Electric Porsche!

The Zilla is the Rolls Royce of controllers, and the 2K is the biggest there is, and they're not making them any more. What I'm paying is what it's worth.

I assure you, that the bigger controller will not improve my range. I will be able to start in a higher gear, and while that will mean less shifting and a more enjoyable driving experience, it will use more energy, not less. If I am gentle on the pedal, and accelerate no faster than I do now, my range should be the same.

You don't get those amazing mpg numbers on your Prius by flooring the pedal at every opportunity. Same with the Porsche: On trips where range matters, I'll have to drive with a light touch and go through the gears as I do now. On trips where range does not matter I'll be able to take off in 3rd instead of 2nd.

And of course I'll be able to go faster on the freeway, which also uses more energy.

 

The glass half full thread, where the suggestion was raised, has pretty well sunk down, and this one seems to have a narrower audience, so I'll report on the interesting results of posting the ad that Justin suggested.

I have actually gotten a lot of replies, and they are still trickling in.

Most of them have obvious scam subject lines like "Hey cutie!" (people don't call me "cutie") but a few have realistic-sounding subject lines, like "Okay, here goes." A number of them sound very enthusiastic, and direct me to adult web sites to see their pictures. A few actually sent pictures, and they are young and hot. All but two or three demand that "because of weirdos" they want me to go to a web site to be "verified" by giving my credit card information. The sites promise me I will not be charged. (I'm not in the market to buy a bridge or a swamp today, thank you very much!) To the ones that seemed halfway legit, I've offered instead to meet them at the police station, where I'll give the cops my ID and let them run a check. Anybody that's really concerned that I might be a convicted sex offender should find this far more satisfactory than a credit-card check by a web site. Nobody has taken me up on my offer.

Four emails have had the identical text, right down to the name "kate" with a lower-case "k" differing only in the signature and the return email address. All want me to go to the same "verification" site where I'm supposed to give my credit card.

Only two have not asked me to "verify" myself with a credit card. One may be a legitimate reply to my ad. We'll see. The other is a gorgeous and shapely young woman probably in her early 20's, who says she is Native American, and who believes in destiny, long-distance romance, and men who will do "anything" for the woman they love. She is (get this!) living with her mother in Nigeria!!! Place your bets: How many emails will pass before she asks me for money to come to the U.S. because she loves me madly? Hey, I've got time to post in Fred's. So I've got time to play with this scam artist. Oh, yes, her husband "diet" last year. That one took me some head-scratching to figure out. (Education may be bad on the res, but it's not that bad.)

It used to be that when you placed a personals ad you got a lot of ads from dating services and maybe a blind date or two with someone even more pathetic than yourself. Now all you get are people demanding your credit card, and using pictures of the most amazingly hot young women as bait. I would swim Puget Sound in winter for any of the women in the pictures I've been sent, if they were for real, but you know those kinds of women do not write to a 60-year-old man they've never met and say, "Hey, cutie, I think you're just the guy I'm looking for."

Sheesh!

 

This was from a classified ad on a free on-line advertising site. Of course I used a disposable email address for it. I'm listed on match.com, or at least I was, and I've never had any results from it.

 

My "dating" profile is not the problem. I'm the problem.

 

Today I got two very different reactions to the Porsche. On the back it says "Electric" and "All electric all the time." So this guy pulls up next to me at a stop and asks "What's all electric all the time?" And I said, "This car. It has no gasoline engine." So he asks how far it can go and I said 80 miles. So he says, "I have a Toyota Prius and it's electric." So I said that the Prius gets all its energy from gas, and the doofus says that it gets some of its energy from going downhill. Then the traffic in his lane moved and he drove on. The guy probably does not have the slightest idea how his car works, and has never heard of the conservation of energy, and would probably argue with you if you explained that recovering energy from regen braking, while it's a good idea, does not alter the fact that that energy came from gas in the first place. As he drove off he shouted "50 miles per gallon!" as if we'd never run out of gas as long as we got 50 mpg.

The Prius is so yesterday, man!

I parked at the centennial trail to take a short walk, and when I got back a couple was looking at the car. They wanted to see the works, and I opened the hatch for them, and they loved it. The guy even knew about the Zap Xebra. We had a nice conversation, and I answered a lot of questions about the Porsche, and then it started to rain so we went back to our respective cars and drove off.

 

Four more emails from the ad this evening. Two of them are the identical word for word "Hi I'm kate..." email, obviously a "bot" fishing for credit cards, one suspicious for language like "... if you think you can handle a wild girl..." and one more in the straightforward "looking to meet someone" mold, but still both asking me to go to a web site and give my credit card.

Now, I know the "kate" email is a scam, so I presume the web site it wants me to go to is a scam. Maybe one of the other emails will turn out to be legit, but it kind of looks as though every single reply I've gotten to my ad is a scam!

What I'd really like to know is what moron writes the subject lines for these emails, most of which give away the scam nature of them right off the bat, and whether any of the email texts are written by someone who actually speaks English as a first language.

It looks as though I'm going to be spending my birthday alone again.