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How do you tell the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? The crocodile has a nose shaped like an “A,” and the alligator has a nose shaped like a “C.” Hard to remember, isn’t it? Life is like that sometimes.

In fact, one of the marks of becoming an adult in our society is that you learn to appreciate the subtle nuances of things. You become an expert, which mostly consists of telling people that they’re wrong about whatever you’re an expert about. For instance, everyone you meet has a simple and perfect idea about what you do that is actually totally wrong.

The obvious thing, the thing that should work, often isn’t done. Rather than stomp your feet and complain about why they aren’t doing the obvious thing, you gotta go find out. Often, it turns out that shit is more complicated than that.

Once you’ve been educated sufficiently, there is still this bit of yawning resentment. No matter how politely the expert has corrected you. It’s just human nature to have a little toddler tantrum and stamp your feet. Even if you’re the kind of person who graciously understands this concept and wants to apply it as often as possible. You’re still gonna be a bit cranky the first time that you’re told you can’t just fix a pothole in a weekend, or go to Mars before you die of old age, or make “alligator” and “crocodile” swap their names and be done with the whole thing.

Feeling embarrassed about being corrected is natural. The right way to deal with these emotions is to build a bitchin’ race car. Those assholes at the autocross sanctioning body told me that winning an event is more than just showing up with an 800-horsepower family sedan from the 1970s with most of its bolts loose, but I’ll show them. I’ll show them all.

One of the things you’ll quickly learn about race car drivers is how superstitious they are. No matter how scientific or analytical someone is, they’ll still have certain habits that they think will help influence Lady Luck to give them a good day at the races. And this is somewhat understandable.

When I was regularly doing legal parking lot racing (instead of illegal parking lot drifting,) the really high end guys were basically researchers dedicated to the concept of asphalt. They’d take measurements. Walk the course a dozen times. Think about the course. Tweak air pressures to within a tenth of a pound per square inch. And then, when the event started, they would be really careful to only put their helmet strap on the same exact way as that time ten years ago when they got a podium. And not wear green.

Of course, I think this is pretty weird. With the very low level of preparation that I do for racing, it’s entirely luck. I’ve added so many variables to my shitboxes that it’s basically a coin flip whether or not my rear axle will fall out on any given slalom. The marshals hate that, even though it usually falls out with the wheels still attached, so they can just push it out of the way before the next car comes by. To think that I can control any of these outcomes by doing illogical things like not putting a certain number on my car, or by actually tightening all the bolts before showing up to the event, is the height of hubris.

Which is not to say that I don’t, myself, have my own habits and hang-ups about the big day. For instance, I’ll always take my license plate off if I see any cops nearby who might be curious whether my insurance is current. Saves weight, too. Eat your heart out, Mark Donohue.

As an expert in mechanical abuse, one of the things I’m the most afraid of is gears. They’re complicated, and trying to figure them out is a challenge at the best of times.

Not only do you have to use branches of advanced mathematics like “multiplication,” but you also need to worry about making sure the gears are set properly. A few millimetres could mean the difference between big power and walking home after you played 17,000-RPM Dentist with your drivetrain. That’s not nearly as fun as it sounds, kids. Real dentists are in the hundreds of thousands of RPM. “Shift up,” I mumble to my dentist as they get ready to obliterate my molars. It is fruitless. I digress.

What’s more, making a new gear is not really within the realm of the home gamer. They need stuff like quenching, complex metallurgy, cutting straight and not getting bored after doing 82 of the exact same thing over and over. Off to the store to buy an expensive new part of your gearset.

And if you blow up a special gear, you’re probably going to either have to go to the local machine shop (if you can even find one) or start your own machine shop in your garage. And then you’ll become a famous YouTuber, and will have no time between doing brand collabs to get back to fabricating new gears for a KitchenAid mixer because you set the backlash wrong, you dolt.

All this is to explain why I’ve been spending the last three weeks staring at the back end of my car instead of actually setting the gears. Honestly, I think I should just admit defeat on this one, throw a bunch of loose bolts and gravel into the diff case, and tell a real mechanic that it came that way.

People freak out about check-engine lights, but they’ve never bothered me too much. They’re just there to let you know that something mild has gone wrong, and that maybe you should pay your mechanic too much money to take a look at it in the immediate future. Me, I don’t worry about what it has to say.

Most of its complaints are not critical. An engine, even equipped with modern electronics, is not capable of figuring out its internal state to this level. Let’s consider a normal, everyday situation: I’m halfway down what is likely to be a 12-second quarter-mile pass, the nitrous is flowing, and I’ve missed my shift.

Despite the imminent danger to manifold, I will not get a check engine light for bouncing the valves off of the top of the pistons, degrading them into the modern-art form of scrap metal. At best, I’ll get a little “oopsy woopsy, misfired!” warning as the block saws itself into three million razor-sharp pieces, and ejects the crankshaft into the stands. However, I will get one on the way to the racetrack, because my gas cap is loose.

With this known, the enlightened mind realizes that you can ignore whatever the check engine light has to say. If it really found out something important, then it will be obvious to you pretty soon anyway, and there’s not much you can do about it until then. Better to just floor it.

