Wednesday ORT: NYC State Of Dating, Pocket Snitch, Bezel Says No, CeleryStiq Paint

All subscribers welcome

Let’s start with some quasi-commercial messages! If you’re a paid subscriber then you’ve already had the chance to read the fascinating new story by Crabspirits. If you’re not a paid subscriber, now’s the time to start!

Over at the Washington Examiner, I’m writing about the increasing irrelevance of odometer readings.

Last but not least, if you like motorcycles and touring, why not check out this great story by ACF’s own ‘Wing commander!

Taking Lake Superior (by Goldwing), Day 1

Alright, let’s get to it.

Guard your salads like you guard your virtue, men

The internet is aflame over claims that women in New York City are using a new scheme to meet “finance bros”: after observing a handsome and presumably highly compensated target at takeout restaurants, they’re stealing the target’s food, reading the name off the package, then contacting them via LinkedIn to inquire about “getting together to make up for stealing your salad.”

Supposedly, this is because men are no longer willing to approach women in public — and some statistics bear that out, with one outlet reporting that 48% of men aged 18-25 have never approached a woman anywhere but online, if that. I’m not surprised. Especially in the cities, people are working longer hours, socializing less, and devoting more of their time to media consumption.

It’s also true that young women are outpacing young men, career-wise. This is doubly true in urban centers. One thing that has not changed about dating: most women don’t want to waste time on a man who earns less than they do, unless they’re deep into desperate girlboss single-motherhood. (And most men don’t want to ask chicks out on LinkedIn, unless they’re desperately seeking an older-woman-sugar-mommy-life-coach. But I digress.)

Therefore, the “finance bros” are now the male equivalent of supermodels, and can be similarly choosy. It’s an 80/20 world.

Of course, you can be a “finance bro” who is chased by women and still find yourself on the wrong side of The Current Year, as the above screenshots purport to show. In a world where “everything is political”, why be surprised when women want to pre-screen your voting preferences before the first date?

Know your worth, kings. And watch your salads.

Speaking of fast women

Team Avoidable Contact Forever ran with Cincy SCCA this past weekend at Mid-Ohio. Your humble author was very much on form and set to record what would probably be the fastest 1299cc Radical times ever laid down at the track — but what started off as a sixth-gear problem in the PR6 transmission became a 4th/5th/6th gear problem almost immediately. I ran a 1:30 on Club and a 1:29 on Pro, taking 2nd of 7 cars on Saturday and 3rd of 6 on Sunday. I was fastest closed-wheel car of the event on Saturday but on Sunday I was bitch-slapped by the remarkable Mark Mercurio, who ran a 1:28.6. Frustratingly for me, I had a 1:27.8 in the bag before being unable to select fourth gear on the Mid-O back straight.

So my weekend wasn’t perfect, but DG and MDG had better luck. The latter set her best-ever time at Mid-Ohio on Sunday despite a soggy engine. Once we get that addressed I’ll expect her to return to the podium posthaste. Danger Girl, meanwhile, is still running on her dead-stock backup motor while we endure the fifth month of trying to make her Dynotronics-built short-stroke 2.35 Duratec behave. (I’ll be writing about this in full shortly.) Saturday she finished third in class and was balked by traffic, but on Sunday…

Some of you may recall that I was once in the employ of an insurance company. Although I was probably the only employee of said company in history to ever win anything resembling a difficult or challenging race, I was not part of their extremely cringe and embarrassing “Round 3 Racing” efforts in ChampCar. Who knows why they were called Round 3. Probably because that’s when my son would knock any of their sad asses out in a straight boxing match. I was told once that the company spent over two million dollars to basically finish DFL almost every time for multiple seasons. (For the record, I raced ChampCar twice, took an overall win the first time, and got crashed out of 4th place the second time.) They made a documentary about it, too — one that I wouldn’t watch even if you put me in the Clockwork Orange eye-holding-open machine. I don’t know if the “team” is still happening, but all these people are still wearing their free race suits at every opportunity.

Anyway, one of the most grifty wannabes from the “Round 3” team was in Danger Girl’s race group, qualifying 3rd overall to her 4th on Sunday. She went around him into turn 1 on the opening lap — as Christ is my witness, I wouldn’t let a man do that to me in equal machinery, much less a prep-school mom in her forties— then effortlessly held him off for the entire race while she focused on sparring with young Madin Workman in his Miata ahead of her. When the lead car broke, it was her versus Madin for the overall win — and she ran him door-to-door in successive laps before fading back to second. Afterwards, she and Madin chattered like canaries while the Round 3 goof moaned that he’d been “held up”.

“Listen,” I said afterwards, “I’m charmed that you beat Mook or Goof or whatever he’s called so thoroughly. But why didn’t you take the lead from Workman and keep it?” She frowned.

“He’s just a kid. What kid would want to get beaten by some old woman? I couldn’t do it to him. Especially not in front of all his family and friends.” Readers, you can take the prep-school chick out of the Tahoe, but you can’t take the mom out of the racer.

