Thursday ORT: Lando Flops, Vintage Sci-Fi Reviewed, McTheDonald Kayfabe

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Worst weekend for Lando since the Imperials showed up at Cloud City

Can we all agree that this has been the most interesting “runaway championship” F1 season in modern history? Unless something significant changes in the next five races, the winning driver is likely to be an employee of the… third-place team. (Has this ever happened before? One of you probably knows.) It seems likely that Ferrari will pass RedBull in Mexico and streak away, as McLaren did before them. If the RB20 isn’t the third-fastest car on the grid right now, it’s only because the Mercedes is also better.

I think the F1 historians will look back at the second half of this season as one in which Max Verstappen further established his reputation as the finest driver in the sport at the moment. He drove a tractor to the Sprint win then played the hardest of hardball in the Grand Prix… but in a true “Happy learns to putt” moment, he managed to make sure he was on the right side of the stewards this time, against a British driver. Were his actions at the start of the GP, when he worked Lando with a Craftsman Truck’s worth of shove while letting the Ferraris through, indicative of strategy or luck? He likely had no expectation of being able to keep Lando behind him, but a 3-4 finish is better for the championship math than 1-2.

Speaking of the RedBull/Verstappen situation: At the podium ceremony there was what looked like a very carefully staged photo op with Helmut Marko, Christian Horner, Ginger Spice, and the kids. Is this an indication that Jos Verstappen overplayed his hand in the whole Hornygate situation? Further grist for the mill: RedBull has reportedly reached out to Oscar Piastri for a chat regarding a 2026 contract. Were I to wake up tomorrow in Oscar’s shoes, I’d be fairly skeptical of such an opportunity. Why not stay at McLaren, which appears to have technical and organizational momentum, with the additional bonus of having a teammate who is about as soft as Land O’ Lakes on an Indonesian dinner table?

Additional thoughts, in no particular order:

• I’m old enough to remember when Alex Albon was the most dynamic driver Williams had seen in years and their leader in any future championship hopes. Theory: The car is better than anyone realized — and only the raw ineptitude of The American Eagle made Albon look like anything but a lifetime backmarker.

• VCARB continues their time-honored tradition of letting Yuki’s strategy be chosen by multiple rolls of a 20-sided D&D dice, but that shouldn’t blind anyone to the fact that Liam Lawson already looks more comfortable in the car than my main man from Japan. Theory: Ricky was even more washed than they said.

• Which Leclerc will Lewis have as a teammate next year: Sprint Race Chucky or Grand Prix Sharrl? If it’s the latter, expect Sir Lewis to change careers sooner than he’d expected. The path is already laid out for this; he’s a co-chair of next year’s Met Gala!

• I keep thinking that Princess George will wake up one day and stop making mistakes, at which point he will be capable of genuinely contending for a world championship. He’s only 26 years old; still two years younger than Lewis was when he made the move to Mercedes. On the other hand, there was a phrase used to describe F1 drivers in the 20th century who drove as quickly-but-unpredictably as Russell, and that phrase was “recently deceased”.

A pair of books from the Golden Age, or close to it

“heechee artifact”, or dusty coaster, you choose

After a few years where I read comparatively little, I’m trying to come back up to speed by re-reading stuff in my existing library, interspersed with some of the better-respected books I never got around to in the first place. This week we have two pulp novels by top-tier science fiction writers, along with Amazon affiliate links to each. I won’t be hurt if you deny me the nickel commission by buying from AbeBooks instead!

