right. the IRL cop cars in 1987–at the time of the actual filming–were boxy-looking 80s cop cars. but the movie was set in a near-future, and shortly after the Taurus debut, the Caprice Classic and Crown Victoria were styled after the Taurus look. So Verhoven (or his art director) was totally right-on.
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Well, I dunno… Comparing the 1st generation Taurus wagon profile to a somewhat contemporary LTD wagon profile seems to suggest at least a half hour might have been spent near a wind tunnel.
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Bit like this?
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Right? Why write longhand when you can type, and edit, jeepers creapers.
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In between having a dot-matrix printer and having an inkjet, I was printerless. We had to write a paper for school and I had already written mine when the teacher announced that those of us who were handwriting instead of printing from a computer needed to use special marks to show emphasis, like underlining things that would be italic if they were printed. I asked whether I had to underline things if they were already written in italic, and that totally threw her off. (It’s really not hard to write on a slant, or for that matter to bold things that need it, but somehow that never occurred to people before printers?)
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All it needed was a Luigi Russolo ad campaign with sirens, metal, and intonarumori!
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Something I just thought of: you know the cognitive impairment test where they ask for a picture of a clock? How long before that becomes problematic because the testee hasn’t learned (or learned well) how to tell time on an analog clock?
I already know people who have trouble parsing “ten to” versus "…fifty ", because they’re unused to looking at the fractions that way.
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No- not a floppy drive. A hard drive.
It was bad ass to be able to store that much stuff. Crazy.
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I remember getting into an argument with one of my teachers because he demanded a “handwritten rough copy and a typewritten good copy” and I informed him that I hadn’t handwritten an essay in three years and had no intention to start.
We actually had to get the computer teacher in to explain to him how WordProcessors worked. (That same computers teacher would, the next year, tear a strip off that same history / law teacher for calling a bunch of us students “pains in the ass” because we argued that a question in the law text did not provide enough information to come to the conclusion he did. But that is a story for another thread).
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We used to call them “bubble cars” and remark on how much they all looked alike.
As for the modern aesthetic, I really like the new Challenger, although I suppose that’s probably more of a retro design when it comes right down to it.
Still, though. Vrooooooom!!!
At the time, though, the height of cool for this child of the 80s was the Pontiac Fiero (mid-engine fires be damned!).
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For this child of the '60s and '70s…
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Is that an MG Midget? My best friend from grade school was really into those, I think at least partly because of the name.
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Yup. They were little pleasures to drive - agile, and able to run off the fumes of an oily rag. (OK, so I exaggerate, but that 5-gallon tank took you a pretty fair distance.) Downsides were the usual British engineering of the time: electrical system by the Prince of Darkness, leather straps acting as doorstops, float gauges in the fuel tank that didn’t (float, that is), etc. They were also very definitely not something to take out into a Canadian winter.
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That’s being rather generous.
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Well, yes, but if you mention the Prince of Darkness, everyone knows you’re talking about Lucas Electrical. I can’t help it if everyone is so complimentary to Lucas. 
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I had a Bitchin’ Fiero for a while. Great fun, but didnt have money for a fun car back then and maintenance started to kill me.
Still miss it.
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Around here people say “ten of” or “quarter of”. I never know whether they mean “ten 'til” or “ten past”, and there’s a 30 minute difference between quarter 'til and quarter past. But that’s just a language barrier. If we’d all just standardize on 24-hour UTC time and do away with daylight savings time, it wouldn’t be an issue.
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I started learning Russian three years ago. I haven’t really written anything longhand since about 1990. Result? I can handwrite Russian better and faster than I can English.
Are there nuts, bolts and bits of rust in the road under it? That’s a good test.
There used to be a joke that the existence of the Devil was proven by the fact that Lucas electrics worked at all. The payoff of the pact was that the Devil got to collect the souls of all the people left swearing at their broken down cars.
I remember seeing several fellow Triumph owners who fitted an extra ignition coil onto their bikes and carried a spare capacitor and set of points so that when the inevitable happened it was possible simply to replace the essential three parts without additional fault finding.
While we’re on to real long term nostalgia, the use of the genitive in times is ancient - it may even be that there was originally a special case for time that just got merged with genitive, but my linguistics isn’t good enough to be sure.
In a number of languages there are usages like “a quarter of the third hour” which actually means 2:15 (because between 2 and 3 is the third hour after midnight or midday). It irks me enormously when people say “half ten” meaning 10:30, because in every other language that has it, it means 9:30, half of the tenth hour. E.g. halb zehn, poluvina dyesatovo. The laziness of removing the “past” is what gets to me.
Linguistic history, therefore, isn’t enough. Ten of or quarter of ought to mean :10 or :15 without any ambiguity at all, but trust lazy English speakers to create confusion where none should exist.
It is interesting though that people keep inventing news ways of butchering time signals, just as other countries start to rationalise their complicated systems onto a 24 hour clock and straightforward numbers.
True, though a lot of what you’re seeing is the result of better press tools, pedestrian safety, use of plastics (which don’t like sharp bends). You can just see a vestigial front air dam. But that design already looks very old. I wonder if the back roof rack is partly a disguised air separator?
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I meant modern computer hidden an old case.
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“Ten of” or “quarter of” is an East Coast US thing. I’ve never learned it. In the Midwest we say “quarter to” if the time ends in :45, or “quarter past” if the time ends in :15. At least that makes sense.
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