Plenty of political news this week, beginning with the long-overdue departure of “Two Tier” Keir Starmer. I don’t know anyone in the UK, right or left wing, who liked this fellow. There’s also the Iran MOU, which is currently accomplishing the difficult task of being seen as a disastrous loss from both the American and Iranian sides. I keep delaying our…

Read more

• What has been your favorite moment as a father and/or son?

• What should we do as a society to help fathers, both in America and elsewhere?

Speaking personally, there is nothing in my relatively pedestrian life that matters to m…

Read more

Lotus started with spindly little cars and it effectively ended with them as well — unless you have any interest in battery-powered stuff, of course. Between those close-coupled bookends, however, there was an era where the folks from Hethel were oddly, almost accidentally, supercar-adjacent. It was the time of the Peter Stevens Esprit in S4 or V8 trims…

Read more

Apologies in advance for both the length and the motorcycle-centric nature of today’s post. I have other features to run this week so I couldn’t break the ORT in half like I wanted to.

sighs Gonna be a Harley owner after all…

Harley-Davidson, Inc. (”Harley-Davidson” or the “Company”) (NYSE: HOG) today announced that it is bringing production of the Revolution® Max platform for North America back to the United States as part of the Company’s Back to the Bricks strategy. The move brings machining, powertrain assembly, painting, and final vehicle assembly work back to Harley-Davidson facilities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, supporting skilled union jobs and strengthening the Company’s American manufacturing footprint.

The production transition is expected to be completed ahead of the start of Model Year 2028 production in 2027. Harley-Davidson expects to manufacture over 100,000 motorcycles out of the Company’s York, Pennsylvania facility in 2027… The Trump Administration's changes to U.S. trade policy, combined with shifts in the global trade environment, have created new opportunities for companies to invest in domestic manufacturing.

This is what it looks like when a company decides to do the right thing. No doubt it is highly harmful to the stonks and the quarterly statements when you move production from Thailand to York, PA. I’m sure the Sherman McCoys of the world are retching at the possibility of lazy white-trash American citizens getting completely un-deserved make-work “JERBS” building 150hp V-twin adventure tourers while their hard-working moral superiors in Asia have to go back to making Groms for 29-year-old man-children Redditors like the dork-ass who parked his MSX125 near my SV1000 at the Hibachi restaurant yesterday, clomped in wearing full AlpineStars boots, and removed his two layers of body armor and GoPro-festooned HJC helmet to reveal a pair of full sleeve tats.

(For the record, I was very adequately protected by this shirt and a pair of New Balances.)

It might not make economic sense to build the Pan ____AMERICAN____ in the United States, but that’s like saying it doesn’t make economic sense to build the Lange 1 Zeitzone in Glashutte. Anything else, as the saying goes, would be uncivilized.

I’d like to think that the change came about because of feedback given to dealers by potential customers like your humble author, but in truth I don’t care if Artie Starrs was awoken from his coke-jittery sleep by a giant American Eagle gleaming in the sky with the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES floating underneath it.

Around this time next year I’ll be able to order my USA-made Harley Pan American ST. This will greatly annoy my wife, who said to me a while ago, “I didn’t want to say anything before, but that Harley was the ugliest, dorkiest, most awful-looking motorcycle I have ever seen.” Well, now she is going to see one every day. I have waited 54 years to own a properly quick street-focused American V-Twin. Now is the time.

(And if Buell gets that Super Cruiser done, maybe I’ll have to own two.)

…But was their hand forced?

Everyone’s buzzing about the “attack ad” campaign being waged by Indian Motorcycle against Harley-Davidson. Indian, which was split off Polaris into the ownership of LA-based private-equity firm Carolwood LP, has come out swinging regarding Harley’s Thailand moves and general “wokeness”. Many gentle souls in the motorcycling hobby are quite upset about this, with this fellow being chief among them:

Yes, it’s the infamous Jonathon Klein, who just got a full sleeve tattoo to commemorate the fact that he couldn’t get his wife pregnant and therefore had to borrow three kids from a foster agency. While I admire his generous spirit — not only am I generally uninterested in my own biological son, I refused to even acknowledge the existence of my stepdaughter, Mini Danger Girl, until she won a 17-car spec class at Waterford Hills — I have to wonder if his Chinese adopted daughter will eventually feel a little weird about the whole “tiger tattoo” thing.

“Uh, Jonathon…”

“You can call me Dad, honey.”

“Uh, sure… Jonathon, why did you celebrate my Chinese-ness with a tiger-in-the-jungle tattoo?”

“Because the lady at the tattoo parlor flat-out refused to do my original idea, which was a manga version of Chiang Kai-Shek riding a wheelie on a CFMoto parallel twin with the Kung Fu Panda riding bitch.”

“…Okay, anyway, when you pick me up from my high school graduation, can you pretend like you don’t know me?”

“Too late, I already made a giant red ‘Year Of The Dragon’ banner.”

Let’s not forget, Klein is the mook who wrote this about having his foster kid yanked back away from him, probably because the agency was worried about additional tattooing taking place:

Thank you, Bentley! He couldn’t have done it without your giant rebadged Touareg. You gotta respect someone who uses authentic trauma to pimp for the VW Group and keep those free international trips flowing. It would be like if Joan Didion had inserted a “Special Advertising Section” for the Corvette Z06 in The Year Of Magical Thinking. Which she neglected to do, because she wasn’t a talentless piece of shit.

Anyway, I do feel bad for Klein, and offer him the following consolation:

Oh, back to Indian, I almost forgot. Klein believes that Brad Parscale, the former digital media director for Donald Trump, is behind the Indian attack campaign and a general “flash mob” of anti-Harley sentiment online that has also apparently led to MMA fighter Sean Strickland changing allegiance from Harley to Indian. The evidence of this is a now-deleted paragraph linking Parscale and his firm, Noise Media, to Indian.

This seems like a mountain-from-molehill situation, but I can understand why people are upset. The motorcycling hobby has endured a solid decade or so of watching its manufacturers, sanctioning bodies, personalities, and corporate leaders run themselves ragged attempting to set new standards for genuflecting to various left-friendly organizations and concepts. This served a lot of people very well, especially the PR people and paid hucksters for race or sexual grievances, even though most of them weren’t motorcyclists or genuine enthusiasts of any sort. But now the vibe has shifted and the gravy train has come to a halt.

There is something profoundly weird about bike companies going nuts for Pride and other gay-coded stuff. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think motorcycling has a massive gay component to it? Was 12-year-old Jack Baruth not the only human being in the free world who failed to understand this image?

Note, too, the raw corporate-cowardly DEI aspect of Harley’s “PRIDE” picture being a man and a woman. Why not have two obviously gay men on bikes? God knows I saw it three dozen times at Sturgis. Motorcycling has always been accepting of gay people, sexual deviants, drug users, Van Hagar fans — it is, by definition, an outcast activity and it always will be. Remember that movie “Mask”, the real-life story of some poor kid with a horrible cranial condition? Remember which group adopted the kid and looked out for him, because they were also outcasts?

When motorcycling (or any other activity) adopts a self-consciously “woke” or “DEI” attitude, it does nothing but re-marginalize the people who had previously been part of it without being singled out. “Hey, gay person, we know you’ve been riding a Harley for 24 years and have 280,000 miles on the road, but now we need you to do the pride thing.” Infuriating. It goes without saying that the primary beneficiaries and proponents of this stuff are HR ladies and people like Klein who want the stolen valor of being social outcasts while at the same time being the most boring and submissive conformists possible. God save me from all the “allies” out there: You’re a pimple on the ass of a subculture that doesn’t like, want, or respect you. At least Rachel Dolezal had the courage to do the cornrows. Getting a full sleeve tattoo and wearing a little tank top to show it off might feel gay but it is not, strictly speaking, gay.

There’s also a nifty bit of misdirection being performed by Klein and the various (mostly Milwaukee-based) outlets that are picking up on the “Parscale story”: the vast majority of the Indian attack ad has nothing to do with DEI or woke. It’s about moving production to Thailand, which was a repugnant thing to do. Harley is fixing that mistake, at least partially because of criticism like Parscale’s campaign. The sleight-of-hand that Klein doesn’t want you to consider is this: positioning an anti-outsourcing and anti-offshoring campaign as an anti-”woke” campaign is providing air cover to the people who want to decimate America further. This is the kind of thing that Target and other demonic corporations do all the time. They wave a social-issues flag in front of you and make offshore decisions while you’re distracted.

Now for the supreme irony: York, PA has a pretty strong gay subculture and a higher-than-average percentage of gay residents. It has a pretty strong manufacturing gay subculture, even. This Harley move, prompted by external “anti-woke” criticism, will put gay men and women back to work. Which, if you ask me, is good news, even if it upsets Jonathon Klein.

Speaking of UFC fighters

I’m not sure what to say about the UFC 250 that isn’t being said better by Matt Taibbi:

Once upon a time Northeast liberals just didn’t know why people liked NASCAR or the WWE. Now they’ve moved all the way from, “I don’t know it and I don’t get it, but whatever,” to “That shit I’ve never watched and don’t understand must be somewhere between porn and lynching!” Here’s Substack’s own Cox Richardson comparing the UFC bash to “the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century”:

He is referring to the NYT piece, written of course by someone named Michelle Goldberg:

By this standard — that U.F.C. brawls, which John McCain once called “human cockfighting,” belong in the White House because lots of Americans like them — there can be no standards. Like Ultimate Fighting, porn is extremely popular, but I somehow doubt [a commentator] would defend a Democratic president who invited a bunch of OnlyFans creators to the Oval Office while he was losing a war.

I have never watched a UFC fight for more than thirty seconds and probably never will, but even I can see this for what it is: a level of deranged class hatred that has little or no place in our public discourse. It also lifts the hood on a profoundly unpleasant state of affairs regarding what kind of “culture” we get in America via the expenditure of public funds. Take the Kennedy Center, which was briefly the Trump/Kennedy center before a judge discovered an inalienable Constitutional right for John F. Kennedy to be the only adulterous, criminally-involved President named on that particular building It’s paid for with public funds. You can see the performance calendar here; it is about 80% the kind of stuff about which no human being outside the Acela corridor has ever given a single damn.

Most of the public culture and entertainment funding in this country amounts to welfare for rich people. The government takes your tax money and uses it to cover the cost of putting on an Aaron Copland night at the orchestra or a retrospective of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” installations. If we are exceptionally lucky we might get funding for something that poor people used to like but no longer do, like Robert Johnson blues or early vaudeville. This is the equivalent of having a “farmhouse table” in your co-op, it’s the vicarious thrill of possessing a completely neutered prolething, basically Kendall Roy rapping in the back of an S680.

Had President Obama, Biden, or (God forbid) McCain been in charge of the 250th birthday celebration, it would have been all Philip Glass and Alice Walker and Honore Sharrer. It would have been a live-action NPR programming schedule, the kind of thing that a Columbia grad can feel good about sitting through the same way your humble author endured a 196-minute Easter Vigil in church a few months ago. With Trump we got something that was dangerously close to “Idiocracy”, and the Decent People Of The Media have been fuming about it ever since.

Guess what? America is a country of low culture. Always has been. Go read a political pamphlet of the 1800s if you don’t believe me. Which doesn’t mean there is no room for something more elevated in the national discourse — but Trump’s profoundly gauche “UFC 250” was, if you ask me, a nice counterbalance to decades’ worth of Presidential programming and media that, collectively, have generated essentially zero sincere interest.

Incidentally, the same people who were upset by the “Michelle Obama is a MAN!” comment will trip all over themselves to praise the “wonderful comedy” of “Druski” humiliating and parodying Erica Kirk before her husband’s body was five months cold in the grave. Dignity for me, but not for thee.

Like Singapore, with Alonso on the other side of the coin

Three podiums in a row without making a single pass: this is a great year to be Sir Lewis Hamilton. Indeed, it might be a great season. Although I don’t have a lot of respect for Hamilton as a driver, I do readily admit that he can reliably win in the best car, which is not something you can say, for example, about Danny Ric. And now Sir has it. Russell’s qualifying margin over Lewis at Barcelona was about half his average qualifying margin over Lewis when they were in identical Mercedes-Benzes, which suggests that the Monaco paddock wisdom of “Ferrari is the best car now” was more true than the Monaco result suggested.

The mind-boggling stupidity at Mercedes, though… how do you not let one of your two drivers cover Hamilton’s pitstop? George could have beaten Lewis with the same strategy, as could Kimi (prior to Toto hitting the Valtteri Blow-up Button). Yes, it’s true that Lewis needed a VSC in about a ten-lap window to win… but since when has Lewis not gotten that kind of luck? Note that Hannah Schmidt immediately followed the Ferrari strategy — but she and Max didn’t have the car they needed to win.

Not only does Ferrari have the best car, they are also going to get more engine upgrades than Mercedes going forward. Don’t get me wrong — I still think Kimi Antonelli will be the World Champion this year. But it won’t be as easy as it would have been otherwise. It doesn’t help that the Mercedes engine keeps blowing up, either.

Just for fun, however, I’ve bet a little bit of money on Lewis to win the whole thing. If I have to listen to the announcers blow this dude up all year, I’m at least going to have a nice dinner out of it.

Further observations:

• Man, Kimi really has Princess George mogged, doesn’t he? Toto should have swapped them out and let Kimi run Lewis down… at least until the engine blew up.

• Lando is drastically outperforming Oscar this year. Is it the confidence of being the World Champion, or has Oscar finally gotten the message that the team doesn’t want him to win?

• It seems obvious that bringing Flavio back was a good idea, but I feel sorry for any organization where the most clued-in person is 76 years old.

• The sad irony of Alonso’s car failure leading to Lewis’s win is almost too much for me to bear. Lewis has done nothing but complain since 2021, while Fernando has put his head down and driven tractors to the podium. His reward is to sit trackside while his old rival picks up yet another win.

• On the other hand, look at their women.

“The test rider was a Chinese prisoner… it was this or be sent to the BODIES exhibit.”

The Chinese have been giving Porsche a thorough beating at the Burgerkingring lately, to the point that a “Manthey kit” had to be cooked up for the purpose of reclaiming the “production car” record. (They’re all still slower than a Radical SR8, but you do get a better stereo.) Still, it’s kind of reasonable that in the battle of “fastest electric blob” you will see YANGWANG and Xiaomi as top competitors. The whole purpose of the EV is to shift manufacturing and technical know-how from Europe to China.

(If that’s wrong, you can’t tell from the actual effects.)

The recent record set by CFMoto, however, is very different. Their V4 SR-RR is a 209-horsepower V-4 superbike that competes directly (on the spec sheet) with the 213-horse Ducati Panigale V4 and 216-horse Aprilia RSV4 Factory. There is nothing electric or alt-propulsion about it. And they have run it up to 196.6mph, without killing the test rider.

(The jokes on Instagram regarding this are next level, by the way.)

It takes serious engineering to make a 200mph bike. It’s not something you can do just by throwing battery capacity at a platform. And the consequences for failure are, of course, inherently deadly. CFMoto has long been a sort of joke, they make parallel-twin bikes and Grom competitors that look like baby Yamahas. But there is nothing jokey or unambitious about the new SR-RR, even if the name is painfully derivative.

