Book Review: Unwanted Starship – by John Walker and David Brown

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two StarsLeave a comment

Ethan Cross is a machine maintenance technician who works the second shift at Meridian Industrial, a manufacturing company that uses big machines, like hydraulic presses. He lives a quiet life with no wife or girlfriend, no family, and just a few good friends, all from work. One night he is called into the backyard to diagnose a machine problem when he sees something impossible right there between old steel drums, discarded pallets and the general detritus a manufacturing plant will spawn. It looks like a big hulking thing that makes no sense to him. Then he touches it, and nothing is like it was ever before.

It turns out the thing is an ancient alien spaceship, generated by an ancient and extinct galactic race they call “the Elders” who had technology unlike any race in the galaxy ever was able to recreate, and they had it more than 13 million years ago. The spaceship Ethan touched is of that vintage, and it made Ethan its owner and pilot, but also its victim. The neural bond between she ship and the owner can’t be broken, unless the owner dies.

Left with no choice, Ethan takes the ship to the stars. Soon he is a stranger in a strange land, in a vast galaxy, populated by dozens of intelligent and spacefaring alien species, most of which want him dead because they want to get their hands on his ship – and the Elder technology it is made of.

It sounds like a cool story which was a fun read, and I kept turning the pages, but in the end most of the world, the galaxy, was pretty trite.

All the aliens were basically bi-symmetrical,  bipedal humanoids, with knee joints, elbows, albeit one key species had an extra arm joint. Most of them had faces, ears, eyes and mouths. Magic trick 1 was they all spoke into translators which allowed them to seamlessly communicate across species, including human English, right from the start. Magic trick 2 was that interstellar travel with ships seemed effortless, through  a variety of portals, where space bent on itself. Magic trick 3 was that they all communicated instantaneously over hundreds of lightyears using some “quantum technology.” Magic trick 4 was that somehow all planets and space stations seemed to have just the right air mix, temperature and pressure to suit humans, and all aliens. Nobody seemed to need any space suits.

Picture yourself in the bar in the early Star Wars movies where all the aliens just hung out and ate and drank, like humans in alien suits, jolly and jovial.

Cute, but not serious enough science fiction for me to want to read the other books of the Unwanted Starship series.

Movie Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

I read the book Remarkably Bright Creatures a couple of years ago and here was my review. As it often is with movies based on successful books, the story becomes more shallow and big sections of plot are bypassed. However, the visuals sometimes enhance the experience. So it is with this movie.

The story is told from the viewpoint of an octopus named Marcellus, who was rescued after an injury some 4 years earlier and has lived most of his life in a tank in an aquarium in the Pacific Northwest. Marcellus observes the humans who visit him, and he befriends the cleaning lady Tuva (Sally Field).  While he philosophizes about his own life, he also observes the humans in his orbit, recognizes their misery, and plots to help them. That’s a pretty challenging task for an octopus that is about as close to humans as a space alien would be.

In the end, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a feel-good movie that draws out a few tears at the end and makes us feel good about the simple things in life, like a picnic in the yard, surrounded by good friends, neighbors and family.

And as I am wont to do, I will put in my English language lesson: The English plural of octopus is octopodes, often also octopuses, not “octopi” which we often read. The word comes from Greek, and the original plural form is actually “octopodes.” The Latin word for “octopus” is actually “polypus.” There is no “i” in any form of octopus.

I have written a lot about octopodes in this blog. Put the word “octopus” into the Seach box and see for yourself.

2.5

Movie Review: Pressure (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

One of the most important and most consequential days in the history of the 20th century was D-Day, the day the Allied forces invaded France by landing on the beaches of Normandy. Pressure tells the true and mostly untold story of one of the contributing elements to the decision to invade on that day: The British weather.

In the last 72 hours before the invasion, Britain’s chief meteorological officer, Dr. James Stagg (Andrew Scott), is called in to evaluate the weather and advise the Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Frazer) on the weather and if it was suitable for the mission. As it turned out, there was a huge weather front coming in and Stagg could simply not allow the mission to proceed, even though the entire high command, and most of his own subordinates, were pressuring him to go along. Too much was at stake.

