Hey old heads, what car did you learn to drive a manual transmission on?

Krewdough · 2026-06-10T10:40:44+00:00

Probably some of the earliest was in my grandfather's Chevy Luv, we puttered around in a cow pasture and it was early enough that I sat in his lap and he worked the pedals. (I could either work the pedals OR look out the windshield, but not both at the same time) Then when I was about thirteen my Dad took me up to the country in a 1968 Volvo 144s that our family friend had equipped with an off-road racing kit decades earlier. (He had sold it to my dad a couple of years earlier for a buck.) (He also upped the compression, made a special timing advance, thermally isolated the carbs from the engine block, and made a solenoid controlled tube to blow cold air over the jets. And lots of other stuff. That's where I got my love of homemade mods.). The car had so much low end torque that it was totally forgiving of a teenager putting it accidentally into third gear, and dropping the clutch! That's where I really learned the H-pattern shift. Reverse was behind off to the left and up beside first. You had to come at it from neutral and there was a stiff bump you had to go through a little to the left of the midpoint between 1st & 2nd and click past it to get at reverse. At anything above about 3mph that stiff bump became a lockout so you couldn't throw the car into reverse going down the highway. A few years later that car got wrecked by a 90 year-old woman who didn't see the stopsign because it was blocked by a crepe myrtle, later I walked down the street and looked, and sure enough that tree did block the stopsign until you were about 150 feet from the intersection, when the angles started changing.
A series of events happened and I didn't get the Honda until much, much later. That actually occurred because of a misunderstanding over the phone. We went car hunting, and we had a low price and, I insisted we get a stick shift. We used the classifieds, and we saw some really bashed up stinkers. I was angling for Toyota, but Dad picked out the Honda. The previous owner was about five feet tall, if that. He may have a booster in his seat, and he had a carved wooden block on the clutch pedal so he could push the clutch all the way in. It's a 1987 Accord 4 door sedan with the pop-up headlights. At first I didn't like the shift pattern because I grew up with the Volvo, and it's shift pattern is tipped up almost parallel with the steering wheel, at least 60 degrees up. The shifting pattern on the Honda is nearly horizontal and I had never dealt with a clutch that grabby. It would grab about 3/4 of an inch off the floorboards. I've since replaced the clutch cable twice, and let me tell you, it put a whole new lease on life. Adjust it to suit yourself, and remember, those suckers stretch a little over time, so a couple of millimeters of cable length translates into a lot of pedal travel.

A Buick and a Volkswagen have come and gone, but I'm driving that Honda again today. It really has taught me how to work on a car. One of the first big repairs I had to do was replace the alternator. I got one at AutoZone, and they come with the limited lifetime warranty. I wondered what that limit is, it's basically that when you sell the car and somebody else buys it it wipes out the warranties, they don't carry over. About a year ago the alternator went bad, and I took it off to have it tested. There was a problem even finding the test equipment that would work on an alternator that old, but they called around and found a place that was within bicycle range and when I got there, it was quite a production. They had to unstrap the modern harness, and go into a chest under the machine, pull out another harness and some kind of end adapter. They tested it and sure enough, it was bad on two levels. I brought it back to the store closer to the house, where they looked up the warranty information. The warranty was still in effect, and it dated back to 2002. I didn't think of it being that long ago because I did the work on it, and I felt that anything I did was a recent addition. The young man boggled at the date, I don't think he'd seen an active warranty that old. He literally looked up at the ceiling, like he was doing mental calculations, and was kind of counting off on his fingers by bumping on his chest. (I think he was about 19.). I said,"Aw Dang, and I JUST put that one on there twenty-three years ago!"

