The Bermuda Depths

Some things from your childhood stay with you a long, long time.  For me, one of those things was a made for TV movie called "The Bermuda Depths."

Way back in January 27, 1978 there came a made for TV movie called "The Bermuda Depths".  It was only shown once on TV but it was one of those events in my childhood that I remember even to this day.  I remember watching this movie, sitting spellbound in front of the old console Zenith TV and I remember feeling really, really sad after the movie was over.

"The Bermuda Depths" was a once in a lifetime event and if you missed it as a kid, you missed it and everyone was telling you about it the next day at school.  This was back before VCRs, before DVRs, before the Internet so you couldn't go rent this movie, you couldn't get on a computer and look it up and three months after it aired you couldn't go to a store and buy a copy of it.  Once it played and once it was over it was basically gone forever ... you either saw it or you didn't.  Those who saw it remember it to this day, so my experience has told me.

Check out some of the actors ...

Carl Weathers.  

Connie Sellecca.  

Burl Ives!  

It was Connie Sellecca's first TV appearance and if you were an 8 year old like I was ... whooooo, mama!  

We all know Carl Weathers as "the brother from Rocky" and later as "Action Jackson" and he faced down The Predator in a jungle down in South America.  

"I'm on a boat."

Carl Weathers has always been a bad ass of an actor, at least in my humble opinion.  If anyone can rock the "I've got a Gilligan hat, a speedo and a scoped bazooka with a harpoon loaded in it and I'm about to kick kaiju turtle ass" look, it's my main man Carl Weathers.

Burl Ives?  

He was "Sam the Snowman" in the Rankin Bass "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" children's holiday specials that we grew up loving so much.

Rankin Bass ... The company that brought us the animated "Hobbit" cartoon?  Remember that other unforgettable childhood event?  "The Hobbit" came along late in the 1970's when Dungeons and Dragons was just starting to get cool but I digress ... 

Rankin Bass got with Tsuburaya Productions who was famous for doing the special effects for "Ultraman" (another show I used to get up at 6am every Saturday morning in the '70's and watch on Ted Turner's  SuperStation (WTCG later renamed WTBS).

"The Bermuda Depths" came on only once, as far as I know, and those of us who watched it would always remember it ... for years ... for decades ... afterwards.

Here's a synopsis from IMDB

"Traumatized, orphaned college dropout Magnus Dens returns to Bermuda to find the cause of his father's mysterious death years before. At the Bermuda Biological Station, he finds Eric and Dr. Paulis, friends and colleagues of his late father, and joins them on a quest for gigantic sea creatures. He also meets Jennie Haniver, a mysterious young woman who was once his only childhood friend. Dr. Paulis' housekeeper, an island local, warns Magnus that Jennie is dangerous. The beautiful but vain young woman had sold her soul with the Devil centuries before and lives forever young deep in the waters of the Devil's Triangle (a.k.a. Bermuda Triangle). Nobody heeds the folklore and the researchers trap the giant sea turtle, setting the stage for a deadly confrontation with both minions of the Devil."

Here's a nice amateur review of the movie from Cinema Apocalypse.

Basically "The Bermuda Depths" is a cheap horror / thriller, made for TV but like I said, those of us who, as kids, tuned in and watched it ... well, we never forgot it.  "The Bermuda Depths" isn't just a cheap horror / thriller ... it's a supernatural love story that will break your heart (it did mine when I was a child).  There are many things that I remember about this movie but what I think I remember the most is the theme music.  It had this really sad song called "Jenny" that played in the background and that song stuck in my mind for years afterwards.

Decades after I saw the movie on TV, I keep running into people who remember the movie but never remember the name.  It was like one of those childhood events where, if you weren't there you missed it and that was that.  It took me decades to track down the information on the movie (thank you, Internet) and I finally got a copy of the movie on DVD (TV quality) off Ebay about a decade ago.

What's been neat is how many people I run into that, when we discuss growing up in the 1970's that "the monster turtle movie on TV" always seems to come up in conversation.

If you get a chance to watch this give it some slack ... the FX are done by the same people who did "Ultraman" so the monster / miniature sequences are about on par with a 1970's Godzilla film ... other than that it's a pretty good romp and, like I said, if you were 8 years old when you saw this (like I was), it's something that will stay with you for a long time afterwards ... decades.

A new set of wheels

Some of you may not have heard but I was involved in a really bad car wreck back in November of 2014 (probably why I haven't blogged much).  I lost my '89 Dodge Daytona Shelby turbo which I had previously blogged about having bought.  You can read about it here.

