I thought that quote was quite useful but the very successful easyrentacar company in the UK now adds £10 to the bill if you don't

oh god, i have washed a rented car. i was young! i didn't know better! it's the net, damnit, i can't possibly be the only one around.

The technical linguistics term for this is a "yogiism", although you will occaisionally see reference to the deprecated term "yogiberration."

:^)

I've never washed a rental car, but I have washed company cars, when I didn't have to.
The reason, of course, was that a clean Lincoln looks cooler than a filthy Lincoln.

Great comments, but I too have to admit washing a rented car-- outside and in! I'd driven it on 100 miles of Utah's back roads when the agreement (in fine print) said not to. The red dust on a white body was too flagrant. Sorry, Larry.

"Dance with the one that brung ya"

Darrell Royal, University of Texas football coach

"The first rule of tinkering is, 'don't throw anything away'."

-- some famous naturalist, quoted on a display in the rainforest exhibit of the National Zoo in Washington

"Never call a man a fool. Borrow money from him." -- Mark Twain

I too have washed rented cars, many times. As another poster noted, some rental agreements require you to return the car clean. And as another noted, clean cars are better to be seen in.

Hey I vacuumed out a rented mini van on account of being too embarrassed to turn it in after the the kids turned it into a pigsty while on vacation and I even washed the outside too.

People do wash rented cars.

Hey I vacuumed out a rented mini van on account of being too embarrassed to turn it in after the the kids turned it into a pigsty while on vacation and I even washed the outside too.

People do wash rented cars.

I washed a rental car - mind you that was after using it working at a contaminated site at a US Airforce Base.

Sorry about the double post but I have another comment on your quote: "Don't be in a hurry to lose".

Which is my thought on war with Iraq. If we do go to war with Iraq then the price of crude oil, pre barrel is going to shoot though the roof. Prices on oil are already up on the spectulation of war and the strike in Venezuela, because Marathon and the other integrated oil companiesa are posting profits now. I'm not an economist but I don't think people put enough weight on enegry cost and how that affects the overall market.

It will not be a short-term oil spike and that is going to hurt the the economiy just like it did back in the 80's, except that we're not going to get a glut on market like we did back in those days with all the price fixing going on. Sen. Carl Levin isn't in any position to call a congressional hearing on Marathon and other oil companies now that Republicans control the Senate. I've noticed that the SEC, FERC and EPA don't seem to work very well ever since Junior took office.

Risking changing the subject: Was Tom Friedman's column brilliant? Should the point of our foreign policy be spreading democracy by all means? I am puzzled. Possibly the aphorisms are not all that important.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/opinion/22FRIE.html

What liberals fail to recognize is that regime change in Iraq is not some distraction from the war on Al Qaeda. That is a bogus argument. And simply because oil is also at stake in Iraq doesn't make it illegitimate either. Some things are right to do, even if Big Oil benefits.

Although President Bush has cast the war in Iraq as being about disarmament — and that is legitimate — disarmament is not the most important prize there. Regime change is the prize. Regime transformation in Iraq could make a valuable contribution to the war on terrorism, whether Saddam is ousted or enticed into exile....

I once rented a washer. (I was waiting for Sears to deliver a special-order washer, and didn't want to go to the laudromat four or five times in the interim.) Does Larry have an epigram set aside that inverts my life experience in a fashion that explains why we should bomb Bagdhad against the counsel of other nations?

Friedman writes: Faltering Arab states (can) traced (their troubles) to their lack of three things: freedom, modern education and women's empowerment,(that democracy provides, right?)

So Friedman wants to impart the blessing of “freedom, modern education and women's empowerment” with whatever violent means necessary.

These people of the Middle of East are just going love our freedom via brute force. Friedman doesn’t spend enough time watching his PBS station when it comes historic documentaries in this area. The people of Vietnam never did comprehend that message of freedom very well and during the Spanish American War, Cubans didn’t get it either nor the Filipinos. People don’t change overnight and virtues of our society don’t intermix in the cement mixer of vastly different cultures without so resistance especially if we deliver it by act of violent war. We’re not going to Iraq to liberation the Jewish citizens in death camps here.

