Day: August 6, 2007

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The Wonderful Land of Serendip

Busier than I really wanted to be, but have had a forced break.

No shiftee from firstee, lil car would makee. Gearshift just flops.

Yep. Linkage disconnected.

Center console out. Yep. Shift linkage bushing broken–pretty cleanly into two pieces. Temp “jackleg mechanic” fix: quick epoxy and cloth tape [N.B., also known as “friction tape”] with a layer of epoxy over that. Holds. Shifts. Drives. But not the right fix.

This guy has the fix. Great job, Roger! Off to the hardware store! (Well, after combing through my junk bins here at twc central. Heck, I might have everything I need right here!)

UPDATE: Nope. Didn’t. Sooo, I just “had to” run an “errand” that took me by a Lowes. Picked up some Grade Five hardware (it’s be heck to have a soft steel bolt break in traffic, eh?). Yeh, looks good. Now, the key to just how much this warms the cockles of this tightwad’s heart is that when the bushing goes south on one of these lil cars–a 1997 Saturn–ya can’t just buy the bushing. The way Saturn made the thing, if you want to replace the bushing, you have to buy a $375 shift assembly cable, etc. This way, even buying an extra few pieces of hardware–spares, ya know :-)–I spent about $2.50. And heck, the installation can’t be anywhere near the time and effort of replacing the entire assembly! Getting on it as soon as the battery for my lil cordless Dremmel is fully charged.

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I blog these things so you don’t have to

Even some Dhims have (or at least once had—this was in 2005) a better feel for the political pulse of the electorate than Fifi Mohammed Bush and his cronies do:

“Bubba doesn’t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we’re going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat.”

— Political consultant Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, quoted by Craig Crawford, on how Democrats can pick up blue-collar white males if they move to the right on immigration.

But lest that quote seem vaguely encouraging (while demeaning those who are concerned aboiut American sovereignty and the rule of law), remember we always have Foggy Bottom to remind us that evil should never suffer consequences that are just and fitting. For example, when Tom Tancredo sanely observed that threatening (with, I assume, the intent to carry through) to nuke Mecca and Medina if Islamic terrorists (yeh, I know: redundancy alert) nuked an American city, the State Department, in the person of a “deputy spokesperson” had one of its typical hissy fits:

Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN’s Elise Labott that the congressman’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.”

No, head-Casey, what’s “absolutely crazy” is cozying up to mad dogs and expecting not to get bitten. You don’t give mad dogs treats; you shoot them. Better, if they have a place to congregate, you wait for a large influx of ’em and nuke it.

There you have it: from both sides of the aisle brief brushes (for whatever politically realpolitik reasons) with the sanity Fifi Mohammed Bush has forsaken.

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