Martin Pease

The Boomers have a lot to answer for, and surely the career of Bruce Springsteen is among the crimes of this generation. My cohort, Gen X, is guilty of making Kurt Cobain into some sort of icon, but at least he's been dead for a few decades- the stink has dissipated. Springsteen continues to linger. He can't write lyrics. He can't sing. He's a big phoney. He is a less talented Meatloaf. Have you listened to Born to Run? He sounds like a guy trying to remember the words to the song; it is cartoonishly terrible. The idolization of this guy boggles the mind. Sure, we all have our guilty pleasures- everything by INXS for example. But nobody walks around claiming they were anything other than a minor band for 6 months in 1988. Bruce Springsteen is some sort of voice to the worst generation.

My wife screamed a loud, sharp, “STOP!” I jumped immediately on the brakes, just as a phantom Chevy Tahoe emerged from nowhere and crossed our path from right to left. The driver gave me a sidelong look with a clear indication of his opinion of me. Of course, the Tahoe had been there the entire time, yet it was all but invisible to me. Computer aided design, wind tunnel and virtual aerodynamics modeling, and NTHSA safety ratings have caused what I believe to be a minor crisis in automotive design. This rigorous process of fuel economy and safety rating maximalization dictates a generic blob, which the car companies then “style”. In the search to make their blob stand out from everyone else’s blobs, the incidental surface decoration of many cars is becoming increasingly bizarre, e.g. everything Toyota is producing currently. But this relentless march to the regulator’s tune has a secondary, and worse, effect. More and more cars are just too damn hard to see out of. Let us list a...