Ray and Tom Magliozzi, MIT 1999 Commencement Address [video] | Hacker News Reader

Ray and Tom Magliozzi, MIT 1999 Commencement Address [video]

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130 pointsstefanpie86 comments

Grew up listening to Car Talk with my dad.

When I was 19 I attended summer school in Cambridge, and right in Harvard Square there was a window on the top of a building painted “Dewey, Cheetum, and Howe”. Fans will recognize this as the name of their fictional lawyers in the credits. I tailgated someone leaving, took the elevator up and knocked on the door.

A middle-aged woman answered, and I gee-golly’ly asked if this was Car Talk. She—Louie “Cronan the Barbarian”—said “Yes!” and invited me in.

She generously showed me around, apologizing that Tom and Ray weren’t in at the moment—my guess was Ray was at the garage, and Tom was exploring the cafe standards of the greater Boston area. She smiled.

On my way out she asked if I liked ice cream and pointed to a Ben and Jerry’s branded freezer right at the entrance. “They just come by and refill this for free, if you ever want some, you’re always welcome to come by, say hi and grab yourself a pint.”

I went back three times that summer. Never did meet Tom (RIP) or Ray, but sure got some good ice cream, and some welcome comfort as an awkward kid in a big new city for the first time.

I still look forward to their twice/weekly reruns.

I have similar childhood memories about Garrison Keillor/APHC..

I just never got to encounter them almost 1:1 like that.

Of all the people to get tagged in the MeToo, Garrison would not have been on my list of "that makes sense". But then I realized I knew nothing about the man, and just made that assumption based on his APHC character.

I cant tell if he was a serial abuser, an aspie who was poor at reading the room, or just someone who was a weirdo. All are plausible and its even possible more than one is true.

That window was dead center of HS, right above Curious George. The entrance to my work was right across Brattle.

>I still look forward to their twice/weekly reruns.

Boy that last episode after Tom died was the most heartbreaking and funny episode ever. I only wish I had brotherly love like that.

Ray said something like "When Tom said he didn't remember last week's puzzler, he really didn't, that he had Alzheimers..." man, that got me, Ray laughing and crying at the same time.

Did you meet Heywood Yabuzzoff, at least?

I hear Pikop Andropov is driving for Uber now

Warren Peace is working on his Dostoevsky bio

Normally I wouldn't bother being this pedantic, but since I'm watching the BBC adaptation of War and Peace right now (with no Russian actors, AFAICT):

That was Tolstoy.

I still have my Car Talk fuzzy dice and t-shirt. :)

Also grew up listening with my parents. I'm pretty sure their show is one of the reasons I pursued automotive repair as a hobby.

I took the elevator up around 2000 or so but never had the nerve to knock. Now I wish I did.

For those who may not know, Tom and Ray are mechanics who were the hosts of the Car Talk radio show that aired on NPR from 1987 to 2012 (edited past episodes are still aired online weekly I think). The radio show would take listener calls about their car problems, and Tom and Ray would help them solve these issues. However, that is a very reductive description that does not capture the unique explosive humor, rapport, and varied conversations and observations about the minutiae of everyday life and the human condition.

The HN crowd may enjoy the weekly puzzlers that are presented every week ranging from car puzzles, logic / mathematics puzzles, and historic folkloric puzzles.

Oh, my childhood. Saturdays were for helping Dad clean the garage, build a piece of woodworking, or change the oil in one of the cars... while listening to car talk! In the garage we had this old 80s era radio/tape player (I was a kid in the mid 90s) and I remember jiggling the tuner to get the channel to come in clear.

HA! We're back, it's Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers here to talk about Cars, Car repair, AN-DA, the new Puzzler.

Damn, I'm getting choked up typing this out.

One of the best moments in car talk was when Astronaut John Grunsfeld called in to complain about how his government vehicle, a 'Rockewell van kind of thing' was running. Ray and Tom finally caught on when Grunsfeld admitted he was going 17K MPH while a couple hundred miles north of Hawaii. ;)

The banter between them included memories of an unpaid bill and references to the 'small technical institute' nearby ("Oh, that place!").

Great stuff all around. https://youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8

That was a delight to listen to. Thanks for sharing! (And highly recommend others spend the 5 minutes...)

My favorite puzzler:

100 prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned. And each pirate has twelve coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch which the prisoner may either leave as it is or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are forced to wear either a red had or a blue hat. They can see all the other prisoner’s hats, but not their own. Meanwhile a six digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse. Then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn’t know that a priate doesn’t know product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that n+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what color his hat is. What is the solution to this puzzle?

