I like to haunt r/abandonedporn, where people post photos and videos of derelict buildings that they explore. I want to do that! It’s a bad time of year for it though, since it’s about -20°C out there, and if the spiders are all frozen, what’s the point? Once the world thaws again, I need to get out and do some exploring. These places are full of spiders, and I don’t have to interact with people to investigate them — spiders minus people? Perfection.
This summer you all have to help out by nagging me to get out and find abandoned houses, farms, and shacks, every weekend. I’ll reward you with pictures — lots of close-up pictures of creepy crawlies. It’ll be awesome.
For now, here’s an example: this guy explores an abandoned house and finds an abandoned 1973 Corvette in the garage. It’s February, though, so no spiders, which makes it a lot less interesting.
There’s got to be an interesting story behind it. This is an isolated, tiny house — am I the only one thinking it’s a drug house? — with an expensive car rotting and neglected. Where’s the owner? What happened that no one would claim that car? And most importantly, what kind of spiders will be flourishing there once the weather warms up?
I clicked on the link ,that’s not a real tank.Now this is the type of thing I would love to find.
Wild – Colossal – “Arresting Photos Document the Polar Bears Occupying an Abandoned Weather Station in Russia.”
(There’s a video, and my pet conspiracy theory is that it’s deep fakes meant to prepare us for the false-flag Ukraine video.)
Well, to justify their attack on Poland ,Germany stage a fake attack on a radio station in Germany just across the border
from Poland. They fired a few shots did a brief message in Polish then withdrew.
They left some dead concentration camp inmates dressed in Polish uniforms as evidence of what them naughty
Poles had been up to.
It’s a car that was left in a garage. Who’d put a car there, I wonder?
Why won’t my eyes stop rolling?
Well if I found a ratty old Corvette I would think of it as a potential Spyder conversion (because Corvettes are mostly boring):
https://www.motortrend.com/vehicle-genres/miami-vice-ferrari-daytona-spyder-corvette-facts/
“All hardcore Miami Vice fans [Hemi too?] and car buffs, though, know that Crockett’s Ferrari was not an authentic Daytona Spyder. The Ferrari on the show was a replica built on a Corvette C3 chassis by Tom McBurnie of McBurnie Coachcraft, who produced two examples. One for glamour shots and the other to take a good beating during stunts. The show used a replica because it was cheaper—and because Ferrari North America refused to supply authentic Ferraris to the show.
Crockett’s Ferrari 365 GTS/4 Daytona Spyder starred in the first two seasons, exiting the show early in season three during an illegal arms business deal by way of being blown to pieces. The Corvette/Daytona’s exit from the show, however, was not originally part of the script but a response from Miami Vice producers to a lawsuit filed by Ferrari against McBurnie.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Corvette_(C3)
“The Chevrolet Corvette (C3) is a sports car that was produced from 1967 until 1982 by Chevrolet for the 1968 to 1982 model years.”
And the end of the line for the fake Ferrari (love Tubbs’ reaction: “Sold!!!”):
https://youtu.be/ClvV5i8TTOk
But it is still Spyder abuse which should not go silently on this blog. Damn them!
@5 One of the most silly American cop shows,a cop with a top of the line car.
Spot the dirty cop.
@6- davidc1
The reason for a cop to be driving a Spyder (and later a Testarossa) was that it was a car confiscated from criminals.
https://miamivice.fandom.com/wiki/Crockett%27s_Daytona
“Just as Crockett’s other luxury cars during the series, the Daytona was loaned to him from City Property for his police duties as an undercover cop. It was assumed that the Daytona had been seized from criminals under the RICO act.”
He also had a sailboat he lived on (with an alligator) and a go-fast boat. I doubt any of this was realistic, but was for the storyline of the show a way for Crockett/Burnett to keep up appearances using a legend or undercover persona and mingle with the criminal underworld of Miami as he took them down one by one.
Crockett and Tubbs didn’t come across as corrupt cops but had to deal with corruption in their midst. This was the aftermath of the Dadeland Mall shootout and Miami’s notoriety as a Mecca for cocaine trafficking in the US. There were episodes dealing with hot button 80s issues such as US mercenaries helping the Contras. Maybe silly in retrospect.
Besides it featured Edward Olmos in one of his greatest roles (aside from Adama in BSG).
Crack-addled ones who would kill you for the change in your pockets?
hemidactylus@7 I thought Olmos was excellent in Stand and Deliver and it wasn’t a movie I was expecting to like much (but in fairness, I had it confused with the one about the school principal with the baseball bat).
me@9 I can’t resist adding that my high school calculus teacher also had acne-scarred skin and a comb-over, making Olmos nearly uncanny in that role, not to knock his prodigious talent as an actor.
@10- PaulBC
My whole aside about Miami Vice was at first intended to make the jump from a Corvette to a Spyder, which is more germane to the blog. The Spyder should be the honorary Pharyngula car.
hemidactylus@11 Got that. I realize my comment was off-topic, but Stand and Deliver remains one of my favorite roles played by Edward James Olmos.
yes indeed “Stand and Deliver” demonstrates all the heroic virtues!
I enjoy exploring old wrecks and abandon things. I Am enthralled by all the processes of things braking down, and all the different lives that take advantage of the space created by it or the nutrients or the prey inhabiting them
have fun exploring!
@11. hemidactylus : “The Spyder should be the honorary Pharyngula car.””
Plus the spider – fizzy soft drink plus icecream – should be the official Pharyngula drink too!
Well spyder isn’t specific to that Ferrari but may apply to roadsters or convertibles in general (links from wikipedia article on roadsters):
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a20685360/why-convertibles-are-called-spiders/
Could have connection to a spiderish appearance of spokes on a carriage: “As you can see from the picture above, these carriages have a smaller body and large wooden wheels with thin spokes, which sort of look like spider legs. Once cars came around, this naming scheme transferred over to lighter, more agile, sporty vehicles, often with no roof over the cockpit. It’s stuck ever since.”
But OTOH it could be a garbled mishearing of “speeder”:
https://www.granturismoevents.com/news-why-are-so-many-italian-convertible-cars-called-spider/
But even that article still leans toward the arachnid origin story for spyder/spider.
So a Pharyngula spyder car could be any convertible or some expensive European sportscar?
@14- StevoR
I usually call those floats. The wikipedia says it’s called spider in Australia and New Zealand. Interesting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_float
@7 To be honest I never watched it I read somewhere that one of them had a very expensive car.
There’s got to be an interesting story behind it. This is an isolated, tiny house — am I the only one thinking it’s a drug house? — with an expensive car rotting and neglected.
Maybe some drug dealer bought the car, then later realized it was too conspicuous, or too obvious a tip-off that he was richer than his legal job made him, or the cops had seen it in connection to the dealer’s business activities; so he had to hide it in that house, and was never able to get it back out before getting busted, or killed, or having to bugger off somewhere else.
The reason for a cop to be driving a Spyder (and later a Testarossa) was that it was a car confiscated from criminals…
That doesn’t sound realistic — the criminals would know who had recently been busted, and what unique flashy cars had been confiscated; so when any such car reappeared, they would instantly know its new owner was a cop.
@17
its a TV cop show they have not used anything like reality since the original “Drag Net” in the 50’s and even then it was “adapted” and staged reality even the news gets it wrong