You’ve got to know this stuff. Cars are far too expensive to make a bad choice – but if all the new ones are bad choices, where does that leave you? The 20-30 year old stuff is 20-30 years old. They may have been built better, but their owners have had 20-30 years to tear them up. Most people have been skating on thin ice financially since the early 90’s, which means maintenance doesn’t get done. Some people won’t run premium gas in a car that requires premium gas. Think twice about that used luxury or performance vehicle – you could be in a world of hurt if a previous owner damaged the engine internals by running regular in a vehicle that requires premium.

To make matters worse, the masses have been running to older vehicles for a while now. That market has been running dry of supply for a while. Yesterday I looked at an ad for an 80’s Buick Electra Park Avenue. Nine grand, less than 100,000 miles, clean car – except it had a rebuilt title. Nine grand for an 80’s Buick with a rebuilt title? Wow. What kind of condition is that car really in? Is it two wrecked cars that had their bad ends cut off, and the good ends welded together in the middle? Some of those jobs are done so poorly that the car can’t be aligned, which means it is eating tires until it is finally taken off the road.

I’ve seen used car dealerships move exclusively to rebuilt cars, for lack of low-mileage used cars to sell, which tells you things are bad. And it’s been this way for a long time.

There is no good answer here for the masses – we’re not all going to find a unicorn “forever car.” There aren’t enough left for us to all have one. Some people are going to lose, and cry. A lot. They’re going to be ruined.

I’m back dating after divorce – why are midlife men only after one thing?

I’ve been doing everything myself for years. Cooking, cleaning, all the traditional housewife things short of child care. Everything I’ve learned to do, turned out to be easy. Perhaps a 1950’s era housewife could do it better, but I clean better than my mother did. I don’t cook as well as she did, but it turns out I don’t need much of that. Her cooking was the reason I struggled with flab all my life. I may not have model-quality abs yet, but I do have them.

I could get an AI girlfriend that will always try to be an agreeable companion, but I haven’t. It’s a bit disturbing, but it turns out that wasn’t very valuable either.

That only leaves one thing that is potentially better with another person, but it’s not worth as much at 51 as it was at 15. It’s nothing to trade a peaceful and comfortable old age for.

Here is a little rot I found next to the toilet drain –

In case you weren’t taught how to repair toilets either, the white plastic part is the top of the drain pipe. If you look on each side of the toilet base, there will either be a plastic cap (if it was installed right), or a bolt (if someone couldn’t be bothered to finish the job correctly, or didn’t have the tools to cut a bolt. Bolts come longer than they need to be.)

In the top right corner of the picture is a bolt that has been blackened by exposure to decades of humidity. The head of the bolt goes in that long slot – the head shouldn’t be lined up with the opening of the slot like that. Seeing it makes me think the pipe is installed incorrectly. The head can obviously pull out through the opening to the slot. Those bolts clamp the pipe to the bottom of the toilet, which they obviously can’t do if they can pull out of the pipe.

A wax seal gets squished between the drain pipe and the bottom of the toilet. The wax seal eventually breaks, and then waste water seeps out over your floor. Or, in this case, under the floor tiles. If it goes under tiles or a rug, you might not notice for some time that it is leaking. Which is what happened here, causing the floor rot. But, the fact that it is leaking is bad enough. You don’t want to call a plumber every time the gasket breaks. It’s a simple fix that can be done in an hour, if you have the tools and know how to do it. All you have to do is remove the water from the toilet (I use a shop vac with a water filter. I may get a dedicated wet vac, because swapping the dry and wet filters is a pain), unhook the water line to the toilet, undo those two bolts clamping the drain to the toilet, lift the toilet up and put it somewhere else (it will be dripping water). I like to put the toilet on 4″ blocks so I can work on the bottom, because the next step is to remove the remnants of the wax seal from the toilet and the drain pipe. Use a hair dryer to heat it up, when it’s melty the wax will come off easier. Then put a new wax seal on top of the drain pipe, lower the toilet back into place, making sure it is at a 90 degree angle to the wall and the toilet outlet is going into the drain pipe, and squash the toilet down on the wax seal.

Everyone should know how to do this. The wax seals are only a couple bucks, so the repair is practically free if you know how to do it. Lifting the toilet does require some physical strength.

If you were fascinated by that, here’s some wood repair.

The little bit of rot was more extensive than it originally appeared to be –

Structurally, I don’t think this is a problem, since the pipe doesn’t support the toilet. I dug out most of the rot and used Minwax Rot Hardener to harden the remaining wood. Unfortunately, it darkened the wood too – but the splotches are mostly under the toilet, and the areas that stick out beyond the edge of the toilet won’t be very noticeable.

I used wood filler to fill that hole in, since I don’t want waste water pooling up in it the next time the wax seal breaks. I’ll sand the filler down and put polyurethane over it. It should be fine.

In site news, supposedly site traffic goes up when school starts, so I’m looking forward to seeing if that happens or not.

I had this intriguing result with page 57 –

How can more people have liked the comic, than viewed the comic? That looks like the view count did break when the SSL/non SSL problem was fixed. It doesn’t make sense to get hundreds of views a day, but only single digit views on the main page.

More people spent a long amount of time on the site this week, instead of almost everyone bouncing in their first 30 seconds (not necessarily a bad thing – how long does it take to read a page? Not very.) So that’s another big positive.

Here is some more life news – I didn’t get the good job I applied for, in fact they ghosted me. So it looks like I’m going back into hard production work, and cutting back on my classes. So it will two years to finish college, instead of one. And when I’m out, I’ll be older again. It’s going to be next to impossible to get comic pages done, but maybe I can make videos on the long ride too and from work.

The woman in the glasses is onto something. A percentage of women checked out first, at least part of the time, when they got the only part of the male robot they need to be satisfied. In truth, cats, dildos, and a thankless job are a better deal for a woman than a useless, out-of-shape bum. I’m not wearing pro-male blinders. There’s a large percentage of men who would rather pig out, play video games, and find relief for their woes in self medication, than put in the work. And there’s a certain logic in that too – if attractive women don’t want you, why not coast through life?

But I think the thing missing from this conversation is, “What will men do when the work guarantees the reward?” When a man has put in the work to buy the car, he gets the car. When he’s put in the work to buy a nice house, he gets the house. What happens when every man who puts in the work to be able to support a family, can have an android wife and then have his kids through surrogacy or the artificial womb? Will he become a more productive member of society, because the reward is guaranteed?

Most of those female robots aren’t very good, but the one cued up here might pass in dim lighting. Some of the glancing expressions are hitting –

Now this is why I don’t like to let any other mechanic touch my vehicles. Do you see the problem –

The second caliper I got from O’Reilly’s was also defective. The rubber boot is not seated properly on the piston. Here’s what it looks like after I seated it properly –

Everything is like this now, so you’d better know what you’re doing and be able to spot problems.