Baggy Paragraphs

Still life photo of Pink Lady apples with Gerbera daisy by Baggy Paragraphs

Boy, I’m telling you, I just hate it when I:

1. Run out of staples in my Swingline stapler, which is as aggravating to me as a political reversal to the committed party member, or a home team’s loss to the ultrapartisan fan
2. Wake from a nap and see a ten-inch lizard on the floor, which awakens my primitive flight response, as though my inner eye were seeing a dinosaur
3. Forget whether I locked the car, which may or may not feature my iPhone standing as ripe as an artichoke in one of the center-console cupholders because, of course, I forgot it, too (the day when we wear our phones as part of our clothing will be a good thing for me and others, including those who drop theirs into the toilet and vaguely report, “It fell into water” — unless adding apparel before flushing is a routine thing)
4. Bite my cheek while too avidly chewing, or scald my lips and tongue with a hastily imbibed hot drink, leaving me with the vague hope that the tissues of the mouth indeed heal quickly because of superabundant vascular circulation
5. Leave my shopping list on the counter and my collection of cloth and polywollydoodle shopping bags in the car’s door pocket, while my main emphasis upon entering the market is to find the restroom
6. Am taking my daily walk, and the hard rubber ball or the baseball with which I play Mouth-of-Driveway (high toss with backspin; sharply angled carom from driveway’s sloping mouth received with the off hand without breaking stride) bounces awry and rolls with dismal, disheartening finality into the storm drain
7. Go outside for the newspaper that hasn’t been and won’t be delivered today
8. Break a drinking glass
9. Flip the light switch and hear the filament snap, making me want to curse Thomas Edison
10. Have to peel fruit labels

After today’s Motor Press Guild‘s luncheon in Los Angeles, I went for a short ride in the Fisker Karma with hot rod culture’s legendary Ed Iskenderian and two others.

It was the 90-year-old Isky’s first-ever ride in a hybrid. 

So I made a video.

The video is only 2:23 long and ends with a laugh as Isky thoughtfully (and revealingly) fields the last of my questions.

I promise this will be worth your time, and I invite you to share or Tweet the link: http://youtu.be/A24sOclfZtI

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• First Drive: 2012 Fisker Karma [w/video] (autoblog.com)

The 1954 Merkle Subatom MC² Sport was a side project of Captain Hyman Rickover’s when he was developing the nuclear navy and adapting that technology for civilian power production. It was named Merkle, for an old friend of the admiral’s back in Poland, as a way of deflecting attention; yet it was indeed Capt. Rickover who climbed behind the wheel when the Merkle competed in the Carrera Panamericana. As viewers of that race remember, the entry surged to an enormous lead by the middle stages, proving the efficacy of nuclear power in automobiles, but during a restroom break at a tiny pueblo in Zacatecas, Capt. Rickover decided to power down the reactor and learn the Spanish subjunctive mood from a woman he met near a bougainvillea hedge.

Series production of the Merkle was briefly considered, and the Packard Motor Car Company appeared interested in acquiring the model as the linchpin for a new division of high-performance automobiles. The plan snagged when Packard’s assistant chief engineer John DeLorean insisted the Merkle be equipped with the company’s Ultramatic transmission, which he had helped to develop; but Capt. Rickover’s minions, who were handling the Merkle deal, let it slip that they preferred General Motors’s Hydramatic tranny, and DeLorean stormed out of the meeting, going home to his mother, with whom he still lived.

Hyman G. Rickover

After this traumatic episode, the one and only Merkle fell into obscurity. Following his promotion to Vice Admiral, Rickover began to drive Cadillacs. The Merkle languished for many years at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. Later it was put back into driving condition for use as an airport shuttle at Los Alamos National Laboratory; then it served as a hogan near Round Rock, Arizona, with the built-in central heating being a prized feature.

