It's a Bouncing Baby Toyota

The dealership called back Monday morning to say they could find no Matrix models with side airbags left unless we started looking at electric blue or white cars. We didn't want either, so we agreed to take the car they showed us on the lot Saturday. The still-turbulent wind knocked out power at the office right before 3, and I killed time at Barnes & Noble. I met Your Sis at the dealership at 6, and we emptied out the old Contour before trading it in. It was appraised at $1,000, a shock to both of us. I figured it would maybe fetch $200.

The salesman we talked to this weekend took our insurance information and the Contour keys and handed us to the finance officer for the billing. Then we signed about ten forms for contracts, registration, and warranty agreements, right before handing over the check for the down payment. Then we were handed to the service chief who showed us our manual and warranty paperwork. And he walked us out to the new car. Your Sis hadn't bought a new car before, so I made sure everyone was clear on what they were telling both of us. We moved the Contour contents to her sportscar, and I drove the Matrix home. I'd say we were there about 90 minutes.

It's a manual, and it's has been a few years since I drove one, but the gearbox is nicely built, and I had no trouble getting back into rhythm. It likes to go fast. Really fast. I like this car a lot.

Picture of the Day
The language makes it funny.


In the News
It didn't take long for the usual desperate blame-throwing to emerge on talk radio. It's the media, it's the liberals, it's a national move away from God, it's the anti-gun crowd -- everyone except the gunman. I almost understand the need to assign accountability. We face an boggling amount of mass shootings and have for decades. The California McDonald's shooting, the post office deaths, the office shootings, the school shootings. And the only way to make everybody safe is to also invite more danger. Arm college students? Arm teachers? Insert draconian safety measures (as if students didn't protest authority before)? Likewise the calls to fire the college president are in hopes that someone will face punishment when the gunman has escaped it through suicide. This, like 9/11, happened in the alignment of dark stars. A certain person on a certain day acted a certain way and did certain things. You can't escape chaos. By definition, you can't prevent it.

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The Pulitzer for fiction went to a sci-fi novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I have to dig and see if the genre has won before.