I didn't realize all the quirks my car had until I tried to sell it

You don't know what you have until it's gone. You also don't know how weird your old car is until you sell it.

Mrs. Brad and I recently got a new-to-us car. We don't need three vehicles, so we sold our 2005 Prius. It's 20 years old, but it's been my daily driver since we bought our last car (a 2012 model for Mrs. Brad) in 2014.

Simple, no? I was willing to take far below the Blue Book value if I knew it was going to someone who needed it. It's reliable. It has a newish hybrid battery. Other than the big dent in the front bumper (where I hit a concrete pillar at my workplace parking garage right before the pandemic), the body is in good shape.

It just has a few old-car eccentricities. Things I lived with for years. Simple.

Try explaining that to someone who is considering spending $1,000 on a car (cheap, right? Especially for a reliable daily driver with just a few eccentricities, right? Right? You want to know the eccentricities? Well . . .).

What seemed simple to me sounded a lot stranger when I explained them to the possible purchaser.

"It's not a big deal, but sometimes the dashboard goes dark," I said, wanting to be clear. He looked at me like I'd just said the car had a leaking nuclear reactor core.

"No, it's not that bad. It doesn't affect how the car runs, it just goes dark. And I have a trick to get it back on. And when the trick doesn't work, I just drive the car and park it. Every time that's happened, the dashboard comes on the next time I start it."

Sounds worse than it is, I think.

But the blank dashboard has nothing to do with the engine, it's probably just a short (according to YouTube). That's easy for me to believe. The prospective purchaser could be excused for being skeptical, so I told him the trick that usually works – a trick I discovered on  the aforementioned YouTube the first time it happened.

"All you have to do is push the start button, without your foot on the brake," I told him. He nodded, then confirmed that you start the car without your foot on the brake. "Correct," I told him. "Then you push down the "climate" button." I pointed to a button on the center console that controls the heat and air conditioning. He nodded.

"You hold it down for three seconds, then start turning the headlights off and on. Over and over until the headlight indicator comes on. Then you turn off the car, turn it back on and usually the dashboard is on."

Simple, right? No?

He was confused. "What if that doesn't work?"

"Do it again, I guess. When I can't get it to work, I just drive wherever I'm going and eventually, it comes back on."

He wasn't reassured, but I wanted to tell him the other curiosities of my beloved car.

"Oh,  sometimes it won't turn off," I told him. He looked troubled, so I added, "There's a fix to that, too."

I had a captive audience.

"So when it won't turn off, you just hold down the power button for a few seconds and the car shuts down," I said. He thought that the was the end, but it wasn't. "That doesn't turn it all the way off, though. The dashboard is still on (in my brain: Irony!), so you take the key fob, put it in this slot next to the steering wheel and pull it out. That stops the car totally."

He looked troubled.

"None of this affects how the car works, though. It works great. And it only happens once in a while."

He asked how often.

"Maybe every few weeks for the dashboard, but only two of three times ever for not being able to turn it off. That almost never happens."

Hey, man. It's a $1,000 car that runs well, if you can ignore that the dashboard occasionally goes dark and once in a great while it won't turn off without a trick.

He was skeptical, but he liked the car, so I told him the two other quirks: You can't unlock the driver's-side door from the outside, necessitating that you crawl through the passenger side to unlock the door. And the trunk has a leak, meaning water gathers in the wheel well for the spare tire. So once or twice a winter (when the insides of the windows are so wet every day that I carried around a towel on the passenger seat to wipe them down), I use a towel and a turkey baster to remove all the water.

A turkey baster is an auto-repair tool of sorts!

He was shaken. He wanted the car, but this seemed complicated. I knew it was, but it was manageable. You just have to remember to start the car without your foot on the brake, hold down the climate button for three seconds, then flick the headlights off and on and off and on. It usually works. You just have to hold the power button down until the engine stops, then insert the key fob and remove it to turn off the car. You just have to climb in through the passenger door to open the driver's side door. You just have to use a turkey baster to remove the standing water around the spare tire a few times a winter.

The prospective buyer – a really good guy who is the brother of a friend –-- was unsure. He said he'd think about it. He said he'd get back to me.

The next day, I got the call. He wanted the car. So I printed out the steps to make the dashboard (usually) work and to turn off the reluctant-to-stop car and inserted them in the glove box.

He bought the car and took it home. I think over the previous night, he realized what I knew: That it's a reliable car with some strange quirks. It's a good buy for what it cost. If you look at it right, it's kind of charming.

At least I hope so. I loved that car and drove it to work every day for 11 years. After the first time the dashboard went dark and the first time it wouldn't turn off, I was OK with those challenges.

Ultimately, my 2005 Prius is like most of us as we get older. Kind of predictable, with some strange quirks that are manageable if you know what you're doing.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, Chuck E. Cheese gets a Christmas special

There are four months to get ready. “The Chuck E. Cheese Christmas Special” will likely begin airing on TV in mid-November.

Yes. A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas Special. On TV. No joke, but one question: Who asked for this? OK, a second question: Have we not suffered enough?

While no network or streaming service has reached an agreement to carry the show, someone will certainly do so and will break an unwritten agreement that America has with the Chuck E. Cheese franchise: That they can have vermin (the animatronic version of which are being phased out) promoting their pizza, but all such activity stays within the walls of the establishment. What happens in Chuck E. Cheese stays in Chuck E. Cheese.

