Consumer Reports

I’m driving up the freeway in my 85 Tercel eating store brand frosted mini shredded wheat out of the box. I thought I was going to be sitting in traffic for a while and I was hungry, so I figured I’d pick up something to snack on in the car. I can’t buy that stuff very often because it’s like crack to me, I have to eat the whole box in one sitting, almost. One woman’s junk food is another woman’s– wait, that’s not working.

Anyhow the reason I’m in the 85 Tercel is that I’m heading home from Circuit City where I had to go to return the Jensen AM/FM Digital Clock Radio for iPod that I’d purchased the day before. See, the tuner in this thing is crap. I wanted to see if the tuner in the iHome flavor of the same device was any better. For grins, I ask the guy if he thinks they’re both made at the same factory, and he says it’s likely, because everything is made in, like, three places now. Or did I say that? They were both made in China, but China is awfully big so it’s impossible to know. Anyhow, the nice young man at Circuit City totally indulged me while I tested the tuner on another Jensen and the iHome and he seemed to agree with my conclusions. The tuner both units is crap.

This is too bad because I was psyched to listen to my iPod while languishing in bed during my post-husband’s-departure depression/glee. (It occurs to me this makes it sound like he’s dead, but he’s just back to Austria. I follow in late August.) I need radio because I am kind of retro that way, after all I drive an 85 Tercel. And the ten year old Sony clock radio that’s next to the bed now gets my stations just fine, without some stupid external running up the wall wire thing that doesn’t help at all.

On the way home from reverse shopping I stopped for a little forward shopping because I wanted to pick up some summer pajamas. If you’re going to write and work at home, you have to have decent pajamas and the flannels with the garden gnomes on them are too warm right now. Luckily, one can go to Target and buy garden gnome jammies in a light summer cotton. And they were on sale, which is nice because honestly, I’m kind of cheap. I believe I mentioned I drive an 85 Tercel.

So there I am, in the 85 Tercel with the radio on, eating my cereal crack snack. I’m tuned in to the station for the cool grownups, the one that plays old Beatles songs and that newish appealing kind of funky pop song by Corrine Ray Bailey, and other stuff that’s just right for the ears of tired parents of smallish children and not too embarrassing for tired parents of teenagers, and easy listening for childless denying middle age hipsters like myself who are terminally cool, like an illness. The radio plays two auto ads back to back that make fun of the Germans. The first is one in which a German is despondent because he didn’t design the new Lexus. It’s immediately followed by another where a German is making fun of some unnamed car because it’s so lousy, take me to the VW dealership immediately. It occurs to me, while I’m waiting for the light to change, that those stupid ads with the German guy are on all the time, and what is with car makers mocking the Germans lately? Do they all use the same ad agency?

You notice how they’re not making fun of the Japanese, the proud manufacturers of my 85 Tercel. That’s because cars suck, mostly, they’re too freaking big and they get the crappiest of crappy mileage except for the Japanese cars. Plus, making fun of the Japanese would probably seem awfully racist, wouldn’t it? I don’t know much about cars at all, only that the 26 mpg that the unspeakable Dr. Z on the Jeep ads tries to pass off as efficiency is not good mileage. 38-42 mpg on the freeway, as the Tercel still gets on the open road at 21 years old, is pretty decent indeed.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. I bought some stuff, I took it back. I went somewhere else and bought some other stuff. And some things I am just not buying, no matter how many fake Germans try to convince me. Also, what’s hotter than a garden gnome printed pajama wearing ranting crackpot who drives an 85 Tercel? I ask you.