Herculodge

Adrenaline Rush Chic or Handsome Practicality?

For 2007, the new Mini Cooper, referred to as the "Mini II," will be released with a newer, more modern engine made by Peugeot and Citroen. A super charged model with an automatic will probably cost 24K. You can bet it will be expensive to maintain, but it will give you the smile factor every time you sit in it.

Or you could get a 2007 Civic EX sedan with a spoiler and 17-inch wheels for about 21K. Better gas mileage and cheaper repair costs for sure. But is it worth the compromise of adrenaline that the Mini affords?

What a dilemma for car lovers on a budget.

Best Radios for the General Listener Revisited

There are many radios but so few are worth buying. There is much deserved hubbub about the Kaito/Degen 1103, which I own and which gives top FM performance. But its mediocre AM, mediocre speaker, and horrible ergonomics, especially the anti-intuitive, tedious two-button volume control kicks it down several notches. For the general listener, I'd go with the 99-dollar  Grundig G4000. Its FM is almost identical to the Kaito/Degen 1103; its speaker is far better; its AM is far better. Its only disadvantage is that it has no "line-out" for hooking between an audio cable and a good speaker system.

But if you want a good speaker with digital presets and a good clock, you might look to the Sangean Sonido . At $99 (60 dollars less than the Tivoli Songbook, which has FEWER radio bands) and featuring weather and TV bands, it may be the best bedside radio for the general listener.

My esteem for the Grundig S350 and its slightly improved cousin the Eton S350 Deluxe has gained in esteem because I've learned to use the RF Grain switch to avoid overload on some AM stations.

Update 9-25-07: Based on price point, AM/FM reception, dual speakers, and iPod connectivity, currently the best radio (absent short wave) available is the Sangean PR-D5. For more info on the PR-D5, check out my review.

It's Time to Say Goodbye to the Cupcake Dieters

You can only eat so many cupcakes. Granted, they’re diet doctor-prescribed cupcakes, fortified with protein, vitamins and minerals. Granted they come in several flavors, your favorites being chocolate, pumpkin, spiced carrot cake, and lemon. Granted, you eat seven a day, one every two hours from seven A.M. to 9 P.M. Granted your calorie consumption was drastically cut from over 5,000 a day to 1,050. Granted, your food preparation and clean-up has been all but eliminated giving you more time for hourly treadmill sessions, twice a day, at the gym. Granted, you started out at 294 pounds and ten weeks later you now tip the scales at 259. But like I said, you can only eat so many cupcakes before you begin to dread your day, before you begin to feel that lifting each cupcake to your mouth is akin to lifting a bowling ball and the thought of eating it is akin to poisoning yourself. Something in your body is warning you that you’ve hit your threshold. Your personal nutritionist  says this is all nonsense, as does all the other members of your Cupcake Diet Support Group. It’s all in your head. It’s your unconscious fear of success. It’s your unconscious need to stay fat and to avoid intimacy. It’s your unconscious guilt, which says you must be fat and ugly and therefore be denied the love of others. It’s your unconscious fear of being attractive and being treated as an object instead of the real you. It’s your fear of rejection. It’s your fear of exiting your cave where you’ve learned to make peace with your fat, lonely self. But you know that none of this is true. You know your fellow cupcake eaters are simply reading from a script provided by the Cupcake Diet Facilitator and that the more they harangue you the more they can distract themselves from their own self-doubts.

You know for a fact that your body simply cannot handle the cupcakes anymore. You’re breaking out in hives, you have diarrhea, you have nightmares that you’re being suffocated in a giant mixing bowl of cupcake mix.  You would rather be dead than eat another cupcake. Funny, the thing you resent most is that you’ll never again be able to enjoy a real cupcake because it will be forever tarnished with its association with the phony, crappy ball of flour and food byproducts that you were brainwashed into believing was a genuine cupcake when in fact it is a revolting concoction of oat flour, whey protein, and sugar substitute. And eating seven of these little crappy food balls a day was supposed to provide you with blissful satiation, a faster metabolism, and a sense of belonging with your fellow diet cupcake eaters, but instead you feel as if you’ve joined a malignant cult, which requires something far more serious than weight-loss. It requires the abnegation of your critical faculties and blind faith that they Diet Cupcake’s founder, a doctor with a dubious background, possesses the One Way to the Promised Land.

You have found others like you on a variety of Internet chat sites. People who are disgusted with the cupcakes. People who have snuck into the cupcake factory and witnessed rats and cockroaches defecating in the so-called “organic” mix. People who have learned that many who go under the title “personal nutritionists” are in fact multi-level marketers promoting the cupcakes to enrich their own pocket books. People who have suffered from similar symptoms since going on the diet. You’ve learned since chatting with these “cupcake survivors” that it’s not the cupcakes per se that are making all of you so sick. It’s a combination of inflated expectations, the guilt that comes with not enjoying the cupcakes, and the fact that it’s just plain human nature to want to eat a diversity of foods. In other words, the Cupcake Cult is demanding that you violate your human nature in order to become one of them.

You learn something else about human nature: Deny it for too long and it will rebel with an uncontrollable intensity. In a rage, you dump your cupcakes into the dumpster outside your apartment and then proceed to eat fifty dollars of fast-food: bacon cheeseburgers, onion rings, milk shakes, fruit pies. Your initial euphoria is followed by suicidal despair and the need for a new diet that will lift you from your sense of failure and anguish. There’s the Hollywood Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet, the Fruit Diet, the Atkins, the Pritikin, the this diet, the that diet. Finally, you settle on the I Don’t Give a Shit Diet.

