Finn’s high school was ranked in the 99th percentile of Maryland high schools, according to the 2024 school report card. Not too shabby.
Back in 2012 or so I started watching a goofy YouTube show called Roadkill, about two guys who would drive somewhere remote to find a junky car, fix it up, do some burnouts, and drive it somewhere else. It was pretty popular, and eventually the two hosts—who then were both editors of Hot Rod magazine—quit their jobs and hosted Roadkill full time. A couple of years ago it was put behind a paywall at MotorTrend, and I missed the show.
Last week, deep in Week 3 of working from home, I was actually on the “buy” screen for a year’s worth of MotorTrend On Demand, but for some reason I never pushed the button.
This afternoon, I got an email from Hagerty announcing they were giving us members a free year of MotorTrend On Demand as part of our membership. I’m looking at several days at my desk making edits to WRI’s Annual Report, so this gift could not have come at a better time. Bravo, Hagerty, you just made my quarantine 100% more bearable.
Roadkill is a webseries put together by Motor Trend with an unscripted, americanized Top Gear sort of sensibility. I found it random a few weeks ago, and got sucked in very quickly; someone on Metafilter helpfully put together a list of all the current episodes.
Here’s the video update from the last month, with a big chunk of July chopped out of the middle for vacation.
In other video entertainment news I was happy to see that Roadkill, which used to be on the MotorTrend channel until MotorTrend blew themselves up, is now on Max, so I’m catching up with all the seasons I missed (something like 6 years’ worth). They’re also showing a couple of related shows like Roadkill Garage and Junkyard Gold, as well as Mythbusters. So there is a reason to keep Max around for a while.
Huh. A couple of years ago I paid for a MotorTrend+ subscription so I could watch Roadkill, the original “Will it Run?”-style TV show, and they also had Dirt Every Day and Top Gear US among other good shows. Most of the rest of the channel was cable-TV dreck—Reality TV-style customizing shows that were irritating when they were on cable 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I felt pretty good about my subscription, because I liked the three shows mentioned above. I let the subscription lapse after the first year and considered renewing it, but then they watered down Top Gear US and got rid of the hosts I tolerated. Then they axed Dirt Every Day. Now it turns out they’re bleeding cash and are shutting down the streaming service and moving everything to Discovery+, where I will not be subscribing. I feel like we subscribe to enough services as it is, and seriously, if we didn’t use Amazon Prime for online purchasing, I would cancel that subscription, because their streaming selection is straight garbage.