Gateway, Frederick Pohl, 1977. As a teenager it was common for me to read a dozen sci-fi paperbacks in a week. How I never got around to Gateway I don’t know, but it’s a good thing I didn’t, because this is a Freudian deviant-sex novel masquerading as an astoundingly inept bit of world-building. Essentially a bildungsroman of a “slime farmer” who wins the lottery and ends up traveling in an alien spacecraft, this could have been a decent pulp novel had Pohl not felt compelled to shove as much literal psychoanalysis and weird stuff in there as possible. In many ways, the Seventies were the apex of Sci-Fi — I mean, we had Omni magazine! — but if you read deeply in the period you’ll continually be confronted by authors who were deeply envious of the public esteem accorded quasi-pornographers like Philip Roth and tried to “push the limits” without a fraction of Roth’s talent. Allow me to completely spoil the book for you: a key plot point of the book is when the protagonist admits to his psychotherapy robot that he masturbates while envisioning that he is being raped by his girlfriend’s bisexual ex. Then he cries. I don’t want to see the movie of this book and neither did anyone else. You’ve got to be a John Scalzi type of person to be impressed by Frederik Pohl, at least here. Grade: C-

Tower Of Glass, Robert Silverberg, 1970. He started his career with the standard robots-and-bug-eyed-monsters stuff in the Fifties, but once he had an established name he wrote a flurry of genuinely brilliant novels and short stories, each one exploring a different but hugely imaginative theme, before burning out and returning to writing pulp in the Eighties. Tower of Glass, along with To Live Again, The Second Trip, Son Of Man, The World Inside, A Time of Changes, Shadrach In The Furnace, The Stochastic Man, and the short story anthologies from the mid-Seventies, always approach the status of literature and often exceed it. Tower of Glass, like most of the other short novels mentioned above, is written in a sparse, modernist style in which most paragraphs are expected to carry some artistic merit in addition to moving the plot. The worst thing you can say about this book is that Silverberg’s fundamental humanity shows through in his plotting. Anyone with exposure to modern sci-fi will laugh at the idea that someone would make humanoid robots without a killswitch. Worth your time, and if you enjoy it there are a few similar books to try afterwards; start with The World Inside. Grade: B+

For the record, his appearance in “Home Alone 2” was also staged

Looks like Kamala Harris is the real billionaire; she’s attracted over $1.5B in donations since stepping in for President Biden a few months ago, much of it from corporations and heavy-hitter high-net-worth players. The Trump campaign, by contrast, is currently raising about 40 cents on the Kamala dollar. It’s not enough to play hardball on a level field. The Donald needs to think differently, and maybe use a bit of showmanship.

Thus the McDonald’s stunt last week, in which Trump visited a restaurant that had been closed for the occasion, tried cooking a few fries, and posed for a bunch of photos. Supposedly, this was in response to claims by Kamala Harris that she worked at McDonald’s as a teenager; this claim appears to be impossible to verify, which is strange because I can come up with quite a few people who can confirm the various fast-food gigs I held as a kid, but whatever.

As theater and campaign strategy, McDonaldtrump’s was pure genius. It dominated the news cycle, effortlessly erasing however many hundred million dollars Kamala spent during the same time. It played well in Pennsylvania, home of the fellow who probably should have been Kamala’s VP and also a key battleground state. It generated instantly viral photos and created a million memes on the trot. Crucially, it also validated the work experience of God knows how many fast-food workers, who have long been treated as the punchline of bad jokes and/or cautionary tales: If you don’t pay attention in school, you’ll end up working at McDonald’s!

(For the record, the equivalent to that in the Baruth household was my father’s acerbic observation that If you don’t pay attention in high school, you’ll end up teaching it.)

Faced with this canny but ephemeral bit of political theater, the best thing for Team Blue to do would have been to shut up and let the media keep carrying the ball for them. Instead we got, from various usual suspects:

• “It was all staged! He wasn’t actually working there!” Who came up with the astoundingly stupid idea of pushing this message? It insults the intelligence of everyone who reads it. Obviously Trump didn’t get hired at McDonald’s, for God’s sake.

• “Convicted felons can’t work at McDonald’s!” Tell me you’ve never held a real service job without telling you’ve never held a real service job. Fast food, and the kitchens of high-end restaurants, are massive employers of felons. McDonald’s has specific programs in place to help franchisees succeed with convicts. Everybody in America with a household income below $75k a year knows this and when you read the contrary on social media it just reinforces how distant the opinion-makers are from the rest of us.

