I saw a Hyundai Ioniq 5 on my way to work today and I realized why electric cars repel my: They all have this overly-clean, Uncanny Valley design aesthetic to them, like those humanoid robots with the rubber skin.
Plain ol Borax left for a while does the trick wonderfully. Outside I cake it on with some water and leave it till it blows away. The sealers never work. If you really want to prevent it you'll have to slop around some epoxy.
Sadly Ohio might not have a nice Indian summer stretching to November this year. That is if the almanac is to be believed, supposedly the propane companies are expecting more use this winter in the Midwest, however, that could be a sales tactic? Who knows what to believe when the default now is to know lying is commonplace and our high trust society is being abused at will.
Still sounds like an amazing idea! Or we trading farm labor for driving time?
Just endless pulling tits and shoveling shit , animals out of the barn , back in the barn, drive the horses out of the stables, muck out the stalls, let the horses back in to the stables, give them each a few flakes of hay, oh damn it's time to milk again or castrate some hogs, gotta go fix some old fencing, the chickens need feeding, damn ! where did the day go ?! .
I'm -SO- lucky I discovered I could avoid 4/5ths 0f that by up fixing old dead trucks, cars and tractors etc....
"The twisted magic of “Car Week” is that it takes everything we love about the automobile and inverts it.
Start with this: Why were you obsessed with cars as a young person?"
Excitement, noise, the prospect of freedom to go where I pleased provided I was back home at a reasonable hour.
"How much of it had to do with mobility and freedom?"
How very on the nose!
I find the themes of inversion common these days: taking what car hobbyists loved and changing it to upside down world; take our cultured politeness and turn it into a weapon against us; taking our dumb video games and turning them into cutscene simulators.
I know they're coming for my newfound motorcycling from the top with government mandated electrification. Destroying the soul of motorcycling (yes, it is amusing to wind a motor above 12k) just as they are coming for the cars. It's supposedly in the name of the planet, but they never seem interested in actually solving problems and they definitely don't seem to be a fan of humanity in it's filthy masses.
I love the noise of a car, whether it's the burble from the unequal-length headers on a Subaru boxer or a big, rumbling V-8 or the buttery-smoothness of a straight six, it's one of the very best things about cars. And now with electrifying EVERYTHING (Chrysler/Dodge recently announced their electrification) my interest wanes. Telsa makes fast cars, but they just don't do it for me. I don't know, maybe it's stupid to have such romantic feelings about cams and exhaust notes and supercharger whines, but that was all part of the mystique.
And to touch on the freedom, I read somewhere that you can buy a longer range for your Tesla. So you can travel farther. But you gotta PAY, and the way I read it is that it is only a software thing, not extra batteries, so you have to pay for a line of computer code that lets you go farther on a single charge. Maybe I'm wrong and it is extra batteries for the upcharge, but the point still remains, you don't have to pay extra to get a bigger tank for gas in your car, and if you run out you can always fill it back up in 5 or 10 minutes.
One of the best things about a gas or diesel powered car is that you can refuel it without having to preplan in most places in this country in about 3 to 6 minutes and be back on your way. My daily driver will go about 500 miles on a full tank and it usually takes less than 4 minutes to refill. I have 6 cars at home and 3 drivers at home, am I supposed to put in 2 or 3 electric chargers and spend thousands of dollars? No thanks, I’ll stick to the internal combustion engine for now thanks.
The meanest-sounding V8 car I've ever encountered is still that black SVT Terminator with the full Magnaflow setup I saw in Pittsburgh 15 years ago. That car radiated intimidation like a GNX.
In John Coletti's book on the history of the Terminator, he describes how the development of the car's engine was more or less "Run the prototype engine till something breaks, then replace THAT part with something from the Summit Racing catalog when we build the next prototype engine and try again."
Saturday night I was westbound on 696 and I noticed a black car coming up quickly in the left lane, likely headed home from the Dream Cruise. It was too dark out to tell if it was a Grand National or a GNX but it had to be one or the other. Dark and menacing.
I've written about the GN and GNX so I'm pretty familiar with the differences. It was just too dark to see them, plus the car was in the far lane and it was pulling away from me.
