What Am I? Red Carpet
Welcome to another edition of DT’s cure for the Monday morning blues, everybody’s favorite guessing game — What Am I?. This week we take a look inside some old piece of junk and you get to guess what it is.
What am I? Comments below.
How about a 1960 Ford Courier ?
These are solved way too easy. DT should give 1 very hard one or a few easier ones. This was solved in under a half hour.
*cough*
What? I didn't say 'nut-in!
I refuse to apologize for my savant-osity.
I'll bet its a hit with all the ladies. I'm jealous.
I'm sure all of us who frequent this site suffer the same fate. Obscure, inane, useless knowledge about automotive minutiae is pretty much the ultimate aphrodisiac. It's a wonder my wife even lets me leave the house.
Ha! It's the new Viagra.
Do I hear the casino jackpot bells ringing?
So, forgive my ignorance, but is the most successful strategy for identifying these features to perform a google image search? I only ask because I find the idea of FTB or mrkwong or KBZ or K2 or Rene quickly identifying the car in question using only their wits (?!?) much more appealing than cheating with google-fu.
maybe we need to invent some kind of puzzle aspect to make these more complicated – like an automotive acrostic with riddles and in-jokes – i bet there's a puzzlemaster somewhere adept at the mechanics of such a thing who could help us take our knowledge and put it into a format like that – K2 had treated us to some arcane puzzlers a while back, and i, for one, found them to be a lot of fun
Probably beyond the limitations of the blogger platform, but in theory, I think it would be awesome to keep posting them as you are, but somehow not reveal the answers until 24 hours later, at which point you get to see everyone's answers and when they posted them.
If I may make a suggestion, today's What Am I was an excellent one and FTB's skill admirable. Street cred to him!
The Doc is right though; there's no skill or knowledge challenge to Google Images (I'm not saying that FTB did so). A great way around that is to do some very simple image editing. This would have made the challenge a bit more…uh, challenging. For example, try it with this image to see what I mean;
[img] i.imgur.com/kAJtAwm.png?1[/img]
That all being said, I think it's not a bad thing to mix it up a bit, with the challenge being super easy sometimes and crazy difficult other times.
Anotherfactor is that you can never know what is easy and what is difficult because people have a wide array of knowledge. So it can't be El Jefe's fault, no matter what. It's just a fun little thing that we do once a week. +1!
Just an FYI, but I just tried to perform an auto-GIS on the original pic, and nothing came up, so cheating wouldn't have worked on this one if you had wanted it to.
Yeah, I figured out that people used google image search with a left click in chrome pretty early on, so now I copy the image into a new file to remove meta data, recrop and save as a different file type so they are pretty much un GISable. Or so I thought.
"people used gblabla search with a left click in hackeeek pretty early on, so now I copy the image into a new file to remove RRRRgrk!, mamamam and save as a different tisiakkky so they are pretty much un nibbybibbypoop. Or so I thought."
Please, use actual words, we have MG owners here!
Quote of the week!
Not really….I could tell from the pic that it was a two door wagon, and based on a couple tell-tale signs that it was from the 50's or 60's (more likely 60's based on rear window shape). I went down my mental checklist of 2 door wagons….I was really thinking it was a Chevy Nova 2 door wagon at first, but the cargo area was wrong–same with the Chevelle. The Safari and Nomad were just all wrong from a window shape standpoint. I didn't recall many 2 door Mopar wagons, and the rear window was too long for a Rambler, so I started researching Ford 2 door wagons of the era. Found the Courier….looked right to me, then looked on eBay and found this one. voila (FYI, I actually have a life, despite what this post might imply…..it took me longer to write this up then to do what I just described).
FTB, how many other vehicles had speaker grilles like that? I'm curious; they're so very cool.
Interesting question—I actually googled "music note speaker grilles" as my first move and quickly found that these were JC Whitney specials—in other words, zero help in identifying the car.
Aha! So they're aftermarket. I wondered and now I know.
For what its worth FTB.. I was riding the same logic train using 2-door wagon, with the goofy note logo on the speaker grill. I figured it was later '60s because of the 2 speakers and figured it was a ford immediately because of the Mustang in the background suggesting that it was from a car show. Inevitably, hindsight reveals that I completely forgot about the Courier (American Version) as the Ranch Wagon was obscuring my vision. By the time I had it narrowed down, you'd already cracked it.
I know what you mean about being a savant of the weird. Throw me and old hubcab and wait for my inner Rainman to come out of his dark hiding place that my wife prefers I not enter without a trained clinician.
*secret savant handshake*
Yeah — this was not an easy What Am I? feature, this was just the case of the right dude with the right amount of whiskey in his veins and a desire to figure it out. A few have been too hard and last week's underside of an FJ was downright diabolical, but somebody figured it out. Instead of showing the underside of the glovebox of a Facel Vega and smile as people struggle, I try to find a car that is just common enough that a few folks will know about them, but show more details in the picture as the car becomes more obscure. If anyone has a What Am I? suggestion (pic, car, or detail), please send them into the tips box.
Thanks -Vince
Vince, I will offer one tip to maybe up the diabolical factor, while not making them pointlessly difficult. There's a definite trend for these to either come from CL or eBay, so some methodical searching of searchtempest or ebay can often find the result, even if the car isn't known. I might advise to keep on doin' just what you're doin', but mix it up by finding cars from cars.com, message boards, etc….heck, they don't even have to be for sale if you just wanted to post a pic from a random photo gallery somewhere. That would really remove one easy source of searching and make these all about car knowledge. Just my .02. Thanks for doing them…they're fun, even when I have no clue what they are.
Never thought to do an image search. I just figured it would be on the DT server.
What I usually do is first consider what I think it is. Then post if I think I am heading in the right direction.
Next I do an eBay & Craigslist search punching in my guess and see if it's there.
I would have got this one as I figured it was a 60 Ford 2 door wagon right off being a Ford wagon fan.
But I must say most other times I am way off or "ain't got no ideaaarrrr"
Maybe we need to some submit some pictures or DT could do some cropping.
I like the sculptured sheet metal shapes to identify. It reminds me of being a kid and noticing all of the small detail differences.
Nice. I say keep them coming exactly as you do already. I'm incredible impressed knowing that y'all geniuses get these so quickly based on knowledge alone.
I guess if I wanted to feel better about myself I could post intra-operative pics from laparoscopic appendectomies or close-ups of hypopion or CT stills of a pulmonary embolism. But those still wouldn't be as cool as nailing one of Vince's W-A-I…
I don't know, that Ford Courier shot is dangerously close to HIPAA….I mean, it is a trunk shot.