Now, let’s place this 196.6mph top speed into perspective. The 1999 Suzuki Hayabusa, with its 1299cc engine and no aftermarket tuning, hit 194.0 mph for Cycle World, the fastest top speed ever recorded on the magazine’s radar gun. The ZX-12R reliably hit 197mph in Kawasaki’s internal testing, but the “gentleman’s agreement” that the Japanese government strongly suggested tuned the production bike down to187mph, or 300kph. The ZX-14 was factory limited to 300kph, as is the ZX-14R. The Gen2 Hayabusa was noticeably more powerful than the original but, of course, could not go as quickly.

Four years ago, a pair of dudes with a normal used-bike 2013 ZX-14R got it to 198.6mph after removing the limiter and fitting an aftermarket exhaust. In just 1.5 miles, with a 180 pound, six foot tall rider. I can’t say how fast my ZX-14R would be without the restrictor, but I can say that it gets to an indicated 185mph on Ohio freeways without anything like difficulty.

That being said, it’s not quite fair to compare the Busa, ZX-12R, and ZX-14R to the CFMoto. The latter is a superbike/road-race form factor, which makes it shorter and (especially compared to the slippery Hayabusa) aerodynamically worse.

Overall, however, I would say that the most encouraging thing about the new CFMoto superbike is what it says about the future of motorcycling. Chinese companies tend to get their direction from the government, thus the EV/sustainability focus. Someone in some Party committee somewhere told CFMoto, “Internal combustion bikes, even 209-horse ones, are here to stay.” Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?

Good evening, friends. Thank you for putting up with some, ah, passive-aggressive commentary from one of the free readers on Wednesday. I’ve spoken to him and I am hoping we will see less of that. It’s always interesting to see how complete mainstream-normie typ…

Read more

I’m going to restart the ACF Book Club for July. As before, it is for paid subscribers only. If you have a suggestion for a book, leave it in the comments.

In the meantime, we have two reviews of novels with… well, not a common theme, but a common existence. We will start with the astoundingly dirty one, of course.

Fish Tales, Nettie Jones, 1984 (and 2025). Those of you who have read Cat Tales, my recent nonfiction book which, unlike Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales, is not about bisexual perversion in Detroit, will perhaps recall that I briefly digress in one of the stories to talk about how much I dislike the work of Toni Morrison. You can argue that perhaps a friendly little anthology about feral cats is not the ideal platform from which to throw stones at that particular idiot, but you go to war with the platform you have, not the platform you want.

Scratch that. Toni Morrison is far from an idiot. She is a smart and successful human being. She is simply not a gifted writer. Like Brick Top’s associate in “Snatch”, who has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty, Toni Morrison has all the characteristics of a gifted writer except the gift. Her educational background was HBCU/Ivy picture-perfect, she went directly from being an English student to being an English teacher, she was an editor at Random House before she got her own first book off the ground, and she has won every useless literary award with which it is possible to festoon a nonentity in the manner of North Korean generals clinking and rustling past a review pavilion.

Although I despise Morrison’s novels, I had always assumed that she was at least useful at her day job as an editor — until, that is, I read Fish Tales. This book had been turned down elsewhere before Morrison bought it, which is no stain on its virtue; both Moby-Dick and Dune were rejected dozens of times before someone took a chance on them. In fact, I think Morrison’s decision to purchase Fish Tales speaks well of her. Even if 95% of her thumbs-up came because she was a Black woman who mostly wanted to hire other Black women, the other 5% is admirable. Kind of like how people gripe about the Waffen-SS but are just blown away by the uniforms.

My issue with Morrison’s Fish Tales connection is this: Nettie Jones wrote a book that was one competent editor away from being worthwhile, and she didn’t get one. This was a betrayal of sorts. Morrison took the ball from Jones but couldn’t carry it over the line. In a conversation with the NYT, we learn that

Looking back, Jones still feels stung by how little editorial attention and promotion she received.

“I just don’t think I was what she expected, and that was because I had no fear of her — I didn’t know I should’ve,” Jones said of Morrison, then laughed. “I wish I had kissed her hand, if that’s what it took.”

Zero surprise. Her editor was a woman who never really managed to finish a book correctly on her own, and who has been endlessly praised for accomplishing very little. Oh well. Fish Tales was panned on its debut and fell into a well-deserved obscurity during which its author nonetheless continued to live a life of astounding privilege in various undeserved professorships and fellowships that she nevertheless managed up to screw up to the point that, according to the Times, she was reduced to living in a homeless shelter. At one point she even quit a job at NYU, which is an act of astounding self-sabotage even your humble reviewer is unable match. She is now 84 years old and living in a “subsidized” Brooklyn apartment.

Fish Tales has been reanimated for 2025, in hardcover no less, by (no relation) Hagfish, a publisher that specializes in reanimating overlooked or discarded titles. It’s been feted in a few major review publications as a work of unrecognized genius, so I wasted no time in ordering a copy.

The story of Fish Tales is fairly straightforward: during the 1970s Lewis, a (never directly stated, but implied) Black woman in the Detroit area leaves a long-term sexual relationship with her middle-school teacher to marry a successful dentist who is a “freak” in his spare time. He first permits her to have sex with other men, then encourages it, then joins the party himself. Lewis becomes part of a freak subculture presided over by two flamboyant male sex workers, zipping back and forth between Detroit and Greenwich Village as the never-ending party dictates. After being hospitalized for self-harm she falls in love with a six-foot-five (implied) white paraplegic doctor and devotes herself to his care, which brings her into conflict with his other girlfriends, and things get violent again.

The end.

I was massively disappointed after the fact to find out that the book was about ninety percent autobiographical, because I thought the idea of a black “freak” chick falling in love with a giant white cripple who is somehow the abuser in the relationship was admirably innovative. Turns out it actually happened to Ms. Jones, along with pretty much everything else in Fish Tales. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

If the universities had any sense, they’d replace whatever Toni Morrison junk they currently force down the throats of their students with this book. Not because it’s great, or literary, but because it would remove their generation’s illusions about having invented anything sexual. The freak scene of the Seventies was, as we would say in tech, feature complete for kink. At least the physical aspects of it. You have all the possible combinations of Plug A and Slots B/C/D going on, plus exhibitionism, plus groups, and so on. The freaks, of course, were not inventors themselves, at least not in terms of who did what to whom; that’s all as old as classical antiquity or longer. They did, however, kind of amp everything up courtesy of a laundry list of drugs that had never been simultaneously available to any of their predecessors.

Jones details all this in prose that is rarely explicit even when it is obscene. She also does a half-decent job of capturing something that most of us are or were better off not knowing, to wit: the combination of powerful drugs and uninhibited sex play is addictive in a way that reaches into the marrow of one’s bones. Once experienced and understood, it is impossible to forget or dismiss. Her collection of “freaks” is vastly diverse but united by one thing, namely that they can’t give up the game. For Lewis, Ms. Jones’s stand-in, there is only one desire stronger than the freak flag. That desire is to be needed. Enter “Brooks”, the handsome doctor with a knack for breaking women’s souls in half. What he has to offer is stronger than any combination of plugs and slots and pills and puff. He offers her a purpose.

The concept of Fish Tales is both acceptably strong and usefully shocking. If it is autobiographical, then so be it; that’s the most common characteristic of first novels. Rather, it’s the execution that fails. This is one of those books that suffers from what I think of as “blocking issues”, with “blocking” having the meaning that it does in theater. Ms. Jones knows what the characters are doing, and why. She just forgets to make it plain, or even visible, to the reader. There is too much obscurity, too much random movement of place and person. A little bit of obscurity can be artistic — and hold on to that thought, we will return to it — but too much is merely inept. It takes no great skill to scribble nonsense and expect your reader to imbue the required meaning. That’s how you get the “poetry” of Rupi Kaur or Maya Angelou.

In another life, Nettie Jones could have been a great author. She drives Fish Tales to a workmanlike conclusion and leaves no thread uncapped, which is not something you could say for many modern writers. Her misfortune was to meet Toni Morrison, who was busy polishing her own lamp and therefore had no time, or no skill, to be a worthwhile editor.

Let’s call it, “a great idea, inadequately realized”, give it a Grade: B-, and turn to:

Audition, Katie Kitamura, 2025. Rarely have I read a book that is so alternately exhilarating and infuriating. Mrs. Kitamura, a tolerably lovely Japanese-American woman married to race hustler, third-rate Pakistani-British slopwriter, and fellow NYU professor Hari Kunzru, has a knack for patiently assembling beautiful phrases from commonplace constituent parts. Much like Lisa Taddeo, the author of the (mostly) nonfiction Three Women, Kitamura just plugs along doing nothing in particular until somehow she arrives at a little Faberge egg of sorts. In the below scene, the narrator of Audition recalls a time when she had been briefly pregnant before miscarrying and she had surreptitiously caught her husband using an awful white-trashy app that tracked the size and development of the fetus she wasn’t yet sure she wanted to keep:

I recalled the way he had been, in those brief weeks, more than usually attached to his phone, there had been an almost tender intensity to the way he had consulted the device, so different from the usual irritation and worry with which he would scroll through the news or his messages. I realized that he had fallen into the cotton-candy world of the app, the soft corners of its feeling, he was using the app not despite its aesthetic but because of it.

This writing would elicit nothing but a snort from someone who is accustomed to the Coltrane-esque sheets of sophistication blaring from the horn of an Updike or Pynchon, but through the one hundred and ninety-seven pages of Audition I came to enjoy handling Kitamura’s phrases in my mind the way one might unconsciously over-caress a perfectly joined and fitted wooden cigar box. Her facile wordplay is a lesser gift, like the durable sheen of studio production applied by Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg to a hundred Britney-Spears-or-similar tunes, but it is a gift nonetheless and to see it exercised to such an extent is almost indecently enjoyable. She has taken the delight of reading an upscale fiction journal in one of the better airport lounges and simply mass-produced it to novel size. If Fish Tales means to continually shock you with the language and the sentiment, Audition condescends to soothe with those same tools.

Which is probably why the novel, as a whole, is such a stupid bummer. Here’s the plot: A actress of a certain age and an uncertain race — somewhat like Nettie Jones, Kitamura defiantly refuses to describe most of her characters in this respect other than to say that they are of an “underrepresented” race, which in a more amusing world would mean Inuit or Martian but here is 100% likely to be Japanese-American, because for her to imagine anything else would be a purity-circle misstep — gives an interview in which she discusses having had an abortion. The article, when it is printed, obscures this choice into “giving up a child”. Cue the arrival of an engaging young man who believes, or claims to believe, that he is her abandoned son.

It would greatly surprise me if Mrs. Kitamura had not seen the film “Babygirl” during her completion of this novel; the fake son, Xavier, comes across like a Japanese-American version of the thrusting, manipulative, perfectly self-confident character played by Harris Dickinson in that film. He manipulates and discombobulates the protagonist much like Dickinson does to Nicole Kidman, right down to the sexual aspects; in her second meeting with Xavier, the protagonist is oddly conscious of the various disturbing messages sent by their relative ages and bearing.

Or maybe — let’s face it — both characters are just different faces on the type of man not-so-secretly desired by the boss-bitch crowd.

Audition is split into two parts. In the first part, the protagonist meets Xavier and decides to discourage him in his attempt to enter her life. Then we are immediately shifted to a second universe of sorts in which Xavier lives with the protagonist and her husband, Tomas in their West Village apartment. In this universe, the protagonist is unsettled by the fact that she does not remember much about Xavier’s childhood. When Hana, the dangerous and manipulative girlfriend, moves in with Xavier, the situation degrades rapidly to the point that…

…the protagonist basically sits up and says, “Hey, this has been fun, but I don’t want to pretend anymore,” and at that point we realize that the “second universe” is not an alternate reality at all, but merely a game or fantasy of sorts that she, Tomas, and Xavier had decided to play. And this is where Mrs. Kitamura’s skill becomes insufficient to the task, because the hand-wave is just too big to be covered by delicate little phrasing and pleasurable polishing of everyday speech. In this context, her simplicity of authorial dialect comes off as uncertainty and/or not-entirely-deliberate obscurity. There’s too much fog for the meaning to permeate through in the reader’s direction.

This could have been a much better book in the hands of a more daring author. It fails because it is just so gosh-darn genteel in the modern sense of “NYU-affiliated, self-conscious upper middle class, navel-gazing, angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin, slightly spicy misunderstandings in a co-op or faculty lounge” meaninglessness. It is the work product of someone who has never genuinely suffered and never, ever, will. It reeks of complacency and privilege and affiliation and correctness. The fact that it putatively takes place within a three minutes’ walk of the worst scenes in Fish Tales just drives home the point, because what is New York City now if not a theme park for the self-consciously cosmopolitan cross-racial bugmen, current and aspirational, of the world? And isn’t this Disney-fied self-satisfaction built on the bleeding backs of the freaks and the gays and the union workers and all of the people who experienced a full spectrum of joy, pain, exhilaration, and sorrow in a time when a triple-Photoshop-pixel-smoothing of unimaginable wealth had not yet been slathered onto Grove Street?

You can just feel the bones of Kitamura’s, and Kunzru’s, existence in this book. They have not been short on money or opportunities at any point in their lives. They have effortlessly transited an international web of financial and career support from private schools to foundational grants in order to arrive at their current sinecures. They are a hundred times more loathsome than Marie Antoinette because she didn’t have the cheek to claim that she was a victim of the system or anything other than the princess that she was and that these two authors also so clearly are. NYU invited them here the way the Brits permitted Saxe-Coburgs to insinuate themselves into the rotting corpse of royalty: come here, aliens, and rule over us in your highly deserved glory. We will cover the tab.

So far, so loathsome. Yet this is what I would like to believe: I would like to believe that Katie Kitamura has a brilliant, incisive, transgressive book in her. That she has a secret desire to blow the cover off the various $CITY_reviewofbooks fluffjobs with something awful and painful and striking and unforgettable. That she has chosen instead to write Audition, which is the 70% Lindt dark chocolate of literature1, because she knows that her astoundingly comfortable existence would be rent asunder as a consequence of doing anything different, and she is afraid. I want to believe that she is just one bad decision away from turning her obviously considerable talent towards the sort of greatness that posterity cannot help but concede, like that of Melville. I want to believe that she will live to write that book, and that I will live to read it. But this shit right here? Grade: C+

Good afternoon, friends. A Housekeeping note: I’m not commenting on the Karmelo Anthony decision because, frankly, watching some of the discourse on the subject has made me lose a measurable amount of hope for our continued American co-existence. If you want to talk about it here, please be respectful to everyone involved. One child is dead. Another child is doomed. Another housekeeping note: I forgot to put in my order for the PRS SE Rock Lady until the end of the day yesterday, so I’m not guaranteed an allocation. Therefore any discussion of this guitar will result in immediate sobbing on my part.

You’re the guy who hasn’t made a pass in months, right?

Alright, now Sir Lewis is second in the championship — I said it last week but I’d done the math wrong. The media is very excited about this, of course. Let’s discuss the ways Lewis was lucky and the ways he was smart.

Lucky:

• Ferrari was the favorite for Monaco, due to their low-speed grip and their obviously superior launches. Both Lewis and Charles underperformed in qualifying, but Charles managed to push just a little too hard in Q3, which left Lewis ahead. Meanwhile, Max Verstappen dragged the RB up to 2nd with his bare hands, but…

• The Red Bull has started badly all season but now it’s not starting at all. This was doubly lucky for Lewis, because not only did he not have to pass an unpassable Verstappen, he also gapped Charles who had to drive around Verstappen.

