(Girl who wrote a letter complaining that the show sucked and that she had to listen because her parents did in the car... they had her on and she'd periodically call in for years)
My all-time favorite was the episode where someone called in and said that their vehicle would run pretty well but with lots of vibration for 8 minutes, then the engine would cut and refuse to start up again. It turned out to be someone onboard the Space Shuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8
"The odometer on this thing reads about 60 million miles."
That was John Grunsfeld - he used to work on his car at Hacker's Haven in the late 70's (a DIY garage that Ray and Tom ran in Cambridge for a few years). That's just awesome that he was able to call in from the Space Shuttle.
I really liked their cameo in Cars. Tom's character was a Dodge Dart, which was problematic car he had owned, and was often a point of discussion on the show.
Car Talk was my gateway into NPR growing up when I used to listen with my dad on long drives. I've had the fortune to meet the Car Talk brothers many times and they were just as funny and friendly in person as they were on the show. RIP Tom.
My Dad and I were lamenting this news today. We listened to the show together. And although my Dad spent his career in aircraft maintenance (as an officer in the AF), corporate finance, and now (in semi-retirement) higher education, he is a talented car mechanic who fixed all our cars until I was 5 or 6 and he became too busy at work to do so. He understands cars at an almost intuitive level, and even though I'm a decent mechanic myself, I frequently call him up when I'm wondering what's going on with a car.
And I see several other comments here about people listening to the show together with their fathers, and how their fathers were talented mechanics. It's definitely a generational thing.
So many mechanically-inclined boys who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, including Tom and Ray Magliozzi, were into building and repairing cars, just as many mechanically-inclined boys in the 1970s and 1980s were into building, repairing, and programming computers.
(I do say "boys" because this seems to have been a mostly male gene [correction: gender] phenomenon. Fortunately, I think this may be changing now.)
My Dad gets along well with computers (particularly spreadsheets), but he little understanding of how they work inside.
It makes me wonder if my 4-year-old son or 7-year-old daughter and their friends will be strikingly talented in some new field, like virtual reality or nanotechnology, but will marvel at my knowledge of C and of the inner workings of early computers.
What a thoughtful comment. I don't intend to attack, so please take the following question in good faith: did you mean to say "male gene" or "male gender"?
I'd certainly agree for the former, but I would hope you'd elaborate more if you were to suggest a purely genetic origin.
One of my fondest memories growing up was sitting around the breakfast table with my parents while listening to the puzzler segment of the show, as well as when people would call in to have them diagnose random problems with their cars.
My dad, a decent car mechanic in his own right, would try to guess the cause himself and then we'd wait to hear if he was correct. Given that my dad passed away suddenly one month ago makes the timing of this even sadder for me. Truly the end of an era of my childhood.
I started listening to Car Talk in high school in the 1980s. I loved the wit, the banter with callers, and the weird questions about cars ... which (as others have noted) were often really about people.
Tom and Ray showed the value of personality and wisdom when it comes to mass media programming, especially in an age when so much information is available online. Yes, many of the problems experienced by the callers could have been diagnosed via Google or prowling car forums. But Car Talk was so much more dynamic and effective, as these two knew what questions to ask about the problem, which (often) led to a correct diagnosis.
The calls I particularly enjoyed:
* People calling in from Afghanistan, Alaska or other remote places with edge cases
* People calling in to question their husband's, father-in-law's or neighbor's advice about cars.
* The bizarre cases -- someone who had a plastic bag wrapped around the axle that wouldn't come off, the person with spiders reproducing in the A/C, and the guy whose cassette player not only had an REM tape stuck in it, but the damn thing was stuck on loop and wouldn't turn off while driving.
> People calling in from Afghanistan, Alaska or other remote places with edge cases
If you've never been to Alaska, I highly recommend a trip. It's extremely beautiful and "edge-cases" quickly become a way of life.
I live in the Yukon, and just yesterday I was waist deep in a half-frozen river in the middle of nowhere, smashing out ice with the back of an axe. Once I'd done that enough, I rigged up a pulley on a tree on the far size, ran a cable and my buddy and I pulled each other across on our quads. It was about -15C (5F) the entire time. Today I'm sitting at my desk working as a Software Engineer.
Or the guy that "lost a frozen turkey" in the car before thanksgiving, finding it much later after having not driven, and their advice of just selling the car because no one would never be able to get the smell out..
