Month: March 2023

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Now That’s Italian Edition of SORT
As of Monday, March 27, 2023 at 4:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2017 Ferrari
California		 2019 Lamborghini
Urus		 2014 Maserati GranTurismo
Not exactly the sportiest, but it is open-air and has red brake calipers. No one ever has taken one of these off-roading, but I’m surely going to. The name spells it out and its got a big trunk, just don’t ask about reliability.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 1974 Porsche 914 Sold for $17,000 on 3/21/23
Off-Road: 2020 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Sold for $145,000 on 3/21/23
Touring: 2010 BMW 328i Wagon Sold for $15,000 on 3/21/23

Back to the 60’s One More Time

Amazon Prime Video finally let us know when the 5th, and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will premire, April 14th,. So, as we have done in the past I thought we should go back and start from the beginning and watch seasons 1, 2, 3 & 4 in preparation for watching season five. Donna opted out of the rewatch, but I’ve gone ahead and started watching them.

I started five days ago with the very first episode, Since then I’ve finished up to the second episode of the third season, or 20 of the 34 episodes made so far. At the rate I’m going I might have enough time before the 14th, to go back and watch all the episodes over again. I won’t, but I could.

I wonder in what form it will get released in? The first three seasons were dumped all at once, season 4 was released two at a time on Fridays. Seasons 1, 3 & 4 had eight episodes and season 2 had 10. Right now IMDB shows that the fifth season will have 9 episodes, so two shows every Friday really wouldn’t unless the final show is a two hour episode.

Just Who Do You Think You Are Messing With?

This was really the genesis for Last Saturday’s post, Watching Family Trees Grow, but I got long winded there and I didn’t want it to get lost, so here you go:

As we powered through the episodes of “Who Do You Think You Are” we had a couple of instances weirdness. First was the 5th Episode of Season 9 about Molly Shannon. Molly’s maternal grandfather came from an island off the coast of County Mayo called Achill. Ms. Shannon actually travels to the island and meets folks who knew her grandfather and some cousins she never knew she had. Later that evening Donna and I were doing the crossword puzzle from that day’s newspaper when we came to a clue that read, “Western Ireland Island.” The answer was five letters long and we had the last letter already, an ‘L’…

The second time it happened was Episode 2 of Season 10 about Josh Duhamel. Josh discovers that his 12x great-grandfather, a man named Thomas Norton, held prominent status in 16th century England, and was an influential figure in the war between Protestantism and Catholicism at the time. When they were discussing this religious schism the names of Queen Mary the 1st (Catholic) who was succeeded on the throne by her half-sister Elizabeth the 1st who was Protestant my ears perked up. Earlier in the day I had started watching the movie Elizabeth starring Cate Blanchett which covers this very period. Unfortunately Mr. Duhamel’s 12x great-grandfather didn’t figure in the movie. Or maybe fortunately because Thomas Norton “interrogations” of Catholics in the Tower of London led to his being nicknamed “Rackmaster-General.”

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

German Spring Edition of SORT
As of Monday, March 20, 2023 at 4:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
1974 Porsche
914		 2020 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 2010 BMW
328i Wagon
I have wanted one of these ever since I drove one of a friend of mine’s back in June of 2018. If we sold our house we could probably afford this. But we would still have a place to live… Perfect for seeing the country on an extended road trip or as just the perfect grocery getter.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 2003 Mazda Miata Sold for $16,500 on 3/17/23
Off-Road: 1989 Jeep Cherokee Sold for $17,000 on 3/15/23
Touring: 1987 BMW M6 Sold for $46,635 on 3/17/23

Watching Family Trees Grow

Donna and I have been a big fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s show on PBS called Finding Your Roots for quite a while. While it is fun to dig into the family trees of actors, musicians and other famous people, it always come with an interesting history lesson that a member of their family was directly involved in.

Because we have a subscription to Peacock so we can watch bicycle racing we were pleasantly surprised to stumble on a show on it called Who Do You Think You Are?. It is pretty much the same thing as Finding Your Roots except is from NBC and sponsored by Ancestry.com.

