Lucky

Coincidentally, this article is in today's LA Times: You love your car. You want to treat it well. You certainly don’t want to do anything that would damage it. That’s why you’ve been filling it with premium gasoline all these years. But with prices up above $7 a gallon, you’ve started to wonder: Does my car really need the good stuff? Can I just switch to regular? Or should I compromise and buy midgrade? Answers: Probably no, probably yes and almost definitely not. Confused? Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Many years of research at the American Automobile Assn.'s Los Angeles fuels laboratory has shown that if your car requires premium, you should keep using premium and suck up the cost. But thanks to a mix of clever marketing and quirky consumer psychology, some 16.5 million U.S. drivers fill their cars with premium when regular would work just as well, according to AAA. Think you might be one of them? Check your owner’s manual, advises Doug Shupe, program manager at the Automobile Club of Southern California and the AAA. And pay close attention to the language. “Unless your vehicle manufacturer says premium is required — not recommended, but required — we’ve found no advantage to using premium fuel,” Shupe said. If it says “recommended,” you can ignore the recommendation and pocket the 30 to 50 cents per gallon you’d be saving. Spending more doesn’t buy any benefit in horsepower, fuel economy or emissions, Shupe said. Depending on how much you drive, the switch can save several hundred dollars a year. With the average price of a gallon of regular now above $6 in California, that’s money that could go to food or rent. What does “premium” even mean? That gasoline grade is laced with an extra dose of hydrocarbon molecules called octane. In a high-compression engine, heavy pressure can squeeze the fuel-air mixture so tight and hot that some fuel combusts before it should. That leads to uneven explosive forces, which can vibrate engine parts unnecessarily. The extra octane helps the fuel burn more evenly. In California, premium gas is labeled 91 octane, midgrade is 89, and regular is 87. All are unleaded. The results of AAA’s octane tests have become widely accepted. So why would a carmaker recommend premium when it’s not needed? One reason may be the belief by many customers that premium, required or not, boosts engine performance. For a manufacturer seeking to support a luxury car’s high sticker price with claims of similarly high performance, the association might not hurt. In fact, some higher-end models from the likes of Audi and BMW have a sensor that can tell if gasoline is premium or regular, according to Jil McIntosh at Autotrader, and adjust the engine accordingly. The AAA lab didn’t test the pluses or minuses of midgrade fuel. That could be because there aren’t many benefits to speak of, except for gas industry profit margins. (The exception is older cars with engine knock, which can potentially benefit from midgrade gas.) The middle choice is an artifact from the days when unleaded gasoline began showing up as an alternative to gasoline containing lead. Gas stations needed three pumps to sell leaded regular, unleaded regular and unleaded premium. After leaded gas was phased out beginning in the 1990s, midgrade was a way to make use of the third pump. Midgrade makes up a tiny fraction of retail gasoline sales. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 88% of gas sold in the U.S. is regular, 11% premium, and the rest midgrade. If midgrade customers are trading up from regular, whether they need it or not, that pump provides fatter profit margins. When premium customers trade down, profit margins are squeezed. One thing all gasoline buyers should look for if they’re seeking performance and longer engine life, according to Shupe: an indication that a gas station is selling “Top Tier” fuel. Often there will be a label on the pump. Most major brands do; many minor brands do as well. Any grade of gasoline — regular, midgrade, premium — can be Top Tier. Such gasoline is processed with additives that reduce carbon buildup and is tested by an independent group to verify the formulation. Tests show such fuel improves performance and extends engine life. Brand names such as Chevron’s Techron and Shell’s V-Power are Top Tier, for instance, though they’re not always designated that way. Those fuels cost more than gas at deep-discount stations that don’t sell Top Tier gas, but the AAA suggests that the extra few cents are worth it.

I need 13 people to each post 100 times today!

It's now 11 months since he last visited.

And how would you know this? Inside line at HS?

The wisdom I gain from the message board has no bounds! 🙂

Sorry, @Rand I just looked at this post so I could see your avatar again!

He looks a little scared of that dick! (I deleted the pic rather than run afoul of any rule since it looked semitumescent.

So it's a fake Inwood!

The worst thing about San Francisco is the fog and wind. The homeless usually stick to themselves unless panhandling.

If I had known what a dipshit he is I wouldn't have posted about him.

I learned today that famed pitcher Tommy John, for whom the famous surgery on a pitcher's arm is known, lives near me in La Quinta, California. In December, 2020, he fought his hardest fight when he and his wife came down with Covid. Later, John developed Guillain-Barre syndrome and spent months in a wheel chair. Hard to imagine the famous pitcher falling so ill, but he survived and just turned 79. https://nypost.com/2022/05/29/tommy-john-fighting-way-back-from-covid-blood-clots-lucky-to-be-alive/

Who's afraid of a few homeless people?

