Wednesday ORT: Pebble Screech, Eggs Frozen, Peg Heated, Gs Down Hoes Up

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this michael harley guy would suck a pitbull’s dick if it made someone at pcna happy and that’s on gawd

Good evening, friends. Hope you are enjoying Monterey Car Week. My absence from said event is one of the small measures of grace given to me by God Himself in what would otherwise be a uninterruptedly intolerable existence tempered only by the certainly that I will one day experience the sweet oblivion of death. Now, on the other hand, if you’re doing Woodward Dream Cruise, I’d invite you to join about twenty of your ACF brethren in a parking-lot campout where 97-point cigars will be served, at least one absolutely unprintable tale will be shared, and all builds will definitely not be respected. Paid subscribers should message me via Substack or Instagram for details.

Speaking of Car Week:

Please make it stop, part one

Were you aware that Singer, the freaky-deaky Porsche 964 vandalizers nominally headed by former British buttrocker Rob Dickinson, also makes and sells watches? Well, they do, and these watches are awful. It would be difficult for me to pick my least favorite, but after some fortification via the mighty Yamazaki 18 I was able to look at the website long enough to come up with at least a first guess: the Flytrack Barista.

Release the PR slop:

The most minimalistic celebration of elapsed time calculations dressed in a timeless style. The Flytrack collection, designed to once again reimagine the chronograph, is a celebration of the practicality of a chronograph combined with a specific calibrated scale.

Barista Edition is a creative watch that celebrates elements of Italian culture and lifestyle, featuring the unique one-minute coffee brewing scale.

The Barista scale allowing easy measurement of the extraction time for your favorite coffee style prepared with your espresso machine.

Nominally this is a $42,000 watch, but its immediate predecessor, the Flytrack Cocktail, can be had for 50% of that on Chrono24 and I’d say this one would be lucky to match that level of resale performance.

Who buys Singer watches? Surely it is only the owners of repainted pre-owned 964s Singer cars, right? Because the conversation can only go one way, really:

Doofus A: Is that… a Singer Flyback Starbucks Bathroom Edition?

Doofus B: It certainly is! (Preens lightly)

Doofus A: So… you have a Singer 911, right?

Doofus B: You mean a “Porsche 911 Reimagined By Singer”, of course, right?

Doofus A: I’m very sorry. I’m working on my lack of verbal precision with my therapist.

Doofus B: Me too! Oh my god! Do we have the same therapist? Let’s “dock” for a bit.

Doofus A: Okay, but before we begin: which “Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer” do you have?

Doofus B: Oh, no, I don’t have one of those cars. I just have the watch.

Doofus A: I think I’ll be docking elsewhere.

Now, you might say something in defense of Singer Watches, like, “Okay, so they look like $800 Chinese microbrands minus some of the aesthetic interest, but at least they aren’t chewing up vintage watches to make them, like they do with Porsche 964s.” But, sir, you would be wrong! Because they are doing exactly that!

after and before they fucked it up

The Valjoux 236 was a low-ish-grade column-wheel chronograph made from 1974 to not much longer after 1974. The arrival of quartz watches killed entry-level Swiss mechanicals dead so apparently there’s a whole sack of “new old stock” 236es somewhere. Some of them were recently used by Nivada Grenchen for a “Broad Arrow” costing five thousand dollars. Raymond Weil used a few more for a special edition watch featuring a white gold bezel, priced around eleven thousand dollars.

Naturally the Singer costs more — the cheapest watch with this reanimated cheapie beating inside costs sixteen grand. Of all the watches you could buy with sixteen thousand dollars, this should not be one.

Whew! Sure glad we are done with the Singer news for today.

Make it stop, part two

“This unique and remarkable adventure began with a request for a dashboard clock for a car reimagined by Singer,” said Jean Arnault, Louis Vuitton Watch Director. “In addition to the design and production of this clock by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton workshops in Switzerland, it quickly became apparent to us that this collaboration with Singer could extend to the personalization of every functional element of the vehicle, enhancing them through our expertise in leather craftsmanship and watchmaking.”

Surely no one is buying this insanely stupid and intelligence-insulting origin story for the Porsche 911 Revandalized By Singer For Louis Vuitton. To begin with, why would Singer be asking Louis Vuitton for a dashboard clock, when they (as we just learned!) have their own clock-makin’ operation?

The cars are the Trump International Hotels of Porsche 964s Repainted By Singer, if that isn’t too unkind to the Trump hotels, which can actually be decent if you’re in a certain mood.

The coupe looks stupid enough, with its Loooou-ee leather box on the roof rack, but the convertible is a hitherto unforeseen low point in rear-engined automobiles. For some reason, they’ve done an impact-bumper look (ON A 964!!!) with gold plating, something that wasn’t even contemplated by Porsche dealers in 1981 when it would have made a sort of despicable sense. It has a “Carrera tail”, familiar (and triggering) to old men like me from the years when Porsche dealers would slap them on every 911SC that failed to leave the dealership within 23 hours of coming off the delivery truck, usually without any sort of airdam up front to balance it out.