You can’t watch too many war movies. After I walked out of the theater, I had to tell myself that I had just witnessed one crucial aspect of one of the most consequential battles in history. Yet, all I could think of was: Here was another example of our leaders sending other people’s sons and daughters into harm’s way. Eisenhower surely learned, but our president today plays with this awesome responsibility like it’s a reality show – you “get killed” and it means you’re voted off the island. Well – no – you get killed and you’re dead!

Dead!

Pressure is a movie I definitely recommend you watch. It made me think I should pick up a biography of Eisenhower so I could learn what stuff real presidents are made of.

Movie Review: Nuremberg (2025)

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Four Stars, Movies1 Comment

The final last quote on a black screen at the end of this movie was:

The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.

— R. G. Collingwood

(Robin George Collingwood, 1889–1943) was an English philosopher, historian, and archaeologist best known for his work on the philosophy of history.

I decided to lead my review with this powerful statement. Of course, the movie refers to the man Hermann Göring, the Reichsmarschall of the Third Reich and Hitler’s second in command. But the message of the film reaches far beyond what happened in Germany during World War II. We often say that what happened in Germany in those years could not happen again. Yet, all over the world we are seeing men seek totalitarian powers right in front of us, in broad daylight. That, my friends, is what I believe Nuremberg is about.

The movie tells the story of the Nuremberg trials largely from the point of view of Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a US Army psychiatrist assigned to assess the mental state and trial-worthiness of the prisoners and also to keep them from committing suicide. His main objective is to get through to Göring (Russell Crowe), who is the obvious leader. If he is convicted, they all will be. A lot is at stake. In the course of his assessment, he crosses the line and perhaps gets too involved in the life of his patient, to the point where he carries letters between him and his family.

Nuremberg shows the intense preparations and illustrates the extremely high stakes of the trial. Rami Malek does a masterful job portraying Dr. Kelley, and Russell Crowe is superb as Göring. I would not be surprised if one or both of them were to win awards for these roles.

IMDb has good background information about this movie, which I recommend. Here is the link. It points out many goofs, factual errors, and historical inaccuracies. I will not list them here separately. Just a couple of key ones are in the spoiler section below:

Mild Spoiler – will not destroy the experience.

  • Douglas Kelley was not fired, discharged from the army and sent home in disgrace. He never spoke to a journalist, or publicly denounced Robert Jackson’s ability ahead of Göring’s examination.
  • Both prison psychiatrists Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert arrived at different conclusions regarding the mental states of the prisoners, there was no antagonism between them. They never had a physical fight.

Overall, Nuremberg is a powerful movie with a running time of 2 hours and 28 minutes. It goes into depth and it puts a spotlight on the atrocities by the Nazis and makes us think about whether we today are better, given what is currently going on in the world.

Could it happen again?

Hell, yeah, it could!

The Loneliness of a Green Lawn

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, NatureLeave a comment

I am currently reading The Comfort of Crows – by Margaret Renkl. It’s a book of chapters, one for each week of the year. I usually just read one chapter per session.

This one – an excerpt of Spring – Week 5 gave me pause and made me rethink the grass I am trying to grow in my backyard – unsuccessfully.

The flowering trees—dogwoods and redbuds and serviceberries, crab apples and peaches and cherries—are in full splendor now, and every time it rains, the streets are paved with petals. But the flowers I love best are the tiny ones, invisible from a car window. Exquisite flowers, most of them smaller than my pinkie fingernail, bloom all around my house in April, and they have wonderful names: woodland violet, spring beauty, daisy fleabane, pitcher’s stitchwort, birdeye speedwell, yellow wood sorrel, purple deadnettle, creeping Charlie, dandelion, and many others. Something new every day. Most people call them weeds.

A few of these flowers aren’t native to Tennessee, and some of the non-natives can be invasive. Those I pull up, or Haywood mows down, but the others are beneficial, early blooming wildflowers that pollinators need. Long before my actual pollinator garden is lush with cultivated flowers, the flowers I didn’t plant are blooming, an ankle-high meadow thriving in the place where most Americans grow grass. Wildflower seeds are carried on the wind, on the coats of animals, and in the digestive tracts of birds. Anybody paying attention would see them for the gifts they are: flowers that arrive, through no effort, to feed the bees and the butterflies.

