Kia woke

the faces of Kia vehicles

Kia woke up and came back to the mainstream.


Kia’s design department went through a recent rough patch, during which they headed in a rather oblique direction with the look of the front of their vehicles.

The 2017 Kia Sportage typifies their ugly period. (Let’s just be honest.) You’ll see that in the left side of the photo montage above. Think of a carp’s face.

They finally decided to come back to the rest of the automotive universe. The right side of the photo montage is the 2021 Kia Sorrento.

The face is the most important part of any car design. We can relate to a car’s mouth (grille) and its eyes (headlights).

For the 2021 Sorrento, they decided to go in a more snarling mean-looking direction. It works. SUVs are supposed to be rugged.


The left photo is courtesy of Car & Driver. The right photo is courtesy of Kia. Both are not used with permission.

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Letters and privilege

A letter sitting on a desk

The pandemic has forced us to slow down. And that’s a good thing.

One of the slow-downs has sped up life for many… delivery services are overloaded. A good friend drives for Amazon. He has been regularly been putting in 60-hour workweeks. Knowing him makes me very thankful to all the delivery drivers out there.

An upside to overloaded delivery services is that we have to wait. Amazon Prime used to mean next-day delivery. Now it can mean two-week delivery.

Some of the things we “need” we really don’t need.


We have some friends in South Africa. They live near Cape Town, a beautiful place that would be fun to visit. That’s on my list of dream destinations… if only the airfare was less. (Sigh.)

I sent them a letter last summer and received it back a month later. A stamped message on the envelope informed me that South Africa no longer has any mail service.

Wow.

I take for granted the privilege that mail is.


Before the pandemic, one of my sons lived in Sicily, Italy. Two months was the normal time for my letters to reach his mailbox.

Living in America is a privilege.

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