We will go on record as saying this right now: Great Expectations was the only enjoyable book Charles Dickens ever wrote. And look, as a fan of Jawbreaker, Rites of Spring and Milan Kundera — and in Wert's case, Bob Seger — we're not ones to forego the depressing in favor of lighthearted fluff. Jeremy Clarkson, to hardcore fans of specs, may be fluffy. But as a writer, he's one of the best contemporary, broad-radar turners-of-phrase Blighty's got. The point is, aspiring Chavs are a far cry from our dad in the Forties, who read The Canterbury Tales just for the fart jokes. We haven't perused the other authors in UK Education Secretary Alan Johnson's published list that the Daily Mail mentions, but good writing is good writing. And Clarkson's a great, engaging writer, even if can be a sanctamonious prat now and then. Dickens, on the other hand pretty much sucks. No wonder British teenagers don't read.

The legacy, while worthwhile, is tired and out of context. And let's face it, when was the last time you read Arrowsmith? I'm a massive proponent of literacy; history isn't bunk, and there's plenty to learn from the past, but who'd rather re-read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs than muddle through Jane Eyre? I'll raise my hand without shame. Clarkson, while old beyond his 47 years and willing to play the educated fool/well-travelled unreliable narrator for the sake of ratings, at least brings some context to modern Britain while offering up food for thought in a hyperliterate, engaging way. And besides, while "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" has become a classic cliché, how punters actually remember its origin? After all, Dickens never wrote anything as brilliantly parsed and scatological as describing the taste of seal flipper as tasting "exactly like licking a hot Turkish urinal." The flowers are in the dustbin, the poison's in the machine. These kids are the future, your future. Stick that in your Sidney Carton and smoke it, Chuckles. – Davey G. Johnson

Dickens driven off boys' reading list by Clarkson [The Daily Mail, UK]

Related:
More Jeremy Clarkson [Internal]

So what does some grizzled shotgun-shack-dwellin' rustic crackin' brews and rattling down a dirt road in a Jeep have to do with a drunken caveman crossing chasms on tree-branch bridges or a Gay Nineties dandy chugging from a huge stein whilst navigating his penny-farthing bike through mud puddles? Everything! This 70s-vintage anti-DUI film features some high-quality animation and clever gut-bucket-n-banjo soundtrack. Glug glug glug! – Murilee Martin

Related:
Fire Chief Thwarts DUI By Snatching Child From 1990 Dodge [internal]

One may recall Stanley, the robo-Touareg that won the 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge. Well, now the boffins in Paly are working a successor to the SUV, based on a Passat known as Junior. Junior's designed to navigate an urban environment, rather than a desert off-road course. DARPA plans to announce the location of the next race, to be held November 3rd, sometime in October. Meanwhile we're still waiting for information on the atomic-powered Saab 96 entry from Venture Industries. – Davey G. Johnson

Urban road race to test limits of robotic cars [Reuters]

Related:
Next DARPA Grand Challenge to be Held on City Streets [Internal]

"I need someone who's here 24-7 kissing my ass." Ugh and eef. It's interesting the dynamics that extremities of treatment, entitlement and enfranchisement engender. It's also somewhat goddamn disturbing. Then again, the extremity of the female minority population at NYC's Automotive High School is somewhat of an interesting story in and of itself. Interesting enough that the Village Voice deigned to send down a reporter to cover it. Good read, even if the pistonhead details can be sketchy at times. – Davey G. Johnson

The Body Beautiful [The Village Voice]

Related:
Women Harder to Please than Men in Cars, Chuh [Internal]

We kind of had to post this, simply because we like typing "Poughkeepsie." Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie. Okay, sorry, we're done now. Poughkeepsie. No, really we're (Poughkeepsie) done. Regardless, a gang of students all got together at Dutchess Community College, which we presume is somewhere near Poughkeepsie, to run maglev model cars down the track. Some were fluffy. Some were wind-powered. Ours would've utilized the body of a Barbie doll and had an Estes D-Class rocket motor on the back. Maybe some sort of confetti warhead at the front for extra-awesome end-of-track asplosiveness. Minds would've blown, man. Minds would've completely been blown. Poughkeepsie. Shit. We're really sorry. – Davey G. Johnson

Students design magnetic cars [Poughkeepsie Journal]

Related:
German MagLev Train Kills People [Internal]

A group of engineering students from the University of Toledo slapped together an auto-park system that's KISS-simple. Get the nose into the spot, lower the hydraulic dolly, and bingo-bango, A Bruce-like parking job in a mere Corolla! – Davey G. Johnson

UT Senior Capstone Project, Group #16 [via Autoblog]

A year ago, a band of high school students set off from Austin, TX to Los Angeles, California, a trek we would replicate ourselves a few scant months later. Only we did it in an overloaded SUV pulling an overloaded trailer, rather than in a featherweight solar-powered car. And we didn't build the Dodge ourselves, either. This year has been a closed-track event, as is every other Dell-Winston Solar Challenge, ending today at the Texas Motor Speedway. Next year, though, they're back to ditching the NASCAR schtick and taking their show back on the road, from Texas to NYC.