Suburbia isn’t paying attention. Homeowners are still in thrall to a status symbol invented by English nobility. People enraptured with the idea of a lawn as a rolling carpet of grass, a green that remains green even during seasons when grass is supposed to be dormant, can’t help but see these homely flowers as intruders. They consider this question, if they consider it at all, as a matter of personal preference: I like wildflowers, and they like grass. But with biodiversity disappearing from every ecosystem on the planet, including our own, our preferences aren’t ethically equal. Lawns are a waste of precious water and soil because non-native landscaping like turf grass and boxwoods and crepe myrtles and Yoshino cherry trees provide little habitat or food for native wildlife. Worse, a manicured lawn requires many different poisons to maintain.

The wind that carries wildflower seeds to my uncultivated yard also carries wildflower seeds to my neighbors’ highly cultivated grass. It’s not easy to pull all those weeds, so homeowners—or their lawn services—set out poisons that keep the seeds from germinating. Then they spray a different poison that kills any plants that germinate anyway. Still another poison kills the insects that eat the “desirable” plants. Yet another kills the field mice trying to survive in a place without fields. And those poisons don’t stay put. They end up in the air and the water. They end up in our bodies, linked to asthma, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, and several cancers.

It kills me to think of my baby bluebirds hunting poisoned insects in the yard next door. It kills me to think of Cooper’s hawks eating the poisoned bluebirds. Every time I see my neighbors’ children rolling around on their poisoned lawns, absorbing into their skin and breathing into their lungs these dangerous endocrine disrupters, I have to work hard not to cry. So much life is imperiled by what is merely fashionable: a green lawn, a tidy yard. It makes me feel lonely to think about it.

— from The Comfort of Crows – by Margaret Renkl –  Wildflowers at My Feet and Songbirds in My Trees – Spring – Week 5

Movie Review: The Town (2010)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

There is a neighborhood in Boston named Charlestown, which is famous for having an unusual high number of armed robberies. For generations, crime families have arisen and their children stay in town, live lives of crime and robbery.

A group of friends are particularly good at it. They wear masks, enter banks, rob them at gunpoint, and hope nothing goes wrong before they can escape with the loot. Due to an unexpected twist, they end up kidnapping a young female bank manager, and they have to let her go later, hoping she didn’t recognize any of them and pick up any clues.

The gang leader Doug (Ben Affleck) ends up falling for her. They develop a relationship that is based on some massive lies. She cannot ever find out he was her kidnapper, and his gang friends cannot know he is dating her.

As you might suspect, things don’t go well.

This movie is well-done, fast-paced and full of tense moments. A great crime story.

The 4444th Post in this Blog

On By Norbert HauptIn Feelings5 Comments

This post is my 4444th post in this blog.

I am not into numerology, and round numbers are just numbers.

It’s just that recently I was curious how many there were so I programmed a widget that displays the number of post in the right sidebar. That’s how I noticed.

So I thought I’d give myself 4 stars for 4444 blog posts.

 

 

It’s going to be a while before it’s 5000, but I can aim, can’t I?

Book Review: The Lost Bookshop – by Evie Woods

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

The Lost Bookshop is the story of Opaline, a woman who lived in England in the 1920s, and Martha and  Henry, who are contemporaries. All three of them are book lovers and in their individual journeys, they come together in unexpected ways.

The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of the three main characters, where Opaline lived over a hundred years before the other two. As the plot develops, we learn how Opaline’s life affected Martha’s and Henry’s in unexpected ways.

The main themes are illustrating the class system of English society, and above all the role women played as sub-humans, basically the chattel of the men in their lives, which was very true for Opaline a hundred years ago, and still true for Martha today due to her abusive husband.

The story weaves around Emily Bronte’s only novel, the classic Wuthering Heights. The characters believe that she might have written another manuscript that was never published before she died at age 30 from tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights became one of the most famous works in English literature shortly after she died.

One might say this book is about Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights, because the entire plot is developed around her character. So much so that I decided to dust off the book in my Kindle library and start reading it again. See my review here.

The Lost Bookshop is an entertaining read, full of nostalgia, some outright magic, quite a bit of mystery and above all outrage about the suffering of women, through history, and up to today.

