Wednesday ORT: Meet Julius, Okay Bunny, M3 Stops, Dan Moans, Grenadier Driven, Luce Goose

All subscribers welcome

after all, the two of them are already into toys

This is about the last chance for free subscribers to join us for an exclusive discussion of Arrogance and Accords with the man who wrote it, Steve Lynch. Paid subscribers have access to the PDF of the book as well. I know there are a few of you who despise me and only read this Substack to leave hateful comments; you would never give me any money. Well, this week we have a way to you to join the discussion without handing over a single red cent to my narcissistic circus of steak dinners and London tailoring:

Orange you glad you met Julius?

Almost exactly this time last year, I asked the ACF Superfriends to assemble and save the life of a blind cat named “Loopy”. Your response was astounding. Loopy got everything she needed to live the last seven months of her life in dignity, and without pain.

Well, as Bernie Sanders famously said, I am once again asking for your support. “Julius” is an older cat who was brought in from the streets because he was unable to fight off an upper respiratory infection. He’s doing well now and is in foster care.

As with Loopy, I will give you a paid subscription, or extend your existing one, by any amount you donate to City of Elderly Love, the organization that is fostering him. So this would be a great way to help a kitty cat and hang out with Steve Lynch for a day. If you donate $25 or more, I’ll mail a “Meow and Dent” paperback of Cat Tales to the (48 state) address of your choice.

Ways to donate:

• Via the website

• Paypal or Venmo to ‘@cityofelderlylove’

• text ‘SENIORPETS’ to 44-321

Contact me via Substack messages or email (hardcover@cattalesbook.com) to obtain your book and/or subscription. We will be providing Julius updates via this site, of course. Thank you.

Alright, we’ve all taken a moment to be decent people, let’s put that aside and make fun of Dan Neil.

He’s been trying to tell us for years

actually, that’s the cullinan

There’s a joke about a man, absolutely not named Wes Siler, who goes into the woods to shoot his first bear. Unfortunately for him, the bear sneaks up behind him, takes his gun, then rapes him until he passes out. Furious about this humiliation, the fellow gets a night-vision setup and a new shotgun, slips into the woods at night to kill the bear, only to be surprised and raped again. The man goes back to the gun store to get a .44 Magnum revolver and body armor before once again heading out into the woods to settle the score. As he walks past a particularly large tree, the bear jumps out, puts a paw on his shoulder, and says,

“Listen, you’re not really here for the hunting, are you?”

Every year or two, for the past decade, Ford gives the Wall Street Journal the loan of a Super Duty pickup. The WSJ, in turn, has Dan Neil write a “review” of the truck from the perspective of a very badly-closeted gay man¹. In each of these pieces, Neil moans suggestively about the big, long, hard steel chassis and aluminum body then complains about how the girthy, guzzling engine just takes what it wants from the planet and gives nothing back.

These reviews are very satisfying to everyone. Dan Neil loves writing them because it’s the closest he gets to being a theater critic. Manhattanites love them because they reinforce their feelings of superiority over F-250s owners. F-250 owners love them because they reinforce their feelings of superiority over Manhattanites. Ford loves them because Dan, just like any other good little whore in the business, gets the message out. And the message is: The F-250 is a finger in the eye of middle-aged cat ladies.

In other words, no one is really here for the hunting. This sassy state of affairs could go on indefinitely, except that Dan Neil finds himself in the position of any long-term mistress/prostitute: he has to keep getting kinkier to hold the man’s interest. We all know what is at the end of the kink rainbow, thanks to former FIA president Max Mosley: Nazi roleplay. Where is where Dan went this time, in his second F-250 review of the past 22 months:

Russell Crowe’s portrayal of Nazi leader Hermann Göring in the film “Nuremberg” is brilliant but incomplete. Little is made of Goering’s outrageous personal style: the power-blue Reichsmarschall’s uniform, the fur-lined capes, the diamond encrusted badges and batons, the face makeup. Göring’s sartorial choices raised suspicions among both the Allies and Nazi high command that he was homosexual.

