Panko-crusted goat cheese rounds from Whole Foods are of the devil's hands.

ooooh ... sounds yummy

The manual transmission is helping me right now when my speedometer decides it doesn't want to work. I can judge my speed pretty well by gear and the sound of the engine (I don't have a tach, so I've got to go with sound).

Oh, Gud, here's a solution. Get a pigeon and tape it to the roof of your car. Then get a mirror so you can watch the bird. Your speed in mph will be roughly how many times the pigeon flaps its wings each minute, divided by 4.732837. (I use lots of decimals to give the illusion of accuracy.)

I drove stick for 15 years. When we got our new car, we went with an automatic, mainly because my slightly-wonky knee is my left, and I can't deal with driving a stick in heavy traffic these days.

I miss a manual transmission.

I get my milk from Golden Glen Creamery at the local farmer's market. Sometimes, I cheat and get it from Twin Brook Creamery at the Metropolitan Market. In either case, the bottles are glass and the milk cream line. (Neither is listed on the site linked to with the moo.)

I wonder if Subarus are extra popular in SF because of that nifty clutch system.

Mostly the 4WD ones are popular for going into the mountains for skiing.

I had one of those and used to get notes on the car fairly often, offering to buy it.

Just got another recruiter that asked me to lie on my resume. Why do they bother? All I will do is give them a bad name.

I'm so used to manuals that sometimes automatics get on my nerves, "Hey car, I didn't want to shift gears right now."

I am Gud. I haven't owned an automatic for a couple of decades. Atlanta traffic is not an ideal place for them, and I do have to replace the clutch more often.

My father tried to teach me to drive a stick shift, but there was yelling. There was usually yelling, but in this case I was stuck in a VW Bug with him. My ex taught me and was remarkably patient with the terrible noises I made with his baby, a 240Z. Then my car died and we inherited a car with a manual transmission, so it was either master shifting or stop going to work. For the first couple of weeks, I screamed obscenities at anyone and anything that made me shift.

Never having owned a car, I've never felt the need for learning stick, although somehow I always felt I should.

In a zombie attack , it might be useful to be able to pop the clutch to start the car.

OTOH, with an automatic vehicle, you can fill it full of explosives, put it in gear, put a brick on the gas pedal and send it into a crowd of zombies.

I learned to drive stick in a blue yugo with a missing gas cap.