Sturgeon’s Law Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.
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To mount the small side sills I had to remove the perfectly good front mud flaps. Well they were no good to me any more, but they probably would be great for someone else with a Garnet Red Mica Miata. It did take too long to find a match, someone in Orlando, Florida will be the lucky recipient and all it will cost them is some postage. I saved all the hardware when I pulled them off, but I couldn’t really remember what went where at first. Then I went out to the garage and started to piece it all together and I’m pretty sure I got everything where it should go. The only problem is that the double sided tape has lost most of it’s stick when it was pulled off the car. Guess they’ll just have to go get a bit of it from an auto parts store.
I feel that I have to post something here tonight besides the joke from earlier. Although I found it extremely funny when I got it via email this morning, I don’t want all 4 of my readers to think that I didn’t take today’s election seriously. In yesterday’s post I recommended you vote an obscure 3rd party candidate, well that was sort of tongue-in-cheek and advice I didn’t follow. Although, I did vote for the candidate that every poll in the country is calling an obscure 2nd party candidate in South Carolina.
I just couldn’t endorse a man who got us into this Iraqi mess just because the whole middle east war thing worked so well for dad. Instead I picked a guy who supposedly roots for my favorite baseball team, but can’t name anyone on it (and when he tried he combined the first name and last name of two players) and when he threw out a ceremonial first pitch at a Yankee Red Sox game last July, used the pitching motion of a little girl and couldn’t even make it to the plate without bouncing it while throwing from in *front* of the mound.
I leave you with a quote George Will used to lead off his column in this week’s edition of Newsweek:
PRESIDENT,n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom, and of whom only, it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary” (1911)
I had a really nice little election post almost all written when I accidentally hit the back button on my browser. Gone it is.
Oh well, I guess I’ll go put the
Don’t Blame Me…
I Voted For Bartlet
bumper sticker on the back of the Miata.
A bakery owner hires a young female clerk who likes to wear very short skirts and thong panties. One day a young man comes into the bakery, glances at the clerk and glances at the loaves of bread behind the counter. Noticing the length of her skirt (or lack thereof) and the location of the raisin bread on the very top shelf, he politely says to the young woman, “I’d like some raisin bread, please.”
She climbs up a ladder to reach the raisin bread, providing the young man with an excellent view, just as he surmised she would. When she comes down the ladder, he says he really should get two loaves as he is having company for dinner.
As the clerk retrieves the second loaf of bread, one of the other male customers notices what is going on. Thinking quickly, he orders a loaf of raisin bread so he can continue to enjoy the view.
With each trip up the ladder, the young lady seems to catch the eye of another male customer. Pretty soon, each male customer is asking for raisin bread just to watch the young woman climb up and down.
After many trips, she is tired, irritated and thinking she is really going to have to try the raisin bread herself. Once again she is up the ladder retrieving a loaf of raisin bread for another male customer. She stops and fumes, glaring at the men below. She notices an elderly man standing among the crowd of males looking up at her who hasn’t placed an order yet. Thinking to save herself another trip up and down the ladder, she yells at the elderly man, “Is yours raisin, too?”
“No”, croaked the old man, “but it’s a-quiverin’”…
While on a road trip, an elderly couple stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. After finishing their meal, they left the restaurant and resumed their trip.
When leaving, the elderly woman unknowingly left her glasses on the table. And, she didn’t miss them until after they had been driving about twenty minutes. By then, to add to the aggravation, they had to travel quite a distance before they could find a place to turn around in order to return to the restaurant to retrieve her glasses.
All the way back, the elderly husband became the classic grouchy old man. He fussed and complained and scolded his wife relentlessly during the entire return drive. The more he chided her, the more agitated he became. He just wouldn’t let up one minute.
To her relief, they finally arrived at the restaurant and as the woman got out of the car and hurried inside to retrieve her glasses, the old man yelled to her, “While you’re in there, you might as well get my hat.”
As a public service to all you folks who are coming here looking for that Fenway Flasher movie, I tracked that sucker down today. It didn’t happen in the world series though, it took place during a September 3rd game against the Texas Rangers. Without further adieu, I bring you the Fenway Flasher!
My new favorite hat showed up on my doorstep this afternoon. Whatever contraption they use to assemble them or the form used for quality assurance or the head of the guy who packs them in a box must be the same size as my head, because I put it on, and it fit perfectly. I’m going to wear it to work tomorrow.