Saddam may die and Americans find large pockets of civilian resistance in our war to domain Iraq in order to bestow the blessings of democracy.

As I recall the American Indians did all end up on reservations and not that many of them ever did embrace our type of government at the time nor our Christianity all that well or as well as we Christians had hoped. Democracy is a government philosophy, a religion of sorts and “Friedman is at play in fields of the Lord”

Friedman may get to experience the vision of an Iraqi woman voting for the frist time in a free election but the same Islamic woman might not be able to work because in mostIslamic religious beliefs woman don’t work (outside the home that is), so she and her children maybe starving at home because their father died in the American Iraqi war. In fact the USA Today reported that the Iraqis aren’t looking for liberation all the much in fact most Iraqis (Moslems that they are) sided with the terrorist on 9/11. Iraqi government and Islamic reglions are vastly different that what Friedman has invisioned and will not happen of overnight. A bloody war will not help that process in fact it'll be a major inhibitor and I suspect the Iraqis are going to throw it back in our arrogant American faces.

I'm fairly sure Bush knows this but if he get Friedman to sing it well....

ALSO Brad DeLong:

The newspapers have recently reported the price per barrel of crude oil is NOW higher then its been in 8 years so I wonder why it was $2.00 and $3.00 dollars a gallon just over a year and a half ago but now its not that much or even more now at pump? That must have been a huge artificial price increase back then, so how come no economist ever explains this? Of course, I'm sure I already know the answer about the energy crisis and how much of fraud it all was but people never even seems to question how it all correlates with the Bush administration. NO one has every gotten a free pass like Bush jr has. Bush steals from us in plain sight and everybody thinks that's just fine.

There is a conspicuous lack of YogiBerra-isms in this thread, despite one promising reference, and so I will offer one. Commenting on the Yankees, the great man said:

"We have deep depth."

I went on a road-trip through France this summer with my girlfriend. Along the back roads we took through the beautiful French countryside, our rental car got splattered, endlessly splattered with poor, dead bugs. It was just too gross NOT to wash our car. In France, though, most of the car wash places are not auomatic - you pull into a little stall, plunk some coins into a machine and use this big spray gun to get your car all wet and soapy. It was actually a lot of fun!

DavidNYC,
You didn't have to go all the way to France to get a rental car splattered with poor, dead bugs. We have great places to do that here at home as well as plenty of the swell, self-serve 9 quarter car washes where you always manage to spray yourself and run out of rinse time before the soap is all the way off the car. With classic capitalist ingenuity, the machines are designed so you can't simply put in one quarter once the time has expired, but must put the full 9 in to start again. After ripping one pocket off a pair of pants feverishly digging for a quarter to extend the original time, I have learned to keep the extra quarters handy and to watch the timer. So, in the interests of preserving our balance of payments, skip France and come visit the beautiful Northern California wine country instead. I'll spring for the car wash for you.

The Friedman column, far from being brilliant, was fundamentally misguided. The Arab peoples taken as a whole do not have any secret lust for democracy. If the lid is taken off in the region, and regimes like the House of Saud fall, theocracies, and not democracies, will emerge.

You want aphorisms for America's Mid-East policy? How about, "Like father, like son."

The Friedman column, far from being brilliant, was fundamentally misguided. The Arab peoples taken as a whole do not have any secret lust for democracy. If the lid is taken off in the region, and regimes like the House of Saud fall, theocracies, and not democracies, will emerge.

You want aphorisms for America's Mid-East policy? How about, "Like father, like son."

I find the quip about washing rental cars somewhat annoying, especially in the mouth of someone like Larry Summers. The aphorism is an obvious allusion to the now commonplace observation that lack of well defined private property rights reduces incentives for the proper husbandry of resources. In many, perhaps most circumstances, this observation is both true and important. However, the extreme form of the aphorism ("Never in the history of the world ...")evokes for me the smarmy tendency of some economists and many conservative pundits to dismiss too casually and absolutely social ordering mechanisms other than the market. Moreover, as previous comments show, the aphorism also evokes the fact that too casual dismissal of non-market mechanisms is often based on even more casual empiricism. I am sure that Larry Summers doesn't generally think this way, but his choice of aphorism evokes such thinking.

