Open to all subscribers, focusing on this week's competition results, the ridiculous "lease scheme" on the 911 S/T, two fallen justice-reform leaders, and recent Countach purchases
If I were ever to buy a Countach, it would be to satisfy 12y/o me who had a Countach picture on the bedroom wall. Just like I’d sleep with Britney Spears today because 16-22y/o me would have loved to.
The fact that neither of those things is desirable to do today is irrelevant; like cocaine, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
These old exotics is one place I might blaspheme and take it away from stock, at least on the engine internals to breathe more horsepower into them or improve the cooling system, etc to improve reliability.
I'm dreaming of an S1 Esprit with a Honda K motor in it. Unfortunately, that's not the sort of phrase that rolls off Bing Crosby's tongue, just like it probably won't ever happen for me in real life, but still.
I know someone who bought FOUR S1s and I don' t think he paid over 15k for any of them. If you ever get serious about this ridiculous idea I'll put you in touch!
This is that guy in the Toledo area, right? It's an idea so insane that I could make it work in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future. I will keep this in mind when I get serious about it!
The one Lamborghini I have driven was a lot of fun, but not my favorite, even in a green Spyder configuration. I would say I was a poseur, but I tolerated the label briefly.
I’ve no idea. I mean you can play that game forever; why buy an Aventador when you could have a Z06 and $300k in cash? I’m guessing that Dougie bought his because of some combination of “quirks and features!” and expected future value. I am poor enough to congratulate myself on living in a house that’s worth ~Countach money, I don’t dream big enough to pick and choose between Lambos.
I'm interested in how MLB is going to react? Bauer seems to be doing okay and making fans in Japan but now that he's shown the receipts and proven that he was set up, will anyone sign him here? Also, she wasn't a gold digger, she was a criminal.
I wouldn't buy a Countach cause it's just too tacky and the driving experience sounds awful. I wouldn't buy a Ferrari because I don't want to be associated with anyone who does. I wouldnt buy a Corvette because I'm a middle age guy and I'd be laughed at by everyone who knows me. I've got lots of reasons for spending or not spending dough.
The key to owning a Corvette is not giving a shit what other people think, just enjoy the driving experience. And don’t hang out with other Corvette owners.
Shortly after I bought it, I took my low-mileage, no options 2008 C6 to a Corvette gathering, or rally if you will, in Telluride. Driving over Red Mountain Pass in the Fall with 50 other Corvettes was a quite a scene, literally stopped traffic in places.
Socializing with the other owners was like being dropped into a Caste society where drivers of the (then) rare C8 were the Brahmins who trailered their 'Vettes to Telluride. Of course, I was treated like an Untouchable forced to actually drive my C6 up from Denver. The only genuine people who I spent more than a minute talking to drove their well-patinaed C2 convertible up from Pueblo. I thought they had the most interesting car there that day. That was the first and likely last association for me with a "Corvette Club". Just got a feeling that a lot of those Brahmins didn't even like cars especially, they seemed to like being a big fish in a small tank.
Yup, clubs can ruin whatever they intend to celebrate.
Love the C6 and would much rather have one than a C8. As a fellow C7 owner once told me, “I’m sure the C8 is a nice car, but it’s just not a Corvette anymore “.
I'll never be able to afford an LC500, but I have seen prices on 90s SC300s and SC400s and those are very reasonable. And still Toyotas with arguably peak Toyota reliability.
Have you considered the SC430? That bathtub convertible from 2002-08?
Like a Japanese SL500; again without the maintenance costs. Hard to find, but inside a nice one is a lovely place to be.
Allegedly the styling team was sent to yacht design school because Lexus wanted some sort of nautical influence on their design language. That would explain the chrome side strakes on the mirror caps -- they were supposed to remind you of the side stays on a main mast.
When I was younger I thought they were rather ugly, almost a little bulbous and geriatric looking. Now I don't think they're so bad (and the interiors are very nice places to sit), but I like the older coupes better for two reasons: I still think they're prettier, and if I were to drive one across the country there's a usable trunk for luggage and souvenirs. I know I could put baggage on the little "seats" behind the driver and passenger, but I'd rather have that stuff hidden.