• Lewis ignored the FIA guidance about cutting the corner before pit lane, because still he rises, so he was hit with the same 5-second penalty as everyone else who was too special to follow Race Control. When Leclerc effortlessly dtove up to 2.4s behind him after the last stops, the scene was set for Lewis to take 3rd place from 2nd, but Ferrari chose to double-stack their pitstop, thus forcing Leclerc to also serve Hamilton’s 5s penalty. This so infuriated Leclerc that he promptly drove into the wall at the restart.

So. A race where his competition broke at the start and his teammate had to serve his penalty with him. Lucky. But what was smart? Well, when Ferrari offered a different brake system to both him and Charles, he was the only one to take it. Leclerc, who has effortlessly outqualified him pretty much everywhere for more than a year, probably figured it was safer to drive a brake system he disliked but knew well. Turns out that was a mistake.

Somehow the Hamilton Hype O’ The Week has largely overshadowed the fact that Kimi Antonelli turned in a genuinely legendary weekend performance. Without the fastest car, he still qualified up front. Then, when the FIA took his half-lap lead away and decided to make him do a standing restart next to the Ferrari, he brushed Sir Lewis away like a fruit fly and won the race decisively. Toto Wolff looks like the cat who ate the canary. Antonelli is effortlessly toasting the driver — Princess George — who has been making Hamilton look awful for years now. For the record:

• Kimi Antonelli salary: $2 million. He is beating

• George Russell salary: $34 million. He regularly beat

• Lewis Hamilton salary: $60 million.

Toto Wolff, like Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton, has been part of seven World Driver’s Championship trophies. Here’s how he is different: at the end of this year, he will have eight.

Other notes:

• The FIA has determined that Red Bull has the best F1 engine, which means Mercedes will get one upgrade and Ferrari will get two. This decision seems somewhere between “quite stupid” and “openly corrupt”.

• After a race where their suspension collapsed for no reason, Cadillac now has drivers making avoidable error after avoidable error…

• …which is why Alonso, and Aston Martin, are now somehow not dead last despite having a car that is literally painful to operate.

• The Liam Lawson hype train, which is like the slower and more developmentally handicapped version of the Sir Lewis hype train, is under full steam right now based on Lawson’s luck-based wandering up to fifth place. This is a driver who has been beaten like a rug by everyone who has ever sat next to him. Send him home already.

• Alex Albon is such a whiner I don’t know what to say any more. Williams worked like hell to create a strategy that put him in the points; he moaned the whole time and almost ruined it.

• Princess George is maximally, totally, cooked. He will go down in history as the biggest choker since the Elway-era Denver Broncos.

She is having to remind the people who she is, because no one seems to know

There comes a time in every man’s life when he simply needs to stand up and be the person who speaks truth, regardless of what others think. I’ll try to be that person today and say: what you are seeing in the chart above is a stolen election, it is fraud, it is evil. I know, I know, I know that talking about “stolen elections” is the sort of thing that simply removes you from the discourse in this country. Thanks to a six-year-long campaign of media bombardment, the average normie in America views “election fraud” with the same OK-Boomer disgust he assigns to people who claim to have been anally probed by aliens. (Aliens from outer space, I mean. I know plenty of people who have been anally probed by just regular aliens.)

Look at the chart above, and ignore Spencer Pratt. Compare Bass and Raman. Bass went from 36% of the vote to 35% of the vote during the batshit insane period of ballot harvesting and invention that characterizes California’s Forever Elections. Meanwhile Raman went from 21% to 27%. I have been reading reports that she was beating Bass two to one in the harvested ballots.

Normally I would couch my observations about this in some sort of moderate language like, “This is probably not fraud, but it has the appearance of fraud and therefore the system should be revised.” In this case, however, the mask has slipped too far. There is no way that late mail-in voters prefer a particular candidate by two to one over early mail-in voters. That is ridiculous. It is fraud. And unless something major happens in the next few days, it will go unchallenged.

Note, as well, that Raman got the absolute minimum of votes she needed to knock Spencer Pratt out of the final election. Anything above that, and she might have started to look electable. The machine clearly wants Karen Bass to continue running Los Angeles into the ground. You can say whatever you want about Zohran Mamdani, but I have zero doubt that he was elected in a free and fair election. The same cannot be said about Karen Bass, when she wins.

Let us take an additional moment to wonder at the fact that Spencer Pratt’s platform, which amounted to “Maybe we shouldn’t have 50,000 homeless people running wild and stabbing folks despite being the recipients of over a billion dollars’ worth of corrupt, frequently-diverted funding,” was successfully marginalized as “extreme” by the California media. Despite that, about a third of Angelenos turned out for the man… or maybe it was a quarter of them. We’ll never know; California doesn’t permit any external oversight of their elections. Raise a glass to Karen Bass, possibly the worst mayor in America. Long may she reign.

We didn’t know we needed it, but we do

The big-block Corvette had a relatively short existence — 1965 to 1974, across two visually different but mechanically similar platforms — but it has always exercised an unhealthy fascination on the marque’s fans. Like Sullivan, the enigmatic older-woman artist sketched lightly throughout Dom DeLillo’s Americana, it lives in the hearts of men. Chevrolet was fantastically unsubtle about this when they extended the LS small-block to a (nominal) 427 cubic inches of displacement for the C6 Z06 and (my favorite) 427 Convertible, but calling a small-block a “427” is like the phrase “Van Halen singer Gary Cherone”; no one wants to hear that.

If you are like me, you probably struggle with your attraction to what I can only call unnecessary technological obfuscation. It is why I own a Honda VFR800, for example. On paper it’s a dog. In real life it sounds wild, plus I have the enjoyable knowledge that it is a delightfully complex V-Four with gear-driven cams. Some machines are delightful just because they are unusual, or difficult somehow, or evocative of a previously important emotion. The racer in me could not care less about this; I know that the 2.7-liter, 10,500-rpm RPE-V8 in my Radical is a hand-built masterpiece of complexity but if I could shave one second a lap by replacing it with the K20 from a junkyard Honda CR-V I’d do it in a heartbeat. But the man, the human, in me is endlessly fascinated by dual-impulse escapements and titanium valve springs and electrostatic loudspeakers.

Which brings us to the 8.1-liter Corvette C8. This in no way needs to exist. Small-block Vettes are capable of making a thousand horsepower as easy as breathing (deeply before ordering the turbo kit). The 496-cubic-inch engine at its heart is the Vortec 8.1 that used to be an option in 2500 Chevrolets. (Younger people often ask me why there are so few 8.1 Vortecs out there, and the reason is because Chevrolet drastically curtailed allocation. The dealers had to beg, borrow, and steal for them.) It’s just a plain-Jane truck engine, really. It didn’t make a ton of power.

Well, in the hands of Larry Hofer, it’s going to make power. Because he has re-engineered it to feature direct injection, variable valve timing, and — get this, fam — eight individual throttle bodies. Yeah, it weighs 200 pounds more, but Hofer isn’t going to run this thing around road courses. He simply wants a proper big-block Corvette, and he’s going to get one. He has been working at this for three and a half years, with what looks like a fairly unrestricted budget.

Could Chevrolet take a page from Hofer’s book? Well, they do still make the big block as an aftermarket item, most spectacularly as the 1,000-plus-horse ZZ632. Dart makes an aluminum big block, as do a few others. We already have too many different Corvettes, but this is an additional complexity I would welcome.

The real opportunity, here, is for Ford. Everyone knows that a Godzilla Mustang would sell like Labubus. We even know what it needs to be called: Boss. If the heritage crowd needs to be pacified, they could de-stroke it a tiny bit and call it the Boss 429, but I’d be just as pleased with a Boss 445.

F them kids

Back in 1999, 87 acres of land in Taylor, Texas, was donated (nominal fee $10) to the city by a farmer, with a condition in the deed that it would be used for community parkland. In 2025, the land was sold for $10M to a data center developer, who has won several legal battles against the nearby residents who are trying to stop the massive construction project, reports 404 Media. Now, the disgruntled locals are planning to take their case to an appeals court.

Bland [the farmer in question] once said… “I see the kids don’t really have nowhere to play.” He continued, “I’m thinking about giving this land for parkland because these kids need somewhere to play…”

July 7, 1999 – Bland granted the land to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a public trust, for $10 on the condition it be used as a park,

2003 - Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation granted the land to another non-profit called the Williamson County Park Foundation,

2003, one month later, Williamson County Park Foundation gave the land to the City of Taylor,

2008 - the city of Taylor sold the land to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation (TEDC) for $15,000,

2025 – TEDC sold the land to data center developers Blueprint for $10 million.

Absolutely astounding, and every detail just makes it worse. What I find most fascinating is how the data center, like the electric vehicle, is brutally catapulted past every possible legislative or social hurdle facing it. We always hear about how you can’t get anything built in modern cities due to NIMBYism and endless environmental interference — but a 69,000 sqft data center next to the Nashville Zoo was given an immediate building permit with no red tape whatsoever. The builder’s response to public pushback was… to add another one more than three times as large next to it. You can’t make this stuff up.

My township has passed a data center moratorium, as have several other townships in the area. Mostly, this has been the same as me deciding I won’t sleep with Olivia Wilde — she never asked — but there have been a few attempts to get something done in the county. I doubt they will succeed. Somehow, our local hicks have a better sense of the environment and what’s right in general than, say, the enlightened zillionaires of Nashville, TN or even the corrupt cowards of Taylor, TX.

If there is any justice in the world, the survivors of that farmer who donated the 87 acres will wait until the DC is built… then get a court to award it to them.

Finally, some good news

The base price for Honda’s parallel-twin CB750 Hornet is $7,999. For just three grand more you can replace the weedy 83-horse parallel twin with a 129-horse 998cc inline-four; that is the delightful CB1000 Hornet that appeared in the States last year. (It can be retuned to 155hp if you swap the exhaust!) It’s even made in Japan. The only thing you could say against it was that, well, it’s not perfectly handsome.

Well, the new CB1000F is perfectly handsome, it’s four hundred bucks cheaper, and it’s just ducky.

This looks like a motorcycle. It is reportedly retuned for 115 or so horsepower but more low-end response, which is a must for those of us spoiled by the V-twins out there. First and second gear are lower than in the Hornet, but the others are higher. Truthfully, this is the motorcycle I wanted when I bought my 2014 CB1100, which turned out to be more of a deliberately-engineered air-cooled evocation of Seventies Hondas, kind of a Grand Seiko 44GS Tribute on two wheels. Don’t get me wrong, I still put 12,000 all-weather commuter miles on it, and I still have it, but I would have enjoyed this faster, more purposeful motorcycle more. I am of the opinion that every motorcycle should have at least one hundred horsepower, and that one fifty would be better, and that 208 seems just right.

My 2014 CB1100 had an MSRP of $10,399. So the $10,599 price of this CB1000F amounts to an astounding discount. I’m going to go look at one. I’m not in a position to make the trade right now, but if I had the requisite four or five thousand bucks sitting around I would do it without thinking. In fact, if any of you out there are disgusted by the fact that this new CB1000F is water-cooled, and you want a real air-cooled Honda retro, let’s talk. I’m your huckleberry — because the new Honda is my huckleberry, no doubt.

The minute I saw the new Suzuki GSX-8TT, I knew it was the bike for me. I’ve been dabbling in “retro” bikes for a long time, becoming a Honda CB1100 owner in 2015 and then putting a few hundred miles on the XSR900 and Z900RS afterwards, but none of the available choices is without flaws. The XSR900 has never looked right, while the CB1100 and Z900RS have never managed to beat 100hp at the rear wheel and therefore feel a bit weedy at times. The GSX-8TT, on the other hand, perfectly captures the modern/retro aesthetic, is priced fairly, and offers about 150 horsepower from a slightly modified version of the GSX-R750 inline-four. Sign me up; I’ll be paying with Affirm.

Er, wait. The GSX-8TT is not powered by a GSX-R750 inline four or any variant thereof. The unfaired 2020-2023 GSX-S750 was powered by a 114-hp detuned version of the 750 inline four turning 11,500rpm, so you might think that the new bike is at least that strong. Nope. This GSX-8TT, like the GSX-8T retro and the new GSX-8R, is powered by a 776cc 82-horse parallel-twin that chokes out at 9500rpm but makes peak horses even lower than that, at 8500rpm. Which means you can’t compare it to any GSX-R in history, really. Instead, you have to compare it to second-tier machinery like… uh… let me flip through Cycle World until I can find a mainstream Suzuki sportbike with this little power… okay, I found one that makes just a little more power.

That’s a 1994 Katana 600, for those of you who didn’t immediately recoil in disgust when you recognized it. It was like a cheapie alternative to the GSX-R, and it made 86 horsepower to push 441 pounds. Oddly enough, this is just four pounds lighter than a GSX-8TT; I guess we’ve learned something in the past 32 years.

Anyway, the Katana 600 was a total sled, it got zero respect on the street. I was riding a 1987 Ninja 600R (75hp!) when the Katana came out, and I remember thinking “well, my bike is not fast, but it is also not a Katana.” The best thing you could say about the Katana was that it rarely got stolen despite the fact that it could be started with a screwdriver and a rubber mallet. People laughed at it because it ran a 12.1@111mph.

The new GSX-8TT runs… a 12.2@111mph. It has all the modern conveniences, it has a full LCD screen, it is Bluetooth compatible (I think), but if some kid rolls a smoking Katana 600 with tri-color eBay bodywork up next to you at the light, your first thought should be How can I get out of this situation with my dignity intact?

If this feels familiar — brand-new vehicles selling for top dollar with oddly strangled engines and a real lack of shame on the part of the manufacturer about it — well, it should feel familiar. Cast your eye down the following list:

• Audi A4, A5, A6

• BMW 330i, 430i, 530i

• Mercedes C300, E350

• Volvo S60, S90

• Lexus IS300, RC300

• Alfa Giulia

• Jaguar XE, XF

• Porsche Macan

• Range Rover Velar

• Cadillac CT5

• Jeep Grand Cherokee

• Acura TLX

What do all of these cars have in common? Simple: they were once powered by an astounding diversity of engines from inline sixes to VTEC fours to pushrod V-8s but they are all now shoved along by a long-stroke two-liter four-cylinder light-pressure-turbocharged engine. If you look at the specs, it is plainly unnerving just how similar they are:

I tossed the 718 boxer in there so you can see what an engine looks like when the manufacturer wants it to make power. Other than Porsche (in their car), only the Japanese and Ford provide you with anything other than a plug-along small-bore choker.

Few engines are as unhappy in their work as a long-stroke four-cylinder. You get a real winner’s combination of “hates to rev”, “shakes like a Hitachi”, and “sounds like Jonny Lieberman watching Jason Cammisa videos with one hand under the covers”. The best you can hope for is an insulation and engine management package sophisticated enough to transform the driving experience into “moaning noises from a comfortable distance while you pick up speed at the approximate rate of a 2011 Accord V-6.” If your last impression of a two-liter turbo came from a Mitsubishi Evolution or something similar, expect a full Crying Game’s worth of unpleasant surprises once you start, er, going hard at it.