As the child of working class parents, who now as I inch towards 30 see myself not really ascending another run in that particular ladder, shit like Car Week has always had an appeal to me in the way that the lifestyles of the rich and famous always does. The idea that people can just drop my yearly salary in a weekend because fuck it who cares seems neat! Just once or twice, it would be fun to not have to worry about money. I have not spent much time around the moneyed crowd, and it is likely that their attitudes would sway me away from any positive feelings, but I’m not going to lie and say that my particular circumstances make me an inherently better or more interesting person either.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s envy. It’s probably envy. Grass, greener, etc.
i used to work with a fellow with a $2MM or so P-car collection, who took every chance to talk about how CHEAP he got these cars in the early 00s, and how EXPENSIVE they are now. little did he realize that they were only expensive now because every wall st schmuck his age did the same exact thing, and were all sitting on a dozen or so of them as trophies with no ability or desire to drive them. the "(insert hobby here) as an investment" idea is one of the most hideous inventions of neo-boomerism and i will take great delight in watching these cars see their valuations slashed in quarters as the only people who remember driving them die off and their heirs are more interested in paying off their credit card debt than paying for an $800 a month NYC parking spot for dad's old sports car.
im not sure how to reverse this "everything must be an investment" trend, other than seeing a real growth in wages for young people so not every hobby has to be or turn into a "side hustle" to justify it.
It's a side effect of inflation, like "passive investing".
The very idea of inflation is a way to steal money from people who earn a wage. There is perpetually a sucking sound as wealth is drained into assets, objects, taxes. Sure, your house "appreciates"; so does the next house you're going to buy. I "doubled my money" on my last house, then paid 2.5x as much for what I'm building now as I would have in 1999.
inflation is certainly a factor, i think part of it is the glorification of "hustle" culture which could arguably also be called a side effect of inflation. every spare minute must be monetized, every possession must either be bought from chinese factories or an investment grade heirloom, every career step must be MAXIMIZING EARNED INCOME
Completely agree. At the risk of setting my subscriber base on fire, I find it very personally difficult not to see the broad-based corporate support for abortion as nothing but "hey, girl, kill that baby and get BACK TO GIRLBOSSIN' asap!" I don't think it's a coincidence that our modern megacorps shamelessly support and promote every single lifestyle choice that makes it easier for people to work 16-hour days, from alternate sexualities with little family involvement to abortion on demand to the continual "voluntary buyouts" of people who are old enough to have perspective on the value of corporate work vis-a-vis family.
I hate the word "hustle." I know those who use it mean it positively, but whenever I hear somebody talk about his "side hustles," it always sounds like he's making pornography or selling stolen tires out of a van.
I've read a ton of stuff on inflation and gold backed dollars Peter Lynch yada yada blah blah. Seems like we are all stuck in an experiment that has never been run on humans before. Are we all fucked and doomed or is there anything to be done if one has an income south of a mil a year?
I think all we can do is plug along, look after our kids, don't make the mistake of thinking that 1957 was the rule and not the exception. Throughout history human beings have found happiness and contentment in all circumstances. At least that's what I want to believe.
If I've learned anything from Jewish history, which has had a number of "golden eras" as well as great disasters, it is to enjoy the good times while you can, focus on your family and your community, and do as much good for others as your circumstances allows.
All this stuff seems so joyless. But most any hobby gets that way, I suppose, at the extreme ends of it.
The point about multiple tiers and exclusivity I think is a perfect example of the "not quite as rich as I want" class. Because really the ultimate form is to be the person driving the Bugatti with the $10mm restoration up the lawn, and everyone else is a relative piker. So they can't quite get to that level, but they can make sure that their level is fully acknowledged and there are people to look down upon.
It simply gobsmacks me that seemingly intelligent people can act so dumbly, but then I look around the tech world and see _the exact same thing_ everywhere, at every level. It's like an idiocy fractal.
(I know nobody here really likes capeshit aside from Ronnie Schreiber, but...)
I used to work at a comic book store. We had picky customers come in every week, but one guy stood out from them all. He went through the stacks of books that came in wearing clean, cotton gloves. He would instantly seal them in bags with backing boards. He never let me or the owner of the shop touch them when it was time to ring him up, he'd hold them up for us in his gloved hands and slip them into his bag on his own. I never knew if he actually read them, and if he did, could he enjoy them? Or was he so wracked with anxiety over whether or not one of his gloved hands would damage one of those precious books to do so? You're totally right in your first point, it extrapolates perfectly to even the stupidest of hobbies.
John Updike satirizes that in a "Bech" story; the writer Henry Bech thinks he has a devout fan but in reality the fellow never reads the books and leaves them in long, plastic-jacketed lines with Mailer, Roth, and others.
