Turner's Garage: "A room-a-zoom-zoom!"

From: chance <chance_at_unix.infoserve.net>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 06:49:02 -0700

Matt wrote:

>If TPS wants to help the environment, they should stop wasting all that
>celluloid on CP!

Picture this. You're someone like Ted Turner and you have a garage full of
cars, but your favourite is a gas-guzzling monster that's an order of magnitude
slower than everything else in the garage, but is your favourite because it
has a certain unquantifiable "something" that everyone else simply labels "awful".
Though it's a drain on your resources, the public averts their eyes in horror
when you drive it, and it smells real bad on its regular route from nowhere to
nowhere; you still keep driving it because you're a rich man, and can essentially
do what the hell you please. However, you still have to field multitudes of
questions as to *why* you continue to drive something everyone else
despises, so you come up with little convenient asides like "it promotes
safety" (euphemism for "big, clunky and unwieldy"), it's "got lots of room
in the trunk" (yeah, the typical Mafia three-stiffs-and-the-lid-still-shuts type),
and "it's a family car" (read "School Bus").

Ted's Garage:

"SwatKats" :peppy little import number that will go zero-to-Nielsens in
2.3 seasons flat - except for the minor detail that nobody bothered to
put air in the tires.

"Scooby Doo": Model A Roadster that was hip when it was made, but
though it still trundles about at a max speed of some 20 miles-an-hour, has
lost most of its "showroom shine" in the intervening century or so.

"Dexter's Lab": This one's a kit car: frame lovingly handcrafted from the finest
materials available, but with a fiberglas body to cut down on cost. Race results
still coming in.

"Captain Planet": '57 Edsel bangin' on four of the possible eight cylinders, and
factory butt-ugly. Gets a fresh coat of paint every couple of years and the
word "New" added to the pink-slip periodically, but essentially the same vehicle
unloved by millions. Driven by an old man to corporate acquisitions on Sundays
 whose comings-and-goings are neither noted nor remarked upon save by a
 precious few. Sadly, in the mind of the driver, those ignoring him are actually mentally
clapping real quiet-like, and the "few" become an imaginary multitude when the
subject of retiring a vehicle that should never have been forged in the first place
comes up for discussion.

"Jonny Quest": A '64 Cadillac Convertible driven flamboyantly by a Las
Vegas gambler whose exploits are the stuff of myth and legend. Ignored
one stop sign too many, and sat in a garage for years despite being the
subject of many a "restoration" conversation. Briefly brought back from the
grave by an incompetent mechanic in 1987 who stuck it back together with
bubble-gum and bits of twine, but couldn't get it running beyond the odd sputter
and cough. Enter 1995 and another incompetent mechanic with lots of money.
Now it coughs and splutters on Premium, but doesn't do much aside from eat
9 million bucks worth of fuel travelling down roads nobody wants to see. Now
it's '96, and the old Caddy might regain a bit of its former glory under the care of
a couple of mechanics who got a certain "peppy little import number" up to speed.

Who do you think's gonna win the race??

(Lord, I hope the answer is "the viewers" for a change.)



Received on Tue Jul 02 1996 - 10:40:45 PDT