Chad’s out racing, Brian’s doing his thing in the tower and I’m neck-deep in Mustangs, both my own and other people’s. The “racing season” might be a little bit off, and the spring equinox even further away, but if we were supposed to get a memo, sorry, that got filed in the circular filing cabinet next to the desk. As such, we’ve taken just a quick moment to look over this week’s random news bites and have found a few to smash together for something kind of palatable. Here’s Scrapple…enjoy!

1. That’s no longer operator-level maintenance, Sergeant.

In military lingo, it’s 10-level maintenance, or operator-level maintenance. It means that instead of roping one of the actual mechanics into fixing your rolling catastrophe of a HMMWV, you should be able to fix it yourself. (Technically, it also means that you aren’t supposed to change engines without a mechanic present, but I digress…) But the funky thing is that the whole “right to repair” deal is starting to bite the military in the ass, too. If you haven’t heard of right to repair, it’s the reason why farmers are trying to buy any pre-1980 tractor they can, because manufacturers like John Deere…ok, especially John Deere…don’t want to sell a product anymore, only a “license to operate” system that requires anyone working on it to be a part of their system. So, in the case of Oshkosh Corporation, who currently build out JLTVs, HEMTTs, LMTVs, M-ATVs, MTVRs, and the M1070/M1000 tank-hauling system, among other military vehicles, could require an on-site rep to oversee work or even better, require a contract of worker support that keeps soldiers from troubleshooting or fixing their own machines.

And my First Sergeant wondered why I wanted to build up a wrecked Chevy Silverado as a gun truck.

2. Road rage for one, please.Nothing is more frightening than the term, “disgruntled employee”. Those words usually mean that a post office is about to be turned into Swiss cheese by one very angry individual. But this time around, a Waymo-operated driverless van got the brunt of the anger of 31-year-old Raymond Tang, a former employee of Waymo who is accused of brake-checking a van into a crash in Tempe, Arizona on January 30th, 2020. The van was being driven by a human at the time, who suffered minor injuries. Not that we’re fans of driverless tech around here, but dude…show us on the stuffed van plushie where Waymo touched you. Angry much?

3. Happy baby news!Growing up, the only way to calm tiny-tot McTag down when he was a volcano of screaming, crying and bonafide fury was to strap him into a car seat and take him for a night-time drive around Colorado Springs for an hour or so. The combination of the streetlight strobe effect, the burble of the ’69 Plymouth Fury GT my mother had and the road noise would knock me out. Hm…explains why I love driving through cities at midnight. Nissan understands this trick works on all sorts of young’ns and has created “Dream Drive”, which is a mixture of electric and gasoline vehicle noises, DJ Tom Middleton and the idea of sending Junior to Dreamland via five three-minute song mixes, which can be heard HERE. Be warned…I’m listening as I’m typing right now and I’m ready to doze off.

4. Sad baby news!Vehicle repossessions are not a glamorous thing. Some big dude in a big truck shows up, takes your car and if you’re lucky, you might be able to get the stuff you left in your car eventually. In the case of a New Jersey man, that thing left behind in the repo’d car woudl be his daughter. Yeah…repo guy just took the car, daughter inside and all, and drove off after Dad realized he forgot her bottle and made a quick trip to go get it. Father calls police, believing his child has been kidnapped, and forty minutes later the little one was found and returned to the parents after getting a checkup at a hospital.

5. …I refuse to publish any of the wiseass cracks I have for this story.Vin Diesel, in an interview with MTV, has admitted that work has commenced on an all-female Fast and Furious franchise film, with a script being drawn up. Other than Michelle Rodriguez’s concerns about the way women have been portrayed in past FnF films, one has to wonder where this all-female cast idea came from and what the end product will be. After ten timeline films, two short films, a television show (Fast & Furious Spy Racers) and the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off, do we really need another film? Is Universal Studios that desperate for cash?