I'm not really a comic book nerd. I'm a child of the '60s when it seemed that every kid read comics. My mom sent me copies of Aquaman and the Flash when I went to summer camp. The Comics Code apparently was a success in making formerly disreputable comics acceptable to American parents. I support independent creators today because of the culture war. To be honest, I've never had much patience with adults who discuss the minutia of the various superhero "universes", but then I feel the same way about adults and Harry Potter, and maybe even adults and Tolkein. I've long wanted to get a bumper sticker that says "Suq Qe' yIn" ("get a life" in Klingon).
Bonus points if you can pronounce the Klingon with glory! Q'apla!
You seemed pretty knowledgeable about the comicsgate guys, and that now makes sense. The only new comics I've bought in the last 10 years have been from them, but I haven't done the whole "who would win in a fight" thing since I was a teenager.
I hate Fan Boys. They're the reason normal people can't openly enjoy sci fi, comics, anime or a hundred other things. They live vicariously through their favorite media, everything about it is deadly serious business to them and they don't know when to turn it off and relax.
I have thrown out almost all comic book related stuff that's not comic books (which I keep at home safely out of view from the public) so I do NOT get associated with them. I'm embarrassed by them, and I was even in my dorkiest teen years. To be fair, almost every hobby has their subset of superfanboys who take it all way too seriously...
" people who can afford as many electric toys as they want
people who can’t make a payment on a 2004 F-150"
Truer words etc., etc.....
I'm sure this is how we got to the fake patina situation that seriously grinds my grids .
I remember being loudly berated for showing up in old beaters I'd just begun to resurrect, now the stupid kids all clamor to buy my battered and rusty old VW I'm embarrassed to drive but I can't afford a $35,000.00 incorrectly restored one.....
As you stated : it's all about the _driving_ for me, I'll never feel young again but I certainly remember 1972 clearly when I'm driving it and wondering why all the others are parked in enclosed, temperature controlled garages .
They miss the entire point of being a gear / petrol head : IT'S THE DRIVING STUPID .
I happen to live about 10 minutes from any event at "Car Week" and have attended for the last 8 years. I have seen this event evolve from free events and many cool (but obtainable cars) to a complete money grab and entirely unobtainable cars (that are really not worth lusting after anyway).
Next year will travel to Hot August Nights in Reno....
A lot of money has changed hands behind the scenes to make things the way they are, and I'm probably not allowed to say any more lest I be sued out of my NDA.
It sounds like you and I have parallel thinking, Jack. I would like to take in some of those West Coast events as well as the Greenwich Concours in the east. I can't bring myself to do it, at this point. Until then, I will relish my two, favorite events: Saturday dawn at the registration line in Hershey and camping at the Watkins Glen Historics.
One of the fun things about Jay Leno's Garage was seeing him actually driving the rare and expensive cars he gets his hands on. Everything gets touched. Every door opened. He turns the engine over so we can hear what it's like to start it. He takes it out onto public roads and drives it on California highways. Awesome!
Top Gear once had Jamiroquai singer Jay Kay on for their interview segment and he talked about how he loved taking his Lamborghini Miura out and blasting down the roads in it despite its rarity and value. Cars are meant to be driven, not hidden away in a museum somewhere. We're talking about machines with a purpose, not a work of art like the Cross of Coronado.
Shows like this "week of cars" or whatever never interested me, too static, too boring, and, with this little inside look, DEFINITELY too hoity-toity. These cars will end up museum pieces, or forgotten and covered in several inches of dust in the Sultan of Brunei's garages, and that is a far worse fate than being crashed in pursuit of first place or used up after hundreds of thousands of miles.
Harry Metcalfe of Harry’s Garage is also a good watch as he takes his expensive cars and drives them everywhere. Lots of pure driving enjoyment on his videos. Many videos of his long trips, like him driving his Testarossa to the Sahara.
He’s great because the basis for his whole channel is his love of driving his cars for personal satisfaction, the opposite of the concours crowd.
I even like his farming channel Harry’s Farm, because he shows you the inner workings of his farm and like JB has mentioned, the genius of the people working on farms. I even watched a whole video on a crew installing a fence.
I loved his trip to the arctic circle in the ratty old (1970?) Silver Shadow he bought off of eBay. I'd be leery taking a 50 year old Rolls to the corner store, but with limited prep, Harry made the trip. He even had to tweak the points along the way. That was some of the best car guy TV I'd seen in ages.
