Behold! Two Bosch-branded oxygen sensors for the Vanagon! Which is the new one, again?

If you go to buy a Vanagon O2 sensor, you’ll discover that they’re $140. But Bosch also makes the same O2 sensor that you can get for $40. What’s the difference? The connectors:

So here I am, holding the O2 sensor Bosch paid me $100 to make:

I bought the sensor from van-cafe.com, who were kind enough to include three wire crimps with the package.

Note that one of the most important diagnostic procedures you can perform on an ill-running Vanagon is to turn off the ignition, disconnect the O2 sensor, and then start it again. It might very well run better that way. This is your clue as to what needs fixing or replacing.

“All politicians are crooks, and we are karma hunters.”

Gone. Gone. Gone to the far shore. Assembled on the far shore. Vanishing. Amen.

(With apologies to Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva. Avalokiteshvara is the Buddhist apostle who saw the suffering of the world and cried a single tear. The tear fell to the earth, and formed a lake. And out of the lake came White Tara, goddess of compassion. Avalokiteshvara’s mantra is in the Pali language, ‘Gate gate paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha.’ It basically translates as, ‘Gone, gone, gone to the far shore, together gone to enlightenment, amen.’ Now you know.)

(Being a subversive, Avalokiteshvara would, no doubt, end up in the CIA torture gulag.)

Microsoft Windows Vista’s EULA forbids you from ‘work[ing] around technical limitations of the software.’ There’s plenty more, too.

The things you learn about Texas by browsing Flickr maps…

Turns out in Warrenton, TX, there’s a museum of old cars called The Old Car Museum. It’s set up as a non-profit by Sterling McCall, well-known TX auto dealer.

I like the story of how it started: Someone traded in a Model T for a new 1979 Toyota. I guess it was the extra fuel efficiency that sealed the deal… Anyway, McCall decided to keep the T, and other oddball/historic trade-ins. I also like that it’s not called ‘Classic Car Museum’ or ‘Museum of Automotive History.’ It’s just the Old Car Museum.

I’ll have to go. Maybe I could trade in my van there.

(I got started on all this because someone wants to license one of my flickr images that I took in Texas. I got started updating its tags and geotags, and before I knew it, I was reading about the Old Car Museum. Yay internet.)

(Not to give too much away, but did you know that there was a failed moment of French exploration into Texas? La Salle was supposed to build a fort to protect the French interests at the mouth of the Mississippi. Instead he ended up in Matagorda bay, 400 miles to the west, beset by Indians and eventual mutiny. This was the mid-1600s. The story goes that the Spanish eventually came along and found this derelict fort (Ft. St. Louis) and the remains of the last few explorers. They buried the bodies and the French cannons, burned the fort, and built a presidio (another fort, which ended up being La Bahia). This story has circulated for quite a while, but it wasn’t until 1996 that the cannons were found by a local farmer out with a metal detector.)

You know what the scariest thing about Halloween is?

Those big bags of ‘fun size’ candy bars.

And you know what’s even scarier?

The pile of wrappers.

N55 makes me happy. Start clicking around on the ‘manuals‘ section.

And who wouldn’t want to live here?

I’m scarcely able to believe this. 9/11 comemorative coins, made with silver that was in a vault under the towers when they fell??

Yours for the unbelievable price of $29.95.

Fiddler’s Inn. It’s up the hill from where I live. It’s a kind of smallish place made out of a gutted house. They have a goodly assortment of PNW microbrews on tap, but the real reason to go there is the pizza.

I mean, not really. You’re not supposed to go to a pub for the food, or even the hoity-toity microbrew thing. You’re supposed to go there because your neighbors will be there and you can hang out with them and argue about sports or politics or tell stories or whatever. But I’m somewhat excluded from that experience, so let me just say that the pizza is really good.

It reminded me of a place that used to exist in Houston, just a few blocks from where I grew up. There was this pizza place called Panjo’s. For a long time, the gimmick at Panjo’s was that there’d be old-timey barbershop quartets and banjo-and-tuba New Orleans jazz. I liked going there, because the pizza was really good and it was just silly and chaotic enough to be fun for a little kid. And they served root beer in a frosty mug, with that sort of waxy ice in it, the kind that feels soft. Even as a child, my palate was discerning.

In later years, they skipped the music part altogether. They’d have old-timey rinky-tink music on the speakers, but it wasn’t nearly the same, obviously. And the place had two sides. One was the big family hall with the long wooden tables and benches, and the other was more like a bar, with pool tables and lots of video games. The kitchen was between these two sides.

As a little kid I was always fascinated by the other side. Whenever we went there, I’d try to peek through to the area my parents had forbidden me to go. I guess the pool table was too much or something. I’d look over the order counter and through the kitchen where some guy was throwing spinning dough into the air, and over to the other side, where teenagers were looking nefarious. Those evil-doers! Or something.

Then I was a teenager, and Panjo’s had dropped the rinky-tink music, and they had tossed the pool table, and filled the whole other side with video games. On weekends, I’d ride my bike there and spend my allowance on a small cheese pizza and a coke and video games. Mystery gone.