Month: December 2022

No Plan B

I know back in February that I said that Better Off Dead, might be my last Jack Reacher book, but it wasn’t.

After buying a couple of new sweatshirts with my self gifted Christmas bonus I still had a wee bit of money leftover. I thought maybe I would get our local bookstore to order for me the latest Jack Reacher book, No Plan B. That way I could pick it up on our every four week visit that coincides with our haircut. The next of which was on the calendar for the 29th.

Donna said go ahead and get it from Amazon, so you could have it for Christmas. So, on the 18th I placed an order. At checkout my estimated delivery date was listed as the 28th, so much for that expedited Prime delivery. In the end they did get it to me earlier than that and even earlier than Christmas to boot, the book arrived on Christmas Eve.

The first few books every story was more or less direct, as if you were walking in Reacher’s shoes, but as the series progressed the stories would occasionally give the point of view of the villain in the story, but still it was very Reacher centric. This last novel written with his real life brother, who will eventually take over by himself, was with four different points of view. Of course Reacher was the center point and there was also the main bad guy, a CEO of a for profit prison that was up to no good. That really was enough, but we also got a thread about a father out for revenge because of his sons death. There was also stuffed into the narrative, the story the story of a teenager boy who is running away from home. Both of these last two story lines were left until the end to fit into the main story and done in such a way that seemed jarring to me. And while both of them were, in some way, used to further the plot along, in the end they both were wrapped in about a paragraph each and they really weren’t really needed.

So, this time I mean it, No Plan B was the last Reacher book I’m going to buy. I’ve got digital copies of the first two dozen books and I’ll probably go back and read each one as they get adapted for the Amazon Prime TV series.

Gas ‘Em Up

It is coming up on the end of the month so we needed to finish using up our Fred Meyer Fuel Points that are left over from November. We filled up the Mini last Wednesday, but we still had a touch over 800 points to use or lose by the end of the month. so this morning I unplugged the battery tender, put up the top and drove to Freddy’s and bought 6.858 gallons and saved $5.49.

It wasn’t really snowing, I just added it to the picture for fun. The snow on the roadside is real and left over from the last snow storm.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 4

 

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Boxing Day Edition of SORT
As of Monday, December 26, 2022 at 3:00 PM pacific time:

I was going to post nothing but Porsche Boxsters, but couldn’t find one in “Safari Style.”

Sport Off-Road Touring
Porsche 356 Speedster Replica 1990 Land Rover Defender 90 200Tdi 5-Speed 1935 Plymouth Deluxe Woody Wagon

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: Chrome Racer Pedal Car Sold for $9,550 on 12/26/22
Off-Road: Mini Monster Go-Kart Sold for $14,454 on 12/20/22
Touring: Bugatti-Style Pedal Car Sold for $4,300 on 12/23/22

Christmas Eve Pizza Run & Shakedown Drive

We planned on pizza for lunch and when I called our usual place around noon no human answered the phone after about 10 rings. This is not unusual as they can get busy at lunchtime and sometimes I hang up and call again and someone will answer almost right away. As I was about to try this strategy when a machine picked up, they were closed for the Christmas holiday and would reopen on Tuesday. Dang.

Plan B was implemented. I called Papa Murphy’s, a take-and-bake pizza place, and they were open. We have used them a couple of times before and while they are no comparison to Rodeos, this seemed our best option. I opted to take the Miata because the roads were finally almost entirely clear of snow and ice from our post Thanksgiving storm.

Plus I wanted to test my fix for the front tires scraping when making sharp turns. Yesterday I had finally decided to see what the tires might be hitting. Turns out it was just the driver side and it was hitting on a bent down area on the inner fender liner. It was missing one of the plastic twisty fasteners that held the front part of the liner to the middle section. I didn’t have an extra one, so I stole one from an area that had a couple close together.

This helped, but did not solve the problem totally because the plastic liner pieces were still bent down enough to hit the tire on full lock, so I let loose my red-neck engineering side. I drilled an eighth inch hole inside the engine compartment through the inner fender and through the liners. I found a small flat head screw and screwed it through the liners from insdie the fender to hold them tight against the fender. Then I sprayed both sides of my “repair” with some black Plasti Dip to kind of seal it from the elements.

Success, no more ugly sounds when making sharp turns.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 3

 

25 Years Ago – Issue V 1997

This was a “special” edition of the Miata Club of America magazine that introduced the second generation Miata to members. I think, but can’t be sure, that news of the remodeled car was already out there before this was published and distributed in late November of 1997. The car went on sale in February 1998 as a 1999 model.

Virtually Informed

By Gary Fischman
Founder & owner of Miata.net

LEAKS IN THE NET
The new Miata has been a topic of conversation, speculation, trepidation, and mediation on the Internet ever since Mazda’s top brass announced there would be “some minor changes” in ’98. Some looked forward to these changes, while others simply prayed that the new car would retain everything that made us rush out to buy the original.

