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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.

Have you ever thought about how much of human existence is being wasted, scraping old sealant off of things? No? Maybe I just have a lot of free time to think about things like this now, what with having spent several hours so far trying to get the last little bit of goop off of this old valve cover without bending it.

Call them what you want. Glues, sealants, adhesives, caulks. They're all a huge pain in the ass to get off of the surface, so you can put new goop on. And usually, you're only removing the goop because the previous jerk didn't clean it well enough, leaving a molecule-wide hole that allowed a bunch of oil to leak out. So you don't want to be that person, because you'll be back in here next week. Especially if you were already that jerk, and this is your second or third shot at trying to seal this piece of shit.

Maybe it's just me who has such bad luck with this stuff. My buddy's dad once showed us a trick where he just kind of ran a light switch cover along it, peeled it all off, and then slammed new stuff on with his bare fingers. Held just fine. He went on to destroy the economy, though, so you can't have everything. I did the exact same stuff he did, and then ended up with a fountain of hot ATF pouring out of my transmission pan five seconds later. The car wasn't even running.

From now on, I'm going to be trying the only thing that is guaranteed not to produce a surprising leak. Tek screws. Throw a handful of self tappers into that baby, and there's no chance you'll be blaming adhesives for your problems from now on. Hmm. Maybe I could run some along that seam, make it look nice...

Wait, who told you they built this city on rock and roll? Did you ask them for their credentials? The reason why I ask is, and I'm sure you're starting to wonder yourself by now, is that I'm pretty fucking positive that they were not qualified geologists.

Yes, I realize that I'm "shouting" and making a "hostile workplace." Do you know what else is a hostile workplace? This office after about thirty seconds of quartering winds, when it implodes into the parking garage. You guessed it, because its foundation was constructed entirely on glam metal at best, which we all know is terrible at supporting two hundred thousand tons of concrete in compression.

Ted. Ted. Get over here. Do you see this sinking piling? Yeah. You see it. Ted, get a drill team in this building fucking pron-to, and let's see if these dipshits actually managed to hire someone to put a 50-storey skyscraper on top of a bunch of old Tonto albums. I can already feel the weight of our sins swaying above us, ready to crush the entire populace of downtown if a seagull shits on the building wrong. God willing, we're going to find out that it's at least progressive rock.

It could be a lot worse. It really could, Ted. When I was your age, I went to this new fancy-dan geodesic dome thing they built for the World Fair. Everyone was so proud. And they were dead like, fifteen minutes later. Crushed to molecule-thin paste. Why, Ted? Because they built it on bubblegum pop. Germans love that shit, it's so easy to get for cheap. Bubbles are voids. They had to have known. I won't let them forget.

Chances are, you don't appreciate trees enough. Even the most passionate arborist can take the leafy canopy of their hometown for granted. It's easy to do: we're novelty-seeking creatures. While you're gaping at cool new trees and their weird little saplings, your average elm tree is ignored.

When The City comes to take that tree out, though, everyone cares. People don't appreciate what they have, until a bureaucrat is telling them it has to be removed for a sewer line relocation. At that point, even the most Dodge Rammy suburbanite will transform into a passionate defender of the environment. Suddenly, it is socially acceptable to scream at their representatives in the hope of protecting the chunk of half-dead wood at the end of their block from the ravages of development. It is a virtuous and righteous thing to scream about, as opposed to adding extra lanes to the highway (which are probably the reason the sewer line is getting relocated anyway.)

Regular readers of this manife– column will know that hypocrisy is the default state of humanity, so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone out there that when the city finally gives in, those same suburbanites go right back to ignoring the tree. Maybe they take some celebratory selfies in front of it, but an unqualified driver will smack into it during the next winter and the city will end up throwing it out anyway.

Now, I love trees. In fact, I love them so much that I planted a whole bunch on my property, so the city can't come and seize all my derelict cars. If the bylaw officer tries to cut down a tree, he'll invoke the fury of every pen-pushing office-chair-coddler in the entire province. Sure, I can't get the cars out, but we'll worry about that problem later, once I've successfully fixed any of them. And by then, we'll probably have flying cars anyway, so I can just pick them up. Man, just imagine the ways people will crash into trees in the future.

In recent years, there have been a lot of arguments about the nature of objective truth. Because it's so easy and fun to lie, people do it a lot. Sometimes, people do it so much that other people find it hard to understand what "lies" are anymore. Then they start lying to themselves. Science was supposed to fix this, but it turns out that science is not very good at being as entertaining as the liars. That's why we invented fiction.

In case you're unfamiliar with the concept, head on down to your local library. Then, ask the librarian to take you to the section that's full of lies. Yep, that's right: the fiction section is books about things that didn't happen. They're not real. Even if there's real people in this book, the things they're doing are fake. You can finish the book, and not call the cops afterward because you have a hot tip on "the Little Red Riding Hood murders." She killed that wolf in self-defence, anyway, even if it was execution-style at point blank range.

Now that you know there's a convenient place to go get entertaining lies from, you can be more suspicious about everything else you read. See a news article that made you hyper mad about something that you don't really understand? You just checked out like thirty books and you gotta finish them all before you have to give them back to the library. No time to be mad, only time to discover what really happened to that band of intrepid British teenagers who travelled to the Tomb of the Underdeep in order to liberate Milton Friedman's bejewelled skull. Crooked politicians won't be able to send you text messages about child-eating foreigners while you're busy reading, and you'll probably cancel family dinner with your more reactionary parents in order to dive into a murder mystery, too.

