Back in November, North American electronics retailer Circuit City filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced that more than a hundred of its locations would be closed, in an attempt to restructure the company’s debt load and keep the chain going until a buyer could be found.

Well, apparently that didn’t go according to plan; Circuit City announced today that it would seek permission from the bankruptcy court to switch to a straight-up liquidation of its remaining assets. The 500-plus U.S. stores that survived the November cutbacks will be closed, putting more than 30,000 people out of work. (Apparently the CC-branded stores in Canada will stay open; must be operated by a separate company.)

Circuit City joins a growing list of retail chains (Tweeter Etc., CompUSA, Office Depot) that have taken ill or bought the farm altogether in recent years, killed off by a combination of the generally failing economy, their core business moving online, and, in Circuit City’s case, monumental management screw-ups (e.g., sacking most of their actually-knowledgeable sales staff and replacing them with clueless teenage biscuits straight out of central casting). There is supposedly a nonzero chance that it may live on as an online brand, but I don’t know as I’d bet the ranch on that. It is survived by its chief (and now largely uncontested) competitor, Best Buy.

It’s easy, sometimes, to forget that gizmos don’t have to be elaborate, expensive things with embedded application software and 45 different world-shinking, life-simplifying, William Gibson-thought-of-this-in-1985 functions. Not that there’s anything wrong with those; I love a good gee-whiz electronic gadget as much as the next guy. The very idea that a person can just look up, say, the span of years in which the F-4 Phantom II was in production (1958-1981) anywhere, at any time, without having to wait for the library to open still catches me short with amazement sometimes.

But these are dark times, and not all of us can afford to pursue the latest word in ultracompact personal electronic backup brains or super-high-resolution home theater gear with umpteen-watt wireless Dolby surround speakers. What’s a gizmo lover to do when all the buzzworthy gizmos are out of reach?

Some people find some smaller bit of technology to focus their addiction on. My mother, for instance, has a curious fixation with USB flash drives. She has dozens of them, more than she’ll ever have any actual need for. White ones, black ones, pink ones, ones with store logos on them, ones with clever rotating covers, even one that looks like an old-fashioned Eberhard Faber Pink Pearl eraser. (She doesn’t have one of the ones that look like a severed USB cable yet, but she knows of them and wants one very much.) Whenever we’re out shopping, if we go anywhere that sells flash drives, she’ll leave with at least one. It’s like a compulsion.

But I don’t sneer at that, because I’ve carried on my own minor-tech-widget love affair for years. In my case, it’s not flash drives. It’s flashlights.
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From the “not so much about gizmos as about where we get them” department:

High-profile North American electronics retailer Circuit City, a chain nearly as ubiquitous in the US as Best Buy, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This comes a week after the company announced that it was closing 155 stores as part of an effort to improve its cash position going into the holiday retail season. This, in turn, was presumably spurred at least in part by the New York Stock Exchange’s notification to Circuit City on Oct. 30 that its stock no longer meets the NYSE’s requirements for listing.

The holiday season’s expected to be brutal, especially for retailers in Circuit City’s line, which is no real surprise. They’re basically toy stores for grown-ups, and people don’t buy many toys when they’re either out of work or worried that they soon will be (in short, when the sound of the US economy collapsing is audible in Buenos Aires).

Here’s a list of the stores to be closed. On the plus side for those of you who do have some cash to spend on gizmos this Christmas, chances are they’ll be offering some interesting liquidation deals at those stores, especially given that they’ll be liquidating during the run-up to Black Friday.

Okay, I just finished mowing the biggest of the three lawns, and I was right: Setting the Neuton to a saner cut height (2) fixed the “clippings foul wheels” problem. It still doesn’t seem to be terribly effective at mulching – I end up with rows of cut grass, much like if I’d been using the side ejector, but they’re in slightly different places – but that’s all right with me.

The battery was just starting to run out of steam and the mower to bog down as I was finishing up, and that included a number of switches back and forth to the Clever Attachment to knock down the grass around the trailers, the woodpile, the parked snowmobile, etc. that the Big House people like to leave scattered around the lawn. (In practice, the Clever Attachment turned out to be just as handy as I expected it to be.) According to the documentation, the battery won’t reach its full power until it’s been drained and recharged five or six times.

It’s definitely easier to jockey around the obstacles – and drag back to the garage afterward, which involves going pretty much all the way around the compound – than the gas mower.