A decade ago, the Merkle was sold at a well-known vintage and collector car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, realizing a disappointing sale price of just $12,750. Quickly taken away on a flatbed, it was spotted in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and subsequently reported in Beatty, Nevada, by an automotive spy photographer who spends her summers there in pursuit of future production models that are undergoing tests in Death Valley. Pictures of the Merkle were found to have been spirited away from archives such as the National Automotive History Collection in the Detroit Public Library, where a tall, bespectacled, white-bearded gentleman in a bespoke English suit, who signed the guest register as Lorem Ipsum, was the last to request the file. The only known surviving image of the Merkle, seen above, was recently acquired by a collector at a literature, toys, and memorabilia show for vintage Porsches and VWs in a hotel near LAX.

This was one automated phone call I received not with annoyance but a thrill. The stumbling computer-generated words relayed welcome news: tomorrow between 12.30 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. my new refrigerator would be delivered to my home in “Monrovia, Caw.” Such poetry! Not just a new refrigerator: a real refrigerator! Because of uncertainty as to my future, not knowing whether I’d stay long in this small house I’m renting, I had endured the last five months since May, when I moved in, with a 2.8-cubic-foot mini-fridge. This is like having R2-D2 as your best friend. It’s a dorm-room fridge, good for keeping the beer and liverwurst and mustard. I do a modest amount of cooking and had increasingly struggled to make do with this compact fridge. The tiny freezer compartment wouldn’t preserve leftover mac and cheese; it’s so disappointing to open up your presumed dinner and find mold. And the cooler needed to be reorganized with every new Rubbermaid storage container. I spent a lot of time squatting before the little pint-sized thing, always forgetting the door lacked a self-closing tendency and instead, being stupidly pendulous, would swing all the way open and smack into the nearby jelly cupboard.

Afterwards, hoisting myself once again to a standing position, hoping I never needed to look for something to eat while I happened to be suffering from patellar tendonitis or a pulled hamstring or sciatica, I’d tell myself this was a good way to get in my deep knee bends. Calisthenics and capers! Why, yes, indeed, I was getting along just fine chasing the head of lettuce that rolled out with every opened door, dementedly meandering across the kitchen. Finally I stopped buying Iceberg lettuce. Romaine doesn’t meander. But it’s too tall; it had to be angled beneath the middle shelf, which was the first of two wire racks that got dislodged from their tracks with the slightest bump. Boston lettuce is short enough to fit in the lower tier but doesn’t make high-volume, high-satisfaction salad. Outta lettuce? Yet another trip to the market is required. Oh, and time to buy more orange juice and milk: the shallow door pocket encouraged the pairing of rapidly depleted pints.

Have you tried living without ice cubes? Do you realize what a luxury it is to have ice on hand? Not even automatic icemaker ice, just manual ice for drinks, for the Champagne bucket, for rubbing on burned fingers, for putting in a plastic bag and applying to a sprained shoulder like when I went down on my mountain bike in August. Even the dog enjoys playing with the occasional ice cube. And how about a lighted refrigerator compartment? Five months with the mini-fridge led me to conclude that it’s a phenomenal step forward for civilization to have a real door handle instead of a grip-it-and-rip-it indentation on the side of the door. Same for having a self-defrosting freezer instead of needing to unplug and empty out every six or eight weeks in order to extricate the one thing that will in fact stay frozen in this minuscule freezer compartment amid the dense buildup of frost: a pound of peas.

Meat? I had to throw out a rib-eye steak.

A real refrigerator allows me to buy gallon-size containers, to buy two bags of frozen lima beans when they’re on sale, to throw a whole turkey behind either of the doors. A mini-keg of beer, a pitcher of lemonade, a large bottle of water, a layer cake sprouting candles, a ham, a gaggle of rhubarb, a haggle of leeks, a pride of Swiss chard, a flagon of vodka (I don’t drink vodka), oodles of noodles: everything will fit! And the sculpted commodious door pockets with soft and grabby nonskid plastic and gently curving bumpers to protect against the out-of-control caroming brisket, the enclosed butter tray with clear cover, the cheese-and-meat drawer and the crispers with adjustable ventilation—all in this basic Frigidaire that I selected at Best Buy—combined to suggest most seductively the squalid excess of which I would soon be partaking.

Romero and another dude showed up early, at twelve o’clock noon, to deliver the fridge, doing a bit of setup right there in the street before harnessing themselves to the appliance and waddling along, climbing the stairs, passing through the gate and along the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s cottage. (There are four structures on this half-acre lot.) The first attempt to enter my own house was repelled by the screen door’s strike plate, which Romero removed with my screwdriver. And when he popped out the pins from the main door’s hinges, I got my tub of grease and coated them because they had been squeaking.