He wasn’t, apparently. A later generation of sociologists might have diagnosed Göring’s martial flamboyance as a form of “homeovestism”—that is, exaggerated and often impractical gender-normative dress or behavior intended to signal elite social status. Although the term is clinically obsolete, examples of male peacocking are as close as the nearest bejeweled Patek Philippe, sterling-silver rodeo belt buckle or jumped-up, gold-plated pickup.

Because Dan is an observer of the upper middle class, rather than a member of it, his stereotypes fall a bit flat. Every rodeo belt buckle is sterling silver; the nice ones are decorated far beyond that. The “bejeweled” Pateks that Dan sees in the window of the authorized dealers are “relationship pieces”; you buy them for the purpose of building a relationship with your dealer that entitles you to the steel or rose gold Nautilus without diamonds that you really want. You don’t wear a relationship piece, you sell it to a Dubai jeweler for 50% of retail.

Similarly, Dan sees what is a pretty standard F-250 and thinks it is some kind of Landman oil millionaire statement. And because he is super gay, and super obsessed with Nazis, just like every other Soy Boy Of The Current Year, he can’t restrain himself from cooking up a fantasy about the Reichsmarshall and his jewel encrusted baton.

Artistically, the review is a failure, because it doesn’t make cohesive sense. Commercially, however, this is an excellent advertisement for the F-250 — The elite think you’re a Nazi for buying the Godzilla engine! — and for Dan Neil — He is confronting those Nazi F-250 owners!. In other words, it is just like everything else Dan has ever written: journeyman-grade advertising copy cosplaying, badly, as literature.

Speaking of cosplay

this is what you get when you spend nothing extra

Was it three whole years ago that we welcomed a 318,978-mile Silverado to our little hobby farm? It’s now a 352,063-mile Silverado that has probably corroded more in two Ohio winters than in the first fifteen years of its life. “George” has also suffered mightily as a tow vehicle for Danger Girl’s MX-5 Cup car; the transmission is on its last legs and the engine is noticeably down on power even after a tune-up and new throttle body. The situation isn’t that dire because my unemployed ass is taking the year off from racing and we can therefore use my Godzilla Nazi Goering Edition F-250 to tow the Mazda, but at some point we need to take George off winter-beater duty, fix him up for posterity/storage, and get another truck.

The obvious solution here is a Lexus LX600 or GX550, but when DG saw a Grenadier on the road last month she was charmed by it, so we went to the local dealer on a 10-degree day to check it out.

Most of you probably know the Grenadier story: INEOS big dog Jim Ratcliffe, most recently notable for saying something completely true, invented the Grenadier out of whole cloth because he was disgusted by the current Tata Motors Defender. It was engineered by Magna Steyr, the folks who are generally responsible for the G-Wagen, it’s built in France by a former Mercedes-Benz factory, and it is powered by a detuned BWM B58 turbo inline-six spinning through a ZF8 and a Tremec transfer box. Like the original Defender, it is available as an SUV or a four-door pickup, although there is no short-wheelbase version. It can tow 7700 pounds, which is more than enough for us.

Strictly speaking, there is no reason for anyone to buy a Grenadier. Most of what we would use it for, with one exception to be covered below, could be more capably and cheaply accomplished with a Chevy Tahoe. Of course, a Tahoe Premier now costs $76,000, which is more than the $72,995 base price of the Grenadier and just below the GX550 Luxury’s base of $79,500. But it would certainly be cheaper to run, assuming the torque converters lasted longer than they did in my 6.2 Silverado and also the engine didn’t blow up.

The Grenadier is really just what the kids call a vibe. And what a vibe it is. Everything about it is just plain fun, from its dopey-Land-Rover look to the aviation-style overhead console. Sitting in the Grenadier for ten minutes makes you realize just how corner-cut the Wrangler and Bronco, for all of their other virtues, truly are. Like my Radical SR8, it has the sense of being kinda-sorta lashed together from the most expensive component parts humanly possible.

