Hooptie Update

Thursday, April 30, 2009
So we found a Hooptie for the SmartBoy. It's a 1990 Honda Accord EX, and in fact, looks very much like the one he totaled.*

It's currently in the shop getting some repair work done, but once complete, it should last the SmartBoy until he's out of school and has a job that can support something better.

I paid for it, but the SmartBoy will be reimbursing me for half the purchase price on a monthly installment plan. If he totals this one, then he'll be getting re-acquainted with shank's mare.

In other news, he has been accepted to Metro State College of Denver, and he's decided to attend his first two years there while he figures out what he wants to do. I'm supportive of this decision, as the tuition at Metro is so inexpensive he'll be able to manage his portion of the expenses without incurring student debt.

I'm just glad he has a plan that doesn't include him working for minimum wage and living at home.


*Except for the purple interior. Seriously - purple? Who thought that was a fabulous design choice?

10 comments:

Jeri said...

Yeah for hoopties! And congrats on the college admission, even if it may mean more kid-living-at-home time.

We tried to start our hooptie this weekend (which has a maroon interior AND exterior) and the battery is beyond salvaging.

Lesson one for the youngest: selecting and installing a battery. :D

Janiece said...

Jeri, if him living at home means he can start his adult life with no student debt, then I think we can stand it. :-)

Eric said...

Congrats to him for the college!

As for the decision not to take a train hundreds of miles to Nebraska to purchase an ugly, decrepit Gremlin--meh. That's his loss. He could have had a car that would have built character and you had to go and settle for reliable transportation. This, of course, is the reason America is in decline. Well, this and the fact that we no longer wrestle bears in public as much as we used to.

In Andrew Jackson's day, you had to be able to wrestle a bear just to get the franchise to vote--it's a fact, look it up--and that's why America was AWESOME. No foreign country would even dare to mess with America, because every time anyone even thought about it, somebody would say, "Holy fuck, do you know what you're doing? They wrestle BEARS for Christ's sake!" and then the whole thing would be dropped.

America's eventual decline from a state of AWESOME was conclusively marked by Woodrow Wilson's notable refusal to wrestle a bear during the 1912 elections, though he did pose for a photograph of himself administering a chokehold to a stuffed wombat. (Little-known but also true fact: President William Howard Taft would have had an excellent chance of winning re-election except he suffered a bear-wrestling-related injury in March of 1912, that sprained his back and made it impossible for him to campaign as diligently as he would have liked to, nor was he able to attend a match scheduled between himself and "Old Man Cooter's Ferocious Companion, Black Benji," originally set for that April. This hurt Taft with independents, since it was a well-known fact that his rival, former Republican Theodore Roosevelt, was claiming he'd wrestled two bears the night before the famous charge on San Juan Hill, though he never actually produced anyone who said they'd seen him do it, and it's possible one of the bears wasn't so much a wrestling bear as it may have been a drunk and amorous bear lacking in the usual discrimination bears usually display when choosing mates.)

I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah: congratulations!

Janiece said...

Eric, I would tell you seek help, but you're to amusing for that.

Anonymous said...

Congrats for both the new transportation and college acceptance, SmartBoy! Just no bear wrestling in or around the car.

Janiece, purple = fabulous, just by default of being purple!

Jeri said...

So Eric, how did we decline so far from a country of AWESOME to one that sanctions the manufacture and resale of AMC Gremlins?

Eric said...

Like I said, Jeri: we stopped wrestling bears.

This country was a proud country of bear-wrestlers. Franklin wrestled bears. Jefferson wrestled bears. Washington wrestled bears naked. John Adams didn't wrestle bears at all for religious reasons, and that's how we got the Alien And Sedition Acts.

The American Civil War had strong bear-wrestlers on either side. Lincoln once wrestled a bear while riding on Stephen Douglas' shoulders and debating the merits of slavery during the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates/Bear-WrestleMania 1858! tour, and Robert E. Lee famously said he'd rather wrestle a bear than his wife any Sunday evening after church you could name. Although it's to be admitted that Stonewall Jackson famously preferred shooting bears and disdained what the French referred to as le combat Américain d'ours--a singular moral failing that may go a long way towards explaining the South's loss.

But after the wombat-posing Wilson at the beginning of the 20th Century, things quickly went downhill. The last American president to wrestle bears was Herbert Hoover, and he only wrestled pandas for fuck's sake, which, as I'm sure you know, depressed everybody greatly. It's true that FDR was physically unable to manage bears while his wife Eleanor was a superb bear-wrestler known to give the teeth of bears she'd slain in hand-to-paw combat to her paramours. And it's also true that the postwar bear shortage that began in 1947 and only ended in 1954 severely limited Truman and Eisenhower's access to bears--but a real American would, of course, have imported bears even if it had meant importing them from the Soviet Union.

(Interesting side-note: it's widely believed that Mao Zedong began gifting the United States with pandas because he idolized Herbert Hoover after reading an unauthorized biography of the unfortunate President during the Long March. This is also why the CCP chairman refused to go near water--as everybody knows, Hoover suffered a mild case of rabies after being attacked by bats in 1942 and was unable to go near the liquid without snapping wildly at his handlers and thrashing at the end of his leash.)

The fact that we are no longer a nation of what makes us great (bear wrestling) is the entire reason our country produces and continues to re-sell AMC Gremlins. It's also the reason we continue to subsidize Celine Dion's platypus fetish and consistently rank in the middle nintyonethousand1/3th percentagram in math and simple statistics.

This is why I hope that America returns to its bear-wrestling roots. President Obama has proposed a bill to the Congress that would replace the current American flag with a picture of a naked George Washington putting a large bear into a submission hold beneath one arm while holding aloft his trademark bottle of cheap booze, while simultaneously (the bill, I mean, not George Washington) giving a 10,milliontieth/17.2% tax break to middle-income households who spend at least one week a month wrestling bears. Under Obama's plan, individuals who wrestle polar bears would get the tax break plus a really sweet car with a banging sound system for free because polar bears are awesome and anybody who can wrestle a polar bear without getting every part of his body that's attached to something ripped off deserves a really pimped-out ride. I encourage all Americans to support the President's proposed plan and to write their Representative, Senator and MP.

Jeri said...

Depends (TM). They're not just for the elderly incontinent anymore.

Eric said...

I was pleased to discover today that Time Magazine has honored the AMC Gremlin with a short profile as part of a longer feature on fifty noteworthy American cars!

ntsc said...

My first new car was a 73 Gremlin