I'm a conservative, former Boy Scout, hiker, writer, and amateur snapshot photographer. I'm also, I suspect, a narcissist because nobody else around here is worth obsessing over or talking about. I know this is a flaw, but people here aren't especially nice. Egotism is a natural disease for authors, btw. Every single one of them is an egotist. Even if you're really good at observing people, you can't write about anything unless you believe in yourself most of all, and vanity presses are so cheap these days it no longer costs money to publish through them so you don't have to be rich to be an egotistical author.
I think this is part of why I find Jeremy Clarkson so very entertaining. He's one of the hosts of the car review show Top Gear. They do many silly stunts involving cars to show of their designs and sometimes their flaws in ways you don't normally do in a car test drive with a dealer. They also do some hilarious things which piss off the Liberals, like buy used cars and drive them to show off their cheaper to keep running than the taxes and fuel from electric cars and hybrids, which still aren't there yet. All you have to know about hybrids is watch a current Season F1 race and see which cars just... stop. That isn't a normal thing for F1, before hybrid engine setups this year. Some champions have had their cars just die on them. Its been hilarious chaos having F1 insist on being green. When Bernie Ecclestone, current chairman of F1, steps down or dies underneath his latest conquest with a heart attack and a smile on his face, the new chairman should fix the formula back to cars with engines, no batteries, and probably a clutch pedal would be a good idea too. The cars back in the 1980's were faster. Keep the cameras, but lose the team radios. Let the drivers drive. Top Gear makes suggestions on car racing, and why rallysport is cheaper and more fun than golf. They even made a film about it.
See? Better than golf. And you'll end up learning a lot from your car, what makes it go, how to repair it, what equipment is essential and what is just weight that hurts performance. Around here, in the mountains, lots of people have specialized offroading trucks and jeeps, with roll bars and big knobby tires, some of them for the sport of riding dirt roads, but most I think because they have pot fields and that's the only way to get there.
Top Gear has also reviewed ATVs, which I appreciate, since they're the modern equivalent of the Willys Jeep that hasn't been made for years and was the sort of quality steel you'd find in a Lancia, most of which currently fits in a small bucket due to the rust.
ATVs do what little jeeps did but don't anymore due to modern car safety standards. Yes, modern cars are very safe, but they're also very heavy and unsuitable to offroading. Subarus are mostly AWD to help with slushy snow conditions, not actual offroad. They can deal with gravel, which is slightly slippery, and graded dirt roads, but nothing more severe than that. As graded dirt is one rainstorm away from rutted dirt or stream or mud bog, Subarus just don't cut it in real woods. They're good for snowy places like here and Tahoe, which is about an hour away over the crest, as we call it. Nobody has a lancia, and while there's plenty of Priuses around here, I don't see many moving when it snows. Mountains are special conditions. We don't get many 49cc Vespas either. It is mostly bigger bikes, and I see more Dual Sport bikes than scooters on the road here. More useful. Like a jeep, only you can hurt yourself a lot further away from help on one. Still, better than walking 20 miles.
The Polar Vortex is coming again, because we're having a double-dip El Nino. El Nino is not human caused. They've been happening for at least 100K years, predating coal burning, people as we are today, and even the most recent ice age. And they keep happening and I think most of the global warming hysteria is a mix of religious nihilism by masochists like Al Gore (or con men cashing in on the panic to make a lot of money and attend parties with breathy hippie chicks who don't wear bras or panties) is just more El Nino weather. There's tons of data on El Nino, how it works, what makes them and what ends them, and nobody confuses El Nino weather events with people because its ocean currents responsible. Way bigger than us. And going on longer than we've been us. You can't sell the idea because its ridiculous.
Polar Vortexes, before they got the silly name and eviscerated public support of Warming, costing the Greens this election and their control of public funding to their environmental causes, which is still about hippie chicks not fixing any part of the environment. Its a fund raising scam, and the funds are going into Freds Bank, which is his left front pocket, not the thing they're "saving". They never "save" anything. Its ALWAYS a scam. That's one of those truths. This is one of those fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives do the work. Liberals raise money they don't care to see where it goes because it always goes to a scammer they fool themselves into trusting. Idiots. The Polar Vortexes are going to slam global warming again this winter, and its going to make the Liberals look even stupider, and cost them more support and I'm going to laugh, even though this means more drought for California. We need the water. This years El Nino should be weaker than last, so we should probably get more rain and snow than last year, but still not normal levels of it. California hasn't had many Top Gear visits, and Clarkson has avoided the wine country and the Pacific Coast Highway north or south of San Francisco. I am not sure why, I'm sure there's a reason. Maybe he'd get bogged down racing on the curvy roads that he thought American's didn't know existed.
He likes to say American cars flip over at the least sign of a corner, and he's not completely wrong. I saw lots of 1970's musclecars in ditches when I was a kid. Live rear axel meets bumpy pavement requiring all independent suspension? Duh. When my Dad bought an AWD SUV for mountain roads in the snow because he had friends on gravel roads and holiday dinners are socially mandatory here, he couldn't find an American one without a live rear axle so went to the Japanese who understood them newfangled Wishbone thangs. This gives you all independent suspension and prevents many kinds of crashes, provided you do your part. When people who are fans of SUVs and Trucks insist the live rear axle is "good enough" this just tells me they live on very straight roads or lack imagination or perhaps haven't heard that other options exist.
Someday events like the Polar Vortex are going to be called "winter" again like they were back in the 1980s and those kinds of blizzards happened weekly during the long Eastern Winters, and the Midwest didn't fuss about Chicago being closed down by snow because this happened every year. The brief period of slightly warmer and drier winters we've had in the 1990's and 00's has returned to more normal patterns. This is new to the 20 somethings, but old hat to me. And justifies the taxes and crap economy here in California, though that will change as normal winters will prompt more old boomers in the Midwest to sell out at market price and move here to warm up their joints and reduce that winter arthritis pain. There are lots more areas in California where we can build houses, provided we build water pumps to supply their lawns, sewers and swimming pools. I could easily see Cloverdale, Willits, Ukiah and such getting huge retirement communities, hospitals and jobs, with RV maintenance, storage and sales for those hot summer months when the locals get out to the coast and enjoy seeing America and not being in the 115'F heat. Lots of California has much better weather than the Midwest in the winter. You don't have to spend a fortune buying in Palm Springs to take advantage of it. Polar Vortexes should kickstart the next housing boom here, and that will mean jobs and development.
As for the Midwest? Getting normal cold winters again supports splitting cords of firewood, having a wood stove and a blower run by a couple of deep cycle marine batteries. That will heat your house. It means putting up the storm windows, and probably winter curtains too, and those silica absorbers at the base so moisture doesn't ruin your floors and walls when its really cold out. Serious winters justify serious preparations and a deep pantry and probably a generator. We used to get those, back in the 80's. The weather is returning to normal. Calling it a Polar Vortex is just more media politics, more bias. More propaganda. More reason to get your news elsewhere. And the public voted and slammed the entire agenda. Bring on the snow. Snowmobiles are fun. Skis are great exercise. Cuddling up to your spouse makes more babies, perhaps ones that won't be conned into warming nonsense when they play in the snow every winter. This is normal weather, not "extreme". Extreme was the mild warm winters of 20 years past. That's over. Back to normal.
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