Harry P.

I just watched the Seattle/Green Bay game. Great game, wound up tied and going to overtime. So here's my rant: For OT, Seattle won the toss, and scored a TD to win the game. Unfair! Green Bay didn't even get a chance to put their offense on the field! I hate that "sudden death" sort of OT. Why not just play a full 15-minute OT, let both teams have possessions, and see where it goes. It's unfair that one team can win the coin toss, score a TD, and be called the winner while the other team never has a chance to play offense in the OT segment. In the regular season, play a 15 minute OT... if the game is still tied after OT call it a tie. In the postseason, you obviously need a winner, so play 15 minutes of OT, if the game is still tied, play another 15, etc. until someone wins. Sudden death OT is unfair.

I saw that too, and wondered the same thing. Her second song, she faced the side of the stage and not the audience. It all seems way too pretentious to me... another pop singer taking herself waaaaaaaay too seriously and trying to turn pop music into "art." She has a nice voice.... she doesn't need the sideshow act and the goofy dancers and mime.

On the real car there is a trim piece on the interior that runs from side to side at the lower edge of the windshield. That piece isn't in the kit so I made one out of wood to match the wood trim on the door panels...

In order to make sure the exhaust pipe supports were in the exact right place, I glued them in and used the hood panel to make sure they were placed exactly. It turns out that I had to cut off the lug on the lower end of the two exhaust supports in order for them to fit exactly into the hood panel cutouts.

Here's how I did it... for each strip of trim, I scraped the paint off the fender or body, being careful to always keep the scraped area within the area of the trim strip (don't wan't any white plastic showing outside of the trim piece!)... then I glued one end of the strip in place with a tiny dab of liquid cement. Once that end set up, I pulled the strip tight against the body, held it in place with my fingers, and glued the other end. With liquid cement you only have to hold the pice in place for a few seconds, it sets up pretty fast. Once I had both ends of the trip piece glued in place, I ran a little liquid cement along the piece and just let the cement wick in by capillary action. I have found that if you use just a bit of the liquid cement and run the brush along the edge pretty quickly and don't "dab" the cement on, the cement will not harm the paint.

Future is clear acrylic. It won't turn yellow like enamel does, you can clear right over foil.

Couldn't use Future because the trim strips didn't follow the curves and shapes of the body very well. I needed something that would really hold well so that I could force the trim strips to follow the curves on the fenders and body... so I used liquid cement (and yes, I scraped the paint).

And here's a better idea of how that Spaz Stix worked on the wheels. Compare to the hubcaps that came off one of the chrome trees of the kit. The hardest part of building this kit is applying those thin, long chrome trim strips without any glue showing on the paint. It's a pretty tense process, lemme tell ya!

Here are the finished door panels...

True story: when I was a little kid, this album was huge! My friends and I played on a pickup soccer team (yeah, we were way ahead of our time! ).... Anyhow, one Saturday morning we were all supposed to meet up in the park for practice. All of us were there, waiting for the last guy to show. We waited and waited, and finally one of the guys said he'd run over to José's house (we all called him "Hosie" and he didn't mind) and go get him, as we all lived on the block right next to the park. A few minutes later our volunteer comes jogging back and tells us that Hosie was listening to Iron Butterfly and would be right with us... as soon as "In a Gadda da Vida" was over! Absolutely true story! One of my favorite childhood memories to this day!

"Johnny, I haven't come for you, but I want someone who's dear to you, and the price you pay is to remain alive"...

"Mama, take this badge off of me. I can't use it anymore."

Final vote... 20 REAL, 29 MODEL. And the answer is... REAL!

The black and white pages are here to stay, nothing we can do. I try to use articles there where color isn't that important, but it doesn't alwats work out that way every month. I would love to get rid of the B/W pages and go all color, but...

Eagles, Take It to the Limit. I'll get any Eagles lyrics every time.

When I bought my '67 Impala I took it out for a test drive. The first time I hit the brakes, I thought they were broken! It's amazing how far cars have come. If you ever have the chance to drive an old car, you'll know what I'm talking about. Sloppy steering, vague handling, and downright scary brakes!

"I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon, and another girl to take my pain away"...

"Dark and dusty, painted on the sky. Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye"...

Fleetwood Mac, Rhiannon. Nazareth. Keith Richards and Norah Jones did a really cool version...

So tell me how. You seem to be sure it can be done. If you are so sure it can be done, you must have some idea as to how. And if it's possible, why didn't the engineers see the possibility? What do you know that they don't? It's easy to say that cutting a half ton out of a Challenger is "theoretically possible." Tell me in real world terms how you would do that.

It's not the desire, it's the bottom line. Carbon fiber is currently cost-prohibitive to use in mass-market cars. If the price becomes realistic to use in Corollas and Focuses and Elantras, then it will be used... you can bet on it. Carbon fiber is the "magic bullet" as far as weight reduction, but as of today it's not cost-effective for mass-market vehicles. Again, manufacturers have to make cars at a price point that the majority of consumers will accept (and can afford), and that fact means that certain decisions have to be made. They can't sell very many $100,000 Chevies and Fords. If automotive engineers and designers were told they can do whatever they want, regardless of cost, then sure, they could do a lot. But in the real world, cost (consumer price) is the major factor.

"All this time I've been makin' deals, shades if black and white on a Hollywood reel. All this time I've been missing something so real"...

Another variable you may be glossing over is affordability. Yeah, manufacturers could go with carbon fiber or exotic alloys to save weight, but the bottom line is that the cars they build have to be affordable to the mass market. It's easy to design a $500,000 car that incorporates all sorts of super high-tech wizardy in it, but when you have to sell your cars to the public for $25 grand, it's a little harder to do that.