I’m still sold. I hate mowing lawns, but it’s a hell of a tool. Someone who liked mowing lawns would probably be in hog heaven with this gizmo.

I just talked to one of their technical support folks (they’re apparently a division of DR, the company that makes the giant field mowers and stuff one sees advertised on TV, which I find slightly amusing). They’re sending a replacement for the key socket assembly, no charge. The guy said he didn’t think it’d be a problem, given that I was able to correct the misalignment with the key itself, but we might as well replace it anyway.

Replacing this bit apparently does require the use of one tool – a screwdriver. You’ve got to love modular technology.

Anyway, since it’s working correctly, there’s no need to wait for the new part to get here – it’s just a contingency measure – so I may as well go and do the back 40 now. More in the gripping saga of the electric mower later.

I have various little jobs here on the Ireland estate in beautiful, cosmopolitan Millinocket. One of them is groundskeeper. In this capacity, I’ve been grumbling mightily for the better part of this year that our old 4.5-horsepower gasoline-powered lawn mower is getting a bit worn out. I was hoping that this campaign would eventually culminate in the acquisition of a new riding mower, to replace the one my mother gave to her father a couple of years ago. That would have made the Giant Rear Lawn so much less… daunting.

Instead, the head office acquired this little gem: a Neuton CE 6.2 electric lawn mower.
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It should come as no surprise to anyone that there’s a fair number of toys available relating to Disney-Pixar’s current feature film, WALL-E. After all, there’s a fair number of toys available relating to any Disney theatrical release of any significance, and in the case of WALL-E, almost all of the main characters are robots – the perfect subjects for licensed toys.
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Over the years, I’ve owned a couple of different cars with mechanisms for opening up the top and catching a little fresh air, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite things you can get a car to do. I’ve had a Saab convertible for years, and I don’t even care that where I live, I can only open it about ten days a year. I gladly accept the reduced forward visibility (because of the heavy frame around the windshield) and the nearly nonexistent rearward visibility (because the back window is about the size of a comic book), the increased road noise, and having to do that little windows-open-a-bit-and-shut-again thing to make them fully seal against the weather strips just for that magical first day in late spring when the time has come to undo the latches and wind back the lid. There are even some facets of the top-up experience I actually like – the sound of a heavy rain, for instance. And, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t cold in winter or drafty anytime. The Swedes know how to build for foul weather.

When I was younger, I had a T-top Camaro. This was a whole different animal. The tops were heavy, taking them off and putting them on was a pain in the ass, they took up the whole damn trunk (not that a Camaro has much of one, admittedly) when stowed, they started leaking about half an hour after we took delivery, it was drafty and cold, and there was the ever-present terror that you’d manage to very expensively break one while putting them on or taking them off (though, fortunately, I never did). To add insult to injury, it didn’t really feel much different with them off. Oh, sure, you had the open space where the bit you’d normally hit your head on getting into the car should’ve been, and that was nice, but on the road it was just noisier. With the same view through the rearview mirror either way, there just wasn’t any particular feeling of… liberation.

Put simply, the convertible is worth it; the T-top wasn’t.
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The discussion resulting from the last Technosophy item got me to thinking about a couple of things. One of them was the whole gas/electric hybrid car concept. I really do think this is a technological dead end, the kind of thing that future generations will look back on and say, “They seriously thought that was worth bothering with?” I honestly believe that, if all the money that’s been wasted developing hybrid drive systems had been spent instead on improving the efficiency of the normal ones, everyone would be getting better mileage now, not just the tiny, smug, self-important Prius minority – resulting in a much larger net gain in fuel economy worldwide with much less silly faffing around.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that piston engines have reached the limit of what can be wrung out of them. That what’s really needed now is a whole new concept in automotive powerplant technology, something that will make cars with piston engines seem as antiquated and quaint as fighter planes with propellers.

Well, funnily enough, I think that something already exists. In fact, I think it’s the same something that left propeller-driven fighter planes behind at the end of World War II… and it’s a something that engineers first seriously took a crack at putting in automobiles in the early 1960s.
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I was born just a few months before the first major petroleum crisis to hit the United States, in those last few days before the American car-buying public got its first hint that maybe – just maybe – the gravy train wouldn’t run forever. In response to the Arab oil-producing nations putting the screws on the world economy in October of 1973, my father – a shadetree mechanic since high school, which at that point was only three years ago for him, admittedly – decided, very reluctantly, to bite the bullet and buy a small car.
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