You've very effectively summed up my feelings about this sort of thing. I've often wondered if it's my 'join me on the picket line brother Baruth' working class back ground, my inverse snobbery of always being outside the tent pissing in, or just sheer inability to relate to people who have never struggled to make the rent.
Years ago when I was a student at the Royal College of Art (seriously, I was already living the dream and never did I expect someone like me could go there. My talent got me in and luckily a scholarship paid most of the fees. I moved back in with my mother while I attended) we had two projects that let me peek behind the velvet rope. One involved the RAC Club in Piccadilly (jacket and tie, no ladies) and the other was Salon Prive at Blenheim Palace. I drank their champagne and ate their lobster, and I'm sure I popped a few monocles looking as I did like a fucking goth rock star.
Who is also taking his Mondial QV to Radwood UK tomorrow. At least I'll be there in something with some credibility, rather than something that has suddenly become worthy of consideration just because of when it was made.
There’s a Radwood UK? The name lost all meaning the second it expanded beyond the circle of hell some call the Bay Area. This should make even less sense to people on the other side of the Atlantic (keeping in mind the marketing folks back in the day even had to change the title of “Encino Man” to “California Man” because nobody knew what the fuck an Encino was outside the states)
Yes, there's only one every so often (I think this the first one for a year or two). It's run by you know who and it's at Bicester Heritage (like every other fucking event these days).
For years, I asserted that the logo was outright stolen from the film Rad and that Kevin McCauley, the manlet who stole it, should be publicly keelhauled. Nobody involved with Sadwood has ever "gotten Rad". Brownell in particular is the alpha example of someone who was too big of a loser to even hang out with the losers who skated and rode.
Naturally, with their Hagerty acquisition I am now prevented from talking that kind of shit, so consider my opinion changed.
As someone who's completely ignorant of Radwood, but I'm interested in what you have dish out for Bradley. I'm surprised him and you would have crossed paths in the real world.
He has publicly said that if he ever sees me in real life "he'll leave the room in handcuffs." I assume that's some reference to an imagined criminal penalty for inept writing, because I'm 20 years older than he is and I could beat his ass into a coma while reciting "Dover Beach" and making a hotel reservation on speakerphone.
The lizard people reducing or eliminating the mobility of lower income Americans through their EV money grab is the absolute worst thing about EVs. There will be no 10 or 20 year old EVs available for these Americans to drive due to obsolete technology and prohibitive battery replacement cost.
Where, Oh! Where!, are Ferris Bueller and his compatriots to sneak one of those displayed vehicles (displayed likely by one of Cameron's dad's friends) off the lawn and down the road toward Gilroy at a stately 110 mph?
I saw a Hyundai Ioniq 5 on my way to work today and I realized why electric cars repel my: They all have this overly-clean, Uncanny Valley design aesthetic to them, like those humanoid robots with the rubber skin.
I don't know if this is intentional or subconscious, but your photo captions read as if they were ghostwritten by Edward Teach, MD.
Thank you for compiling all of the reasons why I think supercars are lame, and putting them in one place for easy future reference.
Great artists steal.
Is that the first oil on the new concrete?
sadly, yes.
Nah. Fuck that. Not sadly. This concrete is there to be used. For race cars, old cars, motorcycles, real life in all its forms.
I think I'm going to buy some Oil Eater.
Plain ol Borax left for a while does the trick wonderfully. Outside I cake it on with some water and leave it till it blows away. The sealers never work. If you really want to prevent it you'll have to slop around some epoxy.
Sadly Ohio might not have a nice Indian summer stretching to November this year. That is if the almanac is to be believed, supposedly the propane companies are expecting more use this winter in the Midwest, however, that could be a sales tactic? Who knows what to believe when the default now is to know lying is commonplace and our high trust society is being abused at will.
Still sounds like an amazing idea! Or we trading farm labor for driving time?
I *hope* there's no labor involved, I hope to have it all done myself by then.
"I *hope* there's no labor involved, I hope to have it all done myself by then. "
HAHAHA ! =8-) .
Old Motos and no labor involved ~ Jesus H. Christ Jack ~ I have old HONDAS and still have to spin the wrenches to ride .
-Nate
Thats admirable but city slicker mentality. The work on a farm never ends, just pauses 😂
I never noticed any pause .
Just endless pulling tits and shoveling shit , animals out of the barn , back in the barn, drive the horses out of the stables, muck out the stalls, let the horses back in to the stables, give them each a few flakes of hay, oh damn it's time to milk again or castrate some hogs, gotta go fix some old fencing, the chickens need feeding, damn ! where did the day go ?! .