Visibility is excellent to the front and sides, not so great to the rear. You get two lovely mini-sunroofs, called “tropical roofs” up front, but unlike in my 1997 and 2003 Discovery there are no “safari windows” to let light in from above. (The double-sunroof and double-safari window setup of the original Discovery has never been equaled.) The seats are absolutely first-rate and you can get them with cloth. Rear seat room is adequate but not luxurious. Lexus GX owners will be fine with it. There is quite a bit of usable space in the tall cargo compartment, in that respect it’s more like my “long-tail” 2003 Discovery than like the cramped 1997.

It’s weird to encounter BMW/ZF’s “monostable” shifter in an Africa truck but it works here about as well as it does anywhere else. The rest of the switchgear is beyond criticism, but the center-stack display screen isn’t all that easy to see for driver or passenger. Due to an inept over-the-air software update, our demo Grenadier felt that it was 16,700 days overdue for service. “That will be fixed,” the salesman reassured us.

He also warned us that the 2024 and 2025 Grenadiers, an example of the latter being what we were driving, have no “return to center” in the power steering. Danger Girl wasn’t bothered by that, but the 2026 is supposed to be better in that regard. On the road, the Grenadier continues to charm. It has enough power, feeling generally stronger than MDG’s GX460 despite a lower rating and more weight. Credit the pinwheels and the ZF8 for that. Road noise is acceptable, as is wind noise. Or maybe we just felt that way because we’d arrived in a 2008 Silverado with a leaking side window. Body lean was better than you’d expect, certainly better than a steel-spring Land Rover.

During our time with the Grenadier, I kept thinking: They aimed at the Defender 110 but they hit the Discovery 4.6 HSE. Which is a good thing, because when the old Discoveries actually ran they were the finest SUV you could get. 95% of the time, you would probably rather have a Lexus GX, but the other five percent you’d be like the fellows who were home in England on St. Crispin’s Day. As the mistress of a modest country estate, Danger Girl would be well within her rights to own and operate a Grenadier; the cosplay accusation would bounce off her even as it stuck to the “overlanding” types who put tents and whatnot on their Grenadiers for their once-in-a-year trip to a national park.

I also think it could do one potentially quite useful thing for us. Our Roxor is commonly considered to be un-stuck-able here on the property. I’ve had it truly buried just twice. The first time I got it out with the winch, because there was a tree within reach. The second time we had to use George and perform a ballistic recovery, which probably hastened the death of his transmission by five years.

If we had the Grenadier, and of course we would get all three locking diffs for it, then I could use it to give tours of the back acreage, secure in the knowledge that I probably couldn’t stick it — but if I did, I would have the Roxor to unstick it. Or, really, vice versa. So I’m going to vote Grenadier for 2026. Not that my vote counts, mind you!

I’ve seen worse rabbits

Alright, this Bad Bunny business has me hopping mad. I apologize in advance because my views on this probably won’t mesh with anyone else’s, but:

0. It is moronic to call this “activism” or “anti-American”. Bad Bunny, like him or loathe him, is the biggest artist in the world right now and, frequently, the #1 Spotify artist in the United States. This should be no more controversial than having any other top artist perform. He is not a niche performer.

1. We have a long tradition of Hispanic-American artists and sometimes just plain Hispanic artists in this country’s popular music. Bad Bunny sings in Spanish. So what? Richie Valens sang (sometimes) in Spanish decades ago. Nat King Cole sang in Spanish. Diana Krall sings in Spanish.

2. I have no more issue with Bad Bunny using a Puerto Rican flag than I have with calling a funk group “The Ohio Players”. Let the man be proud of his territory. Some wag on Twitter said that “Puerto Ricans combine the worst aspects of gay people and Black people.” That is mean; I remind him, and you, that John Leguziamo is actually from Colombia.

3. That being said, the intent of the NFL in choosing him, and configuring the halftime show the way they did, was absolutely to shit in the proverbial mouths of Middle America. Guess what, friends? It’s the NFL. They hate you. They have hated you for years. The only people who would celebrate another deadly Iowa hurricane more than the NFL leadership are the NASCAR leadership.