The automakers aren’t stupid. They know that no one wants these engines. They also know that the universality of the two-liter engine robs them of an important differentiation vis-a-vis the competition. (In the modern bugman-bossbitch marketing era, this is often seen as a good thing. “Make it the same as everyone else, we will win with a social strategy!”) But the low-rev four-banger has an important feature: it easily meets most taxation and emissions requirements around the world while putting up class-appropriate numbers. The current BMW 530i makes 255 horsepower. The 2001 530i made 225 horses from an inline-six, while the 1994 car made 215 horsepower from a V-8. If you close your eyes and try not to think about the 580-pound weight increase over the past twenty years, then the 2.0t comes across as not entirely unreasonable. It’s also dirt-cheap to build in bulk; I wouldn’t be able to accurately speculate about how much money you save by building one four-cylinder engine type for a car instead of three or four different architectures, but it must be something.

It is also worth considering that in the era of the electric vehicle, even the least compelling turbo-four has some charm to it. I happened to be on a rural two-lane yesterday behind some teenager in a BMW X1, powered by a 240-ish-horse two-liter. He was flooring it off lights and Steptronic-downshifting the thing like a madman, enjoying the hell out of what to me is kind of a depressing little wagon but to him is a real BMW powered by a real turbo gas engine. I could point out to him that I often had a chance to drive my father’s E30 sedans when I was that age, but it would be like showing him a chart detailing the average curb weight of a Kappa Kappa Gamma or Alpha Phi in 1989 and 2026; why steal the sunshine from our young men?

The new-generation parallel-twin is the motorcycling equivalent of the 2.0t, being an engine that no one really wants but which is nonetheless omnipresent in showrooms. And as with the 2.0t, there are regulatory and cost reasons for it:

• It’s cheaper to make an upright twin than it is to make… almost anything else. A V-twin is far more complex, as is an inline-four.

• Euro 5 requires that catalytic converters come up to working temp more or less immediately. A twin is very good at that.

• Both cylinders cool at the same rate, which makes emissions management easier. They run at the same temperature, compared to an L-twin where you have a “hot” cylinder in the back.

• It’s the easiest multi-cylinder engine type to package: narrow like a V-twin but short front-to-back like an inline-four. I also suspect it is more effective as a stressed chassis unit than any other engine format, since it’s closest to a square.

Yup, the parallel twin is pretty good at everything… except making power. KTM can get 140hp out of theirs, but if you look at the offerings from the other manufacturers, the results are just plain dire. Suzuki has built their entire middleweight lineup around that 82-horse twin. Honda claims 90.5 for the CB750 Hornet, which is only impressive if you compare it to a 1969 CB750 at 69 horses. Their most powerful p-twin, the 1,084cc model in the NT1100 and Africa Twin, maxes out at 101 horses. BMW can get you 105 from their p-twin, a Chinese catastrophe manufactured by Loncin. Yamaha offers 112 in the Super Tenere 1200 but just 75 horsepower in their family of middleweights like the FZ-07, YZF-R7, and XSR700. Kawasaki has their Ninja 650 and Z650, which make 67 horses.

As a result of this move to parallel twins, power outputs are sharply down across the board for the Japanese brands, especially in their volume models. The everyday sportbike from Yamaha used to be the R6, which made almost 120 horses from a 599cc inline-four. Now it’s the R7, which features a 15% price reduction and a 38% power reduction.

Go look at any 2010 lineup for a Japanese manufacturer; you will see a wild array of literbikes, 1300cc sport-tourers, V-twin sportbikes, and high-revving, high-horsepower inline-four screamers. Those products are pretty much all gone, replaced by a diverse array of two-cylinder motorcycles. At Honda, for example, there’s just one core product with four cylinders below 998cc: the CBR600RR, which has been an off-again, on-again product for Honda as they struggle with the mechanics of making an engine emissions compliant at 15,500rpm.

It’s safe to say that if you are shopping for a new motorcycle and your budget is $12k or less, pretty much all of your choices are going to be p-twins. (Unless you’re willing to consider the fantastic new Honda CB1000F, about which more will be said tomorrow.) So what are they like to ride?

As fate would have it, both of the ladies in my household are, or have been, p-twin owners. Danger Girl rode a first-generation Yamaha R3 for a while, and her daughter has a very fetching matte-white Ninja 500. The less said about the R3 the better, because while it is a great starter bike that is all it can accomplish. At 80mph it sounds like it is about to explode. Acceleration is fantastically modest. It also sounds and feels like a toy. With 42 horsepower, the most you can say about it is that it’s not dangerous to operate the way the old Honda 250 Rebels were; I can remember involuntarily falling below 55mph on my brother-in-law’s Rebel back in the day, going up a steep-ish hill on Route 71, and being fairly certain I was going to be killed by a semi-truck.

The Ninja 500 is less toy-like. It has 51 horsepower and a bit more substance to the frame. Kind of like a real bike. Maybe too much so. You can read a lot of anguished posts in the Reddit motorcycle forums: “I’m a 26-year-old powerlifter who wrestles alligators for a living. Is the 500 Ninja too dangerous? Should I get a Ninja 300?” We have done such a good job of terrifying our young men about everything outside an LCD screen. It makes me sick. The youth cohort has been artificially bifurcated into Dirty White Boy/Stunt Brother, doing wheelies in Harlem or Montgomery on a stolen Gixxer Thou, and Redditor/Mommy’s Boy who is afraid of the Ninja 500. Like most Gen X men, I was neither. The day I got my 600R I ran it up to the aero wall at 135mph, then was glad to slow back down. To this day I’m a fairly cautious motorcyclist, absent the occasional episode where I outrun police planes and/or almost fall off the back of an SV1000.

Maybe the Redditors are right to be afraid. Mini Danger Girl crashed her 500 almost immediately, albeit on gravel. It did not discourage her. She rides it like she is protected by a force field bubble. Last time we went out she gave it full throttle for the first five gears past the local police station. I could see people looking up the parking lot. There was nothing to do but twist the throttle on the ZX-14R and go get her. I don’t know how fast she was going — the nominal top speed is 120 — but I had to hit 140 or 150 to catch her from a quarter-mile disadvantage. That’s why God gave us the 1441cc motorcycle: parenting.

Bottom line is you can still get killed on a 500. You can get killed on a 300. The way my son rides the CRF110 around our property, I worry about him getting killed on a 110. All motorcycles are inherently deadly, but you can also get killed walkin’ your doggie. The plain fact is that the p-twins are Not Enough Bike for most young men. You can argue that they are faster in a canyon. No one cares about that. If they did, the Suzuki Hayabusa wouldn’t be in its third generation. When I was 25 years old, the standard for an entry-level bike was 90 horsepower. When I was 35 years old, it was 105 horsepower and climbing rapidly. Now it is 75 horsepower and sinking. This is not an exciting state of affairs.

Now, you will perhaps note that historically, people have been willing to give up power in exchange for character. That’s what used to sell weak shit like the Ducati 900SS, the so-called “Sausage Machine” that terrified Hunter Thompson but in real life was an easy mark for my sad little Ninja 600R. It also sold a lot of Harleys, Moto Guzzis, et al. Your humble author is vulnerable to engine character. I walk by a pair of 175mph hyperbikes most days and fire up a 125-horse Suzuki SV. Because I love the way it sounds, I love the character of the engine, and I love how alive it feels on the move.

The p-twins do not have the raucous character of a Suzook 998 L-twin or a gear-driven Ducati twin. They don’t even match up to the smallbore Moto Guzzi that my friend, notorious Attempted Fingerer Blake Z. Rong1, used to ride around Los Angeles. Most of them used a 270-degree crankshaft to put both power pulses in a syncopated rhythm reminiscent of a Ducati twin, but a p-twin is to a Ducati like the Fleshlight is to a 1989-era Kappa Kappa Gamma: so far away from the real thing that it’s more depressing than nothing at all. The vibe of a p-twin’s vibration isn’t Sons of Anarchy; more like Is This Thing Gonna Break?

I worry that motorcycling won’t survive the combination of Cautious Mommy’s Boys and Cautious Poky P-Twins. Either on its own would be fine, as shown by the way in which the GSX-R600 used to turn frightened young servicemen into either authentic studs or authentic statistics, or the way Mini Danger Girl treats a Ninja 500 like a rented Lime scooter. But when we put low-voltage men on low-wattage motorcycles, the result of that equation is too often What’s the Point Of This?

Don’t let any of this dissuade you from buying a p-twin as your first motorcycle. As Milton’s Satan once said,

Better to ride on a p-twin

Than drive with a V-12.

And as Henry V once told us the day before Agincourt, the men who sit in McLarens hold their manhood cheap when a kid on a Kawasaki Z650 pulls up next to them. Any bike is better than no bike. But once you have that first bike, make sure your dealer, and your manufacturer’s social media, know that you want more. We want the return of inline-fours, V-twins, L-twins. Even a freaky triple like the Yamaha XSR900. We want character, we want variety. Motorcycling is, inherently, an affair of the heart, not a result of a calculation.

As for me? Well, I just spent $710 on new tires, sprocket, and chain for my SV1000. I’m going to ride it until the engine blows up — or until someone makes another Japanese sporting twin of similar minerals. And Mini Danger Girl? She says she wants something faster. A lot faster. When she says that, I act like I haven’t heard her say it. But I think a Ninja 1000 might be just the thing. 142 horses, plenty of room. Perfect for a young lady. Which means Not Enough For You, dear male reader of a certain age.

No worries; they still sell the Hayabusa, and long may it ride. Maybe one day they’ll sell the GSX-13TT. I don’t know many they’d sell. I know they would sell one.

Before we start, a note to readers: 13% of ACF subscribers reside in India. A significant percentage above that are Indians residing in the United States. For reasons of coincidence and timeliness, we will have topics both today and Wednesday involving Indians who live in the States. I’m going to remind all of you that no one wants to be judged by the worst foot put forward by his countrymen. William Calley was an American. Jeffrey Epstein was an American. Jonny Lieberman is an American. American soldiers in the “Greatest Generation” raped more than 14,000 German women while “liberating” Germany. We can discuss a situation, or a problem, without descending into Redditor tirades. That’s all. As always, thank you for reading.

Guitar Center wants you to design its products, then buy them

A few weeks ago, my son wanted to “busk” in Washington Square Park. We had an acoustic guitar and an electric bass with us… so we needed a travel-ready bass amp. There was a Guitar Center in Newark, NJ so we headed over there, got some useful advice from the kid working the guitar section, bought a Fender Rumble 25 for $149, and took it to the park, where it worked very well.

If you’re a Business Idiot (about which more on Wednesday), you no doubt read that paragraph and thought, “Why did Fender get a cut of that? Guitar Center was their only choice to buy an amp in the Tri-State at 8:35pm on a Wednesday night. Why should Fender get paid?” Honestly, it’s a good question. Guitar Center has managed to outlive its national-level competitors and become the only major music retailer with a dependable brick-and-mortar presence. If you need new music equipment, or if you are new to playing music, you are almost certainly going to deal with GC sooner or later. It doesn’t matter if the retail location carries Fender, Gibson, or PRS. You are a Guitar Center customer, not a Fender customer.

Sam Ash, Guitar Center, and Sweetwater have long engaged in serious house-branding shenanigans with stuff like music stands and other accessories, but now GC is going to go the rest of the way and make… a Guitar Center guitar. So they’ve asked their customers to chime in about what they want. Which seems reasonable. They’ve even opened up a subReddit… which has been promptly overrun by people whining about the existence of the subReddit. As you’d expect, even the helpful suggestions are schizophrenic; at the time of writing, the suggestion “Built In Wireless Connection To Amp” is running neck and neck wit the suggestion “Keep It Simple”.

The whole exercise has me thinking about more than just the guitar business, which — let’s face it — is already way past its peak earning years. In the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, distribution was key. You either bought what was available at the local general store or you shopped with Sears Roebuck. In both cases, your choices were entirely determined by the distribution channel. The brand of the product hardly mattered.

From 1930 to 2010 we had kind of a Golden Retail Age where there were a lot of brands with a lot of brand image and there were a lot of retail outlets. So you might decide to always buy Milwaukee tools, but from multiple sources. Or you might be the kind of person who always goes to the Home Depot. You could choose your strategy. My local “mall town” of Ontario, Ohio is a great example of this. We have a Home Depot, a Lowe’s, a Menard’s, and an ACE Hardware.

Ah, but in the long run these four channels will almost be certainly optimized to one. So if you’re shopping for home improvement, you will have to buy whatever that single channel wants to sell you…

…except you will also be able to deal directly with your favorite brand via an optimized online sales channel.

In the middle of this, you have Amazon, which rose to power by carrying all brands but is now engaging in actively predatory behavior against those brands in favor of its own partners. Amazon is very smart and they know how to calculate costs. It is very hard to make huge money selling anything through Amazon, the same way Wal-Mart was famous for making manufacturer reps stand in empty rooms for a while to soften them up before the pricing discussion.

In light of this, Guitar Center is smart to get into the guitar business itself. Fender, Gibson, and PRS have nowhere else to go anyway. Not if they want a brick and mortar retail transaction. If the Guitar Center Guitars are decent enough, they will succeed for the same reason the Chevrolet Equinox is always a best-seller; that’s what’s easiest to buy.

Some of you will note that this model has kind of been done before, via St. Louis Music and its in-house guitar brands “Alvarez”, “Electra”, “Westone”, et al. It was a raging success, undone only by a sharp increase in the dollar-to-yen ratio. Your humble author started his career on an Electra. It could just as easily have been a Guitar Center Whatever.

Knock, knock

Okay, he is the actor son of a director mother — but this is great politics, and it’s brilliantly done. New York City has started their pied-a-terre tax, which is aimed at people who own expensive properties in the city but do not live in the city full time. Because the city vastly underrates the value of its own property when doing tax assessments, its most public target — Citadel CEO Ken Griffin — will only pay an extra $1.4m in tax a year on apartments that together are probably worth well over half a billion dollars.

About 10,000 properties are expected to contribute about $500 million a year in total to NYC’s annual tax-and-spend budget of $124.7 billion dollars. That is an insane number, by the by; only 8.5 million people live in the five boroughs, so that works out to almost fifteen grand in services per resident. By contrast, the state of Ohio spends $60 billion every year on 11.9 million people, a rate of five thousand dollars per person. For context, the real estate in New York City is worth approximately four times as much as all the real estate in Ohio, even if you count my farm.

I will admit to being hugely conflicted about the idea of taxing people just because they don’t live in New York. I believe that the power to tax is the power to destroy, that governments are rarely more efficient than markets, and that if you start by attacking billionaires you might easily wind up killing people just because they wear glasses. On the other hand, I think that when someone eats up half a billion dollars’ worth of real estate to not live there, it has an awful trickle-down effect. The $150M place becomes the $250M place, the $75M place becomes the $150M place, and at the bottom you pay $1.6 million, which means $14,071 in monthly payment, which means a minimum suggested income of $550,000 a year, to live on the block where Ron O’Neal gets attacked in the movie “Superfly”.

Oh, and at that income level you can’t actually afford to eat on 125th Street. Even the Popeye’s down the street charges almost 2x Ohio prices.

