Saturday, June 9, 2012

No More Click and/or Clack

Sad to say, "Car Talk" on NPR is going on permanent hiatus as of October.  The good news is that there are 25 years worth of recorded shows that will be recycled.  It will seem odd in 2020 to listen to callers whose 1970 Ford Fairlane is making a funny noise, but the automobile information was only a part of the show's appeal anyway.

My favorite "Car Talk" moment came when I was living in a condo in downtown Minneapolis. I was driving home one Saturday and the topic was shock absorbers. They mentioned that the way to tell if you needed new shocks was to push down on the corner of your car and see what happened.  If the car simply returned to its previous position, fine.  If it continued to bounce once or twice, you needed to replace your shocks.

I pulled into the condo parking lot at the same time as one of my neighbors; he turned left into his parking spot
and I went a little further and turned into mine.  Naturally I got out and pushed down on the front corner of my car.  As I did so, I glanced up and saw my neighbor doing the same thing on his car.

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