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No big deal will be made (online anyway), but happy birthday to the love of my life, Sarah.
Love ya babe!
Every sports outlet in SoCal was abuzz with the news today, the evil BCS computers had ranked USC second behind Texas. It seems that some people were absolutely aghast at the idea. I think you all need to take a break and try to remember what it was like before your heads became the size of watermelons.
In my opinion Texas deserves to be the top seed at this point in the season. We're talking about current standings based on statistical criteria (generated from an incomplete set of data). Any whining before the end of the season is misplaced and potentially counter productive. Not that it has stopped anyone from complaining about any part of the BCS from the moment it was created. If you really want to whine, aim it Arizona State, a fine team which battled LSU and USC down to the wire and subsequently fell on an attitude bomb. The performance of ASU is the biggest chink in the USC ratings armor right now.
I'm not going to try any kind of whitewash. I've lived in SoCal for 18 years and I'm a bit of USC fan (more so than when growing up but even then I could appreciate the Trojans). I'm certainly more of a UCLA backer (the gutty Bruins always appealed to me more back when I thought this land of nuts and flakes) and I've been to a bunch of their games. If it were a popularity contest, I'd be for lowly Rutgers, or Penn State (and Joe) or Notre Dame. That should get my bias out of the way.
I generally try to use the idea of teams meeting on a neutral site when comparing them in my mind (one wonderful thing we get from NCAA football is a chance to do that for real in many of the bowls). Assuming we had Texas and USC facing on another on a neutral site next week, I'd have to pick Texas in a very close decision. The SC defense is a patchwork at this point and it seems that anytime now the Trojans will be forced to bring on the 9th string cornerback or safety. I'd have to favor the Longhorns.
Nothing lasts forever and there are a lot of games yet to be played.
If the season plays out for both schools (a bigger if for SC), they'll face off a month after the regular season in the Rose Bowl (on Jan 4th, what a silly notion) where this years national championship game will be happen and I'd give the nod to SoCal.
That's not next week and it's not a neutral field.
We had one hellacious hail storm today in Pasadena (sometime near 1:30 PM).
Smack dab in the middle of a meeting it started banging on the windows of the office we were in and startled us so completely that we stopped temporarily to check out the racket.
About a half hour later I wandered up to the front of building looking for someone and noticed that people were throwing handfuls of white stuff at one another outside.
Curious, I stepped outside and realized that there were piles of rapidly melting stones shoved up against the building and in corners here and there. Most of the hail stones were about 1/4" to a 1/2" in diameter, but there were quite few of the larger variety (although I didn't spot any that were really big).
A few minutes later I realized that I have a camera phone and grabbed a few pictures... score one for the flexible modern mobile phone.
This has been a day of some of the most intense rains I've ever seen in SoCal. We always make light about how nutty everyone out here becomes when it rains, but it very rarely rains this hard; there was good reason to take it easy. At one point this morning, I was in the left lane, passing most others and I was going all of 42 MPH.
Weird weather is here to stay.
In some ways, having a searchable history can be quite bothersome. It can make it far too easy to find things like buying a new car (from late April of 2004). I guess there should be little wonder that my kids now think I'll buy a new car at around approximately never. Sadly, I've been at this for nearly a year and half and yet, the end is now at hand, I've ordered my car.
My problem was really quite simple. Cars are boring. They're all more or less the same thing everywhere you go.
After many months of looking around I was sick of the dealers and bored out of my mind by the cars I might reasonably afford. I drove a lot of cars, checked out many more online and found nothing that would make me part with money for any of them. I'd rather buy a dump truck. So I gave it up and continued driving my mind numbing old Civic.
This past summer, I started getting interested in convertibles. I'd always wanted one, but had never gone that way (still remembering a bad experience my mom had when I was just a lad). I did know they were all driving pigs (poor cousins to their hard headed progeny) but figured I'd look anyway. While doing research on convertibles, I started reading some pretty amazing things about the '05 Mustang.