Mamdani’s actions here will reduce the value of NYC real estate. Which is almost certainly a good thing. But he’s coming at it from one corner of the demand equation. Let’s see what happens when you come at it from another corner:

Are you going to scam in Fricso? Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you’re like about a third of ACF readers, generally among the more successful and educated cohort, you might wonder why your fellow commenters occasionally break out into an anguished chorus of “these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it's funny.” Perhaps the Bloomberg approach to the “Texas Real Estate Boom” will help you understand:

Since 2018 the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area has attracted more corporate headquarters relocations than anywhere else in the US... The influx drew thousands of software engineers and other Indian-born workers to the federal H-1B program, which provides temporary (FUCKING LOL — jb) visas for professionals with corporate sponsors… Collin also had the biggest percentage jump in Indian residents among large counties, climbing to an average of more than 116,000 in the five years through 2024, from 70,000 in the preceding five years.

But the momentum is quickly reversing. Indian buyers are disappearing from the market as federal and state governments tighten H-1B restrictions and many of the tech companies that employed the new arrivals fire workers in favor of artificial intelligence. Prices in the Collin County suburbs north of Dallas in February dropped almost 9% from a year earlier, compared with a decline of 4% in the metro area as a whole, according to data from brokerage Redfin.

The shift has knocked down home prices, slowed population expansion and risks eroding the tax base needed to fund schools and roads planned during a five-year growth streak. The changes also take a personal toll on immigrants because many have lived in the US for years and have established families and communities.

South Asians have become the most important first-time buyer group for builders, says Alex Barron, an analyst at Housing Research Center LLC in El Paso, Texas. “Who is there to replace them?” he asks…

One client, a senior IT director with two homes worth more than $1 million each in Frisco, is considering selling both and moving back to India. Another financed an $800,000 home almost entirely with debt. It’s now worth less than he owes, and he might just hand over the keys. “He will not lose anything,” Gupta says. “The banks will lose.”

This dude has two million-dollar homes? Give him the pied-a-terre tax, now. How did he get two of those homes? The federal government, which effectively sponsored his arrival to the United States, and which taxes his employer less on him than they do on an identically compensated American citizen, also probably backstopped his loan:

During the Biden administration, H-1B visa holders were buying houses with 97-100% financing. 97% would come from the FHA, with the rest coming from state first-time home buyer programs.

Zero money down. Thanks to programs that were supposed to be helping low-income American families buy their own homes.

FHA loans to non-permanent residents quickly grew to represent 6% of mortgage issuances. The percentage was undoubtedly higher in places like the DFW area, where H-1B visa holders are disproportionately concentrated.

This is a gross misuse of Federal funding and it is an astounding betrayal of American citizens. Some people, such as Ohio’s appointed next Governor Vivek Ramaswamy and our own “Sherman McCoy” would have you believe that Americans are lazy, entitled scumbags who bray about “JERBS” while erecting barriers against hard-working immigrants who more truly represent the American Dream than any trailer-trash possibly could.

The reality of the situation is that our government has stacked the deck against employing Americans for more than twenty years now. Compared to an American worker, an H1-B costs less to hire and less to employ. He is also unable to participate in most labor protection schemes and/or complain to the DOL about what you do.

Even if you don’t care about what this does to Americans, think of what it does to the H-1Bs. Their residency status is tied to employment. If they displease their employer — say, by refusing to work sixty hours a week while putting just forty into the timesheet, or by refusing to do anything else at all — they can be deported with very little notice. This happened to a woman which whom I worked at Recursion Phamaceuticals a few years ago. They told me to use an 18-foot ladder to fix networking equipment in the ceiling at night. I told them to fuck off. So they made poor young Deepika do it. Night after night she tottered at the top of a ladder, alone, troubleshooting CAT 6 cable, while I rode my Super Blackbird to In-and-Out Burger and read the classics until I fell asleep.

When she finished the project, they terminated her without severance. She then had 90 days to find another job or be sent home with nothing.

So the government and the major corporations basically work together here to remove even the pretense of protection from white-collar employees in multiple industries from tech to medicine, while at the same time making the business case for hiring foreigners damn near unassailable.

The Trump Administration turned off the “FREE MONEY TO BUY A HOME” spigot. Now they are looking hard at H1-B abuses. They aren’t cutting H1-B, they aren’t getting rid of it. They’re just looking at people who are scamming it. And the net effecct of those two changes — no more free house money, no more free scam money — has the home market in Frisco, TX down nine percent!

The rest of the Bloomberg piece, which is written by Bloomberg contributors Prashant Gopal and Tanaz Meghjani, is a bunch of sob stories about foreigners who bought million-dollar homes and now have to sell those homes for their purchase price, thus denying them the chance to make real-estate money after years of making minimal payments on 100% subsidized loans.

Oh, and you’re also supposed to feel sorry for some jerk-off home builder who is sitting on an inventory of 125 luxury homes under construction. I hope that dude accidentally falls into a woodchipper. Alternately, I hope he gets e-Verified so hard they throw him into prison so MS-13 can rent his ass to the brothers. If you want a picture of the modern “hustle culture business superstar”, it’s this guy: he illegally employs Mexicans to build homes for Indians, the federal government throws money at him, he thinks he’s brilliant for accidentally participating in the most corrupt process since Martin Luther heard the word “indulgences” for the first time, and he still can’t find pants that fit.

In the same way that a $238 million penthouse purchase makes it impossible for a garbageman to own a home in Queens, a never-ending tide of federally-funded immigrant homeowners makes it impossible for working people in Texas to own a home. If you’re tempted to reply something along the lines of “Those working people in Texas should just work harder,” then congratulations on never opening a history book of any sort. The average Middle Ages peasant had more autonomy and more freedom than the average service-class worker in 2026. And those service-class jobs are increasingly impossible to get.

But here’s the scariest part: Zohran Mamdani wasn’t elected in a vacuum. He was elected to pursue an explicitly socialist agenda — for God’s sake, he quoted Eugene Debs on Election Night — because the man in the street is sick of $238 million penthouses. Americans, by and large, tend to be optimists. I walk into the Vacheron Constantin store and I think, “You know, with hard work and luck I’ll have one of these.” You see an S-Class roll by and you think, “Hey, I might end up buying an S-Class some day.” For the last 150 or so years, we haven’t had an outright populist riot with public executions in this country because we have maintained the fiction, however paper-thin at times, that anyone can make it.

The prevalence of $238 million penthouse sales, combined with ever-worsening economics down here on the ground, threatens to tear that paper-thin fiction into shreds. You can argue it’s already happened to some extent, because we have a Muslim socialist mayor in the world’s greatest city.

Now, when the same illusions are shattered in Texas, you’ll get a different kind of protest vote. Or you might get no vote at all. You might see people simply acting out in all sorts of ways. The media, the Bloombergs of the world, will be shocked. Because they’ve witnessed a lead pipe being taken to the skulls of the middle class and lower middle class in this country since 1990 or thereabouts, and they thought the beatings would never stop.

And it’s true: the beatings never stop. But they are occasionally shifted.

Don’t let them see my Affirm statement

The automotive journalism business continues to be operated by people who neither drive cars nor buy them. The latest news from Autoblog about Chevrolet’s Corvette lease program is proof positive of this:

According to CarsDirect, which got its hands on dealer lease bulletins, Chevrolet’s first national lease offer for the 2027 Corvette Grand Sport X is $1,799 per month for 39 months, with $3,839 due at signing. The offer is based on a vehicle carrying an MSRP of $112,195 and includes an annual mileage allowance of 10,000 miles. Factor in the upfront costs, and you’re looking at about $1,897 a month before taxes and fees.

According to the report, the main reason for the towering monthly payment is the sky-high lease rate that translates to a 10.44% APR. Chevrolet isn’t offering any lease cash, loyalty bonuses, or discounts to soften the blow either. The only thing in your favor is a solid 63% residual after 39 months.

When I see stuff like this, I ask myself: How stupid are these people? I don’t like the Grand Sport X, and I don’t like hybrid Corvettes in general, but as deals go, this is one. Let’s look at the numbers. If you do this deal, you will hand over a total of $74,000 across 39 months, plus taxes. Your residual will be $70,683.

Compare that to a five-year purchase, which would cost you $2,225 a month without tax. That’s an extra $16,614. At the end of 39 months, you’ll still owe $43,775.

If the Grand Sport X turns out to be a resale superstar, you’ll want to have purchased it, because at the 39 month mark you could be up to five or six grand ahead depending on what else you could do with the money you don’t pay during the lease term. But I don’t think it will be a resale superstar. I don’t think the average Grand Sport X will be worth seventy grand after more than three years. But if it is, guess what? You can buy it for the residual amount and flip it!

Five grand over 39 months is… $128 a month. That’s not a lot of money to risk in exchange for the chance to walk away from a hybrid Corvette around the three-year mark. In my experience, a three-year lease payment should be slightly less than a five-year purchase to make economic sense. In this case, it is a lot less. So Autoblog is wrong…

…but I don’t think they made all of the above calculations. I think some dumb-ass who has never purchased a new car in his life saw the figures and thought OMFG THAT IS SO MUCH MONEY. No, friend, it is not. And especially not on a car that costs over $110k.

To put this in perspective, when I was in the methadone clinic game we had a pair of leases out on $70k Range Rover Vitesses. Each lease was about $1600 a month. We considered that to be a deal because we in no way wanted to have a Range Rover Vitesse a single day out of warranty. If we could have gotten $112k cars, which back then would have meant “loaded S600 coupes with cash in the trunk,” at $1799 a month, I would have had three S600 coupes in my driveway. Alas, the average modern car blogger is just becoming an S600 coupe buyer now, when they’re five grand on “Cars and Bids”.

That’s all for now, folks — we will have a fun guest piece and an “Ask Jack” this week!

What a week it’s been! Let’s cover the highlights and have some fun. But first, a brief commercial message: I’m back in The Free Press talking about why the Ferrari Luce is so awful. Don’t expect the level of discussion we get here; TFP is a relentlessly non-automotive audience. And some of them are excited about the Luce, presumably because it’s a way to have the Ferrari badge without the attendant Ferrari experience; it is the giant Louis Vuitton logo T-shirt of automobiles. It is important to remember that we increasingly occupy a world where display of the brand is more important than any particular virtue of said brand. That’s why Patek Philippe dress watches from the Fifties and Sixties sell for the melt value of their gold; there’s simply no way for someone to see you’re wearing a Patek. Another way to look at it: the street value of an early-purchase Swatch x Audemars plastic watch is greater than that of pretty much any gold dress watch from the past. The sole exception is probably a Cartier Tank… because everyone knows what a Cartier Tank looks like.

Anyway, we apparently live in a world where a few folks would really like their electric blob to have a Ferrari badge. Thank God I can get paid to speak truthfully about this piece of shit rather than being forced to fluff it for a payday. Which reminds me:

The bold alpha males speaking out in favor of the Luce

By any measure one could reasonably conjure, the new Luce is not a good product. It looks worse than a Tesla Model S and will probably trail said Tesla through the quarter-mile while also providing less interior space. The last time someone whiffed so comprehensively against a fourteen-year-old product that has just been idled for major revision was probably… the 1994 Smith and Wesson “Sigma”, which was demonstrably worse in all categories than an early-Eighties Glock 17. When it came out, some wag on the USENET (alright, it was me) opined that “Sigma” stood for “Sure It’s Glock… My Ass.”

You can argue that autowriters don’t have as much responsibility to the wealthy public as they do to the normal public. It’s a genuine dereliction of duty to promote a bad $25,000 car; promoting a bad $250,000 car is much less harmful and acting as advocate for a $2.5M car is entirely value-neutral. No one will ever lose his job, his home, and his kids because he is late for work due to his Bugatti, regardless of what you might see on “Billions”.

So I don’t think Jason Cammisa and John Pigboy Heffalump1 are hurting the public much by coming out in favor of the ugly-ass Luce. But it is also true that I would not be doing a material disservice to humanity by changing this Substack to “Avoidable Contact Forever, brought to you by Dude Wipes(tm) and Realdoll(tm).” Nevertheless, I shall not be doing that, and for one simple reason: nobody's offered me any money to do that. God in His infinite wisdom has chosen to protect me from the kind of temptations that have recently led friend of ACF Matt Farah to endorse a $79 Chinese watch strap (that looks suspiciously similar to a $21 Watchdives product) and a $1,299 Chinese2 watch (that looks suspiciously similar to a $99 Watchdives product).

Autowriters who will say and/or write anything in order to get on the next five-star press trip are morally inferior to those young women who get paid for visiting Dubai and serving as human toilets for various sheikhs and such. The latter are only degrading themselves; the former are also harming the business and their readers.

I suppose its possible that both of these fellows are expressing their honestly acquired opinions instead of nakedly toadying towards the prospect of free hospitality at the LVGP. Somehow that would be even worse, like finding out that those Dubai girls are just really into the rough stuff.

Charming in its own way

IndyCar is pretty neat in my experience if you just think of it as MX-5 Cup played at 2x speed. Anything can happen and you don’t need to overthink the strategy et al. In road course trim the cars are oddly handsome, too.

The Detroit street circuit is really, really tight; I was there a few years ago for the GT4 race and it was immediately apparent that not a single turn on the course is genuinely two cars wide. In order to shine here, drivers need a real traction sense and also a real idea of tire state. It doesn’t hurt to know what your brakes can do. If anything, most of the drivers underestimated their stopping ability; plenty of the overtakes were clearly the product of different opinions in that regard. Maybe three times there was a genuine instance of overbraking. Far more often we saw the over-enthusiastic application of exit throttle, aka the “Mark Reuss”.

It’s been said that IRL was the better organization but CART had the better vehicles. In any event, the (forcible) reunification was a good thing. Here’s an idea for another good thing: Unify IRL with F2. They’re the same car, more or less. Then encourage F1 drivers to dabble back in F2 the way Cup drivers run in O’Reilly. Wouldn’t you like to see Max run the Detroit GP? Sure you would.

Five-sentence movie review: “Backrooms”

0. You don’t need to know anything about the “lore” or the YouTube stuff or the Steam games to enjoy the movie; quite the contrary.

1. Chiwetel Ejiofor, whom I despise thanks to a profoundly naive idea on my part that he is anything like his character in “Children of Men”, delivers an acting masterclass, and is the second most impressive Black actor to be discussed this week.

2. The visual design of the film is astounding, drawing from Nineties-furniture misery, the Omega Mart in Last Vegas, and THX 1138 in near-equal measure.

3. Don’t expect anything good to happen, and you won’t be surprised.

4. Renate Reinsve is a nearly perfect female and would be one thousand times as famous as she is if some of you short kings out there could find it in your hearts to love a woman who claims to be five foot ten and is obviously lying, this broad is closer to six feet than Vin Diesel is.

From euphoric to majestic, painfully

It takes a lot to be a better actor than Chiwetel Ejiofor, but Colman Domingo handles it effortlessly in the final episodes of “Euphoria”. If you’ve seen the flamboyantly gay, emotionally wrecked drama-queen character in “The Four Seasons”, you would be excused for not recognizing that Domingo is both that guy and “Ali”, the Muslim, First Infantry soldier, and recovering addict to whom Rue Bennett turns in “Euphoria”.

Plot twist: Domingo is actually gay in real life, by the by.

