Tetris with/on wheels

I love the video game Tetris, the old Russian puzzle game based on blocks of four. When I worked at Nintendo back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and 16/32/64-bit systems were still over the horizon, one of the benefits of my job was sitting at my desk playing with the (yet unreleased) GameBoy. The only GamePakâ„¢ I had was Tetris, but that is all I needed or wanted. Whenever I got on the phone I’d pick up the GameBoy and start stacking bricks. I still do that today, but usually with the “Breakout”-style games on my Treo or iPod. The game takes away my lizard-brain need to fidget with something while my mammalian brain can concentrate on talking. If you call me at work, and the conversation goes for more than a couple of minutes, I’m smashing bricks on my Treo, almost guaranteed. Weird I know, but that is how I work. I should write some discourse sometime about fidgety behaviors, but not today.

Today I played Tetris in real time with two complete tire/wheel or tire sets of FOUR each… that is FOUR Dayton 6″ stainless steel wire wheels, with some old worn Pirelli p4000 super touring tires mounted. FOUR new Pirelli p4000 super touring tires (wrapped in pairs for added Tetris difficulty!) THREE empty 5 gallon buckets (for my home-brew Diesel rig) and ONE 5 gallon Diesel can. Plus myself, my two bags, and extra set of shoes. All this I stacked into my 2002 Volkswagen Jetta TDi for a run into Seattle. I dropped the wheels and tires off at Foster’s Wheel Service for mounting. All the Seattle Jag club folks I talked to suggested Fosters, so there I went. (Actually I did get a suggestion for a place down in Kent, but that is a bit of a drive for me coming down from Arlington!) I dropped off my wheels and one of my signed copies of the KZOK Classic Car Calendar for them.

Amazingly, it all came out a lot faster than it went in, but before I left I took some photos of the FOUR by THREE configuration in the car (Any hard core Tetris player would know why I didn’t dare stack another set of FOUR things in there!:

It may be a boring looking, Teutonically efficient (52 MPG on veggie oil), dull little car, but those Germans do design it to be very useful. Gotta admire that to some degree. There is no way I could have squeezed that load into a Toyota or Honda of equivalent size.

I agree with Paul Wigton’s dad in that life is too short to drive a boring car, which is why I have the Jag. But you will note that I don’t drive it to work more than once or twice a year. 😉