Wednesday Open/Racing Thread: Deep Stupid, Daytona, Lyle And Frozen Crown

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the perfect girl doesn’t ex...

Even taking a politics break, there’s so much to cover!

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I’m in the Washington Examiner last week, writing about the limits of AI and pseudo-technology’s ability to blind even the most capable genius.

Subscribers to the Turbo Diesel Register will get two pages from me in Issue #123, which just mailed. I’ve said this before, but TDR is the absolute model of what you want from an owner’s club resource and magazine. I love writing for them, because unlike R&T the place hasn’t gone nuts and unlike some of my other outlets in the past the magazine doesn’t get placed immediately into the waste bin of a retirement community.

Racing thread, from a guest

I’m handing the race discussion over to my friend Josh, who sent me the following topics:

“First is the Almost 24 Hours of Daytona. I’m shocked it got more coverage than Ganassi supposedly running over a driver’s dog.

Second is the Andretti-F1 debacle… and US interest being lower than expected once real numbers were crunched. After all it is a niche sport when you consider… the NFL during any given game week that matters.

Third is F1 planning to clearly add more tracks… but HOW? The schedule is already a grind.”

Well, Josh, I could tell at least two firsthand stories about Mr. Ganassi — let’s save them for a paid subscriber day. I also wouldn’t underestimate American interest in F1. This whole Taylor Swift Super Bowl thing feels like a last gasp for attention. In the final analysis, the NFL is still a 3-ring circus of human garbage operated by people who despise normal Americans while uncritically throwing around phrases like “authentic Black quarterback”. Professional stick and/or ball sports are circling the drain with people who can actually buy anything you see in the advertisements. NASCAR has been mismanaged into the toilet. F1 has a lot of growth potential left here. Let’s hear from the readers.

Why are so many executives worse than a flipped coin?

you could make a zillion dollars just doing the opposite of what she does

Yesterday, we looked at how General Motors has been both careless and greedy with their full-sized truck strategy — and yet other than the Corvette and the Korean outsourced stuff I think it’s fair to say that everything else they do is handled with even less competence than are the trucks. Since then, I’ve been asking myself: Why are so many executives so bad at their jobs?

If a heart surgeon had Mary Barra’s record, he’d have been sued out of business in his first year. A cop or fireman with her judgment would likely be dead by now. Hell, if the kid cooking burgers at McDonald’s got it wrong as often as she does, the franchise would have been pulled. If you take some time and look at every public decision she’s made since taking over as CEO, in addition to evaluating some actions at GM that she must have approved, her record is something like 2 for 30. If every decision ever put to Barra had instead been decided by the flip of a coin, there’s a good mathematical chance that GM would have a Gen4 Volt right now, or engines that don’t blow up, or a sedan that people want to buy, or at least a lot more money in the bank. We’d have a 50 percent chance of not having the showroom-paperweight $whatever_IQ Cadillacs, or the Hummer EV, the first electric car in history to offend people who love electric cars in addition to offending normal people.

Here’s the problem: I don’t think she’s really a stupid person, not in the sense of IQ or ability to understand basic concepts of logic and reason. She’d probably have been a great window-switch engineer. You meet a lot of leaders like that. I worked a couple of steps away from a CEO who was obviously an intelligent, insightful, witty person — but he was unable to resist doing the bidding of other, more forceful men who repeatedly beguiled him into making them rich at his own expense.

There’s something about being a CEO that causes otherwise worthwhile men and women to pick up the Idiot Ball and dance around with it. Their decisions are often obviously wrong to the people on the front lines of the company, but it doesn’t matter. I have a theory about this, to which I’ll return a week from now, but it would be idiotic of me not to let all of you talk about it first, so I can steal your best ideas and say they were mine.

Epiphone update, plus a few things you might actually enjoy

I’m sure you’ve all been obsessed with what I’m going to do with my 1989 Samick Epi Les Paul Custom — so before anyone goes on a hunger strike, I’m gonna clue you in.

As discussed before, everything’s great with the Epi except for the wiring and the dead-ish pickups. So I bought a used set of Seymour Duncan APH-2 pickups off Reverb. They’re 100% USA-made, they have the correct gold pickup covers, and they were $175 for the set.

The wiring will be completely replaced by a basic JonesyBlues kit. I’ve been buying from him since 2010 and have never regretted it. To replace the missing and damaged knobs, I’m getting period-incorrect Gibson top hat reflectors from Matt Emick at Sweetwater. For my own amusement, I’m replacing the “poker chip” pickup selector surround with something to honor the Les Paul’s original owner.

So I’ll have about $350 in upgrading the guitar. To keep it from escalating past that, I’m going to do all the soldering and installation myself, including re-drilling the top for USA-made potentiometers. When all is said and done, I’ll do an A/B against… oh, gosh. How about a 1995 Kalamazoo H-150 with Sheptones, a 50’s Tribute Les Paul that’s gotten a couple grand worth of boutique improvements, and… let’s make it tough by dragging the murderer out of the vault, shall we?

Alright, enough of my abysmal musicianship and six-string dentistry. Let’s hear from two sets of real musicians. First: one of the finest things Lyle Mays ever wrote, the “Alaskan Suite”, arranged and played by a Polish orchestra. Some of these women are heartbreakingly beautiful, others are like the female version of me — but they are all astoundingly talented. Twelve of the most emotional minutes I can conjure up, folks, covering a full dynamic sweep from chilling distance to real joy.

Next, we have something that I never knew I needed until now, namely: an Italian group cosplaying Swedish metal the way Iron Maiden would play it, singing in English. Frozen Crown went through a lineup change recently and is all the better for it. The fire burns in none like the converted; Muddy Waters didn’t really spend a lot of time living the blues, and these youngsters were born and raised somewhere with the same weather as Jacksonville, but after listening to this track you’ll be ready to ride a dire wolf across a glacier for the glory of the ancient gods. Preferably with their lead singer, the sublime Giada Etro.

As most of you know, music isn’t a full-time job for most people nowadays, so you’ll be pleased to know that Miss Etro has twelve years of experience as a dentist and orthodontist. How in God’s name have I had one implant, four veneers, and a dozen crowns… none from her. I don’t care if I die during the procedure like Ye’s mom did during her discount Mexican plastic surgery. My next cavity will be filled by her. Wait. I think I meant that backwards. You know what? Let’s hand it over to the readers before I dig this hole any deeper.