Saw this car this morning. I believe it is as MG TD. I don’t know, but a cursory examination of the interwebz leads me to believe this may be a circa 1953 MG T-type.
I drove in this morning, parked near this car and figured I’d never see it again. But it was there when I left this evening, because I left earlier than I’d anticipated.
At a glance, you can tell that the owner is proud of this vehicle and, I assume, is happy to have people notice it. I wonder how often it sees the road. Perfect weather day for it today, but you surely pick your spots with a classic, right?
The MG people produced 30,000 TDs over three or four years in the UK. Some 23,000 of them were shipped to the US. You can buy one today ranging from $17,000 to $32,000.
And, yes, if you have a MG, you get an MG hat and you wear the MG hat.
But why did I leave earlier than I’d anticipated today? Excellent question.
After they closed the building for the day I worked elsewhere. And I got to go home at the regular time, rather than after watching the news — which they did outdoors this evening, which was impressive.
So we went to the lake, and floated on tubes into the early evening.
Fine way to spend a Tuesday.
books / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Rocket ship emoji19 Sep 22
The hill of truth. It isn’t much of a hill, and what little there is is basically behind the photographer at this point, but for some reason getting over and around that curve tell you a lot about a ride.
Of course it was two-thirds of the way through my Saturday morning ride. All of its truths had been laid bare already. It was a slow start, as rides often are, and the burst off the first little roller wasn’t as sharp or as long as it usually is. The sprint I’ve been tinkering with, one long straight road that takes you from one neighbor to another, I didn’t even try. And then she ran off and left me.
I only saw her again after one of the turnaround points. And that is what happens when you have no legs on a 30-mile ride. You get dropped.
I can enjoy it. This was the biggest mileage week for me in the last few months. Not a lot, but plenty for the moment.
Maybe I can find more miles this week, or the week after.
Let’s do the weekly check-in with the kitties. They’re both doing great, thanks for asking. Phoebe spent a bit of time last night hanging out in the entertainment center for some reason.
Poseidon was more than happy to take a nap in the fuzzy blanket. When they cover their eyes like this I assume they are embarrassed about something going on around them. The only question is, by whom?
Probably his sister.
Finished the Thomas Cahill book, this evening. The barbarians invaded Rome. It all slipped away, slowly, then suddenly. Eventually literacy gained a foothold in Ireland. And then came Patrick, Columcille, and Colombanus.
It’s a light popular reading. So there’s not a lot of depth, but if you were looking for an entry-point into an important period of Irish history, this is a reasonable start. The book ends with this downer.
There are almost 8 billion of us now, last time I counted, so that at least gives us plenty of permutations and possibilities. And, if that somehow doesn’t work, there are always emojis.
cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off on Ridin’ into the weekend16 Sep 22
One of the night shift spiders was happy to show off his work in the yard this morning. May you catch many insects, spider. And stay outside, why don’t ya?
I rode in early enough this morning to enjoy the long shadows. Right after this I tried my new game, to see how far I could coast without turning a pedal.
I made it one mile after which, with two of the softest pedal strokes ever recorded, I made it to the next little place I could glide. This is possible because, depending on which map you prefer, that mile is a descent of 87 or 79 feet. You also have to go through three stop sign-controlled intersections, over a bike lane that students walk in and around both foot and car traffic.
Meaning, if I didn’t have to worry about all of that I could do the last tenth of a mile while coasting. Meaning I could do 22 percent of this bike commute without turning a pedal.
Meaning I’m going to try this one day when no one is around, I guess.
After work — which featured the traditional studio time, punctuated by meetings and other meetings and then some spontaneous meetings — I celebrated the weekend, with a bike ride out to the lake to see The Yankee swim. It was a surprise! We were all surprised.
Her and her swimming friends came in just a few minutes later. We had a discussion about which of the two routes had the easiest climb away from the lake. Everyone there was a cyclist, so it led to a discussion about steepness and duration.
The way I came, the consensus opinion emerged, was longer, the other route was steeper.
Well, turns out they are about the same, because both roads away from the lake are routes up the same hill. So I chose the second route, because we all agreed that maybe it was easier and, besides, I couldn’t really remember the last time I went that way.
Before that climb started, though, I impulsively called an audible and took a right turn. I knew where that road headed. I haven’t been up this road since 2020, and it, of course, was the longest, hardest climb available to me. Precisely what I was trying to avoid.
But I set two PRs as I inched up the spine of that hill, and that impulsive decision let me add on a few more fun miles to the day.
Which was a lovely thought right about here …
Which is also where I remembered that my lovely bride said something about another bike ride tomorrow morning.
Went for a short run after my bike ride from work-to-house. This is almost a brick workout, then. And my first run since last week. On the one hand, this makes two weeks in a row featuring a run. On the other hand, that’s hardly a note of distinction. On the third hand this is the time I’ve run twice in two weeks since July. On the fourth hand, why are we counting a third hand?
Anyway. My knees will hurt for a good two, three days after this. So you better enjoy these pictures.
If you must run, run either at night, or in the golden hour.
Around here, you’ll bump into deer during either of those times. And this doe is unbothered by my existence.
Her fawn doesn’t yet know any better. Still losing spots, gaining experience, and posing casually for photographs.
I ran past that deer, noticed the baby hadn’t flinched, turned and walked back to take that picture. I’m easily within five feet of the fawn.
Sometimes the light conspires with the tree cover and you get something quite nice.
I am woefully overdue on an update to the Re-Listening Project. I am working through all of my old CDs in the car, repeating a project I did a few years ago. I didn’t write about it then, but using it as a bit of content now. And you’re along for the ride. What you’ll read today aren’t reviews, but maybe a few highlights or memories.
