Top Down - Miata MX-5 Blog

Saturday, November 30, 2002

What happens when your Miata burns down while you were adjusting the timing? Parts car!

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A video of TrackDog, Flying Miata's track car, shows it flying around Thunderhilll. Woof woof!

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The world's longest tongue at 7 cm. belongs to this 12 year old girl. When she grows up, I wonder if she'll be able to lick her ears?

Nathan Ramsey posted in-car track videos, here and here, from a recent driving event at Thunderhill.

In San Diego, police are cracking down on illegal street racing, even going so far as targeting those just watching the races. NPR has a audio piece on this. (Real Audio).

Some more new photos of the RX-8 were made available.

A good article on Tom Matano, ex Mazda designer of the Miata, in today's LA Times.

So if you're trying to squeeze a little more speed from your cable modem, the FBI can bust your butt big time.

The developer of the nation's quickest Miata has had his turbo kits out for a while, and I just noticed his page.

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A great wake-up-and-smell-reality post from a volunteer firefighter who came to the scene of a deadly aftermath of street racers.

Oh dear...what's happened to this perfectly good NB Miata? I wonder if people who do this kind of thing ever had a master plan to get to this point, or if they're always winging it, and it just ended up looking like this?

A good page describing the physical differences between the solid and hollow spoke OEM alloy wheels of the '94-'97 Miata.s

Yay! Jaguar finally tossed out Niki Lauda as team principal for their F1 racing team. Now if they can only get back Bobby Rahal, they might have some how of recovering.

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I don't know, but a multipurpose cell phone that also serves as an FM radio, walkie-talkie, garage door opener and TV remote control sounds a bit too much. Cool, but a little too geeky.

Too bad....the all-dominating Audi and their R8 won't be back to field a factory team in Le Mans next year.

The RX-8 is on the cover of this week's Autoweek magazine. Story is online.

It sucks when your furniture explodes. Then again, some people need to get hit with a big clue stick when they start using an artillery shell as a table leg.

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There's a nice article on Audi's cool twin-clutch transmission used in the TT 3.2 quattro.

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Ouch! Andrew Koch's car was in the driveway, idling, TEN and GND jumpered together on the diagnostic connector. He went inside to get his manual, and returned and saw his Miata burning. Yikes! That's one very expensive timing adjustment.

A great site for oil and gas information, including forums that discuss additives. Neat!

If your high school football team lost because of a bad call, in Florida at least, you can go to court to try to change the referee's decision. Uhh...right.

Ahhh...the sound of the old Mazda 787B Le Mans winning car.

Over at the MazdaSpeed site, the rules for purchasing the stripped down $19995 '03 Mazda Club Sport (MCS) version state that the vehicle price charged to customer cannot exceed MSRP. Cool beans.

This is getting a little intimate with your computer - a man using a laptop had his penis burned.

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Our young adults suck at geography. 83 percent of those quizzed in a recent study were unable to locate Afghanistan. Questions are available to see how bad we suck.

So that's how tattoos work. An ink-injecting sewing machine...yeah boy, sign me up.

BMWfilms.com has the lastest short film available - Beat The Devil.

Cool....a backup program for the brain, or google your life experiences. Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write into a surrogage braing that never forgets anything.

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This could be the reason why many children are afraid of clowns.

It's takes guts to admit your driving mistake and post on the web. Even more guts when it involves crashing your Porsche 911 in turn 9 at Laguna Seca.

You gotta love a country where people go crazy for a snack called Gorilla Boogers.

I wonder if the truth behind this FoxTrot comic strip regarding Grand Theft Auto Vice City is the reason why bids for the game on Ebay exceed the price you'd find in a store? Could it be that kids are buying them online behind their parents back?

Geez...how could I live life without a dancing neon radio frame for my car?

I don't know how successful this What-Would-Jesus-Drive? campaign is going to be to get people to move away from fuel inefficient SUVs. Personally, I think JC pilots an Apache helicopter - better to scare the hell out of people.

This web site has drawings and dimensions of various vehicles, including the NB Miata. Neat. Someone also has a nice small x-ray type drawing of the NB Miata being used as his home page background.

I wonder if a rollbar would have helped lessen the damage when a large tree fell on this Porsche Boxster.