Dell-Winston Solar Challenge

Related:
The Solara Panamericana? High Schoolers to Race Sun-Powered Cars From Texas to California [Internal]

Those good 'ol Hokies over at Virginia Tech have walked off with top honors in the GM Challenge X 2006. It seems the team of smarties reengineered a 2005 Chevrolet Equinox as a split-parallel hybrid with two electric motors, that also runs on E85 and has an operating range from Blacksburg, VA to the Lincoln Tunnel on a case and a half of Yuengling Lager (if only). They beat out the University of Wisconsin-Madison's biodiesel-electric hybrid, and Mississippi State's steamboat.

Related:
Bears Go Cruising in F-Cell: Cal Researchers Get Hydrogen Car [internal]

What would the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have become if Karen O had been able to carshare? Actually, we have absolutely no clue, but she's the only former Oberlin student we can pull out of our asses at the moment. Needless to say, for non-auto-havin' students, the college's deal with Cleveland-based CityWheels makes a date with the night a bit easier for students sans regular vehicular transport. Just don't spit beer all over the dash.

Students can pay to share cars at Oberlin [Ohio.com]

Related:
Collegiate Car-Sharing Action [Internal]

Bumbeck took time out of his [Star]quest for fire and tossed us this item from the New York Daily News regarding a Staten Island bus driver who masterminded a Star Wars-themed fight club aboard his bus, complete with the posted bylaws of the Death Cheese Club, which state in part: "In a ranking of Master or above, the penalty is death or severe beating...[Heresy] will not be tolerated." Meanwhile, kids were getting beat up and having their clothes sliced up with scissors. Michael Cianci, the driver in question, lives in New Jersey with his mom. Why does this not surprise us in the least?

Meet Jabba the nut [New York Daily News]

Related:
Is There a Science to Safe Bus Paint Schemes? [Internal]

With hundreds of thousands of hybrids set to be produced yearly, and with automakers showing off alternative-energy concepts that run on everything from hydrogen to Ethanol to Red Hots candies, the demand for mechanics familiar with advanced systems will surely outstrip supply in the near future. The Detroit News reports on the first school in the nation that will provide skilled hybrid techs to meet that demand, Macomb County Community College in the Detroit suburbs. Sounds pretty innocuous, no? But check out the last sentence of the News piece: "Hybrid makers have allowed Macomb instructors to sit in on training classes, but are "guarded" about disclosing some of the technology, he said." If these schools are in the position to expose hybrid makers' highly classified systems to competitors, a situation that's causing carmakers to be "guarded" about disclosing some of the technology, does that mean students are only getting rudimentary training in hybrid operations, not actual systems? Could it ultimately mean a shortage of qualified hybrid mechanics if companies aren't aggressive about training their own techs? Hmm.

School is among the first to train hybrid mechanics [The Detroit News]

Related:
More on hybrids [internal]

Heads at the University of California, Berkeley are stoked. DaimlerChrysler just dropped off a happy new F-Cell hydrogen-powered vehicle and the brainy-brains at Cal can't wait to get their grimy li'l mitts all over the thing. They'll refuel the car at a station operated by AC Transit (the people who operate the East Bay's long green buses) in Richmond, north of Berkeley and another at the UC Davis campus roughly 70 miles to the northeast. As reader Punkey, who tipped us off to the story, points out, besides expanding the hydrogen-station infrastructure, they're gonna have to cut down that 10-minute refueling time.

UC Berkeley program to test drive hydrogen-powered car [San Jose Mercury News]

Related:
DaimlerChrysler Predicts Cheaper Fuel-Cell Vehicles by 2015 [Internal]

Man, this would've come in handy when we were stuck carless for a semester at a liberal-arts college close to everything but decent public transit the six-year-old Zipcar auto-sharing company has inked deals with colleges including Brown, Rutgers, U Minn and U Mass-Boston, giving students, staff and faculty an opportunity to buy into the car-sharing service. Literally, we can't think of why this wasn't an immediate target market for Zipcar and rival Flexcar from the get-go, unless it took administrators time to warm up to the idea.