SC430s have reached the stage of “they look so weird that now they’re cool”. I kind of like them now. There’s actually many nice examples out there because the old people who bought them babied them.
I think they made them until 2011, and the later versions look a little better. Last car sold in the US with an in dash cassette player. Some great color choices, too.
True. But nobody buys it for the weight. I had no idea myself until you posted this and I had to go look it up. Same with horsepower -- and even then the quoted figures from multiple sources never agree. Or 0-60 times. Or skidpad numbers.
But go sit in it and drive it and listen to that exhaust sound and all is forgiven.
C6 Z06 (lowered) or C7 Z06 in black, or pick your meanest color. I, too, am aware of various stigmas as a nearly-middle-aged man, even if a stock C6 with a manual in good shape in dark red or a nice color is a perfectly good car in its own right. The chrome wheels, loud colors, and tacky "mods" are what really sink them. I can really only "practically" afford LT1/LT4 C4s, which means Optispark for me again, but I really like C4s.
Sometimes I like the idea of having a C4 Gran Sport. I like the color scheme and the black rims, but that dark purple color on like a '95 or '96 with a 6-speed would be just as good. I'd take a coupe over a convertible. Corvettes may come with a questionable image but I like them better than Porsches, Ferraris, etc.
I saw a beautiful example of a C4 Gran Sport this summer at a car show. The blue is stunning. The interior was black with the super cool asymmetric-patterned leather seats. Since black wheels continue to be played out, I'd be happy with GS blue and the salad shooter / turbine wheels. Dark purple, too. Coupe with the glass roof, no 'vert, though the convertibles look just fine.
Thank you!! Bookmarked the link. For all my future projects that "just need money" first. This is actually quite attainable since LS-swapping is a lot more and I'd just like to keep the stock setup in there and going. Now I need to go find my '97 Z28 (T56) that I traded in four years ago...
I would do a phenomenal restomod. Why follow the herd?
My latest restomod idea is a ‘67 Eldorado converted to rear wheel drive with a V12 under that long hood. Cadillac explored putting a V12 in the Eldorado, I would actually do it if I had FU money.
Which V12? Wonder if the Falconer V12 would fit... and of course there's already a YT video covering a 1958 Lincoln convertible with a Falconer installed. Never mind.
I think for most this just comes down to if you want a performance car, or do you want to relive your childhood fantasies. There's part of me that wants an E46 M3 or B6 RS4 (or a Phaeton), but I know I'm better off getting a new 5.0 Mustang for the money, even if it's not what I wanted in high school
I still want an 88 Mustang GT convertible. Not because it is a great car or a fast one. I want it because 16 year old me wanted one so badly I could taste it.
I'm pretty convinced you could time the classic car market as being 30 +/- years as your cohort graduated high school. I graduated in '93 and have been musing '93 Mustang GTs, the 93 Prelude, 93 SVX and 93 Corrado.
There is a guy in Atlanta who is always swapping in and out of exotic cars. At the moment, he has several toys, including an Aventador SVJ with a Gintani exhaust. I have never heard a louder street car, and bear in mind that I drive a straight piped GT3…
From what I can tell, he likes to drive around at redline at 1 AM every other day or so.
A good number of the Aventador owners I've met are Asian small business (nail salon, restaurant) owners who are in their fifties. Skimped all their lives, now blindsided by memento mori, splurged on a Lambo to distract themselves.
One of my acquaintances, upon seeing the assemblage, commented, "are Aventadors the easiest supercar to obtain?" YES.
Some Indian billionaire with a Bollywood actress wife in his Lamborghini just killed a Swiss billionaire and his wife in a Ferrari in Sardinia. They were all on some kind of billionaire’s club drive. (That sentence was the grammatical equivalent of the Indian billionaire’s driving)
The Indian is being investigated for “road homicide.”
As usual, the Daily Mail has the video.
The Swiss couple in the Ferrari burned to death, the Italian occupants of a camper van who were in the way of the billionaire’s procession were injured, but not badly.
