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The Blue Beetle was not a clown car," I said severely. "It was a machine of justice.
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Jim Butcher (Skin Game (The Dresden Files, #15))
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I slammed the doors open a little harder than I needed to, stalked out to the Blue Beetle, and drove away with all the raging power the ancient four-cylinder engine should muster. Behold the angry wizard puttputt-putting away.
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Jim Butcher (Summer Knight (The Dresden Files, #4))
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Better watch out said a second voice from somewhere under the Beetle. Don't park those two kraut cars too close together; it's springtime, and they might decide to mate. then Charlie'll be stuck with a garage full of little orange safety cones
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Mercedes Lackey
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The Blue Beetle was not a clown car,” I said severely. “It was a machine of justice.
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Jim Butcher (Skin Game (The Dresden Files, #15))
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How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore’s law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline. What
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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For some reason, she didn't want to take the motorcycle, so that left my car, the ever trusty (almost always) Blue Beetle, in old-school VW Bug that had seen me through one nasty scrape after another. More than once, it had been pounded badly, but always it had risen to do battle once more – if by battle one means driving somewhere at a sedate speed, without much acceleration and only middling gas mileage.
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Jim Butcher (Side Jobs (The Dresden Files, #12.5))
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I stopped looking at the cars after the first few miles. Once I started to see past the exteriors, I saw what lay inside some of them and felt the urge to sprint to the nearest freeway exit. Some people had tried to outrun The Plague by leaving town. They hadn't realized the illness could still find them in their cars, and now the 405 was one of the largest graveyards in the world. I thought for a moment about all of the other cities across the globe that probably had scenes just like this. My eyes stung, wondering if my mother, my dad, or any of my friends were in similar graveyards.
I made the mistake of glancing into an overturned Volkswagen Beetle as I passed and saw a pair of legs clad in jeans and white Jack Purcell sneakers in the shadows of the car. They reminded me of Sarah's shoes. The man who laced those up that morning hadn't realized he wouldn't be taking them off again.
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Kirby Howell (Autumn in the City of Angels (Autumn, #1))
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Then the snowshoer explained how he never drove anywhere in the beetle without what he called an emergency novel. If I drive off the road and am lying upside down in a ditch, unable to move my legs or get out of the car, I want to have something good to read.
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift
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John Irving
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It needed a child, Stephen thought, succumbing to the inevitable. Kate would not be aware of the car half a mile behind, or of the wood’s perimeters and all that lay beyond them—roads, opinions, government. The wood, this spider rotating on its thread, this beetle lumbering over blades of grass, would be all, the moment would be everything. He needed her good influence, her lessons in celebrating the specific, how to fill the present and be filled by it to the point where identity faded to nothing. He was always partly somewhere else, never quite paying attention, never wholly serious. Wasn’t that Nietzsche’s idea of true maturity, to attain the seriousness of a child at play?
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Ian McEwan (The Child in Time)
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This particular Sunday, the Sunday I was hurled from a moving car, started out like any other Sunday. My mother woke me up, made me porridge for breakfast. I took my bath while she dressed my baby brother Andrew, who was nine months old. Then we went out to the driveway, but once we were finally all strapped in and ready to go, the car wouldn’t start. My mom had this ancient, broken-down, bright-tangerine Volkswagen Beetle that she picked up for next to nothing. The reason she got it for next to nothing was because it was always breaking down. To this day I hate secondhand cars. Almost everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life I can trace back to a secondhand car. Secondhand cars made me get detention for being late for school. Secondhand cars left us hitchhiking on the side of the freeway. A secondhand car was also the reason my mom got married. If it hadn’t been for the Volkswagen that didn’t work, we never would have looked for the mechanic who became the husband who became the stepfather who became the man who tortured us for years and put a bullet in the back of my mother’s head—I’ll take the new car with the warranty every time.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood)
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THE HEATHMAN IS NESTLED in the heart of downtown Portland. Its impressive brown stone edifice was completed just in time for the crash of the late 1920s. José, Travis, and I are traveling in my Beetle, and Kate is in her CLK, since we can’t all fit in my car. Travis is José’s friend and gopher, here to help out with the lighting. Kate has managed to acquire the use of a room at the Heathman free of charge for the morning in exchange for a credit in the article. When she explains at reception that we’re here to photograph Christian Grey, CEO, we are instantly upgraded to a suite. Just a regular-sized suite, however, as apparently Mr. Grey is already occupying the largest one in the building. An over-keen marketing executive shows us up to the suite—he’s terribly young and very nervous for some reason. I suspect Kate’s beauty and commanding manner disarm him, because he’s putty in her hands. The rooms are elegant, understated, and opulently furnished.