The PBS version is a nicer shop to watch because there are no interruptions for commercials and it will usually follow both sides of the person’s lineage back. The NBC version usually just picks one branch to chase back and while we don’t get commercials (we subscribe to the add-free level), we still get the 4 or 5 interruptions, with the title cards where commercials were, along with some sort of “cliff hanger” before and the repeat of when we get back.

After watching the 6 episodes of Season 1 of the show on Peacock and because the copyright date at the end of the last show was MMXX (aka: 2020), Donna asked, “I wonder if they are going to make more?” So I headed off to IMDB to see if there were any more. Turns out there are 85 total episodes over 12 seasons of the show. Not only that, but the “season 1” we watched on Peacock was actually season 12, the last one listed on IMDB.

A bit of poking around led to the discovery (pun intended) that the show aired for several years on TLC. Wait a minute, I’ve seen TLC listed on the Discovery+ streaming service we also subscribe to. Sure enough, we could watch more of the show, Discovery+ had seasons 4 thru 10. We had already seen 12 on Peacock, so where were seasons 1,2,3 and 11?

Adding up the total episodes from each season listed on Discovery+ for seasons 4 thru 10 comes up at 49. I then counted the episodes on IMDB for seasons 4 thru 11 and the total episodes was 49 again. The seasons on IMDB and Discovery+ didn’t line up, the quantity of episodes per each season were different and some shows were listed in different seasons.

So I tried a third source, Wikipedia. I counted episodes from season 4 to 10, because this source called season 11 what IMDB called 12 and Peacock called season 1, confused, me too. Anyway Wikipedia’s total was 52! I went through the list and found the 3 missing episodes, J.K. Rowling, Minnie Driver and Jim Parsons.

Also on Wikipedia I learned that seasons 1, 2 & 3 of the show were originally broadcast on NBC. Hello? Peacock is the streaming arm of NBC, why aren’t they available there?

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 10

 

Huh!?!

This is a photo of 1/2 of our stair railing between floors. If you scan along the balusters (or pickets or little vertical stick thingies) from right to left, notice the last one on the left. It is upsidedown! We have lived in this house for a little over three years, meaning we have gone up and down the stairs over 2,000 times each and never noticed this. Until yesterday…

I’ve Been Blogging Too Long

It has been 8,108 days since I wrote my first blog post, Happy 2002, on January 1st of that year. That post consisted of 34 words. Since then there have been, not including this one, 6,047 more posts written with a total word count of 1,401,582 words. The average post word count overall is 232. Some posts have had a lot fewer words, including some with no words, just a picture. Others have been so wordy that you might not want to read the whole thing. The shortest post, That Hosting Company VIII cont., was a mere 4 words and the wordiest post, BMW Ultimate Drive for the Susan G. Komen Foundation was 2,374 words.

One of my and my wife’s favorite features on the blog is the “On This Date” widget in the right column. It is set up to throw a link to a couple of posts from the same date as when you are looking at the page. It is kind of fun to get tossed back into the past and see what was going on it 2002 or 2008 or 2014, etc.

Yesterday’s headliner in the past links was Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch that concerned a nail in the Miata’s tire, Netfix movies and the TV show LOST. There were seven links to other places on the web in the post and not a single one lead me to where they were originally when I wrote the post in 2008 or 15 years in the past.

The first 2 are for Netflix movies and I linked to them using a URL shortener TinyURL and the first movie’s text is just called “this movie” while the second one lists the title and it is called The Good German, but send me to a Netflix error page. The last five are basically just screencaps from the show LOST.

When I take these time jumps to the past me and there are links that don’t work for various reasons, no S at the end of HTTP, the site is no longer there, etc., I will usually try and fix them. This time there are seven and that many caused me to write this post, but because I’ve got nothing else to do and even though these new links may fall by the wayside as well in the coming years, I still went ahead and put my Internet Sleuth Hat on. So if you click on Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch you too can be whisked away to 15 years ago and get a peek into my 2008 mind.

P.S. The word count for this post is an above average 423…

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 9