I also fondly remember then appearance on a Nova science special where they pretended to be water molecules passing through a fuel cell with balloons taped to their bottoms.
RIP. They were so entertaining. I never knew shit about cars but always felt a bit of excitement when I was in the car and heard that we'd be listening to them instead of some of my parents' music.
Also this is pretty great:
> Tom and Ray Magliozzi did open that do-it-yourself repair shop in the early '70s. They called it Hackers Heaven.
Don't care about cars. Care about those devices called "humans". These dudes fixes and tuned the latter while appearing to fix and tune the former. And one will not be the same without the other. So many fond memories...
I loved Click and Clack. Their laughter and enthusiasm was always infectious. No matter how down I was, listening to Car Talk always lifted me up.
Though they were exceedingly smart and good at what they do, their self-deprecating attitude humanized them, and really instilled the lesson of humility.
Well put. Their good natured self deprecation was hilarious but also so sweet. You really felt the bond they had between each other, with their audience, and their love of the show.
100% seconded. Tom was truly one of a kind - the infectiousness of their personalities reminded me, in an odd way, of Robin Williams. Tom, Ray, and Robin - they a made the world a better place by being reliably themselves, institutions of my growing up, and hilarious. My deepest condolences to Ray on what must be a terribly sad day for him.
Listening to car talk taught me an enormous amount about how to be an engineer, and it helped teach my wife how to be a doctor. How to formulate hypotheses and ask the right questions to test them, and that no matter how expert you are in your field, you will always encounter some oddball phenomenon that's entirely new to you.
Man, it occurred to me that their show goes all the way back to when I, too, was an actual auto mechanic many years ago. Saturday mornings in the shop, listening to the show while a half dozen professional mechanics tried to diagnose the problem. Once in a while we concluded that those two got it wrong, but right or wrong wasn't the point. They were funny, entertaining, and informative, all in a format that was accessible to those for whom a car is mostly a black box.
RIP, Tom. I wish I were ever as much the complete package when comes to mechanical things as you were.
My kids (7 and 5) and I loved sitting in the car and listening to Car Talk. They didn't have a clue about the content, but just loved listening to the brothers joking and having a good time with each other and the callers. So many Saturdays on the way to this or that, did I get the request to turn on the radio for Car Talk. In all honesty, Car Talk was almost like an audio-only cartoon for them, with those jovial and dynamic voices.
Also, being an incurable VW nut, I often experienced so many of the issues folks called to ask about. I really enjoyed expressing my own opinion out loud and waiting to see what the boys usually said (which was different than what I thought, and often made a lot more sense than my own theories).
R.I.P. Tom. I hope Ray is holding it together today. What a blow.
The fact that this is at the top of HN and has been for hours is phenomenal. Despite the often insular nature of the HN crowd, it's things like this that reveal ta deep respect for the hacker in everyone. Imagine being so badass that you hosted a national tech-support call-in show and solved people's problems random computer problems: "Tom: Sounds like you've got corrupted memory... Ray: Don't listen to him, all his memory's corrupted. [minutes of infectious laughter]"
Agreed. I think it wasn't just his humor and his knowledge, but his approachability and willingness to share. I worked at NPR for 6 years. I never met either of the brothers, but we were all a gog the day Doug the Old Grey Mare came in to talk to pick our brains about web analytics, of all things. Here is this person who I think is an absolute genius, but can listen to us talk about a seemingly banal thing earnestly. They listened, they shared. They cared.
My dad called into car talk once and told them on-air about how I would listen to every episode while driving around in my little tikes car. I didn't understand what they were talking about, but I loved their laughing.
Also, I still can't take the new Fiats on the road seriously.
This is a point that I think a lot of people are missing: Click and Clack, while being funny, were primarily master troubleshooters. They could digest incomplete descriptions of a problem over the phone from a neophite user and in the span of a phone conversation, usually with no ability to run tests, could work out a plausible root cause and a corrective course of action. The "Stump the Chumps" segment would occasionally follow up with some previous victims/callers, and more often than not they had largely gotten it right.
I'm not sure how much you'll actually learn about cars from listening, but if you pay attention you should be able to learn a whole lot about effective troubleshooting.
My favorite "remote debugging" of all time was the caller who complained about the key in her old Subaru wagon not working sometimes.
After some back and forth, one of the brothers said, "wait, wait--I'll bet you have a huge set of keys, right?" "Well, yes." "So, on that model of Subaru, the weight of the whole key set will eventually wear down the lock and make it stick. I've seen that before."
