calvan

Yup, could be the same reason the Canadian dollar has been recovering lately - American liberals moving money north in anticipation of filing refugee claims if Trump wins.

My vote has to go to the Dodge Ram pick-up truck. Not that it's intrinsically worse than other trucks (which I am not overly fond of), but my Elise has been hit twice by inattentive knuckleheads driving Ram trucks. Luckily low speed, low damage on both occasions.

It's still winter weather here, at least in most of the country, but here is something from sunnier times a few months back:

One of these days some bright spark of a researcher is going to come out with a study proving that breathing kills brain cells, while neglecting to note that not breathing kills them faster.

I undertake some volunteer work doing Community Policing with the RCMP - fraud seminars for seniors, basic security measures and recording speed & traffic stats on the local streets. Interesting work, although some of the knuckleheads I see driving about can be truly frightening. I usually do one afternoon a week. The combination of volunteer work, playing ice hockey a couple of times a week and monkeying about with the cars gets me out of the house and keeps me sufficiently occupied in retirement (that is quite important).

In Feb. 2010 I won CDN$500,005. I got an Elise, my wife got a diamond, a good chunk went to fix the house, which had developed a water leak, and the rest eased the transition into retirement. Oh, and our 2 adult children got some too. An amount like that is a windfall but it is easily spoken for without being life changing.

Here is an unexpected benefit of owning an Esprit, although I imagine that some other mid-engine cars could give a similar result. After several years away from the game, I have recently gone back to playing hockey (for clarity, ice hockey) and have joined an old-timers team playing two mornings a week. The Esprit trunk is just large enough to hold my equipment so I often drive it to games. The unexpect benefit is that the 25 minute drive to the rink is long enough for engine heat to warm my skates to a nice toasty temperature. And after dragging my carcass out of bed early enough to be in an ice rink dressing room at 8:00 a.m., warm skates are something to be happy about.

A couple of years back, when I was in Scotland seeing family, I met a fellow whose claim to fame is that he once punched Tony Blair. It turns out that it happened when they were both kids, about 11 or 12 years old, but I gladly bought him a beer anyway.

This is also a bit off topic, but I have sometimes had people approach me to see if I would be interested in selling a Lotus, particularly my Europa. Standard response is that they had best start with a significant multiple of current "market value" to get even a glimmer of interest. Most of the numpties are confused by this as they don't seem to appreciate that the real notion of a market value is the price paid by a willing buyer to a willing seller. They seem to think that if the Hagerty valuation (purely as an example) says it is worth $X they should be able to buy it for that. But, as I don't want to sell, they have to do something to pique my interest and that likely ain't gonna happen.

Ah, the prospect of documenting our fleeting fame. About six years ago a short-lived sci-fi television series called Caprica was filmed in Vancouver - it was intended as a prequel to the Battlestar Galactica series but only lasted for one season. Anyway, they needed some older cars, both British and American, for filming and hired my Europa for one day's shoot. I was at work then so my son dutifully drove it for the day (and retained the $ $ paid for use of the car). As I recall, the Europa had a one or two second cameo in a couple of episodes and presumably is now echoing through history in someone's DVD collection.

Proper Windows 7 sounds like a good idea. I'm the first to admit that I iew my computer as an appliance - I want it to be as reliable as my fridge and consider it to be perhaps a little less exciting. With that background, I went out and bought a new laptop a few days ago. It had Windows 8.1 and I loaded Office 365. Big mistake. It was such a piece of crap that it went back to the store a coupe of days later. Maybe I'll look at a Mac or, even better, a new abacus.

Recognition of the day has even reached the fromer colonies. This coming Sunday is the 9th annual St. George's Day British Car Show held in Fort Langley, BC. I will be there, but as a Scottish-born, Canadian-raised Lotus owner, I will have the Saltire window flag on the car.

The comments on brand reputation and prejudice put me in mind of something I saw recently, perhaps in this forum but I don't remember the source. So with advance apologies for some innocent plagarism I offer the protoypical magazine review of a new Porsche (or Corvette or other "prestige" marque): " The new Porsche is perfect. Siginificant engineering work has corrected the many flaws of the pevious model, which was perfect."