This was played on the July 18, 2009 edition of Car Talk on NPR and attributed only to “Alan”. If you download the podcast, the puzzler starts at the 36:00 minute mark.

I have been known to repeat one of theirs to younger people, "when is 90 greater than 100?" with the answer being "on a microwave". Maybe this one wasn't a puzzler, but something definitely heard on Car Talk. Beyond the puzzlers, their other jokes were top class dad jokes.

huh… It never would have occurred to me to enter numbers on a microwave this way! But it works, at least on mine.

My first reaction to the question was "When they're both negative…)

Are you saying you would never enter 100 for 1 minute?

But I'm pretty sure this is the meaning of it. Sort of like there are 10 types of people in the world...those that do, and those that don't

They would never have typed 90 seconds instead of 1:30.

That's an assumption on your part, while it might just happen to be true.

Typing 130 vs 90 is 3 button presses vs 2, so the converse would be why type 100 when you could type 60. You can either be a seconds person or a minutes person.

Edit: they entire number entry thing for microwaves is just weird. 60 => 1minute. 100 => 1 minute. 120 => 1minute 20 seconds. Essentially, any 2 digit number is always interpreted as seconds. Which makes me wonder if the Car Talk question wasn't actually "when is 99 > 100"

It's not an assumption, it's what karmajunkie said two post up.

"It never would have occurred to me to enter numbers on a microwave this way"

in what way? entering 90 for 1 minute 30, or for entering 100 for 1 minute vs 60?

It's not clear, and you're not helping

lol this is not the comment of mine i would have expected to generate controversy…

for the record, i meant entering 90 instead of 130. my entire life i’ve converted to min/sec.

> Typing 130 vs 90 is 3 button presses vs 2

For me, it’s not about the difference in number of button presses. I switch between “seconds” and “minutes” depending on the situation. (Sometimes the instructions for frozen food are in seconds. Sometimes they’re in minutes and seconds. But this is just one reason why I might switch between two. There are others.)

Also, number of button presses varies depending on the microwave (e.g. express cooking).

One could even argue that pressing the same +30 second button 3 times is simpler than moving your finger to press 2 buttons for 90 seconds.

(Personally, I tend to press a single “1” for express cooking 1 minute and then click the +30 second button to get 90 seconds. But again, not always).

I find it interesting in how the "essentially" same keypad can be used in so many different ways. I've never once used the +30 second button, nor any of the other presets. Even before learning what is used in microwave popcorn, I've never used the popcorn preset button as they always scorched the popcorn. When I do use the microwave, I rarely use it at full power and pretty much always lower it 80% and use it for longer.

I seriously just use the "add 30" button for everything.

Link to episode: https://www.npr.org/2009/07/18/106774140/car-talk-0929-july-...

As a grad student at MIT in the mid 90s, I took my elderly Toyota to Ray's garage to get worked on several times. I was amazed to find out that often as not Ray would be the one working on my car. He was as funny in person as on the show and was talented at figuring out the least expensive way to get the old blue thing back on the road (I think he remembered what it was like to be a grad student financially speaking :).

Really appreciated that he was still providing that service. When I graduated, I celebrated by getting the Blue Plate special done - where they went over the vehicle and enumerated all the work you needed done, ought to get done, and could do if you really wanted to. The only mechanics I've ever really trusted to go on that sort of fishing expedition...

They were the ultimate example of how one can make any topic engaging.

I bet a pretty significant part of their listener base had little interest in learning to repair cars. But it didn’t matter. They were so engaging, hilarious, and you could sense the strong brotherly love.

I also read once that they had started a thing in their garage where you could bring your car and they’d walk you through fixing it and you could do it yourself with their tools. So you paid more to rent the space and tools. Seems like a dream to me and the HN crowd I’m sure. Like a car based maker space.

The shop was called "Hacker's Haven": https://web.archive.org/web/20141206061027/http://www.goodne...

Wow, what a perfect name...

Totally, people who didn't even have or work on cars would listen too

I still remember the time I found Car Talk (late 80s?): I was driving from Arlington MA to Lexington with the radio on NPR, mindlessly listening to some call-in talk show. A caller was asking why there was blue smoke coming out of his car's tailpipe: The smartass who answered said that was exactly what you would expect from red shift.

It was such a high-level quip that it woke me out of my driving trance. "Who are these guys?"

Several years later in grad school, I used the Good News Garage (which was about a mile from the MIT campus?) to replace a radiator. It was a little odd to be talking to Ray in person because I had grown used to him being only a voice. Nevertheless, he was a good enough guy.

