I haven’t done a silly Internet quiz in a while, so I happily followed Michael May‘s example with this one. The questions were leading — if you’re into adventure stories at all, you’ll easily guess which character each question is describing — but it killed five minutes and I’m pleased with the results:

Quiz brought to you by
Tripbase – Vacation Ideas

If you’ve never read King Solomon’s Mines, run to the library or click over to Amazon straightaway. It’s a great tale, even if it is an obvious product of its times (i.e., it’s Victorian, and that includes Victorian attitudes toward race and gender), and Quatermain is an obvious inspiration for the quintessential adventurer of modern pop culture, Indiana Jones, if that piques your interest at all. There have been two film versions that I’m familiar with, the 1950 version with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger (which is pretty fun), and the 1985 version with Richard Chamberlain and a young Sharon Stone (this one can be a certain kind fun if you’re into bad movies, but be warned before you press “play” that it can’t be described as “good” in any of the usual ways). And of course Sean Connery played Quatermain in the execrable film League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; he was the only good thing about that pile of steaming camel dung…

The Girlfriend has acquired the mildly annoying habit of stuffing straw wrappers, napkins, crumpled-up receipts, and other little bits of paper detritus into the cup holders of my beloved Mustang. It’s not that big a deal, and I suppose it’s really my own fault because I’ve always resisted hanging a trash bag from the gear shift like most people do. But still, neither of us ever seems to remember to remove this crap immediately when we get home, so it tends to build up and make my car look kinda white-trashy. And it reduces the functionality of the cup holder, too, since cups don’t sit evenly on an uneven wad of junk. They tend to tip and tilt, and if they’re full, they’ll spill a little, which makes the cup holder and the debris layer sticky, and, well… it’s just not an optimal situation, as my friend Jack would say.

So I was delighted yesterday to discover that this trash problem takes care of itself if you accelerate to 60 mph with the top down on a brilliant sunny evening. It’s unclear whether it’s strictly necessary to have Foghat’s “Slow Ride” booming from the stereo in order to actuate the de-trashification process, but I recommend it anyhow because it’s a totally bitchin’ song.

(Incidentally, I realize I never reported on how the repairs to my car came out… there was a bit of heartburn because the body shop used a “pre-owned” door to replace my damaged one after promising to use a new one, but they did a really nice job of matching the paint and I doubt if 98% of people looking at the car could tell anything had ever happened. Still bugs me that the accident happened at all, but I guess it turned out all right.)