Of course, there is one exception. Sometimes, the check engine light keeps you from flooring it. The car, in its boundless and triumphant wisdom, knows that you are going to hurt it if you actually try to use all the revs you paid for. In this case, the average shitbox owner will attempt to fix the check-engine light. This is the wrong impulse, and will only teach the car to be more pessimistic in the future. The correct thing to do is to grab a different car from your hoard, and ignore the first one until you have absolutely no choice but to fix it. That’ll teach it to complain.

They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but for my money, if you want to prevent medical professionals from gaining access to your compound, the best way is fences. Landmines, sure, but the hoity-toity, poofy-doof governments of the world think that’s a “war crime,” even if they’re entirely on your property and you work really hard not to step on any of them when you’re out gardening.

For years, and nobody has been able to keep my attention span for long enough to explain it to me, doctors have been able to break into houses whenever they want. It’s for your health, I assume, though whenever I am awoken by a strange noise at 3 in the morning, only to find a swarm of oncologists rooting through my trash, I don’t feel particularly great afterward.

Perhaps you are also afflicted by this strange phenomenon. I think that we can band together, as a community, and tell doctors to keep this shit only to their offices. Or at least the daytime hours only. Of course, there is the risk that they will withdraw their medical services entirely, and we’ll all start dropping dead of commonly-curable illnesses like scurvy and complex too-much-poopitis. So maybe we need to find a negotiator.

So, if any of you know how to make a rope trap that can catch a negotiator, come on by my place. We’re going to meet out front, though, just in case you’re actually a doctor. You’ll have to pass my test in order to gain access to the secret group chat, at the very least. We’ll show you a picture of a Porsche Boxster, and you have to not have any weird opinions about how the 911 is a better car.

Nothing that humanity has put on this earth is as challenging as the humble bouncy castle. Is it an icon of joyful childhood glee, or a deadly trap waiting to consume the unwary? One thing is for sure: it’s cheaper to buy one than to rent it twice. Party planning parents in my periphery participate in a profiteer’s piratical paradigm. Every weekend, I see an event-rental truck appear and disgorge a balloon-based fortification. That’s money I could be making.

On paper, a bouncy castle is pretty simple. Those of you who fell asleep a lot in physics class: I’m gonna try to make this as straightforward as possible. You’ve got a bunch of fabric in the shape of a castle. You’ve got a compressor that fills it full of air. As long as nothing leaks too badly, it turns into a puffy castle. Like blowing up a balloon. Then – don’t fall asleep again – you tie it down.

That’s right. You have to tie down a bouncy castle, and tie it down really well. Something about the size and the seeming solidity of this thing tells our brains that it’s big and heavy and can’t easily be moved, but if you think about it even medium-hard, it’s basically a parachute that we’re farting into. A big wind storm comes through, and that sucker is in orbit. So you want to make sure you tie it down really well. That’s where my competitive advantage comes in.

You see, bylaw has been getting angry about my parking habits for the last couple of weeks. And, to be fair, their argument does have its merits. It is very unusual indeed that I have over six hundred cars, most of which are in states of disrepair, littered all over my neighbourhood like kudzu. I imagine that visitors to the community find it hard to park. Hell, I have to find a place for a new car almost every week, and I’m cussing myself out when I have to walk home after parking twenty blocks away, inside a church basement where they forgot to lock the windows.

A car’s engine is basically a big air compressor. And a car is very heavy, too. Perhaps you see where this is going. All I had to do was get some old bouncy castles, strap ‘em to the roof, and instant party rental. I’ll always have a parking space in front of the house of whatever kid is having a birthday this weekend, parents don’t have to worry about a three thousand pound counterweight blowing away, bylaw is afraid to interfere with any revenue-generating parking, and I get to collect some tax credits for “carbon capture.”

It went really well for a couple weekends. Then those leaks started to show up. Turns out I had a few very poke-y pieces of rust sticking out of the dilapidated cars I was using as a mobile fortress platform. That ripped up the castles real fast, and soon I was spending all my profits on duct tape. That’s why they don’t have castles anymore, history profs.

Everyone now is super excited to use their 3D printers. With this magical new piece of science-fiction, you too can produce the exact wad of plastic you need to solve a problem. Need a tube, but at a weird angle in order to connect it to another tube? It’s just six hours away, baby, unless something goes wrong and you have to get a new extruder shipped. House full of plastic pieces that are worthless because you fucked up basic measuring on them? Print a bin to put them in until you have a wobbly table to level out.

Now, don’t think I’m down on this new technology. Like many hobbyists, I cherish any new power that lets me pretend to be a 1980s comic book villain. I love to be able to make, with just a thought, the exact piece of extruded microplastics that I need to hold my garbage-picked trash parts together in a new configuration. Whether or not this combination of parts ever should have existed is a matter for the philosophers.

