I'm a co-founder/Chief Creative Officer of the Autopian, the site you're on right now! I'm here to talk to you about taillights until you cry and beg me to stop, which I absolutely will not. Sorry. Hug? Also, David's friend.
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Current Fleet (running or close enough): 1990 Nissan Pao, 1983 Citroën 2CV, 1989 Ford F-150; (not so running): 2020 Changli, 1977 Dodge Tioga RV, 1973 VW Beetle
I had a bright yellow manual na veloster I bought Boxing Day 2016 after my Colorado transmission took a dump. Thing was a ton of fun on a dirt road. I flipped it on the way into work one day dodging pigs in the road.
Member
Phuzz
1 month ago
Reminds me of the time I woke up in my tent at a festival, horribly hungover. I crawled to the front, and grabbed the first bottle of water I could see and took a massive swig.
As it hit the back of my throat I remembered the day before when I’d been stopped from bringing in a glass bottle of vodka, so I’d carefully decanted it into a plastic water bottle…the very one I’d just taken a massive swig of.
Some how I kept it down, and honestly it did help my hangover, although this was back in my 20’s when hangovers only lasted a morning, not a weekend.
Member
Mrbrown89
1 month ago
I had a couple of stories of myself running away from the police when I was a teenager. In Mexico they will do random stops, ask for money or take you to the police station and hold you there until you pay them. A couple of times I was near my house (1 mile or less) and I just continued driving normal, open the garage door from the distance and turn into our garage on two wheels lol close it and they would stay outside pissed.
My parents then will come outside mad at me, mad at the police for randomly stopping people and to pay the randsom from them to leave us alone, free ICE CREAM since my parents still own an ice cream shop in front of our house lol
Member
Grey alien in a beige sedan
1 month ago
TIL that Torch is the Tom Mullica of the 21st century.
Member
Jmfecon
1 month ago
I can understand Torch about eating cigarretes during college.
I used to challenge people to pay my tap if I drink a Tabasco bottle (the small one) during happy hours in my early 20s. The faces were priceless.
Probably that took me a couple of years in terms of life expectancy, but saved me some money and made me known in the company as “the guy who drinks Tabasco”.
Member
MikeInTheWoods
1 month ago
My roommate in college used to spit his chewing tobacco spit into bottles. I nearly killed him when he knocked over a 2L bottle onto our dorm heater. The smell was horrendous.
It’s fucking disgusting. At work, I’d be trying to program on one of our shop-floor PCs and wonder why the trash can always smelled like rotting god-knows-what. One day I saw someone spit into it and figured out what it was…it emitted a cloud of stench for a 10′ radius. And people put that shit in their mouths!!
Member
Cryptoenologist
1 month ago
Torch, I liked your story. Just one quibble— if you felt like you had to puke, you were nauseated. I won’t put up with this recent trend of using the word nauseous to mean the same thing, even if most dictionaries have now given up.
Member
Nlpnt
1 month ago
When I was 4 or 4 years old I took a sip from a Dixie cup of water that my aunt had been using as an ashtray in my absence. I didn’t swallow but the resulting ejection of what would prove to be my lifetime total of tobacco consumption had to be a spit-take for the ages.
“…for some reason, there was a period of time in college where almost every woman I knew smoked…” Was this in North Carolina, California or somewhere else? I grew up in a significantly less tobacco-friendly part of the country than NC but there was a time in high school where everyone I knew in my own age cohort who smoked was a girl. Part of that could be the kind of high-school boy I was – like Screech from Saved By The Bell (how’s that for a mid/late Gen X reference) I was either the nerdiest cool kid or the coolest nerd, so one group was in sports training and the other’s discretionary income was earmarked for roleplaying game supplies – but it would be interesting to see what the decline in tobacco use in male vs female was in that period.
Member
BenCars
1 month ago
You ATE cigarettes? Man, I’m surprised you’re still alive.
Before I vowed to not date any more smokers no matter how hot they were, I found there can be a wide variance in detectability when making out with them. One was like licking an ashtray, but another was nearly imperceptible. Don’t know why there was such a difference, but I have no desire to explore it further.
