Adult Swim canceled one of my favorite shows, the Venture Brothers, last year, with little fanfare. They announced today they’re going to produce a follow-up movie for the series along with Metocalypse and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, two other canceled shows. It’s not as good as having a whole season, but I’d love to see things wrapped up (and have a little more time with Team Venture).
I haven’t mentioned the Mustang here because, well, it’s not here yet. The seller was being a little iffy about the possibility of it making an hour-long drive and crossing a 3-mile bridge with no breakdown lane, so we postponed the pickup and explored other options. I talked with Matt yesterday and he’s arranged for it to be towed here this afternoon, as he didn’t want us to get stuck on the bridge or somewhere in Eastern Maryland with a car we hadn’t ever driven. Which is, frankly, fine with me: as much as I’d love to road-trip it across the bridge, I’d rather do the 1-10-100 test with my USAA towing card handy.
In other news, I dusted off my acoustic guitar a couple of days ago, tuned it up, and put it behind my desk in the office. There are a bunch of simple songs I was learning back when I was taking lessons ten years ago—sweet creeping Jesus time has flown—and recently decided I’d like to pick this thing back up and learn them again. I found my notes and chord books and I’ve worked on the progressions for two songs already, and my fingertips already hurt. But it’s nice to make music again!
Cousin Matt texted me a picture of a pretty black 1965 Mustang on Sunday, nonchalantly asked me if Henderson Maryland was close by, and if I’d be interested in driving out there to pick it up for him, drive it back to the house, and hang on to it while he arranged for transport. I told him it would be a major inconvenience, but I’d do it anyway. Actually, I jumped at the chance. He’s getting the insurance and other legal stuff taken care of, and then we’ll drive out there later this week to grab it up—probably Thursday (which works best, as it’s going to be raining until then anyway). I’m going to load up a bunch of GoPros and make a fun afternoon out of it. I’ve driven a lot of different cars in my life, but never a ’65 Mustang; taking it back across the bridge is going to be a treat. I don’t know what driving condition it’s in, and I’ll have to do a pre-drive inspection before I get it on the road, but this should be fun!
Jalopnik, one of my favorite go-to websites for years, has been pretty much gutted by its private-equity overlords. Most of the authors I liked to read have moved on to other sites and I can’t stand 90% of what’s left, so I was pleased to learn that a couple of alumni have resurrected an older site called Carbibles.com and are building it out into something more along the lines of what I want to read: a mixture of how-to articles, personal stories, reviews, and opinions.
Here’s an excellent article on how to manage up—and what it means to do it right: First, the author makes the point that a manager can’t know everything about their reports, and that it’s a good idea for the employee to push the right information upwards so that the manager can help them do their best. As a manager, I try to regularly ask my team to tell me what they need and what’s holding them back, but this is an even better way to frame a conversation.
Wow. If Dad were still alive, I would buy this and offer to fly out to the West Coast to drive it back with him: a 1968 Ford Country Squire wagon, the spitting image of the wagon he had when Renie and I were little kids. This one has a couple of dents and dings, but overall looks like it’s in good shape. Of course, a 390 under the hood means we’d be filling it up every 15 miles, but that would be an epic trip.
I would do some light modification to this wagon—I’d repaint it in the original Ford green, find a roof rack (or the equivalent Thule roof basket) and lift it slightly for some better tires—but keep the stock hubcaps. Refresh the engine, suspension and brakes, sort out the interior, and drive the piss out of it.
So Rush Limbaugh died Wednesday after a bout of lung cancer. Cancer does suck, but seriously, fuck that guy. He and his kind are a cancer on our democracy; maybe that’s a sign of cosmic justice out there somewhere.
Good grief. One of my go-to podcasts, Reply All, did a series on the racism scandal at Bon Appétit, a very popular magazine and online property which has been accused of keeping people of color out of the spotlight. That exposed an identical problem at Gimlet Media, the podcast channel that publishes Reply All. What a mess.
I went back and looked at the Reverb listing for my bass after having forgotten it for a couple of weeks; it’s been viewed 8,000 times but there are still no concrete offers. Meanwhile there are a couple of others listed for more money elsewhere; I’d love to know if anything is moving right now. Here’s to hoping an offer comes out of the blue.
With the purchase of fancy new iPhones, we’ve run into a problem with our aging fleet of vehicles. The iPhone SE (2020) does not have a headphone jack as our old 6-era models did, so there’s no way to connect our phones to the stereo as we did before. Both Hondas are from pre-Bluetooth days—at least, the CR-V is; Bluetooth may have been offered in the Accord but we have the base model which came with nothing other than an auxiliary jack and a secondary power port in the console. To be clear, in COVID days, connecting phones in the cars isn’t an immediate requirement, but it would have been helpful on the ride up to New York and back.
