Month: March 2025

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

There Is No Substitute Edition of SORT
As of Monday, March 24, 2025 at 6:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2024 Porsche 911 GT3 RS 1982 Porsche 911SC 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera
I did this all 911s once before back in November 2022 and a couple weeks later I did it for Miatas as well, so we’ll see if that happens again.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sport: 1966 Porsche 356 Replica Sold for USD $39,000 on 3/19/25
Off-Road: 1987 Mercedes 240GD Sold for USD $45,000 on 03/19/25
Touring: 1952 Mercedes 300 D Bid to USD $106,000 on 3/18/25

Many Post Office Weekend

The first 4 rows of photos with the blue Miata were from Saturday and the last three with the black car are from today. Twenty-one total and now I have to go back and add some interesting tidbit to each photo, if I can. And because I’m old and my brain is too, I will have an issue dredging up something to say about every one of them. And surprisingly, the greater the chance of that seems to be on the newer photos…

Sunday In The Rain

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky

I did go for a drive in Bucky and did photograph nine more post offices in spite of the rain, occasionally heavy. Trouble is I only took eight of the ones I thought I would, but by luck got one more. I can’t trust a saved Google Map that has multiple stops in it. The Google to Samsung transfer hiccups and you end up with just the Start and End points. Which is really wonderful if the start and end were the same place. Also, you can’t start driving before you hit drive button on the map, because it will keep shouting at you to do a U-turn to go back to the starting point first and sometimes with this it’ll drop all the stops too.

Because I made all the Oregon post offices as a Saved Place, they show as dots on the map and I can hop from dot to dot on a loop. The problem of my missing one on the loop today was because in Hillsboro, the regular post office and the DCU1 were about a 1/4 mile apart and their dots kind of overlapped. I didn’t notice the miss until I was home and removing the photographed post offices from my saved places list.

Lucky, number nine was because there was one post office on the way home that would made an out of the way detour next time I came this way. It was in the small town of St. Paul, between OR99W and I-5. Below are today’s outtakes, AKA non post office photos.

Saturday At The Coast

Well, I did drive over to the Oregon coast today, but more time was spent getting there and back than on the coast. I drove a total of 285 miles and only about 30 of it was along US101. I did pretty much used a whole tank of gas on the day. There were a few walks in state parks, the Indian Beach Trail in Ecola State Park, to the beach at Sunset Beach State Recreation Site and climbing around defensive batteries at Fort Stevens State Park. I set out to clean up all the unvisited Post Offices in the upper left part of the state and it took pictures of a dozen of them to do it. Here are the non post office photos, those you’ll get tomorrow, maybe.

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky. When I got home today the new beige seatbelts were at my doorstep instead of the expected Monday arrival. So after a 10 hour trip, I spent 2 hours in the driveway installing them.

Stuck In The 70s

What brought on this fascination with the 70s? Because my formative years between 15 to 25 were spent in that decade? Because I will be turning 70 this year and that is around the time when a DNA segment mutates causing you to be nostalgic for those formative years? So, I guess, life?

Last Sunday I mentioned watching something called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Today I watched the nineth episode in that series and it just fed the ‘stuck in the seventies’ rut, its title, “American Cinema of the 70s.”

A few years ago, probably COVID time, I decided that I would get rid of all my physical media, I ripped all 500 of my CDs to MP3s and most all my DVDs to MKVs. I only did the DVDs that I’d probably watch again and ended up with 158. Of that total, there were 12 movies from the 70s and 3 of those got coverage in that episode of The Story of Film. Here is my list of 12 with their release dates and I italicized those three:

M*A*S*H – March 18, 1970
Woodstock – March 26, 1970
The Andromeda Strain – March 12, 1971
Le Mans – June 23, 1971
American Graffiti – August 11, 1973
Jesus Christ Superstar – August 15, 1973
Chinatown – June 20, 1974
Jaws – June 20, 1975
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – November 19, 1975
Star Wars – May 25, 1977
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – November 25, 1977
Alien – May 25, 1979

Can I Have “70s Movies” For 1,000,000 Alex?

A cool million was the ransom demanded by Mr. Blue for the safe return of the seventeen hostages in the front car of a New York subway train.

