Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Let me advance a heterodox idea: You can’t save. More precisely, you can’t provide for tomorrow’s consumption today with nearly as much certainty as you think you can. Most of what we consider “saving” is really just a hash of complicated contractual arrangements, with all the attendant fragility thereof; an unenforceable promise isn’t worth much.

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Editorial note: This is a little story from my past. It has no great significance, I just find it amusing.

My first car was a 1984 Mustang. It was a serviceable enough car as the factory had built it, but money from my first job, mulish stubbornness, and spectacularly bad judgement combined to turn it into a real monster. A full EFI conversion (from the original carburetion — a word spellcheck doesn’t even recognize anymore) was followed by race heads, full intake and exhaust upgrades, a massive fuel system, the de rigueur Vortech V1, a dyno tune, and a bunch of other stuff that slips my mind at the moment. The end result was 472HP at the flywheel (in 1998) paired with the stock rear drum brakes. Wheeeeee!

Aside from everything else, the car was loud. It wasn’t just the exhaust note (which once got me pulled over on a completely unmerited “exhibition of speed” complaint). The fuel pumps were loud on this car. The supercharger could be heard blocks away, and that brings us to our story.

I’d arranged to meet one of my friends for lunch, and when we sat down, he told me that he’d actually forgotten our appointment. When I asked how, then, he happened to be here, he explained that he’d been out for lunch on his own account, and had heard my motor’s distinctive racket pass by some streets away, which jogged his memory.

I was sorry to let the car go, but I could never get the computer tuned reliably, and there were certain questions in re: smog compliance. I understand the motor lives on in a Cobra replica, while the car itself has gone to that great garage in the sky. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Three weeks ago, I wrote that I would be “astonished” if the Senate acted to weaken the filibuster in the current congress. And, in fact, we see that the Senate “voted overwhelmingly … to reject efforts to change its rules to restrict the blockades that have sown gridlock and discord in recent years on Capitol Hill.”

Senators were emphatic in their votes against limiting the filibuster, a treasured right of minorities trying to prevent majorities from running roughshod over them. Many Democrats, while now in the majority, envisioned a day, perhaps as early as after the 2012 election, when they would return to the minority.

::Preen::