My wonderful wife’s mother died this morning. Please keep my wife in your thoughts.
#SadNews
#disaffectedmusings
Tag: Disaffected Musings
More Crap
The less one speaks, the more valuable their words, ceterus paribus.
Cliff Clavin was a funny TV character, but in real life I wouldn’t want to spend time with someone like that.
#disaffectedmusings
A Hiatus
As I have some important personal business to conduct, both individually and with my wonderful wife, after today I will not post for 7-10 days. Wish me/us luck as I/we will need more than our share. Good luck and I have been estranged for a long time.
Please don’t forget this blog; I will return, barring an unforeseen disaster. Here are the three most-read posts so far this year, not including the About page:
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What is the life span of the average blog? Two blogs I followed regularly have either been discontinued or are not likely to be continued. According to some research, the average blog is “dead” after just 100 days.
Today is day number 979 for Disaffected Musings. I guess I should feel good about that, but people can keep writing a blog even if no one is reading. I am grateful for the boost in readership since April, even though I know much/most of it is due to bad circumstances beyond my control.
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This recent article from Classic Cars is titled, “Dreaming of doing a restoration? Read this to avoid a nightmare.” I think the sub-title is quite funny, “Seriously, do not pass Go and do not collect $200 until you’ve considered the time and the cost and the labor involved.”
Here are the two key paragraphs in the piece, IMO:
“However, car restoration is not for the faint hearted and it is never — I repeat — never inexpensive. There are no bargains on restorations, only bad restorations or good restorations. There is also no such thing as a driver-level restoration. There is only one way to restore a car and that is completely. Any car that is described as partially restored is likely to have had a brake job and a fresh coat of paint, and not a bare metal respray just a scuff and a new paint finish over the old one. That is not a restoration.”
“Yes, there are a number of shops that will say you can restore your car inexpensively and will give you a quote for say $25,000. Do not believe what they tell you. If you go this route one of two things will happen, either you will get a bad quality job or you will have the shop owner calling you every few weeks to tell you that again your car’s restoration requires more money. This is what people in the industry call the elevator ride.”
The author advises people who want a driver quality car, and not a concours level automobile, to simply find such a car and buy it without attempting any major work.
I have often written that I do not want to own a de facto museum exhibit in the form of an automobile that is too nice to drive. While I would upgrade an older car with modern systems (such as Electronic Fuel Injection) where possible, I would not attempt a full-blown “restoration.” Even the resto-mod C2 Corvette I thought about having built would have been my daily driver, not that I drive much. (I’ve driven my Z06 about 3,700 miles in 18 months.)
On the other hand, I absolutely do not believe in being penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to cars or anything else. Cars need maintenance and maintenance usually costs money. Any used car we buy after (if?) we move will immediately go into a shop for service.
Speaking of my Z06, here’s a recent photo that I am 99% sure has not been displayed here before.
See you on the flip side, I hope. I would still welcome another guest post from a regular reader.
#AHiatus
#LifespanOfAverageBlog
#BeCarefulWithRestorations
#My2016CorvetteZ06!
#somanycarsjustonelife
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Congratulations To Us/Sunday Saunter
In the big scheme of things this “event” is not even trivial, but minutial. That would be true even if the world were not in virus lockdown. However, to this blogger this event has meaning. Even though April, 2020 has a few days to go, Disaffected Musings has had more blog views this month than in any other month since its inception in January, 2018. More impressively (in my opinion, anyway), unlike the previous record month, April of last year, this month had no exogenous boost to readership. Last April saw a two-day surge in views when Bill James tweeted the main link to this blog. Those two days still rank 1-2 in daily views of Disaffected Musings. [By the way, Bill, please feel free to tweet the main link or link to a specific post anytime you want. 🙂 ]
So, congratulations to us and thanks for reading…people searching why Cristy Lee is no longer on All Girls Garage (or the Barrett-Jackson broadcasts) and/or people searching why Lou Santiago and Jared Zimmerman are no longer on Car Fix were the largest contributors to blog views this month. As I have written before, Where Is Cristy Lee? is now the most read post in the history of this blog, not counting the About page. As I write this, blog views for the year are 20 percent higher than the total for the first four months of last year. Here are the rest of the top five posts in all-time views:
Please feel free to acquaint, or re-acquaint, yourself with those posts. (I guess I haven’t written much about Studebaker lately.) Please keep reading and please tell your friends about Disaffected Musings. Thanks.
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My wonderful wife sent me this photo from Fack Fucebook. How do I feel about her using that company’s services? I don’t like it, but we have a marriage, not a dictatorship. Here’s another beautiful shot from Arizona:
Yes, that’s the lovely Katie Osborne, also courtesy of my wonderful wife. One more (just one more, pah two at the very most…inside joke for Dr. Zal) photo of the lovely Arizona sky:
Sorry, local friends and neighbors, but I just can’t wait to be able to see views like that outside my own window.
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Here’s a sample of my buying during these idle times:
Gee, what a surprise! Books about defunct American car companies…these were published by a company called Iconografix. As I cannot find a website for them I’m not sure they’re still in business. I am sure I would like to share some of the photos in these books, but the usual “you can’t use anything in this book anywhere without written consent of the publisher” warning is in all of them. If a company goes bankrupt, what happens to the rights to their products? I guess those rights could be sold at a bankruptcy auction and, therefore, would belong to the purchaser of those rights.
