Thanks to the kind people on the MercedesShop Forum. What a wonderful community of helpful and generous fellow Mercedes enthusiasts. If you haven’t been there, check it out.

UPDATE: A few days ago I posted the following regarding www.greenbenz.com. I have no firsthand knowledge doing business with this company but have subsequently read some disturbing things about their business practices. They sell cars on ebay under the username auto_usa. What troubles me is that on a couple of their listings for converted Mercedes, the filter clearly displayed the Lovecraft Biofuels sticker. Brian at Lovecraft told me himself that he had not converted those cars. The seller received two negative feedbacks on ebay on 46 sales transactions. Caveat emptor.

GreenBenz is taking orders for the 2007 Mercedes Benz 3.0 CDI, converted to run on veggie oil. You can be the first on your block to drive this 2007 vegcar!

The 3.0 CDI features an engine block made of cast aluminum. Here is some more information on this new generation of diesel engine.

In an interview, Jimmy Carter gave Tony Blair the verbal spanking he so deserves.

“I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behaviour,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

[...]

Mr Carter also said that the Iraq invasion had subverted the fight against terrorism and instead strengthened al-Qaeda and the recruitment of terrorists.

[...]

“We now have a situation where America is so unpopular overseas that even in countries like Egypt and Jordan our approval ratings are less than five per cent. It’s a shameful and pitiful state of affairs and I hold your British Prime Minister to be substantially responsible for being so compliant and subservient.”

[...]

“We’ve never before had an administration that would endorse pre-emptive war – that is a basic policy of going to war against another country even though our own security was not directly threatened,” he said.

Some readers of this page may wonder what this post has to do with vegcars. It has as much to do with them as invading Iraq had to do with 9/11.

Two friends have recently purchased Mercedes for conversion to svo. One is a 1980 300CD and the other is a 1983 300SD. If all goes well, we’ll be converting both cars in the next couple weeks. Both will be single tank conversions.

This will bring the total number of vegcars in our little town of 3,000 people to 5. At one vegcar for every 600 people, North Fork, just might rank as the highest per capita vegcar town in the world. Vegcar.net’s research staff will investigate this assertion. Stay tuned…

If you haven’t discovered it yet, the ShopForum at mercedesshop.com is a great forum for owners of Mercedes Benz cars. There are lots of parts cars listed as well as postings with diagnostic and repair help. There are also links to many other resources.

As with all forums (fora?), search the forum before posting. Your question may have already been asked.

I posted a couple of questions and received very helpful information within a day.

I watched the movie V for Vendetta last night. It was another great film by the Wachowski Brothers. This is a thought provoking look into one scary but possible future. It ranks up there with Logan’s Run, Omega Man, Fahrenheit 451 and Matrix.

It wasn’t that much of a leap when today, I saw this video of Bush at a press conference. Nearly 6 years later, I still can not believe that he is the President of the United States. He (and Cheney) should have been impeached years ago. It isn’t too late.

Check out the video of his rambling nonsense about his miserable failure in Iraq.

UPDATE 1-17-08: This video was removed for use violation. This is scary folks. videos like this, of the president of the US speaking to the public, are and should be in the public domain.

I have discovered one risk of vegcars. This is a big deal coming from me, a vegcar evangelist. I am heading to Yosemite tonight for a hike up Half-Dome tomorrow. I thought about the warnings in the park about not leaving anything in your car that even looks like it might contain food. Well, how about a car that smells like a fry-o-lator?

I posted last year about my friend who had bio-diesel in his truck and a bear chewed (and destroyed) his fuel line. I weighed the pros and cons and I’m going to drive my gasoline powered pickup to the park. I know! I’ll be supporting Exxon, Chevron, Bush, Cheney, Saudi Arabia, et. al. But I just don’t want this to happen!

This week I took care of a bunch of repairs that my car needed. Actually, I took the car to the shop to have them fixed as I am not much of a mechanic myself. I needed the following:

• New alternator
• New radiator and hoses
• A/C recharge and dye injection to find leaks
• Replace belts

Cha-ching! When one purchases a 22-year-old car, no matter how well it was maintained, parts are going to wear out. I told myself to expect $1,000 or so per year in maintenance. I was just about right on that – it has been more like $1,200. But as these parts are replaced, I figure the car has that much more life in it.

I also remind myself that I have saved more than $1,100 in fuel by running on free wvo. More importantly however, my investment in my vegcar has allowed me to greatly reduce my financial support for the oil companies and the government policies they push.

Drive a vegcar and say, “peace”.

From the Boston Globe:

Nearly all members of the House of Representatives opted out of a chance to read this year’s classified intelligence bill, and then voted on secret provisions they knew almost nothing about.The bill, which passed by 327 to 96 in April, authorized the Bush administration’s plans for fighting the war on terrorism. Many members say they faced an untenable choice: Either consent to a review process so secretive that they could never mention anything about it in House debates, under the threat of prosecution, or vote on classified provisions they knew nothing about.

Ah! That must be the democratic ideal we are bringing to Iraq.