Book Review: Wuthering Heights – by Emily Bronte

On By Norbert HauptIn Books (not finished reading)1 Comment

I don’t seem to do will with classics. Check out my category of “Books (not finished reading)” and you’ll find a lot of classics there.

Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous novels in English literature. I have tried several times to read it, and I usually get to about 10% before I toss it away – hopefully never to try again.

Recently I read The Lost Bookshop and Emily Bronte, the author of Wuthering Heights, is a central character in the plot development. Reading so much about Emily and her life and aspirations, I decided to dust off Wuthering Heights again and give it one more shot.

To no avail. I just cannot read that book. I just can’t make myself care about the characters and their challenges. This time I got to about 10% again, and I was relieved when I finally succumbed.

Books (not finished reading) do not get a rating in my reviews. The just live there and invite your comments.

Movie Review: The Christophers (2025)

On By Norbert HauptIn Art, Movies, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Julian Sklar (Ian Kellen) is a once famous and somewhat notorious (and obnoxious) artist whom his children expect to die soon. They do not have a loving or even respectful relationship with their father, and as one would expect in that situation, he thinks of them as losers and grifters.

Julian has a number of famous works in his portfolio. “The Christophers” are a series of paintings he did more than thirty years ago when he had a love-affair with a Christopher. There was a series of nine more drafts of Christophers in the works when they had a bad falling out. It appears that Julian never got over that, and he never finished the 9 remaining paintings. They were sitting somewhere in his attic.

His children thought of hiring a forger to finish the paintings in Julian’s style without his knowledge, hoping they would be worth millions once he died and there would be something valuable they could cash in as an inheritance. They find Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who is an artist, an art restoration specialist and also an expert forger. Lori reluctantly accepts the gig and goes to meet the artist. She expected to meet a senile and ill old man, but that’s not quite what she encounters.

The Christophers is a quiet movie that I, as an artist myself, enjoyed tremendously. There really are only two actors, Lori and Julian, with the two children being supporting actors. This whole movie felt like a play. It could be performed on a single set stage.

Michaela Coel has very striking features. From the beginning of the movie on I saw her as one of the female aliens in Avatar, and I could not shake that sentiment. She was born in 1987 as Michaela Boakye-Collinson to Ghanaian parents and brought up in England. Both she and Ian Kellen did an excellent job acting in this movie, and I would not be surprised to see either of them nominated for awards.

The Christophers is a movie about the inner and outer world of an artist, the artistic community and their lifestyle, and the lasting effects our youth and its loves and passions have on the rest of our lives. There are some things in life we just don’t get over, and sometimes it may take until the very last days for us to realize what really mattered.

Book Review: Squeezed – by David Atkinson

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

Squeezed was recommended by friends years ago; they thought it was “really funny.” But after reading the description, I passed. Just a few weeks ago, I read another book by this author, Future Proof, and I liked it. When creating that review, I came across Squeezed again and finally decided to go for it.

Squeezed is a book I almost didn’t finish reading. I even have a category in this blog: Books not finished reading. And I don’t rate those. Sometimes I drop out after just a few pages. Sometimes I make it to 50%. With Squeezed, I lost interest at 10%, then again at 20% and again at 50%. Fortunately, I just had knee surgery, and I had a lot of time on my hands with not much to do and no better books in the queue, so I just kept going. Well, here it is.

Scott and Hannah have been together for seven years, they had two children, and the two finally were able to go on a honeymoon in Thailand. While in their hotel room, Hannah told Scott she had ordered a prostitute to spice up their evening with a threesome. She didn’t discuss that with him, and he didn’t really have much say in the matter, because the “package was on the way.” Thirty minutes later “Marilyn” showed up, and matters commenced.

They proceeded with their vacation and went back to their home in Edinburgh, Scottland, and continued with their modest lives, where taking care of their two young daughters and holding up their middle-class jobs took all their energy. They lived in a tiny and cramped apartment, and they shared a beater car. But there was happiness in their lives, and love, or so it seemed.

One day, during a terrible blizzard, their apartment doorbell rang. Marilyn from Thailand stood there, inadequately dressed, and six months pregnant. She said Scott was the father. They had no choice but to invite her in and set her up on their couch. 

