Tuesday ORT: Bond Cinematic Universe, Land-Dweller, Dead Blogs, NYT On UKR, Loopy Update

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nice tissot, bro

We are shifting the production schedule a bit this week to better suit my travel, for which I apologize. No racing updates from me, but feel free to cover your favorite series and I’ll pin as usual.

She’s doing great!

Good news for all the Loopy’s Loonies members and other cat fanciers out there: Loopy is doing very well on her new heart medication and is currently available for adoption. If any of you have room for this blind but very friendly cat in your life, contact City Of Elderly Love. Rest assured that I will think of something special and/or interesting to do for Loopy’s forever parents, whether that’s a long-term loan of the Les Paul Special once toured by Sheryl Crow or maybe a bit of acrobatic flight with The Commander. (Leave your spouse on the ground for that one, just so the kids have someone afterwards.)

I’d desperately like to bring Loopy home to Mid-Ohio, but I think she’d find the reign of Snobes to be more than a little oppressive. He makes life hell for the other cats in the house — and they can see him coming from fifty feet away!

For once in my life, I wish we had more Broccoli

It’s been confirmed that Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson have finally ceded control of the James Bond franchise and IP rights to Amazon Studios. For years, the duo had worked to restrain or frustrate Amazon’s worst ideas, with the “James Bond Cinematic Universe” being at the top of that list. Per WSJ via Esquire:

It was an open secret that the two sides were not friendly with each other, but WSJ took it to another level. According to sources who spoke with the paper, the Bond producer believed that her Amazon contacts were “f**king idiots.”

“She has told friends she doesn’t trust algorithm-centric Amazon with a character she helped to mythologize through big-screen storytelling and gut instinct,” the exposé continued. ”She characterized the status of a new movie in dire terms—no script, no story and no new Bond.”

Then, per Variety:

Variety’s sources also suggested that [new ‘Bond 26’ producer] Salke intended to transform James Bond into a “less dangerous” character who could potentially transition across to television shows and video games. It was an approach that Broccoli reportedly took considerable issue with, and one that insiders have referred to disparagingly as an attempt to water 007 down into “a rebellious cookie-cutter spy out of an NBC drama.”

Yes, that’s what we want out of secret agents: they should be less dangerous.

It seems inevitable now there will be a “James Bond Cinematic Universe” filled with Moneypenny spinoffs and other worthless garbage. This is one of the several ways in which “Star Wars” has been driven face-first into the ground. Not only are the continuation movies universally awful, there’s a planet-sized mass of other junk surrounding them, all of it cynically designed to separate nerds from their GameStop cash via Glup Shitto Funko Pops and the like.

How do all these “creative” people not realize that relative rarity is part of a movie’s charm, even in the case of the Bond films? Is it just that so many of us have been lulled into “consuming content” for 4+ hours a day, which in turn creates a yawning hole in everyone’s lives that must be filled, regardless of the artistic cost?

Also, how do you square this desire to have several Bond spinoffs with the fact that a European “secret agent” makes approximately zero sense in the world as we know it today? What will these spies do exactly? Go to Russia? Gaza? China? The idea of “James Bond” only really ever made sense during the Cold War, and then just in the parts of said Cold War that were explicitly European.

There’s also the very real risk that were a “James Bond” to appear anywhere nowadays, with his first-rate tailoring, his Aston Martin, and his ironic quips, that he would immediately be misidentified as an Instagram influencer and would therefore be “put on blast” across social media.

If there is any silver lining to be had, it’s found in the Telegraph, which notes that

In the late 1950s Ian Fleming wrote a treatment for a proposed James Bond television series, featuring the exciting notion of Bond going undercover as a racing driver and haring around the Nürburgring while his enemies tried to finish him off.

Surely this could be made interesting, right? Just keep the weird six-foot-fourteen kid from Gran Turismo far away from it — and keep Emelia Hartford on another continent entirely.

Mechanically admirable, stylistically…

If you like the idea of the Tissot PRX but want to pay between fifteen and one hundred times as much for it before grey-market dealer bumps, then the new “Land-Dweller” from Rolex is for you. Expect this one to cause some real heartache and confusion among the faithful.

Let’s start with the name: Land-Dweller. It follows Sea-Dweller, a sort of super-Submariner for ultra-deep dives, and Sky-Dweller, a suave and sophisticated double-time-zone watch for people who spend a lot of time traveling. Both of those kind of make sense, but aren’t we all Land-Dwellers by default? And what makes this watch uniquely suited to, ah, being on land?

It doesn’t help that the new case with its integrated bracelet just screams “ugly quartz Swiss watch from 1983”. Everybody knows what expensive Rolexes look like. This doesn’t look like an expensive Rolex.

Technologically, on the other hand, this is probably the most impressive watch to ever bear the Hans Wilsdorf crown. It has a natural escapement, which is one of those ideas that always gets batted around by watch dorks but never appears in reality, and certainly not in a mass-market $15,000 item by the world’s leading watchmaker. It also has the “Syloxi” silicon hairspring, basically what I have in my Tudor Ceramic Master Chronometer.

