In geezer world where I reside jigaboo was an extremely racist term. As insulting as it gets. Do not use it.
Your car is committing suicide. It will soon stop and you will have nothing. No way to go to work even if you find a better job. The car with nearly 200 k does sound like a better option.
You wont get 700 for your car. The deal will fall through. If it does, good for you. But you will have a period without transportation if you do not move quickly.
I’m going to avoid the hijack just to say this: your dad is telling you to buy a used Taurus as if that’s going to be more reliable? I think his judgement on cars is seriously suspect. I’ve owned many cars in my life and the only one that was a lemon was the Taurus. Ours was not an unique experience with the model. The Cavalier sounds like a good choice.
Bravo for sticking to your budgetary guns on your car. Going into debt to buy a nicer car wouldn’t help with that problem of being poor…
My dad knew cars (he sold used cars for more than 20 years), but his fondness for American cars over others still came out. My first car was a Pontiac Sunfire, purchased on his advice. My second is a Honda Civic, which I find is nicer and more trouble-free (and gets better gas mileage, yay!). The problem with a Civic for you would be that they tend to hold their value well, so you don’t get as much of a break buying used instead of new.
I have heard that the 1997 Chevy Cavalier/Pontiac Sunfire is a decent used car, though- mine was a 98, and they seem to have gotten less reliable that year 
No kidding. My god… and you’re pitting your parents ???
Look in the mirror, shitstain. :rolleyes:
Just as an update: I didn’t buy the used car. My father offered that if I buy the parts, he will do whatever work my car needs for free (he used to be a mechanic like 30 years ago. His knowledge is a bit out of date, but works most of the time).
I have a potential new job on the horizon (geez I hope so) that I’ll know more on in about 3 weeks, so he thinks he can make my car last until then, if not longer. If I get the job, it’ll be a ~220% pay raise ($8.25/hr to $16.40/hr plus government benefits) so I would be able to afford a real car payment.
Upon closer inspection he thinks it might be the radiator fan freaking out, but things may have warped during the occational overheating. My fingers are crossed, as a fan sounds cheaper and less deadly.
Jesus fucking Christ, would you read the whole fucking thread, you hyperventilating asshole? He didn’t know what the word meant!
Congratulations!
Dad is dead. My mother’s notions of “good and bad” are completely based on wallet content; she thinks that the best two years of Dad’s life were those when he was factory manager. The years when he was smoking 4-5 packs a day. The years when he was working 60-70 hours a week. When he’d be awakened by a ringing phone at 3am telling him he had to be in a town 400km away by 8am. When the slightest noise would irritate him. Those were the good years, she says. His opinion on which years were his best, I’ll never know, since he was unable to have a conversation with me (I think he spent 32 years trying to get over the surprise of having produced a daughter, his family being heavily male). But I know he wanted me to be something feminine… say, a nurse (I spent my childhood taking care of Mom and my brothers a lot more than any child ever should) or kindergarten teacher (while I like individual children, when they’re plural I have merry visions of oven-roasting them).
I’d rather never have good years like those and I love being an engineer. Mom and Dad don’t know shit.
Hell, look into how much a used engine from a junkyard might be for your car. Could be cheaper than stripping it down, if labor is free.
I get that too from my ex’. She gave me the “sell all your stuff on EBay”, while merrily buying crap of her own. When I place my laptop in my room, it roughly doubles the value of the contents added together.
I try explaining the Al Bundy rule to her, that eventually crap is resold so many times that theres one guy at the end of it all who is left with it and can’t shift it (although in my case its not really crap per se, just things that are at the end of their fashion cycle and I can at last afford them)
How cringeworthy.
You truly delight in dawdling around after me, finding new ways to shit, don’t you? Gosh. Get a life.
Guess what? It’s 2007. He should know what the fuck that world means. Oh wait, I forgot, we’re not here to fight ignorance.
Dick.
Let’s see…gigi said the word was “cringeworthy”. I dont’ see you slamming that poster.
Dick. 
I don’t know…I find it a nice tribute to his parents that Captain_C didn’t know that were was such a word as jigaboo, let alone its meaning.
On topic: kids have to make their own mistakes. Only way they can grow into the pain in the ass parents he’s pitting.
I don’t have a thing against you, but yours was a rather jerkish post. Why would he know what it means unless he 1) Has some black friends who clued him in (mine never did), 2) Likes Spike Lee movies, or 3) Paid attention to the Imus scandal. It is not even like the “Ignorance of Astronomy” thread where he would have to be void of curiosity. There is no reason he would know he didn’t know, so there is no reason to castigate him, only inform him.
Oh, and even if you use the word out of ignorance it is still cringeworthy.
Not that you care what with all of the focus on the slur, but it probably isn’t your head-gasket at all. Usually with a head-gasket, you’ll find coolant mixed with oil, or vice versa. Your over-heating problem is probably due to any of a few relatively minor problems. First test the thermostat (with as quickly as it’s overheating, that would be my guess), next check the water pump, and lastly check the belts and hoses. Cooling on those old cars was an issue, but it should be relatively cheap to fix.
Also, despite the mileage, I think the Cavalier is not a bad deal for $3000. I had the sister of that car (a Corsica) and put over 130,00 on it before I gave it away to my nieces. It still runs, not problem, and they love it because with only four cylinders it gets great mileage.