Great show, I could not care less about car maintenance back when I listened to this show religiously. Years later, my kids loved Pixar's "Cars" and what a delight to see (hear I guess) them make a cameo.

That was such a great sort of "insider" thing with Cars. I loved that cameo.

I just love that whole movie. I know it's not that highly regarded but we all have a movie like that it seems like. Every time we are on a road trip, and we drive by a truck stop with all those trucks stopped at night, I always say "Look at all those sleeping trucks" in my best John Ratzenberger, it's like I can't help it.

Now I'm going to have to rewatch it. I'm class of '99, in the crowd in that video, and my son watched the Cars movie countless times and I missed the cameo because he always watches the dubbed version (we're Dutch).

I grew up listening to these guys with my dad on the radio. They called themselves Click and Clack. I never knew when I was a kid that I’d be able to watch these guys live streamed from my internship at the MIT Media Lab years later.

Don't drive like my brother

Don't drive like my brother!

If there was ever a model to use for podcasting, these guys would be it!

Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers - which if you're a car or mechanical person at all is even funnier.

This was my grad school commencement. One thing that really stuck out was how many folks I knew where either themselves or their families complained about the Car Talk guys giving commencement instead of some head of state or what have you. Ray and Tom’s speech was thoroughly entertaining and humble.

Funny. I was at that graduation because my little brother was class of '99. My primary memory was that Tom and Ray were nearly incomprehensible over the PA system. At least from where I was sitting. I heard a lot of their trademarked guffawing but not much else.

As I head into my mid-60s I can look back on a pretty good life. Regardless of whatever else I did, for me my all-time greatest achievement was getting on Car Talk and posing my question - a real-life problem I was having that they solved almost immediately.

What was it?? I'm curious how many people will recognize it.

I remember quite a few people annoyed that we weren't getting some more famous speakers, but I grew up listening to Car Talk and I was over the moon.

Ditto!

You’ve got a thoroughly appropriate username, as well.

The loss of Car Talk (as well as You Bet Your Garden) from my local NPR broadcast are both still felt sharply.

A Prairie Home Companion was also a dear loss too.

I enjoyed Live from Here, its replacement - but Chris Thile was not Garrison Keillor, and the pivot from an even mix of storytelling and music to mostly storytelling, caused it to lose something.

I think had COVID not come along, it could have found its audience, but alas, COVID came and it went.

The switch to WFH definitely lost a lot of NPR radio time. While not driveway moments, since Car Talk was on the weekend, I would find myself with parking lot moments as I was usually running weekend errands and would find myself hanging out in the parking lot of Home Depot.

Live From Here was mostly storytelling? I thought it was mostly music, given that Thile is one of the greatest living musicians. I never listened to a whole LFH show, but I watch a lot of great musical clips from it.

Here's my favorite LFH clip: https://youtu.be/I_LhXKBSNi8?si=QzqUBXzWLutFQtck&t=127

Yes, indeed, I meant it the other way.

I believe the entire Car Talk catalog(or maybe just "Best of Car Talk", but still many years worth) is available on the NPR site / app, if streaming is an option for you.

I interviewed at a startup in Palo Alto about ten years ago, my last round was with the CEO who had a question that sounded like it came straight out of a Car Talk puzzler. Being a regular listener, I of course solved it right away, and got an offer a few days later. (I turned them down because my would-be supervisor was talking about 60 hour weeks being standard, but of course sometimes they had to put in a little extra).

Not being from the US, I only heard of them because one of the two brothers did a podcast with The War on Cars. The funny twist is that both of them only liked cars as engineers, but otherwise hated car culture and what traffic did to cities. One of them only had an old beat up car just so he can say he has one, but they both preferred public transit and bicycles. Heh!

Here is the link https://thewaroncars.org/2019/03/18/the-war-on-cars-meets-ca...

The amazing thing was that they actually diagnosed mechanical failures over the phone. And in later years, they'd call back some earlier callers to ask whether they had been right or wrong, and they actually had a pretty good track record.

My favorite piece of advice was that if you had a car with an actual old-school carburetor, you should make sure to select a mechanic with at most one tooth, because only the old, grizzled mechanics really had a feel for them.

Yes, and they were usually right! And they often diagnosed issues that other mechanics had missed in person.

Listened to a series of reruns on a recent trip across the U.S. Still funny.

The familiar banjo intro, some carefully crafted fan mail, and the first call.

They were in the process of doing battle with Melissa Peterson. That little twerp.