It’s rare for Rolex to try anything technologically adventurous in their main-brand watches. That’s what Tudor is for — and, not to put too fine a point on it, what the Rolex fans have always criticized Omega for doing so assiduously. So the Land-Dweller is going against type and then some. It should appeal to people who want the latest engineering in a mechanical wristwatch.

Expect it to be impossible to get for a few years, but not as impossible as the new green ceramic dial GMT-Master II:

This will probably retail for twelve grand and sell in the open market for twenty or more, if you can find someone to part with it at that price. Real talk: if I could afford it, I would buy one at any price and never look back. What a handsome devil.

Three car blogs go to the Rainbow Bridge

what does that even mean

Today is the last day of operation for Motor Authority, Green Car Reports, and The Car Connection. If SimilarWeb can be believed, all three blogs were already sucking fumes prior to their closure, combining for 1.4 million total visits last month. Not unique visits. Total visits. We used to do three times that volume at TTAC with one full-time employee. I can only speculate at how the owners of these sites managed to pay salaries for several different mooks at the same time.

There were some nice people working there, and even a couple respected acquaintances — I won’t name them, because I don’t want them to be punished by association with your humble author. One of them introduced himself to me a decade or so back by sticking out his hand and saying, “I’m Name, and I know I write crap.” The reader perhaps will be surprised when I say that I was upset by this. I’d never meant to be a scourge of decent, hardworking writers. I’d set out to challenge the industry as a whole, not make individual people feel like I was out to get them.

Oh, well. Although many blogs and sites have failed in the past few years, there are many more to go. Should I start trying to get press cars now? Should we have car reviews here? Wouldn’t it be fun to try?

The wildest thing, and most frightening facts, you’ll read this year

The NYT has released its Ukraine expose, archived for free here. It contains staggering revelations:

America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations… Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field…

The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats. The story of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line, how increasingly dire events forced them — some said too slowly — to advance it to more perilous ground and how they carefully devised protocols to remain on the safe side of it.

Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.

You’re reading it right: our leadership was risking a nuclear exchange for… reasons. It gets worse:

The red lines kept moving.

There were the ATACMS, which arrived secretly in early spring, so the Russians wouldn’t realize Ukraine could now strike across Crimea.

And there were the SMEs. Some months earlier, General Aguto had been allowed to send a small team, about a dozen officers, to Kyiv, easing the prohibition on American boots on Ukrainian ground. So as not to evoke memories of the American military advisers sent to South Vietnam in the slide to full-scale war, they would be known as “subject matter experts.” Then, after the Ukrainian leadership shake-up, to build confidence and coordination, the administration more than tripled the number of officers in Kyiv, to about three dozen; they could now plainly be called advisers, though they would still be confined to the Kyiv area.

Perhaps the hardest red line, though, was the Russian border. Soon that line, too, would be redrawn.

In April, the financing logjam was finally cleared, and 180 more ATACMS, dozens of armored vehicles and 85,000 155-millimeter shells started flowing in from Poland…. The unthinkable had become real. The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil… Provocative operations once forbidden were now permitted.

Those readers with functioning memories will be aware that both the Biden Administration and the American media have steadfastly denied 90% of the above for years now. The Times story is sobering because it makes utterly plain how quick of a campaign this would have been for Russia had the United States not actively and fervently intervened in every aspect of Ukraine’s operations.

Put aside the rightness or wrongness of Russia’s invasion for a moment — I don’t see how it is any more or less morally vacant than our toppling of Saddam Hussein — and ask yourself: How would you feel if Russia had been killing American soldiers in America somehow? Let’s say it came out that Russia had been arming or advising the Mexican cartels. Would that feel acceptable to you?

The whole enterprise was predicated on the idea that Vladimir Putin was a fundamentally sane and reasonable man who would not, in fact, drop an ICBM on Americans in Europe as a belated thanks for their interference. Which goes quite counter to what our media and government say about him in public.

It’s also plain to me that the pattern of “crossing red lines” could or would have eventually taken a Vietnam-esque turn where American boots on the ground would have supplanted the “brave local resistance”. I don’t think anyone voted for that at any point in the past fifteen years.

One wonders what the Times hoped to accomplish by printing this. I mean, it’s obvious why they were researching and writing it in the first place: they expected Ukraine to win, at which point we’d have gotten a big self-congratulatory article like the one done about “saving” the 2020 election. Right now, however, it looks like Ukraine is on the way to the negotiating table, where it will be at a profound disadvantage. Does anyone think that this story of rash and bloodthirsty brinkmanship will, like, encourage Americans to demand more of it?

One also wonders what would have happened had President Biden been re-elected, or if VP Harris had succeeded in her campaign. How many Americans would be deploying right now? How many of them would be coming home in a box shortly afterwards? I’d like to believe that we’d have stopped short of that — that President Biden would think of how he lost his own son before he would command the death of anyone else’s sons — but I have doubts, dear reader, I have doubts.