After the last couple of 70’s movies, I fell into a fog of nostalgia and started thinking of other movies of that period that I have enjoyed enough to revisit, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three bubbled right to the surface. I’m sure I saw it in theaters, rented it on VHS from Blockbuster and possibly caught on TV too. Checking IMDB I found that it was available on MGM+ and for $6.99 a month. So, I signed up and after watching this movie possibly find some others that might be worth a look.

It starred Walter Matthau, but the movie was packed full of 70s stars. First up was Mr. Blue, Robert Shaw (Quint of Jaws), he’s the leader of the gang of 4 who hijack the train. His accomplices included Martin Balsam (Juror #1 of 12 Angry Men) as Mr. Green who is the only survivor of the baddies in the end. I just looked at his IMDB page and he was credited with 179 roles in movies and TV from 1949 to 1997, with 51 credits in the 70s alone. Other recognizable names included Hector Elizondo, Jerry Stiller and Doris Roberts.

Turns out, there are 2 other versions of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The first was a TV movie in 1998 which I knew about and a theatrical release in 2008 that I didn’t. Coincidentally, both movies were available on MGM+.

I remembered being excited for the TV version, but was so disappointed in it that I shut it off after about 30 minutes. It didn’t hold a candle to the original even though it was chock-a-block full of stars of the day, Edward James Olmos, Vincent D’Onofrio, Donnie Wahlberg and Richard Schiff. Also, Mr. Olmos’s was Lorraine Bracco, Tony Soprano’s shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. I tried to watch it again this afternoon, but failed. Partially because it still paled in comparison, but also its aspect ratio was off, it seemed a version that was tweaked for High Def TV after being filmed in standard definition. I did watch as far as the initial hijack of the car and then fast forwarded to the end to see if they kept the perfect ending (they did.)

Because of today’s windy, rainy, 40-degree temp weather, I was inside with time to kill, so I looked at the third version. Wow, what a hot mess. I repeated the previous procedure and watch the initial hijack and zipped to the end for the finish which was, well, WTF. It too, had some big stars and some other big-name folks too, including James Gandolfini, the afore mentioned Tony Soprano.

After scrolling thru the movies available on MGM+ I realized there was only a couple things besides The Taking of Pelham One Two Three worth spending money on, luckily when I signed I up I’m entitled to the first week free, so after watching the next couple things, both music documentaries, in my queue I’ll just cancel. First up is San Francisco Sounds: A Place In Time about the music that came from Haight Ashbury in the 60s and 70s. The other covers basically the same time frame, but its Los Angeles based, called Laurel Canyon: A Place In Time.

Can I Have “70s Movies” For 1,000 Alex?

On today’s bill here at the Bogardi Movie Palace is “The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.” This movie was released in early 1975 so I’m not sure where I saw it first. There are a few possibilities, first it could have been in the on-base movie theater in Patuxent River Naval Air Station, either with or without Donna. Or maybe I saw it along with a handful of fellow sailors on the hanger deck on the U.S. Midway. Another possibility is that Donna and I saw it on VHS sitting on our own couch in Millington, TN or Meridian, MS.

Where ever it was, it creeped me the f*ck out. The premise of the movie is, well, in the title. This guy is having very vivid and intense dreams, it feels like he is actually there and in them, but the guy doesn’t look anything like him. In these dreams there are these brief flashes of places, there is a very distinct bridge, a large church and a statue.

The thing is, I actually knew these places. I could picture them in my head, but for the life of me I couldn’t place them in the real world. Was I reincarnated too? I can’t remember exactly when I found out those images were tied to my childhood memories, could be anywhere from the 1980’s to the 2010’s. I also can’t remember how it came up in topic on the Santa Fe to Hammond to Santa Fe road trip with Sally, but I regaled her with my first being creeped out by the movie to my solving the riddle of those images.

In several summers growing up, we kids (Me, sister Diane and brother Paul) would go and stay with our grandmother in Springfield, MA for a week. Every time we went there it was pretty much the same routine. There was one thing planned for each day and after that we to be quiet and play in our bedroom. Three of the day’s events meant we would walk down a couple blocks to downtown, the first day was always to the toy store so we’d have something to play with. One was to the Natural History Museum and then the other, a favorite restaurant, The Waterfall, where we got to have a milkshake.

We drove across that bridge to get to Springfield, that church was right down the street from her apartment and the statue (The Puritan) was at the museum.