Anyway ... I've got a new toy ... another '91 Chevy Corvette.  This one is the third C4 (fourth generation) Corvette that I've owned.  My first C4 was a 1988 Z51 coupe, red with a tan interior and the quirky but heavy duty Doug Nash 4+3 speed manual transmission.  I bought that Vette in 1992 after a failed relationship.  I sold it a year and a half later and regretted it ever since.

Fast forward to 2008.  I'm about to turn 40 years old and I decide that I want another C4 Corvette.  My dad was about to retire from work and he told me in passing that he really wished that I had another Corvette like I had back in college.  

No problem.  

I searched for a few weeks on the Internet, found a 1991 Z07 Corvette down in Miami, bought it, flew down to Miami and drove the Corvette back.

The '91 Z07 at the start of The Tail of the Dragon - Deal's Gap.
318 curves in 11 miles.  Not a problem.

The '91 Z07 at the bottom of Fontana Dam.

It also was a red coupe, tan interior, but it had a six speed manual transmission (which had replaced the 4+3 back in 1989).  I kept that '91 for almost two years then sold it and restored my 1986 black and gold Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.

I spent almost a year restoring my rare '86 black and gold Pontiac Trans Am (LB9, 700R4, WS6, T-tops, factory Recaro interior) and bought a Lincoln Town Car as my daily driver. 4 years later I sold the Lincoln Town Car (because I'm not a four door car kind of guy) and bought a rare one owner '89 Dodge Daytona Shelby turbo (T-tops, 5 speed, Turbo II engine). 

I kept the Daytona about five months to the day then one morning I woke up behind the wheel of the Dodge, sitting in the median of the highway with EMT and rescue personnel cutting the roof of my Dodge off to get me out. Apparently I had been sitting at a stoplight and a kid in a pickup truck had hit me from behind. I never felt the impact, just woke up when they were pulling my body from what was left of my classic Dodge. 

How I survived I have no idea ... but I did.

While I was in the hospital I started looking for a replacement for the Dodge, could never find one and since I was a two door sports car kind of guy I decided to return to GM.  I chased a '91 Pontiac Firebird Formula with a 5 speed and T-tops (black on black) but miscommunication killed that deal.

That was about the time that I started thinking about another C4 Corvette.  When I sold my last '91 I told my wife that I was swearing off of Corvettes forever and that if I ever said I wanted another Corvette to remind me of what I'd said.

Well, I told her that I wanted another C4 Corvette and she reminded me, in no nice way, of what I'd told her to remind me of years ago.  I also reminded her that before I met her in 1992 that I'd officially sworn off of relationships and women as well ... and look where that got me.

So, I returned to Corvette ownership and bought another C4 ... thought I would go for an automatic since I'd never had a C4 L98 with an auto before.

I didn't know if I would like it ... I was worried that I wouldn't like it ... right up until the moment that an auto transporter company delivered the new '91 white 4 speed automatic Vette to my garage door.

The '91 being delivered to my house.

The '91 white Corvette in the garage ... along with my black / silver 2004 Honda CBR600RR ... and the black and gold '86 Pontiac TA.  Yes, that's a sleeping cop speed bump in front of the Vette ... the previous home owner installed it I guess to keep his wife from driving the minivan through the garage wall and into the living room.  Events like that tend to interrupt "House" marathons with a quickness.

This '91 came from the Venerable and Son dealership out of Walnut Cove, NC and has a Triad Corvette Club membership emblem on the driver's side of the windshield. It also has Loyd's mats, inside door sill protectors and a later model year combo Bose stereo cassette / CD player.  It has what I think is a Clifford alarm system (LED in the center console, some kind of horn hooked up under the hood) but no remotes and no manuals on the alarm system.  If you know this Vette, give me a shout.

So far I'm happy with the '91. It sat up in a climate controlled warehouse for several months not getting driven or cranked so it's about to get a full tune up front to back.

Mods I've found so far include Accel yellow wires under the hood and a strange cat-back system with rectangular tips and tennis ball can sized mufflers / resonators.


It's my new daily driver averaging 28 miles per gallon on the highway.  Not bad for a 25 year old Corvette that has 250 horsepower, 350 lbs-ft of torque, does zero to 60 in about 5 seconds, does mid to high 13 second quarter miles and has a top speed of 157 mph.  I didn't think I would like a white Vette or an automatic but driving it for two weeks now has changed my mind on that ... a white four speed automatic Vette is nothing short of awesome.  Once you push the loud skinny pedal to the floor things get busy real quick and the L98 still has plenty of guts left in her.