Now they had some explaining to do, to their friends, to their parents and families, and – as it turned out pretty quickly – to the authorities.

Squeezed is a story about hapless family that is trying to make a living against all odds and yet has to deal with life’s adversities whether they are ready for them or not. 

The reviews said that I’d be laughing out loud from the first page on, that Squeezed was a romantic comedy.  I didn’t think that at all. It was funny here and there, but it was no comedy. It was slow and boring at times, as the author went into great detail about things that didn’t seem to matter in the plot, but I just kept plowing on, as I said above, and in the end, I found the story rewarding.

 

Movie Review: Train Dreams (2025)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

 

Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is born in the early 20th century somewhere in the woods of northern Washington State, not far from Spokane. In those years, before World War 1, Washington was frontier country. Robert does not know who his parents were, whether he is an orphan, or an abandoned child. He grows up to be a reflective boy, trying to understand the world around him from observing it.

As a young man, his life changes and becomes happier when he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) in church. Soon they are inseparable, get married and have a child. They build a cabin on an acre of land in the woods, near a creek and they have a daughter.

Being a logger and a railroad builder are the only jobs Robert can find, and unfortunately the seasonal work separates him from his young family for months at a time. It makes for a stressful life for both of them. They dream of saving some money, starting a sawmill and grow vegetables for the market, which would enable the family to live together year-round.

But tragedy overwhelms the family when a wildfire sweeps through their area while Robert is not home.

Train Dreams is based on a Novella by Denis Johnson. Joel Edgerton delivers an Oscar-worthy performance and the cinematography is incredible. It is a quiet and very slow movie. There is little action, just lots of contemplation and observation. Once I realized this was a pensive film, I settled in and let it take me with it. A few tears rolled down my cheeks when I was overwhelmed by the hardness of life those frontier people had to endure, and the brutal realities that literally struck people dead in the middle of the day, completely unexpectedly. They were helpless. Somehow they had to survive. Somehow they had to live their lives, even if there was no joy other than knowing they were one with the world.

And thus Train Dreams follows the life of Robert Grainier from beginning to end. When the credits rolled, I just sat there, listening to the music, while my mind sorted out why life is beautiful even when it is sometimes really, really hard.

 

Book Review: Artemis – by Andy Weir

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science, Science Fiction, Three StarsLeave a comment

I just read Artemis, by Andy Weir, now, a few days after the NASA mission to the moon, Artemis II, safely returned to earth. Andy Weir catapulted to fame with his first book, The Martian, in 2011,  which I reviewed here. Artemis is his second book, released in 2017, before NASA officially named its new lunar program Artemis in 2019. So Weir didn’t copy the mission name. Both drew the name from Greek mythology. Artemis is the goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo.

Jasmine Bashara goes by the name of Jazz. She is a very smart young woman, the daughter of a Saudi welder who raised her as a single father. She lived her childhood and adult life in Artemis, the only city on the moon.

She is poor and works as a porter. Think of it as a DoorDash person, picking up and delivering packages. She lives in a coffin-sized apartment and subsists on what all poor Artemisians live on, gunk, which is flavored algae. She wants to get wealthy enough to afford her own apartment, with a private bathroom and enough room to stand up and stretch.

Through her connections, a score comes her way that could make her rich and end her worries. She goes for it. Little does she know that the heist quickly draws her into a global conspiracy and a war between the mob, billionaires, and the city’s elite. At the end, she not just fighting for her own life, but the survival of the city of Artemis itself.

There is a lot of science in this book, particular chemistry. I happen to be a scientific person, I know my math, biology and physics, but somehow I was able to escape chemistry all my life. It’s the big educational gap is my background. In this book I learned a lot about chemistry.

True to his style, just like in The Martian, Weir stays very close to the science. We get to know how pressure equalization and airlocks work. We learn about smelters, and how to turn lunar regolith into aluminum and oxygen, two of the essential elements needed if you want to build a city on the moon and survive in it.

It only took me a few days to finish this book. I kept turning the pages. I now have read all three of Weir’s books,  and I am sure I will read the fourth – whenever that comes out.

Movie Review: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Time Travel, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Aliens have attacked the earth. Their military superiority is unmatched by anything humanity can come up with.

Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is a public relations officer who is, against his own will, thrown into front-line combat in a suicide mission. Once in battle, he dies within minutes. But without explanation, he wakes up a day before the battle, and has to relive that day. He dies again, the wakes up again. He is basically a time traveler, reliving the same day, sort of like Groundhog Day, the famous 1993 movie with Bill Murray. Each time he learns from the previous death experience and lives a little longer, adjusting his strategy as he goes. He teams up with another fellow time traveler and warrior, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) and the two team up, looping in time, for their and mankind’s survival.

As the plot develops, we learn that it’s the aliens who actually are able to control time, causing the time loops Cage and Vrataski have to grapple with.

The application of time travel concepts in this movie is definitely unique, except for the fact that it’s basically the same concept as applied in Groundhog Day, where the protagonist, without explanation, has to relive the same day over and over again.

Edge of Tomorrow is definitely a time travel movie worth watching.

Simple Cars – from Blue Highways

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product11 Comments

Here is an excerpt out of the book Blue Highways:

Even then, Vern was an anachronism. We boys who collected at his station didn’t call him that, of course. We called him, as I remember, “an old fart.” Vern, in his antique ways, believed that anyone who got behind a steering wheel could rightly be expected to operate the car rather than just steer it; that’s why you were issued an Operator’s Permit. He believed the more work a driver did, the less the car had to do; the less it had to do, the simpler and more reliable and cheaper to repair it would be. He cursed the increasing complexity of automobile mechanics. But, as I say, he was a man of the old ways. He even believed in narrow tires (cheaper and less friction), spoked wheels (less weight), and the streamlined “Airflow” designs of Chrysler Corporation cars of the mid-thirties—designs Chrysler almost immediately gave up on before proceeding to build the biggest finned hogs of all. We boys of the fifties loved their brontosaurean bulk.

— From William Least Heat-Moon – Blue Highways: A Journey into America (p. 404). Little, Brown and Company

Reading that paragraph gave me pause.

My first car in America was a 1973 Ford LTD.

Mine looked exactly like this, same color, four doors, green vinyl top. Huge engine.  In 1977, when I bought it from another soldier in Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for $1,800, it had about 54,000 miles on it. I loved that car and the power it had. It got just 10 miles to the gallon. Gas cost 57 cents per gallon then.

But let me get to my point – simple cars. This is what it looks like inside of this listing of a car over 50 years old. Mine looked pristine at the time.

There was nothing automatic.

The doors had cranks. You turned them to lower the windows. The air conditioner was turned on with one button, in or out. When you wanted cold air, you pushed a slider switch one way, when you wanted warm air, you pushed it the other way. If you wanted the fan off, you pushed a slider switch to the left, to turn it on, you pushed it to the right, the farther to the right, the higher the fan speed. You turned on the lights by pulling that big knob on the left of the dash.

There were no screens, no setup, no menus to touch or to drill down. Other than looking out on the street, you didn’t need to see anything. You could drive this car with your hands without having to look at any controls. They were all where  they should be, and they worked intuitively. You never needed to look at a manual.

In contrast, every time I get into a rental car today, I have to deal with trying to figure out how to control the climate, how to turn the thing on or off, how to make the radio not blare a channel I am not interested in, heck, how to turn the radio off altogether. I don’t use the parking brake because I can’t figure out how to use it. I am scared of the gear selector, since it’s often just a knob and to select a gear, you have to take your eyes off the road and look down, first find the little knob, and then select the right gear, Drive or Reverse.

Once I rested my arm on the middle console while driving down the freeway in a rental car and – don’t ask me how it did it – I put the car into the parking brake – and it actually let me do it. Imagine the moments of panic I went through before I got myself back out of that impossible situation!

Another time, in a different rental car in the winter, I managed to let the car run in the parking lot of a hotel, from 4:00pm in the evening to 8:00am the next morning. It burned a full half of a tank of gas idling all night. It had one of these remote control buttons that turned the car off or on. I am not sure how I did it, but the fact that I managed to do it, shows how wrong that feature is designed.

My point: I want simple cars back, with knobs and buttons and sliders that I can touch. Abolish all screens in cars. I want to drive my car with arms and legs without having to look at anything inside. And I want the controls to be intuitive.

I can wish, can’t I?