6 Tips For Saving Fuel and Getting Better Gas Mileage

Barak Obama was all over the news recently, mocked by his opposition for saying we can conserve fuel by simply inflating our tires. Made for a great sound bite for the 24-hour news stations, but the thing is, he's right. According to experts, under-inflated tires can reduce your gas mileage anywhere from 3 to 15 percent.

So what else can you do to help lessen your gas consumption? I spoke with the experts at the NASCAR Technical Institute and Traffic.com, two groups that know a little something about fuel management. Here are their top tips for squeezing out more miles from every gallon.

1 - Check Your Tires
Tire pressure changes with changing temperatures, so it's important to check the pressure after all weather changes. An under-inflated tire not only reduces the life of the tire, but can cause your gas mileage to plummet by as much as 15 percent. (And they recommend rotating tires roughly every 5,000-10,000 miles to extend the tread life. With or without a pit crew.)

2 - Change the Air Filter
Dust and other impurities getting into the combustion chambers of your engine's cylinders results in wasted gas and weaker engine performance. Replacing a clogged filter can improve mileage by as much as 10 percent, which translates into more money in your pocket every gallon. Change the air filter every six months, more often if you live in a dusty location.

3 - Lighten Your Load
For every 100 pounds of extra weight, your mileage goes down by two percent. Take all that unnecessary junk out of the trunk, and while you're back there, check the air pressure on the spare.

4 - Check Your Spark Plugs
Spark plugs fire as many as 3 million times every 1,000 miles. That's a lot of heat and wear and tear. Dirty spark plugs cause misfiring, which wastes fuel by as much as 30 percent.

5 - Make Sure Your Cap is Tight
According to NASCAR's Tech Institute, nearly 20 percent of vehicles have gas caps that are damaged, loose or missing altogether, allowing that high-priced octane to vaporize, wasting some 147 million gallons of gas every year.

6 - Don't Be Idle
Obviously, sitting in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic is a tremendous waste of fuel. Traffic.com recommends using the real-time traffic function available on many newer GPS systems to avoid backups and find clear routes, and updating the system's maps to find the quickest way to your destination.

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Cars of the Candidates: Who Drives What?

With the most important election of our lives closing in quickly, we have to take time to reflect on the facts, to set aside the emotions and rhetoric, and get to the very core of the issues. The most important issue of all, obviously, being what cars these men of power choose to drive.

A note: I despise politicians to my very core. Politics is a game of pandering and lying and using the resources stolen from the many to help the very few who can afford lobbyists. It’s disgusting, but you have to vote for one of the major candidates, right? You wouldn’t want to throw your vote away, right? Ugh.

Anyway, let’s get this over with, here are the cars that these plastic ambition-bots drive:

The Chrysler 300C, Obama’s old car, before he got on the hybrid wave

Goldenboy, aka, the Manchurian Candidate, aka, Barack Obama used to drive a Chrysler 300C, which is actually a respectable choice. It’s a nice car, powerful, good looking, etc. But he made a speech back on May 7th chastising Detroit for failing to anticipate rising oil prices. It included this little tidbit: “While foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in bigger, faster cars. The auto industry is on a path that is unacceptable and unsustainable. And America must take action to make it right.”

The Ford Escape Hybrid, darling of the politicos

Unfortunately, when someone pointed out that he actually drives a bigger, faster, gas guzzling V8 beast, he promptly threw away the 300C and switched to a Ford Escape Hybrid, which is to politics what the Cadillac Escalade is to hip hop. Apparently Al Gore and John Edwards drive the Escape Hybrid too. I can almost picture the meeting where they decided on that car. “Ok, it’s American, it’s a hybrid, and yet, it’s big enough to say you’re strong, you’re no little Prius driver, you won’t fold to Iran, YOU CAN LEAD”. I can’t stress this enough. I hate politics.

As for the old snapping turtle himself, John McCain, he hobbles around in exactly what you’d think a 90 year old curmudgeonly war veteran hobbles around in, a Cadillac CTS sedan. An old man in a Cadillac? It’s almost too perfect, but it’s true. I bet he leaves his blinker on for hours at a time, just in solidarity with the rest of the very very old voters.

Get off my lawn, you damn kids!

Now, say what you will about Ron Paul, but he really was the only one that made any sort of logical sense. Granted, he has his kooky side, and he never had a chance, but the facts are still there, and there’s a reason that people with higher IQs are more likely to be libertarians. Because libertarianism is based on sound economics.

Whatever though, this is about cars, not about the nation of sheep that sets out every 4 years to pick between two colors and pretend like it matters. THIS IS ABOUT CARS. And Ron Paul drives a Buick. All anyone could get out of him was this nondescript quote when asked what he drives: “a Buick while in Washington and a second-hand Lincoln car and Ford truck back home.” That’s all he told anyone, you know why? Because he doesn’t want the gawrd’dang government all up in his business, tracking his car movements with their elec-tro-tronic sat-e-lites and what not. An interesting side note, Ron Paul also says he keeps a 1979 Chevette at home for “sentimental reasons.” I love you Ron.