He’s not the only surprise to be had. Not since Dylan went electric has a creative person changed direction as effortlessly, and convincingly, as Sam Levinson has in this show’s third season. Seasons One and Two, which premiered in 2019 and 2022, respectively, were deliberately dream-like, artsy, and massively unrealistic meditations about youth drug use. Few shows have offered as many unforgettable set pieces in just sixteen episodes, whether it was a nude Sydney Sweeney being choked or Labirinth singing gospel in the famous Knox Presybyterian Church or my personal favorite, a brutal sequence where Zendaya has to channel her inner T-1000, parkour expert, and junkie all at once:

“Euphoria” has been repeatedly criticized for glamorizing addiction — but in Season Three, Levison crushes those vibes with a ten-pound sledge. He then does the most shocking thing of all, in a show already renowned and notorious for shock value: he evangelizes for both the Old and New Testaments and their power to heal even the most degraded among us. It is an astoundingly Christian message, especially coming from the Jewish director son of a Jewish director father.

In the season, sin is deadly, blasphemy is punished, and faith is rewarded. You might even say that “Ali” puts on the full armor of God… and sheds that Muslim name in the process. The pivotal character in the last genuinely violent scene is named Bishop; he carries something between Muslim prayer beads and a rosary. I suppose we all should have seen this particular end coming.

It’s been interesting, watching the media gripe about Levinson’s message while also reluctantly admitting the deftness of the execution. What fascinates me most about it was that Euphoria didn’t necessarily need to end. Yeah, you were gonna lose Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi ASAP because they have bigger fish to fry, but let’s face it: Zendaya isn’t going anywhere, the public has had a chance to vote on her movie-star potential and they have universally chosen Sydney Sweeney instead.

“Euphoria” could have run ten seasons. Twenty. It could have been “Grey’s Anatomy”; both series lost Eric Dane and kept on ticking. Rather than milk the cow endlessly, Levison decided to do something that Zendaya’s despised “Chani” in the Dune films would understand:

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

Respect.

It was the Silver Sky all along

Paul Reed Smith, the company not the man, has confirmed recipt of a “cease-and-desist” letter from Fender over its Silver Sky model. The reason can be seen in Reverb’s Top Sellers list for 2025:

1. Fender American Professional II Stratocaster (USA)

2. PRS SE Silver Sky (Indonesia)

4. Fender Player Stratocaster (Mexico)

7. PRS USA Silver Sky (USA)

This represents an improved state of affairs for Fender, who took a worse beating from PRS for much of the past seven years. Fender also has a tougher business proposition than PRS does, because they own their Mexican facilities and have to keep them humming by any means necessary. By contrast, PRS outsources the “SE” guitars to Cort overseas. PRS is also able to get more money per “Strat” than Fender does. The cheapest USA Silver Sky costs $2,749, while the cheapest USA Strat is $1,259 and the volume model is $1,499. To put that in perspective, I paid $999 for an American Standard Strat in 2008 and I paid $999 for an American Deluxe during a music-store shutdown in 2013. The wildest thing is that I sold the American Standard for six hundred bucks in 2018, because a friend needed a decent gigging guitar. Oof.

I don’t think Fender can win this lawsuit, and I think it does nothing but elevate PRS in the eyes of the average musician. Which, frankly, they don’t need. Everyone knows PRS makes a better guitar. What they generally don’t make is a cooler guitar. This lawsuit can’t make the Silver Sky any more cool, but it can hurt Fender, and likely will. The fact that the whole guitar market is a bit of a crab-in-the-bucket situation makes the lawsuit even more pathetic. How many guitars will anyone sell in ten years? Twenty?

Trouble in Vowles-a-dise

According to the Guardian and other sources, things are going badly at Williams F1:

Away from the track, the team and their parent company, Dorilton, are embroiled in a messy dispute with a former executive, Claudia Schwarz, who was dismissed in 2022. In court filings, she alleges she was fired after raising concerns about sexism towards her and racism, with claims drawing in Lewis Hamilton’s foundation and the artists Wyclef Jean and Shaggy.

The ultimate ownership of the Williams team is also questioned by the former executive, who makes a hotly contested claim that the team are controlled by Peter de Putron, a billionaire based in Jersey with close links to the Conservative party. They in turn accuse the executive of fiddling her expenses, charging inflated fees and defrauding the company in cahoots with a former CEO of Williams’s parent company.

In the lawsuit she alleged: “Ms Schwarz complained about the various business practices of the Williams Racing Team through its owner, Peter de Putron as it relates to marketing. This included complaints as to the manner in which contracts and business operations were being performed in the country of Bermuda, complaints regarding defendant Peter de Putron’s insistence that the Williams Racing Team not be marketed to African Americans and the LGBTQ Community [and] complaints about not allowing participation to donate/support Unicef alongside all the other F1 Teams for Ukraine war victims.”

Shortly after Austin, Dorilton’s CEO, Bjorn Bergabo, said in a video call with Schwarz’s hospitality and marketing team, according to her lawsuit, that “the investor ‘is furious’ and he made it clear ‘that this is not the quality of people he and board wants to see in the Paddock Club.’ He further said it was embarrassing that [Wyclef] Jean and Shaggy, [the two singers] dared to come to the table of himself, Mr Bergabo and Mr Savage, to say thank you to him for the invitation.”

Schwarz also alleges in her claim that she raised concerns about what she described as De Putron’s decision to prevent Williams from joining the Lewis Hamilton Commission, which assists minorities aiming to work or race in motorsports. In her lawsuit against Dorilton and De Putron, Schwarz alleges the billionaire told Fultz and Capito: “He would ‘rather sell the team’ before he would let the Williams Racing Team become a part of [the Hamilton Commission].”

For the record, “The Hamilton Commission” is an obvious bit of race-bating and grievance-grifting. It’s ridiculous that it exists at all, let alone has full financial participation from every single F1 team (including, nowadays, Williams.) It is also ridiculous that F1 teams are supporting Ukraine; sports organizations are not supposed to be sponsoring wars. Can you imagine the New York Knicks tossing a few bucks at the Wagner Group?

I hope they grind this woman face-first into the ground. It is patently obvious (to me, from what I have read) that she got caught banging at least one executive and she is now doing the ultimate I’m Gonna Go Tell The Teacher What You Did And You’ll Be In More Trouble Than I Am. And nothing, I mean nothing, screams “privileged multi millionaire white broad” than claiming to be some sort of advocate for Wyclef Jean. The mind boggles.

And what kind of value did she deliver when she was CMO, other than apparently getting frisky with someone? Zero, literally zero:

“We had 17 partners generating no money because most of the deals were value in kind,” says Kenyon, recalling when he joined the team. “So we cleared that out. We worked on the basis that if it’s not worth anything, it’s not worth anything.”

She is also alleged to have misappropriated nearly seven million dollars in expenses, which easily beats the time I took ten people to dinner at “Meat on Ocean” and expensed the price of a new Honda Navi on “Japanese A5” and “Ketel One”. On the other hand, she apparently raised concerns about her employer’s dealings in the Bahamas, something similar to a comment I raised at one of my jobs that probably did not help my longevity there.

I would also defend Ms. Schwartz by pointing out that Nicholas “GOATifi” was employed during her tenure there. If she had anything to do with that, then I take back most of what I’ve said above.

See you all later on in the week!

Good afternoon, friends. There’s a minor opportunity for hurt feelings in today’s discussions so I’ll remind everyone of the rules: you can attack public figures and your humble author, but please treat each other with respect.

Guess I’ll be driving one for a long time to come

Read more

It isn’t often seen today in our world of dull, stupid combover fake-SUVs, crappy food and idiot motorists that a new supper club appears. But when it is, it is worth celebrating. And one recently appeared here in the greater Quad City area. And we all say hooray.

It was probably about a year ago my brother told me he and my sister-in-law went with friends of theirs to Fifth Avenue Syndicate, a nice fine-dining restaurant inside the brand new and totally revamped Fifth Avenue Building in downtown Moline, IL. I was intrigued. There are a few places relatively close that I love—you all know The Cellar in downtown Geneseo is my favorite place within 50 miles of Casa de Klockau—there is also The Machine Shed in Davenport and Lunardi’s—best lasagna in the metro area. So when this came up on my radar, I wanted to try it.

At the time I had maybe 3-4 places on my “I need to try this place!” list—still need to get to Monarch in Bettendorf. And it kept not happening for the Syndicate. Finally, early this year, my brother said, hey Tom, why don’t we just take you there for your birthday! And I thought that was a fantastic idea. And so we went. And it was good!

It is immediately adjacent to the Axis Hotel’s art deco lobby, and gave off major supper club vibes. And the food was excellent.

As you may have guessed, I got a steak. In this case a NY Strip, called “steak and frites” on the menu. It was excellent. And so was the Old Fashioned—served with a large, crystal clear round ice cube, so as to not melt to fast and spoil the bourbon. It too, was excellent.

It wasn’t perhaps QUITE as marvelous as The Cellar—the menu was not quite as extensive—and the pricing was perhaps a bit higher. But the quality of the food and drink was commensurate with the cost—in your author’s humble opinion.

The restored lobby was quite cool too. Originally this 8-story building was filled with professional offices, doctors, lawyers and accountants, with retail outlets on the ground floor. But the whole building was completely redone just a few years ago with no expense spared. The Axis Hotel is affiliated with Hilton, and the quality is apparent from the service and the food. Quite nice. I have no need to stay in a hotel 8 miles from home base, but am curious about what the rooms may look like. It is a nice operation, and a big, pretty addition to downtown Moline’s list of businesses.

It was so good I took my parents there a few weeks later for Mother’s Day and it was just as good. I got the exact same thing, and it was just as excellent and delicious.

Klockau says check it out if you’re ever in the area.

Hello friends. Ten years ago, we lost Harambe. His death is often played for laughs, but it was fundamentally tragic; it was yet another example of human carelessness causing animal suffering. Today, President Trump honored Harambe as a true patriot, which is reasonable; he was Texas-born and Ohio raised. In his last moments, he cared for a child.

We have a tradition here at ACF of sharing motorcycles, cars, and musical instruments in his honor. Traditionally this is restricted to paid subscribers but since I’m the owner of today’s subject item, I’m opening it to everyone. Want to see more? Hit that subscribe button, champ. Then you can send us what you have.

Today’s instrument is Paul Reed Smith Private Stock #3215. If you have no idea what that means: Paul Reed Smith makes absolutely perfect instruments for rich people who are crummy musicians, and Private Stock is for people who want the best of the best. There was a time in my life when I was playing a lot of music and spending a lot of money on guitars; at one point I had seven Private Stocks and maybe two dozen of the “Wood Library” and “Core” models. That collection has been cut down in the past years so I could do stuff like race a V-8 Radical and eat two meals a day.

This guitar was completed on October 7, 2011. It is signed on the headstock by Paul Reed Smith and Paul Miles, the head of Private Stock. The backplates are signed by Paul Reed Smith and David Grissom, who designed this particular model. The full leather case is signed by Paul Reed Smith. I bought this from Allan Clarke at Guitar Center’s Hollywood Platinum Room, where I was once disturbingly well-known:

If you’ve never had the chance to take delivery of an $11,000 guitar and put it directly into a Rolls-Royce coupe, I don’t even know how you’re getting up in the morning. (Scratch that; I don’t know how I am getting up the morning. You’re probably doing great.)

Anyway. I hadn’t played this guitar in more than a decade but I’ve been thinking about selling it in order to facilitate other acquisitions such as a Glashutte PanoLunarMatic and/or next week’s meals so I dragged it down to Columbus last night to back up my son at the Rambling House Jam. We had a great time but I made the mistake of relying on my ex-wife to actually take a picture of me playing it on stage, which she very gleefully did not do. No bitterness on my part, I put that woman through hell and if she doesn’t want to be my paparazzi who can blame her.

All Private Stock instruments are special but this one is doubly so because it has the “Celtic Knot” fretboard inlays of abalone and mother-of-pearl which are hugely labor intensive and are now a six thousand dollar option on their own. The cheapest new PRS to have them is the John McLaughlin which is $14,995 plus options. But my guitar has options beyond the Celtic knots, including figured mahogany back, neck, and tuner knobs. The wood is indecently nice. The top is an ultra-figured Koa in non-bookmatched configuration. The PRS Private Stock bird is rendered on the headstock as an outline in 18k yellow gold.

How does it play? That’s the most amusing part: it’s GRRRRRRREAT! Paul Miles is infamous for throwing Private Stocks into the woodchipper if they don’t play well, which is not a philosophy you will ever encounter in the Fender Custom Shop or even the Gibson Custom Shop. The wood isn’t just selected for fancy-looking-ness, it’s also filtered out by weight. So this violin-curved-top mahogany guitar looks like an eleven-pound Lester but it weighs about as much as any Fender Strat you’d take off the wall at a store.

As I reach what is charitably called late middle age I’ve decided that I’ll work harder to enjoy what I already have. I can’t go back in time and play this guitar for thirteen years in a row, but I can start playing it now. Or, I could sell it to you. Current listings on Reverb for PS-DGTs go from $10,500 to $22,000. Not a single one of them has Celtic knots. I will listen to any offer, of course, and give priority to trades of exceptionally fancy bass guitars for my son to throw into the trunk of his Accord like he is tossing a dead raccoon into a dumpster.

This won’t make you a better musician but it will gratify you in many different ways. The other guitarist at last night’s jam saw me bring it on stage and he said, “Youre. Fucking. Kidding. Me.” I could see just how much this immensely talented young man with fifty years of life ahead of him and not a single piece of metal in his body absolutely despised me in that moment. When I waved off a solo during “Isn’t She Lovely”, I think he literally put his head in his hands. You can’t get that kind of agitation with some lame-ass $4,799 Les Paul Custom!

From the astral perch to which he ascended when he was murdered by Hillary Clinton before he could share his secrets with the world, the great Harambe forms his mighty left hand into the E7#9 chord that characterizes “Purple Haze”, and sighs. “In the last ten years, we have all done so much to stifle the humanity in others, and in ourselves. Music is supposed to unite us. Is that the case when it’s played on a boutique instrument made for the most fortunate dentists, plastic surgeons, and recreational Substackers? After all, Willie Nelson played the same cheap acoustic his whole career. On the other hand, Coltrane played the mighty Selmer Mark VI. It’s a big tent. Let’s play together in the shadow of its embrace.” Come join me in the club, everyone.

Good afternoon, friends. We have a couple of ACF Classifieds. From Hurin3:

I have a 1989 F150 XLT Lariat for sale. Club Cab, 8 foot bed. 4x4. Little visible rust, none on the wheel arches. Some bad clear coat. Interior is pretty nice, with a split in the drivers seat upholstery. I moved from MD to PA a couple years ago, and ran this in MD on historic tags, which Maryland is uncharacteristically lax about. It has not been inspected in PA. I just replaced the cracked windshield, and replaced the tires a couple years ago. Who knows what it would cost me to register it in PA. It’s too big for my driveway, and SWMBO says it must go.

Known issues:

Weak starter. Doesn’t like to start when the engine is hot. Drivers window doesn’t work. Oil pressure switch doesn’t work I’ve replaced it twice. Front brakes/hubs click, stop when braking

I’m in York, PA

Wouldn’t you enjoy driving a real pickup like this? Sure you would. Contact me to be put in touch.

