Band Name of the Day

10/25/04’s illustrious band:

Auto Nomics

Brought to you by vehicles I have known.

Most of the people I know name their cars. I know I've named most of mine, and a couple of bicycles, too. Why do we do this? Is it more like having a traveling companion if you anthropomorphize your wheels? Or is it more basic -- just human nature to name things? Or is it just plain fun? Check out the following list and see if you can figure it out.

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Sister-san and Iron Chef Jeff call their Subaru Forester the Phat Ninja. "Phat" is cool, and ninjas are doubly cool. This ranks up there as one of the all-time best car names, if you ask me.
My car is known as either Sammy the Suave Samurai or the Subarushi. I first dubbed him Suave Samurai to compete with the Phat Ninja. Later, Subarushi resulted from Subaru + subarashi, a Japanese word meaning wonderful, splendid, or magnificent. That's a pretty apt description, with extra points for bilingual punning.
G-Doc has named his conveyance Truckie, the Metrosexual Pickup. Truckie is not a brawny, macho, full-size pickup, but a slender, smaller truck that's in touch with its parallel parking side. Tough enough to haul compost, yet graceful enough for a night on the town, Truckie combines "pretty" and "party" in equal measure.
Senor Editor drives the Juicemobile. It's a white Bronco that bears a striking resemblance to the one made famous by O.J. "Juice" Simpson's low-speed police chase. It's a former sheriff's vehicle that Senor Editor bought on eBay -- which just goes to show that you can get dang near anything on eBay.
Once upon a time, while stationed in Germany with the Army, Dad owned a convertible he called Ruben Rot, German for Ruby Red. Ruben covered a lot of kilometers with Mom and Dad, but I don't think he made it back to the U.S. with them.
Fast-forward 20+ years to when I was learning to drive and you find me behind the wheel of Dad's pickup, the Electric Lemon, so named for its bright yellow color. It had been a city service/safety vehicle in its previous life, and Dad got a good deal on it and never repainted it. Do you know how hard it is to sneak away for a joy ride in a small town when you're driving an Electric Lemon? But I had to; Dad insisted that I learn to handle a full-size stick-shift pickup on loose gravel before I was allowed to drive the Oldsmobile. It was tough sledding there for a while, but once I mastered the clutch, life got a lot easier.
The Lemon prepared me well for the first car that was all mine, a scab-colored Renault I named Rene, which was also a stick shift. French car, French name, see? Yeah, it was French, all right. During my first years of college, the dang thing surrendered on the side of the road one too many times and was soon replaced by a Mercury Tracer that I never did name.
After the Tracer came my cute little black Saturn, Ringo. The name was based partly on the car being a Saturn -- planet with rings -- and because the license plate began "JRR," as in J.R.R. Tolkein, author of Lord of the Rings. A true hero, Ringo saved my keister in a wreck four years ago that left me unscathed but turned him into an accordion. That's when I got the Subarushi.
A guy I knew in high school had something his friends referred to as the Orange Crate because it was tiny, it was orange, and it had a slatted floor -- you could see the street passing beneath you through the holes. It was ugly, but it was his, by golly.
My college friend Sheri Kaufman drove a light blue lurching, belching VW bus called the Kaufmobile. It was constructed in such a way that someone riding in the front could lift the top of the between-seat console and pour in a quart of oil -- which occurred every time she took it more than about 15 miles. No kidding. Sheri kept a case of oil just behind the driver's seat.
Another friend, Rona, had a little teal Honda hatchback named Squiggy. Squiggy had a B.O. problem. Some portion of the interior had gotten damp years before Rona got the car, and the smell of mildew was pervasive. That wasn't what bugged me most, though. What bugged me most was that Rona always drove with her right hand on the emergency brake, thumb on the button, as if she was prepared to throw us into a spin at any moment. Made me nervous.
Who could possibly forget the Green Albatross (http://jugglernaut.blogspot.com/2003/04/042303s-illustrious-band-green.html)? Did I tell you that my ex, El Pendejo, built a camper to go on the back of the Albatross? Oh yeah, he sure did. It looked like something Jed Clampett would drive, except not quite as nice. The camping trip we took in that drafty, leaky POS was instrumental in our splitting up a month later.
Another of El Pendejo's roadrot finds was a pickup we called the Great Pumpkin, which he got for about $200 at an auction and bought solely because it was cheap. The Pumpkin was dirty orange where it wasn't rusty, seedy on the inside, and rolled very, very roughly, just like the real thing. One day El Pendejo found a fellow traveler broken down by the side of the road. He stopped to help, heard the guy's sob story, and gave him the Pumpkin on the spot. Seriously! The guy drove EP home in the truck, EP signed over the title, and the guy drove away happy and relieved. I, too, was happy with EP's folly for once; the Pumpkin was an eyesore and I was glad to be rid of it.
The bikes? Sometime in junior high, I took to calling my ten-speed John Denver. Couldn't tell you the reason. But I liked the name so much that all my bikes since then have been John Denver, too. Got one in the garage right now.