Would I Buy a Volvo Again?

On September 5, 2001, I bought a used 1999 Volvo S70 GLT (silver) from a Toyota dealership in Costa Mesa. The car looked clean. It had 31,800 miles and its price was $21,995, a few grand below the other similarly equipped Volvos on Cars.com. Brand new it was about 35K so it seemed like a good deal. In fact, to claim the car, I faxed $500. It turns out, according to the Toyota sales manager, that several disgruntled shoppers showed up to buy it and showed their displeasure when they found out someone else had already purchased it.

I test-drove it and its superiority to my 1987 gray Volvo 240 with 137K miles on it (purchased used with 97K on it in 1997), was obvious. I wondered why the S70 was so “cheap.” It had no salvage title. My only concern was that the car’s pink slip showed that its origins were from Georgia. Shortly after, I noticed a strange thing: shelled sunflower seeds would show up on my passenger seat and on the car’s interior floor. I’d clean up the shells only to find new ones a few days later. My friend theorized that a rodent was living somewhere in the car and was eating sun flower seeds. This seemed implausible but I didn’t have any other explanations. This went on for two years and then finally stopped. Was someone playing a joke on me? I’ll never know.

Now to the key question: Having owned the S70 for nearly five years and putting 27K miles on it (that’s fewer than 6K a year; I clearly don’t have a long work commute), would I buy another Volvo? The answer is probably not.

First let’s go over the Volvo’s good points:

1. Its classic appearance ages well. Even as new Volvo models come out, my S70 doesn’t look passé or weird like a lot of Japanese cars.
2. It’s safe.
3. It’s reasonably comfortable and fast.
4. A nice small turning radius.

Now for the bad:

1. The engine light always goes on no matter how much I have it checked and serviced.
2. The transmission doesn’t seem as smooth as my former1996 Honda Accord coupe.
3. The steering wheel has too much give so I can shake it a little.
4. The Volvo makes a weird noise during sharp turns, making me wonder if it got into a crash that wasn’t mentioned on the pink slip.
5. Its city gas mileage, about 15 mpg, is not impressive for a mid-sized sedan and all the new Volvos, unlike mine, require premium unleaded.
6. A bumpy ride on the freeway.
7. Its panels under the dash have gotten loose; the one on the passenger’s seat had to be replaced for $300.
8. The heater core had to be replaced at 54K for $600.
9. The headlights, which snap into the car like Lego toys, came out on the freeway and as the front left light swung around it put scratches in my paint.
10. The throttle had to be replaced, free of charge since it was defective. But here’s the kicker: Volvo didn’t publicize the problem. I had to research the recall to bring the car in which was in fact stalling.
11. The thermostat light blinks, indicating a malfunction in spite of having it serviced repeatedly.
12. The air conditioning leaks  water from time to time.
13. The car is already squeaking like mad on the front passenger side where the windshield meets the dashboard. This is not a subtle squeak. Rather, it is glaring and it annoyed the hell out of my wife yesterday as I drove her to LAX. As of writing, I’m taking it to the dealership to get it checked out. I have no idea what it will cost to fix IF they can identify the problem. Mind you, the car has fewer than 60K miles and should not sound so bad unless it went through an accident that I don’t know about.

14. At the 60K mile service ($530), I still had check engine lights and thermostat lights showing malfunctioning. I still had the rattle. I took the Volvo to the dealership and found out that I need to fix the mass air flow blockage, the temp sensor and replace the serpentine belts and front brake pads. With the "fuel service," which is done with the temp sensor, the cost is $1,500. To add insult to injury, I thought my front brakes were part of my 60,000 mile service. And they didn't fix the rattle because that would be another 10 hours of labor. I imagine the real cost of my "60K service" will be closer to 2,000 dollars.

Conclusion:

You can see that the bad far outweighs the good. Therefore, it’s doubtful I’ll buy a Volvo again. My small two-car garage makes it necessary that I buy a car with a width of no greater than 70 inches. That’s too bad, because I’d like to buy a 2007 Toyota Camry SE in silver. I don’t need a 6-cylinder. All I want is a spoiler in the back. But since the Camry is a couple inches too big for my garage (perhaps I'll rent one to make sure), I’m looking at getting a used Acura TSX, a brand new Honda Civic EX sedan in silver, an Azure Blue Scion TC (with or without the spoiler?) or a 2007 Space Blue super charged Mini Cooper with a silver top (after 2007, the Mini will have a superior Peugeot engine to replace its current Chrysler engine so I’d wait for that). I’d like to get the Mini in a manual, but my Los Angeles traffic conditions require an automatic. Of the three cars mentioned, the Civic would be the most practical, but for fun I’d risk less reliability to enjoy the pizzazz of the Mini. Finally, the Mini is more practical than people think. My office mate’s wife has one and she boasts that she buys over $300 worth of groceries at Costco and sticks them in the back of her Mini with ease.

With all the money I've spent on repairs, I feel I should keep the Volvo until its mileage reaches at least 85K or so, but then it's time to leave my Volvo-driving days behind me for good.