From yours truly, the author, we have an Astounding Porsche Wheel Deal for 986 Boxsters and, with some thought, 987 Boxsters as well. I have one set of OEM Boxster twists, 18x7.5 and 18x9. I bought them from a PCA member in 2005 and rattlecanned them brown to match my 550 Spyder Edition. These were track wheels and never got subjected to road use. They have old Falken RT615s on them now. I also have a set of Moda 5-spoke 18” wheels with Pirelli Sottozero snow tires on them. $800 for the factory wheels, $500 for the Modas. Paid subscribers take $100 off each set. Trackday Club members take 50% off. And don’t forget, Trackday Club members are now part of the ever-expanding Moonswatch/G-Shock/Orient Loaner Program. I’ve already sent out two watches and would like to send more.

Alright, thank you for reading our commercial messages.

I’m sorry, Toto, but your Princess George is in another castle!

Never in my life have I been so strongly tempted to watch an entire race weekend with the volume muted. The F1TV/Apple coverage this weekend amounted to a non-stop fellation of Sir Lewis Hamilton, who skipped the simulator!! and has never been so comfortable in the Ferrari! and looks like the Lewis of old! Then he battled his nemesis Verstappen and came out on top!

Let’s take a less deranged look at the situation:

• Lewis outqualified Leclerc for the sprint then ran into the wall and ended up 6th against his starting position of 5th. This is hardly luminiscent stuff.

• Lewis qualified 5th for the race, ahead of Max in 6th. The two McLarens started on intermediates and disappeared for an early pit stop, moving Lewis up to third. Then George blew up, which guaranteed Lewis 2nd. Max passed him in a weaker car but Lewis was eventually able to catch back up and take 2nd place.

In other words, Lewis didn’t actually make a single place all weekend. Which didn’t stop the official F1 site from giving him first place in the Power Rankings, well ahead of Kimi (who won the race) and Max (who nearly beat him in a much slower car). At least they had the decency to also rank Colapinto first, because he finished sixth in an Alpine. I know the British establishment loves Lewis but this weekend’s coverage was somewhere between “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and “raceplay fetish”.

Now for the hilarious part: Sir Lewis is currently second in the World Championship despite having never been a threat to win a race and generally trailing his teammate by between five and fifty seconds at the end of every event. (Edit: that was a miscalculation by the F1TV team. he is fourth.) Who saw that coming? Certainly not George Russell, who even before Toto pressed the “Valtteri Blow-Up Button” on his Mercedes had been the subject of a comprehensive de-pantsing by a 19-year-old for the fourth race in a row.

Princess George is cooked. He is chopped. It requires no great feat of imagination to think that he will be out of a job next year. This was supposed to be his year, but instead it is Kimi Antonelli’s year. Comparisons to the Norris/Piastri kerfluffle of 2025 do not apply, for one important reason, namely: every single person at McLaren from Zak down to the floor-mopper desperately wanted Lando to come back and beat Piastri, but at Mercedes that role of “teacher’s pet” will belong to Kimi until Max reluctantly agrees to win two or three more world championships with AMG power. George knows he is fundamentally unwanted, and while you can imagine a more stubborn and mentally fit driver like Alonso or even Mark Webber thriving in that situation, the Princess will not thrive.

This is deeply upsetting to me because George is my idea of the perfect modern F1 driver away from the track. He is handsome. He wears real clothes. He basically bullied IWC into making a Princess George watch by hiring Bamford to prototype it. In the words of Nickelback, look at this photograph! Doesn’t he look exactly like a race driver from a movie?

Next to George Russell, little Kimi Antonelli looks like he should be delivering pizzas for Sal’s in Bed-Stuy. (More on that in a minute). Alas, it would appear that George only looks like a world champion. Kimi Antonelli is going to be a world champion.

Unless, that is, the Red Bull gets a couple of fixes.

The value of a great last lap

I don’t know what to think about Vintage Spec Dallara as a series but it’s hard to argue against the general competitiveness and crowd interest of the Indy 500 in its current configuration. There’s a NASCAR-ish sense of “pretty much anyone can win”, which I dislike but plenty of people enjoy. This was a very decent race, albeit one in which quite a few cars were trashed.

Mick Schumacher got Rookie of the Year, which was nice, and survived a bump against the wall.

Felix Rosenqvist deserved to win the race, and he wasn’t going to let a red flag stop him. His last lap has already been called “the greatest lap in Indy 500 history”. It was the closest finish to be sure. It shows the strength and the weaknesses of the spec format; when all the cars are the same it’s often just a matter of conserving momentum and having some luck.

Katherine Legge had a not-really-her-fault crash to start her double weekend.

Here comes the rain again

Sometimes the race off pit lane is the race — and that was the case at the Coca-Cola 600, which ended under rain conditions with Daniel Suarez up front. This was MDG’s first weekend as an authentic NASCAR employee, which means she is no longer free to give her opinions on why certain cars did or did not win the race. Having heard her off the record, however, I think she is right.

Katherine Legge had more bad luck with a damaged front corner, but let’s give her credit for being fit enough to compete in both races. This is a rare accomplishment and doubly so for a female racer.

The unexpected end of the race didn’t do too much to harm Tyler Reddick, who is out in front by a truly remarkable amount. His lead isn’t that much less than Kimi Antonelli’s.

The cars are okay, the bids are not that great

Our friend Greg Smith, with whom I once took an overall ChampCar win back in the Obama era, listed his Abarth on Cars and Bids. Had he asked me, I’d have told him not to do that, because you always get more money on BaT. A mutual friend said that “at six grand, this car is Grand Theft Auto.” Yet that’s where it wound up, with a final bid of $6,100.

I bopped over to BaT to see what Abarths like Greg’s fetch:

The bottom line is that no Abarth in any condition has ever failed to fetch more than $6,100 on Bring-a-Trailer. Period, point blank. Friends don’t let friends list their vehicles on Cars and Bids. Spread the word. Even “regular traffic” does better; I recently saw a manual-transmission late-model Forester go for $21k when the CarGurus listings are in the $15k range. I’m not saying I’m a fan of Hearst or Randy Nonnenberg or any of the players involved, but the facts are plain: Bring-a-Trailer gets you the most money for almost anything.

“Aesthetically, it’s not as good”

The internet is up in arms about an episode of the social media series “Subway Takes” in which a Saudi-born Pakistani nepo-baby producer who moved to New York City in her twenties tells an Egyptian comedian who moved to New York City in his twenties that “White people should not be allowed to sit on stoops in Bed-Stuy”.

Bed-Stuy, for those of you living decent and fulfilling lives outside the eight-figure-population rabbit warren of the Tri-State Area, is the Brooklyn neighborhood called Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s featured in the famous Spike Lee film, “Do The Right Thing”, in which a block erupts in violence against an Italian pizzeria owner after the NYPD kills a “gentle giant” in their community1. If you’re a Gen X or younger New Yorker, you probably think of it as an historically Black neighborhood…

…but the name of the place should clue you in a bit. This neighborhood was laid out in the eighteenth century and largely built in the nineteenth. Germans built the houses, Irish bought them later. Not until the Thirties did it have much black presence at all, but from 1930 to 1990 the percentage of black residents went from ten to ninety.

Once “Giuliani came in and deaded shit,” to quote the great Ja Rule, New York City was on its way to the theme park it would become for real under Bloomberg, at which point Bed-Stuy became a viable place for white people to live. Today, the stone townhouses that lined the setting of “Do The Right Thing” would be worth between $1.5M and $3M. This was called “gentrification”, which everyone knows is awful.2

Which leads us to the “Subway Take”:

AROOJ: White people should not be allowed to sit on stoops in Bed-Stuy.

KAREEM: Wow, 100%… disagree!

AROOJ: What???

KAREEM: Let the white people sit on the stoop.

AROOJ: Oh My God. (In stereotypical “7-Eleven voice”, possibly as self-parody.)… It looks bad.

KAREEM: It does look bad. Aesthetically, it’s not as good.

AROOJ… those historic brownstones… I mean, I have lived in Bed-Stuy for 12 years, and I too do not sit on my stoop… I take one for the team… and I feel as more and more white people are moving into Bed-Stuy, and messing up the vibes, and having, like, our favorite bars and our favorite places close down… they should not be inviting their friends to come here and sit on the stoop.

KAREEM: …I just want my white fans to know, I love you.

Let’s face it: if Brother Bark and I sat in the bed of my F-250 and we broadcast a conversation about how black people shouldn’t have the right to come to my township and sit outside in public in front of their own homes, we would be publicly executed by a roving unit of the People’s Justice Army. This is a conversation of staggering, insane racism.

Plenty of people have pointed out that “stoop” itself is a word borrowed from the Dutch, who originally settled the area and whose ideas attached themselves to the architecture and language of New Amsterdam, later New York. Plenty of other people have pointed out that Arooj’s family wealth comes from literal slave trading. One person photographed her name on the takeout list at a “slop bowl place that opened six months ago lmao”.

There are two ways to look at this. The first one is cynical and it’s best expressed by this Tweet:

It’s worth noting that you have to be a transplant to have these kinds of ideas or even that level of romanticism about NYC. Two weeks ago I found myself walking through Rowayton with one of my relatives who opined, in response to my request for dining suggestions outside the 3 or 4 places I always eat in the city, “You know, we tried to eat in the city as little as possible. It was where you had to go to work. We were not really happy to be there. The idea was to leave as quickly as you could and get back to a restaurant in Westchester or somewhere.”

My long-time guitar teacher, a native New Yorker and Italian-American, left the city not that long after I did, and he will always cap some astounding story about having Larry DiMarzio rewind his pickups or gigging with Bill Frissell with “Well, of course, shortly after that we got lucky enough to move to Ohio.” Let’s face it: if NYC had been anything other than a tenement-heavy, garbage-juice nightmare for most of the past three hundred years, the United States would be basically Singapore. There wouldn’t be any human settlement past I-95.

Ah, but then you take a week like I did with the Commander and Mini Danger Girl, and you go to all the great clubs, and you walk on the High Line, and you see all the shops that have everything you might possibly want in stock rather than back at the warehouse, and you visit the Guggenheim… and you see the romance of the city. You’re just walking down Fifth and you see The Little Prince! And hey, over there is the Dakota! If all you ever did in New York was play music and eat interesting meals and wander aimlessly, you would think it was the greatest place in the world.

Well, for rich kids like Kareem and Arooj, that is their experience. They have two-million-dollar homes and they can do whatever they want with their time. To them, the city is a theme park with Tomorrowland (Billionaire’s Row) and Adventureland (Central Park) and Cultureland (the Village) and so on. So I can see why they are upset.

Anyway, that’s the cynical take on the Subway Take. The more black-pilled one: you’re watching an exercise of power. You are watching two wealthy immigrant transplants set the rules for civil behavior in New York City. They just got here, they are neither American nor African-American, but they have the ability to dictate to both of those groups. Arooj can buy a brownstone with daddy’s money, and then she gets to be difficult about white people sitting on the stoops. She and Kareem get to sit on the subway in perfect safety because of hard-nosed people like Rudy Giuliani, and they get to do a little TV show of sorts. Because they have power, and you don’t.

If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a Pakistani woman telling you what you’re allowed to do in America… forever. And why not? Isn’t the mayor Muslim? Put the whites and the blacks together — basically, everyone in “Do The Right Thing” but the girlfriend and the convenience-store owner — and they are 49% of New York. More importantly, neither of those groups has the self-awareness to pursue their own interests in the city, while many of the incoming groups do have that self-awareness and will be as aggressive in setting up their power structures as “Boss Tweed” was for the Scots and Irish of Tammany Hall.

It will be interesting to see what happens, but I think the first thing likely to happen in the Mamdani era is that it won’t be safe to do “Subway Takes” for much longer. I can’t imagine my mother wearing an Arooj’s worth of gold jewelry on the subway in 1971. I don’t think anyone will be able to do it in 2031.

Did you hear the Starship blew up?

Some people say that Alaska is the last frontier, which is why my son went there last week to hike in the mountains. (He didn’t die, and he didn’t even fall asleep in an old transit bus.) Others say the city is the last frontier, and that’s closer to being true; the major cities of the world are the only places that are never the same place twice.

As long as Elon Musk lives, however, there’s another frontier, and it’s space. Much has been made of the Starship “disaster” this past week, usually accompanied by video of the Starship main unit blowing up. While it’s true that the booster segment failed to land itself properly, the Starship itself did just fine. Its explosion afterwards was according to schedule; apparently it’s cheaper to build another Starship than it is to go get an existing one out of the Indian Ocean.

If we have a future off this planet — and a lot of very smart people don’t think we do, for many good reasons — then it will start with the Starship and its descendants. This is why I will always admire Musk without any concern for what anyone else thinks. It’s highly instructive to see what people do with money and power. Bill Gates tried to change the demographic makeup of the world to something he likes better. Larry Ellison put his kid in charge of the media and bought a bunch of stuff. Steve Jobs paid attorneys to keep his daughter away. Ted Turner bought a ranch the size of Israel and wouldn’t let anyone go there. Most people with nine figure net worth just want a condo in a major city, to always fly private, and to not see any poor people, ever.

Elon Musk, by contrast, wants to go to the stars. How can you not admire that?

Alright, you ruffians. You want to talk about the Luce so much that you keep wandering into other topics to post about it? Let’s have the talk here. These are my thoughts, in no particular order:

• A “city car” is the right move for a Ferrari EV. I think we’ve all seen by now that the “EV hypercar wedge” idea as illustrated by Rimac and the Lotus Evija and NIO et al is a complete loser. Nobody wants one. The “look at me” Cars-and-Coffee demographic wants to rev the engine in front of people. Not only does an EV hypercar damage every brand that tries it, the non-EV products that vaguely resemble it suffer by association. If Ferrari had made a pure EV take on the new Testarossa, prices of the Testarossa would drop because of the concern that you, the new Testarossa owner, would be mistaken for an EV owner. Therefore, Ferrari was right to make their compliance car an urban shopping trolley.

• …but it shouldn’t look like this. Just like the new AMG GT makes the Taycan look good, this Luce makes the Purosangue look good. Which shouldn’t be possible, but here we are. Really, this car is just awful from each and every angle. It does retroactive harm to the reputation of everything Jony Ive has ever done, and it further burnishes the reputation of Raymond Loewy because how could you not take an Avanti and a punch from Mike Tyson over this Luce?

• Ferrari will sell every Luce they make, but they will cut production down to the bare minimum. It seems safe to say that almost no one will buy a Luce on its own merits. Instead, this little golf cart will sell based on the perception that it is a “relationship piece” or “gateway piece” to a Ferrari that you would actually want. If there are two loyal Ferrari buyers with identical resumes but only one of them steps up for a Luce, presumably that’s the differentiator for access to the exclusive Icona or XX pieces. Or so the dealers will heavily imply, anyway.

• When it comes to high-end EVs, the party is over. Ferrari’s noted conservativism should have given them a chance to either cancel the Luce or adjust it more strongly to actual customer demand. They did not. Which is bad news for the Luce, but even worse news to anyone who still has an expensive EV in the pipeline. If you want to know how bad it could get, look at this list of Americans trying to get out of their Rolls Spectres.

Alright, that’s what I have to say about it — your turn!

“The future is already here,” wrote William Gibson many years ago, “it’s just unevenly distributed.” In the case of Ford’s F-150 pickup truck, this is literally true: some models got updates for 2026 and others did not. The XLT 2.7 was one of the variants that didn’t get hit with the new-features stick. Luck…

Read more

Today we will round up some of our unusual or eclectic discussion topics. Feel free to discuss the death of Kyle Busch — I suspect that as drug-resistant pneumonia continues to increase its reach, we will see more and more cases like this. I’ve probably come closer to dying from pneumonia than from any impact trauma or vehicular foolishness.

