Do your favorite characters listen to Car Talk on NPR?
If so, what car problem do they call in with?
Which, I gotta admit, is a little different from the usual memes.
emmaboredatwork to teslamomma:
Can you believe it?? I actually got the guys to kick in some fun bits for me, so we’re all doing each other. Verbally. I mean, writing-wise. Stop laughing, you know what I meant!
What, has D– been sending you some of *those* pix too? If I’d known the man was so silly I’d never–never mind what I’d never! It’s *not* helping at work, believe me. Concentrrrrate!! gotta get bloodypresentation whipped up like a souflee before the committee falls.
So yeah, this is what Drin said about *me*. I can’t believe it!!
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This is Emma:
“Whoa, the Emma of Doom, man, watch out!”
“Oh yeah, the Rack of doom, you mean. Dust Drin’s bookshelves just by bending over and turning. And I bet he just smiles.”
“Damn right I would.” It’s not even all that gratifying, watching the poor guys jump when I come around the corner and catch them gossipping. I smile at them. “She’ll kick your ass with both high heels, Robert, she ever catch you talkin’ like that.”
Which she will, and given how annoying Robert can be, half his co-workers will help her do it.
Where were we? Oh yeah, the car meme thingie.
Emma listens to various NPR and Sirius radio shows and argues with the callers. If she’s provoked enough, she’ll call in, using a cheap hands-free Blue-Tooth headset which cuts out on every other hill. For the car show, she might call in with embarrassingly detailed discussions of the fit of the upholstery in her ten-year-old Volvo and how it’s aged. That embarrassing rattle as she tries to get it to accelerate uphill never gets mentioned. She just talks about how she doesn’t like it when some guys she knows borrow her car, because they make out in the back, and their lube attracts all kinds of junk that you can’t clean out around the seatbelt attachments, and it’s just soooo embarrassing when she’s carpooling a bunch of the gals out to a True Colors concert.
If you’re noticing this is no longer about cars, you’d be right.
If she’s really provoked by somebody’s remarks, then she’ll go on to explain that she’s currently committed to supporting the relationship of these two guys who are lovers. She will explain she is not part of their sandwich time, although many people assume otherwise. Then she will explain what that word polyamory means, in excruciatingly personal detail, and her broadest Aussie accent.
Of course a lot of deejays just let her ramble on, because she gives great radio.
She really has no mercy.
She will even explain that the guys each used to think they were gay, and no, she didn’t “convert” them, far from it. They thought they were gay because visuals of hawt guys really do it for them, and dorm-room quickies with dorky wannabe Phi Betas in college were really fine too, and all their daydreams were about guys. But then they ran into her, and when it comes right down to a personal relationship, taken on a tangible in-person sort of way, she’s that legendary bi-chick your mother warned you about. They are totally willing to do her exactly the way she tells them to as often as she lets them. She knows that of course they’re on the verge of pleading (with that sort of helpless fascination she says is so endearing to watch) if it could possibly be on their knees, with way too much leather involved. What else would any self-respecting woman do with a couple of pretty pretty menz?
Or, put another way, they seem to have discovered that their taste in lovers was less attached to plumbing parts and more related to intangibles like the capacity to stand toe-to-toe right in their face and yell back totally kick their asses.
No kidding.
However, they totally reserve the right to complain about her cell phone bills.
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Can you believe he said that??!
Okay, okay, I know you’re laughing too loud, now cut it out! or your Big Boss will wanna see what’s so funny.
But enough about me. This is what I said about Dance. He hasn’t found out about it yet. I’m probably gonna get it when Drin tattles on me.
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If you look at old photos of Dance, he looks like a gawky skinny kid who just stepped off the boat from Hong Kong or Seoul or something. But not now. Not since Drin got his hands on that boy. Talk about sleek and shiny and buffed to a shine! He’s in much better shape, but now he’s being evasive about getting new pictures taken, after I posted embarrassing things about him getting heat exhaustion through stupidly overdoing his exercise routine.
Dance doesn’t own a car. He’s a musician. He’s been poor long enough that he’s lived in people’s living rooms. (Yes, I’m lookin’ at you, Amalia!) He takes transit, he ends up in odd places at the weirdest times, he bums rides. He’s exceedingly good at looking dignified and remote and perfectly self-possessed while holding out his hand asking for your car keys.
