Wednesday ORT: Checo-ed Out, Doug DeLeto, Harmonicaster, "Drones", Honda/Nissan, G-Revival

All subscribers welcome

these two combined for 152 wdc points

So much to write about. Let’s get straight to it.

Call him “Ronnie Fender: why dontcha

ACF’s own Ronnie Schreiber is more than just an engaging writer and erudite scholar on countless and diverse topics — he’s also a inventor of some serious merit. Just over ten years ago he wrote me to discuss his idea for a feedback-proof, stage-optimized harmonica that would work effortlessly with guitar amplifiers and PA equipment. Shortly after that we had a booth at the Nashville NAMM show, which generated a lot of interest and also quite a bit of useful feedback (In a few cases, literally.)

After countless optimizations and improvements, Ronnie’s Harmonicaster is just about ready to be an overnight success. Check out the video to learn more. It’s a niche market, as well as one that tends to be overfilled with difficult and/or opinionated people, but the good word on this unique product is finally spreading at the proper velocity. Want a Harmonicaster of your own? Mention it in the comments and Ronnie will reach out.

Dear God, let it be Yuki

Add Sergio Perez to the long list of teammates who have been dismantled in very public fashion by Max Verstappen — but Checo’s implosion was perhaps the saddest and most difficult so far. Was it really just a year and a half ago that a variety of unserious idiots were talking him up for a World Championship? It’s been all downhill from there.

If the RedBull hivemind can be faulted for anything related to this decision, surely it would be the tardiness of it. There were many sound reasons for putting Yuki (or, I suppose, anyone else) in the RB for the last third or quarter of the season. They probably couldn’t have canned him before the Mexican GP but he should have been on waivers before the sun went down on his utterly disastrous hometown performance.

Where could he go? One has to wonder. He has a lot of personal sponsorship available and he’s also beloved by a nontrivial viewer demographic. Surely Williams would have preferred him over Sainz, if only because the financial aspects of it would have been far more advantageous. Who’s going to replace him? The official ACF position is: Yuki Tsunoda, obviously! The likely answer: Liam Lawson, who doesn’t perform as well as Tsunoda but who doesn’t have ties to Japan and Honda. Either way frees up a VCARB seat, too.

Let’s dream for a moment — whom would we like to see in the second seat? Hear me out: what about Sir Lewis Hamilton? Wouldn’t he like a chance to prove once and for all that he can beat Max in the proverbial “equal machinery”? Perhaps not. What about… Princess George? There’s enough money floating around to make almost any outcome plausible. One crowd favorite, from what I’ve read: buying Carlos Sainz back from Williams with enough cash to put Colapinto into the vacated seat. Surely we’d all enjoy that!

Started from the bottom, now he’s here

the star wars holiday special of car-cuck cringe

There’s a meme out there where a little kid is praying at his bedside and the superimposed text is “DEAR GOD - THANK YOU FOR NOT MAKING ME ATTRACTED TO FEET.” Not all of you reprobates out there can say the same thing, I know, although when finally I get around to telling “The Story Of Jymmyfish” on this Substack even the most ardent of you toe-lickers will realize that you’re just amateurs in comparison.

When I pray at night, I often thank God for having freed me from the burden of wanting to be liked. Admittedly, He accomplished this task by making me a sullen and self-pitying conflict addict with a lightswitch temper and the future time orientation of a male grasshopper, but still… Thank you, God, because without this gift I might be on here trying to convince people that I was some kind of Horatio Alger success story.

It’s no secret that I’ve never had any affection or respect for DeMuro; his mere existence trivializes an industry that is already pathetic. I think he is a congenital liar and fantasist who will say or do anything to be a somebody. Frankly, I’d rather be a crack addict in the Tenderloin than a wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-man-lookin’ social climber wannabe whose dearest desire is to ascend to the approximately second-lowest rung on the Nantucket ladder.

Any normal and mentally healthy man who received an 8-figure payout from selling his bullshit shill-bid site to vulture idiots in addition to a likely million-dollar annual profit from YouTube would surely spend the rest of his life enjoying said life far from the public eye, but Doug’s insane desire to be liked has caused him to do precisely the opposite. Yesterday he put up a video explaining to his viewers that he doesn’t owe any part of his success to his parents despite the fact that they:

• Gave him an upper-middle-class upbringing and education;

• Paid for him to get a degree at Emory;

• Co-signed his Ferrari 360 loan;

• Gave him full backing and assistance just in case his ideas for self-employment didn’t work out;

• and many other little helping hands that DeMuro was too busy polishing his imaginary bootstraps to mention.