Through constant exposure to low-grade, non-threatening lies, you will become resistant to them being shoved down your throat in the future. Like a magic potion of resistance; what boring people would call a "vaccine." Of course, you can always go read the non-fiction section if you want to keep track of the world around you. Why would you, though? It's much more fun to read about dragons than penguins.

If you're the nervous kind of person, I urge you not to think about how much of the world is currently being held together with a ratchet strap. Maybe take a walk around the block and try not to look into any backyards, or under any trucks.

Invented by Phineas Q. Ratchet-Strappe in 1916, the ratchet strap has been an essential component of every backyard dirtbag's backseat ever since. When you have something that moves, and you don't want it to move, an elaborate shibari arrangement of ratchet straps is the perfect way to do it.

There are many reasons for the absolute dominance of the ratchet strap against its closest rival, doing a job properly. They're cheap, so you won't miss them when the temporary fix becomes permanent. They're often brightly-coloured, which makes them a safety device. And they're widely available, so you can dip into the store and buy another bag when your muffler starts to fall off too.

Obviously, it has downsides. They like to rust after just a mere four or five winters holding the suspension of your truck together. At that point, they can't easily be removed, so you'll probably never "get around to" fixing it the proper way. They're a lot more expensive than zipties, which can often be ouroborused into a configuration that still holds several hundred pounds of weight if you squint just right while tightening them.

One day, science will find an even better replacement for the ratchet strap. I hope they figure it out before the floor falls out of my car at highway speeds, because I could only afford the Cheap & Shitty® brand from Princess Auto to hold my seats in. If I can make it to next week, I'll add two or three more. It's not going anywhere then.

"Do you want garlic bread?" Fuck yes, you idiot. I have never wanted anything more than garlic bread. If it were feasible I would consume only garlic bread until the authorities came to scrape my delicious smelling corpse off the futon.

Ever since the collapse of Western civilization, I've been coming to Olive Garden a lot more frequently. And not all of it is because I'm being forced to, despite what the haters have to say. Yes, it is pretty weird that they're the only restaurant that survived the initial nuclear strike. I think it's because this used to be a Pizza Hut, and the hatlike shape of the roof bounces all the horrible death stuff back out into space. They've also got a lead-lined bunker under the restaurant full of a century's worth of frozen garlic bread. There's a sign at the entrance saying not to ask too many questions about it.

Sure, payment is kind of expensive, because the whole financial system took it in the pooper, too. Money is worthless. Luckily, I'm a pretty handy guy, and I can fix vent hoods, ovens, coffee makers, and up-armoured, modified muscle cars in case someone wants to drive the Wastes. In fact, the only thing I can't fix is microwaves. If you need another one of those, you're just going to have to head to the Wal-Mart on route 6 and fight off whatever radioactive hellspawn live there now.

Sorry, hold on. The waiter is coming back. What do you mean, you can't "reheat" the garlic bread? I thought you were doing this shit in the regular oven. You're telling me this sumptuous texture, this pillowy softness, is from a microwave? You fool. There was garlic bread enough for us both! It's not fair!

Sometimes, people come to me with problems. I try to leave them with fewer problems than they came in with, or at least the same number, but different. Like those take-a-penny-leave-a-penny jars at the convenience store. Before they outlawed pennies, that is. Now it's take-a-unique-cryptographic-hash-take-a-unique-cryptographic-hash, and nobody has time to do all that math. Certainly you can't fix a loose battery cable with a Merkle tree.

For a couple of months now, I've been working a new job. After my latest parole officer burned out and decided he would much rather be trying to revive the last Mmmuffins franchise left in the Canadian wastelands, I got a new one. And she has a lot of crazy ideas, ideas like forcing me to get a job or she'll put me back in jail. This dedication to her job inspired me to seek some meaningful work in public service. I became a social worker.

Now, I know what you're saying, especially if you're a social worker. Becoming one requires a lot of education, training, and oversight from trusted people. However, my province barely requires a drivers' license. It's exactly the one you think it is. Soon, I was helping folks deal with their most complex familial struggles. One client was a stressed-out single mom, who brought to me her young son. He liked to take things apart, she complained. Once, she found a disassembled flashlight and several stolen screwdrivers under his bed. This, she felt, was not a normal thing for a small child to do.

I had just the cure. That's how I got my transmission swapped in the Dart. All I needed to do was show this little ankle-biter how to work the transmission jack and he tore right into that A727. He already knew the other critical technique of "lefty loosey, righty tighty," which is impressive for his age. After that, I put my feet up, and had a couple beers while he had fun taking apart and putting back together the biggest box of toys that he'd ever seen, courtesy of the Plymouth Motor Corporation.

When I gave him back to his mother at the end of the day, he was tired as all hell. In that state, he was certainly not willing to disassemble any televisions, fridge compressors, or dogs in the area. He wouldn't bother with such small game from now on: no, he had been ruined by the concept of pseudo-economical 1970s American shitboxes. His mother was delighted, and slipped me a couple twenties even though you're really not supposed to tip your social worker (and if you do, I prefer gift cards to RockAuto.)

Is there a moral to the story? Yes. It's that children want to work, so we should let them do it. That way they get a nice outlet to discover the real world, and also I don't have to do jack shit. I do wish the little bastard knew how to read, though. It was very annoying having to lean in every so often to set the torque wrench for him.