I'm -SO- lucky I discovered I could avoid 4/5ths 0f that by up fixing old dead trucks, cars and tractors etc....
I never really looked back .
=8-^ .
-Nate
"The twisted magic of “Car Week” is that it takes everything we love about the automobile and inverts it.
Start with this: Why were you obsessed with cars as a young person?"
Excitement, noise, the prospect of freedom to go where I pleased provided I was back home at a reasonable hour.
"How much of it had to do with mobility and freedom?"
How very on the nose!
I find the themes of inversion common these days: taking what car hobbyists loved and changing it to upside down world; take our cultured politeness and turn it into a weapon against us; taking our dumb video games and turning them into cutscene simulators.
I know they're coming for my newfound motorcycling from the top with government mandated electrification. Destroying the soul of motorcycling (yes, it is amusing to wind a motor above 12k) just as they are coming for the cars. It's supposedly in the name of the planet, but they never seem interested in actually solving problems and they definitely don't seem to be a fan of humanity in it's filthy masses.
I love the noise of a car, whether it's the burble from the unequal-length headers on a Subaru boxer or a big, rumbling V-8 or the buttery-smoothness of a straight six, it's one of the very best things about cars. And now with electrifying EVERYTHING (Chrysler/Dodge recently announced their electrification) my interest wanes. Telsa makes fast cars, but they just don't do it for me. I don't know, maybe it's stupid to have such romantic feelings about cams and exhaust notes and supercharger whines, but that was all part of the mystique.
And to touch on the freedom, I read somewhere that you can buy a longer range for your Tesla. So you can travel farther. But you gotta PAY, and the way I read it is that it is only a software thing, not extra batteries, so you have to pay for a line of computer code that lets you go farther on a single charge. Maybe I'm wrong and it is extra batteries for the upcharge, but the point still remains, you don't have to pay extra to get a bigger tank for gas in your car, and if you run out you can always fill it back up in 5 or 10 minutes.
One of the best things about a gas or diesel powered car is that you can refuel it without having to preplan in most places in this country in about 3 to 6 minutes and be back on your way. My daily driver will go about 500 miles on a full tank and it usually takes less than 4 minutes to refill. I have 6 cars at home and 3 drivers at home, am I supposed to put in 2 or 3 electric chargers and spend thousands of dollars? No thanks, I’ll stick to the internal combustion engine for now thanks.
The meanest-sounding V8 car I've ever encountered is still that black SVT Terminator with the full Magnaflow setup I saw in Pittsburgh 15 years ago. That car radiated intimidation like a GNX.
I love Terminators. Somehow they got EVERYTHING RIGHT at the end.
In John Coletti's book on the history of the Terminator, he describes how the development of the car's engine was more or less "Run the prototype engine till something breaks, then replace THAT part with something from the Summit Racing catalog when we build the next prototype engine and try again."
Eventually they ran out of parts to break.
Saturday night I was westbound on 696 and I noticed a black car coming up quickly in the left lane, likely headed home from the Dream Cruise. It was too dark out to tell if it was a Grand National or a GNX but it had to be one or the other. Dark and menacing.
Did it have wheel well flares and fender portholes?
I've written about the GN and GNX so I'm pretty familiar with the differences. It was just too dark to see them, plus the car was in the far lane and it was pulling away from me.
Wasn't sure how familiar you were with them.
As the child of working class parents, who now as I inch towards 30 see myself not really ascending another run in that particular ladder, shit like Car Week has always had an appeal to me in the way that the lifestyles of the rich and famous always does. The idea that people can just drop my yearly salary in a weekend because fuck it who cares seems neat! Just once or twice, it would be fun to not have to worry about money. I have not spent much time around the moneyed crowd, and it is likely that their attitudes would sway me away from any positive feelings, but I’m not going to lie and say that my particular circumstances make me an inherently better or more interesting person either.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s envy. It’s probably envy. Grass, greener, etc.
If you go once, you'll have a great time.
If you go twice, you'll be ready to join Occupy Wall Street.