Far from it. The curse of the nanny state with daft rules and unintended consequences has spread far and wide. Here is another Canadian example: The City of Vancouver is one of the few Canadian cities with the pwer to enact its own building code - most codes are done at the provoncial or federal level. Anyway, a few months ago the Vancouver City Council decided to amend its code to ban doorknobs. In the interest of making doors more accessible to people with mobility or grasping disabilitiies, it is now mandatory to use lever mechanisms rather than knobs on door latches. This applies to all new buildings, not simply public buildings in the city limits. (If I was to build a new house inthe city, which I am not about to do, I might think it in my own interest to use levers but I would have no choice). Fast forward a couple of months to a report in the local papers. They quote a study from an Opthalmology Association in the US which is now reorting an increase in serious eye injuries in young kids, particularly boys. It seems that they are running around houses (as kids are wont to do) and running face first into door levers which, for a 4 or 5 year old, are at eye level. Of course, kida have done this since who knows when but the levers are typically pointy and much more damaging than old fashioned doorknobs. In fairness, I have not researched the article cited by the papers but it seems to make sense. More unintended consequences of over-regulating governments

Many of those rank up there with: There are 10 kind of people in the world - those who can read binary and those who can't

Messed tht up somehow. The past post should have had a comment that boring was the wrong word - jaded would have been better. The trip across the Rockies can be a great drive if you have the time for stops, sidetrips and bursts of speed. On the other hand, when you set off in the morning knowing that you will be on the main highway for the next 590 miles or so, a certain grim determination sets in

Right, back to the dull bit of answering the basic question. "Calvan" doesn't get used a lot - not being a frequent poster - but it does have a background of Canadian geography. At the time I registered I was working, and staying, in Calgary even though my permanent home is near Vancouver so I just combined the first syllable of each city. Those days are done now and I kind of miss Calgary, but not the travel. In my peak year I did the round trip drive across the Rockies 5 or 6 times. Great scenery but even that gets boring after a while.

Admitted lifer. I (more porperly "we" as my wife is quite complicit in this) have had the Europa since 1977. It has seniority of tenure on both kids, as I remind them from time to time. The fleet has grown over time. We added a V8 Esprit in 2003 and an Elise in 2010, but if I had to go back to just one Lotus it would likely be the Europa.

Just don't use the spare ones.

The points have been made that all the teams kniew the rules, and thus the tire issues, off the bat and that motor racing has to strike a balance. I see the balance as being among a number of potentially inconsistent concerns, e.g. speed, safety, cost, etc. It strikes me that the tire construction in recent years, and this year in particular, has pushed the balance point too far to the tire management side. The result is that F1 and endurance racing have effectively swapped positions. Back in the day, and not that long ago, a team running Le Mans would commonly run at a pre-determined pace for most of the race in order to conserve the car. if the race went well they would then hope to be in position and have enough car left for a closing sprint for position. In recent years it has become almost a cliche that Le Mans has become a 24 hour sprint. On the other hand, F1 has historically been a full out sprint for most of the race. However, the demands of managing wear of the Pirelli tires has turned recent F1 races into 300 km tests of endurance. Instead of full out racing we now see F1 cars running to a pre-determined pace in the hope of having enough left to gain some positions at the end of the race. I realize that this is a bit of a simplification and that race strategy has always been important in F1. I still think that the series has badly missed its balance point and needs to do something to bring back more raciung and less tire management. Something as basic as a 10 - 20% increase in tire durability may well do the trick.

To adapt an old, and admittedly not overly funny, attempt at humour: Q: What is flat, black and glows in the dark? A: Pyongyang, about six hours after a missile hits Seoul.

Are you insinuating that there will never be a "CSI:Norfolk" because all the DNA is the same there?

Same thing, only different.

Baseball is an excuse to sit in the sun and drink beer. Which begs the question of why you need an excuse to sit in the sun and drink beer.