Thursday, 21 January 1999:

Car Trouble

I'm having some weird car trouble lately. Most of the time my car is fine, but I've noticed that every so often I'm having trouble starting it. It hasn't happened enough for me to sense a pattern, but my feeling from my recollections of the 2 or 3 times it's happened is that it occurs when I've just made a short drive - so the engine hasn't entirely heated up - and I stop to go in somewhere, and come back only a few (10 or 15) minutes later. The car has trouble getting started. Yesterday it got so bad when I stopped at the comic book store that I had to pump the gas pedal repeatedly while holding the ignition until it finally rumbled into life.

And yet, leaving it outside for four-to-eight hours in the cold and it consistently starts up just fine.

I'm sure it's not a battery problem - I've had them before, and this is different. And I don't think it's a starter problem, either. My first thought is that it's vapor lock - probably because of the urban legend going around the net about the guy whose car wouldn't start whenever he stopped at the store for vanilla - and only vanilla - ice cream. The symptoms are remarkably similar. Karen suggested that it might be that I have a fuel line problem.

So, I guess I should take it in to get looked at. I still need new tires, too, although even on my current tires I seem to be getting on just fine.

Or maybe it's just about time for a new car.

It's been more of the same this week - working on projects at work, buying comics yesterday, going to dinner with Karen last night, and so forth. Here's this week's comics haul:

I haven't yet read any of the Grendel Black, White & Red series, I think out of disappointment that Matt Wagner's not drawing as well as writing it. SubHuman is an entertaining pulp-ish series written by Mark Schultz of Xenozoic Tales, but the writing is a little spotty and relies too much on eerie mystery and not enough on solid plot. Fanboy is a Sergio Aragones yarn parodying the really obsessive comics fans; cute, but lightweight. X-Men Companion was a two-volume set published in the 80s about the first 20 years or so of the comic, which looked worthwhile since it focused mainly on the best part of the series' run, in the late 70s. I haven't read it yet; I picked up the first volume on my Boston trip.

Today I also went to the library and took out some CDs. The first I listened to was Ellington at Newport, about Duke Ellington's 1956 concert at the Newport Jazz Festival, and it is a terrific album, right down to John Gonsalves' famous sax solo on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", which really is wonderful. I've mostly stayed away from big band/orchestra work in my jazz explorations so far (except for Gil Evans' Out of the Cool), but this one is making me think I should check more of it out.

On the other hand, Jack Dejohnette's Album Album is not so strong: Dejohnette's drumming is superb, but the writing is rather bland, I think. One time I remarked to a friend that I liked the track "The Impaler" on Michael Brecker's album Two Blocks from the Edge, which was written by the drummer, and he commented that he wasn't sure drummers should be allowed to write tracks. I'm not sure I agree, and I still like "The Impaler", but Album Album isn't a strong statement in favor.

I'll comment on the other albums when I've had a chance to listen to them.

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