It has awful leather trunk straps and awful fake Fuchs deep-dish wheels and what looks like yacht decking on the cabriolet top cover and I just can’t go on. This car looks like it should be in the DirectTV “Oligarch” ad:

Is this where we are as a society? Just for fun, let’s roll the tape of all the shaft-licking the media was forced to do on these two absolutely inexcusable exercises in public nuisance:

“Extraordinary” — Michael Harley, Forbes

“Very cool” — Mark Vaughn, Autoweek

“The apotheosis of bespoke” — Jason Barlow, Top Gear

“Luxury is an understatement” — Autoevolution

“Chic” — Car and Driver

I was initially very excited about the Bloomberg headline,

because it suggested that I would have a chance to watch “Singer Vehicle”, the company, founder, meaning sink or fail completely, on the Louis Vuitton partnership. Unfortunately, the link takes you to an advertorial where you get two hear two morons try to sell you this junk; one of them is the founder of Singer, the aforementioned buttrocker.

Leggo her eggos

back when they were fresh

“Don't be weird about this, even though I know all of you will be,” Representative Ocasio-Cortez said, immediately before recording herself as she injected fertility hormones into her bared belly. At the age of 36, the popular actress/bartender/politician has decided to freeze her eggs. At the same time, she revealed that she had broken up with her white ginger boyfriend a little while ago. The two had gotten engaged in 2022, but Ms. Ocasio-Cortez apparently decided her “war on whiteness” had to be fought on the home front as well. Supposedly, she is now on Hinge. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” she said, referring to the whole egg-freezing thing but perhaps also referring to her upcoming “bop phase”. Your humble author has noted many such cases of women in their thirties saying something similar before entering their “bop phase”.

For the record, I have no issue with the representative’s decision. Statistically, about one in twenty of the women who freeze their eggs will ever unfreeze them; it is the female equivalent of the male “I’m buying a Jeep to go overlanding in the West.” I think she would be better off using the eggs in their current condition. Surely she would have no trouble finding a compelling man among the ranks of 35-year-old Democrat dudes, right? Right?

We can all quit the guitar now

Your humble author used to play a stripped-down version of Steely Dan’s “Peg” in my lunchtime gigs. There is a limit to how far you can strip said tune down; I think my arrangement still used about eighteen chords, most of which were fairly elaborate. But while I was stripping down, Kent Nishimura was amping up.

Yes, he does most of the Jay Grayson solo, while playing the bass part at the same time.

This is a remarkable achievement and also a nice arrangement of the tune on its own merits. Like all such performances, it relies on your memory of the original tune to fill in the gaps, but that is not a criticism as much as it is just an observation. Nishimura develops a unique tuning layout for each of his songs; it simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

In a perfect world, Kent would follow the infamous Icelandic immortal, Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir, along the same path from “first rate covers” to “first rate originals.” Here’s hoping. The only thing better than hearing this level of talent devoted to my favorite tunes would be hearing this level of talent devoted to the creation of great new music.

Sisters are doing it for themselves… no, wait, they’re doing it for us

“Stay at home boyfriends” are the newest trend, and the newest labor statistics bear this out: for just the third time in American history and the first time since the Second World War, there are more women in the workforce than men. Expect this trend to accelerate, because women are more prevalent in fast-growing sectors (healthcare, education, prostitution) while men are increasingly confined to declining sectors (manufacturing, automotive journalism, three-card-monte street scams).

It should be noted that Wes Siler led the trend here, the same way he claims to have led the trend in armored motorcycle jackets and stabbing bears. (Warning: reading that article will make you laugh so hard you might experience your own “I Can’t Breathe” moment.) Siler, to my knowledge, has always depended on his wife to pay the bills so he can be free to stab bears and get vasectomies. Those of us who have chosen to emulate him, including your humble author who has barely averaged 25 hours of quasi-legitimate work per week since leaving NVIDIA, are merely following in his footsteps. In fact, we can see only one set of footprints on the beach, because when we got tired, Wes carried us while waving the turkey fan. Do we have time for the story of Wes’s turkey fan? Of course we do:

For Thanksgiving last year, a bunch of us went up to Big Sur and camped at a remote wilderness site on top of those mountains. A native american girl showed up, mourning her old horse with an acid trip, and spent the night sleeping in one corner of our campsite. In the morning, she woke up, handed me this, explained that she’d made it from the feathers of turkeys and pheasants and the skin of a doe, all of which she’d killed herself, then just wandered back into the forest.

It’s a fan priestesses use to wave smoke into the face of people during ayahuasca ceremonies. One of those was one of the most powerful experiences of my life, giving me the balls to quit that toxic job and launch a new career as an outdoors writer.

Everyone believes that happened, right?

While it might have been the ayahuasca that gave Wes the balls to quit his “job” as a part-time Internet scribbler, the money that let him do it came from his wife. Oddly enough, I think his wife also requested that he disconnect his balls, medically, so she didn’t accidentally conceive his daughter during one of the weird MMF things he used to hint at on social media — but that, friends, is a story for another ayahuasca ceremony.

The important part here is that today’s young men need to stop worrying about fulfilling their career dreams and start worrying about how to land the career woman who will free them up to participate in the most common activities of their generation: gooning, listening to Joe Rogan, Polymarket, therapy, SSRIs, and sim racing. One excellent candidate, who will no doubt continue to earn millions of dollars a year in ways that can’t really be explained by “Morning Joe”: newly single, and recently frozen-yet-unthawed-at-the-same-time, Representative Ocasio-Cortez. City boys up!