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His Holiness
Friday, September 22 2006
It's been up on blocks for two days and I've had the replacement parts for half that time, so today I finally got around to replacing the red Honda Civic's exhaust system from front to back, the parts accessible entirely from under the car. The nuts and bolts were too rusted to separate so I had to cut, drill, and sand them away. Though it's small and can't cut as quickly as a drill, I found that my Dremel was the most useful tool for this task. It's the precision that matters most.
I had a housecall in Woodstock so I drove the newly-fixed car there as something of a shakedown cruise. Unpleasantly, it was now making a loud rattling sound that at first I mistook for leaking exhaust gases. But then I noticed it only happened at 2000 and 4000 RPM. Clearly this was a resonance issue. It turned out that the muffler was being held too close to the car's frame by the rubber hangers and at certain engine frequencies the two rattled against one another.
The Dalai Lama had just visited Woodstock and, despite the fact that the visit hadn't been widely publicized, there were handmade signs everywhere welcoming "His Holiness." If I'd been chosen the Dali Lama, I wonder if I would let people call me "His Holiness" or if instead I'd issue a Buddhist Fatwa decreeing that I was henceforth to be called "He Who Has No Holes, Only Unusually Large Protuberances."
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