But not now. Now we have "The Chuck E. Cheese Christmas Special" . . . and perhaps more.

According to an article in Variety, the show will be written and produced by the people who did the same thing for "Phineas & Ferb" and "Be Cool Scooby Doo!" There are already a bunch of actors providing the voices for Chuck E. and his pals and the show will feature at least one original song. (Perhaps "My Rat Will Go On," "Can You Fear the Rat Tonight?" or "Chuck. E.'s In Love?")

We don't know anything about the plot, but we can assume it involves parents taking a group of overamped kids to a child casino, where those kids are exposed to flashing lights, loud noises and various viruses. Maybe there will be a kid who is sad about Christmas and a giant rat (there remains some controversy over what Chuck E. Cheese is, but it's pretty clear that he's a rat) hands him 1.5 million coupons, enough for him to get a pencil at the front counter.

I'm just spit balling. The Chuck E. Cheese people are free to run with my idea, though.

The Christmas special is horrifying (and answers the question: "There are so many Hallmark Christmas movies! What could be worse?"). But there is even worse news.

The people who run Chuck E. Cheese Entertainment were quoted as saying the show, “is not just a seasonal moment – it’s the beginning of a long-term vision to transform beloved characters into a storytelling universe for today’s kids and families.”

You read that right. This is the gateway to a world filled with Chuck E. Cheese shows. The "Chuck E. Cheese Valentine's Day Special." "Happy Easter, Chuck E. Cheese!" "Chuck E. Cheese's Red-White-and-Blue July 4 Fireworks-o-Rama Special." "Ten-Hut! The Chuck E. Cheese Veteran's Day Special."

In the Variety article, Chuck E. Cheese's vice president of global media, licensing and entertainment was breathlessly quoted.

“This is more than just a TV special – it’s a milestone moment for the Chuck E. Cheese brand,” said Melissa McLeanas  “We’re entering the entertainment arena in a way that builds on our nostalgic legacy while charting a new future for our characters as a storytelling franchise.”

OK. All I know is that the Chuck E. Cheese franchise terrified a generation of children (including my oldest son) with their giant animatronic band. Chuck E. Cheese also horrified a generation of parents (including me) with noisy games, sweaty kids, bad pizza and cheap giveaways.

Now we get a Christmas special. It's a Rat-a-ful Life, indeed.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Ranking the TV commercial jingles that stick with you

The greatest jingles in advertising aren't the best songs in advertising. If that were the case, no one could dispute that Chili's "I Want My Baby Back" tune is the greatest commercial jingle ever. It's not even close – that song is even better than the "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coke jingle from the early 1970s that became a pop hit.

Alas, that's not the standard. The best jingles are those that stick with you. That you find yourself humming. The jingles that immediately make you think of the product.

Historically, we've had great jingles that reached this level: The very-short "Clap on, clap off" for The Clapper; "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" for Almond Joy and Mounds; "Yummy, yummy in my tummy" for Beefaroni and Beef-O-getti, "The best part of waking up" for Folgers.

You get the point.

But the songs don't have to be good to be effective (is the "song" for the clapper even a song? It's not clear. Maybe it's a chant). And in an era when TV show theme songs have gotten much, much shorter (true fact: The theme for "Gilligan's Island" was 2 minutes, 21 seconds. A typical modern TV theme song is a 15-second instrumental), the same is true for jingles.

But they're still good. And I now present the eight greatest current jingles, based on how effectively they stick in your brain and make you think of their product.

8. O'Reilly Auto Parts. I've never been in one of their stores, but I respect their hustle – purely because of the yelp at the end of their jingle. The O-O-O'Reilly part at the start is good, too.

7. Nationwide. If I asked you what insurance company is on your side, you'd know: Nationwide, since that's the key lyrics in  their jingle. This is the most vanilla of these jingles, which is saying something, so the biggest problem is that it might blend into the background like a song by the Carpenters. But it still works.

6. Popeyes Chicken. The modern, shorter version of the Chili's song. This has a bit of funk to it. "Love that chicken at Popeye's" is catchy, fun and presents the facts: Popeye's sells chicken. It works.

5. Liberty Insurance. A simple lyric: "Liberty, Liberty, Liberty . . . Liberty," works, even if you don't like the "Liberty Biberty" guy or other variations of the theme. Like KC and the Sunshine Band, the writer of this jingle leaned into simplicity and it worked.

4. Living Spaces. I'm not entirely clear what Living Spaces does (I guess it's a furniture store), so I'm not sure it works for making me call them. But if I needed a space to live, they'd probably come in handy.

3. JG Wentworth. The financial services company has a variety of operatic commercials that let you know that if you have a structured settlement, but you need cash now, where to call. You know the number (877-CASH-NOW) because you hear the song in your head now.

2. Safelite. Mrs. Brad often sings the four-word jingle: "Safelite repair, Safelite replace," so when my windshield had a crack, I immediately called Safelite. Unfortunately, they had to replace, not repair the windshield, but their theme song worked. Simple and clean.

1. Kars-4-Kids. You hate it, I hate it, everyone hates it. But who would you think of first if you want to donate your car? And what's their phone number? See? You know both! Their insistence on having snotty little kids pretend to be a band while singing the song indicates that either they're unaware of how they come across or they're in on the joke. Hopefully the latter, because this jingle works. Unfortunately, too well.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.