I’ve said it before, but what these people hope to get by buying these cars is something that can’t be bought. They might be rich, but they’ll never be cool. It’s like Bezos with that used-up harridan. He might laugh at my relative poverty, but I’m laughing right back at him.
You know, if we were in high school together, we'd have either been inseparable best friends or mortal enemies, I don't think there's any in between. I mean, a Fifth Element quote? My hope is that we'd have been best friends.
I think the years of hard work and building a massive business allows you to act like a clown a bit. What's the point of all that money if you can't burn some of it on fun? I'm not denying some of the comments, but I'd do stupid stuff too if I were that rich. But I would never own a boat.
I rather liked that bit about how "...Zuckerberg's billions couldn't get him any better than a Shanghai Hard 4 who didn't respect him enough to take his name."
May 2005, That's how they roll in Italy. Maybe the investigation will end in 2034.
Williams object to court closure on Senna's death
Italian state prosecutor requests halt to long-running proceedings
The manslaughter trial following the death of the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna in the San Marino grand prix 11 years ago may be over finally after an Italian state prosecutor yesterday asked for proceedings to be halted because time had run out to press charges under the terms of a statute of limitations.
Senna, three times a world champion, was 33 when his Williams-Renault FW16 ran off the circuit at 195mph at the Tamburello left-hander on Imola's Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari while leading the third round of the 1994 championship. He died later of head injuries in hospital in Bologna.
The cause of the accident aroused much speculation and Patrick Head, the Williams team's technical director, and his then chief designer Adrian Newey, now technical director at McLaren, were charged with manslaughter.
I saw a Ferrari 355 roll through our nice little downtown area and let off a few very nice sounding revs on main street while out for dinner with my wife. Also got to see a white Testarossa in my neck of the woods a few years ago. Both times, I was much more excited and the cars had a lot more real world presence than any number of modern Ferraris/Mclarens/etc that I've seen rolling around. Ditto the early 80s (rwd) Lesabre I passed in traffic one morning, so much more authority/presence on the street versus say, a brand new S-class. Something to be said about crisp uncluttered styling whether its a sports car or big luxury sedan.
Love 355s. Drove NSXs on occasion while an Acura dealer lot boy in college. I still have the tape-on windshield stock number from a black/black '01 NSX-T 6-speed we had. NSX forever.
Down the street from my office, there’s a veterinary clinic where--ever since my first visit to this town ~8 years ago--has sat an abandoned red early model NSX. I’d like to buy it, but the tires rotted in the Obama admin and it’s a veritable basket case I’m certain. I’d at least like to know the story.
Living in a spot with a lot of the modern stuff (we have Ferarri, McLaren, Aston, and many more dealers on the main drag), I think the well maintained 80s and 90s stuff turns more heads if that's your thing. Jack and others may disagree, but I'd think that they may be more entertaining to drive on our roads too since they don't have that crazy warp speed performance of modern cars. When I get to driving around my dad's '98 SL 500, I find it much more satisfying than the modern ones as it still has that mechanical feel, and the performance is accessible - I won't be dead and off the road when I floor it
“ it still has that mechanical feel, and the performance is accessible ”
That’s it right there and it applies to both cars and motorcycles for me. Which is why I’m (sort of) on the hunt for some flavor of 80s/90s fair weather commuter car. The most fun/engaging drive I’ve had in years was in a ‘85 Prelude S (the base twin carb model) I test drove about 5 years ago. I should have bought it.
I think the nice *looking* ones are cheap. A truly well sorted one that's had maintenance kept up on, good parts used, etc, is a 12-15k car (I guess within the grand scheme of things that is pretty cheap). What I'd personally really love is a W126 560 SEC hardtop
I'm with you on the 560SEC, but the R129s feel like a much more modern car. Not today's fancy tech, but the 80s Mercs still have a bit of a vintage feel. It's how I got my dad to go with the SL500 over a 560SL. Properly sorted you're likely over 20 for one with low miles and all records, the cheaper ones tend to need some work and likely on the top hydraulics which are complicated and EXPENSIVE
I spotted a 308 Dino on the backroads of NorCal a few years ago and thought it looked cooler than most of the exotics nowadays. I know that car doesn't get a lot of love, but at least it was distinctive. so many modern exotics look like bars of soap to my eye.
