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From: Jonathan:

To whom it may concern:

Saw the vehicle along PCH and went to the website. I like your message.

Very quick couple of friendly suggestions
:

1) You may want to consider linking to the Cartalk website. Click and Clack have come out in full force against the SUV as a family car for those rough-and-ready, 4-wheel-drive trips to the mall. (I'm assuming, of course, that you know about Cartalk; if not, let me know and I'll clue you in happily! You'll like them.)

2) You may want to provide links to news stories or other web resources related to the current proposed legislation to force manufacturers to reduce "greenhouse" emissions (specifically CO2, I believe) by 2009. How about a "click here to write your lawmaker." A simple House and Senate lookup by area (available from other .orgs) and/or form letter might help.

Keep up the good work.

Sincerely,

Jonathan

Jonathan:
good lord above, this is the first email to gaspig.com that doesn't say "tree hugger, left wing liberal who just wants to take away my suv"! and today i found the gaspig mobile egged, a drive by egging, a hate crime! i took some photos, re-parked the gaspig mobile and rolled into the office to find an order for stickers and your cool letter. thanks!

i'd love to link to the cartalk website. what's their url? i listen to npr quite a bit, but being technically impaired, i haven't tuned into the show. i'm glad they're not pro-suv-family-car.

there are some links to informative websites as well as some headlines that refer specifically to the legislation in california that i believe was signed into law today by the governor. perhaps i could set up the web-pages to make it easier to navigate and find current news like that. and i really like the idea of posting a button that encourages people to write their representatives... consider it done. (course being a big organization-not, our staff-me, having other tasks-dayjob, may take some time get it posted)

letters like yours are going to keep me rolling with this project... thanks a million, i really appreciate it.

Pig

OK!

So, several things here. First, Cartalk is not really about cars. They're sort of the thread that keeps everything rolling. You WILL love it. If you don't, just tune in another time and you will eventually be pretty much addicted. They're on the 2 NPR stations in the area: 89.3 and 89.9 on weekends. (I'm in a bit of a hurry at this precise moment, but I'll try to send you the exact times.) 10:00 am Saturday AND Sunday come to mind. One station's show is a week old, so you can listen to both and not hear a rerun on one weekend.

You'll be able to get to their website through the NPR.org site, and the URL MIGHT be cartalk.com. (I'll look into this for you at a later time.)

I don't even change my own oil, and I think the show is hysterical. It really isn't for motorheads. One of the guys is actually a professor at MIT. The other runs the Good News Garage in Cambridge, MA. It is hidden away in the boonies of a residential area about a mile from Harvard Square, and they've worked on my car many years ago. (When you listen to this, you'll understand why this is significant.)

I recommend the show to any intelligent person for entertainment value alone. For you, it should be required listening.

Second, a legislator lookup may be a tool that is available from another site such as GreenPeace, WWF (World Wildlife - not the wrestling folks.) You might consider checking out other "best practices" prior to investing much time. A short-term fix is simply to list local reps and their districts and their addresses.

By the way you liberal tree hugger, someday they'll be calling us foresighted visionaries. Non-renewable resources will eventually run out - I believe that's why they call them non-renewable, but what do I know? At that time, we WILL be required to switch to renewable resources, and we WILL be required to do it in a foresighted manner that doesn't pollute. So, rest assured that you're headed in the right direction. The only way you can avoid the dreaded "environmentalist" label is to make a zillion dollars in this pursuit - then they'll call you a visionary business leader, and you'll eventually get appointed to a government position to "serve" your country.

Don't say we don't have diversity in our current administration, after all, we have representatives of TWO oil companies running the show. Republicans call this pluralism.

By the way, a standard in website design is to run the menu down the left hand side. This doesn't mean YOU have to, but it is what people have come to expect. Say, a column with links and an indication of whether they're internal or external. This is just my 2 cents. The stuff on the bottom is TYPICALLY administrative stuff, such as licenses, agreements and other small print that nobody will want to read.

Again, keep up the good work, and don't anybody's criticism get you down.

- jonathan

Right on Jonathan:

i'll certainly tune into the show, maybe when this thing gets rolling, i'll call in too. yesterday i found the website through npr.org and will set up a link to cartalk. so when i tune in, i'll hear something about the work they did on your car?? thanks again for the website tips. my navigation bar is planted right at the bottom of the page. one of these days i'm gonna recruit a web guru and sort things out.

tree hugger, i couldn't agree more. one day we'll be mining old land fills to get back scraps of the stuff we're filling them with today. things will change, no doubt, but i wonder how bad things will have to get before radically new approaches become mainstream. the simple question i find myself asking people is what's so bad about conservation? what does gobbling up more stuff have to do with the pursuit of happiness? left wing liberal, how dare we even suggest using less stuff? the gaspig truck should be banned!

by the way, we're designing a smaller and cooler looking logo for window stickers. if you like it, i'd be happy to send one off to you...

Woops - no, they don't talk about my car, but they make lots of fun of Harvard Square. (My car is entirely irrelevant, here; I simply enjoy shameless name dropping.)

Confirmed: 10AM at 89.3 on both Saturday and Sunday.

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