This story is slightly outdated now that Toyota has announced (with very few details) their plans to repair (not replace) their crappy accelerators causing deaths nationwide and now that the probe expands, deepens, and finally it seems like somebody is paying attention to the baby killing machines that Toyota produces. This aspect of it is still relevant, though, and angers me to no end.
Toyota is sending new gas pedal systems to its factories rather than its dealership service departments, The Associated Press learned Friday. The move angered some dealers who say they should get the parts to take care of the millions of car owners whose accelerators may stick.
Dealers? Good god, what about the customers? The fact that Toyota sent this to their factories, so they could sell new cars, before fixing all the death traps they’ve got on the road is one of the most unforgivable things I can imagine. They’ve got “precision cut steel reinforcement bars” on the way to dealers now, but I don’t find that phrase, nor its other name, “shim”, nor the fact that it will take a significant amount of time to train their servicepeople to do the repair, comforting at all. This is almost certainly the last Toyota I’ll ever buy.
Can somebody please string these assholes up by their sphincters? Are we really going to let them hide behind their lawyers as their dawdling costs lives, money, and lost productivity as many parents are now, quite reasonably, not putting their kids in these car-to-coffin transformers?
It’s been nice, that’s for sure, in terms of driving conditions, general comfort, and the gas bill. The cloud contained in this silver lining, though? These warm temps, while nice in January, are more typical, not of February or March, but April. Meaning I have a lot of crappy Aprils to look forward to.
The really crazy part about it, though, comes at the end of that blog post.
Today while walking through the UW campus I was surprised to see a number of the cherry trees in blossom and many daffodils in full flower.
I’m not even sure I believe it since I haven’t seen it myself. The last three years those trees haven’t reached bloom until spring break, which is the last week of March. This puts them two months ahead of schedule, which is just plain eerie. Though I have noticed some bushes blooming around here several weeks ahead of schedule. Still…two months? Might faltering end early this year? I won’t get my hopes up.
Last year I reviewed 10 2008 albums that received four or more lunchboxes. In 2009 I only reviewed two that achieved that score. And 2009 didn’t have a single five lunchbox album, at least not that got reviewed here and, really, did it even happen if it didn’t get reviewed here? Sucks to be 2009. But of course that’s been covered elsewhere. At least Melvins made the top ten list two years running.
The other night in childbirth preparation class, between watching explicit videos of birth and practicing breathing, my offspring got the hiccups. It was bothering him as well as My Baby. He’d move violently with each hiccup and thrash around after each one; My Baby attributed the secondary thrashing to him being upset by the hiccup.
But never fear, Daddy’s here. I applied some pressure to My Baby’s abdomen with my hand and rubbed firmly and slowly. From the minute I started rubbing his hiccups stopped and they didn’t come back.
My accelerated path to World’s Greatest Dad continues. I’ve got this s**t down. Bring on the teenage years.
So Toyota sold me a death trap. Thank god they talked me out of that Kia with the whole resale value argument because I bet these death traps are really going to hold their value. If they were a house, I think you could talk about my loan/mortgage as being underwater right now.
Not that resale value’s that big a deal for us…we were planning to drive this into the ground. Looks like we’ll be driving it into a wall instead.
The best part may be their response. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
If I am an owner of one of the affected vehicles, what action do I need to take? Toyota is working quickly to prepare a correction remedy and will issue owner notifications in the future. No action is required at this time unless you feel you are experiencing this condition. If you are experiencing this condition, immediately contact your nearest Toyota Dealer for assistance.
Maybe they’re right. After all, how bad could the problem be if they’ve STOPPED SELLING SEVEN FUCKING MODELS, including their flagships the Camry and Corolla. O. M. F’ing. G.
I have to take it in to the dealership for an oil change this week (we got a few free). I’m pretty sure I’m going to walk in with a t-shirt that reads “Ask Me About My Death Trap” and start loudly asking questions about whether I can get my money back on my death trap.
The Red Sox of the NFL strike again, managing to get oh so close and once again amaze us with their ability to lose in new and unimagined ways. Our biggest rival’s greatest player ever joins us to be thwarted by a 12 man in the huddle penalty to push us out of field goal range? Wow…didn’t see that one coming.
I’m very sad, natch, but am handling this one in stride, much unlike the disaster of 1999. It’s just who the Vikings are. If they were different, they wouldn’t be the Vikings. It’s just their way…you don’t know what it’s like when we’re alone together.
Besides, since 1999 I lived through the W presidency, and two financial crises (and two respective turns of unemployment), and the health care reform and Haiti disasters of the last two weeks served to provide some immediate perspective as well. So I’m not completely distraught, and I’m not disowning them like I did for a few years after 1999, either. I’m owning them, wearing them like a battle scar, a badge of…not honor…but a badge of something.
The Vikings are like sun spots, managing to lose NFC championships in stunning, painful, head-shaking fashion every 11 years. 1988, dropped pass in the end zone. 1999, the best Vikings team ever lost as the only field goal kicker ever to make every kick in a season missed a relatively easy kick indoors. 2010, well, we’ve covered that. And don’t forget about that one year we needed to beat an awful Arizona team in the last week just to make the playoffs and we let them score a last second touchdown on something like 4th and 25 from midfield. I’ve got money on an excessive celebration penalty in 2021.
I can’t remember why, but for some reason over Thanksgiving my mom turned on her cell phone, something she never does unless she’s on a road trip. When she turned it on the phone made an audible alert.
Mom: Oh, somebody’s calling just as I turned it on.
Me: It’s probably just telling you you have a voice mail.
Mom: Oh. No, wait…it says ‘new voice message.’ What does that mean?
Me: …
Mom: Is that the same as voice mail?
Me: Yes.
As My Baby pointed out, what’s odd here is that “mail” in “voice mail” is really a misnomer. There’s nothing mail-y, in the postal service sense of the word, about receiving a voice mail. But here they’ve tried to be more accurate in their naming and it’s only confused things.
Someday I will be old. This fact is often presented to me in such stark ways that there is no way I could overlook it.
I signed a contract that will keep me working at least through March and seems likely to be extended until July.
I don’t know if I’m mature enough to make it work, though. I may end up sucking my thumb curled up in the bouncy, animal-covered chair waiting for somebody else downstairs.
Probably just typical new-job jitters. Man there has been/is a lot of change going on around here. Still, I have a blessed life.
As I was emotionally medicating with a bag of plain M&M’s yesterday afternoon (my brand new machine blue screened five times in 70 minutes, I’m being “asked” to write a paper I don’t want or need to write but mostly the computer crashing thing, and this health care debacle…good f’ing god), I remembered that at one point it time I felt very strongly against adding any colors at the time that M&M’s was adding the blue M.
You probably saw this all over Facebook et al. when it happened last month, but since love of Al Franken has been a big theme of this blog, I don’t hesitate to give it its late time in the spotlight here. What you’ve got is Al Franken calling out John Thune’s lies on the floor of the Senate. I find the “you’re not entitled to your own facts” line staid and naive, but I do love Franken’s witty ferocity. During a stretch where I’ve felt so disappointed in our system and in many individual Democrats, it’s nice to have some optimism left that Franken really will be a strong progressive voice for Minnesotans in the Senate.