Well, thing is I’m always ready to Occupy Wall Street
“Occupying” Wall Street isn’t what needs done.
i used to work with a fellow with a $2MM or so P-car collection, who took every chance to talk about how CHEAP he got these cars in the early 00s, and how EXPENSIVE they are now. little did he realize that they were only expensive now because every wall st schmuck his age did the same exact thing, and were all sitting on a dozen or so of them as trophies with no ability or desire to drive them. the "(insert hobby here) as an investment" idea is one of the most hideous inventions of neo-boomerism and i will take great delight in watching these cars see their valuations slashed in quarters as the only people who remember driving them die off and their heirs are more interested in paying off their credit card debt than paying for an $800 a month NYC parking spot for dad's old sports car.
im not sure how to reverse this "everything must be an investment" trend, other than seeing a real growth in wages for young people so not every hobby has to be or turn into a "side hustle" to justify it.
It's a side effect of inflation, like "passive investing".
The very idea of inflation is a way to steal money from people who earn a wage. There is perpetually a sucking sound as wealth is drained into assets, objects, taxes. Sure, your house "appreciates"; so does the next house you're going to buy. I "doubled my money" on my last house, then paid 2.5x as much for what I'm building now as I would have in 1999.
I figured out a way to stop inflation dead in its tracks.
We simply reclassify everything in the economy that can be purchased, from candy bars to aircraft carriers, as "employees."
Then nothing will EVER get more expensive.
inflation is certainly a factor, i think part of it is the glorification of "hustle" culture which could arguably also be called a side effect of inflation. every spare minute must be monetized, every possession must either be bought from chinese factories or an investment grade heirloom, every career step must be MAXIMIZING EARNED INCOME
Completely agree. At the risk of setting my subscriber base on fire, I find it very personally difficult not to see the broad-based corporate support for abortion as nothing but "hey, girl, kill that baby and get BACK TO GIRLBOSSIN' asap!" I don't think it's a coincidence that our modern megacorps shamelessly support and promote every single lifestyle choice that makes it easier for people to work 16-hour days, from alternate sexualities with little family involvement to abortion on demand to the continual "voluntary buyouts" of people who are old enough to have perspective on the value of corporate work vis-a-vis family.
I hate the word "hustle." I know those who use it mean it positively, but whenever I hear somebody talk about his "side hustles," it always sounds like he's making pornography or selling stolen tires out of a van.
Part of the endless ghettoization of polite discourse, really, in which heiresses at Barnard do their best to sound like Key Glock.
In many cases you aren’t too far off. Just ask any random, attractive woman in her 20s for her OF and prepare to be as disappointed as her father
I've read a ton of stuff on inflation and gold backed dollars Peter Lynch yada yada blah blah. Seems like we are all stuck in an experiment that has never been run on humans before. Are we all fucked and doomed or is there anything to be done if one has an income south of a mil a year?
I think all we can do is plug along, look after our kids, don't make the mistake of thinking that 1957 was the rule and not the exception. Throughout history human beings have found happiness and contentment in all circumstances. At least that's what I want to believe.
If I've learned anything from Jewish history, which has had a number of "golden eras" as well as great disasters, it is to enjoy the good times while you can, focus on your family and your community, and do as much good for others as your circumstances allows.
My Christianity makes me some sort of ‘Jew fan-boy’, so I understand and appreciate that perspective. Thank you.
Someone once defined Hell as "being able to remember the good times while being wretched and miserable in the present."
I would say that's what's driving a lot of the cultural malaise - memories of how good things CAN be, epitomized by the year 1957 in this case.
Fiat and ZIRP can be found at the core of almost all government and business malfeasance. The bubbles and most of the wars at least.
All this stuff seems so joyless. But most any hobby gets that way, I suppose, at the extreme ends of it.
The point about multiple tiers and exclusivity I think is a perfect example of the "not quite as rich as I want" class. Because really the ultimate form is to be the person driving the Bugatti with the $10mm restoration up the lawn, and everyone else is a relative piker. So they can't quite get to that level, but they can make sure that their level is fully acknowledged and there are people to look down upon.
It simply gobsmacks me that seemingly intelligent people can act so dumbly, but then I look around the tech world and see _the exact same thing_ everywhere, at every level. It's like an idiocy fractal.
(I know nobody here really likes capeshit aside from Ronnie Schreiber, but...)
I used to work at a comic book store. We had picky customers come in every week, but one guy stood out from them all. He went through the stacks of books that came in wearing clean, cotton gloves. He would instantly seal them in bags with backing boards. He never let me or the owner of the shop touch them when it was time to ring him up, he'd hold them up for us in his gloved hands and slip them into his bag on his own. I never knew if he actually read them, and if he did, could he enjoy them? Or was he so wracked with anxiety over whether or not one of his gloved hands would damage one of those precious books to do so? You're totally right in your first point, it extrapolates perfectly to even the stupidest of hobbies.
