country burn gasoline. But some pundits say we should all have electric cars. So why don't we get rid of the fuel on cars and just use all the fuel we burn profusely every day in our cars, we should use that fuel to power electric power generators instead? and just plug all the cars in. Would we use more or less fuel this way?

crown royal indeed is awesome stuff and they even give you a velvet barf bag to use should you indulge in that goodness a little too much.

x2 where i grew up the reasons they raised the drinking age to 21 was so legals wouldnt buy for their HS friends, and so teen drunks wouldnt drive and kill or get killed quite as much. imagine teen drunks with cell phones. i think if the drinking age and driving age were both 18 (learners permit at 17) you could use a coordinated approach to education and enforcement. myself, i would like to see the drinking age at 19. i dont want high school seniors out binging at bars, and i dont want them buying for HS friends. i had my learners permit at 14 and i think my license as well at late 14 or 15. But dad made sure i didn't drink when i lived under his roof. when i got to college i definitely caught up. lotsa binging. looks kinda silly now but its all part of it. me and buddy used to travel light with our drinks. we would each buy 2 20 oz cokes and dump out some of each and replace it in the bottle with everclear. needless to say, it would last us all night, and we werent spending big money on beer or pissing a lot. and it definitely made you a little bit toasted.

enjoyed the hell out of cheap sutter home cabernet at a wedding this weekend. not sure how many bottles i scarfed down but 8 ibuprofens to make it go away leads me to think it was a good night. mixed with some cheap wedding keg beer too. now that really is carbonated piss. good beer is worth it. and then there is Bud, etc. canadian beers are good. generally though these days i stick to wine, or canadian whiskey / coke zero, or long island teas with diet coke. even light beer ends up being too many calories for the buzz you get.

i lost 100 pounds in the last year or so (few months removed) and 'fast food' alone is not the enemy. eating copious quantities of it is. most places, a burger is one of the best items on the menu. let me clarify that. leave off the cheese, and the mayo. if you leave the ketchup off and use no salt ketchup that helps. look for smaller buns. most burgers are the lowest sodium items on the menu, sodium is the biggest influence on staying bloated. rid yourself of sodium (stay under 100% daily intake, try 50% if you can, good luck with that) and do 1500 calories a day to lose weight. then maintain at less than 2000. eat monounsaturated fats (nuts, oils, avacado, see 'flatbelly diet') as much as you can. greatly reduce your starch intake. watch fat intake, don't get too obsessed with it. Meats like beef, pork, and chicken are fine. avoid fat added items like sausages and weiners, mainly because their sodium level is so high. there are some good chicken and turkey sausage and brat products. i actually did and still do eat many various kinds of veggie burgers, but i do so because you can nuke them quick and they taste good. a 1/4 or 1/3 pound beef patty will have same calories and even likely less sodium than 2 veggie patties. A 1/4 burger at most fast food joints prepared right will be 300-400 calories and not have a lot of sodium. skip the fries and the sugared pop. get a side salad with low cal oil based / vinegar based dressing instead. lay off the condiments and cheese and such that have salt. make your own condiments to lean out the calories and sugar and salt. look for tomato purees and crushed with no sodium in them for bases to make spaghetti sauces and barbeque sauces. use fresh cut jalapenos instead of sodium laced pickles. salads are good but lay off high cal and high sodium dressings. Newmans own light and maple grove farms local dressings are the bomb. chicken, turkey, etc. pork beef all great in salads. we have tacos all the time. i brown a pound of 93% beef and rinse it and to duplicate the chichis taco meat spice mix which is laced with sodium, instead i put in a can of green chiles, onion powder and garlic powder, and finely minced onions (you could mince garlic if you want too). i will sometimes add some light salt to get the saltiness back. Little bit of cumin. then we cut up sides romaine, cheese (not too much!) tomatoes, jalpenos, sometimes black beans, sometimes we have guac and light sour cream. i stopped using hard taco shells. actually, don't even use typical soft shells. Tortilla shells are loaded with calories and sodium. 3 soft shell tortillas alone can pack 600 calories and almost all your daily salt. that said, i found a whole wheat type lo cal tortilla we buy now with 50 calories per shell that is awesome and its not too salty. when you go to chipotle, skip the tortilla and get the burrito bol and lay off some of the higher cal options and you are in good. beans have lots of calories so skip 1/2 of the spoonful if you can. arbys has a few good choices. fast food kills because people just need to search for the items in the sandwiches and such that have all the calories and fat and salt. chicken sandwiches are often killers because either breading or sodium is terrible. when i was losing most of my weight, i was frequenting subway a lot. limit yourself to a 6 inch. skip cheese sometimes. no mayo, etc. pizza and chinese food were my vices, still love em. but i switched to mongolian and truthfully you gorge on a lot of that if the sauces are low sodium and do not have starches in them. mongolian is mostly meat and veggies which if are lean you can eat them without limit and still not get huge. i have not as of yet been able to make a good lo cal pizza although i have found ways to make them low sodium. KFC buffet is a guilty pleasure again now that they have the grilled chicken. strip the skin (the best tasting part) and you get a great protein meal with lower cals than you think and the sodium with the skin off is not too bad. then the buffet just gorge on teh cottage cheese and salad items (not a lot of dressing). back on topic, lets not blame the restaurants, although they should lean up and clean up some of their choices. i have been wanting to try an angus at mcd's now....although i would prob wilt and get a double quarter pounder (no cheese) instead. mcd's side salads are awesome (get two of them and they come with newman dressings). burger king rocks with the whopper and double cheese (skip the cheese). now i am hungry. veggie burger for lunch!

rotating every 6k i get a lot of life out of my tires. the forteras on my aztek went to like 70k, even with them cupped and making noise. the fortera assurance triple tread or whatever is an intriguing tire. my forteras were even ok in snow.

The Eagle RSAs i had on my SHO were ok. they were decent. kinda loud, but got 60k + out of them and they were ok in snow. Replaced them with Conti Pro COntacts, a tire that is not well known, but affordable and a very good tire and quite good in snow for a speed rated tire. I had eagle aquatreds on my first SHO, trememdous sticking power and soft and quiet (quietest tire i ever had) but only lasted about 25k miles. Tires do make a big diff. I had a Diamante with some crappy base yokohamas. Traded it for one a year later with different tires and alum wheels. The yokohamas, worst tires in snow i ever had and yes they were all seasons. crappy in dry also. i cant recall which brand the second one had. they may have been goodyear or michelin or bridgestone but a MAJOR improvement. Same car, but the tires made it so much better. tires really can make a difference.

incentives are crap this month. may and june was the time to buy. gm cleared the books so they are in no rush to fire sale cars anymore and the plant shutdowns have starved dealers.

real women don't poop.

first equinox had that also. FWIW, the malibu maxx had the same feature as well. clever. unappreciated. handy.

engine code 1811 'max shift adapt delay' or something. plus now a little slippage. recommend diagnostic. will probably do next week. hopefully its just the PCS. pressure control solenoid. otherwise new remanufactured trannies are 3 grand. apparently GM does big business on this one.

Californians feel BMWs are an entitlement so i think CARB will not bear down so hard on them.....