You know what I realized? I haven’t done an Automotive Would You Rather since before my heart exploded! No wonder that happened! Clearly, I’m not doing these nearly enough, so let’s solve that. This week I have a pair of scenarios that both seem to involve foreign objects being lodged inside you, so let’s not spend too much time scrutinizing that, how about? No one will be happy. Let’s just get into it! It’ll be fun! Right? Right?
SCENARIO ONE: The Curse Of Hearing
You’re at the junkyard one weekend afternoon, desperately trying to pull the two-stroke, three-cylinder DKW-style engine out of an old Wartburg Knight you managed to find, improbably wedged between two Oldsmobile Delta 88s. You’re pretty sure the engine will be ideal for the engine-swap project you have in mind, where you’ll stuff it into that old Bentley Arnage you have killing grass on your lawn. The engine is pretty small, for an engine, so you’re pretty sure you can get it out on your own.
You’ve got all the bolts out and this thing should just lift out; you’ve wrapped your arms around it, bear-hug-style, and are heaving and pulling as hard as you can. You’ve already peed yourself from the strain, so you’re well past the point of no return. This engine is coming out!
You give one last good heave, your body ejects a pencil-girthed column of urine out of your pant leg that spatters noisily in the dirt, and then it’s free, the force of your efforts flinging you backwards, where you land, in front of the car, with a heavy thwock. Seconds later you hear a whistling then feel a sharp pain in your ear as one of the spark plugs, launched free by your Herculean efforts to remove the engine, comes shooting down out of the sky and lodges firmly in your ear.
You’re a bit dazed but unhurt; you try to remove the spark plug from your ear but it refuses to budge. It’s in there for good, it seems. As you try to make sense of this, you start to pace, down the aisle of the junkyard, and as you do, you hear a low, calm voice in your ear; it’s telling you what is wrong with every car in the junkyard!
As you walk past each car, a litany of the issues that brought it there are whispered into your ear. You touch the plug, and it pauses, but as soon as you let go, it starts again. You hold a water pump in front of your face, and you hear how much longer the bearings have to go, and what caused the initial failure. You roll a tire into your field of view, and the amount of good remaining miles is whispered. Hold a halogen headlamp bulb, you hear how many hours it has left.
It’s amazing. This spark plug will diagnose any car or part you pause to look at! You’ll never be baffled by a car problem ever again!
As you’re marveling at this, a pair of people walk by. As you gaze at them, the plug starts to tell you what they’re thinking about you when they see you, but, from the sound of it, it’s just the negative things. Alarmed, you run out of the yard and into the street – as you scan around at the various people, you hear every fleeting mean thought or callow criticism they have of you. It gets to be a lot, so you clamp your hand over the spark plug, silencing it, for a while at least.
So, now you have the ability to know what’s wrong with every car or car part you encounter and also have the ability to know what’s wrong with you, at least according to the randos you happen to see.
This is a real monkey’s paw situation here! Is it worth it?
SCENARIO TWO: The Magic Kidney Stones Of That Denny’s In Arizona
You’re on a cross-country road trip with some friends, having the absolute best time. While passing through Tempe, Arizona, you and your pals stop at a Denny’s for a quick meal and bathroom break. When ordering, the waiter mentions that – and this is pretty unusual – they just made a complete Moons Over My Hammy, one of the best he’s ever seen, but they can’t sell it because it was made by an employee who just that moment quit in a huff because she was caught practicing witchcraft, which goes against Denny’s strict no-witchcraft or magick policies.
The waiter doesn’t want to throw it away, because, really, it’s the best he’s ever seen, and it just seems a shame. Would any of you want it, he asks?
Well, the Moons Over My Hammy is your go-to Denny’s meal, and you’re kinda broke, so you say yes! You get the still-hot sandwich, and, damn, the guy was right, it’s the best you ever tasted.
