Expecting witty banter? Of course you aren’t, but we have to make a mad dash out of the door to another track this weekend, so we will keep it quick: we’re going to reach into the top of the trash bin, grab some of the throwaway news clippings that weren’t so bad, and fling them at the screen with a bit of zest and sarcasm, and hope that something sticks. Here’s your Scrapple for the week…gotta go!
1. Poke-no.
Courtesy: YouTube.com/Egoraptor
Seriously, Pokemon. I can’t believe we have to write about freaking Pokemon here. In case you’ve taken a week to try to live like Helen Keller, since that’s the only way you could possibly not know about this, a game app called “Pokemon Go” has come out and has turned legions of Poke-fans into Poke-zombies, staring at their phones while trying to catch ’em all. How bad has this gotten? A Baltimore police officer’s patrol car was run into after the driver of the other car was distracted due to the game. The driver’s response to the accident? “Well, that’s what I get for playing that dumb ass game.”
In case you’re unaware, Pikachu, the most popular Pokemon in the series, uses electricity to shock opponents…so would it be a bad thing to Tase some of these zombies and claim that they just startled a rare Pokemon?
2. There’s barely room for a driver and passenger!
29-year-old Jessica Reger and her friend, 28-year-old Ilena Blackburn, were tooling around in Pennsylvania in a red Corvette when they were pulled over by police. Care to guess why? Nope, not speeding…Reger had stuffed her two children, ages 3 and 5, in the “trunk” of the Corvette. We don’t know if that means that the kids were roasting underneath the glass hatch or, if it was like a hardtop C5, they were stuffed into that compartment that can barely hold a golf club. Regen has been charged with two misdemeanor charges of endangering the welfare of children and recklessly endangering another person, while Blackburn has been charged with recklessly endangering another person. I can’t even offer a suggestion for punishment that won’t violate BangShift’s standards of decency or language use, so moving on…
3. Bring on the Mopar cop cars!
Ask anybody who was driving in the 1970s which cop car they didn’t want to see in their rearview mirror, and you’ll get pretty much the same answer: the big Mopar with the big V-8. While the Dodge Diplomat and Plymouth Gran Fury were good, they didn’t quite have the teeth that the Dodge Monaco and the Plymouth Fury had. Fifty years later, and what news do we get? The California Highway Patrol just put in an order for 580 Dodge Charger Pursuits. The good news is that most of them will be 3.6L Pentastar V6-powered cars for regular use. The bad news: not all of them are. Some of them will be packing Hemi power, and between that, the radio, and the helicopters, the chances of you ever running from the cops has been reduced dramatically, right? Well…if not, we will enjoy the footage on those cable TV cop-chase shows.
4. And bring on the badass factory off-roaders!
Once again, it’s time to break out the unicorn picture, because we don’t have permission to show you the spy photos of two new vehicles caught during testing. But that’s what Google is for, so let us tell you what has been seen tooling around: The Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 edition, which brings back GM’s code for a properly set up small truck that has a strong off-road kick, and then the truly mythical beast itself has been spotted: the Jeep pickup. Judging from the spy shots we got our eyes on, it’s most of a new Wrangler with the bed of a Ram on the back, but it looks as good as any vehicle wearing hundreds of pounds of black camo bagging is gonna look.
5. …I swear, if that robot hugs me one more time, s#!+ is gonna go down…
Picture, if you will: a robot that not only can read your mood, but can have an emotional conversation with you. Yes, that’s in the works. Honda, who currently makes the Asimo robot (pictured) has one end of the program down. The other end comes from another Japanese company, SoftBank, whose “Pepper” robot, creepy face and all, can already adapt to the emotions of humans. Both companies are coming together to create, in short terms, an artificial intelligence system that can be used for autonomous vehicles. Because that’s what you really want to have in the car with you during horrifying rush-hour traffic, right? A robot that is trying to understand why you’ve used that one particular word fourteen times in the last five minutes?
A friend of mine once managed to fit five of us in his Porsche 924 and whisk us off to a slightly sleazy bar in the Byker area of Newcastle upon Tyne. You should have seen the look on a dog walker’s face when a small German sports car pulled up and six drunken middle-aged men climbed out of it and formed an orderly heap on the tarmac.
As for Pokemon Go – its a plot by aliens to cleanse the human gene pool of mouth-breathing geeks by exterminating then in hideous traffic accidents.
Good times. I had an 87 Daytona that we crammed 7 guys into. The small one was 250 pounds. Amazing what you can do when you don’t care about comfort or safety.
I think you can stuff your idea of what “punishment” society ought to put on people for simply riding kids in the back of a ‘vette! I’ll leave it to you to decide where you can stuff it. The law says its dangerous to ride in the back of a pickup, too. Let’s just blindly follow all motor vehcile laws, that were fullly crafted by insurance companies to mitigate THEIR liabilities, with no true regard for what is safe or not, and the willing accomplises in law enforcement who eagerly see them as revenue streams to further harass otherwise peacable citizens.
This is so much BS! It’s dangerous? REALLY? Is that your best defense? What else is dangerous we can outlaw?
I think this may be the first time BangShift editorials have really, really, disappointed me….
Gary, greatest of respect but you’re an idiot. Telling you off for putting kids in the back of a vette or your buddies in the back of a pickup isn’t about taking away your freedoms, buddy. Its about you not killing said kids or friends when you hit something and theres nothing restraining them. Really? you need someone to explain that to you?
So… you are saying its ok to put the kids in the trunk of your car? Not ok but should not be punished for doing that? Not really the same as the back of a pickup either,they are kinda trapped there. I dont agree with seatbelt laws or helmet laws either but I wear them because its smart to do that.
Darwin’s “Survival of the fittest” and Thomas Malthus’ “Positive and Preventive Checks” on society make the most sense to me. Stuffing kid in trunks, playing Pokemon on a cliff, wearing novelty helmets or none at all…bring It on! 🙂
Knowing what I lived through as a child,young “adult” and on 2 kids 3 and 5 in the carpeted area of a ‘vette registers so low as a danger on the meter it gets just an eye roll from me.
Now if the car is parked and AC off that is a whole nother story….
Putting kids in the back if a Vette, you people are really big dumasses! I couldn’t phantom the thought of doing such a thing. You guys need to jump into a gene pool full of chlorine.
“back in the day” in the small town where I lived the R.C.M.P. had a yellow 1970 full size Pontiac unmarked car. As was the case in Canada, Pontiacs came with Chev. motors. This one had a 454 and not many could get away from it.