John Updike satirizes that in a "Bech" story; the writer Henry Bech thinks he has a devout fan but in reality the fellow never reads the books and leaves them in long, plastic-jacketed lines with Mailer, Roth, and others.
I'm not really a comic book nerd. I'm a child of the '60s when it seemed that every kid read comics. My mom sent me copies of Aquaman and the Flash when I went to summer camp. The Comics Code apparently was a success in making formerly disreputable comics acceptable to American parents. I support independent creators today because of the culture war. To be honest, I've never had much patience with adults who discuss the minutia of the various superhero "universes", but then I feel the same way about adults and Harry Potter, and maybe even adults and Tolkein. I've long wanted to get a bumper sticker that says "Suq Qe' yIn" ("get a life" in Klingon).
Bonus points if you can pronounce the Klingon with glory! Q'apla!
You seemed pretty knowledgeable about the comicsgate guys, and that now makes sense. The only new comics I've bought in the last 10 years have been from them, but I haven't done the whole "who would win in a fight" thing since I was a teenager.
I hate Fan Boys. They're the reason normal people can't openly enjoy sci fi, comics, anime or a hundred other things. They live vicariously through their favorite media, everything about it is deadly serious business to them and they don't know when to turn it off and relax.
I have thrown out almost all comic book related stuff that's not comic books (which I keep at home safely out of view from the public) so I do NOT get associated with them. I'm embarrassed by them, and I was even in my dorkiest teen years. To be fair, almost every hobby has their subset of superfanboys who take it all way too seriously...
For the record, I both read AND understood CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, so I'm not exactly above suspicion myself.
I love capeshit. It is the only thing I can get the family to sit down and watch together, so I love it.
> idiocy fractal
Stealing this. Thank you.
" people who can afford as many electric toys as they want
people who can’t make a payment on a 2004 F-150"
Truer words etc., etc.....
I'm sure this is how we got to the fake patina situation that seriously grinds my grids .
I remember being loudly berated for showing up in old beaters I'd just begun to resurrect, now the stupid kids all clamor to buy my battered and rusty old VW I'm embarrassed to drive but I can't afford a $35,000.00 incorrectly restored one.....
As you stated : it's all about the _driving_ for me, I'll never feel young again but I certainly remember 1972 clearly when I'm driving it and wondering why all the others are parked in enclosed, temperature controlled garages .
They miss the entire point of being a gear / petrol head : IT'S THE DRIVING STUPID .
-Nate
Driving's not the WHOLE point. The building's fun, too.
Yes, this is so for a select few of us .
Most real enthusiasts just want to ride / drive.....
Me, I love resurrecting some piece of junk then searching out the bits and bobs to make it better for _me_ and no one else .
-Nate
I happen to live about 10 minutes from any event at "Car Week" and have attended for the last 8 years. I have seen this event evolve from free events and many cool (but obtainable cars) to a complete money grab and entirely unobtainable cars (that are really not worth lusting after anyway).
Next year will travel to Hot August Nights in Reno....
A lot of money has changed hands behind the scenes to make things the way they are, and I'm probably not allowed to say any more lest I be sued out of my NDA.
What’s the timeframe outlined in the NDA because I want to be sure to subscribe for as long as needed until you can tell those stories.
In that case, it's 30 years! :)
In that case just keep my credit card on file, lol!
Charles, I really hate 'pay to play '.
-Nate
It sounds like you and I have parallel thinking, Jack. I would like to take in some of those West Coast events as well as the Greenwich Concours in the east. I can't bring myself to do it, at this point. Until then, I will relish my two, favorite events: Saturday dawn at the registration line in Hershey and camping at the Watkins Glen Historics.
Greenwich is now fully, ah, Hagerty.
One of the fun things about Jay Leno's Garage was seeing him actually driving the rare and expensive cars he gets his hands on. Everything gets touched. Every door opened. He turns the engine over so we can hear what it's like to start it. He takes it out onto public roads and drives it on California highways. Awesome!
Top Gear once had Jamiroquai singer Jay Kay on for their interview segment and he talked about how he loved taking his Lamborghini Miura out and blasting down the roads in it despite its rarity and value. Cars are meant to be driven, not hidden away in a museum somewhere. We're talking about machines with a purpose, not a work of art like the Cross of Coronado.
