Two wholly unrelated news items:

Rocky road for electric car market

“Sitting around for eight hours waiting for your (Nissan) Leaf to charge up is not exactly a selling point,” he said. “EVs have a sitting-on-your-ass factor that conventional cars do not.”

This has always been a bothersome point for me… minimal electric range (I could not go to the grocery store and back on a full charge with most electric cars) coupled with insanely long recharge times and very high prices seems to equate to a car that not many people would have much use for, IMO.

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Hi grandpa, it’s Mandy – do you still have my car? First words of kidnap victim to her grandfather after being released from Cleveland house of horrors  

In short… before she was kidnapped, Amanda Berry’s grandfather had promised her a 1986 Chevy Monte Carlo SS NASCAR edition if she got her drivers license. She disappeared before getting her license, and that was the first thing she asked her grandfather about in their first post-rescue phone conversation. I thought that was odd… her first question was about a car? But a commenter on Fark actually made it come together for me:

bigbobowski: so is this where Chevrolet is supposed to contact the family to thank them for the product placement and let them know a new Camaro is on the way. (with a truck full of micky d’s). I refuse to believe the thought of a clapped out 86 monte enabled this woman to endure the living hell she went through.

Then you don’t know anything. According to Jaycee Dugard, the one thing that kept her going was seeing the moon and knowing that her mother could also see it. POW’s have commented that it was often one single “little” thing like fishing with a brother or a cone from the local ice cream stand that kept them going. Amanda used to go to car shows with her grandpa and he promised her this car when she could drive. That was a tangible future coupled with a memory of love for her. Of course she would cling to it.

Suddenly it makes a lot of sense. I don’t know whether or not to be disturbed by the fact that wisdom has come from Fark…

And, as it turns out, grandpa DOES still have the car.

This would be a massively wise time for the local Chevy repair shop to offer (free of charge)  to go over the car with a fine toothed comb and repair, restore, make perfect.

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And on the topic of the kidnappings, if you want to ruin your day, READ THIS story about the “forgotten” kidnappee, Michelle Knight. As if a dozen years of torture wasn’t bad enough, this girls life story both before and after reads like a Greek tragedy. “Kicked around by life” doesn’t begin to describe it.