He is particularly fond of borrowing well-kept older cars owned by little old ladies with a crush on cute young– okay, enough of that.
Dance always returns a borrowed vehicle exceedingly clean, topped up, oil-checked, tires correctly inflated. He is not stupid. He knows this will get him more loans from people who like their cars clean.
He knows it sends messy people totally berserk because they can never find anything after he’s tossed out everything that is remotely compostable. It’s just a cheap shot on his part.
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So Dance doesn’t know what I said about him, yet. But I got him to send me something nice that he wrote up when he borrowed Drin’s laptop this afternoon. Dance just learned how to do strikeout type. His emails are full of it. Yeah, I know, you said you couldn’t *wait* to hear this.
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Our Drin is our most-recently person in the house. Easy-going, sooo laid-back he has no blood pressure, older than Emma or me, he is big. He wears big sweaters with cables. He laughs big. He makes our house look small. I like it. I am silly about Drin, and Emma laughs a lot. I like cooking things for him, he brings us cooking toys and weird food to try. He likes my spicy hot food too. I do not know when he decided he must be here, he knew already we like him lots. He kind of wandered in, said hello, hugged and snuggled and kissed ourself all over and did his level best to wreck and reduce ourself to rubble. I think that he’s kind of awesome at kissing sex everything. Well, I can’t speak for Emma but she’s crazy about him too. Umm, he’s very good at it. While Emma was asleep one night he set up computer games on the TV, set up Guitar Hero, and showed me how it worked. Then he came up while playing and tickled ourself until our little man is going off in pants again. It does that a lot with Drin. Some tricks are just not fighting fair.
People ask me how he is rich and I just say he works hard. I do not know what he is working, he does numbers. Drin is checking others. using a lot of bad words about how he makes a living. Most people’s eyes cross when he tries to explain his job. He says, “It mostly involves being a pain in auditors’ patooties.” He spends time staring at computer screen, making tiny change on websites full of numbers. He mutters about people failing to notice all kinds of sad shit totally obvious arithmetic errors. “Look at that, will you!” he says, he points at Greek letters and squiggly lines.
I always point at screen too, saying, “The B-flat is copied wrong, it should be a D, any idiot knows Mozart would never do that,” so we are making him crack up.
You should see him at parties. He will go off into minutely geeky, opinionated detail if you start asking him about commodities markets, real estate investments, and explain how this all relates back to larger political issues such as the GNP of obscure Third World Nations, stabilizing governments, and making their financial instruments more transparent and accountable. anything.
He states that he would never call in the radio show about his car, which looks a bit odd and gets devoted attention from a family of really hunky German mechanics whose names have too many umlauts in them. Even the women are hunky. They charge him much. I think it is all due to accents. He’s a total sucker for bad English when we talk Emma and I have quite different accents, but he says just loves to hear us talk. Which is probably a good thing. You couldn’t shut up Emma if you put a sock in her
He says I wouldn’t know the company that made his car anyway. He says I just like to ride around in it and-never mind what else I like to He thinks making radio calls like “Emma’s rants” just draws too much attention. He says he doesn’t feel the need to explain himself, or justify his taste in lovers, any more than he has to justify his total Aussie-kissing Anglophilia. Or Dancephilia, he says when he stops the car and makes the little man go off.
He’s very happy hugging ourself and our Emma both, and laughing his ass off while arguing with the new-car reviews on an absurdly funny British car show called Top Gear. This is the one where the main part of the show involves three guys competing to buy old beaters and drive them across country until they fall to bits.
He says he’s developed a bit of a thing about threesomes. No kidding.
With no further ado, we give an example of how this car show gets reviews:
…There is nothing quite so beautiful as British boffinry in full, mad bloom. Those wild and crazy guys on the British auto show Top Gear have built and launched a space shuttle based on an odd little 3-wheeled car called the Robin Reliant…
You click away from an ad to see the rest of the review.
https://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=980000298&blog_post_id=1220016722
We were all sad their YouTube link no longer works, so Drin dug around and found us another link instead.
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Arrrrgh! Good Lord, we’ve hatched a monster, letting Dance near the keyboards. I can hear the Graveyard Smash tune in my head already. Don’t you get him going, teslamomma, or we’re all gonna be in the poo.