I have to show it to my manager the Yankee fan.  Back when the Sox won the series, I went back into his office and told him that when I ordered my Boston Red Sox World Series Champion hat they sent me a Yankees ALCS runner-up hat for free and did he want it. That’s when I gave him this:
I couldn’t find a brown paper bag, so I snagged some images off the ‘net, plotted this out and taped it together. He was a good sport about it because he put it on for a second or two before tossing it aside.
Truth or Fiction? I recevied an email this morning:
Brian,
somehow I came over your mr-mita site. You take really great car pictures! Very cool! We are a little advertising agency in Munich, Germany and I think we could use some of these pictures for our work. Are you interested in selling these?
Best regards Andreas Z
http://www.some-site.de/
The Internet skeptic in me wondered if it was another cleverly worded email harvesting ploy. If it is, they’ve gone a step further than most, as theirs is a fully functioning web site if you click on that link. Well I bought it and replied. We’ll see if anything comes of it.
I got my haircut on Tuesday afternoon and I had to take in the strap a touch to keep it from blowing off while driving with the top down.
I’ll be wearing it to work tomorrow. Ever since we went to all casual, all the time, I’ve really missed dressing down on Friday’s. So in an effort to recapture that end of the week frivolity, I’ve taken to wearing a baseball cap in on Fridays. I used to rotate hats and try to color coordinate with whatever shirt I was wearing that day, but now I think I’ll just be wearing the Red Sox World Series Champions (man, I like the way that looks) hat all the time. For a brief irrational moment on Monday when I got the hat, I thought that maybe I would wear it every day from now on, until it disintegrated into the consistency of the that stuff you get from your dryer’s lint filter, but decided against it.
I’m cheating here. I actually did buy and install some new windshield wiper blades on Friday, I just didn’t get around to blogging about it until Saturday. Through the magic that is post-dating this will appear in its proper order in all things blog-like.
I also applied some Rain-X to the windshield. Bring it on, Mr. Bad Weather.
Today was the Master’s Miata Club annual membership drive at Rader Mazda. Because it was a Miata show-off day I got out here early to wash off the car. Water can be down right cold when the outside temperature is at 48 degrees. This year, super salesman, Scott went the extra mile (besides setting up the tent, buying and cooking the food, icing the drinks, etc.) and wrote a nice letter to everyone who had bought a Miata through them in the last 18 months and invited them to come out. It worked pretty well. We got two new memberships, one possible, one not-so-long lost member rejoined and chatted with a couple of Miata owners who just dropped on in. They had invited the regional Miata rep to join us and that he did. Sloane Whitehead (a name right out of a soap opera or romance novel) came in from Columbia and brought along some goodies for giving away as door prizes. Rader also contributed some key chains and service coupons. They had enough stuff so that everyone attending came away with something. I was the lucky winner of a very strange looking clock, a free front end alignment and a hat. The hat is cream colored with a navy blue bill, all and all a nice little bit of millinery until you get to the bright purple Miata logo embroidered on it. Marty of V-8 Miata fame had hoped to get his now Kennie Bell supercharged V-8 Miata out to show us, but minor set back after minor set back kept him from a displaying it’s awesome power (to be used only for good.) He did roll it out, hoodless, for us to marvel at just how much engine can be stuffed into one of these little cars.
Silence so far from the German advertising firm from the other day.
One free 8 x 10, autographed, glossy photo of me to the first person who answers this question correctly. Name a word in the english language has all 6 vowels in it? The vowels must be in their correct alphabetical order: a-e-i-o-u-y. Constanants can be as many as needed or anywhere in the word.
In the 80’s we had posters above the urinals of the Swedish Bikini Team to get us to drink a particular brand of beer. How quaint. Flash-forward into the 21st century, I give you Wizmark.
“Hey, buddy, after you finish up here, you ought to have room for a couple more ice-cold bottles of Duff.”
Right after work we went over to the Aiken County Treasurer’s office to pay our yearly personal property tax on the car. Good thing that it is deductible of off our income taxes…
Passed through 18,000 miles this afternoon in the same fashion a lot of the miles on the car were driven, on the 25-mile long way to the store 3 miles away.
 We went for a walk in Hitchcock Woods this morning and autumn has reached Aiken. I would say our leaves are just past their peak (they are certainly falling off the oaks and hickories in my front yard.) I decided today was the day I was going to start something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Find a spot in the woods and take a picture there every month around the same time. This will allow us to watch the seasons change here. Of course, snow is so rare in these parts, I reserve the right to ignore the once a month rule to capture it if it happens. Looking southwest at the corner of Mr. Fletcher’s Ride and an unnamed path about 1/2 mile in from our usual entry point.
