shaxper
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Post by shaxper on May 16, 2016 9:46:07 GMT -5
You willingly listened to more than 1 second of Journey? Yes, something is quite wrong with you. They have three songs I adore, three songs I loathe, and the rest is mild unpleasantness for me.
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Post by Deleted on May 16, 2016 9:49:00 GMT -5
For what it's worth, I'm not much of a mechanic, and most of what I've done on cars has been because I had no choice (couldn't afford to pay someone skilled to do it). But some 20 years ago I replaced a radiator and air pump on an old Chrysler by myself (without benefit of online video help) and managed to do it successfully. With the added advantage of step-by-step videos, you should do fine. Yep. Once upon a time I was a halfway-decent shade-tree mechanic, at least until they started computerizing all the shade trees. Uh ... I mean, until they started computerizing all the cars. If I could accomplish things (as I did, mainly on my mother's old '73 Pinto, my then-stepdaughter's I-think-'72 Pinto station wagon & my '88 Dodge Colt) like changing out starters, a U-joint, shocks, a master cylinder, etc., there's no reason someone like you can't do what you're hoping to. That was almost all before the internet, much less YouTube & the equivalent. These days I'm not as likely to get much done under the hood, even with a 20-year-old Maxima, but even so a couple of years ago I managed to save myself $300+ in labor by poking around on Google, heading out to a salvage yard & coming back with & installing a screen about the size of a silver dollar. And now I'm getting to practice what I preached, I guess. A week ago my driver-side window stopped working, so I removed the door panel (about an hour-long process, since the images allegedly illustrating the procedure in my Haynes manual bore no more resemblance to what I was actually dealing with than they did to the SHIELD helicarrier) to see if anything obvious was the matter. Wound up heading out across town to the Pull A Part yard Saturday & did the same thing with a compatible '95 Maxima so that I could remove the window regulator & motor, crossing my fingers that (a) that was the problem & (b) the one from the '95 worked. That took about 2 hours, because I spent a good part of that time trying to do the same thing with a compatible later model, only to realize that getting access to everything would be a major hassle with the window stuck all the way in the up position (all the way down would've been ideal). Decided after awhile to go in search of another one with, I hoped, a lowered window, but no luck ... but the '95 I finally settled on had something like 80,000 miles than the first one (& 40,000 or so less than mine), so I figure I lucked out a bit. Had to mangle the top of that door's window channel to extract said window, but I finally managed. Got back home, removed my own regular & motor, switched out the salvaged parts & ... yep ... that was the problem. Of course, now my window is off track, to the point that it jams about halfway up, but after looking at it this morning in the parking lot here at work, with the previous day's exhaustion & exasperation largely lifted, I'm pretty sure it's a simple matter of guiding the glass' front edge into the proper channel rather than where it is now. I'll have to repeat a lot of the above steps, but at this point I'm becoming an old hand at such things.
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Post by Deleted on May 16, 2016 9:50:34 GMT -5
You willingly listened to more than 1 second of Journey? Yes, something is quite wrong with you. They have three songs I adore, three songs I loathe, and the rest is mild unpleasantness for me. Three? Good grief. I mean, I like one song by the Grateful Dead & one song by Billy Joel, & undoubtedly one song each by any number of other wretched acts, but three? Broken clocks are right twice a day (non-digital clocks, anyway), but not thrice. I think I have to go lie down now. Too bad I'm at work ...
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Post by Prince Hal on May 16, 2016 9:53:50 GMT -5
Yep. Once upon a time I was a halfway-decent shade-tree mechanic, at least until they started computerizing all the shade trees. Uh ... I mean, until they started computerizing all the cars. If I could accomplish things (as I did, mainly on my mother's old '73 Pinto, my then-stepdaughter's I-think-'72 Pinto station wagon & my '88 Dodge Colt) like changing out starters, a U-joint, shocks, a master cylinder, etc., there's no reason someone like you can't do what you're hoping to. That was almost all before the internet, much less YouTube & the equivalent. These days I'm not as likely to get much done under the hood, even with a 20-year-old Maxima, but even so a couple of years ago I managed to save myself $300+ in labor by poking around on Google, heading out to a salvage yard & coming back with & installing a screen about the size of a silver dollar. And now I'm getting to practice what I preached, I guess. A week ago my driver-side window stopped working, so I removed the door panel (about an hour-long process, since the images allegedly illustrating the procedure in my Haynes manual bore no more resemblance to what I was actually dealing with than they did to the SHIELD helicarrier) to see if anything obvious was the matter. Are you sure?
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shaxper
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Posts: 22,761
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Post by shaxper on May 16, 2016 9:55:51 GMT -5
They have three songs I adore, three songs I loathe, and the rest is mild unpleasantness for me. Three? Good grief. I mean, I like one song by the Grateful Dead & one song by Billy Joel, & undoubtedly one song each by any number of other wretched acts, but three? Broken clocks are right twice a day (non-digital clocks, anyway), but not thrice. I think I have to go lie down now. Too bad I'm at work ... Faithfully, Anyway you Want it, and Don't Stop Believing. If loving those songs is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
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Post by The Captain on May 16, 2016 9:56:12 GMT -5
They have three songs I adore, three songs I loathe, and the rest is mild unpleasantness for me. Three? Good grief. I mean, I like one song by the Grateful Dead & one song by Billy Joel, & undoubtedly one song each by any number of other wretched acts, but three? Broken clocks are right twice a day (non-digital clocks, anyway), but not thrice. I think I have to go lie down now. Too bad I'm at work ... Which raises the question: Which songs by the Grateful Dead and by Billy Joel do you like?
