Duct-Tape Automobile - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Duct-Tape Automobile

How awkward when a body part
Falls out onto the interstate
That fragment of FoMoCo art -
It spun away in a figure eight!

There is a new part now on order
For this old car; it ain’t no Lexus
It rolls along in taped disorder
And that is how we do it in Texas

God bless our state, and the strong duct tape
That holds together my Ford Escape



Please know that my wonderful Ford Escape is fifteen years old and is a strongly-built car with lots of Texas and New Mexico miles on the odometer. A bit of plastic trim fell from a window assembly a few weeks ago, and the tape is to keep rain and dirt out of the innards while a replacement is on order. A real Texan thinks of duct tape as both functional and in its own modest way aesthetically pleasing (“Aesthetically pleasing” is the English translation for the Texas vernacular, “purty.”

The Death of the Medicare Sled

Mack Hall, HSG

The Death of the Medicare Sled

On Friday the last Ford Crown Victoria was assembled and sold, ending the era of the big American sedan.  Except for our humble, democratically-elected, self-denying public servants looking down upon us benignly from the armored windows of their custom-built limousines, sedans are Barbie-cars now, little plastic constructs more suitable for the nursery floor than for Route 66.

This last big American iron was actually built by Esquimaux and Mounties in Canada, between the assembly lines for birch-bark canoes and dog sleds.  What a mess – we can’t even fail in our own country; we have to cross the border so another country can help us commit industrial suicide.

But wait – there’s more.  The Saint Thomas Assembly plant in Talbotville, Ontario was closed with the production of the last Crown Vic, and that last Crown Vic was sent to Saudi Arabia.  From that box of metaphorical parts one can build an irony bigger than the car.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against Ford because of the economic impact of the end of the non-compact.

And now the unemployed Canadian auto workers must also worry about a big American satellite (something else we used to build) falling on them.

NASA’s 6+ ton Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite, launched in 1991, is due to fall to earth sometime and somewhere this week, maybe on you.  If these six tons of knowledge bash you, you might be in trouble because NASA has said you’re not supposed to touch any of it.  Your smoking ashes could be arrested.

Something styling itself space.com says that NASA says (and if someone says that someone says that someone else says, hey, it must be true) that there’s only a one in 3,200 chance of you getting evolved and devolved by this somewhat heavier-than-air junior high school science experiment gone rogue.  At last report there were some 312,191,000 American customers for Chinese manufactures, and so if we limit the crash site to Alaska, Hawaii, or the contiguous states, only 9,787 Americans are going to die from a massive satellite fail this week.

The satellite might instead fall on Canada, though.  American weather reporters often tell us that a given hurricane is nothing but a fish storm heading off to the north to Newfoundland, and so no one is going to be impacted.  Thus, since Newfoundland is inhabited only by fish, six tons of recyclables descending upon St. John’s will harm only an unemployed codfish or two.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against NASA because of the economic impact of the impact of a satellite cratering Mollie’s Irish Café’ along Water Street.

Just a passing – or falling – thought here – when America’s slide-ruliest math nerds launched this thing twenty years ago, why did they not plan for a controlled landing?

Imagine Ford dropping a Crown Victoria out of orbit to flame down upon a Tim Horton’s in Talbotville, Ontario where a former Ford employee is carrying out the garbage just before locking up for the night.

An engineer would say that’s the price of knowledge; a liberal arts graduate would ask what happened to his doughnut.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against Tim Horton’s because of, oh, any excuse will do.

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The Mice That Ate My Car

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Mice That Ate My Car

The micezillas are eating my car.

Why do mice eat the wiring of some makes of cars but, apparently, not of others? My mother’s pickup, made by Brand X, has lived in the country for years, and has yet to host the first mouse. My car, on the other paw, Brand Y, is like a cruise-ship buffet for the better class of rural rodentia.

This is probably because of man-made global warming and so is your fault for not using squiggly light bulbs.

The folks at the dealership are kind and patient and helpful, but lately they look from the gnawed wiring to me and then back to the gnawed wiring, all with profound disappointment, not unlike my parents when they saw the algebra grade on my report card.

The latest manifestation of rats in the wiring was the failure of my right-turn signal. I was quite worried about not having a right-turn signal, not only because I did not want a ticket but because of the safety issue. Further, I felt that good people would stare and point, and dismiss me as unworthy of civilized company because I wasn’t deploying the signal for right turns. I needn’t have worried; in East Texas folks almost never use turn signals at all. Indeed, the safe driver who signals for a turn is an eccentric.

But I drove the afflicted vehicle for a while because I could not endure the guilt-making of the guys at the shop. No sidewalk yellevangelist appears to be as despairing of your soul as a quiet, mournful service writer who really wants the best for you but can only shake his head at your miserable failure to control your rats. A yellevangelist loudly demands “How’s your soul, sinner!?” A service writer quietly and sympathetically asks “Do you know how much a new wiring harness will cost you?”

Were mice one of the plagues of Egypt? Was the harness of Pharaoh’s custom-built chariot cursed with critters? “So let it be bitten; so let it not run.”

I have sewn the ground beneath my car with rat poison, but anything that feasts on wiring laughs scornfully at poison. Someone suggested mothballs, which seems illogical since the wiring is not being eaten with moths. I placed sticky traps, which stuck nothing. After a water moccasin beat itself to death with a shovel (because, PETA knows, I would never, ever wish harm to one of our reptilian co-inhabitants of Gaia, the Water Planet) I respectfully flung its corpse underneath the car as a critter-deterrent.

If I had placed the snake on the windshield it would have been a windshield viper.

And yet the mice cometh and they goeth, and they doeth so in insolence.

In my despair I turned my hopes to a higher power, the internet, which sayeth unto us that some new wiring is coated with soy-based insulation which rats and mice find a part of this complete, nutritious breakfast. Hey, it was on the internet, so it must be true, right?

The ‘net says that I should spread forth rat poison, mothballs, and sticky traps, which I had already done, and avoid soy-based wiring harnesses. The dead snake was my idea; I’m thinking of getting a patent for it. As for the putative soy-based insulation, is there anyone who ever asked a car salesman about the nutritional quality of the wiring harness? Is the battery labeled for its calorie count? Are cruise controls fattening?

I’m at my rats’ end in the matter of the micezillas, and am definitely open to suggestion.

In the meantime, as you go to sleep tonight, remember that The Mice of the Baskervilles might be coming for your car in the hours of darkness when evil is exalted. They might even be under your bed, lurking there, grinning, with glowing green eyes, waiting to feast upon your soy-based flesh, waiting, waiting, waiting….

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