I swear there’s a conspiracy against do-it-yourselfers with this vehicle. I changed Emily’s oil last weekend, and they designed the filter to where it screws in upside down, so when you unscrew it oils spews down on you. This weekend’s project is the spark plugs, which should be no problem, except three of them are underneath the upper intake manifold. (If you’re facing the same problems, go here, where I stole the photo.) Took me two weeks to get ahold of the replacement gaskets, then three trips out today (Sears for a torque wrench, Ford for the gaskets, and then Wal-Mart for a socket extender), and I still don’t have the right size wrench. Got half the engine apart and then realized I don’t have a big enough adjustable wrench, and to remove some of the EGR stuff (whatever that is) you need a 1.25″ wrench. The sun goes down at 3:30, so I don’t have time to go back out again, which means I’ll be finishing the spark plugs (maybe) tomorrow. Where are my father’s or grandfather’s ten thousand tools when I need them? Where is my garage? Hell, this project has shown me I don’t even have a decent toolbox.

This documentary of Hunter S. Thompson glosses over his childhood and picks up with his early coverage of the Hell’s Angels and contains plenty narration from Dr. Thompson’s work, read by Johnny Depp. It started to drag for me by the end – I would rather have been rereading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which I might do sometime – but overall the movie is an interesting portrayal of one of America’s more bizarre literary celebrities. Like Hemingway before him, Dr. Thompson became trapped in the persona he created, and leaves a similar legacy, that of a hard-drinking larger-than-life wild man with a genius at its core.

Fark points to this Cracked page of photoshopped pictures. Photoshop has been around so long (and circulated in forwarded emails so often) that a page like this is pretty easy to ignore, but this one’s amusing. I especially like numbers 19, 15, 11, and 6.

Emily’s been prodding me about this for a week: Bruce Springsteen has a new album, Working on a Dream, and is going on another E Street Band tour this year. For now you can preview the album at NPR. Like Magic, the album (what I’ve listened to of it) is energetic and poppy, so if you liked Magic check this new one out.

I’m reading Brown’s last, unpublished novel, and goddammit it’s great. You can see him jazzing around, for instance this conversation between crows on a power line, overlooking a worker sleeping after eating his lunch:

-You think we ought to sneak in on the ground for them scraps? He ain’t got no gun. Least I don’t see one.
-Naw, man, he may be just playing possum. They do that sometimes. That’s how my uncle got killed. My mama told me. Fell for one of them owl decoys and a good mouth caller. Let’s just watch him for a while.
-I think he done eat it all anyway. What was it? Fried chicken?
-Yeah. Fried chicken. Wing and a leg and a thigh.
-That’s another bird, too. I mean if you think about it. Seems kinda cannibalistic if you know what I mean.
-I ain’t related to no chicken, but I can see that other biscuit from here.
-Well, if you so badass, why don’t you just fly your black ass on in there and get it?
-I could if I wanted to. I’m swuft.
-In your dreams maybe.
-I caught a rat the other day. Beat a hawk to it.
-A hawk would whip your young ass.
-I can dive-bomb like a freight train.
-Well, do it, punk. Fly on in there and get that biscuit.
-I think I’ll just wait till the time’s right.
-That’s what I figured. Set up here in a tree and talk shit like a juvenile.

That’s better dialogue than I’ve written all year. I’ll let you know how the rest of the book is when I’m done.

Here’s a list of products recalled due to a bad processing plant. Products include Austin peanut butter crackers, which is okay by me because I always choose Lance.

The novelist and critic has passed away at 76. The NY Times has an appraisal of him, and the Washington Post has the Reuters obituary. I’ve never read his novels, though his Rabbit series comes highly recommended, and has been on my list for a few months. I think every aspiring fiction writer has something to learn from his famous short story, “A&P.”