Here’s why I hate customer satisfaction surveys. When the fridge was put in position and plugged in, Romero handed me a card with an Internet address, saying, “If you can give a ten on each category, it would be great.” The new-car salesman who sold me the 2000 Honda Odyssey that I still drive said the same when he handed me a similar card. Wait, you’re asking for a perfect score? I just shitcan surveys like these. Here’s hoping my selfishness (often commented upon by friends and relatives) doesn’t keep Romero’s kids from attending the University of Nebraska of their dreams. Besides, there are a couple of scratches in my $500 box of steel’s thin coating of white paint, and in all honesty I’d have to mention them.

Soon after the delivery team left, I headed down to Target for ice cube trays and a bin, and to Home Depot for disk magnets to take advantage of the unlimited display space. The magnets allowed me to put up some leftover campaign buttons from 2008. So the Frigidaire has solved more than one storage woe.

Yesterday I set the mini-fridge out on the front porch for pickup by Vietnam Veterans of America. My last sight was of its ugly little compressor in the back. I imagine the mini-fridge’s future in a room on Skid Row, where it is stocked intermittently with malt liquor (sorry, no forty zips) and old unwrapped slices of pizza. Meanwhile, as the VVA driver loaded it onto his truck, teetering a bit during the clean and jerk, an imbalance in my life was corrected.

Meeting one’s match might be left to the vagaries of Internet dating sites, but couldn’t a professional matchmaker refine the search? Diary of a Beverly Hills Matchmaker is Marla Martenson’s account of her duties with “Double D Dating Service” in the rarified atmosphere of Beverly Hills. The book is a deftly handled dual narrative as Ms. Martenson wryly recounts episodes from her own fraught life in addition to presentations of home runs and strikeouts in the world of dating, where “clueless dickheads” tend to call the shots. Her gift lies in the ability to balance comic and pathetic aspects on all sides of the story. The revelation about parking her car three blocks away from a restaurant in order to avoid paying for a spot is just as significant as that about her matchmaking client Phil: “He drives a red convertible Infinity [sic], and actually brags about his speeding tickets.” She sets him up with Natasha, who “goes ape-shit over expensive sports cars.” Ms. Martenson handles her scenes and dialog effortlessly. The same is true of the social satire: at an art party, an older woman’s face “is pulled so tight, she looks like a bass.” The vulgarity of the car-buying experience is perfectly encapsulated in Ms. Martenson’s remark about the saleman’s offer of paint sealant for $495 extra: “Only five-hundred smackers to protect the car against bird shit!”

While the natural voice is her most winning quality, use of the first-person  can overwhelm the narration when Ms. Martenson emerges as protagonist. A passage about her return to Chicago gets all balled up: the work is best when she moves back and abandons self-scrutiny. Relying on her powers of description, with the addition of tart commentary, pays off big, as in the wonderfully sweet passage about getting away with her husband to Mexico for a family wedding. There’s also the occasional unfulfilled need for data to amplify her keen observations. “Do they think they’d rather have a momentary shot at biological perfection than a lifetime with a loving mate?” she asks of men who yearn for a perfect and much younger woman. Well, that would be interesting to know. What social factors form the basis of this superficiality? Someone must have researched the subject.

But I don’t mean to overemphasize my quibbles. Diary of a Beverly Hills Matchmaker consistently charms and amuses. Without having met Ms. Martenson in a writers’ group, I wouldn’t have picked up her book; whether it’s chick lit or not, it made me laugh aloud while also touching my heart. So much for trolling Amazon.com for something good to read! I wonder what the group’s other members have written.

In “The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount,” Italo Calvino offers two novellas that dazzle and amuse. As delightfully far-fetched as these novellas are, there’s always a touching humanity about the characters, even those who aren’t exactly human.

