Sounds like a Gernsback character

Just doing my regular look to see if anything has got stuck in my spamtrap and saw a (definitely spam) message.  I discovered a while back that my means of posting to Usenet for many years resulted in a message identifier being place in the header of each message which turned out to be viable e-mail addresses to me.  Each id starts with a mixture of numerals and letters which seem to depend on the time of day I made the posting.

Some harvester program seems to have collected these and some spambot assumes that the bit before the @ is my name.

So I just got a message starting "Dear 1412c".

I know it's hot, but...

I was walking down to the shops just now and at the bottom of the hill, as I was crossing the road, some movement caught my eye and I heard a sound.  Looking round, there was a car stopped as if waiting to come out of a junction, except there appeared to be no traffic for it to wait for.  And a young woman was getting out of the passenger side of the car with such alacrity that my first thought was that she had just had some sort of argument with the driver and was walking off in a huff.  But then the driver got out and they were both staring at the car.

Then I saw the smoke in the car.  By now I was across the road and facing the car hear on.  It appeared to be coming from the dashboard or below it.

Neither of them seemed to be hurt, and my knowledge of car workings is such that there seemed to be nothing I could do, so I walked on.

When I returned, about an hour later, the car was still there, half blocking the junction, with the bonnet up, no sign of the occupants.  No smoke now, but there seemed to be a damp patch on the road beneath it.  Whether this was from attempts to extinguish the fire or some fluid leaking from the workings I don't know.