One Hundred Years From Today

Posted on 10/01/2024 by Grumpa Joe

One of my favorite things to consider is what the world will look like in a hundred years I would love to live long enough to see it for myself. Of course, I’m only a few years away from what a hundred-year picture will look like for me. If the next hundred years of change are like the past, the picture will be one none of us can recognize. What is more challenging to fathom is what it would look like if we went backward in time instead of forward. I won’t go there, but I will move forward.

Today, my solar panels are covered in snow, and it got me thinking about what will happen in the future when we have successfully electrified the country and a snowstorm stops us from getting electricity. I must have seen a magazine or something that prompted me to see the Indianapolis 500 car race, and I asked myself what that would look like when gasoline is no longer the energy source for cars.

Some things came to mind immediately:

1. The race starter will no longer be able to begin the race with “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

2. The race would be silent or maybe just whiny.

3. Pit stops may take eight hours to get a fresh charge.

4. There will not be any competition between automakers for the best engine.

5. Ford, Chevy, and Chrysler will be replaced by who knows what.

6. There will not be anymore fiery crashes.

7. There will not be any gears to shift to

8. No more spilled gas in the pits.

9. Battery explosions and fires will predominate.

10. Drivers may be replaced by AI Robotic driverless cars.

11. Races may be limited to: One lap, a few laps, or the most laps in the least amount of time

The entire car racing industry will evolve into something we won’t be able to envision. All forms of racing will be affected: Twenty-four hours of LeMans, Baja 500, Daytona 500, Nascar Series, Drag racing, you name it, and it will be different. Some forms of car racing will cease to exist, but man’s ingenuity will drive them to invent new ways to compete using electricity.

As I thought about one of the biggest impediments to electric cars, which is a source of charging stations for power, the name of Henry Ford came to mind. How did Ford overcome the impediment of not having gas stations and roads? He didn’t solve the problem; he only fostered it by selling more cars. Early drivers found gasoline in local drug stores. It was being sold as a spot remover. Then, it progressed to gasoline entrepreneurs who sold gasoline in bulk from tanks outside cities. Car owners filled buckets and cans to take home. From there, it progressed to the formation of gas stations and eventually evolved into the modern filling stations of today. Gasoline was already known as a fuel for internal combustion engines, and it was up to the car buyer to figure out how to get gas. They bought the car and then figured it out. This sounds like what we see today. People are buying electric cars and worrying about getting electricity as somebody else’s problem. As long as they can plug in at home, they are okay. Traveling long distances is still a problem, but slowly, it is evolving into an industry. Until charging stations become commonplace like gas stations are, we will keep using electric cars within 50 miles of home. It worked for Henry, and it will probably work for Elon too.

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Commercial Suicide

Posted on 05/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

The world has truly gone crazy. I have a very hard time believing that so many companies are being duped by governments around the planet. Their commitment to company suicide is admirable but assinine. It surprised me when I heard car company after car company climbing onto the bandwagon of switching to electric cars. Have they gone mad?

Actually, when Henry Ford began making cars, he had no idea where the gasoline would come from. There were no gas stations around the country to supply fuel to the suckers who jumped at the chance to buy a motorized wagon. In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a famous line “Build it and they will come.” I guess the entire world now operates on that philosophy. It is not a bad directive, but I would like to believe that there has to be a tiny bit more behind investing billions of dollars in a technology that is still years away from fruition. I give Elon Musk credit for sticking his neck out to build electric cars, but I don’t give GM, Ford, Chrysler, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and the many other car company’s any credit for rushing into this scheme built on the phenomenon of global warming being caused by humans. Yes, global warming can happen but it is far beyond our capabilities to make it so.

My intention with this post is to add to this fray of commercial suicide. I am proposing two of my designs for electric cars free to the world for use by humanity. Both are just as viable as the cars Musk and others are producing. In fact, these designs may be more reliable and cheaper to build than those in current production.

Design number one.

Cheby V110
Diverse Energy Powered Personal Transportation Appliance

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Bootleg Gasoline?

Posted on 28/08/2023 by Grumpa Joe

A good blogging friend posted a question to one of my recent posts. What will happen if we buy a sixty thousand dollar car and the government outlaws the same in favor of electrics? Well, for one thing, Uncle Sam would never be able to do such a thing without starting a civil war. That is something the liberals would be very unhappy about because they would be the unarmed bad guys that we, the armed conservatives, would be shooting at.