I haven't listened to Car Talk in years, but I can still remember the number listeners would call. I'm going to go back and listen to some reruns. I imagine it's aged gracefully.

<sniff/> I miss those guys terribly.

Here's one of my favorite pages: https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/wisdom-supermodels-0

I miss Car Talk dearly and have wished for a reboot/modern version of it on more than a few occasions. Anyone have recommendations for a contemporary show with a similar bent? The fact that it was a car show hardly mattered, I just loved listening to those guys riff.

It's very different, but similar in many ways. The closest thing that I currently consume to them is the youtube content from the Vlog Brothers, Hank and John Green. They don't talk about cars, but they do have a similar back and forth. Their format is a bit different, they each have channels where they publish weekly videos to eachother. They are basically formatted as little video diary posts to eachother. They've done an amazing job of sharing their humanity and helping others with theirs. Recently Hank has gone through Cancer treatment and thankfully remission, they've shared that whole experience in a very human, wholesome way. They also work to fight for things like tuberculosis treatment in Africa, etc.

I did a project at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media on building a hyper-local radio platform, and we'd always use Car Talk as an example of the kind of interactions we wanted to enable. Like, what if you were a vet in rural Uganda, and you wanted to have a show for farmers to describe their problems and get expert help. Call it Goat Talk, and we'd descend into bleats and baahs.

Cah Tawk. Their lawyers were Dewey Cheatham & Howe

Don't forget their Russian chauffeur, Pikup Andropov.

Took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what they meant by "Erasmus B Dragon".

that's the one I was trying to remember, it's my favorite

As a teenager, on one very cold New Year's eve I drove for about a minute in L (low gear) to get the car warmed up faster.

My Dad didn't believe me that driving in low gear would warm the car up faster and told me I should write to Click and Clack to ask if what I did actually worked.

I laughed at him. (It's obvious that if you rev up the engine for a minute you'll warm up the heating system very fast.)

I bet you regret not doing it now

According to them, "driving it gently is the best way to warm it up." https://www.cartalk.com/content/do-cars-need-warm-cold-winte...

I also recall them giving similar advice to this on their radio show: https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/warm-up-car#:~:text....

My freezing teenager ass didn't care about the best way to warm up the car! I only cared about the fastest way to get the heat running!

Fair enough!

The fastest way to warm up a car !== the best way to warm up a car fast.

I grew up listening to them. Started with my Dad but I kept listening as I grew and moved away.

I even wrote a blog post about one of their episodes "ode to a monte carlo" forever ago. https://www.iancollmceachern.com/single-post/2016/12/31/ode-...

They were so wholesome, it's hard to find public figures like this anymore. Truly good people. Good for me to listen to them. They made me a better human.

We love you Ray and Tom. I can't imagine Ray's loss, he lost one of his best friends, but also his business partner and job all at once. Loss is so hard, when it compounds its even harder. Sending as much love, compassion and respect as I can through the ether to both Ray and Tom.

They were the very best anti-depressant. You didn't even have to listen to the show. Their cachinnation alone, like two stoned hens, would do it.

Tom's irrepressible laughter was side-splittingly funny, giggling so hard at times that he'd break into piggy-sounding chortles.

I still love those guys and always will.

Transcript: https://news.mit.edu/1999/clickclackspeech

Deleo's Autobody was down there near the Good News Garage, that guy was ALSO a character, and Mr. Deleo had a very distinctive voice. I was hoping that one day they'd have him on to answer autobody questions.

Had my '72 Plymouth Fury ("The Boat") fixed at the GNG once or twice. And post-graduation '85 Toyota fixed at Deleo's after a fender bender on the SE expressway.

Tom Magliozzi daily drove a 1963 Dodge Dart (convertible) which his brother routinely harassed him for.

Two years ago, son #3 bought a 63 Dart (hardtop) out of someone's weeds and got it road worthy. It's his daily driver.

I love vintage NPR, Car Talk defined my childhood. NPR used to be so amazing.

Yes, we would listen for hours, sometimes all day and night.

I still love my two NPR stations (I listen to Capradio from Sacramento and the SF one) but they both seem to be mostly political coverage these days

Indeed. Like so many here, I listened to Car Talk plus Morning Edition and All Things Considered for many years. The degradation of NPR to where it is today—how it is impossible, impossible, to go five minutes without a mention of "racism", "sexism", or homosexuality/"trans rights"—is sad.

To be clear, in my view, working to fight against those things you mention is important. I'm not personally trying to say anything else.

I'm just trying to say it's (NPR) is not entertainment, or wholesome for me personally in the way it once was.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/582/

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