I find the quip about washing rental cars somewhat annoying, especially in the mouth of someone like Larry Summers. The aphorism is an obvious allusion to the now commonplace observation that lack of well defined private property rights reduces incentives for the proper husbandry of resources. In many, perhaps most circumstances, this observation is both true and important. However, the extreme form of the aphorism ("Never in the history of the world ...")evokes for me the smarmy tendency of some economists and many conservative pundits to dismiss too casually and absolutely social ordering mechanisms other than the market. Moreover, as previous comments show, the aphorism also evokes the fact that too casual dismissal of non-market mechanisms is often based on even more casual empiricism. I am sure that Larry Summers doesn't generally think this way, but his choice of aphorism evokes such thinking.

I find the quip about washing rental cars somewhat annoying, especially in the mouth of someone like Larry Summers. The aphorism is an obvious allusion to the now commonplace observation that lack of well defined private property rights reduces incentives for the proper husbandry of resources. In many, perhaps most circumstances, this observation is both true and important. However, the extreme form of the aphorism ("Never in the history of the world ...")evokes for me the smarmy tendency of some economists and many conservative pundits to dismiss too casually and absolutely social ordering mechanisms other than the market. Moreover, as previous comments show, the aphorism also evokes the fact that too casual dismissal of non-market mechanisms is often based on even more casual empiricism. I am sure that Larry Summers doesn't generally think this way, but his choice of aphorism evokes such thinking.

I find the quip about washing rental cars somewhat annoying, especially in the mouth of someone like Larry Summers. The aphorism is an obvious allusion to the now commonplace observation that lack of well defined private property rights reduces incentives for the proper husbandry of resources. In many, perhaps most circumstances, this observation is both true and important. However, the extreme form of the aphorism ("Never in the history of the world ...")evokes for me the smarmy tendency of some economists and many conservative pundits to dismiss too casually and absolutely social ordering mechanisms other than the market. Moreover, as previous comments show, the aphorism also evokes the fact that too casual dismissal of non-market mechanisms is often based on even more casual empiricism. I am sure that Larry Summers doesn't generally think this way, but his choice of aphorism evokes such thinking.

There are many things some or many will do simply to be kind or responsible. We will gather fishing line lying in the sand along a beach, because we worry about a bird by chance being tangled. Brad DeLong will help a trash collector haul away a tree from the drive of a neighbor. On a New York subway platform someone leaves cat food each day for a cream colored subway cat. We may do many kind things not because we are owners, but because we know we are sharers in this life.

On my first trip to Australia I eventually washed the windows on the hire car I had. Not for vanity or to help the hire company, but because the decrease in visibility was making my passengers nervous. Me, I figured I could see well enough for the few days left, but that that was not a sensible bet to make.

Dave Roberts - Very funny! What's hard to believe is that the wash-machines in France are actually better than the ones you describe in CA. I think you can put just a euro or even a half-euro in at a time, and the amount of water & suds you get is pretty generous. Nine quarters? Who the hell ever thought of that? I can't believe that I've found an example the French doing capitalism better than we do. :)

Oh, on a related note: Being from NYC (and also having few occasions to drive), I've never had my car coated in bugs quite like I did in France. But oh, the wine was good!

I think maybe the aphorism should be changed to something like, "Nobody ever cahnged the oil in a rental car"...

Yes, jimbo. Nothing like a few fun-killing facts to spoil a good aphorism! ;-)

Yet another correspondent writes:

"I have washed a rented car.

"It was rented for a month for our honeymoon. We were in Colorado. It got so muddy it was a hazard and the windows were filthy. It cost about five bucks, and we were going to keep it for 2 more weeks..."