Saturday

...and outside, the first mower of the season is active. *sigh*

This is a funny commercial, but almost as funny are the comments. Try guessing which comments are made by women....

And this is a quote from Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. One of the bad guys, a sleeper Iranian agent, is on his way to assassinate the US President --

"It would have been better for everyone if he'd known beforehand about all the things that were happening....The disease attack, that was something else. The manner of its spread was a matter of God's Will. It was distasteful, but that was life. He remembered the burning of the theater in Tehran. People had died there, too, ordinary people whose mistake had been to watch a movie instead of attending to their devotions. The world was hard, and the only thing that made its burden easier to bear was faith in something larger than oneself...The world didn't change its shape by accident. Great events had to be cruel ones, for the most part. The Faith had spread with the help of the sword, despite the Prophet's own admonition that the sword could not make one faithful...a dichotomy he did not fully understand."

I think thats a pretty good description of how I see zealots. They're saying that they're guided by their faith, and when they don't find their faith leading them in the direction they want to go, or leading away from it...they do what they wanted to do, anyway. In that, they're not all that different than many others...except that they're willing to kill.

Today we go look at cars again. Last night, my wife was supposed to stop by and pick up literature for the hybrid Camry and hybrid Prius, but she met a friendly salesman, and ended up spending half an hour looking at both. An interesting point is that the local dealer for Honda (hybrid Civic, possible hybrid Accord) and Toyota (hybrid Prius, Camry) is the same. She asked the Toyota salesman why one was preferable to the other, and he said that they differed in their hybrid implementation -- the Honda's primary engine was the gasoline one, using the electric engine to give greater acceleration, or for use in low-power situations, while the Prius uses the electric engine as the primary, adding the gasoline engine for extra power as needed. What that seems to translate to is that the Prius is good for short-haul stop and go, running predominantly on electric power; the Honda is good for long-ride driving, cruising on gas, with the electric engine for added punch as needed. The net out is that the mileage for the Toyota is better. Not overwhelmingly better, but better. That's important to us to know, because we want to go into this with our eyes open. We do not expect that the savings in gas, either way, will pay for the differential (about five thousand) in the cost of the car, and we do expect to have expenses that we would not have with a traditional car. We want to note that up front, so that we know what we're doing, what we're getting into, and why. We're not doing it to save money, but we don't want to toss it away, either. Heck, if we wanted to toss away money, we'd -- oh, I don't know, pay for extravagant dental procedures, something like that.

One other tidbit: she said that when she started the Prius, it was completely silent. The gas engine was just ticking over? I asked. Nope, she replied. Not even running. Totally electric.

Ooohhh......