NGK SINKER

On his recent scuba diving trip in Bali, Mark came across this unusual sinker!  For other pics of Mark's Bali exploits follow this link to the photo gallery section of Scuba 2 The Club, Marks dive club. 

                         CARTOON

Euromotive's owner, Mark Dyson, is sometimes accused by his partner Jacinta that the only things he cares about are their dogs and diving.  For one of Mark's birthdays, Jacinta had the attached cartoon done featuring Mark, George and Edna!  You can click on the cartoon for a larger version.

                      DARWIN AWARD

Below is an entrant for the Darwin Award. It's an annual honour given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way. Previous winner's have been the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free drink out of it.

The nominee is:
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smouldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an aeroplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.

The lab finally figured out what it was and what had happened. It seems a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off, actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO! The facts as best as could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3 miles from the crash site.

This was established by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at that location. The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well in excess of 350mph and continuing at full power for an additional 20-25 seconds. The driver (soon to be pilot) most likely would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, basically causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the event.

However, the automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles (15-20) seconds before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at a height of 125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock. Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable: however, small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.

Lessons learnt:
Air bags would not have helped.
Antilock brakes might have.

MICROSOFT CAR?

At a computer expo (COMEX),  Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty five dollar cars that got 1000miles/gal."

In response General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement:

"Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?; and

1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would need to buy a new car.

2. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.

3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine.  For some strange reason, you would accept this too.

4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT".  But, then you would have to buy more seats.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 5% of the roads.

6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower.

7. The oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car fault" warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would say "are you sure?" before going off.

10. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.