Space Car

2017 Hyundai Sonata

On our recent expedition to Iowa I rented a Hyundai Sonata from Hertz. I needed to carry four adults from Omaha to Sioux City and back. We flew into Omaha because it's a P.I.T.A. to fly into Sioux City from Portland, Oregon.

Hyundai Sonata Dashboard

The dashboard looks like something out of Buck Rogers. Buttons and dials and glowing instruments. As all of the controls for actually operating the vehicle were conventional enough, I was able to get in and drive away. But getting any of the creature comforts to operate was another matter.

Notice the small control panel on the right spoke of the steering wheel. And the red triangle in the 'center stack'.

It's not a long drive from Omaha to Sioux City, maybe an hour and a half or so, but it would nice to have some tunes. so I set my wife to seeing if she can find something on the radio. Does this car even have a radio? There is nothing in the dash that looks like a radio, but it's got to have one, doesn't it? I mean radios are traditional. OK, no radio as such, but there is a tablet-sized touch screen and with poking and prodding she is able to tune in some kind of rock and roll and we're good.

We're good until the song ends and then an endless litany of commercials commences. We can put up with this for a while, but eventually we reach our limit and sweetie starts looking for a new station and then, all of a sudden, the emergency flashers start flashing. Flash (Gordon), being on a mission from God, would have charged on regardless, but mild-mannered Chucky, worried about causing the Highway Patrol undue stress took the next exit and pulled over to try and figure out what happened. Well, where the heck is the emergency flasher control? We look in all the normal locations but eventually we spy the red triangle in the middle of the dashboard. Oh, that's it, obviously. We turn off the flashers and go on our merry way.

Since we are on an Interstate highway, I would like to engage the cruise control. I don't want to have to keep watching the speedometer and adjusting my speed to accommodate every little change in the road's incline. Yes, we are in Iowa, and Iowa is very flat, but even the slightest grade can affect the cars speed. I am pushing the envelope on what the cops will tolerate and I don't want push it too far. It would be easy to do. The road is flat and straight and the speedometer goes to 160 MPH.

There is a little mini-control-panel on the right spoke of the steering wheel and the top right button is labeled CRUISE. I push it and little green CRUISE word appears on the instrument panel. I try pushing several of the other buttons to see if I can set the speed, but nothing happens.

The upper left button appears to be a stack of paper (pages?) and pushing it causes the center display between the speedometer and the tachometer to change. I think there are four pages. Pushing this button allows you to cycle through these pages. Eventually I figure out that you can get the cruise control to engage only if you are on the correct page. I don't know whether this is a feature or a bug.

The instrument panel is black with white numbers and other markings. The white is very bright. It wasn't until we got to Sioux City and I specifically stopped and looked for the instrument panel brightness control that I located it. It has it's own little switch on the lower left portion of the dashboard.

I'm thinking that playing with buttons and switches on our increasing complex electronic gee-gaws is America's new past time. It's not just cars. Watch someone trying to find a photo on their smart phone. The tapping and swiping can go on for hours, and it's no good trying to remember the sequence you used to get there, because the next time you will be starting in a different place (in your smart-phone's interface), looking for a different picture using an app that works a little differently than the last time you used it because your smart-phone vendor has pushed an update down the 'wire'. Cars, at least for the moment, are not getting automatic updates. At least I don't think they are.

Employment

Horizon Air Bombardier DHC-8

Matt-of-the-Lake has landed a job with Horizon Air as a flight attendant, based out of Spokane. Spokane is not the world's most popular location, being in Eastern Washington, but being based there should give him a more consistent flight schedule, and possibly more hours.

PenAir Saab 340B

He was working for PenAir as a general gofer up until a couple of weeks ago when he quit, which happened to be one week before PenAir went bankrupt. Matt wasn't able to work as a flight attendant on PenAir because at 6'2" he was too tall to fit in their airplanes. PenAir's height limit was 5'10".

Paloma

Paloma Cocktail

We've been drinking Tequila cocktails lately. Mostly Margaritas but recently Palomas. Palomas taste better than Margaritas and are dirt simple to make: a shot of Tequila in a glass of ice and fill with Squirt (grapefruit flavored soft drink). Salt on the rim, like a Margarita, and a little lime juice if you want. I don't know that the lime juice adds anything, but the salt definitely helps. Tequila, to me, does not taste very good, in fact it tastes pretty awful. The salt takes away the awful and with Squirt it becomes a pleasant drink, which is kind of contrary to the spirit of Tequila!, but it suits me.

Madman Theory

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito, ca. 1675

The madman theory was a feature of Richard Nixon's foreign policy. He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response. - Wikipedia

Hoo boy, just what we need, a fake madman in charge. Somehow this doesn't seem like a good idea, but perhaps it worked? I mean Nixon (the evil criminal mastermind) did get us out of our Vietnam quagmire, which I think was all-in-all a good thing. Via The Adventures of Roberta X.

Stardust by Joseph Kanon

Stardust by Joseph Kanon

What with all my 'adventures' this summer it has taken me a long time to finish this book. It's pretty great. We have a murder mystery set in Hollywood just after WW2 when the communist witch hunts were just getting started. The entire book is an exercise in duplicity, or rather in detecting duplicity. There is some kind of underhanded business going on, possibly subversive, but really unknown because the key player is dead. Our hero gets to put the pieces together, but in true Hollywood fashion he doesn't figure it out until we get to the stereotypical Hollywood denouement: a bad guy emerges from the shadows with a gun, our hero looses his gun and the dame rescues him, or does she? These are the kinds of idiotic scenes I hate in the movies, but they seem to be required in any kind of action flick. But here I can forgive the author because we are so wrapped up in the movie making business it would be sacrilege to have it to wind up any other way.