Afterwards, you’re all in the car on the highway, happy and a bit sleepy, and it’s your turn to drive. You’re doing fine, but the warm car and the hypnotic lines of the road conspire to lull you too sleep, causing you to flop forward onto the dash, weight on the gas pedal, launching you and your friends smack into a large billboard pylon on the side of the road.
You feel the initial impact, you hear the screams of your friends and the sickly boom of impact, the rattle of broken glass and then – all of a sudden – you’re all back in the Denny’s parking lot, safe and sound.
Of course, everyone is freaked out. You go to the nearest hospital, but everyone is fine. The car doesn’t even have a scratch! But you, you aren’t exactly as you were before. Lodged in your stomach, worked into the very walls of your gastrointestinal tract, is a bezoar. According to the MRI scan that found it, it’s got trace amounts of ham molecules on it, suggesting it got into your body via the witch’s Moons Over My Hammy.
Normally these are hard lumps of indigestible yuck found in goat stomachs, imbued with magical properties. But this one is in you, and it seems to teleport you and the car you happen to be in, with everyone and everything inside it, to the parking lot of that Tempe, Arizona Denny’s should you ever crash that car. I mean, that’s the theory; panicked, confused, you rush out to the car in the hospital parking lot and smack it at 60 mph into the side of the building.
You then find yourself, just fine, in the Denny’s parking lot.
It seems you can’t be killed in a car wreck, because you’ll just end up back at that Denny’s parking lot. You and anyone with you, if you’re driving. Your friends, once they realize this, insist you drive for the rest of the trip. They start to make TikToks about it, and it’s fun at first, driving the car off cliffs and ending up back at the Denny’s. But then it starts to go viral, and soon Secret Service agents find you while you’re at the Grand Canyon, telling you that you are now a national asset and need to serve your country. They don’t have you come with them then, but they do let you know they’re watching.
Things are getting weird, but you can’t die in any car crash! And, if you need to go to Tempe, it’s free and instant! But is it worth it?
So, what will it be? A spark plug in your ear that tells you useful car diagnoses and mean-spirited jabs from everyone, or a lump in your stomach that whisks you to an Arizona Denny’s if you crash a car? Here’s the poll!
I’m gonna go spark plug. As much time as I try to spend away from people, it’s not that much of a detriment. This past Christmas, if I hadn’t accidentally made eye contact with my neighbor, I’d not have seen another human at all.
Dr. Manhattan spark plug omnipotence, cruelly flattening existence to a single meaningless strand of time I can traverse at will, ftw.
Good news, I live in Tempe and the Denny’s on Rural and the 60 is less than a 5 min drive from me, so I’ll pick that option. I could do really well as a racecar driver or a Hollywood stunt driver, since I could never die. It would make road trips take half as long too, because I would just drive to wherever, make sure to get into a car accident, and I’d be back home instantly.
Neither sounds particularly pleasant nor useful.
I’ll settle for invincible sandwich.
I have been to Tempe many times. And to the Denny’s there as well.
Not my cup of tea. Spark Plug for me.
Man, I’m hungry and that sandwich looks really good right now.
Did anyone else misread that as the sparkplug went in your rear? No one? Awkward…
Oof, you’re really not gonna like where the coil plug goes
Or the EGR valve.
Wishful thinking? J/K
I think this means Jason is fully recovered. Huzzah!
Why did it have to be Arizona?
Does the spark plug work with non-automotive parts? If so I’d set up an electronics repair shop.
This dilemma sounds like a Dance Gavin Dance song title
A man of culture!
I’ll take the spark plug and become a weird psychic busker.
This one is actually difficult. I could make a much more informed decision if I knew the accuracy of the Bezoar of Uncrashability’s collision detection. My cars with collision avoidance systems seem to think a collision is imminent at least once per drive. If the bezoar was as bad as my truck or Tesla, that would be unbelievably inconvenient since Tempe is a 2,150-mile drive. I doubt I could even make it home before being teleported back. But if it was 100% accurate, I would go for it. A lengthy unplanned road trip is better than a short trip to the graveyard.