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shaxper
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Posts: 22,761
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Post by shaxper on May 16, 2016 9:58:36 GMT -5
Three? Good grief. I mean, I like one song by the Grateful Dead & one song by Billy Joel, & undoubtedly one song each by any number of other wretched acts, but three? Broken clocks are right twice a day (non-digital clocks, anyway), but not thrice. I think I have to go lie down now. Too bad I'm at work ... Which raises the question: Which songs by the Grateful Dead and by Billy Joel do you like? I'm the same way with those two. I can't stand most of Billy Joel's stuff, but man...Captain Jack is a phenomenal song. Much of The Dead is background mood-setting music, but I love Uncle John's Band and Friend of the Devil.
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on May 16, 2016 10:00:48 GMT -5
I didn't anywhere with my truck this weekend. I was busy, more busy it seemed then the whole previous work week, but nothing done so far. I am going to try this weekend if the weather permits.
I also like Journey.
If I've heard an Grateful Dead song, I did not know it was them.
Piano Man is a good song.
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shaxper
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Posts: 22,761
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Post by shaxper on May 16, 2016 10:03:10 GMT -5
Piano Man is a good song. It was a good song. It's been horribly horribly overplayed, and those lyrics are so absurdly egotistical that they make me want to punch Mr. Joel every time I hear them. "Everyone in this bar is a loser going nowhere, but I'm awesome, everyone knows it, and I make their lives better by existing around them."
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on May 16, 2016 10:05:23 GMT -5
Piano Man is a good song. It was a good song. It's been horribly horribly overplayed, and those lyrics are so absurdly egotistical that they make me want to punch Mr. Joel every time I hear them. "Everyone in this bar is a loser going nowhere, but I'm awesome, everyone knows it, and I make their lives better by existing around them." I never thought of it from that angle, to be honest. I guess (especially before being married) a drank a lot in bars, but alone. So the feeling of not wanting to be alone, but still drinking alone is familiar.
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shaxper
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Posts: 22,761
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Post by shaxper on May 16, 2016 10:07:23 GMT -5
It was a good song. It's been horribly horribly overplayed, and those lyrics are so absurdly egotistical that they make me want to punch Mr. Joel every time I hear them. "Everyone in this bar is a loser going nowhere, but I'm awesome, everyone knows it, and I make their lives better by existing around them." I never thought of it from that angle, to be honest. I guess (especially before being married) a drank a lot in bars, but alone. So the feeling of not wanting to be alone, but still drinking alone is familiar. There are better alternatives for that particular feeling: More optimistic and less lonely, sure. But also no pretentious jerk singing about how great he is.
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Post by The Captain on May 16, 2016 10:08:38 GMT -5
Journey is such a Pittsburgh band, although I never really got into them. The only song of theirs I can stomach is "Don't Stop Believing", and only because of what it makes me think of.
When the Pirates were nearing the end of the 2013 season, the one in which they broke their 20-season streak of below-.500 records (the worst streak in US professional sports history), our shortstop, Clint Barmes, started using that song as his at-bat walk-up music. Since that song is still a staple on the most-popular radio station in the city, the entire ballpark would start singing along whenever he came to the plate. I went to the first non-wildcard playoff game in the city in over 20 years that year and Barmes started the game, and the energy of hearing nearly 40,000 people screaming that song at the top of their lungs for his at-bats still gives me chills to this day.
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Post by The Captain on May 16, 2016 10:11:49 GMT -5
Piano Man is a good song. It was a good song. It's been horribly horribly overplayed, and those lyrics are so absurdly egotistical that they make me want to punch Mr. Joel every time I hear them. "Everyone in this bar is a loser going nowhere, but I'm awesome, everyone knows it, and I make their lives better by existing around them." That's my father's feeling on "Stairway to Heaven". When he was reviewing popular music for the local paper, he went to schools to talk about journalism as a career, and at one school, one of the kids asked him if he liked that song. My father replied, "I liked it, the first million times I heard it."
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Post by Deleted on May 16, 2016 10:17:34 GMT -5
Three? Good grief. I mean, I like one song by the Grateful Dead & one song by Billy Joel, & undoubtedly one song each by any number of other wretched acts, but three? Broken clocks are right twice a day (non-digital clocks, anyway), but not thrice. I think I have to go lie down now. Too bad I'm at work ... Which raises the question: Which songs by the Grateful Dead and by Billy Joel do you like? I like the Dead's one (AFAIK) radio hit, "Touch of Grey," probably because it presumably doesn't sound like their usual self-indulgent crap. I'm also unaccountably fond of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," possibly because it's the only song I can think of that mentions Little Rock, Malcolm X & Ho Chi Minh*. And refreshing my memory via Google just now, I see Alabama's in there as well. If only he'd thrown in Sgt. Fury or Brother Power the Geek ... *Whose shared birthday is Thursday [on the extreme off chance anyone was wondering how the May 19th Communist Organization got its name]. I should take the day off.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 16, 2016 10:22:11 GMT -5
It was a good song. It's been horribly horribly overplayed, and those lyrics are so absurdly egotistical that they make me want to punch Mr. Joel every time I hear them. "Everyone in this bar is a loser going nowhere, but I'm awesome, everyone knows it, and I make their lives better by existing around them." That's my father's feeling on "Stairway to Heaven". When he was reviewing popular music for the local paper, he went to schools to talk about journalism as a career, and at one school, one of the kids asked him if he liked that song. My father replied, "I liked it, the first million times I heard it." I'd say the same thing about pretty much the entire playlist of pretty much an "classic rock" radio station. It just stopped being interesting 25 years ago after the millionth playing.
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