It was one year ago today that we left behind a 1995 Laguna Blue Miata at Rader and brought home a 2003 Miata in Garnet Red Mica. In 366 days we’ve been over 18,000 miles together. It is raining tonight, just like it was last November 24th. Last year when we got home with it, we parked it in the garage and drove the MSV down to Florida for Thanksgiving, this year it will be in the same garage, but we will be here with it.
Did you miss me? I missed you?
About 3:30 yesterday afternoon mr-miata.net disappeared off the face internet. Not only me, but everyone connected with me on whatever server that failed. The web site of my hosting service was long gone. When that happens I flash back to the ThatHostingCompany fiasco of April 2002. I can just feel it in my bones that they have gone under and taken my internet life with them. After several hours of absolutely nothing, by 7:00:00 pm I knew they were working on coming up from the depths. The hosting web site was back up, I still had no web sites, but I could see the files when I FTP’d in. This morning when I got up everything was back to normal. Whew.
Before the whole family descended on the house demanding baked poultry and all the fixin’s, Donna and I had time to go out and get a gourmet breakfast at Hardee’s. Mmmm…Biscuits & Gravy. It was a bit chilly, but seeing as top speed was around 35 MPH we could handle it.
Later I took my 17 year-old niece for a top down drive through some of the twistier sections in a couple Aiken’s sub-divisions. Amazingly enough about a 1/2 mile into the ride she emulated a classic Donna pose while I drove, throwing both hands straight up like a lot of roller coaster riders do. I may have to resurrect the old warning sticker I had in the 95.
Back row from left: Me, Donna’s oldest brother Jim, her younger sister Sandy and her youngest brother Scott. Middle row from left: Linda (Jim’s wife), Donna and her next older brother Steve. Front row from left: niece Jennifer (Jim & Linda’s daughter), Paul (Sandy’s husband) and Beth (Scott’s wife).
This Saturday is the Master’s Miata Club’s annual Holiday Party. Before said party, I always lead a Christmas Light Tour for the group. It is a cobbled together combination of light tours that have appeared in the local paper. Tonight we ran through a section of it to see how it would go. There were plenty of lights up already considering it is the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, but it was definitely a good thing we did a dry run. With me following Donna’s reading of the newspaper’s directions, on darkened and unfamiliar streets we must have made a half dozen U-turns because of passing the right street or worse yet, because we didn’t go far enough.
Why is the letter u in U-turn capitalized?
I’ve started work on what my New Year’s Resolution for 2005 is going to be. My first instinct is to pick something doable, but that got me in about 15 pounds of trouble a couple years back when I vowed to eat more and exercise less. So I think maybe I’ll shoot for something hard to do, like watch more television. How can that be hard you ask? Easy, I will not watch any reality shows (as much as I am intrigued by the Gilligan’s Island one.) I’m not interested in and CSI show. Ditto it’s imitators. No Law & Orders. The only sport I’m remotely interested in is baseball, so there won’t be any of that until April. I’d watch MTV if there was any M in it. VH1 is as bad, as it has become the network of “The 100 Most Insipid Music Related Countdown Shows.” About the only thing left is MXC on Spike and it isn’t on but a few times a week. But considering I only watch West Wing on Wednesday nights now…
Started on my New Year’s resolution early. Tonight I watched a show called Overhaulin’. It had two things going for it that made me want to watch it, because I’m a cyclist (barely) it had Uber bike racer Lance Armstrong and as a car guy it had the muscle car icon called GTO (bonus points because it is a convertible.)
I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but what I got was an hour long commercial for Foose Wheels, Clarion, Kicker, Something Parts Group, So & So’s Suspension, etc. Take a season’s worth of This Old House, cut out all the really interesting segments on how to do things, apply it to cars, add pretty boy & girl “hosts”, toss in the arbitrary deadline and ta-da, entertainment for people who want something great while not having to do anything hard (or at all) to get it.
After supper we piled in to the MSV and checked out the North Augusta houses that were listed in previous Augusta Chronicle light tours. It was good and bad news. We had some new gems, some old gems, some new disappointments and some old shadows of their former selves. Seeing as I have the tour time as only 45 minutes in the newsletter we may be able to just get by with the stuff in North Augusta. The NA places might be enough and they are right on the way to the party house. I hate to eliminate some of the Augusta houses because there were a few winners over in Georgia, but it seems so far away. It is not really that far, but maybe it is just the psychological barrier of crossing the river or maybe it is just that North Augusta is suburbia and Augusta kind of inner city like.
We are going to make a timed run on Friday from the start, by all the North Augusta homes and end up at the house where the party is. If it is close to 45 minutes, that will be it. Not sure what happens if it comes up 10 minutes short. We may have to venture into the big city.
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