Crazy times up here in the hills. The much maligned Musso died a week ago - apparently if a timing chain snaps the whole shebang becomes an inert pile of metal - great design and another indication that since the dawn of the automobile the outward appearance may have improved but the old internal combustion engine is still an 18th century-style barely controlled explosion. To quote Norman Mayersohn:
"The internal combustion engine is a throwback. It is a holdover from the age of steam. Its details have been refined, its materials improved and its output multiplied, but the basic mechanism—a piston moving up and down in a cylinder bore—was invented before the phonograph or the light bulb.So we are now out looking for an inefficient fossil fuel burner again <sigh>. Thanks Musso for a swag of stories and a dry bank account.
The product of an era of cheap, abundant energy, the combustion engine is also flagrantly wasteful... today’s gasoline engine typically converts 14 to 30 percent of the energy stored in fuel into useful work. The rest is lost as heat and friction."
On Sunday we tried to go to an Easter church service - honest. We got up in good time, filled everyone up with pancakes, put on our Sunday best - and then headed off. Along the way we were flagged down by an old lady on the side of the road. She is 89 and has just handed in her licence. We have seen her about as she used to drive only in first gear at about 20 kph - you could hear her coming! Anyhoo now she refuses to pay the delivery charge for a Sunday paper. Far better for us to forego 20 minutes of our time and a litre or so of fuel to ferry her to the shops and back!
With "good deeds" under our belt it was time for the "faith" part and off we scampered again, late now, to church. Well thanks to not reading the fine print in last week's bulletin we arrived to an empty carpark and church - the Easter service was half an hour away and we were already 15 minutes late - oh well, I guess deeds will have to do this week. Kym was near crying with laughter.
Whilst out looking for a car today, we were directed towards a wonderfully well kept little white sedan driven back and forth to the shops, as the sales pitch goes, by a little old lady in Mountain River. Yep, the same car the old lady down the road had just switched for our free taxi service.
To finish up this missive of madness, today I looked out the back and saw two moons, one normal and one that appears to be a fully operational Death Star. We know this because we're watching our way through Star Wars with the new kids because it's a great story illustrating that you can use your power for good or evil. Some of us still cried when Darth Vader died in "Return of the Jedi", so I guess we have some more work to do on the whole ethics/morality spectrum.
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| Mooning in the mountains |
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