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E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, #1))
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Small, hunched, dark-haired, he scuttled from the car. A beetle of a man.
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Lucie McKnight Hardy (Water Shall Refuse Them)
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He drives us back to mine in his new car, a black Beetle he seems very pleased with.
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Eliza Clark (Boy Parts)
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the car into gear and drives through the gate. Dede closes the gate behind them, taking another look across the street and seeing nothing. “That’s the thing, though,” she says when she reenters the car. “He wasn’t walking. He was just watching us. I mean, I think. With the headlights, I couldn’t really see. It could just be my eyes playing tricks.” Annie pulls the Beetle onto the grass next to the massive detached garage, hidden from sight. She lets out a sigh. “Good to be home,” she says. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like—” “Would you shut up?” As they walk toward the back entrance, they see the ladder the hot tool-belt guy used yesterday, broken down and lying in the grass. “Noah was cute,” Annie says. “Was he? Was he cute?” Dede throws another elbow. “Now, now, dearest, I only have eyes for you.
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James Patterson (The Murder House)
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Now I don’t know how many people like to drive a Beetle at that kind of speed (on purpose) but I know I’d rather go down Brickmaker’s Kloof on a bicycle with no brakes! Driving any car at that speed in anything other than an expensive German luxury car on a long, straight autobahn is enough of a risk (let alone the risk of hitting anything) – but if you try that with a Beetle and add a light crosswind, factor in some rubber peeling off your tire, and you’ll more than likely find yourself dancing alone in a dark corner without any music.
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Christina Engela (Bugspray)
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Imagine trying to jerry-rig a Volkswagen Beetle to travel at speeds of 150 miles per hour. In 1933, Adolf Hitler commissioned Dr. Ferdinand Porsche to develop a cheap car that could get 40 miles per gallon of gas and provide a reliable form of transportation for the average German family. The result was the VW Beetle. This history, Hitler’s plan, places constraints on the ways we can modify the Beetle today; the engineering can be tweaked only so far before major problems arise and the car reaches its limit. In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed world—one with no history—we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.
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Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body)
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Most people try to find meaning in life by building something that's not just here today and gone tomorrow. We strive to overcomeour sense of finiteness by producingsomething. Some people build equity and get a great sense of power and success by looking at their house and thinkingthrough their portfolio. Somebuild professional reputations throughskilland hard work and get a sense of power and success from their heavy responsibilities and the numbersof people that look to them for leadership. Some people build artistic expressions and exalt in what they have created. Some,moresimply, build hobbies and collections (of coins or beetles or buttons) and gain a senseof superiority from the size of their collection or the richness of their garden or the shine of their car or the wonders of their new Apple computer. The falseteachers in 2 Peter lined their pockets with money (2:14–16); elevated themselves aboveauthority (2:10), built a reputation as astute interpreters of Paul's hard letters (3:16;2:18),and gave themselves to sexual licentiousness. Peter's response to us and themisthis: it'sgoing to be burned up.
The implication of verse 11is this: the only things that are going to survive the fires of judgment on this earth are the expressionsof holiness and godliness. I
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John Piper
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The Beetle’s body, whether it be a ’49 split or a ’73 Jeans Bug, or an ‘03 Mexican, was originally conceived in the mid 1930’s. This is evident in it’s body styling which aside from it’s rear engine layout and absence of front radiator (or radiator!) grille, is very similar to other cars of the same period. Believe it or not, in those days streamlining was a hot new concept, kind of like how wireless networking is today with computing.
