Wednesday OT: Help A Cat, How To Upgrade A Range Rover Without Really Trying, MiG-23 Theft, The Chevette You Never Forget

All readers welcome

less pull than blake z rong on a friday night

This marks the first week I’ve gained weight, rather than losing it, in almost a year. I blame environmental factors, institutionalized fatphobia, and the fact that I had chocolate-chip pancakes for breakfast on Saturday morning. Turns out that when you “binge” without the “purge”, you don’t get the results you want. Who’d have thought? Alright, on with the show. Read down the page to find out how to get a free subscription to Avoidable Contact Forever, so you can read the Sunday threads and see all the mean stuff we’re saying about you.

From the people who brought you the “V6” with eight holes in the block

An ACF reader hipped me to oemactivations.com, which specializes in “unlocking” features that are present upon assembly but disabled in many Jaguar Land Rover products. Don’t confuse this with the usual aftermarket turbo-chip-tuning; these folks claim they can give you the factory tune for increased power levels, plus turn on stuff for which your JLR product might already have the hardware sans authorization, like adaptive lights and enabling “memory” for the auto-stop button.

Some of you will remember doing about the same thing with the “VAG-COM” software in various higher-end VW and Audi products back around the turn of the century. I was able to install and activate a Bentley Continental steering wheel and shift paddles in one of my Phaetons plus turn on the astounding rear-facing foglights using the trunk-valet-lock button. They were guaranteed tailgating deterrents, trust me.

Is there an ethical aspect to this? Surely not. Don’t ship me a Range Rover with adaptive lights then tell me I can’t use them. Expect more and more automakers to be exploited by firms like this, especially the EVs. The “jailbreaking” of Teslas to enable the so-called “Full Self Driving” is just the start.

Just because you’re not an insurance executive doesn’t mean you can’t pay for…

An ACF reader is fostering this friendly and needy old tortoiseshell cat. Any current free readers who donate to City Of Elderly Love in the name of “Loopy” and forward it to me at jbaruth@gmail.com will receive a paid subscription to this site for whatever amount you donated to Loopy’s care. Any current paid subscribers who donate will get a 3-for-1 gift subscription to whomever you like, or I’ll extend your existing subscriptions on a 2-for-1 basis. We can’t all be like Snobes, eating a first-rate meal then sleeping all day on an $8000 custom Eames lounger; some animals are lucky to simply get a meal and some medical care. Let’s help this cat get the $500 she needs to have a little dignity and some time without pain or sorrow. Thank you.

The most delightfully toxic masculinity possible

Raul Castro sent a challenging response to the request for family reunification: “If Lorenzo had the pants to leave with one of my MiGs,” he said, “maybe he has the pants to come and get his family.” Inside Cuba, Raul Castro’s assistant explained to Vicky Lorenzo that she and her children would never be reunited with her husband and their father. When she asked why, she was told, “Because you are scum.”

When Major Orestes Lorenzo Perez approached Key West in his Mig-23, having evaded both Cuban radar and American awareness, he waggled his wings to signify friendly intentions before touching down. Immediately he became famous among the Cuban ex-pat community, but when he asked the Cuban government to release his family, Raul Castro told him “Come and take them”.

Which he did, in a 31-year-old Cessna 310 purchased for $30,000 with the aid of fellow Cubans in America. After dropping in on a rarely-used road, he loaded up his wife and two sons at their secret and pre-arranged meeting point before redlining the engines and heading back to the United States. His younger son, 6-year-old Alejandro, was shoeless, because he’d lost his shoes running to the plane.

Those of us who occasionally find it difficult to do what our families need us to do, whether that is holding a job, putting down the bottle, or just saving a bit of good humor for children after a hard or humiliating day, can take inspiration in Major Orestes Lorenzo Perez. The hardest part of what he did, surely, wasn’t the actual rescue mission but rather the year spent planning and working it out. Similarly, the hardest parts of life for most of us consist of merely showing up, merely persisting, on a daily basis. So let’s all keep doing that.

You can hedge your bet / on a clean Chevette

I’ve aroused the ire of a few ACFers by refusing to utterly and completely condemn the humble Chevette, but how can you read a story like the one above without being just a little bit impressed by the General’s humble T-car? Turns out there’s a whole Chevette dyno and modification scene beyond the ice-racing stuff that’s been discussed in here before.

People put LS and SBC engines in them — of course — but there’s also some interest in the 60-degree 3.4-liter GM V-6, which for a long time could surely be had for a price between “free” and “I’ll pay you to take it”.

My favorite videos, however, are the ones where tired old stock ‘Vettes put down dyno numbers between 47 and 24 horsepower. Oh, and there’s this one which is oddly similar to the drag race that ends the first Fast and Furious movie, right now to some near-deadly train-tracks action at the end!

Stop and think for a moment about the fact that we once lived in a world where any young person could buy an old Chevette for a few hundred bucks and instantly have nearly all the freedom of the American road that was available to, say, the owner of a new 560SEL. I spent my youth in the cantankerous companionship of Chevettes. They were everywhere; driven by grandparents and nuns and convicts and people with little left to lose. We drove more slowly then, though we are loath to admit it, and a car that took half a minute to reach 60mph wasn’t such a dangerous thing to own as it would be now.

Hear me now and believe me later, as Hans und Franz used to say: There’s no future for “American mobility” that doesn’t involve the arrival of something like a Chevette. Our current Glorious EV Transition is a rich person’s game at best. I don’t particularly cherish the idea of everyone driving a battery-powered car but it seems obvious to me that something in the $10,000-$15,000 range is necessary to make that happen — and even then it can only happen once you have ten million of those “shitboxes” on the road in the hands of second and third owners.

I used to think the Nissan LEAF might do it, but the LEAF makes a Chevette look like a Pilatus PC-12 in terms of range, power, flexibility, and service life. So we need a Chevette EV. Something you can buy on fast-food wages and effectively use in the difficult and constrained lives often led by the people at the bottom of our economic predation chain.

Of course, if you run the concept of a Chevette through today’s legal and legislative gauntlet, you end up with a… Chevy Trax. Which might be a decent enough vehicle, but who among us thinks they’ll ever feature in a “FATHER VS. SON DRAG RACE”?

Still to come this week

I’m a simple man. When our friend April writes fiction, I publish it. And when one of our most musical ACFers writes a guide to his collection of bass guitars, I publish that, too. So come back tomorrow and Friday for more of what keeps the blues away, alright?