As a bit of strangeness, 9 years ago I bought the '86 TA from Greensboro, NC, about 30 miles SE of Walnut Cove so I've got two cars in my garage, both bought off the Internet, which came from within 30 miles of each other. 

Weird but then my life is funny strange like that.

The '91 Vette has its own blog as well ... find it here.

Stay tuned.

A new comic fancy - "Manifest Destiny"

So I've added yet another comic series to what I'm reading.  Like I've said before, I'm eccentric and my tastes vary.  I don't like superheroes or other nonsense and I don't think of comic books as "kids stuff" ... comics are, to me, an art form.  Growing up in the 1970's and being subjected to adult sci-fi and fantasy like "Heavy Metal" I took on an appreciation for illustrated stories.  Pepe Moreno, Richard Corben, Angus McKee ... all of these taught me that "comics" could be adult and hard hitting.  The only problem is that not until the last ten to fifteen years have comics not only matured to an adult level but they've also reached a point of not being kids stuff any more ... oh, no they're not.

I like my comic art adult and I like it strange so when I pick up a comic and read it and then decide to buy it that comic has something I'm interested in.

Let's be honest here ... I like weird shit.  There's just no other way to say it than that and my latest comic pick pretty much nails that category head on.  In spades.

"Manifest Destiny"

MD is a high aspiring historical revisionist tale of Lewis and Clark's famous expedition.  As they travel through an unknown America they battle monsters and weird shit every step of the way and I love it.  Giant plants, plant zombies, deep lurking river monsters, centaur bisons living in tribes ... some of this stuff is amazing in concept and the execution does not fail.

The first trade paperback is out and collects several of the first run comics.  I highly recommend it especially since the second trade paperback is due out soon.  Give it a looksee and chances are, if your tastes are like mine, you'll be a lot of not unhappy.

A new fancy: "East of West"

I was at Bombshell Comics in Hattiesburg the other day, seeing if a new "Prophet" had come in and I got invited to peruse a new offering ... "East of West".  It's a post apocalyptic western that mixes "Call of Cthulhu", "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Bladerunner" all together in a delightful blend.

In other words, it's my kind of weird and I have pretty high standards for weird.

It's an alternate America.  Sometime during the American Civil War a comet hit North America forever changing the world.  America is divided into high tech versions of the Union, the Confederacy, Texas, a nation of Freedmen (ex-slaves), the Endless Nations (all the Indian tribes joined together) and an outcast of China which has established a new Chinese empire on the west coast.

All are divided into their areas and at the center point where all of their territories meet is the impact crater of the comet.

Basically the story involves the end times, a group called "The Chosen" which is a cult trying to bring about the end of the world and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Only, it's the three Horsemen because when Pestilence, Famine and Conquest awaken they find that Death has already awakened and been working for some time without them.  In fact, Death has found his soul mate, fallen in love, had a child and had his wife and child stolen from him.

This has tended to make Death a little pissed off.

Death finds that not only has he been betrayed, but that his wife and child are both alive.

His son has been kidnapped and is being groomed to be the "Beast of the Apocalypse" in an isolation facility where the child is being programmed by "The Chosen" as the ultimate weapon and conqueror of the world, a living means to the end of the world.

Death itself is a pretty neat character.  He's dressed all in white, from head to toe, long white hair, white albino skin and he carries traditional, albeit, high-tech western style weaponry.  

He reminds me a lot of Michael Moorcock's "Elric" if "Elric" had been cast to play the title role in "The Outlaw Josey Wales."  Death has some great lines in the comic, one of my favorite being his retort to one of the major power brokers in the storyline when he tells him "I beg to fucking differ." which itself made me chuckle out loud.  Not since "Firefly" and Captain Malcolm Reynolds have I liked a character as much as I've started liking this personification of Death.

This is what weird science fiction westerns should be about / like.

Death is a bad ass and stares down entire armies.  He wades through legions with six guns blazing, riding a mechanical robot horse that has a head that fires a devastating beam that reminds me of the hyperwave gun on the Space Battleship Yamato.  In other words, he's well equipped to deal his trade.

Death is travelling with two companions, "Crow" and "Wolf", both extremely powerful witches from the Endless Nations ... 