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As a follow-up to C8 Saturday, while I still have not seen one “in the wild” now I know someone who has. Scott Hoke texted me yesterday to say he had seen one “In bright red” while driving around his home turf in the Indianapolis area. From Ray Price Cars a picture of such a 2020 Corvette:
Stay safe and be well.
#DisaffectedMusings
#ThanksToDisaffectedMusingsReaders
#ArizonaSky
#KatieOsborne
#DefunctAmericanCarMakes
#ScottHoke
#C8Corvette
#somanycarsjustonelife
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If you like this blog please tell your friends and share the blog URL (https://disaffectedmusings.com). Thanks.
Throwback Thursday/C8 Reveal Day
From torquenews.com one of many renderings by “ChazCron” of the C8 Corvette as well as the announcement of the reveal date, which is today, of course. Since most of us were not invited to the event in Tustin, California I think you can watch here. If you live on the East Coast, the event doesn’t start until 10:30 or 11 PM.
I think that the entire future of the Corvette could be decided by the success, or lack thereof, of the C8. While Chevrolet/GM can rationalize the sharp decline in Corvette sales since 2014—the first model year of the C7—by “blaming” the drop on the rumors surrounding the C8, the American automotive landscape has changed dramatically. In the back of my mind I wonder if the upcoming discontinuation of the Camaro has as much to do with helping the Corvette as with declining Camaro sales. Of course, if that were really true then Camaro production would probably be stopped before 2022 or 2023.
From corvetteblogger.com a picture of an invitation to and the schedule of the C8 reveal. I really hope the C8 is a success although I have no desire to own one at present. I think it would be a shame if Chevrolet didn’t get to produce the two millionth Corvette, which is about 300,000 units away.
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From cargurus.com a picture of an example of the last year of the C4 Corvette, 1996:
While I am not a big fan of their TV commercials, my wonderful wife and I both found our current Corvettes on CarGurus. As I have written before, I have not always been a big fan of the C4. For many years I thought the styling was bland and until the introduction of the “new” LT-1 engine in 1992 I don’t think the cars were great performers. However, I have grown to appreciate the looks of the later models of the C4. In addition, the 1995 and 1996 models had improved fuel injectors that were better able to deal with ethanol content in gasoline, or as I call it, the corn farmers subsidy program.
As almost every Corvette fan or person in the collector car business knows, C4 Corvettes are not expensive at all. A search on AutoTrader, limited to a 100-mile radius of my house, unearthed six 1995 or 1996 Corvettes with list prices under $10,000. A nationwide search, but only for cars with 75,000 miles or fewer, revealed 18 such cars under $10,000. Of course, if you don’t have to have a 1995 or 1996 model then your choices multiply greatly. C4 production totaled 359,028 in the 13 model years it was manufactured (1984-96).
The Corvette world will never be the same after today. I would very much like to read your thoughts, either before or after the reveal or both.
#C8CorvetteReveal
#C4Corvette
#somanycarsjustonelife
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If you like this blog please tell your friends and share the blog URL (https://disaffectedmusings.com). Thanks.
Throwback Thursday
My condolences to the family of Willie McCovey including his San Francisco Giants family. He was one of my favorite baseball players when I was young. In his seminal work, The Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James wrote this about McCovey:
“McCovey lost three years as a regular at the start of his career because the Giants came up with McCovey and [Orlando] Cepeda at the same time and couldn’t play them both at first base. He lost significant parts of ten other seasons to injuries. The heart of his career was in the 1960s, the most pitching-dominated decade since Ruth. He overcame all of these things to hit 521 home runs…if he played in the 1990s with the DH and the modern parks, he’d hit 800 home runs.”
One of the important tenets of modern analysis is adjusting for context. If every player has a .300 batting average, then a .300 batting average is nothing special. (The entire National League had a .303 batting average in 1930, for example.) In my early days in baseball I had a very difficult time getting this point across. As Bill has written, statistics are not truth, anyway; they are an approximation of the truth. To severely paraphrase Shakespeare, there is nothing good or bad but context makes it so.
Carpe Diem!
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I hope in the near future that the daily high for views and visitors are set so often that they no longer merit mention, but thanks to all of the readers who visited yesterday so that, for the second time in less than a week, a new daily “record” was set for views and visitors for Disaffected Musings. Thanks especially to all of the Hemmings, Car and Driver and Corvette Forum readers who visited. If you’re reading this, welcome back and please keep reading. (https://disaffectedmusings.com)
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From barnfinds.com a picture of a 1949 Cadillac Series 62 convertible that appears to be a genuine barn find. Note the small fins at the rear of the car. The beginning of the fin trend actually started with 1948 Cadillacs and almost everyone knows that Harley Earl and his fellow GM designers were inspired by the design of the Lockheed P38 Lightning airplane.
1949 was a significant year because it was the first year that a modern, overhead-valve V-8 engine was available. Both Cadillac and Oldsmobile featured such engines in their 1949 cars. It was the second time in a decade that those two makes offered a groundbreaking innovation as the first truly modern automatic transmission (the Hydra-Matic), jointly developed by Cadillac and Oldsmobile, was first offered by Oldsmobile on its 1940 model year cars. Of course, something called World War II interrupted automobile innovation in the interim.
I know I have written about the 1949 Cadillac and the OHV V-8 before, but that car and engine were very significant. Hey, I’m getting old and starting to repeat myself. What can I say?
Can I hijack a hashtag? #tbt
#somanycarsjustonelife
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Disaffected Musings 