There are more wealthy people than ever before, thanks to vampire-squid behavior that drains the middle class of meaningless shit like home ownership and medical coverage so the 0.1% can live, laugh, and love.
.....live, laugh, love. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I detect some sarcasm there.
I'm always a bit baffled when you can be poor anywhere and collecting, you stick it out in a dangerous place. Because they look and sound like you? Those are the people making it a dangerous place. When push comes to shove, that person that looks and sounds like you is going after you anyways.
Your (2.) is usually given out in the annual Darwin Awards.
I was less talking about the still poor people who live in bad neighborhoods, which is usually because what little support they have is also there. But more talking about people who could live in a decent neighborhood but choose to be in the "hip area" (e.g. Bed-Stuy 15 years ago) then bitch about their car and house being broken into or getting robbed on the street.
I read a story about Ice Cube a long time ago, about how he wanted to be true to his roots and stay in the hood. Then he discovered he was constantly being robbed and got the fuck out. I sure as heck wouldn't stay either.
I get "remembering where you're from" in the sense that you shouldn't let money and success turn you into a giant douche or a turd sandwich (or a giant douche IN a turd sandwich), but that's a little different from getting out of the hood and never looking back!
I remember being a college kid at NYU in the early 2000s and a guy coming out of an alley telling us he’d stabbed someone and for us to help him check if he was all right. I quickly kept walking and pulled the Nokia brick out of my pocket and my two idiot friends stopped to talk to the admitted knifer! They finally moved away and felt bad about not checking on the alley “victim”! My response “You fuckers the only person stabbed in that alley would have been one of us“
I usually had heat on me in college. Nobody knew, and nobody needed to. But I wasn't about to take night classes, then walk all the way to the train station without one of my little friends.
Praise the Lord I never needed it, but I often forgot it was there.
It was more the Bloomberg times than Rudy's, but it definitely has been all downhill since with DiBlasio and now Adams. Covid absolutely ruined it, and here we are. Even keep my head on a swivel on the Upper East Side nowadays.
Spoken like someone who doesn't t remember the Dinkins regime.
Giuliani, somehow, did the heavy lifting, and Bloomberg for his faults did well to build on it .
By Giuliani's second term my Long Island friends, and bizarrely some of my new Ohio friends, could complain about how the city, by which they mean Manhattan, had lost its "grittiness".
It was a popular sentiment for people who had not witnessed homicides during the bad old days to express.
Most of these people also thought "Rent" was brilliant.
It’s because I don’t remember Dinkins, I was a baby! I’m in my early 30s, so I really only started experiencing NYC on my own during the Bloomberg years. I grew up in NJ with a father who commuted into NYC everyday so I was always around the city. I meant moreso that by the time Bloomberg was mayor, that Rudy had done the heavy lifting and Manhattan was safe to roam.
I will say that anyone who complains that Manhattan has lost its grittiness deserves to get squeegee manned or just hit with a 2x4.
What I always tell people who weren't there is this: 87 people died in the Happy Land fire. Since it was arson those are all considered murders. Had the fire not occurred 1990 still would have had a record number of homicides at 2605, or 2518 if you set aside Happy Land, eclipsing 1989's 2246, although 1991 was similar at 2571. It's gotten sketchy recently but it really does not compare to the bad old days.
Jeez! Murders measured in the thousands?? Where I live now I don't think we've had a thousand murders in our entire history. Back home in Toledo I'm pretty sure it would take decades to achieve those kinds of numbers! I know New York's population is huge, but that's a staggering amount of lost life.
I grew up outside of Albany, and had a father that did the M-F commute for work amongst other things for a number of years. I went to the city for the first time around 6 or 7 which was early 90s for the Christmas show at Radio City, I was very excited to go down there and was very upset to find out we would be dropped off right in front of the Music Hall to enjoy the show and then get straight back onto the bus. Little did I know what was going on all around me.
It wasn't until I was in middle school that I would experience the city via track meets at the 168th Street Armory and sneaking out to get something to eat which looking back was probably not smart even in the Bloomberg years.