Americans would improvise to keep their cars running. It occurred to me that in January 1920, the government passed a federal law prohibiting the sale of drinkable alcohol. The law caused a lot of pain to the population, and ‘we the people’ began to improvise by bootlegging alcoholic beverages. The government was put into a sad state of affairs because the citizens didn’t pay taxes on any of the booze they drank, or produced. This era also spawned a huge gangster industry that has never been completely eliminated, much like the drug industry today.

Prohibition lasted for thirteen years before Uncle finally cried Uncle, and Congress repealed prohibition. If it takes that many years to prohibit electric cars, the roadside will be littered with millions of these cars abandoned without charge. I hope to live to see the day. Americans, being Americans, would sadly innovate and carry gasoline-powered generators to run their charge-less cars. No doubt, they would be using 100-proof vodka to run the generators.

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It All Adds Up to Ugh!

Posted on 24/08/2023 by Grumpa Joe

My life has never been this amazing. This week, my car odometer turned 186,000 miles, and I gave it a huge Yahoo! Never have I owned a car that carried my sorry ass so faithfully for so many years and miles. Previous transport appliances never lasted more than 110,000 miles. They were all rusted, oil-leaking, and unreliable. But like many love affairs, this one also, may be coming to a rapid end.

It all began when I noticed that my tires began showing the wear bars between the treads, and the car has been leaning left, indicating a need for wheel alignment. The “maintenance required” light has been on for the past two months. Stranger, yet, during the past week of ninety-degree days, the air conditioner has been blowing hot air into my face. Compounding that, there is a strange squealing sound straining my ears whenever I back out of the garage in reverse. The frosting on the cake was applied today when I took the Death Star to the Toyota dealer for its regular oil change.

As usual, when I go in for the hundred-dollar oil change, I decide to get my money’s worth by asking them to answer some questions like those posited by the list of strange experiences above. Never ask for trouble someone is likely to find it for you. Steve, my friendly service advisor of seventeen years, came to me with the report. He was shaking his head negatively as he chased me down in the luxurious waiting chamber. Oh, Oh, this won’t be good messaged my mind. My mind was right. The good news came first: all my gripes from the list above have been fixed except one; the squealing noise is what I suspected the brakes are in need of new brake pads, and by the way, while we were looking, we found that the boot on the drive axle is leaking and needs to be replaced, and the transmission gasket seal is seeping. I fought back with “that seal has been seeping for the past seventeen years, why would I change it now?” Anyway, Ca-ching went the cash register as the oil change bill came to $371.00 after a special $40 discount.

I have written several positive blog posts about the merits of owning a Toyota, and now I am faced with adding more accolades to the former post. This week I replaced the tired tires with the fourth set, and aside from tires and brakes, I have paid a minimum for failed parts. It is the finest car I have ever owned and now, after spending all this money to keep it running I have decided to keep it until it becomes the last car I ever owned.

I decided it to be my last car because while I was at the dealer, I took the opportunity to peek at some new cars. I immediately went into sticker shock of an immensity that overwhelmed me. In the year 2021, I was at the same dealer getting an oil change, and I took the same peek at the new models. The one I fell in love with had a sticker price of $46,000. Today, that same model is priced at $60,000. Thank you, President Biden, for being such a strong world Asshole who supports the Ukraine war, and the solar and wind industries over fossil fuels. You never got my vote, nor will you ever! I am almost at the point of resuming political cartooning and expressing my opinion on this blog again.

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Reignited Memories

Posted on 20/07/2023 by Grumpa Joe

The human brain works in mysterious ways. Last week my grandson called to tell us that his motorhome trip to Zion Park was terminated by a tire blowout on I-57 not thirty miles from home. It happened on an outside lane during heavy traffic, and he had to pull onto the left side shoulder. The tire change would have to be done with his ass hanging out into the fast lane. He opted for safety and called for help. Traffic backed up and the Cops called the freeway emergency trucks to tow him off the road into an accident investigation area.