Not discussed in the video, but often discussed by others in the autowriting game, is the very reliable-sounding rumor that Doug’s parents gave him the legal assistance he needed to succeed handsomely in an accidental-injury lawsuit against a metro bus provider, thus laying down the financial foundation for all of his car purchases and his 24-hour social media presence in the early years.

Doug’s normally meek and submissive fanbase bit back hard on this new video, and after being mercilessly dragged by a thousand Redditors and furries, but I repeat myself, in a genuine “Worst. Day. Ever.”, DDM decided to delete the whole thing and pretend it never happened. Well, as the famous Ethan Gaines said when Suge Knight performed a fatal hit-and-run on two random people in 2018: “You can’t get back ‘G’ points ya already lost.”

Your humble author will go to his grave not understanding why someone with twenty million dollars or more is simping on YouTube for parasocial involvement and approval. Let me state for the record that shouldI happen to come into $20 million, the very next post on this Substack after such a blessed event occurs will be titled “Fuck Off And Don’t Come Back Here Again, Because The Site Is Closed (No Refunds).” I know a lot of young men read ACF, so here’s some advice: every moment you spend seeking the approval of random, anonymous people outside your family and/or your chosen profession diminishes you to an extent it is hard for me to even comprehend, let alone describe. Take that time and spend it on self-improvement, why dontcha.

Those “drones”

Talk about it here if you like. I assume all of this hysteria has something to do with expanding government power, or protecting previous expansions — apparently there’s some drone-related law that just happens to be up for renewal at the moment. I don’t pretend to understand anything more about it than that. There are no drones where I live, except for my drone that I primarily use to see if there’s a line for the nice bathroom at Mid-Ohio.

The power of nightmares

By now you’ve likely heard that Honda is considering a merger with Nissan, said tie-up being for the purpose of more effectively competing in the EV “space”. This seems uncomfortably like the idea of a 1975-era Daimler-Benz trying to merge with American Motors for leadership in the Pet Rock “space”. But wait, there’s more: famed suicide-factory operator and Tim Cook remote-control-operator Foxconn is rumored to have quite a bit of bankroll ready to throw at the joint venture.

Which de-mystery-izes it a bit. Honda will design the metal parts of the car. Foxconn will handle the batteries and the circuit boards. Production will be done in some under-utilized Nissan facility, or several facilities based on what’s most economically feasible. Surely the only thing Nissan brings to this would be a bunch of empty floor space, otherwise unoccupied laborers, and maybe a couple of supplier relationships.

It’s difficult to envision such a partnership extending backwards towards the internal-combustion stuff. Nissan doesn’t have anything that Honda wants, perhaps with the dubious exception of the Frontier and Titan pickups. You could sunset the current mainstream Nissan products like the Rogue and Altima, replacing them with badge-engineered Hondas, but does that really serve any purpose for anyone?

Let’s for a moment assume that Honda is being smart; it pains me to say this, but I haven’t seen them do anything smart since the 9th generation Accord. If they are being smart, then there’s a method to the Nissan/Foxconn madness that goes something like this: Honda is free to outsource all their compliance-car and virtue-signaling work to China while retaining a focus on building the products their customers actually want, with a little side dish of ensuring the stability of a major Japanese employer. That latter point would be meaningless in the USA but in Japan, where the banks and politicians are still interested in the power, dignity, and sovereignty of their home country, it would carry weight. Just as importantly, it might enable Honda to skip some drama from the Japanese government in the future. You never know… but I don’t think we need to worry about the next-gen Civic being a Sentra in drag or anything like that.

Speaking of Japanese production

You know we love our G-Shocks here at ACF, and here’s a very special one that just went up for sale: the Japanese-made DW-5000R reissue. Let me tell you why you should be interested:

• It costs $200, compared to the previous premium resin-bodied screwback G-Shock, the GW5000U-1, which costs $300.

• It’s made in Japan, like the GW5000U-1 and the “Full Metal” variants, despite being priced more like a Thailand or China assembly.

• In contrast to the GW5000U-1 and the Full Metals, it has the simpler circuit board, LCD display, and feature set of simpler G-Shocks. If you don’t need world time, Bluetooth connectivity, and so on, this will last longer on the battery and require less intricate knowledge to operate.

• It looks neat, it has a polished screwback case, and it will impress the people who know about G-Shocks, which is more people than you’d expect.

• It’s at least as good a watch as the 40th Anniversary DW5040PG-1, which is currently fetching $500 or more on the resale sites.

Don’t like G-Shocks? No worries. Come back here next week; we’ll talk about a similarly affordable, but completely different, watch from the, ahem, Orient.

Housekeeping: Tomorrow we’ll have a great Christmas music piece from John Marks. I’m fairly committed to having at least a half-dozen articles for you during Christmas week, since many of you will be at home looking for something with which to distract yourselves. As always, thank you for reading.