Atkins Diet
Some people ask why the Atkins diet causes weight loss. There are calories in meat and fat. I think of it in caveman terms. If all you get is meat, you must have to catch your food. Thus, you need to stay lean and/or mean. That sounds good to me anyway.

More on cars
At some point in high school I decided to become a gear-head, at least in the talk if not the walk. I sat there in study hall and listened to the guys who knew what was going on talk about their cars. It is amazing how far this has gotten me. I went to Florida in a 73 T-A ram-air with a Pontiac 400 with a 850 CFM carburetor. It had a Turbo 400 tranny. The engine came from an old pickup that was not the original owner. We had to swap another tranny for the one we ended up using. The front shocks were shot, but that kind of works in a 70's muscle car. It makes the front end rise when you hit it. We foolishly cut a hole in the hood to make room for the high-rise air-filter. It turns out we could have sold that stock hood for more than we paid for the car. DOH!
The guy who put together the T-A also had a 71 Chivvy pickup. It was a straight six with a granny gear four on the floor. It was fun because you had to kill the engine with the clutch. If you just tried to turn off the ignition, the crank turned and the pistons fired without spark. This caused the timing chain to pop back and forth. It would eventually break that way. So, you planted your foot on the break with the truck in gear and let out the clutch as you were turning off the key. I drove that truck a couple of times. I've gone over that before.
I still don't know what is what under a hood. Oh, I can point to stuff and guess what it is, but I stopped taking stuff apart long ago. I program now. That satisfies my need to create and learn.
What this has done for me is allow me to communicate with specific people. Not every one in the USA has a car, but you would think so when you speak to people. In Europe, they actually take the train and other forms of mass transit just to get from place to place. The need for individuality and the coming of age that the automobile has evolved into in the USA don't seem to have the same draw in Europe. Some people take pride in how efficient their cars are. A BBC study found that cars have become fashion statements in the USA. People have different cars for different occasions here. That is just nuts.
I live in a city that has designed itself around the automobile. Any one spotted walking is assumed to have something wrong with them. There are whole sections of the city you just can't get to if you try to walk. Freeways cut off buildings and apartment complexes.to pedestrian traffic. It seems people like it that way. My apartment building has seven entrances/exits for automobiles and one for pedestrians. There are over six hundred units, and one entrance if you are on foot. People are expected to walk through the automobile gates. Where I work has three automobile entrances/exits and no pedestrian access from outside. The only pedestrian access is from the parking lots, that are inside the outer-most fence. Most people who work here have no idea this is the case. It has just never crossed their minds. The EPA gets on the company's case to clean up the environment and get people to drive less vehicles to work. This building is one mile from the closest bus stop. There is no way to enter the complex without walking between moving vehicles at their entrance to do so.
Blaw blaw blaw. I will stop griping.