Amarna is currently sprawled out on the couch, glaring at me--oops, no, now she's asleep. She started scratching at it a bit already, but I'm hoping she'll only do that as much as she did the old couch, which isn't too much and didn't leave a mark at all.

From Jeremy Clarkson's review of the Honda Insight for the London Times:

Honda Insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid

The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

A fun read, as he trashed the car thoroughly.

To be fair about the CVT, that's how they work. From what I've read, driving one can be disconcerting, but they work that way because it's more efficient.

Well, assignments came out today. I have 3 projects over the next two years and my lame-ass counterpart has 1.

WTF Tino?

Goddamn Tino!!

Does this mean job security, megan?

Oh, I'm not so much worried about job security. Which, don't get me wrong, is a good thing, but the fact that I would need a 50% raise to make the median income in San Francisco does make me wonder if it's worth staying here.

Sounds like your counterpart is Wally from the Dilbert strip, megan.

I think we need two Buffista islands: one cool weather, one hot. Then we need someone to develop a teleportation device between the two.

Sue -- or a bi-yearly migration, where we drive the cats over the mountain passes, and ford the rivers.

The radio show is finishing now, and everyone is crying, including me! (They just played a very touching montage and came back to both of the hosts audibly sobbing, and even their male newsreader is crying, so I lost it!) WGN is "going in a new direction," so they're firing these two after twenty years.

Which so sucks.

One of them is reading some ad copy, and then lost it halfway through and then said, "They're never gonna pay for this," which cracked everyone up.

I like this island

[link]

Undeveloped in the Bahamas. 55 acres. Sounds lovely.