It's a fairly common problem across several makes of cars. Replaced my ignition switch once because of this, and since then have used a separate clip for my house and work keys.
I've only been aware of car talk for a few years (having moved from the UK) but this is sad. Seemingly every significant road trip I've done has involved laughing my ass off at something in that show, but also being struck by just how wise a lot of their advice sounds (whether it is might be something else). Mere mention of "Manila Folders" or the BMW 9 series manual is enough to reduce my partner and I to hysterics.
This was my experience as well. Inevitably, at some point during every long road trip, there'd be a period where I'd get reception for a while, and I'll be darned if it wasn't Car Talk. After hours and hours alone on the road, it was always warming to have them guffawing about whatever they were rambling about at the time. Brightened every trip.
I'm busy reading his article on Paxos & of course I find this here. Feels like a classic case of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
Regardless, oh my goodness. When you see the solution spit out you just wanna drop your head on the desk. It's that "ahaaa" moment we probably don't feel often enough.
NPR and public radio more generally in the U.S. is such a national treasure, and these guys were one of the brightest gems. I loved seeing their personalities and infectious laugh enshrined with a cameo in Pixar's Cars, which itself captured a sort of best-of or hall-of-fame for American car culture.
I listen to reruns on a regular basis, and what continues to amaze me about the show is their ability to "debug" cars and make it sound fun. They were always helpful, never looking down on the caller or the predicament they found themselves in. Us techies could learn a few things from them.
I'm a car guy through and through, and I started listening to those guys when I barely started turning wrenches on my first car. Great guys, and great show.
My Dad, one of the best mechanics I'll ever know (who has forgotten more than I'll ever learn) used to listen and talk about how accurate they were with their advice and wished more people would listen.
I can report that Tom and Ray did in fact have the occasional cappuccino at Caffe Paradiso in Harvard Square. I had no idea who they were until Tom laughed :-)
[+] [-] ceejayoz|11 years ago|reply
(Girl who wrote a letter complaining that the show sucked and that she had to listen because her parents did in the car... they had her on and she'd periodically call in for years)
My all-time favorite was the episode where someone called in and said that their vehicle would run pretty well but with lots of vibration for 8 minutes, then the engine would cut and refuse to start up again. It turned out to be someone onboard the Space Shuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8
[+] [-] jobu|11 years ago|reply
That was John Grunsfeld - he used to work on his car at Hacker's Haven in the late 70's (a DIY garage that Ray and Tom ran in Cambridge for a few years). That's just awesome that he was able to call in from the Space Shuttle.
[+] [-] Klinky|11 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6y...
[+] [-] theg2|11 years ago|reply
Car Talk was my gateway into NPR growing up when I used to listen with my dad on long drives. I've had the fortune to meet the Car Talk brothers many times and they were just as funny and friendly in person as they were on the show. RIP Tom.
[+] [-] bengali3|11 years ago|reply
Edit: found a video clip of the brothers. Laughs included https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8TC2J1aTr4
[+] [-] atonse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmharvey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srcmap|11 years ago|reply
Car Talk Plaza Box 3500 Harvard Square Cambridge , MA 02238
[+] [-] eric_bullington|11 years ago|reply
And I see several other comments here about people listening to the show together with their fathers, and how their fathers were talented mechanics. It's definitely a generational thing.
So many mechanically-inclined boys who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, including Tom and Ray Magliozzi, were into building and repairing cars, just as many mechanically-inclined boys in the 1970s and 1980s were into building, repairing, and programming computers.
(I do say "boys" because this seems to have been a mostly male gene [correction: gender] phenomenon. Fortunately, I think this may be changing now.)
My Dad gets along well with computers (particularly spreadsheets), but he little understanding of how they work inside.
It makes me wonder if my 4-year-old son or 7-year-old daughter and their friends will be strikingly talented in some new field, like virtual reality or nanotechnology, but will marvel at my knowledge of C and of the inner workings of early computers.
[+] [-] nooron|11 years ago|reply
I'd certainly agree for the former, but I would hope you'd elaborate more if you were to suggest a purely genetic origin.
[+] [-] nether|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|11 years ago|reply
My dad, a decent car mechanic in his own right, would try to guess the cause himself and then we'd wait to hear if he was correct. Given that my dad passed away suddenly one month ago makes the timing of this even sadder for me. Truly the end of an era of my childhood.