The only problem was, in the beginning they didn’t seem to realize that streamlining ought to be applied sideways as well as longitudinally!
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Christina Engela (Bugspray)
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Beetles were made from 1938, in pre-war Nazi controlled Germany. The few actual civilian cars that were produced were used as staff cars and propaganda tools. It is a well known fact that not one of the original civilian orders for the cars were ever fulfilled, at least until the 1960’s when a law suit brought about a settlement for a small number of successful claimants.
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Christina Engela (Bugspray)
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Oval Window, 1953 - 1957
In 1953 came the first major changes in Beetle styling. Rear view was increasingly a problem and so the boys in Wolfsburg cut out the centre post and made the split into an oval. Some callous butchers are known to have manually cut the center post of the split rear window out either to improve rear visibility or to make their cars look newer!
This window stayed in vogue until 1958 with the first small square rear window model.
Note that the rear bonnet was the same as the Split, except for minor changes such as handle and ‘popes nose’ designs. Taillights are larger and also oval shaped. Outer lens is GLASS, not plastic and has a distinctive honeycomb pattern. These Bugs also came with pop-up (semaphore) indicators in the b-pillars.
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Christina Engela (Bugspray)
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Aerodynamically there isn’t much you can do to enhance your Beetle’s handling. The Porsche style whale tale – um, tail is just that – a load of nonsense. It does no aerodynamic spoiling at all except to spoil your car ergonomically, and quite frankly, it looks like crap. It goes with blue LED lights under the car and (yuk) fur on the dashboard.
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Christina Engela (Bugspray)
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Beetle-black iron hissed and popped and spouted steam. Guards marched atop the train cars, watchful. One sang a war song in Talbeg Kai couldn’t follow. Demon ice melted and steamed from the train, and tortured metal creaked. One car hadn’t made the journey intact: an enormous claw had torn its side open, and greenish fluid leaked from within. Blood and dried rainbows streaked the steel. Station hands swarmed the train, tossing nets of grounding wire over the hulk, binding it back into this world after its journey through another.
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Max Gladstone (The Ruin of Angels (Craft Sequence, #6))
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When Chief Justice John Roberts was an advocate, he once wrote that determining the “best” technology for controlling air pollution is like asking people to pick the “best” car: Mario Andretti may select a Ferrari; a college student a Volkswagen Beetle; a family of six a mini-van. A Minnesotan’s choice will doubtless have four-wheel drive; a Floridian’s might well be a convertible. The choices would turn on how the decisionmaker weighed competing priorities such as cost, mileage, safety, cargo space, speed, handling, and so on. I have shared this passage with lawyers all over the world. “Brilliant,” exclaim some. “Look how he gets his point across,” say others. But they all agree on one thing: “Writing like that is an art.” This book will reveal the craft behind that art. I am convinced that if you learn why the best advocates write the way they do, you can import those same techniques into your own work.
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Ross Guberman (Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation's Top Advocates)
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His mother died when he was in junior high, a single car crash on her way home from work after a shortcut through the local pub. By the time the firetrucks arrived with the jaws of life, her pale blue Volkswagen Beetle had fervently fucked a large oak tree, the orgasm of twisted metal, blood, and Mom body parts shot in a load along the edge of the road and into the brush.
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Rebecca Rowland (The Rack: Stories Inspired By Vintage Horror Paperbacks)
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a car park and the blue bit’s the water, it’s for the shark.