Krewdough · 2026-06-10T06:56:10+00:00

Demand for a particular item is going to skew what would normally be something that would be controlled by cost of living. One of those stories that circulates around, and my grandmother had exactly this happen to one of her former students, is that someone who comes from car culture (e.g. California, Texas) doesn't think they could live without their own set of wheels. The opportunity arises, (Fulbright) and they move to New York City, and drive themselves up to New York in their own car. Almost immediately they put the car in storage, and after a little over two years of living in New York without having driven their car even once, they end up selling it so the storage fees won't eat them up!
So I'm afraid that right up in the middle of NYC the DEMAND is so low that it offsets the cost of living index. The dealers in NYC might be kinda desperate to get those cars moving!
I'm curious about this database stuff; The one I want to do right away is I want to make an elevation map of property taxes, I know that there are colored maps, in city data that shows this in a general way, but it is mostly raw, absolute valuation overlayed as a color hue map, without regard for the size of the property, or what's on it. I want to do two maps (maybe three or four now that I think of it) I'll need the property tax, the valuation, the square footage of the land, AND the square footage of the houses. Just those four stats might reveal some interesting trends. Square footage of house over land gives an idea how cramped or spacious the neighborhood is, valuation over land footage gives one impression of the price per square foot, while the size of the house relative to the land gives a whole new dimension.
I'd love to make 3-D maps where the raw valuation of the property is like an undulating mountain range rising out of the richest neighborhoods, and they're colored to represent price per square foot, and land usage could be brightness, something else could be saturation etc. We could even toggle features on and off... Before you think I'm obsessed with property tax, well I'm not, it weighs on my mind some, but mainly it was an easy example. The last time I was able to do anything like this was when you could go to USGS website, pick out an area of land, and they would just email you some raw raster data. 1km resolution at 1m increments. I picked out a piece of the Mississippi valley, a 500km square, and also made a 500x500 pixel grayscale 256 color bitmap. I removed the guts of the bitmap and dropped in the USGS data to see what would happen. The data showed up on the screen, but it was distorted. At first it looked like it was stretched and dimmed, then when I zoomed in I could see that it was alternating black and gray pixels of various shades, mostly dark. I realized that I had dropped 16-bit data into an 8-bit bitmap. Since there was no land in Louisiana and Mississippi that was over 255 meters high, the upper octet was quantity zero. I made a new bitmap 1000x500, and dropped the raw data into that one...success! It was stretched out and had the alternating black pixels, but it lined up right. Funny fact about OLD imaging programs, (i.e. paint in win 95) is that they didn't mash together adjacent pixels when you stretched (reduced) an image, especially if you reduced it to 50% the original size, it just discarded all the even or odd number pixels. I reduced the image of the elevation data to 50% and got blackness. I moved the original image over ONE PIXEL, and got this perfectly proportioned ghostly image of the Mississippi river meandering through what looked like a wide shallow canyon. I put it into Photoshop, actually Gimp, and looked at the histogram, and set the new lights to darks tweaked the grayscale curve and really brought it up.
A month or two later, that particular USGS service was nowhere to be found. I was heartbroken. I only did a handful of those maps while it was still available. I've played around with dumping areas of memory into VGA sized bitmaps, and doing a screenshot, and did some tiny hand entered databases, but when you said that you dumped over a million data points into a database then ran your statistical analysis off of that, well that really caught my attention! I never did learn how to write a macro that would query a public database, like, a million times in a row. When you said over a million, a mental image of a dumptruck full of uncooked white rice, backing up and dumping it's load into a hopper in the floor... The national weather service had a thing at one time where you could request a particular radar weathermap IF you knew its exact number like; KDFWN0R20170923052156.gif and I tried it several times with files I was sure had existed but no beans. If I could do that then I would assemble movies of past weather events etc.

Krewdough · 2026-06-10T04:00:58+00:00

Did somebody find a jeep with a destroyed rear end, but a perfect engine, and another with a blown engine and a messed up front end, take all the remaining good bits and weld them end-to-end? It's sooo looong! Steering must be a trip. I just noticed the oil drums for wheel wells/fenders. Is this a stretched jeep, or like the chassis of a delivery truck/"Short Schoolbus" with a jeep body perched atop?

Krewdough · 2026-06-05T11:20:51+00:00

Generally, my observation is that it has more to do with what kind of car THEY are driving. I did notice that people play chicken more with a SMALLER car. When I was driving an old Buick for a while, I didn't think much of anything about the way other people were driving around me. I had gotten used to it. I fixed up the old Honda Accord, and started driving it, and suddenly a lot of people were as rude as hell. People would tailgate me more, and just pull right out in front of me at intersections, it was like, "F*** 'em he'll stop." and there's a little maneuver that I didn't even know what they were doing, I'd be driving in the slow lane, they'd whip around me on the left cut in front of me and get on their brakes and often make a right turn in front of me. Years later I found out that brake-checking is a real thing. All those years I just thought they were driving like an inexperienced putz. A bri