Rudy cleaned it up and took (and still takes) the heat for it. Bloomberg turned it into an expensive amusement park for tourists and sink for foreign cash.
My favorite stat was that police shootings went down significantly under Giuiani compared to the Dinkins administration but you wouldn't know it from the narrative.
They imagine NY through Scorsese films, romantically. In their minds they are NPCs who observe and are thrilled, but never catch a stray bullet, don't get mugged, and don't have to worry about money.
I would suggest that the three people who were fatally attacked were Darwin recipients, they put too much trust that us mere mortals wouldn’t have given to their attackers.
The world is an ugly, dangerous place full of ugly, dangerous people, and the only way the good guys can survive is by being scarier monsters than the villains.
Modern Marvel did Punisher wrong: his dead wife came back to life, nagged him about his vengeance, berated his toxic masculinity, divorced him and took half his shit, and destroyed all his weapons caches. Then the writer had him off himself after putting him through a Red China-style struggle session. I wish I was making that all up. But there's a reason I went with John Matrix and not him. I think I could pull off the camo face paint better than the white skull t-shirt, too.
Modern marvel has done everyone wrong. The woke crowd took over comics awhile ago. I don't consider anything written in the last 20 years minimum as canon.
Batman is arguably complicit in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people because of his misplaced nobility.
Personally, I think the Greatest Joker Story Ever Told would see the Clown Prince of Crime face down in his own blood at a gas station after trying to carjack some Nobody with carry permit.
I don't know how many women have been robbed, raped, and murdered (often dragged off to someplace to never be seen again) because they thought it was perfectly safe to hang out, DRUNK in front of a bar at 2AM. Like 'I am woman hear me roar' when they end up probably screaming in fear and agony as they get the life beat out of them.
There is nothing so stupid as any woman who thinks she's a match for a man when it comes to fighting for your life.
Except for perhaps Ryan.
Back when I was Ryan's age I was in damn near perfect shape. I -taught- martial arts and sparred regularly. I also went armed damn near everywhere. Even with all of that -I- wouldn't go anywhere in Bud-Stuy at three in the fucking morning. (I used to know two cops who worked there, we called it Bed-Sty back then - the stories!)
I sure as hell wouldn't be taking public transit on the way home from a wedding and even LESS SO if I had a woman with me. And that's ANYWHERE - not just there. I'm surprised that any woman would even put up with this shit!
Why the hell couldn't this idiot take Uber? Or get a cab? Or make prior arrangements for a limo?
Step one in winning any deadly confrontation IS NOT TO GET INTO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!
Hopefully his girlfriend will date a MAN in the future and not a little boy. But somehow I doubt she'll learn the lesson. She's just lucky that the guy didn't decide he wanted a little rape to go with his murder.
There was a narrative in the past few years that NYC was thoroughly gentrified. That combined with general unawareness contributes to this. But this whole nighttime, taking public transportation in bed sty as upper middle class folk is glaringly stupid.
Was talking to a girlfriend of a friend, who moved into that area and I told her flat out she was crazy. I don't care how much better you think it may be now (it isn't) but with the government of NYC no longer putting violent felons in jail, and in fact turning them back out on the streets immediately, you don't go out there if you're not packing heat. Period. Notice no one is jailing the criminals with guns - so why would they bother you?
The problem with packing heat in NY, or Chicago in my case, is you'll be convicted by a jury of your "peers." It's not Texas. It's better than being dead but your life is still over. I have my ccl and barely carry cause the Illinois legislature would love nothing better than to throw a married father of three in jail for a long time on some bullshit technical violation.
Forget packing heat in NYC. You pretty much can't carry a handgun in NY, CT, or NJ unless you're a cop, so it's pretty easy to nail you on that technical violation if you use it to protect yourself. It's one of the big reasons why I don't have a handgun. There's no good use for it up north.
I subscribe to the theory that when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, almost everybody lived in small towns and your "peers" were people who'd known you your whole life and could make a reasonably accurate judgment of your actions, not a dozen random dipshits off the street who're your "peers" only in the All Men Are Created Equal sense.
Taking public transit (other than Taxi's) after dark pretty much died with COVID. No-one we're close with in the city (or suburbs) will get on the trains after dark, or really outside of rush hour.
