Land Rover Farewell

Today we (George, Barb and I) bid farewell to my beloved Land Rover (YouTube). Next week sometime it will roll into Mr. Wolf’s shop to get prepped for sale (on Bring A Trailer). 

It was 7 1/2 years ago —on this exact spot— that I first got to drive the Rover. And it has been my daily driver ever since. When the transport driver started it up I smiled with the knowledge that in all those years, the truck never failed to start on the first crank.

Mr. Wolf will prep the truck for sale and I’ll probably do a couple of posts on those efforts but then we close the book on this most wonderful adventure.

Goodbye old friend

The local electric co-op crew insisted on cutting the few remaining live limbs on our old Walnut tree and it wasn’t going to survive. So today we said goodbye. 

Based on several metrics, the tree was between 80 and 100 years old.

The equipment in the video is a knuckleboom loader (specifically a forestry/trash crane) mounted on a grapple truck. This specific configuration is commonly used by tree service companies (like “Korte Tree Care” seen on the door) to load heavy logs and brush into the truck for transport without requiring a separate loader or manual lifting. A complete grapple truck like the one in the video typically costs between $150,000 and $350,000 when purchased new.

Bronco comes GoPro ready

My new Ford Bronco comes with a dash mount for a GoPro camera. I assume this is a nod to the popularity of the Bronco for off-roading. I charged up the GoPro (it’s been a while) and recorded a minute or so.

The umbrella term for this kind of video is Car Vlogging (eww!) and covers everything from enthusiasts reviewing supercars to lifestyle influencers sharing their “morning thoughts.” Dashboard Confessional is a more colloquial term used by critics to describe videos where the driver treats the camera like a therapist or a captive audience for a rant.

The “Captive” Dynamic: There is a psychological effect where the viewer feels like a passenger. For the creator, the task of driving provides a “natural” distraction that reduces the pressure of looking directly into the lens, often making the speech feel more conversational and unscripted.

Vines

(Wikipedia) “Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share up to 6-second-long looping video clips. Founded in June 2012 by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann and Colin Kroll, the company was bought by Twitter, Inc. four months later for $30 million. […] Twitter shut down Vine on January 17, 2017, and the app was discontinued a few months later.”

During its brief life I created a couple of dozen vines.

  1. Renfield
  2. All work and no play
  3. Ben Hur galley ship
  4. Blipverts
  5. Teletype
  6. North Korean applause
  7. Chinese music
  8. Dancing Santa
  9. Traintracks
  10. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
  11. In the Money
  12. W.C. Fields
  13. VEEP shotgun scene
  14. Hand Music
  15. Cellblock
  16. We serve the law!
  17. Rotary dial telephone
  18. Coffee Zone time lapse
  19. Taisir does Elvis
  20. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington #2
  21. Office scene from Brazil
  22. Wizard of Oz
  23. Night Snow