When I was a child, I would always play with those big yellow Tonka trucks in the sand. My favorite was the dump truck because you could always load it up with lots of stuff and tip it out. You could sit on it, roll it around, throw it off a tree house and it would still work. Not that there were many parts to break, considering it was just metal and plastic. It was still an impressive feat.

My parents have owned a lot of cars in their past. Our very first one in Canada was a 1991 Mercury Topaz. I remember my dad saying he bought it because my mom liked the color. It was probably the worst lemon that we could have picked.

Nonetheless, we stuck with the car for about 9 years. Through those nine years our second car kept changing. First was an old 1989 Ford Taurus station wagon. I believe that my dad was quite fond of it. He bought me a little Hotwheels car and used the touch-up paint to paint it. I don't quite remember what happened to it but I know it was gone after a few years. Then, he bought a Mazda 626.

I only remember it because it had a sunroof...that didn't work. It didn't even stick around long enough for me to remember what colour it was.

Next in line was a car that was worthy to be in our garage. It was a 1986 Volvo 240 GL Station Wagon. This car was a jewel. It was a 4 speed manual with an overdrive. From all the time we had it, I don't actually remember it breaking down. Maybe its because my dad also took good care of it but that's beside the point. This was an original creation straight from Sweden with scandinavian engineering. We took it camping and stuffed it like a pizza bun, our swiss army Volvo.

Nearing the last few years of its life, we injected a little boost. We added a rear-facing third rear seat to the back so it could fit seven people inside. It was great as kids because we would sit back there and wave to the cars behind. I'm sure police found it amusing...

All good things must come to an end and our trusty Volvo was getting pretty old. It was time then to purchase a new car.

Toyota. It's a name that's synonymous with reliability and dependability. We walked away with a used 1991 Toyota Previa LE. A fitting replacement then for our old Scandinavian beater. A big red and round bubble replaced the blocky brown brick. I clearly remember the first big outing. My grandfather had just come from Malaysia to visit us and we were going to be driving around quite a lot. One of the greatest things about the van is the dual air conditioning units in the front and back. Mounted in the roof between the passengers and driver is a large fan that blows a cool arctic gale to the usually hot passengers in the back, keeping us all comfortable.

In my opinion, this was the car that introduced North America to the technology of folding rear seats. Instead of folding down, these seats folded up and to the side of the car. By removing the middle bench seat, a clearing is created looking like I could transport a tree, roots and all.

The huge space was even able to move the earth...albeit in small pieces. We had begun the big gardening project in our new house to emulate a Japanese rock garden. In case you don't know what's involved in making a rock garden, know that it involved nothing other than lots and lots of...rocks.

No matter though. Even filled with hundreds of pounds of earth's crust, the big red bubble forged on. A year later, things were pretty much complete, but we still weren't done with it. At the same time, we were finishing up our incomplete basement by putting in drywall, light fixtures, and flooring.

This meant making frequent trips back and forth from the Orange box- Home Depot. We brought back sheets of 4x8 drywall, stacks of wood flooring...enough to build a small house. We needed a car, and the big red bubble was there.

But no, even after we finished with construction we were still not done. My brother and I had entered University and we forged a new passage through the Canadian country to transport our books and computers to and from the university. Reaching that age also meant that I was getting my G2 drivers license that allowed me drive on my own. Only now would I be able to see what this car was really capable of. The climax to our big red bubble's life had just started...

In the corners it rolled like a piece of bread and pushed through like butter. It had no grip on the limits but it was quite entertaining finding the ragged edge. I had a car that I could beat on without worry of it actually breaking. This is not your average Honda Civic nor did I expect it to be. Come winter though, nothing else could beat it for sheer fun.

I would always brag about having a rear wheel drive, mid-engined car, which it is. It was revolutionary for its time because they mounted the engine under the front seats to maximize interior space. Ensuring that it would never see the light of day, Toyota did everything possible to bullet-proof the engine. A timing chain and platinum tipped sparks plugs were part of the Kevlar. It sure worked because throughout its life, it needed nothing more than regular oil changes and a few changes of spark plugs.