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The International Childern's Digital Library web site is launching tomorrow. It's a digital archive of books from around the world for children.

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This is the best, no bullshit product waivers I've ever read, from a company that sells head restraints for racing. (PDF format).

From these spy shots of the 2004 Mini Cooper convertible, styling seems to have changed from the cute of the hardtop, to the just plain weird. It looks like one of those electric toy cars for kids. And could they have made the folded top size any bigger?

First, there was a Rock, Paper, Scissors international championship. Next, I'm sure, will be the pro-league shown on ESPN. Woohoo.

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A very cute commercial for the Mazda6 targeted for those in the UK. No doubt if shown in this country, lawyers would be suing Mazda faster that you can say Zoom Zoom.

This is a bit costly for a Playstation 2 accessory, but hey, if it can improve your Gran Turismo 3 lap times. a racing seat setup to play Gran Turismo 3 is just the ticket.

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I knew in this great country someone would make a 4x4 out of a Datsun 260Z..

Ackkk...I've had to deal with bugs in software, but never literal bugs in hardware, like what happened to this poor guy when ants infestated his iBook.

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If you have some spare plumbing fixtures in your garage, yes, you too can create a rollbar kit and sell it on Ebay. Sheesh.

A hilarious Flash animation - be prepared the next time someone says you don't know Jack Shit, you really do.

From the Pulp Racing site came this link to a Corner Carver's post explaining What Racing is About. Beautiful.

I just noticed Doug Hayashi has a new chapter to his Pulp Racing web site. His stories are always entertaining to read and a bonus this time includes this butt-kicking 125cc shifter kart racing video.

Edmunds has posted their first drive review of Mazda's new RX-8.

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This is a great place to find color-coded scripts for all the Monty Python episodes.

Holy smokes...some very beefy looking underbody brace for the NB Miata.

A Wisconsin teenager, charged with numerous counts of theft, burglary and auto theft, said he was inspired by the video game, Grand Theft Auto. Uh...hello: that's a video game, you cheese-head.

A good discussion on the clunking suspension noise some people hear on their Miatas. It may be caused by loose alignment eccentric bolts.

Woohoo...a fire truck on an autocross course. Must be hard doing the slalom.

It comes as no surprise that Bill Gates really is a big dick.... an eight-foot tall condom was given to him during a visit to an Indian city, a tribute to mark his generosity in fighting AIDS.

DVD's that self-destruct is coming to store shelves near you soon. Great...so maybe when we rent a DVD from Blockbuster, we can just end up throwing it away instead of returning. Wonderful for the environment.

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Looks like Carfax is running a promo that allows a free report until the 16th.

Pictures of the first Mazda6 rolling off the production line. These are just some of the wonderful media pictures available at Mazda's media web site.

It must be a royal pain in the butt to travel through airport security checkpoints for the human Swiss army knife.

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The world has a new killer bacteria strain, extremely resistant to our most potent antiobiotics, that'll take a lickin' and keep on tickin' and killin'. Called VRSA (short for vancomycin-resistant staph aureus), it's made and bred right here in the good ole USA.

Mazda begins laying the ground work for the RX-8 with the release of this real cool video showing the internals of the Renesis rotary engine. Very nice! Another clip shows the history of the rotary engine.

The California Coastal Records Project is taking pictures of the entire California coast. Wow - that's a lot of photos of surf and sand.

The single seat, convertible Q-CAR, seems like it's more suited to a Roger Rabbit cartoon than the streets of Tokyo.

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The narration is in German but the the sound is all Ferrari 360. Love that drifting.

You know the Cold War is really over when you canbuy a Russian MIG 21 Fighter Jet from Ebay. Great for that commute to work. When you back from the office, you can park it next to your Boeing 727 home.

Someone put together a page of the Mazda6 brochure.

So I guess it's a bad idea to park your car behind a fire station, or else they might mistakenly use it for Jaws of Life practice.

Taking fandom perhaps a little bit too far, there's now a page showing pictures of various iPods at different locations around the world. Hmmm.

So Hollywood is finally backing an online movie rental service. A joint project of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros, it seems like it only supports Windows machines.

Flyin Miata has their own page up that shows the FM-powered DGM Blazing Miata shown last week at the SEMA show.

