Ace-Garageguy

And...I finally saw the 2008 Jason Statham version of Death Race. Only 17 years late. Most fun I've had in a long time.

Used up more leftovers with Cajun-Cuban sausage, beans, and rice. Mighty tasty, and there's enough left to put a couple of fried eggs on for breakfast.

I'm pretty sure that's the Pepto-Bismol top-seller award.

Pretty much the way I see it. Thing is, there was NOTHING wrong with the old smallblock bottom end. The bore spacing and even the bellhousing bolt patterns are the same as the LS family (except for one bolt hole on the LS tail end), fer dog's sake. Emissions, mileage, and performance almost ALL come from the heads...chambers and porting...and engine management including valve event timing, EFI, and ignition control. SO...LS-style heads could have been developed to bolt to the old smallblock, or the old block could have been minimally redesigned to take the LS heads (the aftermarket makes a smallblock bottom-end that WILL take LS heads, by the way), saving gazillions in tooling. It even could have been aluminum, with a separate main girdle for the really hi-po versions. All that development has been done for decades by the aftermarket and racers. But no. We gotta reinvent the whole wheel. AND...with stand-alone EFI and engine-management computers, harnesses, and software, INSTEAD OF RUNNING EVERYDAMBTHING THROUGH THE CENTRAL COMPUTER with another gazillion LAN-linked modules, and by using stand-alone subsystems and analog controls for dumb functions like lights, wipers, etc., reliability, simplicity, and ease of diagnostics and repair could have been vastly improved. It could have been cheaper to manufacture that way too. I KNOW it could. But when you have a bunch of clean-hands dweebles like Barra et al running things, you get this disaster. And sadly, the rest of the car manufacturers are all plagued by the same we've-never-done-squat-but-we-know-better-than-a-bunch-of-past-it-geezers attitude.

Point that melted butter towards my pancakes and give 'er a big squeeze.

Like 'em both, lots.

As far as I can tell, concepts like repeat business and brand loyalty don't register on minds like Barra's. I've owned many GM vehicles, all bought used, some in beautiful condition, some rough or junk...though I have the '63 Olds my parents bought new. Having worked on a very wide variety of vehicles over decades, there are things I like about older GM products, and things I prefer about the way other manufacturers did them. My 3 GM trucks, 1989, 1992, and 1996, have been as tough as tanks for the most part, easy to fix when they broke...again, for the most part...and considering what I paid for them and how many miles they had on them when they came to me and how many miles I've put on them, I have zero complaints. But the only other GM product of somewhat recent vintage I'd purchase is a C5 Corvette (though I'd buy an '04-'06 GTO if the price was right for the right car). Frankly, I think the C5 is the single best vehicle GM ever built, and one of the best high-performance cars ANYBODY ever built. And I wouldn't buy anything they "build" today if I literally had money to burn.

Is what constitutes a sentence really so hard to grasp?

"Different strokes for different folks" is not a complete sentence, but this is.

Ah yes. The ultimate logic of "hey old man...if you don't LOOKIT MEEEEEEEE I'm gunna BLOW YOUR EARDRUMS OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Though I dearly love GM's first-gen OHV V8s, all the R&D and tooling expense for Caddy, Olds, Buick, Pontiac, and finally Chevrolet to build entirely different engines made little economic sense. Still, I think the pendulum swing to "corporate engines" and "platform sharing" went too far in the opposite direction. I also disagree with the decision to kill the heritage brands Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Both divisions could have been downsized to build interesting niche vehicles profitably. Oldsmobile was building cars before Mercedes...since 1901 and recognized as the world's first mass-produced automobile. That's kinda special if you think about it. Mercedes plays heavily on their background and history, but GM's recent management doesn't seem to have a clue, or a care, about their own.

Plan B for repairing my old Dremel involved modifying the motor brush guides after it became impossible to find NOS brushes, and though they've become available again, quality is all over the board.

Here's a fairly cheap one. https://www.ebay.com/itm/277487861328? Looks to me like the wheels just snap onto the axle ends.

Finally saw Pacific Rim 12 years after the rest of the planet too. Not "great" exactly, but fun CGI-heavy late-model sci-fi with an almost standard, predictable set of primary and secondary storylines.

KInda the plan. They were the largest importers of Chinese electric vehicles for a while there, making nothing but the nameplates...which were probably made in China too. "Ewwwwwwww. We don't want to be icky car manufacturers. That's like, gross...and old-fashioned boomer-think. We want to run on the Amazon business model. Buy Chinese garbage and mark it up. If we work it right we don't even have to buy the stuff. They'll just be essentially drop-shipped from China, some minimum-wage contractor will slap the badges on at the dock (maybe even right-side-up), away they go, and we get our cut. That's WAY oh so mo better. Can I get my $25 million dollar check now?"