What I remembered was how Ford had gutted the Mustang and turned it into a little more than a Pinto+ (a long time ago), and then they'd screwed up the way it looked and finally morphed it into a kiddie car. A safe car for an adventurous daughter perhaps (if you couldn't afford the T-Bird) but nothing I'd ever be interested in.
Still, my Mustang loving friends had been telling me for years that it was getting better, even if I wasn't seeing it.
2005 was the year of the big transition and a lot people noticed (last I heard they sold 80,000 more units last year). What really captured peoples attention? Ford ditched the old Fox platform and started anew there. They also reshaped the car to make it look like a lot more like a classic Mustang. In the end, it was reviews like this from Road and Track (along with this collection at Edmunds and even this award) that really piqued my interest. The highlights:
And then I drove a few in various places. Once I got to drive the V8, it got even better.
Along the way, I accidently fell in love all over again with a car I'd written off thirty years ago. And love is precisely the wrong place to be if trying to negotiate a sale according to my informed car buying friends. With them, it's all about the negotiation, buying off the lot and making the dealer make concessions. Their car might as well be a toaster for all the joy they get out of it. What's the point of that?
I'll admit that I was out of luck when it came to a deal of any kind because I had to custom order a car that dealers can hardly keep on their lots anyway. This is fiscally backwards when you consider the dealer perks, a guaranteed sale still comes with factory financed 'lot time' even though the car is in and out pronto (the buyer has to guarantee via some sort of deposit). At the same time, Ford is generating demand for the GT to back up by sending out all these GT's with automatic transmissions (good grief, what's the point of a V8 automatic?) and limiting deliveries. I can't say I disagree. The Mustang is in demand and controlling inventory to keep that demand high is a reasonable thing.
What won me over?
The look, from the body styles to the gauges certainly brings back memories. The changes in the basic platform are more important including nearly 6" more width and 5" more length, making for a more road worthy vehicle. The short throw stick on the manual transmission was a big driving win (in my limited experience, it's an easy stick). The most important thing they've done was to build a great convertible and attach a top (making it better) rather than the other way around.
The big deal in my purchase? My insistence that I would not take a car with a rear spoiler. I could have had many cars that nearly fit my request, but I just couldn't. The spoiler just breaks up the look and really detracts from the view from behind; it's the only really idiotic feature on the car.
It's all history at this point. There's a bare frame in Michigan that has my name on it now.
For those who wondered what the heck happened to me after the fires a bit more than a week ago, here's a small explanation. I was depressed and tired after waiting and watching to see if the fire would hop Westlake Boulevard (it didn't or I might have had a whole new reason for a bit of depression).
I just didn't want to deal with the fire, or my silly weblog. Work and family were already overly complicated.
Even a couple days later, once I felt a bit better about things I just couldn't rustle up the enthusiasm to post about it. I had a bunch of things gathered that I never posted. Oh well.
What went right seems to cover much of it, and I certainly appreciate the long of hours of training and preparation that went into preparing to fight the fire. The article does seem to lowball the massive amount of luck we had with the winds dying down so quickly. Had Thursday been another day of Santa Ana winds, all bets were off.
By Sunday morning things had calmed down enough that I didn't figure to make a pest of myself so I went out and took a bunch of photos.
I went by the Topanga Incident Command Post (over at Conejo Creek Park) first, and chatted with a friendly fellow with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection who hailed from Chico. He assured me that all was well including the Burbank fire which was still burning at that time. He also mentioned that he'd been coming down to SoCal fires for many years, beginning with the SoCal firestorms of 1993 (I'll always recall that election day, I'd had to turn around in Malibu Canyon to come back to vote and by the time I got back the Old Topanga/Malibu fire was underway).
Afterwards, I went to Oakbrook Park where there was little to see but a few engine companies ready in case anything happened.
Finally, I ran around for a bit in the uncomfortably named Smokey Ridge Avenue area of Oak Park. That section starts here and goes on for the rest of the collection. The firefighters must be commended for their work in Oak Park. There was a small bit of brush still smoldering on Sunday morning and that was it. That no homes were damaged continues to amaze me.
I'll finish up this fire saga with a couple interesting things to read:
