Jason Torchinsky

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

For most people, their first real exposure to the actor Dustin Hoffman – you know, the guy from the famous Kramer vs. Kramer, Ishtar, Tootsie, and Midnight Cowboy (including its unofficial sequel, Kung-Fu Panda) movies, was in the 1967 movie, The Graduate. However, eagle-eyed appreciators of foreign car commercials in America may also remember him from a role he got just before The Graduate: a Volkswagen commercial.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

You may have heard that the first all-woman spacecraft crew launched today for a sub-orbital flight, on a Blue Origin New Shepard re-usable rocket. That’s a big deal! Well, I suppose it’s the first all-woman crew if we don’t count Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 three-day orbital flight on Vostok 6, but even if everyone in that spherical Vostok-3KA capsule was a woman, there was only one, and I think a crew needs to be plural.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re out going for a nice hike in the woods, when you happen to see a discarded chili dog glowing and hovering by the side of the trail. Sure, the glowing and hovering parts are a bit unusual, but it’s a discarded chili dog, and you know what to do with those: grab them from the ground and force it into your waiting mouth, rapidly and fervently.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

While there are as many different types of car geeks and hoarders/collectors out there as there are iridescent colors in a puddle of motor oil, but I think you can generally lump them into one of two camps: those that hold on to cars forever, even beyond reason, and those that cycle through cars on some sort of arcane cycle. I’m usually the first, and as a result, my property is littered with cars, running, and, far too often, otherwise.

1 week ago | theautopian.com | Jason Torchinsky

We’re all pretty sick of hearing about tariff stuff, right? Of course we are, it’s tedious and alarming, and it just seems to mean more expensive cars, at least in the near term. But we’re not here to just whine and complain about situations we can’t control. Our job is not to curse your darkness, but rather to turn on the headlights. And, with that in mind, I think we may have found a bit of light in the midst of all this darkness, and it involves the Pope and the Dodge Challenger Hellcat.