I can see the appeal of the spark plug, though. I always assume people think I’m a weirdo (I mean, they aren’t entirely wrong); it might actually be nice to hear accurate mean thoughts for a change. Plus, it could be a massive advantage to have insight into what people think of you. For example, let’s say you are a salesman. If you hear your customer’s negative thoughts, you adjust your sales pitch until you stop hearing things. The ultimate form of information asymmetry (i.e. a person’s thoughts) is now in your favor. This would obviously be useful in the business world, but it equally useful in personal applications. Honestly, I don’t even care that much about its application to auto mechanics.
I don’t need to hear the haters. Sign me up for fearless driving everywhere, all the time!
Oh I’m taking the spark plug! All day, every day, and twice on Sundays! I don’t give a rat fart in a high wind what other people think is wrong with me, but the remote doesn’t work to unlock my car, and new batteries doesn’t fix it!
With the spark plug, think of the killing you could make as a used car dealer
The dreaded, threaded babel fish.
Besides, I already have IBS.
Sparkplug, you can call me the car whisperer as I laugh all the way to the bank due to my diag skillz.
I’ll have to go with the teleporting lump because it’s passive.. sure the psychic spark plug would be useful but it would also get exhausting. The only downside I see is I don’t live anywhere near Tempe so that’s a slight inconvenience but I’d take that over death or bodily injury.
I’m gonna have to go with the car crash lump.Not only is it more plausible since MOMH really is my go-to, but if I wore that spark plug around my wife, I’d have to hear all those things in stereo.
Earplug! Ha ha
Can the spark plug be fooled into silence through means such as a latex glove full of mashed potatoes, anything to replicate a hand or finger? The voices already in my head are bad enough, I don’t need to add to it.
I’m tempted to say I’m going with the Denny’s, although is there a severity level of accident to trigger it? Is bumping into a bollard enough, or is there a minimum velocity involved? It still sounds better than knowing what everyone thinks of me, but I don’t want to be whisked on an impromptu trip halfway across the continent because someone tapped into me.
Eternal auto crash resurrections at a Tempe Denny’s sounds worse than death or at least a form of purgatory. I guess if you like Denny’s, it’d making driving there easier, just speed out of your driveway and plow into a phone pole and poof, you’re there. I think your friends would eventually tire of your one-trick pony act. Imagine going to your 50th high school reunion, everybody’s reminiscing and someone says, ‘Hey, remember when we used to get high then hop in Joe’s car and crash so we could get to Denny’s without getting hassled by the man? Good times. I miss those days. Who’s up for a Denny’s crash run for old times sake?’
I’ll take the know-it-all earplug. I can probably make a buck off of the auto info and I don’t care what people think of me.
I’ll go with Tempe Arizona, then promptly become an astronaut. Rockets crash/explode all the time. Think of how many millions would be saved for every rocket that pops into existence in that Denny’s parking lot.
Username checks out
Tempe is not far from my second home in South Phoenix, so I’m definitely picking Door #2. Do I get to choose which one of the Denny’s? Because the one on Rural is pretty close.
Do we have a choice of ear? I sleep on a particular side and the chances of a successful pillow modification to accommodate an aural spark plug are slim at best.
I was originally going with the bezoar, thinking I could go on the wildest of police chases and crash the car and – bam! – elude the po-po, but all they need to do is camp at the Denny’s (big stretch, there) and grab me when I re-appear.
Well, I don’t like the idea of hearing voices, and one of my favorite bands is from Tempe, so…
The Refreshments or Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers?
Gin Blossoms?
Same difference these days. And yes, them.
Well, the spark plug downside is already my internal monologue…I gain the ability to diagnose cars and the ability to confirm people thinking terrible things about me.
The crash protection could be great for a number of reasons, though.
But I haven’t crashed much and I don’t think a racing career where I disappear when I crash would work out, so I’m not sure about the utility there.