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I recently had a friend who has a 15 year-old ask me that. Below is my response. I know there was a thread over in the Miata.net forums about the very subject, but I couldn’t find it. Somehow I overloaded the search capacity of the forum by putting the word Miata in my search string. Go figure. If you can think of any I missed, good or bad, add them in the comments.

I think a Miata is a terrific first car, but I might be a little biased. 🙂

First a couple of good reasons.

1. No back seat. This decreases peer pressure to get the driver to do something stupid by 2/3rds. It also decreases in car distractions by the same amount.
2. A Miata is not a very powerful automobile, if he ever decides to “see what she’ll do” he will be hard pressed to get it to 90MPH coming down the High Rise.
3. The Miata is a very safe automobile and can take a lot of abuse while protecting it’s contents.
4. It is also highly maneuverable and won’t roll over like a SUV with it’s high center of gravity.

Now a couple reasons why it wouldn’t make a good first car.

1. While safer than an SUV it is small and can be overlooked by inattentive SUV drivers.
2. In some circles a Miata is stereotyped as a girlie or a gay car. This is mostly fueled by uniformed muscle car or pickup truck drivers. (It’s a running gag over on the Miata.net forums.)
3. It is rear wheel drive, which lends itself to being used for drifting.

Seems like every third commercial is for a fragrance. Both men’s and women’s. The actresses all look familiar, like famous people, they probably are, but I can’t be sure, my subscription to People expired in 1981.

I saw a commercial for a vintage Tide T-shirt. If you bought one the proceeds would go to help Hurricane Katrina and victims of the California wildfires. Cool, I’ll help. The shirts are $15, but I never found out how much they wanted for shipping. I would have given them my credit card data to buy the shirt, but first I would have to register to use their site and to do that you need to give them the usual phalanx of info. Forget it, not like I’d ever use their site again.

The Bourne Ultimatum was very good, left me wanting more. It really never slows down for you to dwell long enough on the improbabilities and impossibilities to let them spoil the movie. I wonder if the series is available in a three disc set or are they waiting for the 4th movie? I don’t know if they are going to make another movie, but they sure left it open for one. Matter of fact they probably already have a script, just retool the second movie a little…

To wash the bad taste of At World’s End out of our mouths from the other night, we popped in TDPM this afternoon.

Governor Swann: Perhaps on the rare occasion pursuing the right course demands an act of piracy, piracy itself can be the right course?

Aaaah, that’s better.

Watched Deja Vu on Sunday. I was right with them, even the whole time travel thing, up until Denzel gets shipped back 4-1/2 days. Fifteen, twenty minutes earlier they made a big deal of sending a piece of paper back. They said they had to keep the mass low and still the power requirements were so high that they blacked out the whole city of New Orleans doing it just as the paper was materializing. Everyone held their breath to see if the 3 x 5 scrap of paper successfully made the trip. How they manage to send back a 200lb man after struggling with the paper I just couldn’t believe.

I am usually happy to suspend my belief in reality for a good movie, but it seems lately that there is always a point in the movie that brings me crashing back. I’m betting there is a term for it in Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, but the best I can come up now is “jumping the shark.”

When we watched National Treasure I was happily enjoying the trip when they bust into the vault under Independence Hall or wherever it was that has been sealed for 200 years and they flick a cigarette lighter to the torches lining the walls and they light right up and burn brightly for the rest of adventure. Come on. Our founding fathers must have purchased them from the same place as the Pharaohs of Egypt because every time an explorer find a mummy’s tomb, the torches in there light right up after millenniums.

It happened in The Astronaut Farmer too. I don’t remember exactly what did it, but it was sometime late in the movie. I mean I even bought the fact that launching a rocket through the roof of a barn wouldn’t incinerate the barn. But I was jarred into reality somewhere and ended up shaking my head in disbelief.

I don’t think it will happen in the 3rd Jason Bourne movie, but it is possible. I hope it doesn’t happen in the 3rd Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but it is probable.