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Saturday, March 25, 2006Love my Saturn update...The other day, I noted some problems with our Saturn and Saturn's service. This is a brief update to that post. At least one more update should follow. Hopefully, a happy one. I spoke to the service manager about a week ago. He agreed that however good their intentions, things certainly looked bad and that they should do something for us. He suggested that they would work to make sure I got my money's worth out of the repairs, and asked if I would like to trade in the car. I said that I would be interested, if I was going to actually recoup the money put into the car and suggested I'd hope for at least a trade-in value of $4000 since that's what we'd put into the not-so-hot transmission repair plus the things like new brakes, new hoses and the like that came up over the last year because if not I couldn't really afford to drive Saturns anymore. He said someone in sales would be in touch and they'd make sure they did right by us. Last Friday, I spoke to the general sales manager and he said he'd get some info to us toward Monday. I volunteered that we couldn't really do anything till this Friday or Saturday, but would appreciate a heads-up on where we stood and what to prepare for. I've left the gentleman a couple voice mails. I haven't gotten any calls back. To give credit where credit is due, the service department has been exceptionally good about making sure we have transportation while this is going on. And they've been very helpful about other questions that have come up. I also contacted Saturn's main customer service center in the midst of this. They have left two very concerned voicemails for me, but when I call the number back I get ads for Saturn and assurances that my call is very important to them. Which brings me to this assessment at the moment: Saturn is not necessarily a bad organization. Their intentions seem to be good, their people seem to be well-meaning when you talk to them. But in the attention to detail and follow-through departments, this is not the Saturn I knew two years ago. Mickey Kaus has been suggesting that there's an internal campaign to bring Saturn fully into the GM fold, rather than letting it be the something special it started as. It feels like that campaign is underway and has been having some success. As I told the service manager, if I wanted friendly shrugs and more bills, I could have bought a Ford. I did not add how many people have told me I'm an idiot because however well Saturn had started, it was an American company and if you didn't have money to burn on repairs you had to buy Japanese. We have a nice loaner from Saturn right now, so I can't complain that they've stranded me - unlike the other night in my freshly fixed but unsafe to drive car. But I'm not feeling the assurance I once felt that if you had a problem all you had to do was go to the dealership and all would be taken care of. My call to Saturn this morning went to voicemail and hasn't been returned in the last hour. But fair enough, Saturday mornings can be busy. We're going to go out and look into things ourselves a little later today. Tonight, we'll update you on whether, should you read under your breath, the "Love my Saturn" should be pronounced with sarcasm or enthusiasm. I hope, sincerely, that it's the second. 
posted by gbarto at 11:39 AM Friday, March 24, 2006The post that has everything: Today's Dilbertblog - about James Blake's comeback and about showing a little class.
posted by gbarto at 2:33 PM Instapundit on the media's coverage of the Saddam trial: Imagine what things would be like if the news media actually sided with civilization.Unfortunately, they never do. Not even in America - as I noted last night.
posted by gbarto at 12:09 PM Thursday, March 23, 2006Tonight, AOL asks us: Is the media too negative?They're referring to pushback on the Iraq war, but... I grew up in Michigan in the 1980s. Thanks to a stable of folksy columnists and a few good sports writers, the Detroit Free Press was Michigan's newspaper of record at the time. And the best of what it offered was pretty good. The front page was not so good. Detroit was a basket-case at the time. Almost war-ravaged. And there's no question about where the newspaper stood: it was with the insurgents all the way. If a young man robbed a liquor store, and shot the man behind the counter, we'd hear for a week about how this senseless tragedy had broken a mama's heart - because her oldest boy was going to prison instead of college. Wives deprived of husbands, children deprived of fathers, families robbed of their incomes... it barely made a blip. What made the editorial and front pages were pleas for understanding of why young men were killing perfect strangers for money, followed by pleas for the stingy Reagan administration to spend more money on this, that or the other thing so the young men wouldn't have to kill anyone anymore. Likewise, police shootings did not bring forth stories about the nightmare situations the cops faced. Did not testify to the heroism of those who laid their lives on the line to make the streets a little safer while the mayor's cronies drew the top salaries in the department. The focus of the Detroit Free Press with which I grew up was that all Detroit needed was for the poor to find a decent way to surrender their livelihoods and luxuries with sufficient grace that they wouldn't get killed. That way, their perpetual victimization could be relegated to the police blotter instead of putting Detroit on everyone's front page again. My major exposure to media as a lad, then, was learning that reporters who lived in the suburbs or at least in better neighborhoods thought the solution to crime was to find root causes other than the thinking and actions of the criminals, blame the Republicans and shake the head sadly. Is the Iraq story any different?
posted by gbarto at 9:24 PM Wednesday, March 22, 2006Speaking of great writing (see below), I loved this bit by Rick Ballard that appeared on Tom Maguire's comment thread:A pack of liars writing about a perjury trial in which the prosecution is dependent upon the jury buying the notion that an aggregation of the bafflegab spouted by Cooper and Russert is more believeable than the bafflegab spoken by Libby is not precisely a 'slam dunk' ab initio.It's not every day that you see "slam dunk" and ab initio side by side. The zippy contrast in registers is way cool. IMHO.
posted by gbarto at 2:14 PM PJM flagged this page at lifehack with 50 tips for improving your writing. It's a great read, even just for the examples, which range from a newspaper account of a Senator's death and small-town tragedy rolled into one to some excellent poetry. Tip #6 brings up Dylan Thomas, of whom I knew only "Do not go gentle into that night." The commentary on word use prompted me to google the poem, which you can read or hear at poets.org. Here's the key excerpt: Do not go gentle into that good night,
posted by gbarto at 12:23 PM Monday, March 20, 2006Ethan Zuckerman is pushing for the Chinese government to free blogger Hao Wu.Unfortunately, the link to his banner (seen at right) doesn't seem to go anywhere. I presume that will be fixed soon. Until then, please read about him here.
posted by gbarto at 7:26 PM Sunday, March 19, 2006AOL is running the headline, "Iraq faces painful anniversary."The scoop, of course, is that there's violence all over the place on the eve of the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion/liberation. The basic impression one gets from the headlines is that if this started three years ago, it should all be over but the shouting. One is tempted to make facile comparisons to Vietnam if opposed to the war. Or World War II if in support - there the fighting went for years before the job of pacification could get underway. But I think the most apt comparison is to go back five or six years to another time when organized violence by control-driven thugs and nutcases could too lead to the deaths of a hundred overnight. The only difference is they were in the Iraqi government and CNN elected not to report it.
posted by gbarto at 11:10 AM |
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