Go to college, get a new car [HappyNews]

Related:
Banned in DC: Private-Car Spaces Nixed in Favor of Car-Sharing Slots [Internal]

The British press likes to pretend they've got it all figured out. Of course, so does the American media, but the Brits do it with such a blend of understatement and outright paranoia coupled with a soul-grating "tsk-tsk" that it's really hard not to admire from a certain perverse point of view. This time they take on the American educational system, bringing up the case of a certain Krystal Brooks of Kentucky, a teenager who outran the destiny laid out for her in the adult industry by her parents' choice in names and did well in school. As a result, Krystal managed to win herself a brand spankin' new '05 Ford Mustang.

We must admit, such a conveyance is a perfect fit for a teenage girl named Krystal Brooks, but the the Times brings up a niggling question: are we Yanks rewarding our kids for what they should've been doing all along? Spare the rod and spoil the rod, virtue is its own reward and whatnot? We're not sure, but while we were generally spared the rod, we also weren't offered a glistening carrot on a stick, which ultimately led us into a life of rock 'n' roll, automobile worship and blogging. Essentially, we're a shining, straight-B example of a point that's most likely moot.

Schools give cars to model pupils [Times, UK]

Related:
Arizona Businessman Banks on Hydrogen, Students [Internal]

Retired Phoenix patent attorney Russ Voorhees is all up in the Crown Vic action as a way to save the planet. As our neighbors to the north might say, "Eh?" Here's the deal: Voorhees picks up CNG-powered Vickies at municipal auctions and then delivers them to EVIT, a technical institute in Mesa which serves students from 10 area schools. The kids at EVIT retrofit the motors to run on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas, thus, Voorhees hopes, raising awareness that the hydrogen economy could be now, and ultimately generating business for his company, Global Hydrogen.

Hydrogen Revolution in East Valley [Arizona Republic]

Related:
Scots Create Wind-Powered Hydrogen Microeconomy [Internal]

A mere ten days after screeching Formula One engines shrieked out across the Istanbul Park Racetrack, a group of an entirely different kind of technological marvels were making the rounds of the raceway solar cars. The cars, built by fifteen universities and one high school cruised the track a paltry 45 km/h. You probably wouldn't be ticketed for doing that in school zone. Nevertheless, we're big on the solar car brigade, as they're functional pieces of design to go as far as possible as fast as possible, even if it's akin, relatively speaking, to pouring Aunt Jemima outdoors during a Michigan winter.

Solar Cars Race at Istanbul F1 Track [Turkish Daily News]

Related:
High School Solar Cars Warp Space! [Internal]

The University of Michigan's car "Momentum" won the 2005 North American Solar Challenge (NASC) finishing at 11:27 a.m. (MDT) yesterday. The entirely solar-powered car landed a cumulative time of 53:59:43 from Austin, Texas, to Calgary, Alberta, at an average speed of 46.2 mph, beating entries from University of Minnesota and MIT, which came in second and third. It was a suprise victory for the team, which brought together the required techologies and expertise, despite that Michigan only gets around a half-hour of daylight per day for most of the winter.

University of Michigan Wins Solar Challenge [Renewable Energy Access]

Related:
High-School Solar Cars Warp Space!; A More Different Solara Panamericana: This Time, With College, Eh? [internal]

The Winston-Dell Solar Challenge ended Saturday, a day prior to the kickoff of the collegiate North American Solar Challenge. Houston Vocational Center's team won its fifth straight race, having traveled 953 miles. But wait? Wasn't the race route 1,600 miles? Have a bunch of lowly high school students discovered a warp tunnel between San Antonio and Deming, NM? Not exactly. During stretches where the vehicles would have to run on high-speed thoroughfares, the vehicles were trailered. We'll keep you posted if the guys from MIT's Solar Challenge team bust out with the wormhole technology.

Houston solar car team wins again [Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal]

Related:
The Solara Panamericana? High Schoolers to Race Sun-Powered Cars from Texas to California; A More Different Solara Panamericana: This Time, With College, Eh? [Internal]

We reported last week that a buncha solar-powered teenagers were rampaging westward from Austin, TX to Pasadena, CA. Yesterday collegiate students, with higher budgets and more advanced vehicles (we especially like Stanford's trick self-supporting lift-off top), also took off from Austin. Their destination? None other than The Great White North Calgary to be exact. In what's undoubtedly a far-less scenic run than the high school kids' rally across the West, the top three in the first stage came in like this: University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and MIT.

North American Solar Challenge

Related:
The Solara Panamericana? High Schoolers to Race Sun-Powered Cars From Texas to California [Internal]