No Civic coupes, but, two hatchbacks did 50 MPG, according to fueleconomy.gov
1994-95 Honda Civic HB VX (39 city, 50 highway)
1986-87 Honda Civic CRX HF (42 city, 51 highway)

It would be a miracle finding those with their original engines... '90's Civic engine swaps were simple, cheap, and performance was great with JDM DOHC engines like the ZC, B16A (> 160 hp), or B18C (> 200 hp).

Because I agree with Weird Al?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF6ct9ZEq5s

I somewhat agree with you, it makes sense from an educational view and it's completely pointless to help find a job.

Unfortunately it's not the 80's, back then any good programmer could get a job. In these times, there's a lot of competition and incompetence out there. Employers will only hire anyone who matches all the keywords and does a good interview, regardless of talent, because they're desperate (or clueless).

For example, my hobbyist 8086 and 6809 ASM experience is completely ignored and pointless all the times I've applied for job positions in microcontroller / embedded system programming. My x86 code did everything at a hardware level except disk I/O, mouse, and LAN.

I disagree, the X86 was a really bad choice back then. Pentium didn't exist (released 1 year later), the 486 DX2 was released the same year. The PowerPC easily beat the 486, and because it's endian neutral, I bet 68K emulation would be too slow on P5.

The Pentium also destroyed the 486: the FPU was a lot faster, and it could execute two integer instructions at a time. Unfortunately most code wasn't P5 optimized and avoided the FPU (lots of 486SXs out there). Quake was probably the first app that ran well on a P-60, and unplayable in a DX4-100.

I understand your pain... The x86 empire will always encounter a few rebel architectures. Luckily, there are new powerful weapons like the Atom-izer, and research on the Larrabee GPU (lots of simple x86s).

Most x86 CPUs emulate x86 code to keep the legacy alive... Long live the early 70's Datapoint/Intel 8008 instruction set!

Ok, maybe only the Vista kernel... Windows keeps mutating, becoming more like Microsoft Bob. Ironically, the Windows Server 2008 install has many of those stupid things turned off. Even so, it takes just too many tweaks to make it better.

On the Eee, the only good choice for most users is Easy Peasy. Ubuntu is badly pre-configured. I am running XP on my Eee, I can't recommend it because it requires nLite and a monstrous amount of additional tweaks make it SSD friendly. I hate Microsoft for not telling how they managed to make XP run on the XO laptop, fortunately there are many excellent Eee forums out there.

I absolute agree creating games is the best option, not only is fun, it also creates competition which is a great way to motivate them to learn programming. Unfortunately almost all textbooks are boring, I remember the old Tandy Coco Basic book, and Oh! Pascal!

As for what to use to program, if they're IT students, a neutral choice is Javascript. For non IT, Visual Basic for Applications in Excel. It's lousy but it's something they might probably use. .NET framework is also a good choice, now that M$ is using it in everything, and there's Mono in Linux.