Engine

I heard a joke some years ago that went something like this:

A woman goes to a mechanic and says 'When I buy pistachio ice cream, my car won't start'. As you might expect, the mechanic is dumbfounded. "Say what?" She tells him that she's in the habit of going to a local store after dinner to buy some of their freshly made ice cream. If she gets chocolate, or vanilla, the car starts just fine. But if she gets pistachio -- He just gives her The Look, and she says 'Tell you what. Next couple of times I go, I'll stop by here and pick you up. You'll see.' And she does. They go to the store, she goes in, comes right back out with vanilla, car starts right up. Next time she goes in, gets chocolate, car starts right up. Third time she goes in, comes out with pistachio -- and the car won't start. They sit there for a few moments, and she says 'okay, now it will start'. And it does.

What?

You buy ice cream in the summer. It's hot in the summer. She would go into the store, grab one of the popular flavors, chocolate or vanilla, already packaged, and be out quickly. Pistachio wasn't so popular, so she would have to wait for them to package it. And in that extra time, in the heat, the car would develop -- a vapor lock. And until the lock evaporated, the car would get no fuel, and it wouldn't start.

I have a vapor lock happening with this laptop, and I am sure that if I tell a Knowledgeable Person, I'll get the same reaction. One of those things you'd rather live with than have to explain to someone.

Every so often, the search in Google goes whacky. I can ask it to find pages with Truck on them, and it'll return a list. And when I click on one of the entries that clearly says TRUCK -- the page is iTunes. Every time. If I look for an image, all of the images are that hash character you get when it can't display the image. And its not just Google -- Yahoo and Alta Vista, same thing. The only thing I know is that its somehow Firefox's fault -- because if I do the same search on Internet Exploder, while Firefox is having the problem, it works.

I turn the PC off and on, and its all fine again.

What?