Crow is something not human, a female in shape only that can turn into a cloud of black crows that tear the eyes out of her enemies and tear them apart.  Wolf is an Indian who turns into a pack of white wolves that, well, pretty much tear his enemies apart.  Death, therefore, goes into battle aided by lots of snarling white wolves and a black cloud of killer crows.  It's magic, it fits, and when it happens it's effective.

And then there's the Cthulhu-like horror

There's mystical and mythical and just plain Lovecraftian-type plots going on.  Stories within stories, arcs within arcs.  Not since reading "Jonah Hex" as a child or the late '70's / early '80's of "Heavy Metal" magazine have I found something that catches my fancy like this story does (well, this and "Prophet").

So, it's good to be a kid again.

I don't read many comics but when I do, they're good ones.

I have high standards for weird and "East of West", so far, fulfills all of those standards and exceeds expectations.  If your tastes in weird run close to mine, give it a try.  "East of West" may make you a lot of not unhappy.

Late birthday gift to myself

Broke down and bought these for myself.  

I've had Fantasy Flight Games' "X-Wing" for about two years now.  I've not really played it ... just haven't had time.  Our old game group (mostly guys I work with) really haven't gotten together in a year or so ... so, no games.  So far I've got the starter set (one X-wing and two TIE fighters) and the Millennium Falcon expansion pack (got it mostly just for the miniature).  At $15 bux a piece, the miniatures had kind of hit a price limit for me.  They're good, really good miniatures but $15 is a bit much for me.  Now I've found a dealer selling them for $10 each and free shipping on orders so I'm giving myself the go ahead to start building my fleet and get this game rolling.

These will be the start of my X-Wing game miniatures collection which I plan on adding to each paycheck as well as making some custom capital ships / freighters / support craft through kitbashing.  The Tantive IV is one of my favorite ships in all of sci-fi shipdom.  My 8 year old mind fell in love with that hammerhead shape and those eleven blazing engines as soon as I saw it on the silver screen way back in 1977 and ever since then I've been looking for a good sized replica of this classic ship.  About two years ago I broke down and bought the $300 27 inch long Rand Cooper Tantive IV (currently saving up for his $500 38 inch long Imperial Star Destroyer) but haven't put it together yet.  Here's a Tantive IV in much smaller scale (still large) and it's prepainted and assembled so right out of the box it's a display unit.  I'll probably only have one Tantive IV in my collection but I've got up to three Rebel transports ear-marked for the collection and this will be my first one.  The local hobby shop wanted $50 for the Transport and $90 for the Tantive IV which, again, was a bit much in my book (and for my wallet).  I spend some pretty money pretty fast sometimes but even I'm prone to waiting until the price falls or shopping around for the best price.  I like to support my local shops but going online I saved about $40 on these two items (the Transport was $40 and the Tantive IV was $60).  That savings gives me enough money to either add four fighters to my collection or another Rebel Transport (and I've found an online shop that I'm going to give a lot of business to in the months to come).

So, that's the update.  Happy late birthday to me and it was a pretty good birthday with me buying myself the '89 Dodge Daytona Shelby back in June and now, two months later, these two sets of expansion miniatures.

Prophet!

It's not often that I collect a series of comic books and usually when I do it's a short-run series like Miller and Darrow's "Hard Boiled" or something like Delgado's "Hieroglyph" or Steve White and Dan Abnett's "Hypersonic" but every once in a while, thank you life, there comes another series which I adore.  Luckily I found this one about two years back but didn't start collecting it until this month (which meant that I had to catch up).  

Prophet is the story of John Prophet, a modified / vat grown super soldier (think Captain America) who wakes up from stasis / hybernation on Earth so far in the future that nothing is recognizable to him.  Time, alien races and cosmic events have forever altered the planet, even the galaxy.  John Prophet is not alone, he is one of many John Prophets, some altered genetically for different environments or situations and each as a mission.

The Empire of Man is returning, rising in power, and hell is to be paid.

I can't tell you very much about this other than if you like classic 1970's style Angus McKee, Richard Corben, Moebius and Moreno artwork like that once found in the pages of "Metal Hurlant" ("Heavy Metal" to us Americans) then Prophet is for you.  Just flipping through the pages and looking at the artwork takes me back in time to when art ... comic art ... was hand drawn and not done on computers.  It's crude, brutal and wonderful, not glossy, sedate and precise.  I've ranted about art, especially sci-fi art, and how in it moving into the digital age it has lost a lot of what made it so great.  There's no soul, no emotion anymore in sci-fi art and it shows.  The same can be said of modern sci-fi comic books.  Everything is so clean, antiseptic, mundane and predictable.