I’m also pl…

Read more

Note: this was borne out of our ‘fantastic’ area construction recently beginning and my being EXTREMELY irritated with it yesterday. Bear with me! -TK

It had always been this way. Klockau had lived in the Quad Cities his entire life (so far) and every spring, it happened. All the main arterial roads were unceremoniously ripped apart and citizens were tre…

Read more

“Eyes to the side, I hide — Eyes to the front, I hunt.” Look a housecat in the face. You will see the eyes of a killer. Even the most pampered Persian or ragdoll, g…

Read more

We have so much automotive news this week that I’m doubling the Wednesday ORT. Today’s episode will be 100% car-related. Tomorrow we will have a new episode of Cat Tales for paid readers. On Friday, we will have our non-automotive OT for paid readers, where we will discuss stuff like the 40Hz FC mechanical watch, a proposed rule about venture capital and youth sports, and Fender’s attempt to win the culture war via their attorneys.

First, our brief racing news: Danger Girl suffered through this weekend’s SCCA Super Tour with an engine wiring harness issue. On Saturday she couldn’t get any revs out of the car and it was stalling at random. On Sunday, she ran well but got hit twice by other cars that were having trouble with the conditions. The second hit put her out of the race on the last lap. The good news is that on both days she made multiple positions at the start, against experienced National competitors and at least one National Champion, before the car let her down.

Now, on to the news you can use:

Will the last real M car turn out the lights?

If you follow our friend Gen X Garage Talk on Substack and social media, you will see that he has been on quite the Bimmer buying spree lately, up to and including a V8 M3. I have long felt that the E90 and E92 were the last M-cars that really conveyed joy in their operation; after that, the M3/4/5/6 got bigger and faster in a major way but suffered a corresponding loss of joie de vivre. BMW has been caught in a unique trap of its own devising that goes something like this: making the cars more powerful no longer translates to a genuine speed increase in owner hands. When I was a kid, I could get somewhere faster in a 182hp 535i than I could in a 127hp 528e, and in a 252hp M5 I could get there even faster. The reason is obvious in their power ratings, and also in the fact that we have 30% more people on the roads now.

At the same time, bumping the curb weighs into the two and two-point-five ton range makes the cars a miserable on-track proposition. I should talk about this more in another article but: The way factories approach track time is not the way people approach track time. When I did ZR-1 track testing with GM a decade or so ago, they showed up with TEN SETS OF TIRES plus all the ceramic disc/pad consumables we could possibly need. BMW does the same thing at the Ring.

Which is all well and good, but when you track the car twenty times a year, you will extend the life of your tires, you will use aftermarket brake parts, and so on, just to keep from spending $8,000 every weekend on non-competitive driver’s ed. This is why the OEMs and the magazines don’t care about how much a car weighs or how much it costs to run, but the actual “track rats” do. And it’s why very few people actually track their high-power, high-weight cars with the same level of intensity they would a Miata or Boxster or E36 Bimmer. Heavy and powerful cars are the death of actual enthusiasm.

So BMW is doing its level best, at least here in the USA, to provide an alternative. Thanks to Scott Stirling, BMW’s American product manager, we now have the “Handschalter”, which is German for “manual switch” more or less. Stupid, cringey name that somehow manages to sound like THE BMW M3 BEATOFF MASTER… but the product is nice. It’s an M3 CS with rear-wheel-drive and a six-speed manual.

It’s seventy horses down on a “real” CS, but it has upgraded suspension and a 75-pound weight loss from the addition of some expensive parts. The car has yellow driving lights so you can pretend to be Joey Hand or Hans Stuck while you’re stuck in traffic on the Hutch. Four colors, two of which cost $4500 more. MSRP is $108,450.

Let’s be real: I’d rather have a Lime Rock E92 and a six-month bout of irritable bowel syndrome than any current M3, even this one. And the whole “limited edition” hype being attached to the car is simply yet another way for the German automakers to pretend that their mass-produced consumer items are genuinely special. (See: 911 GT3, SL63 Black Series, Rolex GMT-Master.)

Let me tell you what could murder this “Handschalter” in its fancy contrast-stitched crib: an actual manual-transmission Corvette Grand Sport. Thankfully for BMW, General Motors is run by Mary Barra and Mark Reuss. The latter of whom is supposedly working on a “super-Corvette” above the ZR1X. Yeah, definitely keep working on that instead of on a $90,000 Corvette that would make everyone happy.

Meanwhile, in the category of giving people what they want

Behold the Rumble Bees! They are a handsome combination of TRX fenders, quad-cab body, and short bed. Basically the closest you’re gonna get to the old Lightning or SRT-10 Ram body style.

• 5.7-liter Rumble Bee offers front axle disconnect for misbehavior;

• 6.4-liter Rumble Bee marks the debut of the 470-hp Apache Hemi in the half-ton.

• Rumble Bee SRT has 777 horses from the Hellcat engine for a top speed of 170mph, plus adjustable suspension.

• There’s a nifty rear lip spoiler on the tailgate.

• The Hellcat model gets 16.1” discs and six-piston Brembos as standard. The 392 has them as an option.

These three trucks are an obvious home run and they will have spawned their own subculture before the average person can pronounce the words “street takeover”. It’s sheer brilliance to give buyers a street-oriented Hellcat. The TRX is too “white-coded” to be successful with a lot of core Mopar owners; the Rumble Bee SRT will suffer from no such stigma.

I would be delighted to own a 392 Rumble Bee as a daily driver. It couldn’t replace my F-250 because too often we have both the bed and rear seats loaded to capacity for race weekends, but we would certainly find ways for it to be useful. Just in case the Stellantis brass really read this blog, and the traffic data suggests they might: Any chance you could add a flat-fender Tradesman 392 to this admirable lineup?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Wobble

You, the educated ACF reader, might wonder: Does Jack ever get tired of being completely right about everything? The answer is: yeah, even more than you might think. A full sixteen years ago, I wrote the following:

#1: The (Vanden Plas) Princess And The Pea-Sized Upgrade

“In our previous road test, we shocked the world by declaring the Ferrari 630GTBX to be very possibly the worst car ever made. Across the moors of Brighton-on-Stokes, the 630GTBX was mind-numbingly dangerous and handled with the devastating indirection of a three-wheeled pastry cart. In this drive, however, we confirmed what we had suspected would be the case: that the addition of a 1mm fiber washer in the left front control arm has completely addressed these uncertainties and turned what was a sow’s ear into a true silk purse, flying down B-roads with the furious power of Apollo’s sun-chariot and making gods of mortal men. Once the worst car sold in Britain, the 630GTBX-FibroWasher has become the very best.”

You can blame this one squarely on LJK Setright, who complained that the redesigned nose on the 1995 Jaguar XJ6 completely destroyed its crosswind stability and thus rendered a “perfect motorway car” utterly useless. Setright’s ability to “discover” major ramifications of minor changes was such a cast-iron credibility-builder than almost no English autowriter can resist pretending to discover something similar from time to time. The game works like this: drive an early example of a car that everyone expects will be outstanding — and completely trash it for a flaw so minor that nobody else can find it. This excites readers, generates controversy, and sells magazines.

Unfortunately, it also pisses manufacturers right the eff off, so one is required to promptly test a “revised” car and declare it to be spectacular, possessing qualities that only a very perceptive journalist can distinguish. The smaller the change, the better. After all, any American auto-moron can see the difference between a Mustang 4.6 and a Mustang 5.0, but it takes a true Brit to notice what the 5mm optional spacers on a Porsche Boxster S do for handling.

So, keeping that in mind, let’s see what the automotive press has “discovered” about the new Nissan Z Nismo with manual transmission:

And let’s hear from my friend and colleague, Ezra Dyer:

For the NISMO, the hardware changes are the big news. The manual transmission is the transformative piece, and offering it in the NISMO wasn't a simple bolt-in. Because the NISMO makes more power than its Z brethren (420 horsepower and 384 pound-feet of torque versus the other trims' 400 and 350), the transmission mounts were beefed up and the clutch got a high-capacity pressure plate. The shifter itself has a shorter throw, and the twin-turbo 3.0-liter V-6 has a different throttle map and ignition timing. There's a lot of work that goes into a seemingly easy change—when you want to honor a warranty, at least.

When the current Turbo Z (apologies to Dodge) came out, the automotive press were united in declaring that the car:

• was an ugly revamp of a sad, old platform;

• was no good to drive;

• was outdated on its debut;

• couldn’t match competitors like the MagnaSteyr BMW Toyota Supra for refinement or pace;

• wasn’t worth considering.

The minute I drove a 2024 Z Performance it was obvious to me that the journos were doing the Scott Burgess Wobble, to wit: find a low-volume car from a manufacturer that doesn’t spend big money on European PR trips, and shit collectively upon it. The 2024 Z was, and is, a fantastic car. It’s fast, it rides well, it is quiet, and it kinda handles. In other words, it is what the Z has been ever since it was called the Fairlady 2.4 Yamato Edition or whatever. The Z is such a great car that both the women in my house have six-speed Performance models. Both of them liked the Nismo but wanted a clutch pedal.

The Nismo is certainly a better Z in terms of performance. It has five percent more power and two more pistons in each front brake caliper. But I would bet fifty grand that the average autowriter wouldn’t be able to discern between the Performance and the Nismo in actual daily use.

If you read the reviews of the ASTOUNDING NEW NISMO Z, you’ll find that pretty much all the qualities that have the press so spellbound were present and accounted for in the past three model years. The only difference is the narrative. This reminds me of Rob Henderson’s story about Liam Neeson:

I was hanging out with some fellow graduate students at the University of Cambridge in 2019 when one suggested seeing the new Liam Neeson movie, “Cold Pursuit.” Another student, referring to an unflattering confession Mr. Neeson had recently made, replied, “No, he’s racist, remember?” The first student said, “I read online that people forgive him and he’s OK now.” He pulled out his phone to verify. A few minutes later we walked to the theater.

Nobody had reconsidered Mr. Neeson’s character or weighed the evidence against him. What they’d instead done was consult the social-media consensus to find out what they were permitted to enjoy.

The autowriters, about none of whom can drive for shit and most of whom are either spiritual or literal cuckolds, have collectively decided that it’s now okay to like the Nissan Z. The car didn’t change. The consensus changed.

After hearing that our friend, well-respected club racer and bon vivant Eddy Eckart, enjoyed the red-stripe Fairlady during his press drive, Danger Girl asked me, “Should I just get a Nismo Z to replace mine?”

“I think you could tell the difference,” I replied, “but why would you want to get rid of this one? It’s great.”

“Well, it doesn’t need to go anywhere. It could be a race car.” Reader, if we end up with four turbo Zs in the house, and I don’t own any of them, what am I going to do — and why is the answer to that question “hoodrat-spec G37 Coupe”?

Call It “The Vibrator Catfish”

The new AMG GT4 is a staggering, spellbinding, astounding achievement in the area of spending several billion dollars to develop a car that not a single person in the world could possibly want for any reason whatsoever. How was it created? I can only imagine a board meeting where someone asked,

“Ja, can ve do zee Porsche Taycan, only ugly?”

There is no angle from which the new AMG is even remotely acceptable-looking; it’s the Elana Scherr of 1,000-horsepower golf carts. I never thought I would find myself defending the Taycan, but at least Porsche used the battery platform and its crumple-zone advantages to create a svelte silhouette. Just look at a Taycan next to a Panamera to see how much nicer the proportions are. By contrast, the AMG EV retains the same pregnant-feral-hog profile as the unlovely AMG GT four-door currently infesting Westchester and La Jolla. There is no reason — no reason! — for it to look like this.

Except one:

I have no doubt this thing will look super dope outside the Patek store in Beijing or wherever. The Mercedes stylists have weaponized its ugliness to the point where you won’t be able to look away from the thing. Plus you will have to listen to it:

Inside, the experience is equally uncompromising, from the SKY CONTROL panoramic roof to the AMG sound design, meticulously engineered from over 1,600 individual audio files and 16 microphone positions. The result of all these features combined? 860 kW, 1,169 hp and a top speed of 300 km/h. Because the Autobahn has almost no limits – and neither does this car.

You know what else was meticulously engineered from over 1,600 individual audio files and 16 microphone positions? The song “Rockstar” by Nickelback. What kind of a jagoff do you have to be to drive a car around that combines 1,600 audio files for the purpose of sounding like something it is explicitly not?

As Elaine Benes would say, “It’s weak. Nobody’s buying it, and you shouldn’t be selling it.”

From the folks who brought you the Handschalter

True story: My son’s mother enjoyed her two-year lease of a Ford C-Max so much she replaced it with the C-Max Energi. “Where are you going to plug it in?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” she replied. And she spent the next two years without ever opening the charging door one single solitary time. Which was fine, because she still liked the Energi better. It was quiet more often and it went a little faster. I thought she was silly to never plug it in but ya know what? She paid the money and she got to choose how she used it.

This level of prole self-determination is too much for BMW, apparently. As reported in BMWBLOG:

In an interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, the automaker’s Chairman of the Supervisory Board proposed an interesting idea. Nicolas Peter said it’s technically possible to monitor how PHEV owners use their cars and how frequently they charge the battery. If they never plug in, a technical measure could persuade them to use the charging port: reduced engine power.

“This is a behavioral problem that discredits a climate-friendly technology that could actually be a good way to introduce people to e-mobility – especially where the infrastructure is still too sparse. One measure would be for car manufacturers to be able to document and even penalize usage patterns. If a driver never charges their battery, the engine power could be reduced; technically, this is feasible.”

This reminds me uncomfortably of a passage from Catch-22:

Finishing last in three successive parades had given Lieutenant Scheisskopf an unsavory reputation, and he considered every means of improvement, even nailing the twelve men in each rank to a long two-by-four beam of seasoned oak to keep them in line. The plan was not feasible, for making a ninety-degree turn would have been impossible without nickel-alloy swivels inserted in the small of every man’s back, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf was not sanguine at all about obtaining that many nickel-alloy swivels from Quartermaster or enlisting the cooperation of the surgeons at the hospital.

The difference between Nicolas Peter and Lieutenant Scheisskopf is that the latter is at least slightly concerned with the real-world implications of his actions.

Incidentally — and I apologize in advance for a passage that will strike some of you as uncomfortably racist — this is why German-Americans, as a whole, have probably contributed more to humanity in the past hundred years than have Germans who never leave Germany. There’s something about crossing the Atlantic that opens one’s mind to the possibility of not exercising the maximum amount of rule-following possible at any given moment. Look at Eddie Rickenbacker versus Manfred von Richthofen: a rowdy open-class oval racer vs. a serious aristocrat. Both great pilots, but only the former survived the war.

All of the truly great German-Germans acquired a reputation for disobedience, whether we are talking Rommel, Skorzeny, Schumacher the Elder, or Rudolf Schenker. (Where do Bob Lutz and von Braun fit into this? The reader is encouraged to opine.) A little bit of disobedience is a good thing, you know. Not everything has to be alles in Ordnung. The idea of punishing people for not plugging in their plug-in hybrids? Utterly ridiculous.

Herr Nicolas Peter, I have an idea for you: monitor to see if you’re using your personal equipment to the maximum, and if you aren’t, consider applying an electric shock to the affected area.