This story has many great parts, mostly involved with the characters and their interactions. One thing that stuck out was whole communist witch hunt thing. I don't know how much trouble the commies ever caused in the USA, but the radical Muslims are demonstrating that secret organizations can make serious trouble. So if you are investigating someone for subversive and / or criminal activity, you want to do it quietly, not in front of a bunch of reporters and cameras. But if you are a politician, that is your meat and potatoes, so that's the way you do it.

Linkage

Stuff that showed up in my inbox while I was out having an adventure.

On the Zambesi out of Vic Falls. Via Jack. I'm not quite sure what we have here,
it might be lizard porn. Shoot, since it's from Jack, I know it's lizard porn.

Can a better night’s sleep in a ‘hipster’ bus replace flying? Via Posthip Scott.
Meatpistol and Defcon. Via Detroit Steve.
James Damore memo. Via Monday Evening. Medium has a version complete with charts, etc.
Parabellum. Via Iaman.

Sioux City Adventure

Cold French fries at Wendy's Tuesday evening. Grainy frosty at Wendy's (same time and same place.) Burger was good though. I have to admit that it was late, after 10PM, and this is not the big city. This whole section of town seemed pretty dead this time of night, but there were two fast food joints (Wendy's and McDonald's) that advertised being open 24 hours. On the surface it doesn't seem to make sense that they should stay open all night long, but maybe they get a big influx of customers when the bars close at 2AM. Or maybe the two joints are in a life and death struggle to survive. If one offers something, the other feels compelled to offer something similar. This will either end with both of them retreating to some smaller number of hours that will generate enough revenue to stay in business. Or one of them will collapse and close.

Embraer E175 Regional Jet

Not hot breakfast sandwich at Omaha airport yesterday morning. We're flying on an Embraer 'regional jet'. 1500 miles and it's 'regional'. Pretty damn big region. It's small-ish. Only four seats across, but the aisle is wide enough to walk down, not like those skinny ass aisles they have on those damn 'Dreamliners'. Who gave them that name? And whose dream is it anyhoo? And how could you arrange it any better? With seven seats across and two aisles, what are you going to do? Make it six seats and one really wide aisle? Or six seats and two decent size aisles? I suppose you could do seven seats across and one decent aisle, but it would mean four seats together on one side of the aisle, which means that when the guy in the window seat has to use the john, three other people are going to have to move out of his way. The social pressure of having to make three people move so you can get out could lead to someone staying in their seat much longer than they should, which could lead to 'accidents' or possibly even long term health problems. (Look at that dude, he's so full of s*** that his eyeballs are turning brown. He musta got stuck in a window seat in one of those reconfigured Dreamliners.) The fuselage on those Dreamliners is just the wrong diameter. Or all seats need to be first class size.

The Famous Diving Elks

Good grilled tuna steak at the Diving Elk Wednesday night. I've been on a bit of a seafood kick ever since we went to Seattle. Usually I order beef, mostly because I like it but also because it's my god given right as an American to eat steak whenever I want and I intend to make full use of that right. Besides, I'm eating for all those people who can't get any beef due to politics and/or their uncooperative nature. But lately I've been ordering seafood. I cannot explain why.

Stoney Creek Inn Lobby, Sioux City, Iowa

The Diving Elk has a stuffed elk head hanging on the wall. The lobby in the Stony Creek Inn is kind of like being in a Cabela's diorama. They have a moose head hanging on the wall and a full size bison standing on a platform about the same height. And don't forget the giant fake trees or the piles of logs stacked by the gas fireplace. Kind of like Disneyland, completely fake and tourist-hardened Frontier Inn.

Grandpa was in the hospital when we got there, but they discharged him and sent him back to his retirement home that afternoon. A couple of hours later they send him back to the hospital, and then a couple hours later they send him back to the retirement home. He made a total of six trips that day which seems absurd. Are these folks incompetent? Did the presence of our of town visitors disturb the equilibrium and so their judgement? Or maybe grandpa is just in that gray area where there really isn't much they can do for him.

Socks packed into model of Kinnick Stadium. Iowa Hawkeyes birthday cake.

The whole point of this trip was to celebrate grandpa's 90th birthday. He's made it farther than any of my kids other grandparents. The others have all passed away. I think there might be (might have been?) some other relatives of my wife who lived longer. I seem to remember hearing about someone turning 95. Aunt Gladys, maybe?

Sleep Inn, Eppley Field, Omaha

We drove back to Omaha last night to catch our early morning flight. We stayed at a SleepInn near Eppley field. No place to wirte home about, but our room did have a cool semi-circular extension to the shower. And breakfast starts at 4AM, though I didn't get any. Instead I got the not-hot sandwich at the airport.

We all got approved for TSA pre-check, which means we get to go in the short line, which wasn't really any shorter than the regular line being as this is Omaha and not all that busy at oh dark thirty, and then the (middle-aged? older?) lady at the head of the line bawks at the metal detector. Whether she is afraid of radiation or is one of the new model cyborgs with the metal skeletons wasn't immediately clear.

Everyone was aboard and in their seat 15 minutes ahead of take off time so we got to take off a little early. Right now it is quarter to ten West Coast time and the captain has just announced that we have started our descent into Portland.

Contrary Exit

After the trip to Seattle and the trip to San Francisco (12 hours in a car is too damn long), the drives from Omaha to Sioux City and back were pleasant little pieces of cake. I did miss one exit on the way back to Omaha, or rather I took an exit I shouldn't have. It's not my fault though. Interstate 29 bends around to the right, but if you go straight, which is where the main route should go, you end up at a stoplight somewhere, which means a couple of miles wandering through a residential neighborhood until our smart phone navigation aid gets us back to the expressway.