When I was a kid, we were riding bikes in high heat and humidity and my friend told me to grab a drink from the soda bottle in the fridge. Grabbed the 2-liter, poured into a cup without looking, and slammed it down as I was so thirsty. It turned out to be homemade wine in a Coke bottle for whatever reason. At least I wasn’t riding home for a while. Anyway, I’ve looked at what I’m drinking ever since.
As a former smoker that hated the smell of stale smoke the secret is to always stand upwind and also hold the cigarette downwind from you. In most cars you can lower the driver window 1/8th the way, the rear driver window 1/4 of the way, and the passenger rear 1/2 the way. It clears the air out very effectively but tends to leave ash at the front of the dashboard in case you’re parenting.
Nobody ever smoked in my cars. To their credit, they never even asked. I tend to forget what it was like when seemingly everyone smoked—the yellow haze on everything, ashtrays everywhere, butts still thrown on the ground. I think I was a smoker in a past life. I never smoked in this one or even had interest in it, but I’ve had a lot of dreams where I’m smoking, though usually it’s more just taking a cigarette from my mouth and throwing it before some action. Maybe I’ve just seen too many old movies and that got in my head.
The small print translates to, “If you have good manners, you can enjoy it.” I imagine it’s an admonition not to offend others with “bad” smoking manners, whatever those may have been.
Member
Taargus Taargus
1 month ago
Horrifying. But I’m entertained so, worth it in my eyes at least.
Too bad it wasn’t 420.
It would have been a lot more fun.
Member
Ranwhenparked
1 month ago
Somehow, eating/swallowing a non-filtered cigarette seems like it would be at least slightly less disgusting than a filtered one, but I’m guessing this was filtered
The closest I’ve ever come to something like that was getting my nearly empty coffee cup mixed up with a coworker’s tobacco spit cup, but I had enough reaction time to stop it millimeters from my lips, but, lesson learned, keep an eye on your drinks
Member
Dodsworth
1 month ago
Swallowing a cigarette isn’t as bad as putting a wad of cancer between your cheek and gum. My wife had a Veloster for about a year. Lots of character and fun to drive but the NVH was horrible.
Member
Elusive Pedro
1 month ago
One of my shipmates on our Aircraft carrier used chewing tobacco. One day I mistakenly took a big swig out of his spit battle. It was horrible. UCK! :-/
I was really hoping that was going to end with “and you know, it wasn’t half bad.”
Member
FormerTXJeepGuy
1 month ago
I helped an ex buy a non turbo, base Veloster in 2014 (do not recommend) but I always enjoyed driving that little car. It was the metallic orange, great color.
Member
TheDrunkenWrench
1 month ago
Now I’m picturing college age Torch munching on a pack of darts in his dorm room.
The picture my brain just painted was of Torch just as he looks today, with a tie-die Rasta colored shirt on, practicing so he doesn’t grimace when he does it at parties.
Member
Shooting Brake
1 month ago
Hahahahaha. Excellent. I too miss the silly little Veloster. If I could bring myself to trust Hyundai engines I’d own one.
Member
S13 Sedan
1 month ago
I guess eating a cigarette isn’t all that different from chewing tobacco. I was a smoker in college and went to a tech school in rural PA so most of the students were country boys. My roommates in freshman year were always pestering me to pack a lip with them and oh boy does that hit different than a cig.
Member
MAX FRESH OFF
1 month ago
If this is the I-15 toll road in North county San Diego, people speed on it all the time, 100 mph is not unusual. The barrier between the North and South-bound lanes is moved between the morning and evening rush hours by a truck called a road zipper, that way there can be more lanes going into the city in the morning and leaving it in the evening.
Boston has one of those, too. For some reason, the moving barriers making their way through the zipper car remind me of the legs of a caterpillar.
Member
Dylan
1 month ago
Many years ago I took a swig (accidentally) out of a beer can that was apparently FULL of cigarette butts. I don’t think I swallowed it but my entire mouth went numb immediately. The taste was… memorable
Member
Jdoubledub
1 month ago
So you would intentionally eat the filter too?