But the idea that NYC was gentrified thoroughly definitely took hold pre covid. Now old grimy NYC is striking back with a vengeance on these young, new transplants who buy into this woke stuff.
"There was a narrative in the past few years that NYC was thoroughly gentrified." well, manhattan anyhow. it was pretty much true under bloomberg in a lot of neighborhoods. definitely not true now.
The woman in the Ryan Carson stabbing basically just stood there, 1 foot distant, during the entire altercation--not even running away, as her boyfriend got stabbed to death.
Personally trying to figure out the right level of privilege to give my children. They should have some real world experience but the right level? I don't know.
Mine is a dodo bird. It's not a great outcome but the product of choosing to live on only very high trust places, and they don't allow school yard fight anymore.
I'm insistent on sending mine to a primary school where they'll fight on the playground. I did both and the hoity toity one was miserable. Politics was not something I could fathom at primary school age so I was left to fend for myself
Me, I'd try to get them up to speed as fast as possible without warping them. They're gonna be adults soon enough. Might as well hit THAT ground running.
But my opinion's just academic, because I don't have kids.
I can’t remember the book, but there was a writer who made situational awareness a game with his young kids. He didn’t treat it as a threat assessment to scare the kids, it was more of noticing who was around you as kind of a people watching game. Keeping it fun as to what various people were doing. Then he advanced to being aware of the room or public space they were in, then quizzing the kids on if they had to leave by not using the way they entered, how would they do it? Not telling the kids the possible reasons or threats which would cause them to leave, just always making a game out of it. I thought that was smart.
If I were sending mine to public school I certainly would.
That said, in 20 years this entire country will be an open air pri.... uhh, public school. Hope folks are following Tucker Max (of all people!)'s lead on this:
I think it's good to be prepared, and good to have taken a couple of hits to the face so you know what that's like.
That being said, I've witnessed a few fights to extreme conclusions, usually in the course of extracting my tax money back from the State via overnight housing, and anybody who is conditioned to "fight" up to a draw or hold will have a tough time of it. If you're having a punch-up in the fraternity house, you fight fair. Otherwise? I've never been in a friendly sparring match with a competent martial artist that wouldn't have ended almost immediately if I put a pen into one of their eyeballs.
Fights in prison are generally defined by trying to get the other person's face or head into contact with an environmental object like a sink or a windowsill or the edge of a bed frame.
I don't know that it's actual privilege since the real NYC privileged types would never put themselves in that situation - the driver would've picked them up from the wedding. They were likely transplants indoctrinated into those "luxury beliefs" and faking the privilege she thinks she deserves because of her fancy "education"
She lives in another reality. She also didn't care. She didn't bend over to check on him, she stood there and said 'are you alright'? No emotion. I've seen better behavior out of sociopaths. She just didn't care what happened to him. AT ALL.
She wasn't even all that shocked when he came back at her and spit in her face after just wasting her boyfriend. Notice that she didn't even call 911, much less try to help him or run away. The OTHER woman had to call 911, who she told to 'watch him'. That's right she told the other woman to watch the man who killed her boyfriend rather than to say - help her.
She'll be over it in a few days, I'm sure. If she isn't already.
A biologist friend of mine once explained to me that freezing up in situations like this a third, and a vestigial reaction—hiding.
Or possibly just shock. It’s very possible it’s the first time she’s witnessed violence. I’ve been on the wrong end of being punched several times and didn’t realize until minutes later that I was actually in a fight.
"Avoiding confrontation" was something that popped into my mind earlier today.
I slowed for a yellow and some old dude on his boomer chariot right on my tail wasn't a fan of that. If he hopped off his bike and stood in front of my door, I'd be locked in. Can't get out of the car or move around the car, but he could punch in.
I grew up in a very anti-carry state. And have lived in one that used to allow open carry and is now also very anti-gun. Thing is, everything is a weapon. If used properly.
Reminds me of George Carlin, talking about strangling a pair of stewardesses with really big hands, or beating someone to death with the Sunday NY Times.
