When Some Weirdos From A Car Website Start Blowing Up Your Phone: COTD

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Something I’ve long wondered is what happens after we write about cars for sale. Do the sellers get tons of phone calls? Are there people asking just to look and sniff at their rides? Do readers actually buy what we write about? I have gotten answers to a couple of these questions when readers send me emails saying they purchased something I’ve written about. But I still wonder what happens on the seller’s side.

I ask this because I wonder what kind of messages the seller of today’s diesel-powered Grand Caravan will get from the greater Autopian region. Will one of you buy this van? Sid Bridge gives us a silly tale:

Owner’s Wife: Did you get any emails on the van?
Owner: Nothing since yesterday, but I’ll che… Oh shit. I got 800 of them.
Wife: What?!
Owner: What the hell is an “Autopian”?
Wife: Sounds like a cult.
Owner: You may be right. This one just wants to come so he can touch it.

I do admit that I’ve more than once considered emailing a seller just to blabber about how cool his car is. Thankfully, I’ve refrained from wasting their time. I try to read every comment posted to this site every day. Sometimes, a comment takes you on a meandering journey that makes you forget what the original topic even was. One of these was in last night’s article about the Boeing 777 that tyrannosaurus-wrecked some cars with a dropped wheel. TOSSABL told one of these stories and, just stick around to the end:

Years ago, there were some problems with the black-water tanks on airplanes: at high altitudes/low pressure, the effluent could be sucked out, whereupon it would freeze to the skin of the plane. When enough built up, it could break free and fall to the ground. Happening at a time that Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were in the news, some wag noted that we were all under threat of icy BMs

I hope you’re groaning as much as I am now. TOSSABL says they got this joke from the Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. Sadly, I couldn’t find it on the internet, but I’m still laughing. TOSSABL wasn’t the only jokester. Drunken Master Paul got off a great one, too:

The old joke finally happens IRL.

“What sound does it make when a part falls off a plane?”

“Boeing.”

Enjoy the buffet. Tip the staff.

Love it! Have a great weekend, everyone.

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19 thoughts on “When Some Weirdos From A Car Website Start Blowing Up Your Phone: COTD

  1. I have a Raleigh bicycle tool kit that my father bought at an Isaac Walton League silent auction. The original owner didn’t need it because his bike blew off of the roof of his Cessna mid flight.

  2. I reached out to a seller once, stating that I was just wasting their time but would love to see the car, a Mitsubishi Libero Turbo wagon. He met up with me and let me drive the car and spend twenty minutes photographing it. He may even have bought me a coffee. Amazing.

    An acquaintance had the car they were selling (a Honda Today) mentioned at That Other Site a couple months ago – they were amazed at the uptick in interest, but someone had already bought it by that stage.

  3. Well when I was a child of a mere 7 months old a B52 bomber crashed on our farm, and a lot of other nearby farms.

    My father said that the noise of the explosion was so loud that he thought that caterpillar tractor that he was driving and thrown a rod and climbed underneath it to look for the damage and then noticed that there was airplane wreckage falling all around him.

    I found a few pieces of it when I was a teenager doing plowing.

    You can read about it here

    https://www.ttownmedia.com/tracy_press/our_town/1956-bomber-crash-showered-wreckage-over-tracy/article_ca15be54-5f26-11ea-aa21-a35953ea8f67.html

    and here https://www.google.com/search?q=b52+crash+tracy+california

    Apparently, at the time everybody ran out afterwards to take a look at the wreckage wondering if maybe they could see a nuclear bomb.

  4. Owner: You may be right. This one just wants to come so he can touch it.”
    This was clearly sent by David or Jason. Somebody track the IP so we can see which one of them is this creepy dude (possibly both of them). 😉

  5. In the late 80s or 90s I saw ICBMs articles in mainstream media that were airline toilet leaks, not isolated stories.
    If I recall before the identification of the source people were scared shidless.
    I always wondered why the ice was blue instead of green because yellow and blue make green

  6. I submitted a Ladawri kit car to Rob on NPOND a couple years ago and he ran it. At some point I made a comment about the looks or wheels or something and to my surprise the owner popped into the comments. I took am curious how much traffic an article about a car for sale generated when it gets posted. There are times it is something I am interested in, but it is almost always too far away from me on one of the coasts.

    Still if you are truly trying to sell something additional exposure is good right? Unless you are one of those people who seems more worried about “time wasters” than selling their car.

  7. Ha. Cursory internet searches haven’t turned anything up so far (thanks, SEO & enshittification as per Cory Doctorow’s observations) so this is to the best of my recollection: in the late 80s I came across a report of fafrotskys (a quaint and perhaps obsolete term coined by a cryptozoologist in the 60s, derived from “falls from the sky”) around Ripley, Tennessee (a small and somewhat rural town which at the time had maybe 5 thousand residents) from the late 70s where over a period of several weeks people kept finding chunks of blue ice in their fields with some people witnessing them falling from the sky. After the local authorities checked the chunks of blue ice with Geiger counters and determined them to be free of radioactivity some people tasted the ice & reported an unpleasant chemical taste. Then a microbiologist ran some analysis and found very high concentrations of bacteria associated with chlamydia and gonorrhea which turned on the proverbial light bulb for him and led him to check military flight paths in the area whereupon it was determined that a military plane on a routine path over the area indeed did have a persistent leak from its lavatory with the water, which was blue due to being chemically treated, freezing on the outside and then falling off; the microbiologist was aware of the fact that the military was at the time experiencing high rates of STIs, hence his light bulb moment. When I first read that report I asked a coworker about it, as she had spent part of her childhood in Ripley during that time and still had family there, and she remembered that incident and confirmed the aspect about the tasting. One can only hope those who ill-advisedly tasted the fafrotsky did not suffer any dire consequences. Egad.

  8. I missed the original story — it’s been a busy day. Sometime in the 90s or early aughts, I live in Foster City, CA, which is directly under a glide path for one of SFO’s landing strips. SFO is a very busy airport. One day, a landing airliner dropped one of TOSSABL’s ICBMs onto a Foster City house. The ICBM was mostly blue in color, because airlines used blue-dyed water in their toilets.

    These facts were verified through friends of friends, so this story is 100% true. No one was injured.

    1. It’s a good thing those planes didn’t have the turbines mounted in the tail… If they did, then the shit really would have hit the fan!

    2. occured to me this morning that I might have gotten it from one of Spider Robinson’s Pun Night stories—it does rather sound like his work

        1. Hey, check out his website. Found it during the lockdown. Somewhat melancholic, but you can’t keep that man down. Well worth your time if you enjoyed his books!

      1. I thought the joke was so mething my brother would like and copy and pasted and sent it to him. His immediate response was joke from Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. I am sure I read it too, but his memory must be better than mine, as I laughed like I had heard it the first time, one of the few benefits of getting old.

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