Weekly Roundup: Two Hundred Hour Mirror Edition

Seventeen months ago, I drove a BMW i8 from Los Angeles to just north of Seattle. My journey ended at the RainSong Guitars shop, where I ordered a "Black Ice" cutaway acoustic-electric. It showed up in August of last year. Since then I've played it between three and eight hours a week. Let's call it two hundred hours total. In all conditions, across the country, dropping and banging it, killing string set after string set, sometimes letting it sit in the California sun where it got too hot to touch and other times (like today) letting it sit in my trunk for a full day's worth of ten-degree weather.

Tonight I polished it up briefly using some extra eyeglass cleaning solution. As you can see, the sum total of all the wear it's showing from more than a year of near-daily abuse is... nothing. Nothing at all. It caused me to imagine a scenario where I play it for twenty more years, then die and leave it to my son, who looks at it and says, "Why did Dad lie to me about playing the hell out of this thing? It looks brand new." Is it harder to form an attachment to something that age cannot wither?

Brother Bark discussed transparency at the dealer and dealer experiences. He also did an "Ask Bark Brief".

At R&T, I offered my opinion on the hot mess known as "The Grand Tour" and gave buyers some tips on how to buy and sell sports cars in the winter.

For TTAC, I complained about a PCA raffle and was promptly corrected by the National Director of the PCA. Then I took a look at all the things that will happen before autonomous cars are a reality and considered the idea of Explorer Police Interceptor resale.

That's all, folks! I'm outta here in all senses of the word --- Bark is already hiding from the winter in Florida. I'm going to join him for a bit.