That’s right folks. Nathan was talking about Herbie Jr. yesterday… and we named the dog Indiana.
I don’t really have much to add to the whole thing that Nathan posted, but I had more comments than I felt I should post in the comments section.
First off, I normally wouldn’t mess with a typo, but Nathan wrote the following: “I was designed to be simple to work on and sturdy [thus I was named Stout.]”
Nathan talks briefly about the Beetle that came out in 2003, and I guess what I thought about this is that it probably took those years of the Beetle being out of manufacture to prove there was a market to produce them again. What comes to mind is that I worked with this girl named Jessica back in 1995 (possibly 1996 (possibly both.)) She was really one of the sweetest people I’ve met in my lifetime, and if she wasn’t then she never gave me reason to believe otherwise.
What is relevant here is that she was dating this guy (sorry I don’t remember your name, dude) who drove a Beetle. In addition, he had a number of friends who also drove Beetles. These were tricked out, custom painted, and all cool looking. I think one of the neatest things I ever saw in my life was one day he drove up to pick her up from work, and four or five of his friends were with him. I’m guessing it was joyriding day. She walked to the car and got in, and she said hello, you fool, I love you… sorry. I don’t know what she said. What was neat was that when they pulled in he turned his car to the right and stopped and then one by one each of his Beetle friends, Jon, Pol, Jorge, and Reengo, pulled to the right and parked in formation. It looked practiced, which made it that much cooler. Fuck the Blue Angels. I wanna watch Jessica’s boyfriend and his friends.
Next, I’d like to correct this quote by using a couple of brackets: “Chris has this fondness for stick shift driving. He is attributed (through Miguel) of stating that “driving a standard is not just driving [a car], it is ‘piloting’ [an automobile]”.
Finally, the van in the ATW novel (still in the writing phase) is a Volkswagen van. The reason I chose that is two-fold, but the one that is relevant to the story is that one of the characters is trying to get computers running in the van by jury rigging them. Where this idea came from is that an owner of a Volkswagen van once told me that you can fix anything with a piece of bubble gum. So in review: You can fix anything on a VW Beetle with a paper clip, and anything on a VW van with bubble gum.