If you’re wondering what Ralph Nader drives, he actually claims he doesn’t own a car; he just flies around on his broomstick powered by massive amounts of government regulation and virgin blood. It keeps him young. Little known fact: Nader is actually as old as time itself, he was created in the big bang as one of the major universal forces “Governmentium”. He’s the reason government always gets bigger, it’s a law of nature

Grrrrrr, Brains, must eat Brains

Also, Nader is a zombie.

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Daddy's Little Helper

Some yuppie fathers think a weekend drug habit will keep middle age at bay. It won't.

-By Karl Taro Greenfeld
-Photograph by John Clark

The world needs grown-ups. Yet we are a generation of fathers who seem to loathe adulthood, desperately clinging to our youth as we skateboard into our child-rearing years. Some of us do that by swaddling our beer bellies in faded concert T-shirts and encasing our collapsing arches in Bathing Apes. Some go so far as to drop into the half-pipe at Buttermilk or go into credit-card debt buying Guitar Hero and Wiis. But there's another type of aging parent, one who takes it a step further. He's the one who gives the middle finger to mortality by doing a little blow at a weeknight cocktail party.

This isn't the guy sneaking out for a joint now and then when his kids are otherwise occupied. (Unless that occasional indulgence devolves into a five-bong-hit-a-day habit, it doesn't usually have a discernible effect on a man's relationship with his children—not counting a greater mutual interest in dessert.) This is the oldest guy at the club.

There's a dad who appears some mornings at my daughter's elementary school for drop-off. Other days he relies on his full-time nanny to deliver the kids. That's often because he was out the night before, doing coke and maybe taking E. Think about what's actually going on here: Just like the crowds of twentysomethings surrounding him, this guy is getting loaded. But unlike those taut-skinned, child-free partiers, he can't go to a 24-hour diner at 6 a.m. for an omelet and then to bed to sleep it off. He has to go home, pay the sitter, drop a 10-milligram Valium, and hope that in the hours his kids are at school he sobers up enough to be a competent parent when they get back.

Dr. Reef Karim, director of psychiatric services at Wonderland Center in Los Angeles and assistant clinical professor at UCLA, is seeing more and more parents who, as he puts it, "are using in their thirties and forties and don't want to give up that lifestyle."

Statistics show drug use creeping into demographics that previously might have just downed a martini or three after work. The 2005 National Survey on Drug Use found that the portion of 30- to 34-year-olds who had used illicit narcotics in the month before being polled was up to 9.6 percent, while drug use among 22-year-olds had actually decreased since the previous year's survey. In 2003, nearly 3 million Americans 35 and older admitted to having done blow in the past year.

Karim recalls a patient who, along with his wife, "would hire babysitters whenever they knew they were going to take drugs. It was a precautionary measure. They would go to Hollywood Hills after-parties, where they would do coke, pop some E's. Is that okay? No. Is that safer than actually doing E and hanging out with your kids? Yeah. But you know they are going to slip up sooner or later."

Forget the obvious horror stories: Renton and Sick Boy standing over the dead baby in Trainspotting; Jerry Stahl in Permanent Midnight slipping away from a board game with his daughter to shoot up in the bathroom; Courtney Love. Being a heavy user of recreational drugs is inherently selfish. And if there's one thing that becoming a parent robs you of, it's the ability to behave in a purely selfish way without consequences.

I once had an acquaintance, a woman in her thirties, who liked to take, as she put it, "half a pill" (of E) every weekend. When her baby was still sling-size, she didn't hesitate to take her to raves. But as her daughter became less portable and less likely to sleep through eight hours of high-decibel trance music, this woman had to make a difficult choice: leave the child with a babysitter or surrender her little indulgence. She kept partying. Though I listened to her lament her miserable Sundays coming down from E while taking care of a child, she never once concluded that perhaps parenting and getting high don't really mix.

Dr. Stephen Gilman, an addiction psychiatrist in New York City, has also seen a growing number of parents in their thirties and forties using drugs more than occasionally. Not surprisingly, he finds it alarming. "There is less margin for a parent using substances, even if they are doing it recreationally," he says. "There are huge risks of the child experiencing the parent acting irrationally, of the child becoming fearful."

I stopped using drugs three years before my oldest daughter, Esmee, was born. That doesn't mean I can't understand how the idea of spending an evening recapturing that wild dissolution of being 24—not giving a fuck, doing a bunch of coke, and hanging out at after-hours clubs—still appeals. But think about the phone call you might get at 7 a.m. from your child, getting ready for school and wondering where Daddy is. Or even worse, the call from the babysitter saying you have to meet her at the hospital because something is terribly wrong with your 3-year-old. When you think about it that way, the idea of a 40-year-old carrying a skateboard may seem sad, but it isn't tragic.

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