The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.
What I think is so amazing about having everything, and feeling like I have everything, is that I don’t really find happiness within materialistic things. Like, it’s cool if I can buy myself a new car, and I think it’s amazing for a week, but then the thrill is over, and I’m like, ‘Oh, so I guess that wasn’t really happiness.’
In the movies, every crazy old fart needs a cool old car. Jack Nicholson drove a spiffy yellow 1970 Dodge Challenger two-door in ‘The Bucket List.’ In ‘Gran Torino,’ the cranky pensioner played by Clint Eastwood not only owned a 1972 GT Sport, he also used to build cars like that at the Ford plant.
I like my shame straight up and honest, and nobody does it better than In-N-Out Burger. You go to In-N-Out Burger, and they ask you the most shameful question in fast food. ‘I’ll have a burger, fries and a Coke.’ ‘Will you be eating in the car?’ ‘Yeah. I think so.’
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.
Sam Cooke had a huge influence on me. He left the gospel field at one point and went into the secular, and he had this huge hit, ‘You Send Me.’ Irma, my older sister, and I heard ‘You Send Me’ on the radio while we were driving through the South one night. We had to stop the car. We got out and danced around the car out on the highway.
Automobiles have always been part of my life, and I’m sure they always will be. What is it about them that moves me? The sound of a great engine, the unity and uniqueness of an automobile’s engineering and coachwork, the history of the company and the car, and, of course, the sheer beauty of the thing.
Lyft Line came out of the vision that we’ve had from the beginning, which is how do we get the most affordable ride to everyone? Eighty percent of seats at all times on the road are empty. In Los Angeles, average car occupancy is 1.1, and if it were 1.3, there would be no traffic.
I’m looking into making toilet paper. It’s not an option unless you a bum and gotta use newspaper. It’s not an option. Like, it’s an option if you wanna drive a car. It’s an option if you wanna use a straw. It’s an option if you wanna wear a pair of Nikes or Reeboks.
I hate the hand that comes out of a car and just drops litter in the street. I hate that! For some reason, it just fills me with fury! It’s just utter laziness, lack of interest in other people, lack of interest in the planet, in the hedgehog who might eat the plastic bag, it’s a lack of concern.
My mom and dad divorced when I was 8 years old, but my Dad never left my life. We would go over there on weekends and he’d be playing his guitar, listening to Bobby Blue Bland and B. B. King and KBLX radio while he was out in the garage painting custom cars.
Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man’s mode of transport.
Stuff doesn’t matter – boats, cars, fancy things don’t matter. What matters, what will matter to me, is the love of the people around me, and did I take a chance? Did I seize an opportunity to do something for people with the talents that I was lucky enough to be given? Did I make a difference in the lives of people who needed me?
The fact is I like Mumbai less and less. My son says, ‘Baba, let’s go for a drive’, and I tell him, ‘Where’s the fun of a drive in this place?’ You get caught in a million traffic jams, and you spend time cooped in your car with all that mad cacophony around you.
For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
Part of us believes the new car is better because it lasts longer. But, in fact, that’s the worst thing about the new car. It will stay around to disappoint you, whereas a trip to Europe is over. It evaporates. It has the good sense to go away, and you are left with nothing but a wonderful memory.
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, ‘I want to get out and become like him’. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.
Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family’s cottage in Maine. It’s on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing.
When kids grow up into adults now… they learn that taking care of their body is like taking care of their car. You’re not going to put bad gas into your car. Why not treat your body the same way? It makes all the sense in the world for us to do the right thing for our bodies.
My mom had me at 16 and took me every place she went. I remember going on peace marches. She tried to take me to Woodstock – it was pouring rain. It was on my birthday, and I was crying so much in the car they turned the car around and dumped me at my grandmother’s house… I had a little attitude.
Computers and computing are all around us. Some computing is highly visible, like your laptop. But this is only part of a computing iceberg. A lot more lies hidden below the surface. We don’t see and usually don’t think about the computers inside appliances, cars, airplanes, cameras, smartphones, GPS navigators and games.
The mechanic could lift up the bonnet of the car and show me four dwarves strapped to a pair of tandems and tell me that the motor was actually dwarf-powered and that one of the little fellows had to be replaced, and I’d just be numbly writing out a cheque and scribbling ‘new dwarf – car’ on the stub.
We speak of ‘software eating the world,’ ‘the Internet of Things,’ and we massify ‘data’ by declaring it ‘Big.’ But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It’s hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the ‘real world’ of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.