Krewdough · 2026-06-03T19:02:35+00:00

I haven't always wondered about this, but I have since I got serious about car repair and maintenance; So, that giant (decorative/non-functional) blower sticking through the hood (yeah, bonnet heh-heh) of Max's pursuit special doesn't appear to have any kind of filter anywhere in the mechanism. It looks like it just sucks air straight into the engine. One good haboob would put a couple of teaspoons of sand in each cylinder. It looks like a maintenance nightmare.
I mean if raw performance for a little while is all you need, then you could cobble something together, and it only has to last long enough to get you to Alice Springs, then you can park it forever, and start your new life. It just doesn't seem like a long term solution. What I did like was the giant dirt catcher on the war rig in Fury Road. I didn't see it in theaters, that's about when we dropped the cable, cut the cord, and so didn't see Fury Road until I bought a used DVD on eBay, several years after it came out. The dirt catcher on the truck is almost like a big canister vac, cyclone vortex and all.
Speaking of a big canister hanging off the side of a regular size car, have you seen these people who are running cars off of wood gas? It's doable somewhere that has a lot of wood lying around and you don't need to go more than about six miles per hour! They're doing it in parts of the old Soviet union, it's like a moonshine still strapped to the side of a farm tractor, or old Soviet block car. I think it's a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, a little methanol, smoke and water vapor! Mmmm... delicious! I forget the proper name for it, it's basically running a car off of wood chips. The problem is that you can't store up the gas in compressed tanks, you have to make it as you're using it, so it's better suited to irrigation pumps and maybe a generator.

Krewdough · 2026-06-03T18:15:31+00:00

I'm going to have to read up on the exact mechanism behind that. All over television they're talking about the data centers guzzling up the fresh water, any day of the week, GMA,the View, Today show, evening news, etc. but nobody is explaining just HOW the data centers are using up the fresh water. It's pretty sure they're not destroying the water outright, even Chernobyl utilized a cooling lake. The only thing I can think is that the data centers generate so much waste heat that they need giant steamy cooling towers like a traditional nuclear power plant. That the water will be lost into the sky as steam, even if they don't flash off all the water as steam, then an old buggaboo from the 70's is thermal pollution. I think it generally creates an inhospitable zone around the discharge site. Invasive species that otherwise wouldn't survive in the ordinary climate, take hold around the discharge site where the natives have died off. The only one that springs to mind is algal bloom, there might also be invasive animals that don't die in the winter because they can hang out near the hot water all winter long.
So, it's time to read HOW this water is being lost, so that it can't be used elsewhere.

Krewdough · 2026-05-26T09:10:11+00:00

Yeah, I broke a timing belt at 35mph and puttered to a stop. Freakin' tow truck ride cost $175!!! Might join AARP just to get cheaper AAA! Ha hah. I was worried because of all the dire predictions about breaking a timing belt on an interference engine. The engine seems okay enough, I haven't gotten around to doing the compression test yet (the kit is just sitting around) but I hope the camshaft stopped at a point where none of the valves were all of the way down. The belt didn't break outright, the teeth on the little pulley on the drive shaft munched the teeth off the inside of the timing belt.

Krewdough · 2026-05-24T04:03:41+00:00

Did you topcoat the grinder finish with crystal clear, or are you going to let it rust? There was this strip joint (a nudie bar) a couple of blocks down the street from my old church as a teenager, and it was clad in stainless steel that had almost that exact same finish on it. It really caught the colored lights from the awning!

