Back at the GYG on the way home from the dealership with a new car for the second month in a row. There will not be a third.

Insurance

If you want to know who really runs this country, it's the insurance industry.

I've worked multiple jobs where policies & procedures were based on what level of liability was acceptable to our insurers. Health insurance lobbying is preventing universal healthcare in the United States.

The insurance industry struck the first blow against the automotive industry's muscle car. Environmental regulations and gas shortages combined to finish them off, but insurance weakened their sales by taking away one of the major selling points: increased insurance costs meant muscle cars were no longer cheap horsepower.

Further lobbying by auto insurance companies is why we have mandatory insurance laws. We may not insure with one specific company or another, but the industry now has a captive audience that's required to buy their service, and the largest companies were happy to pay into the lobbying because they tend to benefit the most when folks are required to buy a product.

Nowadays, insurance companies are removing the base model Kia Soul from existence. There's no conspiracy here, every company has actuaries that have analyzed the data and decided that the “Kia Boyz” thefts have made the key-started Kias & Hyundais too risky. Some increase prices to the point where the vehicle is no longer affordable, while others refuse to renew or write new policies.

Progressive won't cancel the vehicle, but they're making it as expensive as a new car payment to insure. We have to transfer our homeowners' insurance (along with the car insurance to get full discounts & benefits) to another company, and they won't touch my 2017 Soul base at any price.

So I have to trade in a perfectly operable, and fully paid off, vehicle that performs as well as it did on Day 1 of ownership despite a small rust spot and a scratched bumper. What a waste. But it's not entirely the fault of the insurance companies, they're not the ones creating the risk. They just analyze risk versus reward and price accordingly. I don't even really fault Hyundai or Kia, since there are plenty of older cars out on the streets without immobilizers, and plenty of brand new cars with immobilizers still being stolen.

This case is entirely on TikTok for promoting these stupidly destructive, criminal “challenges” that have included vandalizing school bathrooms to the point of unusability, firing candy pellets at innocent pedestrians, getting blackout drunk, and most infamously taking other peoples' Kias for joyrides. And they have little incentive to stop since they can't be removed from the internet. If anything, a Chinese company has every incentive to keep profiting off of promoting the self-destruction of their biggest economic and military rival.

It looks good on the dirty driveway next to the shingles.

But this is 2024. We seem to collectively have few good years left and we never know individually how much time we have left. So, it's pickup truck time. I had one before, a 2001 Chevrolet S-10 extended cab in dark blue that I traded in when we needed a vehicle that could accomodate a child car seat. I'd been looking at a Ford Maverick XL EcoBoost in plain Oxford White. A little base model “work truck” that I could put “The Crittenden Automotive Library” on the door, maybe add a little green glow to the bed, and take to book sales & Menards.

That's been hard to find, but on Car Insurance Day (yes, there is a fake holiday for everything) I came across a Terrain color XLT with a basic towing hitch and traded in the Kia Soul. It's a little more than the frugal part of me wanted to spend, but it had the same engine I was looking for and my wife loves the heated seats and blue & orange interior, so we brought it home.

Although I'm already on the receiving end of some gentle mocking over the Maverick's inability to bring home Billy bookshelves without them hanging off the end of the tailgate, it's time to put it to work and finish the move. Not that the truck is at all necessary for actually moving anything from the old house to the new house, but there are a lot of trips to Menards and Savers involved, and eventually bringing home everything from the storage unit.

On to the next stage of rebuilding in 2024.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

Two of the old display cases in the new office have been broken down & removed, with 2 more to go. But it feels like I'm more than halfway there, and the first bookshelves should go up later this evening!

Only two new books were added to the collection this month. I really didn't need to add to the clutter but I was near an out-of-the-way Half Price Books and found the manager's workbook for The Toyota Way and a hardcover copy of Brock Yates' Sunday Driver on clearance. I don't exactly know where they are now, but that's how things go mid-move.

I've also been paying some attention to how news analysts who broadcast from their home offices arrange their bookshelves. The ones that go behind me will be my favorites, and there are a few books I'm planning on facing forward so that you see the front cover instead of the spine like The Indomitable Tin Goose and Unsafe at Any Speed. Also The Toyota Way, since my department incorporated some of the principles into our daily lives a few years ago. I can't wait for the first time I get to log onto Zoom for the day job from the new office!

I've only had a few odd pieces of 1:18 scale die cast, John must have had over a thousand. Technically they're Heidi's now, but I can consider them “on loan,” and some of those will be mixed in as well.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

There is one name not in the Bible that is as important to the debate on the Bible's historicity as any except Jesus himself. And that is a fella named Tacitus. He wrote Historiae and Ab excessu divi Augusti, more commonly known in English as the Histories and the Annals. It is in the Annals that the first non-religious source mentions an event from the life of Christ. Together they form one series of thirty books, and just one copy of the first half was found in an abbey in Germany. The other half was found in just one copy in Monte Cassino. Contemporaries may have written better works, but we may never know, and through luck Tacitus became the most famous historian of all time.

I suppose it's part of the culture of preservation. When you're surrounded by people who preserve things, your life is more likely to be recorded for history. Historians' names are on the front cover of the works we cite. Librarians keep records, including those of their own institutions. It was abbey monks in two countries that preserved Tacitus' records of the Roman Empire that we do have.

So if you want your name to be remembered well beyond your years, and you aren't the kind of person who is destined to become one of the most famous persons of your generation, write about those who are!

Of course this is on my mind because of the new office. John Walczak will be remembered for the contributions to the historical record that his collection provides. I'm hoping someone will keep my memory going after I'm gone.

And somewhere in that new office there will be little mementos of our own lives spent preserving automotive history. Busted old cameras that took so many of the photographs that appear on CarsAndRacingStuff.com, the photographers' credits that appear alongside thousands of those old photos keeping our names going outside these walls. Pictures from the few times we appeared in front of instead of behind the cameras. The shirts we've worn, models we've built, articles we've written. “To John” or “To Bill” on countless autographed photos.

In the very long term, I'm hoping to create a lasting institution that keeps this website going long after I'm gone. If that doesn't happen, I'll have to settle for “From The Crittenden-Walczak Collection” stamped in the front covers of thousands of books & periodicals in a university library.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

A little was posted towards the end of the month, but not enough to keep Google happy. Just a few more months of moving into the new office, and then there will be plenty of new content to make Google happy.