• “Trump is the enemy of working-class people and service workers!” This claim, pioneered at the lefty blogs before making the osmotic transition to MSNBC, isn’t playing with entry-level service workers, who are not unionized, never will be unionized, and are in direct competition with immigrants for their meager opportunities. Bleating that Trump is a “union-buster” makes zero difference to people who have been at-will employees their entire lives.

Sidebar to one of the above points: The drumbeat of “Trump is a convicted felon, and therefore human trash who deserves whatever he gets”, combined with selecting a Presidential candidate who literally made her political career putting Black men in prison for casual drug possession, just might be the reason that Kamala isn’t polling well with what Obama called “the brothas”. VP Harris’s proposal for Black men, intended to address the shortfall, swings wildly between tl;dr pontificating, clearly illegal schemes to give away money, and “Boondocks”-style stereotyping about marijuana.

I’m fascinated by the differences between the McDonald’s stunt and the Tim Walz Extreme Outdoorsman Hunt Where Nobody But Tim Had A Gun And He Didn’t Know How To Load The One He Had. They are both “kayfabe”, in the sense that they were both artificial events designed to be broadly covered in the media. Trump didn’t cook very many fries, and Tim Walz didn’t shoot any birds. They are not real in the sense that your and my everyday lives are real. They weren’t even designed for the people who attended the events. They are theater for the national audience.

Furthermore, they are deliberately ignorant of policy, party, or anything else that might actually be useful or informative to voters. Is anyone reading this Substack enough of a fool to think that gun control will not be a high-priority objective of the Harris/Walz team, regardless of whatever Fudding kayfabe happened in a cleared-out field prior to the election? If Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonald’s, something on which I’d personally bet the last thousand dollars I have, is it really relevant to her ability to govern the United States of America? Shouldn’t Donald Trump be using his limited funds and close-to-nonexistent credibility with the American media to inform the voters about his platform, his policy, and his intentions as President, rather than scoring Reddit points against Harris like the national election is a Pewdiepie/T-Series "beef video”?

Taking this complaint a step further: Why does Team Blue continue to field the most beatable candidates in history? This business about Harris having access to Biden’s fundraising up to that point is now exposed for the stupidity it always was — she’s raised $1.2 billion dollars in the time it takes most average Americans to make two car payments. Didn’t anybody learn anything from the fact that a propped-up mannequin going by the name of Joe Biden easily won an election just by

0. Not being Donald Trump;

1. Not coming off like the unholy combination of a Wicked Witch and a defective robot cop who can’t stop smiling and laughing for no apparent reason?

The angrier of my Team Red friends think the whole thing is supposed to be a demoralizing flex: if “they” can elect Kamala Harris to President, “you” have no remaining voice in the affairs of the United States. The angrier of my Team Blue friends think that it’s Israel choosing our President for us, all the better to facilitate what they consider to be a genocide. I don’t know a single person on either side who thinks that Harris was the best possible candidate, or even among the best, or anything but the worst.

So, dear readers, my plea to you this afternoon goes like so: If you can speak in defense of Kamala Harris in any terms that don’t resolve to “Vote Blue No Matter Who”, then please do so, and I will ensure that you are neither abused nor mocked in the comments. Similarly, those of you who preferred Trump over the other Republican candidates are encouraged to make your case for him on a basis of policy or governance, and I’ll guarantee you the same kid-glove treatment.

What I have in mind here: let’s try to understand where our opponent is coming from, let’s operate in good will and good faith, and let’s try to come to some agreement, however mild, on what this country needs in order to be a better place for our children.

That’s it and that’s all. Paid subscribers are invited to return tomorrow evening for the long-awaited ceramic detailing post. I’ve had a great conversation with a pro detailer about it, and I’ve also corresponded with several hobbyists. I believe you’ll be better off for reading it. See you then.