Fire at DeLonghi. I Bet I Know the Cause.

Looks like the plant burned down that makes DeLonghi appliances in Italy.

The cause of the fire is apparently not known, but I'm going to chime in and suggest maybe someone left one of their programmable coffeemakers plugged in and it randomly turned itself on in the middle of the night and set itself ablaze.

We had one of those. Complete piece of garbage. Serves them right. Better their house than mine.

Hopefully they have another one nearby filled with water. Surely it'll leak enough to put out the fire caused by the first one.

Car Stuff Should Involve People Who Know Cars

This blog hasn’t been abandoned. I just haven’t had much to bitch about lately.

I’ve generally been in a great mood as my wife and I are waiting on a new car to show up.

Of course, on that topic, the government has just introduced a new plan to give rebates on what they deem to be energy efficient vehicles and a levy on those that are very much not.

This is all well and good in theory, but they’ve done such a piss poor implementation that it just saddens me to read about it.

I’ve been happy with Stephen Harper’s Conservative government all this time and didn’t really expect this sort of bonehead move out of them.

As it stands, they’ve taken pretty much everything on the road (except pickup trucks, which are exempt becauseĀ  apparently businesses need them, and they’ve divided them all up into two groups. Cars, and trucks.

Then they gave some target mileage figures that they had to meet in order to pay levies or get rebates.

I’d just love to find the person who decided that all vehicles fit conveniently into those two categories and just smack them upside the head.

As if to prove just how stupid it is, they’ve even put the same car into BOTH categories!

If you buy a Dodge Caliber, then it’s just a car with mediocre fuel mileage.

If, however, DCX puts a Jeep badge on your Caliber, then you’ve just bought a Jeep Compass and it’s a truck with great fuel mileage and you get a grand back from the government.

It’s plain stupid.