De Fenestra

Quantrell Subaru's service department has failed me for the last time. After five years of consistent inattention to detail, I will no longer allow them to touch any vehicle my household owns.

The Outback will be up for replacement in the next one to two years. Despite the Subaru Forester and Volvo V60/S60 Cross-Country being near the top of the list for potential replacements, I am highly unlikely to purchase any of those vehicles if Quantrell remains Lexington's only option for Subaru and Volvo service.

I can't justify a subscription to Motor Trend as "what Dad would have wanted" but I sure can classify it as "what would have entertained him." And their writing is somewhat better than Car and Driver's, IMO.

elalyr and I have been working our way through Top Gear on Netflix. A couple of nights ago, we watched the Winter Olympics special, which was eighteen shades of hilarious. The biathlon event that substituted SUVs for skis got me thinking, though. America loves guns. America loves motor sports. Why haven't we combined the two?

I'm thinking... the obvious answer is to combine rally racing with 3-gun. Picture this...

Shooter begins seated at conference table, pistol in holster, car keys in pocket. Rifle and shotgun are secured in the shooter's vehicle. Upon the start buzzer, the shooter must stand, draw, and engage hostile targets while moving to his vehicle. He drives the first half of the course, stopping at a position overlooking a roadblock. He must exit his vehicle with his rifle, take cover (using vehicle or terrain as appropriate), and engage hostile targets at the roadblock. Upon clearing all targets, he re-enters his vehicle, drives past the roadblock and through the rest of the course, and stops at a final shoot house. He then exits the vehicle with his shotgun and clears the shoot house, engaging hostile targets while on the move. Penalty time is added for misses, hitting no-shoot targets, and leaving the course.

Call it the Wheelman Games. Because Spycraft.

Wandered out of the office yesterday to find a random shard of scrap metal in the Outback's right rear tire. Made the mistake of yanking it out with my Leatherman, thinking it might not be all the way through the tread, and was rewarded with a slow hiss. Changed it out for the spare in 40-degree rain and limped to the local S&S. Diagnosis: unrepairable.

One of the lesser-known joys of owning an all-wheel-drive vehicle is that all four tires need to be very close in diameter - which means the same model and the same amount of treadwear. Get a mismatched tire and you have marginally different rates of rotation. Over time, you can trash the center differential as it tries in vain to keep all four tires turning at the same speed.

Therefore, if it's time to replace one partially-worn tire with a new one, it's time to replace all of them.

I expected this, just not so soon...

I gotta wonder... how many drivers are killed every year when their airbags deploy and ram their lap dogs into their sinuses at 270 feet per second?

Just askin'.

I swear, one of these days I'm gonna brake-check someone just to see a terrier ejected from between a driver's face and her airbag like a furry, howling watermelon seed.

The headline, to paraphrase Denis Leary, will, in fact, read, "woman killed by best friend."