Naturally, I don’t have a 3D printer, because they cost money and require electricity, neither of which I have. Instead of this, I go on the internet and complain bitterly that certain things are impossible to make. Then, I wait until some nerds get mad and make those things just to shut me up. At this point – and this is critical – I do not shut up. I go and take my new headlight bracket, or fancy mirror-alignment clip, or replacement molar, and I complain about it endlessly. “It could be smoother,” I say. Maybe their printer sucks, I propose. This usually gets me a couple more spite projects, until they are driven into the insane asylum by my endless requests for useless gewgaws.

Yes indeed: the democratized future of at-home manufacturing is finally here. Used to be, cranks like myself would have to phone a machine shop and get the old guy working the mill super angry before he would spitefully bang out a 20-hour piece of magic. Now, you have thousands of weird nerds to pick from, and all of them available for just the cost of a library card and a throwaway forum account.

Potato planting season is pretty fraught around my part of the world. Historically, the township was formed around a bunch of soldiers who decided they were sick of oppressing the locals, and instead started planting the easiest crop they could think of. Then they ate nothing but potatoes for like two hundred years. We even have a potato parade; the Mayor dresses up like a hashbrown and kids throw ketchup on him.

Right. Potato planting season. See, the thing about harvesting potatoes to eat is that you have to plant them first. While every moron has a bunch of semi-festering potato vines curling around their basement from long-ago grocery store visits they forgot about, it is actually surprisingly hard to grow potatoes. Everyone plants them at the same time, basically. Like many other poorly-planned demand surges, this annual burst of activity causes many strains on the local infrastructure.

As a result, most of the spring is spent with me waiting in traffic behind various farm conveyances. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem, except that my cars love to overheat unless they’re going at above-highway speeds basically all the time. Probably need to check out the fan clutch or whatever. Don’t have time to do that, though, since I’m spending half my day behind a zoom-boom heading to a barn. Sorry, a telehandler. I’m not allowed to call them those anymore.

Last week, I was once again stuck in stop-and-go, watching the contents of my radiator be ejected into the stratosphere, when I thought: wait a minute. Potatoes are a fantastic heatsink. Have you ever touched the ground? It’s cold. That’s probably the potatoes doing that. I crammed my engine bay full of seedlings, and suddenly the temperature gauge wouldn’t move off stone cold (probably because I broke the wire shoving all those potatoes in there.) The best part is, if there’s an oil leak, I end up smelling like French fries instead of a tire fire. I still wouldn’t eat what’s falling behind this glorious shitbox, though. Better to throw it at the Mayor.

Grilled cheese technology hasn’t changed much since the invention of cheese. You’ve got your flat, hot thing, you’ve got your bread, you’ve got your cheese, and you’ve got your fat. Now, most people will use butter. Some folks will use mayonnaise. There’s no need to fight in the comments section.

Personally, what I like about the grilled cheese sandwich is this exact simplicity. No matter where you are, as long as you have the stuff, you can probably figure out how to cook one. I’ve made them on the side of the road, using a hot engine. When I visited a cool castle in France, one of the servants made me one with a sort of elaborate cast-iron bread-clamping device that was invented in the 1700s specifically to make grilled-cheese sandwiches. Elaborate, to be certain, but some things are worth going to the extra effort for.

All the great foods are like this, because we figured out they were great early on. Eggs come out of a chicken’s butt and really don’t need much more than “flat, hot” to be good. Nobody had invented the concept of the air fryer yet when they discovered that coffee keeps you from murdering your entire office at 6:30am. In fact, that’s probably why it was able to be invented in the first place, rather than an idea trapped in the mind of someone burning down their engineering lab because they hadn’t had enough hot, brown caffeine yet.

Like the humble grilled cheese sandwich, it is best to strive for simplicity in your daily life. Stop adding some shit that you don’t need to your projects, and make those projects happen. If they’re any good, they definitely don’t need jalapenos or pickles in them. A little bit of ketchup on the side, that’s all. I said don’t fight in the comments section, folks.

Did you know that you can just go buy an electric fence kit? You don’t need a license, or to be a farmer, or anything. When I first heard about electric fences, as a kid, I figured that you had to make your own. And that required you to be at least organized enough to go get all the supplies together, read some instructions, and wire it up without killing yourself in the process. Not so. You can just go get a box off the shelf and skip at least one of those three steps.

Now, you might think that my interest in electric fences is purely materialist. I want to protect my cars from thieves, or something. No. I want to protect the thieves from my cars. There was a story a few months ago about a guy who was trying to steal wheels off this rich dude’s car, knocked the jack over and crushed himself with the car. Horrible tragedy, and the cops took the jack as evidence. Dude got robbed twice.

Or at least that’s the story I tell the cops when they come by, looking to steal my electric fence. In reality, I’m using it to do some at-home electroplating. You see, the power company gets really mad if you try to chrome your own bumper. Costs a whole lot of power, which shows up on their little computer as being “probably a weed farm.” Folks, I got enough dandelions that I don’t need to make more.

Shucks, officer, looks like I must have made a mistake in wiring up this fence and accidentally spliced into four hundred amps of three-phase service. Good thing I’m on “your side.” I’ll get this figured out with the landlord, you have yourself a great day and don’t inhale too much of that hexavalent chromium drifting through the air. Real windy today.