[+] [-] ilamont|11 years ago|reply
Tom and Ray showed the value of personality and wisdom when it comes to mass media programming, especially in an age when so much information is available online. Yes, many of the problems experienced by the callers could have been diagnosed via Google or prowling car forums. But Car Talk was so much more dynamic and effective, as these two knew what questions to ask about the problem, which (often) led to a correct diagnosis.
The calls I particularly enjoyed:
* People calling in from Afghanistan, Alaska or other remote places with edge cases
* People calling in to question their husband's, father-in-law's or neighbor's advice about cars.
* The bizarre cases -- someone who had a plastic bag wrapped around the axle that wouldn't come off, the person with spiders reproducing in the A/C, and the guy whose cassette player not only had an REM tape stuck in it, but the damn thing was stuck on loop and wouldn't turn off while driving.
We'll miss you, Tom.
[+] [-] grecy|11 years ago|reply
If you've never been to Alaska, I highly recommend a trip. It's extremely beautiful and "edge-cases" quickly become a way of life.
I live in the Yukon, and just yesterday I was waist deep in a half-frozen river in the middle of nowhere, smashing out ice with the back of an axe. Once I'd done that enough, I rigged up a pulley on a tree on the far size, ran a cable and my buddy and I pulled each other across on our quads. It was about -15C (5F) the entire time. Today I'm sitting at my desk working as a Software Engineer.
Life up here really is very different.
[+] [-] salgernon|11 years ago|reply
I also fondly remember then appearance on a Nova science special where they pretended to be water molecules passing through a fuel cell with balloons taped to their bottoms.
[+] [-] wdewind|11 years ago|reply
Also this is pretty great:
> Tom and Ray Magliozzi did open that do-it-yourself repair shop in the early '70s. They called it Hackers Heaven.
[+] [-] jgwest|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinkimball|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheri|11 years ago|reply
Though they were exceedingly smart and good at what they do, their self-deprecating attitude humanized them, and really instilled the lesson of humility.
Will miss him and the show.
[+] [-] comrh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aqueous|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephencanon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|11 years ago|reply
RIP, Tom. I wish I were ever as much the complete package when comes to mechanical things as you were.
[+] [-] steakejjs|11 years ago|reply
My favorite episode was the one where he talked in depth about his time in the Army and how he didn't fit in, but every episode was a good listen.
[+] [-] xsmasher|11 years ago|reply
http://podtail.com/podcast/npr-car-talk-podcast/1430-the-and...
[+] [-] erickhill|11 years ago|reply
Also, being an incurable VW nut, I often experienced so many of the issues folks called to ask about. I really enjoyed expressing my own opinion out loud and waiting to see what the boys usually said (which was different than what I thought, and often made a lot more sense than my own theories).
R.I.P. Tom. I hope Ray is holding it together today. What a blow.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
R.I.P. Tom. Such unique warmth and joy.
[+] [-] astrocat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javaun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philip1209|11 years ago|reply
Also, I still can't take the new Fiats on the road seriously.
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bud|11 years ago|reply
I feel I learned much about the art of troubleshooting in general from Car Talk.
[+] [-] luma|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how much you'll actually learn about cars from listening, but if you pay attention you should be able to learn a whole lot about effective troubleshooting.
[+] [-] cpr|11 years ago|reply
After some back and forth, one of the brothers said, "wait, wait--I'll bet you have a huge set of keys, right?" "Well, yes." "So, on that model of Subaru, the weight of the whole key set will eventually wear down the lock and make it stick. I've seen that before."
I can't imagine the leap of intuition required...
[+] [-] brok3nmachine|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
Already sorely missed. RIP.
[+] [-] HCIdivision17|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pit|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/fintler/tlaplus/raw/master/examples/CarTa...
[+] [-] adt2bt|11 years ago|reply
Regardless, oh my goodness. When you see the solution spit out you just wanna drop your head on the desk. It's that "ahaaa" moment we probably don't feel often enough.
[+] [-] aculver|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voltagex_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiremine|11 years ago|reply
He'll be missed.
[+] [-] JeremyMorgan|11 years ago|reply
My Dad, one of the best mechanics I'll ever know (who has forgotten more than I'll ever learn) used to listen and talk about how accurate they were with their advice and wished more people would listen.
[+] [-] jhallenworld|11 years ago|reply