All week my mind has been sending me messages about roadside dilemmas that I experienced with the family campers. In 1980 we owned a 1978 GMC van with a 405 cu in engine that had horsepower to spare. We pulled a 18 foot long Skamper camping trailer which opened up to 26 feet. We named the trailer ‘G4″, the “G” stood for “Gypsy”, and the four meant it was the our fourth camper. There is a separate story attached to each of the G series outfits, and this one will concentrate on the biggest travel trip our family of five took. That year I had accumulated over eighty hours of uncompensated work time and asked my boss if I could add the time to my three week vacation, and miraculously he agreed.

Barb and I planned to explore the National Parks of the west. My part involved getting the van and the trailer ready. Caution urged me to re-lube the trailer hubs which I did, but this meant I had to remove the wheels first. My trailer manual told me to tighten the lug nuts on the wheels, and to retighten them after a thousand miles on the road. Barb’s part was to cook meals that we could freeze and keep frozen for at least three weeks. This took a big load off her having to cook in camp. We left on a Saturday morning and headed north on I-94.

Mount Rainier above meadows of aster, lupine, paintbrush, and more near Paradise, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, USA.

We planned a route that would take us to Theodore Roosevelt, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Olympia, Lassen, Redwoods, Sequoia, Yosemite, and finally the Grand Canyon, an aggressive schedule for sure. In the beginning we dreamed of staying days at each park, but that changed quickly as we realized to make it we would have to drive 500 miles every single day. When we arrived at Mount Rainier I made a decision to camp more and drive less. One of the biggest impressions we came home with were the trees along the West coast. At Mount Rainier my son and I took an after supper hike up a trail that spiraled upward. What impressed me most was the physical size of the trees growing there. From the road, or from a distance the trees look small, but from the ground they look like they extend to heaven, and a girth of five feet at the base was a baby. When we finally arrived in Redwood territory, the trees on Mount Rainier were truly babies. The girth of the General Sherman tree is at least twenty five feet, and he is at least three hundred feet tall. I never saw any greenery on this redwood because it was so high up.

We left Mount Rainier and headed for Olympia NP, but it was one of the parks I opted to pass by in order to have more quality time. We moved down the Oregon coast and stopped at several beach camp grounds along the way. We even made an emergency visit to a dentist for Barb. In southern Oregon we crossed over the mountains toward Crater lake on Lassen NP. The passage was a twisty windy two lane mountain road. They posted a rule that if you were holding up more than two cars you were to pull over and allow them to pass. I spent a good part of the ride pulling over. We finally reached Interstate 5 at 4 p.m. and there was still another hundred miles to Crater Lake. I made another decision to pass this up in favor of moving on toward the Redwoods. We boogied south on the I-five. About a half hour into the ride, I felt the van suddenly jump-up and land hard. I looked into my rear view mirror and saw a rooster tail of sparks flying off the trailer. I slowed and pulled off to a stop. The Trailer was sitting very low on the passenger side. I looked around and could not tell immediately what had happened. Then I saw it, one of the wheels on the low side was gone. It dawned on me, I never re-tightened the lug nuts. The twisty curvy mountain road had worked the nuts loose on this one wheel and it finally came off the hub. The bump I felt was the free spinning tire hitting the trailer frame to get loose. I never found the wheel. There we were in the boondocks of Northern California with one trailer wheel and four lug nuts short. Thankfully, I had a spare wheel, and I stole one lug nut from each of the remaining wheels to get back on the road. Within minutes of rolling again I sensed a new problem, I smelled rubber burning. This time I crawled under the trailer to see what was happening. When the wheel lifted the trailer to escape it came down hard and the impact of the hub against the concrete road bent the axle. The tire was rubbing on the frame and melting. We limped into a small town, probably Redding, and found a camp ground. It was Friday evening by that time, and finding help to fix the axle was nonexistent until Monday. Luckily, I was able to find a shop that could do the job, but it would take two days. We left the trailer with the fixer and checked into a motel. We spent the time sight seeing the area.

Since this event came to mind, I have recalled three more break down stories on our vacation trips pulling a camper. It has been fifty to fifty-five years that this event was tucked into the folds of my brain, and it took Jerry’s unfortunate breakdown to trigger the memory.

We drove over eight thousand miles during our five week National Park Tour and arrived home physically tired but very refreshed with memories that have lasted a lifetime. I want to do it again, but this time without the trailer, and not constrained by a five week time limit.

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