4. The Turning Point USA Kid Rock show, as a concept, seemed intended to confirm the worst stereotypes about Republicans/conservatives in America. And in one aspect, it was literally correct in that Kid Rock, who was called “Black Bob” in high school, made his money scandalizing Middle America before having the Overton window cross him, the same way that Donald Trump is now Hitler for espousing a slightly more liberal version of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign platform.

5. Had I been given the chance to counter-program the Super Bowl for The Right Wing, I would have had that fine-ass Rolex Testimonee, Yuja Wang, play some Rachmaninoff — or better yet, some Copland — in a Midwestern theater. The proper response to trash culture is not different trash culture. Using Kid Rock handed an easy victory to my dumbest friends, who then had a chance to gloat over “uneducated whites” on social media while raising their educated pinky fingers into the air to suck up lyrics like (in translation) “My dick is being chased and I want you to hide it… Grab it like a bonga… She took a pill that made her horny… She f***s in the Audi, not in the Honda… If your boyfriend doesn't eat your a**, he better f*** off.” The magic of the Omnicause, I suppose, is you get to rub your face in filth and act like you are Dorothy Parker, largely because the alternative was Kid Rock.

I will close this topic like so: The proper response to whatever junk is being pushed on you and your kids is to… avoid the junk, not find a version of the junk pushed by someone with whom you feel more politically aligned.

Maybe they should put the Grenadier engine back in it

BMW has a stop-sale on the M2, M3, and M4 right now, due to a cause listed in their system as “BEARING SHELL”. This is not good news, and likely very far away from an easy fix. One wonders: Why the hell is it so hard to build an engine lately?

Market’s closed, the moose out front should have told you

Much is being said and written about the interior of the new Ferrari Luce, especially the fact that it was designed by two of Apple’s early i-Whatever people. (It frustrates me to hear Jony Ive described as the iPhone guy; he is the iMac and iBook guy!) Speaking personally, I like the look of it. It’s fundamentally as “anti-screen” as you can be in an EV, with about fifteen more real-world buttons and dials than you can get in a modern Cadillac. It doesn’t look like the interior of a serious Ferrari, but then again this is not a serious Ferrari. It is a golf cart, just like all the other zillion-horsepower EVs out there. At least they aren’t skimping on the stuff you will touch and use.

The real question, I think, is this: What is the market in 2026 for an electric Ferrari? There are probably enough EV-only Eurozone city centers out there to sell some Luces, but otherwise I rather think this will be the first Ferrari since the FF to stall in the showrooms.

Now, since it is a Ferrari, it won’t actually stall. It will simply become… a relationship piece. You’ll buy a Luce at MSRP so you can get a mid-engined car just a bit over MSRP, so you can eventually get a hypercar at any price. Nobody will drive them in public, the same way nobody wore a base Datejust in public back when that was what you had to buy to get a Daytona. (Nowadays, you have to buy five Tudors to get a Datejust!)

One can argue that Ferrari is actually the most logical EV purveyor, since it really only sells toys for people who want to be seen in them. The only question: Who will want to be seen in a Luce, fancy interior or not?

1. “Gaydar” is not a strong suit in my family; my father genuinely thought the Village People were straight, perhaps because he saw people like that running around New York all the time. (Those people were gay.) I bought five Judas Priest albums without realizing that Rob Halford was a friend of Dorothy. In other words, you gotta be a gay motherfucker to strike me as gay. We have an ACF reader, a big German fellow, who had to tell me he was gay three times before I realized he wasn’t kidding. On the other hand, when Dan Neil introduced himself to me during a Fiat event about a decade ago, it was painfully obvious, even to me, that Dan is gayer than Harvey Fierstein singing a show tune. He is gayer than the very gay (and very decent!) fellow I worked for at Road&Track. He is gayer than anyone who got beat up at Stonewall. He is gay, gay, gay. If he told me he was bisexual I would demand a list of women’s names to prove it. GAY.