Maybe for your next party trick you could snap the filter off and then snort the tobacco out of the paper tube.
Member
AmberTurnSignalsAreBetter
1 month ago
Just when we all thought that chainsawing a battery was the least healthy thing Jason has ever done…
I had a bright yellow manual na veloster I bought Boxing Day 2016 after my Colorado transmission took a dump. Thing was a ton of fun on a dirt road. I flipped it on the way into work one day dodging pigs in the road.
Reminds me of the time I woke up in my tent at a festival, horribly hungover. I crawled to the front, and grabbed the first bottle of water I could see and took a massive swig.
As it hit the back of my throat I remembered the day before when I’d been stopped from bringing in a glass bottle of vodka, so I’d carefully decanted it into a plastic water bottle…the very one I’d just taken a massive swig of.
Some how I kept it down, and honestly it did help my hangover, although this was back in my 20’s when hangovers only lasted a morning, not a weekend.
I had a couple of stories of myself running away from the police when I was a teenager. In Mexico they will do random stops, ask for money or take you to the police station and hold you there until you pay them. A couple of times I was near my house (1 mile or less) and I just continued driving normal, open the garage door from the distance and turn into our garage on two wheels lol close it and they would stay outside pissed.
My parents then will come outside mad at me, mad at the police for randomly stopping people and to pay the randsom from them to leave us alone, free ICE CREAM since my parents still own an ice cream shop in front of our house lol
TIL that Torch is the Tom Mullica of the 21st century.
I can understand Torch about eating cigarretes during college.
I used to challenge people to pay my tap if I drink a Tabasco bottle (the small one) during happy hours in my early 20s. The faces were priceless.
Probably that took me a couple of years in terms of life expectancy, but saved me some money and made me known in the company as “the guy who drinks Tabasco”.
My roommate in college used to spit his chewing tobacco spit into bottles. I nearly killed him when he knocked over a 2L bottle onto our dorm heater. The smell was horrendous.
It’s fucking disgusting. At work, I’d be trying to program on one of our shop-floor PCs and wonder why the trash can always smelled like rotting god-knows-what. One day I saw someone spit into it and figured out what it was…it emitted a cloud of stench for a 10′ radius. And people put that shit in their mouths!!
Torch, I liked your story. Just one quibble— if you felt like you had to puke, you were nauseated. I won’t put up with this recent trend of using the word nauseous to mean the same thing, even if most dictionaries have now given up.
When I was 4 or 4 years old I took a sip from a Dixie cup of water that my aunt had been using as an ashtray in my absence. I didn’t swallow but the resulting ejection of what would prove to be my lifetime total of tobacco consumption had to be a spit-take for the ages.
“…for some reason, there was a period of time in college where almost every woman I knew smoked…” Was this in North Carolina, California or somewhere else? I grew up in a significantly less tobacco-friendly part of the country than NC but there was a time in high school where everyone I knew in my own age cohort who smoked was a girl.
Part of that could be the kind of high-school boy I was – like Screech from Saved By The Bell (how’s that for a mid/late Gen X reference) I was either the nerdiest cool kid or the coolest nerd, so one group was in sports training and the other’s discretionary income was earmarked for roleplaying game supplies – but it would be interesting to see what the decline in tobacco use in male vs female was in that period.
You ATE cigarettes? Man, I’m surprised you’re still alive.
It’s only really bad for you when you get up to a pack a day.
The key is to eat it filter-end first.
Maybe the cigarettes soaked up the lead and offset each other?
They weren’t lit or anything!
Before I vowed to not date any more smokers no matter how hot they were, I found there can be a wide variance in detectability when making out with them. One was like licking an ashtray, but another was nearly imperceptible. Don’t know why there was such a difference, but I have no desire to explore it further.
When I was a kid, we were riding bikes in high heat and humidity and my friend told me to grab a drink from the soda bottle in the fridge. Grabbed the 2-liter, poured into a cup without looking, and slammed it down as I was so thirsty. It turned out to be homemade wine in a Coke bottle for whatever reason. At least I wasn’t riding home for a while. Anyway, I’ve looked at what I’m drinking ever since.