Not so with Prophet.

Prophet is the telling of an epic story, tens of thousands of years, with characters that have started in another age of comics (the 1990s) and off and on appeared in several series then had their selves thrown into a reboot in the far future, a future so wonderfully bizarre that you wish that someone would make a movie of it.

Carnivorous aliens, symbiotes, parasites, adaptive membranes, interspecies sex, living rock people, living metal robots, crystal sentients, sapient fungus ... Prophet has something for everyone and a surprise for all.  The artwork is amazing in scope and depth, it's like looking at Darrow's work on "Hard Boiled" ... every time you go back and look at it you see something you missed.

John Prophet is an interesting character but so far I'm drawn more to Diehard, a cyborg shell that is over 10,000 years old.   A man from the 1990's, his body was replaced after his death and his cyborg form lives on.  Several stories tell of Diehard's past, some of when he was still a man, others when he was living on some planet with some adoptive race and had a family.  The fact that Diehard is replacing parts of himself with organic parts taken from dead John Prophet clones is intriguing.  At one point he has a human heart beating in his chest cavity (something he hasn't had for thousands of years) and later he can speak again due to adding one of the clone's vocal cords to his design.  You would think that if a machine was operating just fine without a human heart (and for thousands of years) why would it need to install one now?  Also, why does it need vocal cords to communicate which it could just have a speaker to project an artificial voice.

I may find this out yet.

If you want to pick up on Prophet, you can do so now quickly and cheaply.  There are 45 issues of Prophet dating back to the early '90's but the current restart didn't happen until issue 21.  There are 45 issues now meaning that you need to start at issue 21 and catch up.  That means that you have 24 issues to grab.  This isn't hard since on Amazon there are three trade paperbacks which capture issues 21 to 38 leaving you only with 39 to 45.  I bought the trade paperbacks (about 10 bux each) and then found the other back issues at my local hobby shop for face price.

If you like weird sci-fi, were once a fan of the old Heavy Metal magazine and like stuff like Delgado's "Hieroglyph" then you'll dig Prophet.  Each issue is a page turning treat that leaves you waiting impatiently for next month and the next issue.

My old dune buggy

I'm a '69 model, posed here in my '70 model Dune Buggy at my old house in Birmingham, AL. To this day I don't see how my parents never saw what was coming in my teenage and later years but in hindsight I had a frigging great childhood and it only got better after that!

The strange thing is, at 45 years old, I still remember this pedal pusher car. I had a lot of fun in it but quickly outgrew it and moved on to another, bigger toy ... the Marx Wild Rider! Even then I marveled at the levers and pedals that made the wheels turn.

Do you see the discolored stripes in the rear plastic wheels? That's from me doing "burnouts" on the back patio there, I could sit in one place and basically physically pedal it faster than it could get traction so the rear wheels just spun on the concrete. I used to do the same thing with my Mattel "Big Wheel" only with the front wheel. Sanded that thing almost smooth doing "burnouts" on pavement.

My parents really didn't have a clue what they had brought into this world ...

The new toy - 1989 turbo Dodge Daytona Shelby

I turned 45 years old in June and I was good to myself.  I bought another toy, another high tech muscle car from the 1980's, this time it was a turbo Dodge, a 1989 Daytona Shelby to be exact.

I've had a fondness for turbo Dodges since they were introduced in 1984 as the Daytona and the top of the line Daytona Turbo-Z.  

I had a 1986 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z way back in 1989 and 1990 but I sold it so I could buy a 1980 Pontiac Turbo Trans Am Pace Car.  Both the Dodge Daytona Turbo-Z and the 1980 Pontiac Turbo Pace Car are long gone but I find it was the Dodge that I missed more.  The Dodge was just a fun car to drive, sporty, sharp looking, the 2.2 liter turbocharged, fuel injected engine was a real stormer when the long skinny pedal went flat to the floor and she handled great ... a little strange since she was a front wheel drive car, but you got used to that.


That's a picture of my old 1986 Dodge Daytona Turbo-Z, circa 1989, sitting in my parents' driveway.  My only regret with the car was that it didn't have T-tops.  I'm just not a solid roof sports car kind of guy.  If part of the roof doesn't come off from the factory then I'm not going to be happy with the car.  Still, this little turbo Dodge got me through junior college with its 30 plus miles per gallon fuel economy when my '79 Trans Am with its deep 3.73 geared rear end and big 6.6 liter 403 cubic inch V8 was struggling to get the mid-teens in gas mileage while commuting.