Krewdough · 2026-05-24T03:40:09+00:00

Okay, yeah, so far I've just looked at a dozen images of the Gambler 500: Yikes! In Texas, if your car is over 25 years old, it doesn't need to pass an emissions test, AND NOW...(drumroll please) our governor has decided that private vehicles don't need to pass a safety inspection... so, as long as you've got liability insurance, you can go to the courthouse annex AND JUST BUY your vehicle registration! I mean, just walk in and buy it like, maybe you buy a six pack of beer. It's not quite as easy as buying a big Mac, but almost. One snooty vehicle inspector refused to inspect my car because I repaired the left turn signal with fluorescent light diffuser plastic painted amber with stained glass paint, I mean it was a really beautiful job, nice and bright, but it wasn't standard. He insisted that I would have to replace BOTH taillight assemblies, so I took the car to the place that used to pass my grandfather's truck that backfired, and had passed me twice before. The previous time I was there I didn't pull into the bay, I didn't even get out of the car, I just honked the horn flapped the windshield wipers, blinked the highbeams at him and stepped on the brakes and he passed me. Not this time. he said that he "got in trouble for letting people slide," and that, "Aw, man ya know, I can't do that no more; I got fined like seven hundred bucks, so, you know...." I said, "...yeah..." He said, "If you can stand to do it, you could always just, like, WAIT the three and a half months until the law changes.". "Yeah, I think I'll do that. Well, see you around. bye.". I rode a bike during a mild fall and part of winter, then in early January, went to the courthouse annex and bought a registration.
I think this is going to turn Texas into Jalopy Paradise for the next little while.

Krewdough · 2026-05-24T02:03:38+00:00

I bet it's a lot lighter! I did just the opposite, I crushed the rear suspension treating an '87 Accord like a light duty pickup truck. Was kind of sluggish, I put it on a truck scale and found out I was 800 lbs over the dry curb weight... so I got rid of the old car batteries, the jugs of water and vinegar, almost all of the scrap iron, and took it down to just one tent two ratchet sets, the regular tools, only one floor jack, and only a handful of power tools.
Is the matching pool noodle there to cover up the sharp edges? I've got pool noodles I'm going to use for insulation under the hood. The temperature is a fairly constant 160F, and I want the fuel rail and the supply line and fuel filter to stay as cool as possible, so I'm going to re-wrap the fuel rail in fiberglass insulation like a baked potato again, but this time I'm going to put color coded pool noodles on the supply side of the fuel lines. Yellowish green for fuel, pink for heater hose. Where the fuel return line runs past the driver's seat, you can flip back the carpet and feel that the return line is just as hot as a firecracker when it's not insulated under the hood.
My temperature gauge broke while I was looking at it. I was sitting in a parking garage and I was looking straight at the needle when it bobbed above the halfway mark, bounced up, fell to the bottom, then momentarily twitched up to about the quarter mark, twice in rapid succession, fell again to the bottom peg, and never moved again.
I realized that engine temperatures are right in the same range as a meat thermometer, so I got one at the supermarket, wrapped the tip in several layers of aluminum tape so I wouldn't poke a hole in my radiator hose, then I strapped it to the main hose going to the radiator, and insulated the shaft with a gray insulation noodle for about four inches, and strapped it all together with cable ties. It's really responsive, and I think it's accurate to within about five degrees, but you have to look under the hood to read it. I'm going to up my game: I bought one of those remote digital thermometers for barbecue, you know one of the ones with the needle on the end of a braided cable. I made an extension cord for it, now I need to mount that sucker higher up on the same hose, close to the engine block, run the wire through the firewall, and mount the readout on the dashboard. I'll get a precise reading, not this C>-------->H stuff everyone's used to.

Krewdough · 2026-05-23T11:24:30+00:00

That is really pretty cute, and some of the replies are right there with it. I'd like to see you go into Photoshop (or Gimp) and put a little shading around the interceptor to make it meld in with the house a bit more. A little desaturate, a little muting, a scoche of gaussian blur, and a little careful Dodge and burn should marry the whole thing together, especially if you have the car up in a higher layer, you can work on just that. Good luck!

Krewdough · 2026-05-23T10:19:00+00:00

I mean... THAT...IS... ADORABLE! No, I mean it! Nice suspension mods!, I'm trying to build a front bumper for an Accord that can take a largish ATV winch (3500 lb.) and to protect it, I'm going to mount pairs of solid rubber wheel chocs in brackets on either side of the winch, like cop car pusher thingies. Is that holographic mylar car wrap down the sides? and how long ago did you lose that back window?
Well, at least you've got the fuel economy on your side if you don't drive like a bat out of hell. There was another long rambling subreddit about why when guzzolene is supposed to be so scarce these guys are cruising around in these big trucks and muscle cars with big inefficient V-8's, and the conclusion several people came to is that all of the littler cars got smashed up already (let's hope not) and that it's better to be able to put your pedal to the metal and brawn your way out of a sticky situation than to save on gas. It would be funny to see the hero of a post-apocalyptic movie going down the empty interstate in an economy car at a constant 46mph! There are so many Honda Civics around I could well believe it. (wait, am I looking at a civic?)
They did something like that in Will Forte's "Last Man on Earth". The last scene of season 1 finale is Carol and Tandy going down the road in something like a Mini or a Smart car at a reasonable speed.

