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replacement car from Brooklyn
Monday, October 10 2011
Today Gretchen and I had plans to take a bus into the City and meet David, her new vegan activist friend in Williamsburg so we could buy his Honda Civic Hybrid. As we were looking for a place to park at the bus station, we got a call from David saying perhaps his father might have promised the car to his secretary if she wanted it. But that disaster was quickly averted after a few more phone calls, and so we were good to go.
We didn't actually emerge into the outside in New York until Williamsburg (Brooklyn), having taken the subway down to 14th Street and the L line under the East River. It was yet another gorgeous day, and most people in Williamsburg seemed to be dressed for summer (including the Hasids, though I didn't actually see any). A good fraction of Williamsburg's denizens really do look to be cultivating the slovenly slacker look, with carefully-managed unshavedness and tee shirts promoting bands too obscure to actually exist. I even saw one hipster emerging from a Subway, having eating his lunch there completely ironically.
Over in a gritty, decidedly non-gentrified part of Williamsburg, we ate a late lunch at a straight edge vegan café called Foodswings, whose menu leaned decidedly toward junk food. I ordered "fish" and chips, and it made for a greasy, delicious meal. (The "fish" was tofu spiced in a way to make it resemble a highly-processed fish stick similar to those you might remember from your lunches in a high school cafeteria.) Gretchen over-ordered (as she always does at vegan restaurants), getting mac and "cheese," a tempeh reuben, hot "wings," fried "chicken drumsticks" (those two, which had wooden sticks in lieu of bones, were for both of us), and, after deciding the food was all too beige, an enormous salad. The bland dressing with too much black pepper was her only complaint with the place.
After lunch, we killed time by walking around the neighborhood, eventually ending up on Bedford Avenue, which is Williamsburg's visibly gentrified-and-then-slightly-slumped "downtown." It was bustling with what looked like the sort of retail exuberance that would lead hipsters to deem Williamsburg "over," though it's probably been "over" for years and, if the economy keeps going the way it does, it might even come "back."
We randomly ran across David on Bedford Avenue while we were still killing time. He was with his mother, the woman who gave him the left wing outlook he has on life (he told us of how Ralph Nader would come to visit when he was a kid). His parents had divorced when he was a kid and he'd only recently gotten back into communication with his father, the right wing part of his family tree. It turns out that his father is part of the far-right business lobby known as "Club for Growth" (translate that to and from some language and you'll get "Baseball bat for Tumor."). He steps over Occupy Wall Street protesters every day to do some sort of highly lucrative finance work for grim faceless corporations, and that wealth is helpful in paying for David's car needs. David, of course, is a vegan who works these days trying to protect reproductive freedoms, a variety of freedom that isn't included in the freedom-boasting platitudes heard in Republican talking points.
David showed us the car, which had some superficial dings and couple banged-out dents, just part of the price of parking in Brooklyn (most of the cosmetic damage to our Honda Civic happened during the few times it was parked over night in the city). He wanted to be sure to show us absolutely everything that was wrong because, he said, he hates doing business with friends and the last thing he'd want would be for us to be unhappy with his car. Aside from the dings and dents, the only other real problem was that the onboard navigation computer likes to scratch its map data DVD, eventually rendering it unreadable. And a replacement, as with all cheaply-made proprietary things, is expensive: $200.
Gretchen drove the car around the block and it seemed great, so we agreed to finish the transaction. We went up to David's apartment, a recently gutted-and-redone sixth floor walk up. It was a smallish one bedroom, which seemed a little overpriced at $2500/month, but I think Republican dad might be helping with that too. David had a beautiful mosaic of a pig he wanted to hang on the wall, but he'd just moved in and couldn't find the studs. So I showed him the trick of finding embedded drywall screws (which are always at the studs) using a magnet. Then David showed us a family tree made by one of his cousins. It went all the way back to 1492, when ancestors on both sides of his family fled Spain for Morocco. They were Sephardic Jews, and the Inquisition had begun with the killing of all the Jews working in Queen Isabella's court. Both David's parents were born in Tangiers, Morocco, where their ancestors had been living since fleeing Spain.
After we finished the paperwork, David took us up to the roof, which had a completed wooden deck suitable for large parties. The spectacular view of Manhattan stretched from the half-built Freedom Tower (already higher than all other lower Manhattan buildings) to Midtown and beyond.
The navigation system helped us get out of Manhattan, but we missed a crucial Y and ended up crossing the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge instead of the George Washington (we were going to have to cross the Hudson somewhere). The navigation system kept crapping out from read errors, but it would always come back up if we opened it up and closed it again. I figured that finding a replacement DVD was not going to be hard on Bittorrent.
After a few patches of bad traffic, we made it home. Eleanor, who had been so upset by our leaving this morning that she followed our car out into the road, was very pleased to see us. As for Sally, well, her greeting resembled that of a four legged duck. That's the latest stage of her decrepitude, though once she warms up she seems to have full mobility.
This evening I tried to figure out some solutions to a few of our new car's issues, trivial though they are. Most of these problems would have been easy to fix if Hondas weren't hopelessly proprietary, but I guess that's the price of driving a relatively late-model car these days. As a firm believer in open source software and (perhaps even more importantly) open hardware, I found the results of my various Google searches increasingly demoralizing.
One problem I was trying to solve was the fact that we only had one key for our car (the other had been lost). On late model Civics, the key is an elaborate device with strangely-machined crenelations and a thick fob that contains something called a transponder. Unless the proper transponder is present in that fob, the car will not start. It's a theft prevention thing, which is great, except for a form of theft that such proprietary crap makes possible: Honda charges $200 for the service of producing a copy of a key. (Can we really say this is progress from the days when any hardware store could cut a key copy for $2?) So I found myself asking Mr. Google for devices that might be able to capture and the rebroadcast the signal put out by the proprietary transponder. It turns out that there are some companies that have solved some of these problems. For example, you can intercept the signal from the transponder pickup with a special kind of box to copy and rebroadcast it, but this device itself has issues with proprietary lock down.
Then there was the issue of finding a replacement navigation DVD for the navigation system. I didn't really know the proper terminology for such systems, so I found myself searching Bittorrent sites on the keyword "Navteq," and though this was turning up hits, they were all for non-Honda brands of automobile. I also tried to copy the existing scratched navigation DVD, which seemed to have a file system that was readable on a Mac or a PC. But the errors from the scratch (or perhaps a copy protection regime) kept causing my Mac to crash.
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