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Lisette Starr (Martin Makes a Dinosaur Cake (Red Beetle Children's Picture Books Ages 3-8))
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We see the mortal form of the immortal healer climbing along the jutting cornice of some cliff, in search for the simples of life; and as the zephyrs waft his long ashen locks around his furrowed brow, his trembling hand clutches some rugged crag, more perhaps from joy than fear. And so, as we now open the works of Aleister Crowley, we are filled with an exhilarating chain of pangs; mortal-like we are never sated, and as our lips taste the nectar of true poetry we tremblingly clutch the crags of Parnassus in search for the Asphodel of Love, Wisdom, and Beauty. Here, as we turn some beetling height, the dying rays of the Swinburnian sun sink, those rays that ruffled the vestal purity of the clouds to the rosy blush of a lover’s kiss, and in the departing light we again find the mystic Trinity midst the hellebore and thistles of existence, enthroned, eternal. The sun sinks, and the last notes of the nightingale die into the stillness of falling night. The emerald sky like the robe of some car-borne Astarté, slashed with an infinite orange and red, fades into the sombre garment of night; and above silently breaks a primal sea gemmed with all the colours of the opal, deepening into a limitless amethyst, darkens, and the sun goes out. The spangled pall of Night is drawn, and the lull of death is o’er us; but no, hark! the distant boom of a beetle is carried across the still glowing welkin, it is the signal drum announcing the marriage of Night and Day. The crescent moon rises, diaphanous and fair, and the world wakes to a chant.
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J.F.C. Fuller (The Star in the West; A Critical Essay Upon the Works of Aleister Crowley)
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You don’t need to be a hippie to own a Volkswagen campervan. VW camper soon became just as well known for its funky yet functional design, as well as a fashion statement.
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Auto Classics Trade
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It was my father's car, he bought the car the same time he bought this house, the house was my mothers and father's summer house, soon after that my father had a heart attack in the garden and died while my mother was doing the dishes, my father loved gardening he was working on the same spot you are digging in the garden, I was at the beach with the new beetle car that my father bought for me for my birthday when I returned home I saw the ambulance outside, my mother tried frantically to resuscitate him but to no avail twenty years later my mother died, and here I am alone and waiting to die myself
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Kenan Hudaverdi (Nazar: “Self-Fulling Prophecy Realized”)
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RJ: What advice would you give to a young woman today? MB: Open your own bank account. EP: Learn how to change a car tire.
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Rachel Joyce (Miss Benson's Beetle)
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she says something nasty.’ ‘Well, not nasty, exactly,’ Gertie said. ‘More sly, isn’t it?’ Celeste nodded. ‘Like the time she said that you were looking well.’ Evie gave a mad sort of laugh. ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘She said I suited the extra weight I’d put on.’ ‘And the time she admired my dress,’ Gertie said, ‘and then went on to say that she wished they’d come in petite so that she could have one too.’ Celeste gave a knowing smile. ‘I don’t think it’s natural to be as skinny as Simone,’ she said. ‘No,’ Evie said. ‘Didn’t she once say that she hated chocolate? How can you trust anyone who doesn’t like chocolate? It’s not natural, is it?’ ‘It certainly isn’t,’ Celeste said, enjoying the jovial mood between them and wishing it could be like this more often. ‘And if she says my fingernails look like a man’s one more time, I swear I’m going to scream,’ Gertie said. The sisters laughed together before getting out of the car. Oak House was on the edge of a pretty village in what was known as ‘High Suffolk’ – the area to the north-west of the county famous for its rolling countryside. The house itself wasn’t attractive. Or at least it wasn’t attractive to Celeste, who was suspicious of any architecture that came after the Arts and Crafts movement – which this one certainly had. She still found it hard to understand how her father could have bought a mock-Tudor house when he had lived in a bona fide medieval home for so many years. She looked up at its black and white gable and couldn’t help wincing at such modernity. It was the same inside, too, with neatly plastered walls and floors that neither sloped nor squeaked. But, then again, Oak House had never known damp or deathwatch beetle and there was never the slightest chance of being cold in the fully insulated rooms with their central heating. ‘God, I’d rather spend an afternoon with Esther Martin,’ Gertie said as they approached the front door, which sheltered in a neat little porch where Simone had placed a pot of begonias. Celeste didn’t like begonias. Mainly because they weren’t roses. ‘I popped my head in to see if Esther was all right this morning and she nearly bit it off,’ Celeste said. ‘I’ve given up on her,’ Gertie said. ‘I’ve tried – I’ve really tried to be nice, but she is the rudest person I’ve ever met.’ Evie sighed. ‘You can’t blame her
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Victoria Connelly (The Rose Girls)
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(VW Beetles, as I’ve noted, seemed to be the car of choice for serial killers
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John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit (Mindhunter #1))