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There are some neat pictures of the inside of a cut-up Bosch oil filter for the Miata, supposedly marketed as a premium brand, and that of the OEM filter. The pictures are here and here, with the Bosch on the left and OEM on the right of both pictures. Neat!

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This Turbo Hayabusa with 18lbs of boostis a pretty serious speed machine, with mind boggling acceleration.

The Subaru WRX gets muddy in this video.

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A Miata prepared by DGM Motorsports shown at SEMA. Yowza - red overload, red overload.

Autocrossing and more with folks down in Australia in their Miatas. Steering wheel on the right hand side? Too weird!

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It's not every day you read about a 4000 HP (yes, 3 zeros) Integra. Well not really an Integra Type R, but if you squint your eyes really good, you might see the resemblance.

Pictures from day 1 of the SEMA show in Vegas are available.

Very cool...a Rubik's cube solver, written in Flash.

So, it looks like Greece thinks plane spotting as a hobby, also happens to be a crime. And this is the home of great philsophers and mathemeticians?

What a 230,000 mi Miata that was acquired for $150 looks prior to the owner getting it back to shape.

A frustrated autocrosser? A man in Edindburgh gets caught having sex with a traffic cone. That's definitely worth more than a +1 second time penaly.

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Yah baby...with news that demonstrations went well, pretty soon, we'll have lasers shooting down not only artillery shells, but missilies and aircraft. "I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, did he fire six shots or only five? Well to tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being as this is a Tactical High Energy Laser, the most powerful weapon in the world and will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?"

Some Miata hillclimbing videos from down under.

Who knew that a day would come when you could play Doom on your Nokia cellphone?

The world's ugliest Corvette? An artist seeking expressive outlet on a new medium? A great vehicle to pickup chicks? All of these and more!

So whatever country this traffic weaving, motorcycle rider lives in, must not have police or tv news helicopters. Otherwise he'd be caught by now.

Apple announced upgraded iBooks and PowerBooks. Very cool to have a DVD burner in a lap top.

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Pictures of the production RX-8, from a scan of a German magazine article here, here and here.

A very tragic post from a son describing the death of his father while driving his (the son's) RX-7, with the son as a passenger. Pictures on this page. Unbelievably sad. One of my greatest fears is drowning, and to drown while trapped, buckled in a submersed car, and have this happen to your father is a horrible tragedy.

A cool set of pictures showing modification of the instrument cluster for Spec Miata racing. Lots of work went into the car. Discussion here

Spec Miata racing highlights (very large, 54Mb, Quicktime format).

An interesting article (actually, scans) from Popular Science describing how the massive fighting crowd scenes were made for the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

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The World Championship Punkin' Chunkin' Competition was held over the weekend. Pictures from last years competion show an awesome range of flinging devices, from trebuchets to air cannons. Last years winner shot a pumpking 4000+ feet. NPR has a story about this contest (Real Audio).

The CART race at Fontana Speedway this past weekend was run at an average of 197.99 mph. It's a CART race record, but I wonder if this is a world record for any motor vehicle.

So once smart paint is developed by the US army for the battlefield, I wonder how long it will take to start a craze in the import car world.

Bob Hall, the father of the Miata, talks about why speed costs money when producing a car.

Life sucks when you wake up, and find your Miata has been hit and no note has been left.

Not only do Southern California drivers drive poorly in the rain, but they suck in the fog too: a 200 car pileup on the 710 Long Beach freeway on Sunday morning.

A review of the Sony DRU-500A DVD recorder. Finally, a DVD that can read and write the competing writeable DVD formats: DVD+RW/R and DVD-RW/-R.

I'm not sure what's stranger...a skateboard for the Sony Aibo robotic dog, or that there were enough people in the world to buy this, that Sony actually puts it into production.

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This is a nice 3 minute long autocross video called Nationals to Cake.

Local student Pimpin Hard with Flowmaster. Hilarious!

So forced induction and nitro not enough? The latest in engine technology: hamster induction.

So Jaguar fires its two F1 drivers - Irvine and de la Rosa, replacing them with Webber and Pizzonia. Without Irvine, think of the money they must be saving.

Be the star of your local pool hall, when you train with this smart, laser guided, automatic pool trainer - the ultimate teacher.

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