Mark Langlois, Loser
Posted on 12/11/2006 6:50:33 AM PST by LurkedLongEnough
For all the nonsense about the love affair between Americans and their cars, people seem to spend a whole lot of time and effort to avoid climbing into a car.
Super Stop & Shop's Peapod provides home delivery of groceries. That eliminates one's weekly trip to the grocery store. Get the grocery list online, pick the items, and the food appears in the insulated box outside your house.
People can go to Match, Jdate, EHarmony and Match.com to start dating without even heading to a bar. What happened to joining the ski club? What happened to taking night classes? Tennis, anyone? Too much car involved with all that.
How about Greensingles. com? That's for Naturenuts who want to get together with other natural types.
Actually, Naturenuts may be a strong way to describe them. The Web site says it is for vegetarians, animal rights activists, and environmentalists to meet each other. Talk about a good time.
Back in the day, a person would head to the bar and meet a few people. Buy someone a drink. Talk and decide if the person was OK or not. Get her number, and agree to meet later or another day.
I'm willing to bet even money it still works that way on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
In some cities, grocery stores are famous people pickup places. On the waterfront in San Francisco's Marina district was a famous grocery store where singles went to meet people they might like to date. To find a match, they would look in each other's grocery cart.
A Naturenut, for example, might check out the items in a person's cart to see if they're compatible. No ground beef. No steaks. No fur coat. O.K. It's veggies, pita and a match. Go back to the apartment and make dinner together.
A similar spot in San Francisco is the Buena Vista, a restaurant near Fisherman's Wharf. One famous story I know about the Buena Vista involves two people who went there by cable car, separately, and met and later married. They never owned a car.
John came from Sydney, Australia, and he'd heard stories about the Buena Vista in Australia to the point where he took a taxi (yes, that's a car) from the airport to the cable car to get there.
He got off at Fisherman's Wharf, found the bar and started drinking Irish coffees. He stayed for two days and met the woman who became his wife. Neither one of them owned a car. John literally traveled 4,000 miles -- without a car -- to meet a woman and settle down -- without a car.
People do so many things to avoid driving. How about the Domino pizza chain? The whole entire concept is you don't have to go out for Domino's. It's all about home delivery.
Animal groomers are willing to drive their grooming van to your house, and some vets will make house calls.
Maybe the love affair with the automobile is a thing of the past.
The author needs to get out of the city from time-to-time.
That said, if I lived in NYC, I would have a ratty bicycle and a truly awful looking cheap-assed scooter with a basket on the back. I might have to ride more than 4 blocks to find a decent deli.
The phrase "love affair with the automobile" is usually a pretty good indication that thought-free libspeak is in progress.
It could be NE New Mexico, past Clayton, or Nevada, or Eastern Colorado, around Limon, or Montana, near Crow Agency, or southern Idaho. There is a lot of tall and uncut, and the twitter-pated fool who wrote this article hasn't seen any of it.
What people want is cars that drive themselves.
They don't want to deal with public transportation's "icky" people or restrictive schedule, but they also want to drink their lattes and talk on the phone and not have to watch the road.
I know that I would rather trust a computer than a distracted, drunk, sleepy, bad eyesight, having person.
The young people need to go someplace in their car. Now. Perhaps they are checking if the world is still out there as it was an hour ago. There is some uncertainty on this question and TV/Internet is no help since we know anything can be faked on screen.
"The entire concept of owning a car is personal freedom."
Bingo. Nail on the head.
The truth is that computers didn't reduce the paper in the office; they made it possible to print more paper, faster, than ever before.
We should have bought stock in Staples.
I work for an Environmental consulting firm and we have to go out to clients (sometimes 6 hours away) and we drive our 4x4 full-sized extended cab trucks with V8's so we can (if need be) go off-road when we get there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I print out all my timecards and expense reports and file them so I will have a copy...guess I'm contributing to the problem
How am I supposed to get to work without a car?
Since I work in the automotive industry, if nobody had cars, I wouldn't have a job.
Phil is tops at finding photos!
Vegas 9:1 odds this creep is a pansy too
Agreed. This article seems like it was written by a 13 year old girl in the Jr High journalism class newspaper.
Yes Phil, you always turn up with hard to find photos!
I wish I didn't have to own an automobile but I live out in the suburbs and our light rail/bus system doesn't really work for me. It would literally take me close to three hours to get to work and the same to get back home, I'm too lazy for that.
"I have lived in places where you have to drive an hour for groceries."
I'm waiting for Publix, WalMart, et al to build 50 miles west of Miami, in the middle of the Everglades where I live. Only when they do can I dump my Landie.
I suspect the wait will be a long one. ;-)
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