Snow is the great equalizer. It will make the best cars show their dirt and the worst cars claim their glory. It all depends on what the driver can do. In our case, we decided to slide it in the snow, and boy can this car drift.

After a fresh snowfall, we would venture out at midnight before the plows were able to clear the road. The road glistened in the newly fallen powder ready to be drifted on. After getting the knack of it, we could just hang the tail out give a little throttle, and toss the car into an inertial drift to continue into the next corner. We were dancing on ice. Check out the youtube video of our Van in its prime.



Once the winter passed, our car's age had started to poke through again. The suspension crashed over bumps, clunking like a bowl of rocks. The steering felt dead and I just didn't want to drive a van anymore. We didn't need it.

It was near the end of its life that I tried to run it down. I threw it into corners, braked hard and floored it more often than I really should have. I tried to break it. After a few 'drive it like ya stole it' runs, I actually felt sorry for out big red bubble. It hadn't done anything to us. Heck, it pulled our stricken Volvo across the city in the dead of Winter. Our VOLVO.

We had almost hit 400,000 kms on the odo but new life had replaced our van before it could reach four centuries. A silver 2005 Toyota Matrix 4WD was in.

The big red bubble went through three sets of tires, one replacement muffler, a new door handle (after an enthusiastic tug to free the door from its frozen tracks), new hatch struts, a recharge of the air conditioning system and...that's about it. All the electronics still worked and it still blew cold air during the heat of summer. After ten years of ownership (18 years of life) the big red bubble had fulfilled its duty. It was made to haul people and supplies but it sure as heck did a whole lot more. Toyota, I salute you.

The use of a cell phone way back when they were invented was to simply do one function: make a call. All it had was a simple keypad, a battery pack, some electronics and you could make a call without being tethered to the wall. Yes, they were bulky but they must have been pretty simple to use. You picked up the phone, and dialed it just like you would at home.

I've had a cell phone for about one and a half years and the end of my two year contract is coming close. I've been looking around at all these fancy candybars and sliders, but I can't seem to decide which one I want.

Nowadays there's so many features in our phones that even Bill Gates would have trouble using them. To start at the bottom, there's a phonebook that can store more friends numbers than you would ever have on Facebook. Then you have an organizer to remind you of your impending doom and games so you can waste your life in front of a little screen.

Don't even think that I've named everything that you can stuff into your phone. Everyone has stuffed a camera into theirs and not having one is just unreal. Heck, Nokia's N95 has more megapixels than my digital camera.

Apple has managed to fit an iPod into their phone, or is it a phone into an iPod? I could keep rambling on and on about all the 'features' of new phones but then you'd look at me and ask where I came from, Mars?

Phones should have three things:
1. A screen you can see in direct sunlight
2. A comfortable keypad
3. Organizer and phonebook

Every other feature I consider as fluff. Take the iPhone for example. I met a guy who had one and being a techie aficionado, I had to check it out. In short, I was dissapointed. It was big, heavy and worst of all, uncomfortable to use.

I tried holding it up to my ear just to make a call, but it felt like I was holding a calculator to make a call. Plus, the ultra-smooth shell of the phone made it feel like it was about to slip out of my hands at any moment, not the feeling you want to have while walking along the street. In addition, the much touted touch keypad was a bane to use while text messaging, something I do quite often.

On the iPhone of course, you can store pictures, play music, surf the web, and all that jazz, but it begs the question...why?

Why do you need to check Facebook on your little phone? Why do you need to look at pictures of your friends wiping out on ice? Thanks to society, we need to be connected to the outside world at every moment of our life.

My answer to all of that? Just get a phone that makes calls and text messages well. You don't need all the other things because standalone cameras have superior picture quality and surfing the net on a laptop is 10 times better than on a phone,  I guarantee.

So what does this leave me with? If I get a phone with none of the extraneous features, I'll be back in the days of the neanderthal. Yet, If I get one with just one of the things I need, the phone will inevitably contain more than I would ever use. I guess my only answer is, let my contract run dry and borrow my friend's phones. Like, duh...