We bought a 2004 Volkswagen Touareg several weeks ago. It came from Illinois via Florida through an online auction site called Bring A Trailer. On any given day, one can bid on almost anything car-wise, from a restored 1957 Mercedes-Benz 220S coupe to a hot-rodded 1980 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 to a 1972 McLaren M8FP racecar.

Against all appearances, our Touareg is a real offroad 4X4 with high ground clearance and a transfer case with a low range, so we hope it will solve the two problems we had taking our Hyundai Tucson on steep rocky trails. So, while we do expect the Touareg will take us places the Hyundai couldn’t, we do not expect it to be a very good day-to-day car.

I feel guilty badmouthing the Hyundai, it wasn’t particularly exciting, but it did everything it was designed to do. It has been flawless for a hundred thousand miles (except, strangely, one backdoor will not open). It is the most relievable car I’ve ever owned. The only experience I’ve had with Volkswagens is Michele’s GTI, and that was one of the most tossable, delightful, and just plain funest cars I’ve ever driven, although it wasn’t particularly reliable.

Still, the GTI was light and lithe, and the Touareg is the opposite; it feels heavy, and solid, like it was carved out of a solid block of unobtainium. The Touareg, along with the Phaeton luxury sedan, was part of Ferdinand Piëch’s, Porsche’s grandson and head of the Volkswagen group, plan to expand the Volkswagen company upscale to compete with Mercedes and BMW. This was partially in reaction to both BMW and Mercedes expanding down into Volkswagen’s traditional market with the Mercedes A-Class and the BMW 3 Series. Both the Touareg and the Phaeton were designed to be way better than the cars they competed against to compensate for Volkswagen’s reputation as an inexpensive car builder.

Like Range Rover in the late 80s, Volkswagen started with a very solid offroad chassis, then luxed it by adding every bell and whistle known to man in 2000. Our car/truck/SUV – it does look more like a car than a truck – has standard upscale goodies like leather upholstery, woolen carpeting, and a sunroof. It also has problematic electric luxury items – like six-way power front seats with four-way power lumbar support and a power-adjustable steering wheel – that, Like the Range Rover, may become a problem after miles of dusty washboard backroads. BTW, the Touareg even has an airconditioned glove box.

For its first shakedown drive, we drove the Touareg to the Owens Valley, where we drove around in the Alabama Hills before we took it 12.6 miles and 5,000 vertical feet up a dirt road to the Cerro Gordo mine. The Touareg handled all of it effortlessly.

The Touareg seems to be more of a Frau Gruber than a Diane Kruger; it feels sturdy and unstoppable. Still, it is nowhere as good ergonomically as the Hyundai. Part of that is age, the Hyundai is fourteen years younger, but part of it is German engineers thinking they know what is needed better than the future users. The Hyundai has a digital panel that shows the projected range with the current fuel level, while the Touareg has an unneeded amp gage – with numbers – that is unreadable in most light conditions and is the same size as the small, also usually unreadable, fuel gage. The cup holders in the Touareg are two high to put a water bottle in without constantly elbowing it, and on and on.

The road that we had hoped to test the Touareg on, the Lemoigne Mine Road, was closed because of a washout, and the Hunter Mountain Road was snowed in, so we didn’t give the Touareg a real test, but, so far, it seems like it will be up to the task. BTW, the view of the formally dry Owens Lake from Cerra Gordo Road is terrific. The locals say it is the first time one can see the reflection of the Sierras in the lake since 1915, when LA Water and Power started sucking the aquifer dry.

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Computers are not revolutionary, smart phones are revolutionary. Said by me, with apologies to Che Guevara who said “Medicine is not revolutionary, sanitation is revolutionary.

I was listening to NPR (in the car while running errands, I think). Two people – a guy and a gal, as my dad used to say – were talking about Social Media and the use of algorithms to drive traffic and how they are changing. The woman said something along the line of, “All of sudden, I’m getting tweets made by some rando guy with only three followers.” The use of some rando guy as a descriptor on NPR took me back, and I am still thinking about it.

I love that our language is still changing so rapidly, that it is so pliable, so malleable, and so alive. I wonder if they still have it – and I’m not going to look it up – but the French used to have an Office of Official French or something like that. I remember it was installed when the French were still coming to grips with English becoming the global language and words like le weekend were starting to contaminate their language. The French establishment feared that the French language would fade in importance on the world stage, joining other languages like Tagalog, K’iche’, or North Frisian, drifting into insignificance.

While I don’t think that will happen soon, France’s power and influence is waning and will probably continue to wane and making an official way to speak French will not help. Nobody thinks English is insignificant because it lifts words like patio, loot, powwow, or cookie, from other languages. Like sharks and Love, culture and its language has to keep moving forward to survive. Something, I’m glad to say, English is still doing.

Several days ago, Michele was talking to me about a couple of young people she is working with on a project. They had been working with several tools that allowed them to more easily collaborate. It occurred to me that they grew up with smart phones and the constant connection to everything that smartphones provide. They are on their phones with their friends or associates – or social media – all the time time and that means they are connected all the time.

I’m starting to hear the expression late-stage capitalism increasingly; now I realize it’s gone rogue and is showing up everywhere. Late-stage capitalism implies a couple of things. Capitalism, like everything else, has cycles and it will die out. Maybe capitalism was great, but it doesn’t work now. The phrase almost always says that capitalism is at the core of the inequality rattling our society right now. But I’m not so sure. I think the problem is not Capitalism, per se, but too much individualism and not enough concern for the commonweal. In many ways, kids being on their phones all the time is a reaction to that individualism and the isolation that individualism promotes. They are not as isolated as their forebearers, they are part of a new, growing collective.

Lastly, without trying to figure it out – which is fairly easy – follow this link to a restaurant and guess what country it is in. I was surprised. https://lucky.ua/en/#0s

At the last minute, over the Easter Weekend, Michele and I drove down to Bakersfield, over to Mojave, and then up to Lone Pine, and finally, to Stove Pipe Wells in Death Valley. We were looking for wild flowers as much as anything else, but we were really trying to get out of the cold.

More later, but Happy Belated Easter for now.

Propaganda: noun 1.information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”he was charged with distributing enemy propaganda” Google’s English dictionary, provided by Oxford Languages.

One way to look at propaganda is that the propagandist is projecting what he/she/it thinks the propagandee wants to hear. But we may want to hear something else; it’s only their projection. By telling us what they think we value, they are telling us what they value.

In Putin’s case, it’s hard to think of anything, but Putin wants to be a Russian Czar. A Czar who is above the fray, encased in opulence. As an aside, the video obviously comes from Moscow, but the music may have been added later. However, a couple of people in the comments section said that the music was in the Russian original. End aside.

Zelensky, on the other hand, is humble in the metaphorical trenches with the heroes. As an aside, I have never seen a President or any leader of Zelensky’s stature in a room with so many armed people. Every man and woman who came up to be given a medal had an assault rifle casually hanging from their shoulder. End aside.