Welcome to the time of year where the color of your car will change every morning in the same predictable pattern. In the early morning, it will be yellow. A quick rinse will return it to it’s actual color. Wait an hour at the most…it’ll be yellow again. It’s pollen season! It’s also the time of spring where you have the balance between cool air and warm sun can potentially offer up the mythical “mineshaft” conditions. It happens, just saw it happen today at Beech Bend! It’s been spring longer than five minutes, so enjoy our content and be sure to get outside and enjoy the weather as you can! As we like to do, we take some of the scraps of news and mix them up with a bit of roasting and put it on a plate for you. It’s Scrapple, and it’s properly cooked…unlike a dinner of mine from last week!

1. A moron with bad breath.It didn’t cover the fact that you failed to shower after P.E., or ever in some cases, so what the hell would make somebody think that it could mask the smell of alcohol on their breath?! After cutting off a cop, speeding and swerving got the officer’s attention, 49 year old Efren Mencia-Ramirez took the desperate approach and started hosing out his mouth with Axe body spray to mask the smell of the Coronas that he and his passenger had been knocking back. Even if the ruse had somehow managed to work, the eleven empty bottles and the nearly empty twelfth underscored the need for an arrest. Moron of the Week, right here!

2. Oh, what the actual…

San Francisco Rush 2049…in 1999, this was the height of an involved driver game. You had a steering wheel, three pedals, a shifter and if you unlocked them, real cars to drive around in. This was an arcade game, it ate quarters and that was that. Apparently that isn’t enough…twenty years after I was edging into my fuel budget with that contraption above, Mercedes-Benz is offering up the “In-Car Gaming Challenge“. The idea: create a game, learning program, or other sytem that can be enjoyed in an automobile, autono-mobile, bus, whatever. Anything from simply using buttons as input devices to full-kill virtual reality systems are open game. Part of this sounds awesome…playing Grand Theft Auto in my own car would be kind of badass and games like the Forza series would have a higher realistic factor. But…um…the car?! Really?

The contest is open to entrants until May 16th, 2019. There will be two tiers of finalists: “innovators” (gamers, independent groups) and startups (pro developers and companies). Five teams from each category will be selected to present their ideas in Stuttgart. The top three innovator teams will get €10,000 in development money and tickets to an ESL E-sports tournament, while the top startup team will get the green-light to develop a proof-of-concept for Daimler.

3. Say it with me: “groooos-fraaabahhh…”

(Photo: Ford) No use ignoring it, there are days where the most pissed-off person on the planet is behind the wheel of a car. Lived through Seattle traffic at five in the afternoon? You know. You know what isn’t helping matters? The amount of electronic screens and information devices that we have to deal with more and more in today’s world. Ford is trying to thin down some of that information overload…and hopefully allow some disengagement…with the next-generation Explorer’s “Mindful Mode”: a blue background and minimal information: speed and fuel information.

4. There’s plenty of other places to visit, you know.New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and even Portland, Oregon are looking into congestion pricing for vehicles that want to enter and drive through certain sections or even the whole metro area of the city. In the two major metropolitans, on the surface, you could understand why the government might try to limit vehicles…New York’s average MPH in the Central Business District is on-par with an aging mallwalker thanks to horrifying congestion, and that’s just NY, NY…Los Angeles is thinking about a $4 charge to drive through the Westside to the beach and Portland’s efforts are being viewed as an alternative to building more roads, which “…encourages more people to drive. So, we just think it is so critical that we invest in options like transit, like walking, and like biking”.

Sorry, but this sounds less like traffic management and more like another tax under a different name. Prove us wrong.

5. 30 Minutes…Me From Work, You To My Door With Food. Go!As a former dough-slinger for Domino’s back in my high-school days, I can promise you that regardless of where you go, there’s plenty of demand for a hot pizza that can be called in and delivered quickly. Now there’s a way to get the pizza to your place even quicker than normal: the pizza chain is partnering with Xevo, a car technology company, to develop an app that will allow you to order your sensible dinner choices via the infotainment system of your car, without tethering your smartphone. You can even just hit an “Easy Order” button to just get your one favorite setup or a “Recent Order” to duplicate the last time you came home and ate and drank your sorrows away. Expect to see this app to start appearing on models sometime later this year.