(GO GREEN!)
Just curious Captain C - how old are you, and what are your living circumstances, and how much do you regularly drive?
Depending on the totality of your circumstances, it seems to me that continuing to pump $3+ a gallon gas into your Bonny might cost more over time than buying something more economical. Of course, if you have essentially $0 in savings, it would admittedly be hard to make the switch.
Sounds like you are driving an unreliable beater, working a poorly paying job, while living in a depressed job market. I know it is easier to say from the sidelines, but have you ever thought of making a more major change in your circumstances in the hopes of turning things around? Getting out of your present rut (if only to end up in a different rut!) For the price of a bus ticket you might be able to get yourself and your belongings somewhere warm where you could walk/bike/bus to work… And if you are reasonably healthy and intelligent, you should be able to at least equal your present $9.5K/year.
Just a thought.
I didn’t know it meant that either until this thread. Not all of us are up to date on our racial slurs.
I’ve got no dog in this fight, but since when does the year have anything to do with which ethnic slurs we should and shouldn’t know?
And… well, this site is “fighting ignorance since 1973”. So, in this case, the OP’s ignorance was fought. Or, what did you mean by “we’re not here to fight ignorance”? 
Get over yourself. If I see someone acting stupid or being a jerk, I tend to point it out. If you see me doing that alot with your posts, well, that says something about you, doesn’t it?
If it was 1957, he should know what the word means. But in 2007, the word is hardly in common parlance, so it’s not surprising that someone (whom I gather is relatively young) is unaware of the terms origins. Hell, I’d say that’s pretty good fucking news, that naked racial hostility has declined to the extent that we no longer need so many different terms to express hatred for other ethnicities.
I’m going to go ahead and assume this was a rather weak attempt at sarcasm, and note that ignorance in this particular matter had already been succesfully fought by the eleventh post in this thread, and several subsequent times thereafter. Interestingly enough, those posters who were actually interested in fighting ignorance, and not just jizzing themselves in self-righteous outrage, were able to do so without insulting the OP. My guess is that they were able to do this by noting that, yes, it is the year 2007, and the sort of (apparent) casual racism displayed by the OP is very unusual in this day and age, so they gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was using the word out of ignorance. Which he was. So what purpose, do you think, was served by you coming in on the second page of this thread to call him a shitstain? And how, precisely, does “fighting ignorance” justify that? He’s a shitstain for not making a point to catalogue the variety of different racial slurs used throughout history? Is he a shitstain for mishearing a joke used on a popular late night talk show several years ago? Please, explain for me the reasoning behind your post, because I’d just love to hear it.
Never on a first date.
Yes, gigi did indeed say the word was cringeworthy. Or possibly the musical, it’s hard to tell from the context. And a whole lot of other people in this thread have expressed similar contempt for the word the OP used. You were singular in expressing contempt for the OP himself. Now, can your pea-brain understand why what you did was different from what everyone else in this thread did? Think reaaal hard, now. If you can’t figure it out, let me know and I’ll post a couple clues for you.
I don’t care how nicely you ask, you’re not getting any from me.
To answer a few posts at once: I’m 23 years old. I live alone at the moment, but will be moving in with my girlfriend at the end of August when she starts classes again. I drive about 20 miles a day (8 to work, 8 back, plus a bit extra). Moving from this terrible state isn’t an option at the moment. It sucks here, but it would suck more to be far away from my significant other. I just can’t reasonably put a price on that.
I’ve actually applied to an OMG real job that I should hear back on soon, so that would actually nullify this rant as I would be able to afford a newer car. 130 people applied for the open 3 positions, and the pool is down to 5 people. I’m going nuts with the not-knowing. I heard I had the highest score on the multitude of tests they administered, and I had the highest ‘score’ in the board interview, but they aren’t going to let us know for 2 weeks after the last interview (last week)… You can all expect a post in about 2 weeks saying either “WOO! REAL JOB!” or “FUCK, NO NEW JOB!”
And whomever mentioned it might not be a head gasket: I noticed today that the radiator fan seems to be running intermittently. Me thinks this is the problem…
Headgaskets are funny, and they go bad in several different ways. I had a Toyota truck that first did the huge billows of steam out the tailpipe and under the hood thing while the temp climbed to about 4600 degrees Kelvin, then it just stopped running at all. Fixed the headgasket.
Of course, aluminum head/overheating/subsequent warpage style headgasket failure then sets you up for another one–the second failure produced the typical coolant/oil “chocolate milkshake” syndrome but no overheating and billows of steam. Fixed the headgasket. Nasty fucking job getting all that sludge out of the engine, too.
Bought a different car because I was tired of the Toy and the damned headgaskets, so it sat for a few months until a friend of my son’s said he wanted it and I said “take the cursed thing!” Thing overheated, did some weird noises and caught fire on the lower deck of the Fremont bridge–autopsy revealed… drum roll, please! …that’s right, ANOTHER DAMNED BLOWN HEADGASKET!
So, same truck, three different failure modes all from one issue. Headgaskets suck hairy sweaty donkey choad. Ditch Headgasket-mobile, get different car with hopefully different problems.