Bit of Ivory

Well, I’d like to thank everyone who gave such great comments on my
fanfic. Due to such comments, it’s being heavily revised and expanded.
Look for section 2 by the end of the week
In other news, my family got a new car on Saturday. It’s really my
dad’s car– he’s never had a car all his own. In high school he drove
his parent’s car, when my folks got married he drove my mom’s car (and
continued to drive it for the next 22 years), and after that car died
we bought my grandpa’s car from him, and dad drove that. Dad’s hated
that car ever since we got it. We only bought it in the first place
because my grandpa really wanted us to buy it, and since he’s old and
has Parkinson’s disease, we felt we had to do it. But now the car’s
having problems. It won’t start half the time, and the other day it
quit in the middle of the road, then sprang back to life. It was time
to get something new.
For the past three years, my dad has been eyeing the Toyota
Prius. It’s a gas/electric hybrid. Basically, it works the same as
a regular car. You put gas in it, and it gets all its energy from the
gas. No plugs. The difference is that they integrated an electric motor
and giant battery with the gas engine, and added a super computer. The
computer weighs a number of factors, and decides when to run the
engine, and when to run off batteries. Plus, they added a special
feature that turns the electric motor into a generator when the car is
braking, so it takes all the kinetic energy that is usually lost in
braking and feeds it back into the system. The result? The car gets 48
MPG on the freeway and 52 MPG in the city (because with all those
starts and stops, the engine doesn’t always need to run). Dad figures
he’ll need to fill up about every 6 weeks. It has a cool display where
you can track exactly where the energy is coming from and your
real-time MPG, as well as a graph in 5 minute intervals. We took it up
Parley’s canyon to see what it can do. Now, we’ve never been able to go
more than 65 MPH on that summit, but the Prius can take power from both
the engine and the battery when called upon to do it, so we flew by
everything on the road at 75 MPH. We didn’t get the greatest mileage on
the way up, of course, but when we went back down, the engine was off
the entire time and we got about 100 MPG. It averaged out to about 50
MPG. We had great fun driving it, although I must say it’s a bit
disconcerting when the car completely turns off at stop lights. I now
look at all those SUV’s that get 12 or 15 MPG and think “Suckers!”
Toyota is working on getting the Hybrid technology into other cars
right now. They expect to release a Hybrid Sienna and Four-Runner in
2004. Now THAT will be cool. The sticker price is a little over
$20,000, but it includes a lot of extras, like keyless entry, side
airbags, cruise control, and stuff like that. It’s estimated that they
actually cost Toyota about $30,000-35,000 to make, but they’re selling
them at a loss to build a market. Now how many American companies can
you think of that would do that?
And, further to my post of June
17, we are trying to come up with a name for the car. Dad is
favoring Bingley at this point (as in Charles Bingley from Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), although I’m putting on a strong
case to call it Albus. The car is white, and we need something
to keep You-Know-Who in line (that’s our van, again, see previous
post). My brother Ben says it will bring balance to the garage, but I
told him that in that case, we’d have to name it Anakin. Other
possibilites include Guy Patterson (from That Thing You Do!),
Muscles McGuirk (which is a name my dad has used for ages, and we just
recently discovered that it was the name of a character in the old Adventures
of Superman Series starring George Reeves), and White Knightley
(again, after George Knightley in Jane Austen’s Emma). One
thing is certain, however. A couple of years ago, we made my dad a
license plate cover, but it wouldn’t fit on the the Sara, so it’s been
sitting on his dresser since then. We want him to put it on the Prius,
now that it’ll work. To understand the significance of the license
plate cover, you first must understand that my dad has always insisted
that he is Perfectly Normal. Of course, he’s far from it, but whenever
we try to tell him he’s weird, he says “I am not, I’m Perfectly
Normal.”
The license plate cover says “Perfectly normal people worry me.” It’s
going on the car tonight.