Intrepidation

I know, it amazes me how badly people can treat their cars. Of course then youc ome across bargains that have been very well cared for. Just a matter of looking.

I really want a wagon, truck or minivan for a beater...I miss the utility of our van.

Oh I wasn't really looking at it as a beater, I was just curious why the price was so low....and I got my answer. As far as LH cars go, yeah there's a lot of beat up ones but you can also find some treasures too. Friend of mine got a 2.7 SE as a beater so he could keep his ES off teh road. The owner thought the engine was bad and parked it for two years. Turned out that all it was was the harmonic balance pulley. That thing is in amazing shape...paint looks factory fresh without swirling or anything....all for $300. Then I saw for about $500 on Craigslist an R/T that overheated, had a messed up interior, and every body panel was damaged.

On my way home from Lowell today I passed by a small used car dealer on 110 and noticed out from was a grayish `99 LHS with a window sticker for $699. Naturally had to go back and check it out. Park in front of the office and an old salesman greets me. I ask if I can go look at the LHS and if the price was $699. he said yes. We went over to it and he started it up. First things I notice: it has an exhuast leak and more ominously, it makes a hissing/humming sound (what is that sound anyway?). He pops teh hood and I have a look. First thing I notice here is that it's dirty, and there's oil residue around the oil filler cap and the front of the plenum. Then I noticed that the a/c belt had come off and was just hanging there inside out. I let the guy know, who was surprised. He turned it off and pull teh broken belt out. Next I start checking fluids. This is where things go from bad to worse. Oil cap has antifreeze residue on the bottom of it and lining the inside. Check the dipstick, the oil is dirty and it has particles all over it. This engine is basically a ticking time bomb. The other fluids looked ok, but but because the engine was warm I couldn't check the antifreeze to see if oil was mixing or whatnot. Body appears to be in reasonable shape besides a weird dent on teh trunk lid, like someone tried to pry it open. The trunk itself had an alloy spare in it...but no lining at all. Passenger window did not work, the others did but the driver's motor didn't sound good. The central locks did not work from the driver's door nor did the trunk release. However, they did work via the fob. There was tape on the passenger door window switch. Otherwise the interior looked in reasonable shape. As I was going around again I noticed that black paint was coming off the side mirrors and that, weirdly, the grill that the wipers rest on (whatever its called) was gone. It also had 204,000 (hard apparently) miles. After looking it over I start talking to the salesman about it. He told me it drives, steers and shifts good, and didn't overheat. I told him that's good, and the electrical problems and exhuast leak aren't so bad, but there's antifreeze mixing with the oil and that there were particles in the oil, and that it was only a matter of time before it went. He had nothing to say after that. A shame really, but couldn't do an engine swap myself, and that would run about $2,000 before all of the other issues were taken care of. I want a beater, but $700 IMO is too much and that engine isn't long for this world.

Excellent work! You've taken an already great ar and stepped it up to the next level. I love the interior improvements, especially the GPS, and the GXP style fascias. Have you thought about GXP wheels? Modding is fun and addictive.

That would be pretty pathetic if people couldn't even print by hand.

I grade school I had to learn and use cursive from 2nd to 8th grade. However, once I got to high school it was never a requirement. Besides my stylized signature I haven't written in cursive in years. I still write things down all the time, just never in cursive. It always seemed like more work than needed to write a note or make a list.

I actually wouldn't mind a Toyota product, especially a Camry wagon. Remember, my goal is to something I won't care about beating the crap out of. :wink: I've seen a couple Subarus...always liked the first gen outbacks, plus AWD would be sweet. However my budget is no more than $500 so finding one that works will be tough. I've seen a couple Saturns for that price, even saw a Silverado is good condition for $400