The aux jack in the Accord actually makes things pretty simple, and having a power port next to it is even better. I found a little Anker Bluetooth adapter on Amazon that hooks into both and turns on when the car is running. In two minutes I had it streaming from my phone and all was well.
Theoretically I could use this setup for the Scout as well, and probably will for the short term, but having yet another gadget sticking out of the dash in a vehicle with no top invites certain theft. Fortunately, swapping the existing head unit out for one that has Bluetooth, an auxiliary jack, and a detachable faceplate built in is simple—and relatively inexpensive. Besides, I hate the head unit that’s in there right now anyway.
I’ve looked in to Bluetooth options for the CR-V, and this is where it gets challenging. I’d have to buy a gadget that plugs into the back of the existing head unit, tear the dash apart, and install it. None of that is frightening (I’ve had many dashboards disassembled in my past) but I don’t relish the idea of doing it in the wintertime. And this is the vehicle that needs it the most. But before I do that, I’d like to address the suspension that needs to be gone through…
It was too damn hot to do anything serious outside over the weekend, but I thought I’d get Finn out to the junkyard for a mission. We’ve got a flip-up mirror on the visor in the CR-V that I repaired once last year (a hinge pin fell out, making the door useless) and recently the entire edge of the plastic door decided to break off to spite me. I packed a bag of metric and SAE tools, put on my boots, and took Finn down to Jessup in the Scout. I figured they would be cagey about letting kids in the yard, but she’s tall for her age, and everything about the yard is shifty, so I figured we’d act like we did this every day and walk right through. I paid my $4, wrote my name on their sign in sheet, and was almost at the door to the yard when Finley, who normally doesn’t notice her own shoes when she’s wearing them, stopped me in my tracks. “Daddy, the sign says no kids under 16 years of age,” she practically shouted, standing directly in front of the counter lady. Startled out of her waking slumber, the counter lady said, “How old are you?” and before I could reply, Finley practically shouted, “Eleven!”
After I dropped her off back at the house, I paid my $2 and walked through the yard. They had two CR-V’s, one green over tan version and one silver over black that was the spitting image of ours, minus catastrophic front-end damage. There’s a weird phenomenon with junkyard CR-V’s I’ve noticed: usually they’re missing both visors. The last time I found one for the part I needed someone had already hacked it off the mount, realized it was bent, and threw it under the seat. The Silver CR-V was wrapped liberally with plastic and sported two BIOHAZARD stickers on the back windows, which meant something unspeakable and messy had happened during the crash. Peeking inside, I found that someone had braved disease and pulled the visors off. The green CR-V was less picked over and still had its visor, but because the interior was tan, I decided not to pay $10 for mismatched plastic.
The rest of the yard was pretty boring; the oldest and most interesting vehicle was a mid-70’s Ford wagon the size of a small container ship. Kids, I’m old enough to remember when the roads were covered with these barges.
There was also this red MR2 beached on blocks minus its 4A-GE engine; I wondered how anyone would donate such a rare and valuable beast until I saw the rust around the rockers and rear quarters. It was sprinkled inside and out with a decade’s worth of pine needles, and those tires haven’t held air since the first Bush administration. Still, as a cheap-ass trackday car, I was surprised someone wasn’t dragging it out by the bumper.
I racked the beer into the secondary carboy on Sunday, and it smells really good. About three inches of hops were at the bottom by the time I was done, so I threw those in the composter with our coffee grounds and eggshells. Now I wait two weeks before dry-hopping the batch, and then there’s another week before it goes into the keg. It would be great to have something I like on tap because I’m probably spending too much on six-packs of craft beer.
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.
On Jalopnik, Andrew Collins (fellow Scout owner) writes an appreciation of The Second-Gen Honda CR-V. Because Jalopnik’s commenting system is such a giant bag of dicks, I couldn’t log in with one of the four accounts it’s made me create over the years to add my opinion, but my love of our CR-V is well documented here.
David Tracy of Jalopnik undertakes and writes about hare-brained wrenching trips on a regular basis, and his latest one is a hoot to read: he flew 1,500 miles to buy a manual Jeep Cherokee (a rare option), fix it in a donated garage, and drive it all the way home.
A 4-door 1961 Pontiac Tempest just popped up on Barn Finds in pieces, but it reminded me of this 2-door from last year in beautiful shape: there’s something perfect about how the designers moved away from tall fins and folded layers, sculpting more subtle shapes in this era of cars; this particular style is one of my favorites. The split grille is Pontiac’s design language, and the inset behind the front wheels merging into short fins is perfect. Blacked-out dog dish hubcaps are the finishing touch. This would be in my dream garage.