Inhuman but Humane

“The Nonexistent Knight” is none other than Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the Others of Corbentraz and Sura, Knight of Selimpia Citeriore and Fez: an empty suit of white armor that speaks with a metallic voice and irritates all the other paladins in Charlemagne’s army by being so fastidious. He puts up with all sorts of madness during the army’s march against the infidels. Notably, his groom Gurduloo doesn’t know of his own existence exists, and therefore takes many names and forms. Another part of the plot involves a young squire named Raimbaut of Roussilon, who means to avenge his father’s death. Not until the fifth chapter do we realize a cloistered nun narrates this story. As more chapters unfold, we realize her true role and find that not as much was left to her imagination as she first asserts

Half-Human but Reconciled

The first-person narrator of “The Cloven Viscount” is much more of a witness than a participant, but maybe that’s due to the even more astonishing sight of his uncle, Viscount Medardo of Terralba, who returns from war after being split in half lengthwise by a cannonball. And he’s in a foul mood! He terrorizes his subjects, who are already faced with grim enough conditions, barely able to survive. There is a leper colony in the neighborhood, and a nearby mountaintop is home to some refugee Huguenots. When Medardo’s overtures to Pamela, a shepherdess, are rejected, his sourness curdles. But hope soon rises when we learn the fate of Medardo’s other half, which had been detained under a pile of battlefield corpses. Soon the happy ending is inevitable—but Calvino’s remarkable inventiveness still is required in order to deliver it.

In response to my Auto X Prize Notebook description of the Edison2 Very Light Car, a reader asks, “I wonder how its lack of weight will impact snow driving? Thoughts on that?”

A. Depends on the snow’s heaviness.

Q. The Tecate Girls supported Indy racing. Who are the women supporting the Very Light Car’s primary driver Emanuele Pirro?

A. The Pirroettes.

Q. Is it true that Dos Equis beer of Mexico tried to beat out Progressive Insurance for Automotive X Prize title sponsorship?

A. The X Prize Foundation rejected their offer because it would’ve come up in Internet searches as the XX X Prize.

Q. Is it true that the Tata Motors team from India talked with the Hooters girls about a 12-month calendar?

A. A Hooters girl just doesn’t look right with a red dot on her forehead.

Q. Aptera is considering an internal combustion engine for its goofy three-wheeler. Does this indicate a concession that the electric version can’t make the equivalent of 100 mpg and win its share of the $10 million?

A. No. In early shakedown runs, the Aptera 2e was driven by Michigan native James “Lights Out” Toney, the heavyweight boxer. A switch to the electrifying 116-lb jockey Calvin Borel is in the works.

Q. Why isn’t the X Prize on Speed?

A. A sponsorship deal with the Xpedx trucking firm fell through.

Q. Does the Tango Commuter Car stand a chance?

A. The Tango tandem two-seater (not to be confused with the Twingo) could easily win Miss Congeniality because pageant judges have so often shown the predilection for contestants with 2000 pounds of ballast. Tango’s only hope for the overall title is if it’s hustled heroically through its paces by Helio Castroneves, who would consider the X Prize title the final jewel in an odd Triple Crown of championships including the Indianapolis 500 and “Dancing with the Stars.”   

Two Spira Tuk Tuks tuck into a corner, where one fervently hopes they'll stay.

Q. How about the Spira Tuk Tuk, which is made of foam and comes from Thailand?

A. This is the first self-guided FedEx package ever to enter an automotive competition. “Tuk Tuk” is Thai for “Tanning Bed.” Weighing in at 302 lb and powered by a 9-hp, 110-cc Yamaha engine, it looks like a genuine threat to crack the 100-mpg barrier. But don’t be surprised if the final technical inspection reveals this entry has used performance-enhancing surfactants, resulting in foam with illegal colloidal stability and, of course, also resulting in automatic disqualification.

Q. Will the Illumnati Seven, a shockingly large four-seater, have a chance in its class?

A. I saw the Seven in its primer-gray state, and that hideous gosling would’ve been judged defective by its mother and killed. It’s hard to say what the men of Illumnati Motor Works will get out of this battery-powered geexster. Reading their blog is a frightful experience, though. If they fuse wires together like the sentences of the following example, it’s trouble:

“We are basically self funded this has good and bad; how is this good you might ask?”

Or I might not. Use of “The Magnificent Seven” as the operation’s theme song is prohibited.