This blog is hereby dedicated to Gasoline, the Ultimate Energy Drink

As a yo-yo dieter, a mechanical engineer, and an environmentalist, I think about calories a little bit too much. I try not to eat too many of them; meanwhile my honda civic totally pigs out every day (and never gets fat, which is so unfair....)

Here is a list of things that "Thirty Thousand Calories" could be used to describe:

1. fifteen days of sensible and most likely boring and unsatisfying eating.
2. maybe 12 days of food, when not on a diet.
   
3. 22 chipotle burritos
   
4. 222 ten-minute miles on the treadmill
   
5. 375 oreo cookies
6. 4.5 costco-sized barrels of utz party mix, which, by the way, should come with a warning because it's as addictive as a drug.
   
7. About 2500 brussels sprouts
   
8. 30 pints of cherry garcia
9. 900 strips of bacon
   
10. ONE GALLON OF GASOLINE

One gallon of gasoline = 2500 brussels sprouts or 30 pints of cherry garcia. That means that my car is glutton. My car burns about a gallon of gasoline just driving me to work and back every day.

I like to marvel over/torture myself thinking about what an amazing/inefficient invention the Internal Combustion Engine is. It's incredible that something with so many moving parts, operating at such a high temperature, is so reliable. My car has driven 90000 miles without a hitch. And it's like a rube goldberg under the hood. But what's equally amazing is that only about 30% of the gas that my car uses is converted into the motion that moves my sedentary ass from point A to point B. The other 70% is lost to friction and heat, mostly heat of course because the gasoline is being lit on fire inside the engine. Its almost immoral - that one vehicle could use so much energy. It's a good thing my car doesn't subscribe to any particular religion, because I'm pretty sure gluttony is considered a sin by all of them.

My car is a wonder of reliability and inefficiency.