I looked at the BBB complaints for businessclassconsolidator.com and there are many. Mostly flights canceled because of Covid resulted in problems for consolidator tickets. The airlines refunded, but the consolidator didn't.

Austin Butler reportedly knocks 'em out as Elvis. The film got a 12-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Even Priscilla likes it! https://pagesix.com/2022/05/26/priscilla-presley-in-tears-as-elvis-gets-12-minute-standing-ovation/?_ga=2.211663068.835716057.1651612035-1004075814.1651612035 https://www.nydailynews.com/snyde/ny-priscilla-presley-on-elvis-biopic-20220430-iv7c7dhzbvcu3g2tusckqyqvue-story.html

You would avoid a huge city just because a few people there caught monkeypox? Why not just avoid sexual encounters with strangers?

I met a guy at a Rio sauna. He was the best sex I ever had. I kid you not. Just super wonderful. So I later asked him to come to my hotel room where we had more pleasures. When he left, I went down to the lobby with him. There he introduced me to his girlfriend, who was waiting for him to take her shopping! He then kissed me goodbye right there in the lobby. The girlfriend didn't seem to mind.

12 hours to Japan, then an 8 hour layover, then 6 more hours, arriving Ho Chi Minh City at 5:30 am. Not for me.

Half the fun of being in Barcelona is going to Thermas. I would go.

Is this the update? It's two different posters! What happened @Hithereall111 ???

It seems he has been held up.

No doubt the drought contributes to this. Save water!

Wally Cleaver

The Palm Springs Art Museum has an exhibit of work by Leon Polk Smith. The exhibit is featured in today's Wall Street Journal. T The article is behind a paywall, so here is an excerpt: In 1954, the American abstract painter Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) saw some drawings of basketballs in a sports equipment catalog. “They were just line circles with a drawing of the seams on the covering of the ball,” he said. “I was fascinated by the space that was between these lines and felt bound to them and started immediately drawing some of my own, taking off from this space concept. . . . It was flat and the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does.” Although the event didn’t signal Smith’s first brush with abstraction (he’d been painting nonrepresentationally since the 1940s), it epitomizes the relationship of the physical format (usually not a rectangle) to the pictorial composition that characterizes his work. This, essentially, is the subject of “Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962,” on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California through Aug. 28. (The show is an expanded version of “Leon Polk Smith: Big Form, Big Space,” that was at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.) Born the eighth of nine children to part-Cherokee parents who had migrated from Tennessee to what was then the Chickasaw Indian Territory—a year later it became the state of Oklahoma—Smith spoke Cherokee at home. He worked on the family farm until, in his early 20s, he went off to school at Oklahoma State College. When he was a senior, he happened by an art classroom and peeked in through a partially open door. Smith asked the teacher if he could watch for a bit. He subsequently enrolled in a painting class and decided to major in art... Untitled “Untitled” (1953) is a superb little painting—a moving one, if you’re attuned to the beauties of geometric abstraction. The play of curved lines—both within the painting and in the format—the bang-bang but not overpowering use of red, and the way the gray above and below the painting’s midpoint prevents the work from becoming a mere emblem all display Smith’s appetite for nuance, a quality that sets him apart from a plethora of showier geometric abstractionists. “Red Blue Orange Ellipses” from eight years later shows Smith revisiting the tondo mode, working with three flat colors; but this time there’s no black and the abrupt chromatic shift is a little harder for a viewer to handle comfortably. Plus, there’s more than a bit of sexual allusion in the picture. ...The Palm Springs show is good, but whether by circumstance or design is spacious to a fault. Viewers more used to chockablock installation, multiple walls of explanatory texts, and—as is the wont of current painting exhibitions—billboard-size works might feel a little at sea. “Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962” is a respite from all that, and a chance to contemplate the modestly scaled and somewhat formative work of an excellent abstract painter. https://www.wsj.com/articles/leon-polk-1945-1962-palm-springs-art-museum-abstract-art-gallery-of-living-art-new-york-university-brancusi-mondrian-ellsworth-kelly-jack-youngerman-robert-indiana-carmen-herrera-11653426666?mod=books_arts_lead_pos3

Don't get ridden of your broken items! I know a guy who fixes broken things!

When someone with few posts comes here to ask which providers go beyond the legal limits I am curious about their motives.