As a former smoker that hated the smell of stale smoke the secret is to always stand upwind and also hold the cigarette downwind from you. In most cars you can lower the driver window 1/8th the way, the rear driver window 1/4 of the way, and the passenger rear 1/2 the way. It clears the air out very effectively but tends to leave ash at the front of the dashboard in case you’re parenting.
Nobody ever smoked in my cars. To their credit, they never even asked. I tend to forget what it was like when seemingly everyone smoked—the yellow haze on everything, ashtrays everywhere, butts still thrown on the ground. I think I was a smoker in a past life. I never smoked in this one or even had interest in it, but I’ve had a lot of dreams where I’m smoking, though usually it’s more just taking a cigarette from my mouth and throwing it before some action. Maybe I’ve just seen too many old movies and that got in my head.
Speaking of Asia’s obsession with smoking, can someone explain this picture I took in a JR rail station in Nagoya around 2003? I found this so baffling I printed and framed it and used to keep it in the garage.
https://discord.com/channels/1111431722442170408/1118340757363896392/1484007026341445816
The small print translates to, “If you have good manners, you can enjoy it.” I imagine it’s an admonition not to offend others with “bad” smoking manners, whatever those may have been.
Horrifying. But I’m entertained so, worth it in my eyes at least.
Obligatory:
https://youtu.be/ZfTbOlpVZnk?si=GO-BHpeI-G3u9W0o
Too bad there wasn’t a convenient 911 with an open moonroof for your usage.
Too bad it wasn’t 420.
It would have been a lot more fun.
Somehow, eating/swallowing a non-filtered cigarette seems like it would be at least slightly less disgusting than a filtered one, but I’m guessing this was filtered
The closest I’ve ever come to something like that was getting my nearly empty coffee cup mixed up with a coworker’s tobacco spit cup, but I had enough reaction time to stop it millimeters from my lips, but, lesson learned, keep an eye on your drinks
Swallowing a cigarette isn’t as bad as putting a wad of cancer between your cheek and gum. My wife had a Veloster for about a year. Lots of character and fun to drive but the NVH was horrible.
One of my shipmates on our Aircraft carrier used chewing tobacco. One day I mistakenly took a big swig out of his spit battle. It was horrible. UCK! :-/
I was really hoping that was going to end with “and you know, it wasn’t half bad.”
I helped an ex buy a non turbo, base Veloster in 2014 (do not recommend) but I always enjoyed driving that little car. It was the metallic orange, great color.
Now I’m picturing college age Torch munching on a pack of darts in his dorm room.
The picture my brain just painted was of Torch just as he looks today, with a tie-die Rasta colored shirt on, practicing so he doesn’t grimace when he does it at parties.
Hahahahaha. Excellent. I too miss the silly little Veloster. If I could bring myself to trust Hyundai engines I’d own one.
I guess eating a cigarette isn’t all that different from chewing tobacco. I was a smoker in college and went to a tech school in rural PA so most of the students were country boys. My roommates in freshman year were always pestering me to pack a lip with them and oh boy does that hit different than a cig.
If this is the I-15 toll road in North county San Diego, people speed on it all the time, 100 mph is not unusual. The barrier between the North and South-bound lanes is moved between the morning and evening rush hours by a truck called a road zipper, that way there can be more lanes going into the city in the morning and leaving it in the evening.
Boston has one of those, too. For some reason, the moving barriers making their way through the zipper car remind me of the legs of a caterpillar.
Many years ago I took a swig (accidentally) out of a beer can that was apparently FULL of cigarette butts. I don’t think I swallowed it but my entire mouth went numb immediately. The taste was… memorable
So you would intentionally eat the filter too?
Maybe for your next party trick you could snap the filter off and then snort the tobacco out of the paper tube.
Just when we all thought that chainsawing a battery was the least healthy thing Jason has ever done…
Remember, these are just the things he’s willing to talk about. What’s he holding back? Honestly not sure I want to know.