Shows like this "week of cars" or whatever never interested me, too static, too boring, and, with this little inside look, DEFINITELY too hoity-toity. These cars will end up museum pieces, or forgotten and covered in several inches of dust in the Sultan of Brunei's garages, and that is a far worse fate than being crashed in pursuit of first place or used up after hundreds of thousands of miles.
Harry Metcalfe of Harry’s Garage is also a good watch as he takes his expensive cars and drives them everywhere. Lots of pure driving enjoyment on his videos. Many videos of his long trips, like him driving his Testarossa to the Sahara.
Driving a Testarossa to the Sahara? That sounds awesome. I'll check that out tonight.
He’s great because the basis for his whole channel is his love of driving his cars for personal satisfaction, the opposite of the concours crowd.
I even like his farming channel Harry’s Farm, because he shows you the inner workings of his farm and like JB has mentioned, the genius of the people working on farms. I even watched a whole video on a crew installing a fence.
I loved his trip to the arctic circle in the ratty old (1970?) Silver Shadow he bought off of eBay. I'd be leery taking a 50 year old Rolls to the corner store, but with limited prep, Harry made the trip. He even had to tweak the points along the way. That was some of the best car guy TV I'd seen in ages.
You've very effectively summed up my feelings about this sort of thing. I've often wondered if it's my 'join me on the picket line brother Baruth' working class back ground, my inverse snobbery of always being outside the tent pissing in, or just sheer inability to relate to people who have never struggled to make the rent.
Years ago when I was a student at the Royal College of Art (seriously, I was already living the dream and never did I expect someone like me could go there. My talent got me in and luckily a scholarship paid most of the fees. I moved back in with my mother while I attended) we had two projects that let me peek behind the velvet rope. One involved the RAC Club in Piccadilly (jacket and tie, no ladies) and the other was Salon Prive at Blenheim Palace. I drank their champagne and ate their lobster, and I'm sure I popped a few monocles looking as I did like a fucking goth rock star.
Who is also taking his Mondial QV to Radwood UK tomorrow. At least I'll be there in something with some credibility, rather than something that has suddenly become worthy of consideration just because of when it was made.
Sir, on this Substack we call it "Sadwood". They're lucky to have you.
There’s a Radwood UK? The name lost all meaning the second it expanded beyond the circle of hell some call the Bay Area. This should make even less sense to people on the other side of the Atlantic (keeping in mind the marketing folks back in the day even had to change the title of “Encino Man” to “California Man” because nobody knew what the fuck an Encino was outside the states)
Yes, there's only one every so often (I think this the first one for a year or two). It's run by you know who and it's at Bicester Heritage (like every other fucking event these days).
Well at least they changed the logo so it didn’t read as “WoodRad” anymore
For years, I asserted that the logo was outright stolen from the film Rad and that Kevin McCauley, the manlet who stole it, should be publicly keelhauled. Nobody involved with Sadwood has ever "gotten Rad". Brownell in particular is the alpha example of someone who was too big of a loser to even hang out with the losers who skated and rode.
Naturally, with their Hagerty acquisition I am now prevented from talking that kind of shit, so consider my opinion changed.
As someone who's completely ignorant of Radwood, but I'm interested in what you have dish out for Bradley. I'm surprised him and you would have crossed paths in the real world.
He has publicly said that if he ever sees me in real life "he'll leave the room in handcuffs." I assume that's some reference to an imagined criminal penalty for inept writing, because I'm 20 years older than he is and I could beat his ass into a coma while reciting "Dover Beach" and making a hotel reservation on speakerphone.
4
Amen
The lizard people reducing or eliminating the mobility of lower income Americans through their EV money grab is the absolute worst thing about EVs. There will be no 10 or 20 year old EVs available for these Americans to drive due to obsolete technology and prohibitive battery replacement cost.
Mobility is freedom.
Exactly, and clearly we've all had too much of it for too long!
If the autombile had existed in John Locke's time, driving would today be considered a civil right, rather than a state-issued privilege.
Where, Oh! Where!, are Ferris Bueller and his compatriots to sneak one of those displayed vehicles (displayed likely by one of Cameron's dad's friends) off the lawn and down the road toward Gilroy at a stately 110 mph?
Hah! What does it tell you that they won’t even make a movie like Ferris Bueller anymore, merely poking fun at the rich?
I watched a show called Succession, which I regard as a hilarious caricature of the idle rich.