From the Edmunds Inside Line on Thursday, a rumor that Pontiac is getting the axe:

According to a source at General Motors, the company will announce next Monday its new “faster, deeper” reorganization plan, which will likely include a death sentence for the Pontiac brand.

I’m sure friends and family tired of my grumbling each time a Pontiac commercial came on during March Madness. I’ve been saying for months that GM would have to be insane to drop Saturn and keep Pontiac. Rebadge the Solstice, G6, and G8 as Chevys, and call it a day. Is there anything else remotely interesting in the Pontiac line that isn’t already sold as a Chevrolet?

Seriously though, not a rhetorical question; I tried to check Chevrolet.com to refresh my memory and the site is throwing a “Generic failure in middleware” error. Maybe when GM gets that fixed they can come to their senses and instead of killing Saturn stop selling GMC as anything but fleet vehicles. I’ve never understood the GM “strategy” of so many identical models under multiple brands.

I feel obliged to mention that  the first car I bought was a ’99 Grand Am GT coupe. Black. Sunroof. Felt like climbing into an F-14 compared to the ’84 Tempo I had driven in high school. I bought it with around 30,000 miles on it, and loved it for the ~30,000 miles before things started breaking right and left.

That’s what we should put on GM’s tombstone if the billions upon billions in taxpayer bailouts aren’t enough to save the company: “We loved it, before things started breaking right and left.”

I finally scheduled an appointment to have new tires put on my car, having talked myself into and back out of looking for a 2008 BMW to finance at 0.9% several times over. Since the lobby of Discount Tire is clearly not designed for “hanging out” – they have space for a display of racing slicks, but the waiting area consists of half a dozen chairs crammed in a corner – I went to Starbucks in hopes of finding free wi-fi. Surely an hour at Starbucks couldn’t kill me… right?

I have never once entered a Starbucks without being made to feel like an idiot. I asked about wi-fi, which apparently takes a registered Starbucks card. I didn’t even ask if that cost anything. I’m carrying around a MacBook these days and certainly don’t need my name in a Starbucks database, too. After I paid the guy who took my order and he wandered off, I realized I was supposed to wait near the little round thing at the end of the counter. I was disappointed but not surprised to see that $2.50 at Starbucks gets you a hot chocolate that’s roughly the size of a children’s Frosty. Then again, if you know what size a children’s Frosty is you’re probably not Starbucks’s target demographic.

In Europe are all the tables extremely tiny? Is Europe where Starbucks picked that up from? I am sitting at a table with three chairs around it, and it’s like a TV tray. It’s as if all the furniture in this place was designed by Lilliputians. +10 points to Mac for their dictionary’s simple and shiny confirmation of the spelling of Lilliputian. -100 points from EA for blocking me from playing Spore Creature Creator without an internet connection.

[Update: Typos, begone. Who misspells "Frosty" - seriously!]