I miss my old Dodge Daytona Turbo-Z.  I went looking for another Turbo-Z but they are few and far between today and the ones that were in the condition I wanted were just more than I wanted to pay for them.  The cheaper ones had issue after issue, sometimes stuff like holes rusted in the floor boards or old greasy / oily parts wrapped up in shop towels and sitting in the passenger seat.

I looked long and hard and finally found a one owner, 1989 Dodge Daytona Shelby in Corpus Christi, Texas.  It had 142,000 miles and some change on her, one owner, garage kept and maintained.  I paid $1800 for it, drove to Corpus Christi, Texas one Saturday, met the owner, test drove the Daytona, said I'd take it, paid him, signed the paperwork, spent the night in a motel and drove the Daytona home the next day.

I drove almost 700 miles on the return journey.  

The Daytona has a 14 gallon fuel tank.

I used a tank and a half of gas on the way back and averaged about 33 miles per gallon.  This from a 25 year old 2.2 liter SOHC turbo charged, intercooled, port fuel injected inline four cylinder with a heavy duty five speed manual transmission, limited slip differential and a race ready Getrag gear set.  Oh, and the Daytona that I bought had T-tops!

This new Daytona is nothing short of awesome.  Currently she's in the shop getting her AC converted over from Freon to 134A (my mechanic couldn't believe that I was bringing in a Freon chilled car and he doubted that he could even get a can of Freon anymore so I told him not to waste his time and just convert her to the new stuff).

Dodge produced 4741 Daytona Shelbys in 1989.

Here's how mine breaks down.

She's painted Flash Red ... 1612 out of 4741 were painted that color

She's got T-tops ... 1952 out of 4741 had the T-top package

She's got a factory CD player ... 862 out of 4741 had that option.

Also, my interior is this kind of blue gray and according to the options, Daytona Shelbys came with three choices for interior colors ... taupe, bordeaux or charcoal so basically tan, red or black yet mine has a blue gray / silver type interior.  Since the previous owner says that he special ordered the Daytona brand new there might have been a color override making my Daytona Shelby unique and maybe 1 of 1 ever produced.

Sitting pretty on a beach in Corpus Christi (TX)

Well, okay, I've got a new toy.  Since I didn't want to hack up the '86 Trans Am in my garage I needed a new toy that I was willing to modify.

I wanted a toy that I could work on, modify, and make go faster.  The turbo Dodges caught my fancy so I decided that I wanted to learn about how to go faster in a turbo Dodge.  The goal will be to go as fast as possible while keeping everything looking stock or near stock ... no cone filters, no PVC and dryer hose homemade air intakes, no removing the air conditioning or taking the seats out ... it's got to go fast and look bone stock.  The neat thing is that if you go to YouTube you can find several Daytona Shelby's running tens in the quarter in street trim.  

That's almost as fast as my stock '04 Honda CBR600RR (10.7 sec at 133mph) meaning that there are some built-up Dodge Daytonas out there running almost as fast as my super sport bike.

Unreal.

Well, enough gabbing about my new toy.  If you want to learn more, here's the link to my new blog on it; the 1989 Dodge Daytona Shelby Diary.

On a closing note ... I'm eccentric.  I like to drive cars and motorcycles that no one else has.  Life is too short to drive mediocre cars and with all the boring cars and trucks out there today it's nice to drive something that turns heads like whiplash.  My '86 TA never fails to draw attention or even a small crowd when I drive it simply because you never see one of these cars in this good of a shape anymore.

The Dodge Daytona Shelby has the same effect on people.

Just the other day I took my wife to lunch in the '89 Dodge Daytona Shelby and after we circled the restaurant looking for a parking spot we finally parked in front and the owner of the restaurant hurried out, saying that he had watched us looking for a parking spot and he HAD to know what kind of car we were driving.  He thought it was some kind of new exotic import.  When I told him it was a 1989 Dodge Daytona Shelby he was floored.  Yeah, he recognized the Daytona and remembered them from a long, long time ago but he hadn't seen one in decades and certainly not one in as good of a condition as the one that we were driving.

I told him that if he liked the Daytona he should get a look at my '86 Trans Am.

Being eccentric has its advantages.  

The '86 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and the '89 Dodge Daytona Shelby, two examples of street warriors from The Second Muscle Car Era and survivors of that decade that we called the '80's ... a decade when I was a teenager and got to live in a time when cars like the two I own were brand new, prowling the streets and some of the fastest things money could buy on four wheels.