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature. "I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said. Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise. West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade. "It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools. Davis' experience gets repeated every time parents, who recall their own hours of laborious cursive practice, learn that what used to be called "penmanship" is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills. The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. "We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English. Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. "They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said. Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long. "I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds." For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift." That fear is not new, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that produces a variety of instructional material for schools. "If you go back, you can see the same conversations came up with the advent of the typewriter," she said. Every year, Zaner-Bloser sponsors a national handwriting competition for schools, and this year saw more than 200,000 entries, a record. "Everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid's going to have a keyboard, but that isn't really true." Few schools make keyboards available for day-to-day writing. The majority of school work, from taking notes to essay tests, is still done by hand. At Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teacher Sharon Spencer stresses cursive to her first- through third-graders. By the time her students are in the third grade, they are writing book reports and their spelling words in cursive. To Spencer, cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination. "In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said. But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print. That was probably smart, according to Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who cites multiple studies showing that sloppy writing routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand. Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 26 percent of 12th graders lack basic proficiency in writing, while two percent were sufficiently skilled writers to be classified as "advanced." "Handwriting is really the tail wagging the dog," Graham said. Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock. Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade, Graham said, and Wright said it's common for adults to write in a cursive-print hybrid. "People still have to write, even if it's just scribbling," said Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist and a member of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation. "Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we're going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication," she said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090919/ap_on_...s_cursive_angst

He's absolutely right. There's such low demand for wagons and such a stigma against them. People want crossovers. Wagons are a very low percentage of the US car market these days.

Hah, that's awesome. I do that very thing when I need to paint a little area and only have spray paint handy.

What he could do is mask off the ares around the trim piece with say, painter's tape to avoid spillage, that might work.

Pics would help, but 3M make a lne of adhesive that will work. Forget the exact name, but just ask at any auto parts store. As for surface prep...you'll want it to be as clean as possible for best adhesion.

Sounds really cool.

Man there's some pretty good ones out there, found this on LHF.

Its that time of year again. Winter is only a few months away and with it will come snow, ice, and worst of all, salt. With all the work that' been done t the Intrepid I really want it to sit the winter out again this year. However I also want to keep the Prizm out of the stuff as much as possible, because I don't want it to rust away. I'm just casually looking around for now, nothing serious. It's always fun to look. If I do get something 'm planning to do it around November. I'm looking for dirt cheap really. Something I won't feel bad about. I'd really like a wagon or a minivan...I miss that utility, but anything that is mechanically sound where it counts will do. Of course, if I were to end up with the GM I'd be happy with that. Sure I care about the car but it's a tank and its got snow tires on it, I'd just actually wash it and studd regularly unlike a pure beater. Anyone else looking for a beater?

Happy Birthday!

So far the only person I don't care for is one of the guys who was hired when I was. He's probably in his 40's or so. he's one of those people who will take any chance to insert what he thinks is a funny and witty comment when it's stupid and annoying. Luckily we're busy so he doesn't get much opportunity and while I've got my headphones on I don't have to listen to it. Besides that though, I quite like the people I work with.

The driver is an idiot. I would have gone postal if someone rear ended me (again), especially for such a stupid reason like this. I have to admit, to Cavaliers together like that looks pretty funny.

WEYMOUTH, Mass. -- An "itsy bitsy spider" caused a big crash in Weymouth. Amber Buckner, 26, was at the corner of Princeton and Bridge streets when she was distracted by a spider inside her car. She rear-ended the car in front of her, which went straight up onto two wheels and collapsed on top of her car. Buckner, her passenger and Danielle Evju, the driver of the car she struck, were all taken to the hospital with minor injuries. "She's like 'Oh my God, is everybody all right? I was just paying attention to the spider, the spider that was on my windshield.' And that's all that she was paying attention to," Evju said. Buckner is being charged with following too closely and with driving an unregistered vehicle. "I think that it's absolutely ridiculous, that she should have pulled over, I think paying attention on the road, I mean these are people's lives." Firefighters told Evju that the way her gas tank was hit, she could have been killed. (Copyright © 2009 Sunbeam Television Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/BO124842/

Clicky

Good for the student. Obviously if the cops had bothered to catch the guy again it would have been repeating cycle. He would have committed crimes again. The kid defended his property and himself when lunged at, he better not be charged with anything. One less low life in this world.

That's astonishing.

I like the intro. The site itself is nice although unremarkable.

That made my day.