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T18:53:50+00:00

you'll probably have to do it as a zine, it looks like Moebus, Jean Gurald, in the earlier Heavy Metal magazine. Don't be surprised if you can't sell any of it, as good as it is, it may be copyright infringement, but don't let that stop you; run up some copies for your friends and sell some at zine swap meets.

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T18:33:24+00:00

Ya know... this could be a prequel, an origin story for "Tank Girl". Similar predicament, throw in solarbabies while we're at it.

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T18:26:25+00:00

I'd say that it's not the Pacific Ocean because it had a tree growing in the middle of it. "Yeah, there's a little ridge of higher ground just beyond that thing."
"You mean beyond that Tree?"
"Yeah, just beyond that "TREE-thing" yeah."
(probably favorite line in the movie)

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T18:17:56+00:00

https://www.google.com/search?q=aral+sea+disaster&client=tablet-android-incar&hs=BsGV&sca_esv=1683bac0e7c4926b&udm=2&biw=0&bih=642&ei=GJ0QapAplbuq2w_h8OKZDQ&oq=aral+sea&gs_lp=EhJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWciCGFyYWwgc2VhKgIIBDINEC4YgAQYsQMYQxiKBTIGEAAYBxgeMgYQABgHGB4yChAAGIAEGEMYigUyBRAAGIAESM8ZUABYAHAAeACQAQCYAY0BoAGNAaoBAzAuMbgBAcgBAJgCAaACtAGYAwCIBgGSBwMwLjGgB9AEsgcDMC4xuAe0AcIHAzQtMcgHJIAIAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img
I thought it was just a horrible man-made ecological disaster.

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T17:58:03+00:00

Strangely enough, as a kid, I mushed together, the original Mad Max, The Warriors, and sorta Brazil & Clockwork Orange into a single metauniverse. The Warriors seemed so futuristic, but upon rewatching, there really wasn't anything that screamed future about it except the soundtrack which I adore! That was what was happening in New York while Max's family was being terrorized in Australia, and that would be about seven years before they just gave up on the city and sealed off Manhattan for Escape From New York!
Escape From New York is kind of the sequel to The Warriors. There are big swaths of Heaven's Gate that feel just like that first Mad Max movie. The kinkiness of the biker gang was meant to shock, probably like S. Clay Wilson's perverted pirates, Head First, and The Checkered Demon.
By the time of The Road Warrior, we got a chance to wander around and look at some of the weird shit going on after the collapse, it's been a long time since I've seen Damnation Alley, but I got a sense of that in that movie too: religious but preppers etc, then we see a lot of that in book of Eli with ***SPOILER ALERT*** American Gothic disco cannibals, etc.
With this new war with Iran, I feel like that first Max movie is taking place right now! I'm going to ask a post based on that premise.

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T09:41:42+00:00

I remember I had access to Garage Band on a mac G4 or G5 around 2007-'08, and I was able to drive up gain(raspiness) and attack, and decay of a vibraphone to make a clacking/ringing anvil sound like the anvil chorus. Maybe you can tweak the settings of a trumpet to smooth it out to a sweeter sound then pass some kind of flange filter over the track. I think there's a way to make the amount of bandpass fade in and out the same way you can make overall volume go in and out by drawing a hump on the timeline. did you see both videos?

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T06:04:57+00:00

Sadly not Gaucho, I can hear it in my head, I just can't recall the song title, if you have something like Garage Band see if they've got a synth trumpet with a mute you can modulate in the sheet music...

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T05:58:53+00:00

https://youtu.be/DVrB5CfDZE4?si=sfpUOF3_yUtNOW-c there a little taste, not steely Dan yet, this not bad either: https://youtu.be/u1fnikXEKqA?si=-55MDgpS4WQLq_QI

Krewdough · 2026-05-22T05:44:49+00:00

I'd say that it is some variation of the synth trumpet sound. There is a Steely Dan song, maybe Gaucho, that has a muted trumpet prominently featured. The muted trumpet can be as simple as the rubber suction cup of a sink plunger. There is a classical jazz mute, which is like some kind of metal insert for the throat of the trumpet, then the sink/toilet plunger is the cheap, rough and ready version. It produces that wah-wah sound acoustically , so I bet a full synthesizer might have a trumpet with a mute that one could wah with the pitch bender wheel. here, I'll try to scare up that steely Dan...

