I’m slowly catching back up to blogworld after my return to the United States. The timing of the right-leaning set of Weblog Awards (there is a left-leaning set as well, but I’m not familiar with them) resulted in me being nominated while I was in the midst of the chaos associated with any move, much less a move from one continent to another.

The weblog award nomination has driven a series of comments about Random Fate that I find rather odd. According to more than one co-nominee for “Best of the Top 501 - 1000 Blogs” my site here at Random Fate is a conservative weblog. (Feel free to visit the link and vote for me, by the way…)

The amusement value in that is huge for those who have been reading for the past year or so, given how often I am called “liberal” or “left-wing” or given my self-description of left-leaning.

Now, I’m saying I am trying to expand the “rationality-based community” in a riff off of both the “reality-based community” and “faith-based community” slogans of the differing groups out there.

Of course, those who want to make the effort to be rational will always been completely outnumbered by those who want someone else to do the thinking for them.

On a slightly different note, upon my return to the US, I’m driving a rental car courtesy of my company until I can buy or lease a new car. The rental car company was out of mid-sized models, so I had the dubious pleasure of being “upgraded” to a Buick LeSabre. The last time I drove one of those models was around 24 years ago, and sadly, the current model compares very poorly.

In France, I had a VW Golf, far from a luxury sedan, more like a roller-skate that had a reasonable suspension and decent diesel engine. However, even that low-end vehicle had dual climate control, where all you have to do is set the temperature and it takes care of fan settings, which vents to use, and how to heat the air coming in, and sinceit was dual the passenger and the driver could have different temperature settings. The supposed “full-sized luxury car” I am currently driving that is a product of General Motors does NOT have this option, instead it has the same controls that the LeSabre I drove 23 years ago had, manual control of the incoming air mix, manual control of the fans, absolutely no automatic features whatsoever, nor independent settings for the driver and passenger.

Excuse me? A Volkswagon Golf has better features???

The GM car also has about the same level of connection to the road as I would expect in driving a hovercraft.

So much for the “driving experience” that I enjoyed with the BMW I gave up when I moved to France.

In other words, it is a complete POS vehicle when compared to current models, especially when it cannot even compare to the driving experience I had in the same model almost a quarter of a century ago.

No wonder the American car manufacturers are in such dire straights; they deserve to be with this kind of product.

Technorati Tags: general, weblogs, weblog awards