Worldwide Rumors
Most of the early M2 information circulating on the net was learned from Mazda managers who’d been shown a concept video in the fall of ’96. This is when we first learned about the new car’s curved doors and fixed headlights, for example.

Soon after that, the electronic mailboxes at Miata.net – the clearinghouse site for online Miata info – began filling up with letters claiming knowledge about the various features or design decisions being incorporated into the new MX5. Some even came with graphics and introductory text vouching for their authenticity.

These images could invariably be traced to an artist’s conception gleaned from some obscure foreign car magazine, and in every case they turned out to be unfounded. One very popular early image was sent to Miata.net in December ’96 by an anonymous Asia source accompanied by a cock-and-bull story about it having been acquired from a “Mazda insider.” A bit of magnification proved it was a hoax; someone had simply taken an M Speedster photo and electronically added a few new features. Even so, it was enough to pique lots of online interest. That’s part of the Internet’s nature; since anyone can publish, anyone can try fooling you.

Eventually, as Mazda’s concept video was circulated to the company’s various regional offices and was seen by many dealers, more and more information dribbled out. With it came the inevitable worried online exchanges: Will it be an improvement? Will it make our first-generation cars look dated? Will it be another case of a carmaker caving in to its marketing department—after all, who buys a Miata because they need space for two sets of golf clubs?

The Video Gets Out
Mazda’s secret video eventually made its way to a dealership in the south-eastern US that didn’t understand its confidential nature. As a gesture to the local MCA chapter, they showed the video to some club members, and one enthusiast—eager to share the discovery with his equally enthusiastic friends on the net—asked if he could make a copy off the tape. Pointing his camera at the TV, he captured fuzzy, yet easily recognizable, footage of the new MX5!

By morning a few frames from his camera were posted on his personal web page and he had notified Miata.net where the pictures could be found. Just a few hours later, word of the leak had found its way to Mazda headquar-ters in Hiroshima, and Miata.net was immediately asked to hold off publishing the pictures.

The “perp” was also asked to remove them from his site, which he actually did. But information on the net simply can’t be controlled that way. In those few hours, some 300 hits were registered on the spy shots—enough for at least a half-dozen major car mags to find and download them for imme-diate publication. (And we thought we were the only ones who cared!)

The Real Thing
After the Great Video Debacle, it took a bit of time for the online world to regain the trust of Mazda’s PR folks, but that’s the way the informational cookie crumbles now. By the time official photos of the new MX5 were appearing on mainstream magazines’ websites, the leak was older than yesterday’s news. When rumors and real facts both travel at light speed, there’s always something newer to get excited about.

Copyright 1997, Miata Magazine. Reprinted without permission.

 

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Christmas Presents Edition of SORT
As of Monday, December 19, 2022 at 11:00 AM pacific time:

Dear Santa, I have been a very good boy this year. All I want for Christmas is…

Sport Off-Road Touring
Chrome Racer Pedal Car Mini Monster Go-Kart Bugatti-Style Pedal Car

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 2021 Porsche 718 Cayman Bid to $84,000 on 12/14/22
Off-Road: 1977 Toyota Land Cruiser Bid to $35,000 on 12/18/22
Touring: 1968 Mercedes-Benz 280SL Sold for $66,000 on 12/14/22

Reacher: Season 2

The first season of Reacher was based on the first book of the series, Killing Floor, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I liked it so much that when I ran out of interesting stuff on Amazon Prime a few days ago, I rewatched it.

Not long after Amazon released Reacher this last February they announced that a second season had been approved. I figured maybe I should reread the second book, Die Trying, in preparation for a hopefully February release of season two on Amazon. Because I have read most of the Reacher books multiple times as soon as I read the first couple pages I knew the basic outline of what happens.

Book #2 starts with a kidnapping that Reacher inadvertently stumbles into and gets swept up along with the kidnappee. Then there is a cross-country trip in the back of a truck along with the victim who turns out is an FBI agent and daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and goddaughter of the President. So far so good, but then it devolves into a Montana militia group declaring independence and stolen nuclear missiles and the US military, etc. I’m thinking that this would be hard to translate into a 8 episode series. Turns out I need not have worried.

I went looking online to see if their were hints as to when the second season would be coming out, February again maybe, and discovered that the second series was based on the eleventh book, Bad Luck and Trouble. Off to the book and after reading the first page I thought, “Ooh, this is a good one.” It also, to me anyway, seems a lot easier to adapt to the small screen.

And maybe they knew this was what they were going next because one of the things I wondered about in season one when they introduced a character that really doesn’t show until book six, Frances Neagley. She was his sergeant back when Reacher was in the Army and part of his command of the 110th MP Special Investigation Unit. Bad Luck and Trouble is about getting the old gang of the 110th back together to find out what happened to one of their members present day. Neagley’s early entry into the series in season one brought a bit of foreshadowing to season two when she uses the phrase, ‘You do not mess with the Special Investigators’ which is a central to the plot of the eleventh book (and perhaps the first time it is used in the books.)