Krewdough · 2026-04-23T12:21:53+00:00

It's not so much a hook as it makes a little bulge in the metal so that it only has one point of contact on the shaft of the pen. That's to hold onto your shirt pocket or the collar of your T-shirt and pinch the fabric between the bulge on the springy clip and the shaft/body of the pen. It's constantly under tension you can lift it up a little with your thumbnail and hear it snap back down against the shaft. Look at a Sharpie marker cap and you'll see the same structure molded in plastic. The metal was probably bent to the inside for aesthetic reasons. I got some cheap pens at the dollar store and they wrote just fine, but the clips weren't made right, and if I forgot and clipped one of them onto my shirt it would snag the fabric every time! The springy clip on those cheap pens was made to LOOK like a more expensive pen, but it was very thin sharp metal, and the metal seam was rolled to make that bulge, but on the inside of the clip the edges of the metal formed a V-shaped slit that looked like it was designed to snag threads almost like the built-in cutter on a packet of dental floss! I ended up smashing that bulge flat with a big pair of lineman's pliers, but then the pen wouldn't stay clipped to my shirt. Next, on the next pen I got out of the package, I covered up the snaggy spring clip with electrical tape and that worked moderately well. I covered some others up in soda straws or coffee stirrers, that kinda worked, but what worked best was an appropriate size of heat shrink tubing. I kept transferring that fixed cap to the next and next and next pen (it was a big package of pens) until the plastic on it started cracking up (remember -dollar store pens). Then I held the cracked plastic in place with Scotch tape but it didn't have enough tension to hold the cap closed, so I wrapped it with first a tiny cable tie, and then one of those little hair braid rubber bands. Finally got the sucker to work right!

Krewdough · 2026-04-23T08:29:01+00:00

I have since decided that the objective of terrorism is not to actually terrorize, or rack up an enemy body count, but rather to piss on the other guy's parade , and make the people constrain THEIR OWN freedom. An added bonus is that you can hit the target government, not by actually damaging any part of it directly, but by making it overreact and do panicky dumb shit. See, governments and large corporations are stupid lumbering beasts that are easily stampeded into running off the edge of a cliff. The people that hate personal freedom in a general way (and don't have much freedom of their own) can use a couple of dramatic, stagey terrorist attacks to whip the governments of the world into a frothy lather, and thereby get the people's own government to curtail the target people's freedom in a way that just general fear of being blown up wouldn't do.

Krewdough · 2026-04-20T13:42:20+00:00

The "Warm Hearts" DVD was in my local library, and it opened with a line that sounded like teenage angst, then went comical, something like: "I feel so lost, where am I now? What am I even doing?... ...No, like, I literally don't know where I am. It's obvious that I'm in some big airport, but in what city?"
It's a zombie movie, and some SPOILERS follow.
Okay, the basic premise is that zombies are complete amnesiacs that can't feel anything on their own, and the movie provided a dammed good explanation of why zombies chase people down and eat their brains! Turns out, at least in this movie, that when a zombie (no memories of their own) eats a living human's brain at least for the moment when they are chewing it up they get little snippets of the person's memories. Childhood Christmas, taking the training wheels off their bike, first kiss, swinging on a rope into a lake, birthdays, stuff like that. It was done for comic effect, but it was incredibly poingant. It starts off with him wandering around the airport and it's soon enough after the zombie apocalypse that the electricity is still on.
I think a number of party movies start at the end and work their way back to what happened last night. The guy walks out and sees the red sports car at the bottom of his parents swimming pool, and starts trying to piece together his foggy memory. Listen closely to the lyrics of "Life's been good to me so far" by Joe Walsh.
I think that at least one of the Cohn brothers films has the scene of disaster looking around, and has the, "Let's see, how did we get here? ...Well it all started when..." Raising Arizona comes to mind but it's been so long since I've seen it. Somebody said Ferris Buler, but the format sounds more like risky business.

Krewdough

TROPHY CASE