2012 Civics

I had half a thought to swing into a dealership to try to pick the brains of a Honda service shop, but got distracted by a new shipment of Civics at Mohawk.

They had a dozen or more, including:

- LX (AT) at $19,425; to which they had added undercoating or something, to make it $19,804
- EX-L (AT) at $22,725 - with a dealer add-on bringing it to $23,104
- EX-L NAV at $24,225 (!)
and a version that I might actually consider, the
- Civic Hybrid at $26,020 (rated at 44/44/44mpg)

Still no sign of the chimeral HF edition.

So
Hybrid:DX is $26020:$16575
:: 56.98% more than the base model.
That's fully $9445 more - - plus 8% tax = a $10,200.60 price difference.

That's hard to justify just on the basis of gas savings. Even at tomorrow's $10/gallon, that's a thousand gallons of gas; at today's prices, that's not far from a decade of driving.

(I was actually going to ask them about replacement Smart Keys, and about synthetic oil changes, but didn't ever make it inside....)

The internet has again failed me

Turns out, there IS no clear source for the line:

Put your hands in air
and wave them around
like you just don't care

This was already a commonplace back in my college radio days in the '70s - Grandmaster Flash came close to saying it, I'm pretty sure Cameo said it - but who was FIRST to say it? Google won't tell me. (Apparently it's in at least 100 songs....)

A thought for the day

I was cooking breakfast this morning while listening to one of the Columbia/Legacy blues collections (the Son House 1965 session, as it happens...)

and I had the thought:


"Maybe I'd rather live in the alternate universe, the one where the first Monkees single had been called "Last Train to Clarksdale".

(To spell out the joke:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_61 :

"The junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale is designated as the famous crossroads where, according to legend, Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues."

And then I wiki'd it and learned that the pop song nearly HAD been called "Last Train to Clarksdale":

"Though the Clarksville in the song's title appears to refer to the city of Clarksville, Tennessee — and by implication to nearby Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is home to the 101st Airborne Division — co-writer Bobby Hart states that this is a coincidence. "There's a little town in northern Arizona I used to go through in the summers on the way to Oak Creek Canyon called Clarkdale," said Hart.
"We were throwing out some names and then when we got to Clarkdale we stopped for a minute and thought that sounded pretty good. We thought maybe Clarksville would even be a little better. We didn't know at that time that there is an Army base near the town of Clarksville, Tennessee, which would have fit the bill fine."

On second thought, maybe that would actually be a pretty terrible alternate universe, one where Clarksdale, Mississippi was best known from a crappy pop song.


So - on further reflection - I decided I want to live in the alternate universe where the Monkees sang about a trip to the space station up in geosynchronous orbit:
"Last Train to Clarkesville"