The next sign of the apocalypse

Pocket is a dedicated AI thought companion that captures your ideas seamlessly, helps you stay organized, and reduces mental load—perfect for fast thinkers and neurodivergent minds.

What a great idea! Something that MagSafes to the back of your phone and sends all your conversations to an “AI”. Can you imagine wanting such a thing? I think it’s aimed at girlbosses who can’t remember what they just agreed to do in the meeting because they were also streaming “Love Island” and vaping industrial-strength weed at the same time. For everyone else, The Pocket AI is yet another example of an “AI” device or application with no real market, no real use, and no real reason to exist. As Ted Gioia noted two weeks ago:

Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it? That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet.

They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.

AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it—and more so with each passing month. So the purveyors must bundle it into current offerings, and force usage that way.

I’ve been having some lively conversations with our own Sherman McCoy about the future of “AI”. He points out that there is a trillion-dollar economic engine behind the idea and that therefore it is going to “succeed” whether it has any use or not. If enough investors want something to happen, it doesn’t really matter what the public thinks. The days of America just flat-out refusing something like the videodisc player or Digital Audio Tape are long gone. Nowadays everything is a service and that service can be adjusted to meet the needs of the investors.

The alert reader will point out that we are in the process of seeing just such a broad-scale refusal: to wit, the EV. We will call that the exception that proves the rule. Everything else the lizards want, from low-flush toilets to pro-migrant capeshit, happens instantly and omnipresently.

We’ve already seen how “AI” has made search results worse than meaningless. Is there anything that can be done to stop it? The Magic 8-Ball says no.

This bears watching

didn’t win this one, the same way i didn’t win the competition to be my parents’ favorite child, and for the same reason: low motivation

How bad is the fake-watch problem? From the vaguely and unambitiously adulterous nerds at Hodinkee comes a cautionary tale. Brother Bark has done some shopping at Bezel (getbezel.com) and I’ve been blown out of the water on a few auctions there. He’s also had a recent high-dollar watch purchase fail an authenticator inspection, thankfully before his money cleared out of escrow. So both he and I were interested to hear that

Bezel, an online watch trading platform, reports that it has rejected 27% of the watches it has inspected so far this year as part of its authentication service. The majority of the timepieces that failed the authentication tests were Rolex or claimed to be Rolex watches, the Los Angeles-based company says in a report, highlighting its activities in the first six months of 2025. The high rejection rate, with more than a quarter of the watches transacted on the platform not meeting the standards, indicates that so-called 'Frankenwatches' —watches with non-authentic parts, incorrect components, or outright counterfeits or fraud — remain a significant issue for the secondary watch market.

Of the rejected watches, 38% were listed at prices above $10,000. By brand, Rolex accounted for more than half of the rejections at 57%, as it continued to lead the category, "due to its high market demand and counterfeiting incentive," Bezel says in the report. Omega experienced a steady increase in rejections and took second place, with a 10% share.

I’m not surprised that Rolex leads the fake market, because Rolex leads the real market. In a very real sense, there are two kinds of watch buyers: Rolex buyers and everyone else. The Rolex market is vastly larger than, say, the Grand Seiko market, because Rolex has real social significance outside the horology hobby. Your humble author may enjoy his IWCs and Grand Seikos and MR-Gs, but the man or woman in the street, especially the Chinese or Arabian street, only really understands Rolex.

The Rolex “Superclones” are now good enough to fool some authenticators and pretty much everyone you would meet in real life who isn’t carrying a jeweler’s loupe with them. By contrast, it’s impossible to fake a Grand Seiko spring drive and the only way to fake a GS Hi-Beat is to start with an older Hi-Beat or Zenith El Primero. The Chinese can’t do either technology.

That doesn’t mean you can’t buy GS “tribute” watches. I did, as a matter of fact. Can you spot the difference?

Were I in the market for a Rolex, which will likely never be the case, I wouldn’t do anything besides take delivery in person from an authorized dealer. You might want to approach it the same way.

Standard of the twerked

From a reader comes these detail shots of a CelerystiQ. I mean, what do you want for $350k?

Malcolm Bobbitt’s excellent book about the Silver Shadow and Camargue goes into some detail as to how Rolls-Royce tried to deliver a “perfect” product in the Seventies. It boils down to spending two hours fixing the car for every hour you spent building it. After all, the men of Crewe didn’t have any secret knowledge or techniques that weren’t also known at Mercedes-Benz and elsewhere. What they did have was the time and willingness to make things right. So each Silver Shadow arrived at the dealer with the panels aligned and the paint correct and the interior upholstered flawlessly.

Apparently General Motors can’t be bothered to do the same. It’s like they decided to copy the Tesla Plaid and used Copilot AI to boil “characteristics of the Plaid” down to

• costs a lot of money

• bad panel fit

At $75k you could almost forgive it, although my 2001 Lexus ES300 still has perfect alignment all around the car. At $150k it would be an issue. At $350k? Come on, man!

A final note

If you look at the top of this page you’ll see that we now have a “Fiction” section. I’m pleased to announce that this will be where you will shortly find all of our make-believe stuff… led by a new two-part story from our very favorite distaff contributor, April! See you soon.