And the Re-Listening Project is strictly chronological, which is to say the order in which I bought all of these things. My discs crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, a whimsy as so much of music should be.
If you watched any MTV in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, you saw Seven Mary Three. That is, most assuredly, how I discovered the guys from Florida. Their label debut, “American Standard” was rapidly surging toward platinum status and Jason Ross was screaming in everyone’s ear. And if that strikes a familiar cord, then you remember “Cumbersome” and “Waters Edge” and some of those last dying blooms of Gen X angst. (Or were these the first roars from the millenials? Hard to know.)
Anyway, this was the place where grunge and the pure rock of that era intersected. It was right-place, right-talent, right-A&R-staff, right time. And we’re going to hear more from 7M3 in due time. So as not to overburden you, dear friend, here are just three songs. All of these diverge from the over-the-top intensity of their singles, but also hinted at where they were going.
They evolved in interesting ways, releasing seven studio albums and one live record. I have at least four of them.
The math doesn’t make a lot of sense in this song. So I’ve decided it is hyperbole, which lets me just get back to enjoying the song. Which is good, because it’s a great little rock tune.
I’m pretty sure I bought this CD because of my roommate. He loved this song. I can still see us riding around in his pickup pumping this through the old worn speakers in the dashboard.
I don’t know if it is a false memory, but I can just seem him banging out the drums on his steering wheel, with that big perfect smile on his face. He was a good guy, and I always think about him a lot when I hear this record.
And to really shake things up, the next disc in my first CD book was “A Kind of Magic.” This was Queen’s 12th studio record, a quasi-soundtrack to the first Highlander movie. If you think there are a lot of things going on in that sentence, you are correct. Any number of them might be quirky on their own, but in this combination, they make for something totally weird.
It was an immediate and huge hit in the UK. Stayed on the charts there for more than a year, spawned four hit singles. This record peaked at 46 in the United States, but was a top 10 in Argentinia, Austria, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. And, yes, we’re going with quasi-soundtrack. No official soundtrack was produced for Highlander. Six out of nine songs on the album appeared in the film, although all of them in different forms.
If you remember that movie, though, (and how could you not!?!?!?) this song also became the love theme.
That was a hit single, and one of the better ones. This was not released as a single, but is integral to the movie. And also, shows off Queen’s serious musicianship, punctuated by weird movie interjections.
I am pretty sure I picked up this CD at one of the radio stations I worked at. And I’m pretty sure two songs are the reasons why. “Princes of the Universe” became the movie theme and later, a modified version was the theme of the TV spinoff. Also, Brian May is really bending some strings here.
And while this was a quasi-soundtrack for Highlander, I learned about this song from the Iron Eagle movie, which was released the year before. And, somehow, it got tacked on to both movies. This is an open-road, windows down song, and it still evokes that feeling all these many (many) years later.
It has big allusions to Martin Luther King, Jr., and I did not know until just now that it was a Roger Taylor song.
{{{Fried chicken!}}}
(That part always ruined it for me, though.)
And so we move from the UK to Arizona, for another band I discovered because of moderate rotation on MTV.
People that didn’t take the time to get into The Refreshments probably thought this was a novelty act, or a splash in the pan. But let me tell you, Roger Clyne has chops. And some soul. The Refreshments put out one more record together, got disgusted with the big labels, split up and did some other things. Clyne and P.H. Naffah have another Arizona-based band these days, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, and they have 13 albums out and a huge party-band following. But, for now, a little bit more about “Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy.”
I must have picked this up late in the spring of 1996. I stayed at college. Everyone I knew at the time went off to work or home or wherever they went. But to my freshman way of thinking, if you’re paying rent, you may as well be there. If you’re there you may as well be taking classes. So I took classes. (Made the dean’s list that summer.)
And I listened to this record A LOT.
I don’t know what made the narrative structure work so well on me, but it surely did. Straightforward themes, you could see yourself in some of these dusty roles. And you can belt out the choruses with abandon if no one is around all summer.
What’s great about this record, to me, is that I feel exactly the same today about each of these songs as I did 26 years ago. They all still sit just as they should in my ears.
Maybe it was because I really took the time with this record in one hot, slow summer, and they were writing about the hot, slow world in Arizona and Mexico and added just enough wanderlust.
Also, there’s weird doses of humor mixed in everywhere. And if I had to describe the first half of college in one phrase, I could do far worse than saying “It was weird doses of humor.”
Anyway, The Refreshments were great. Another one of those bands I never had the chance to see live, but one day The Peacemakers will be nearby, and I’ll be there. It will be a glass-raising party.
I had one more musical addition. Some label sent me a maxi single of a band they were pushing. It was a hit in southern California, I guess. But they never caught on elsewhere. And the tracks just weren’t good. I made the mistake of googling the band. They managed to put out two records. And at least one of the former members is still in music. His website told me he composes stuff for games and a few movies and slot machines these days. He looked happy. He referred to his band in a nice way. Took the wind out of my sails about being critical of his old work. (I mean, how would I feel? And you certainly could.) So we’ll end the musical exploration here for now.
I’m about to wrap up Cahill’s book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. I will, that is, if I stop nodding off. (This is a function of going to bed too late, not being interested in what I’m reading. I need to start turning pages earlier in the evening once again, especially for good stuff. And this is a nice book. We’re getting close to it, and while these last sections have defied excerpting, this part is telling. After the fall of Rome, when surviving was the most important thing a person could do in Europe, not “reading” or “writing.”
I suppose the most impressive thing we’ve learned here is how quickly that could happen, over the span of time. Just a few generations of collapsing societies and economies and oncoming hordes and it was almost all gone. Makes you wonder a bit about what it will be the next time.
And, even worse, I must now start to wonder, even as I finish this book, what I’ll read next. (So many good options. Only so many I can read all at once.)
