How much?!

Oh yes, what a fun weekend it has been.

The Fiero died while waiting at a traffic light, and upon inspection by the auto mechanic, several fusible links were in need of being replaced.

All well and good, except that I got a telephone call from the mechanic later saying that while the links were replaced, reconnecting the battery produced black smoke coming from the area of the defroster.

The prognosis? About $500 in labor to remove the entire dashboard to diagnose the problem and then $500 to replace the wiring harness that had no doubt been burned up.

So, I of course had the Fiero towed back to my place and proceeded to disassemble the dash myself on my day off. The car now works fine.

The end cost? Two hours of my time and about $1.50 worth of cable to splice in and replace that burnt when it had become to frayed over the twenty years of use and melted the plastic coating.

What the . . . ?

FLCLI caught a few repeat episodes of FLCL (alternatively pronounced “Fooly Cooly” or “FuriKuri” depending on your personal tastes) on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup and was quickly reminded just why I liked this messed up combination of remixed artwork, philosophy and plot lines of other japanese anime, all with the music of The Pillows, which in my humble opinion out-cools even that of Cowboy Bebop.

Plus it has lots of cool things coming out of the main character’s head, including giant robots.

The entire series is a mere six episodes long, weighing in at slightly less than three hours total. Yet in this short length of time, you will be thoroughly confused while simultaneously enlightened, entertained, challenged, titillated, bemused and perhaps a little bit moved. For many, the confusion that surrounds just about every episode may be off-putting, but it’s not a frustrating confusion provided you’re ready to just let the series wash over you. If anything, it’s not hard to understand what’s happening at any given moment, just not why.

In the end, you really can’t expect to understand this animated “coming of age” story, merely to experience it. And if you allow yourself to experience it for the piece of artwork that it is, then you will gain understanding of your experience. Or not. But you’ll still have had fun, especially with the good music.