It isn't that I don't know how to do it. It's that I'm too lazy! When I was 17 I blew the engine in the beater I was driving. I disassembled it and rebuilt it myself. Took me nearly a month after school and on weekends. It ran nicely after that too :) Now I have a good friend who is very handy with these current "take back to the dealer for repair" vehicles. If I buy him dinner he fixes whatever goes wrong for me. Sounds like a deal to me. And I go to Valvoline Instant Oil Change every three months for that. Mostly out of convenience.

Yes, men once expected to change their own oil and drive belts...but that was before what lay beneath the hood looked like an "artist's conception" of a special-purpose robot on terminal life support from one of Asimov's worst nightmares.

With regard to Home Depot: You are probably right that the joints are filled with tradesmen and the incompetent, clueless masses. I would only add that most of the tradesmen, based on the services provided to me in my life by such folk, do dual duty in the Home Depot--tradesmen and incompetent boobs.

My late stepfather was, putatively, a union carpenter. He was, at best, a schlepper, and, at worst, an idiot.

The pinnacle of modern non-do-it-yourself cars? I nominate the Porsche Boxster. You literally cannot see the engine, the dipstick is in the rear trunk, and that's your total access. This aspect of the car has not kept us from enjoying ours from the first model year (1997) all the way until now, with nary a mechanical failure the whole time. Still runs like a watch.

I used to change the fan belt on my first car, which I bought when I was eighteen, all the time. That was because it was a piece-of-crap Chevy Vega (I bought it because it only cost $800 and it "looked cute"), and the tin generator used to strip its connecting screws and then slide down and shred the fan belt all the time. But it was also because it was ridiculously easy to do: there was hardly anything under the hood. (The car had no a/c system or radio, for one thing.) I would have replaced the generator myself too -- it held on, I think, with a couple of screws (which as I said got stripped all the time), but it was too heavy, so that I would farm out to a mechanic buddy of my dad's.

The last car I had I checked the oil and other fluids, but that was all I dared to do. There wasn't enough room in that engine for a squirrel to hide.

My first car was also a Vega, but I only paid $550 for it (nyah nyahhh!). I replaced a lot of its parts myself, including the carburetor on one occasion.

I suppose I could replace the carburetor on my '96 Bronco, if I could find it.

[...]

What? It doesn't have one? What'chu talkin' 'bout!?

The current BMW 328i has no dipstick, only a sensor and an idiot light. And get this:

"I was told the proper way to check the oil is to return the car to your BMW dealership and it will put the vehicle on a rack, drain the oil, measure it, and then reinstall the oil in the car."

BMW pays for all scheduled maintenance during the warranty period, which doesn't make me feel any better about this.

"Non-functioning bombs are a sort of "canary in the coal mine" indicator for general societal dysfunction."

Perhaps non-functioning bombs are reflective of the non-functioning belief systems that drive people to make bombs for the purpose of tearing down the (comparatively) healthy belief systems of others?

I don't know if I'd go that far, but I'm quite certain that the Best and the Brightest have better things to do with their time than plot the destruction of their putative enemies, which means that the loss of an occasional bomber does not represent any substantial brain drain: pace John Donne, his death doth not diminish me.

My dad lives in a neighborhood where the average yard size is half an acre, there are no through streets, and several of the residents own horses. Recently, my dad was issued a citation from Oklahoma City for having a junk car parked in his driveway. I believe the exact infraction was having a car in his driveway without one or more wheels. (The '55 Olds was undergoing a brake job.) It amazes me that somehow this appeared on their radar.

As for the non-functional bomb, blame the Internet. Back in my day we built our explosives based on the Anarchist Cookbook and they worked just fine. Apparently between OCR and 'leet-speak, the directions have been butchered.

Step One: OMGWTF u r going 2 need mad expl0sives and d0nut blow off ur hand okkthxbye.

Somebody probably thought he was performing a service to the community by complaining to Zoning Code Enforcement.

And then there's this:

I've made with my hands: an air-cooled Volkswagen engine, assembled a couple thousand rounds of ammunition for pistol and rifle, brewed more than a few gallons of ales, butchered a few antelope, ground up a bit of it into sausage. I've built 3 Kalashnikov rifles, and am working on a few other blasters.

This weekend I replaced the shock absorbers on my truck. A couple months ago I replaced the gear oil in its transmission. I'll replace the oil in the front and rear differentials next.

The next large game animals I harvest will have their hides tanned, some brain and some vegetable.

Though even I don't get this part: I usually hire the oil changes out to someone else.

There's got to be something scary behind the front bumper.