I’ve Lost That Loving Feeling

Well, I’ve lost the ability to watch a movie all the way through. Watched 1 hour and 27 minutes of Spirited Away, stopping like 40 minutes before the end. I don’t have a concrete reason for stopping, I just got bored. The animation was wonderful and the story was intriguing, but it would have made a nice 90-minute movie. Scenes took too long and maybe there were too many bathhouse scenes.

If you check my Netflix rental queue to the left you will discover that I have a plan. Seeing as I can not watch a whole movie I’ve reverted to TV shows. Specifically, one long gone, but still missed show, The X-Files. I am going to keep at least one disc on the coffee table and every Sunday night at 9:00 PM I will sit down and watch 1 episode. For the next 4 or 5 years I will have something to look forward to on Sunday nights.

Style Bar 3

Donna and I drove over to visit Dave & Shirlene in Augusta this evening. Dave is the owner of a red 2001 Miata with the coveted Frenzy Spider style bar. We had to wait a bit in their living room while a passing shower, one of many I dodged today, went by. I measured from the back of the convertible well to my OEM cockpit brace and got 16-1/4 to 16-1/2 inches. When I measured Dave’s car I got 15-1/2 inches. This was not good news for me. I already had to give the top a serious push to get it to clear my bar, another 3/4 to 1″ more seems to make it way too much. I’m sure I could make do, but think it would really shorten the life span of the vinyl at the bottom of the glass window stressing it that much. Especially with the amount of times the top goes up and down around here. Even removing those windblocker tabs would not make it that much better because they only stick out about 3/8 of an inch.

Made Donna happy though, as she really didn’t want the shiny bar. Too bad, as it was really nice looking bar, even better in person than the photos. Guess I’ll have to figure something else to spend my disposable income on…

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $923.63
Started down, went up, went down, up, down, up, down again, up again, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 174

Well, I Tried

This afternoon I finally blocked out a segment of time to watch a movie. To practice first-in, first-out inventory control, I started with Adaptation because it had been around the longest. Managed to make it about 15 minutes in before bailing out. Just couldn’t take Nicholas Cage’s whiny characters (Character is plural, because he plays twins.) The Meryl Streep portion of the movie that is supposed to be the book that Nicholas Cage is turning into a screen play seemed interesting, but it couldn’t overcome the WHINE.

So we picked the next oldest movie, Rabbit-Proof Fence. It had an interesting premise of a trio of half Aborigine girl who escapes from a re-education camp and head back home. The trick is that home is 1200 miles away and to get there they follow Australia’s rabbit, now emu, fence. We made it 42 minutes into this one.

Tomorrow I will try to get in Spirited Away.

Style Bar 2

I’ve got my wife to let me buy the Frenzy Evil Spider Bar, but it cost me. She doesn’t like it because it is chrome, she liked the more subdued black of the other bar (truth be told, so do I.) I haven’t ordered it yet though. I have a minor clearance concern. When lowering, my glass window top just clears the OEM cockpit brace, but requires a little push to do so. The Frenzy bar has a couple of tabs that stick out towards the back to support it’s windblocker and if it extends any further back than the OEM piece it won’t work for me. Turns out that there is a fellow here in the area that has one on his 2001 Red. We’ve exchanged emails and I hope to go visit sometime this weekend. I’m going to bring a tape measure.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $923.63
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 167

SETI@Home Stats

I added my SETI@Home stats to the Miata Diaries site. I got it to work after several failures. I wanted to add it to this site as well, but I was stymied by the same thing that slowed me down on the other one, I couldn’t get it to work in anything but the root directory of the plog. So I had to use two copies of the PHP script and two copies of the XML file. For whatever reason the one on this blog doesn’t update. It still has last night’s stats.

So I tried once again to get it to link to the one file that is residing in the diaries directory. After one messy failure I think it hooked up to it, but it still shows the old stats.

I guess it wasn’t linked after all, I just deleted the supposedly not being read .php and .xml files and the script fails and outputs what you see on the left.

Back to the drawing board.

Style Bar?

After asking my wife for years about getting a style bar for the car and having her deny all requests, I have successfully worn her down. Today she said yes. She said yes to this bar. I like its looks from the top picture’s angle, but I’m not sure about the straight on from the rear view. Plus the other pictures I have found on the web of them shows it finished in gloss black. I like the matte finish that shows on the page.

I really like the Evil Spider bar, but it is a bit more than is in my budget.

The Moss Motors bar is worth investigating too. It also promises no seat travel restrictions and no cutting.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $923.63
Started up, went down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 167

James Brown Announces Breakup Of Marriage

You may have not noticed this unless you live in LA (Los Angeles) or LA (Lower Augusta) but in today’s newspaper there appeared this blurb in the people in the news section of page 2:

The “Godfather of Soul,” James Brown, has announced his breakup from his wife, Tomi Rea Brown, with a full-page ad in the show-business trade newspaper Variety.
In the July 21-27 weekly edition of the paper, the ad features a photo of the couple and their 2 year-old son, James Joseph Brown II, smiling at Walt Disney World while posing with the costumed character Goofy.
Above the photo, a statement said that because of their “heavy, demanding tour schedule, they have decided to go their separate ways. There are no hard feelings, just a mutual show business decision made by both parties.”
Mrs. Brown is one of Mr. Brown’s background singers.
The pair is touring together in Europe, the newspaper added, and may continue working together despite the breakup.

They are splitting up because of the heavy touring schedule? They’re together! I could understand it is she was home while James toured the world.

They are going their separate ways? Yet she is one of his backup singers and may continue to work together!

I glad to see I wasn’t the only one to find humor in this announcement, why else would have the copy person who culled this from the Variety ad have made room for the part about the whole family posing with Goofy.