Really Boring Blentry

Wait... What Day Is Today?

Hello Monday! And goodbye. What is it, Thursday already? Wow, I have been really falling off the consistency of my blogging. Sorry, it isn't for wont of writing, I just haven't had the time to devote. New job blah blah blah.

I am feeling very good these days. Not like everything is perfect, mind you, but that everything is going in the right direction. Of course, there is not a lot of "everything" going on as yet. I am still in the planning phases and organizing my world as such.

Today I am accidentally going on my first sales call, though. This is why I say things seem to be sort of progressing from an unknown source of kismet. Getting sit-down appointments is hard in sales. I have a few back doors I can use, but mostly it will be a lot of failing before a small amount of success. It is my least favorite fact. But it is a fact. I don't intend to bore, but I have a few pretty good leads already that will hopefully lead to some immediate success.

Enough about that. Wish me luck, though.

Page Two

I was so happy to come home to two car mags. I love my car mags. Sure you can get content galore online, and with readers and tablets you can even get that content in a suitably portable and convenient fashion. But what you miss is the sensation of the glossy pages, the depth of the color of the photography, the layout, the smell... the subscription cards falling out every other page!

I subscribe to four, which may be excessive. I will cull the herd eventually as one will inevitably stop capturing my interest for one reason or another. The two I got this week in the mail used to be the upstarts - the second tier if you will. I speak of Motor Trend and Automobile.

Motor Trend was so cheesy and so poorly laid out it looked like a high school newspaper in a district with far too much money. All it was was a lot of "stuff" everywhere, it was an assault on the eyes. When I began reading it, the Editor in Chief had a very juvenile bent and I as a juvenile was looking for something a bit more sophisticated. There was very little to be learned here and from an engineering or social perspective it was simply not worth the paper it was printed on.

Enter Automobile which began auspiciously headed by the much vaunted David E. Davis, who after being kicked to the curb from Car and Driver for being willful (irrelevant) and difficult (irrelevant), started up his own magazine. I dislike him intensely. In my opinion he is the very definition of a name-dropping self-aggrandizing bloviator who loves to flaunt his wealth and status to the common man. Just because you were with or met famous people does not a good story make. Automobile Magazine was every bit a journal extolling those virtues. It was dry, lacking any editorial expression and simply boring.

My how times have changed. Road and Track was always the thinking man's magazine. A magazine for engineers and people who got the inside line on things. Not mere enthusiasts. It was the magazine for people who genuinely were interested in the science and physics of all things internal combustion. Car and Driver was the Playboy of the car magazine world, witty, irreverent, well put out and exceedingly entertaining.

Motor Trend has grown up and produces a grand product that is wall-to-wall cars, great pictures, and only a minimum of commentary. It is the most dense and right now my favorite. Road and Track and Automobile should merge and I would like the finished product, but alone they are each a bit staid, a bit boring and a bit short on content. I will never leave Road and Track only because of Peter Egan, about whom I previously wrote a couple months back. His features are nothing short of breathtaking and his monthly piece is always fulfilling. If Egan moved to Motor Trend, I'd drop R&T like a bad habit.

Car and Driver has degenerated. Its editorial content is no longer as strong. Its writing is downright hackneyed compared to just five and ten years ago. They have lost their voice and the greatest indication of this is inviting David E. Davis (the same) back on to staff. Now he's in his 80's, and dying of cancer. His bloviations are not mere recalls of dashing adventures told in a droll fashion, they are just rants of an old dying man. There is a reason why Eskimos put themselves adrift on ice floes, and why no one in history has enjoyed the Tolstoy work, "The Death of Ivan Illitch". After a point, nobody cares.

Which brings me back to this blog! Nobody cares! About this topic anyway. So I have just put 38 minutes into something that is simply a grandiose rumination rooted in minutiae (what was that about self-aggrandizing?) . Perhaps I should have told you about the time I came across Eric Braden (Victor from The Young and the Restless) on Mackinac Island...