While most of you know me as the (now incredibly masculine) voice of and , I have a day job at which I slave for The Man as a technical writer. These days, that means I write confusing instructions to lead users of software astray, but in the pre-Dot-Com Boom era it meant that I wrote confusing instructions to lead mechanics astray.

When you write for mechanics, you need scary warning symbols to let them know when a screwup will result in serious injury or death, and I felt the standard symbols I had at my disposal were insufficiently terrifying. So, I talked my boss into paying mechanic, road racer, Southern gentleman, and incredibly talented artist, Mr. , for some custom warning-symbol artwork made to my exact specifications. Walker is the artist who made the artwork for us, not to mention a bunch of the illustrations on , and you're sure to see more of his work here in the future. I figured any image that's really going to grab the attention of a bored bus mechanic thumbing through a thousand-page shop manual would need to involve both skull-and-crossbone imagery and traumatic injury, so I figured the ol' Driveshaft Through The Skull deal would work well. Sadly, my boss made Walker remove the driveshaft from the image, figuring the skull image alone was enough. But today I share this image with the world, and any fellow tech writer who wants the original vector artwork for their own publications should email me (murilee at jalopnik dot com) and I will email you the file.

When you're building weird stuff out of car parts (or if you rely entirely on cheap-ass beater cars