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For the first four years of this site, The Vent was the only section that was updated on anything resembling a regular basis: most of the time, you got four of them every month, and anything else was done on a when-I-get-to-it non-schedule. In June 2000, though, I started doing daily blog updates, and at the time, I was concerned that The Vent would be pushed into the background. To some extent, it has, yet the same four-per-month production schedule has been kept for the five years since. And one thing that's been made possible by running two separate sets of pages is the ability to repurpose — um, reuse — the material from one set in a different context in the other. In other words, this is the equivalent of a clip show, a selection of spiffy segments from the first few months of daily bloggage, done mostly in the absence of a real topic. Try not to be too disappointed. Molly, my lately-too-often-beleagured car, came down with a bad case of the stalls, which only partially cleared up once she realized she was on her way to a service shop. As is my usual custom, I rented temporary wheels, and this time the agency came up with a 2000 Chevrolet Malibu in Betty Crocker Frosting White, possibly the very car that got GM denounced by wags as "Generic Motors"; stenciling "CAR" on its doors wouldn't be much of a reach. If Chevy trucks are, as the ads say, "like a rock," this mid-size Malibu is a packet of gravel. Over the lumpy concrete and randomly-located expansion joints of the Belle Isle Bridge at a modest 55 mph, it bounds and lurches like a kangaroo on diuretics. I'm starting to see why the General's market share is going into the old porcelain facility. This being Labor Day in the US, I put forth as little labor as I possibly could. And while so doing, I happened across some music video show on what they call Country Music Television, and after listening to a bunch of thrushes named Shania and Martina and what have you, it's perfectly clear that instead of Bob Wills and Kitty |