I think it would have been too easy to rile him into violence. Looked like one of those pretend tough guys with his Harley-mandated leather jacked and minimum legal size helmet.
I once had a guy behind me freak out when I stopped on a yellow and he didn’t like it. When it was safe to do so, I ran the red light and got out of there.
I decided to tempt fate and drive away slowly and nearly keep pace with the van in the left lane. Wannabe biker dude didn't appreciate that and split the lane under full power.
I saw a guy lose his shit and get out of his car when I had the nerve to stop for an ambulance crossing the intersection in front of us with lights and sirens. He somewhat came to his senses and sped off while I was debating flight or fight.
Just like when someone tailgates me, I always lose a few mph and go the exact same speed as the guy next to me just to drive the point home. I am not a left lane driver. I pass and move back so it takes effort to tailgate me. "I'm 30 back in line dude, we aren't going anywhere wait your turn" I'm less passive aggressive than I used to be cause there's kids in the car now.
The other day on my way lunch the next town over, a boomer on a harley came flying up behind me on the 3 mile, arrow straight speed-trap road I was on. He was right on my bumper and turned on his brights. My V1Gen2 was blipping Ka and steadily getting stronger, an indication the town Marshall is fishing.
I popped my flashers, slowed and got over on the shoulder, and he went blasting by downshifting as he passed to express displeasure at me only going 5 over the admittedly low 45 mph speed limit.
Sixty seconds later, I see red and blues turn on and go after the biker.
Oh, jeez - I didn't realize we were talking about Bed-Stuy. I remember all the horrible weight the name "Bed-Stuy" carried back in the 80s, and I'm from northern New Jersey.
There are plenty of ways to spend money. Some people buy a too big and gaudy house. Some buy a dumb old car. Sounds like DeMuro has enough money to buy a Countach and an LMP car. Mocking the guy serves no purpose IMO.
"Some people buy a too big and gaudy house" My neighborhood is going through this. Building the largest most hideous mansions I have ever seen. People with more money than tastes.
I had a relative who made a bunch of money in a business bought out by a Fortune 100. Built a house totaling over 20,000 square feet for himself and new GF. Sold it three years later. At some point it was occupied by Shaquille O'Neal. Dumbest thing I ever saw. He blew through ALL the money in about 20 years.
My parents’ house is about 5400, for just them (I have no siblings and haven’t lived there for any regular length of time since 2021). It’s excessive, and far too much to clean. Really, it was too big even when I *did* live there: 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, a 900 square foot “bonus room” I called my bedroom. For three people, a dog, and two cats. Id be happy with something half its size.
I’ve got 3x floors of 1500 each. Perfect. 1 floor of bedrooms, 1 floor of living space and kitchen and 2 offices, and 1 basement with a little bit of finished space and lots of storage for bins and unused exercise equipment and pool table and the like.
My parents is 7500. It’s ridiculous but they bought it during the last crash. If my mom and wife got along, id knock mine down live there for a year and build something a bit bigger on my lot.
For someone who made their money through business and likely had no fame, I have no idea. I can see it for celebrities though. They basically can't leave the house without causing a circus, so things like gyms and movie theaters come to them.
Really dumb is building a castle surrounded by thatch mud huts, relatively speaking. If you sell it down the road, if you have the only castle you will not get castle prices.
You build your castle near the edge of all the current ones.
Scott, it the Cardinal Rule, never build/own the most expensive house in the neighborhood. Exception, in McLean Va you buy a 2,500 sqft 1950’s executive home for $1.5M and tear it down and build a 10,000 sqft 2023 $5M executive home that does not hold a candle to quality of construction of the home you tote down.
Nah, you'll win in the end, Jack. After you die, you're probably looking at a few months in Purgatory performing some Sisyphus-like task until you've learned your lesson, then it's on to peace, joy, and eternal communion with the Lord our God. DeMuro's headed for Hades, where he will be sodomized by a demon with an earth auger for all eternity.
These whitelibs obviously never read Richard Wright's Native Son. Sic semper whitelibbus.
Wow. Am I really this mean-spirited? Or have I just had a bad week? Crap, it's only Wednesday.
Not just any Monte Carlo. A mid-90s Monte Carlo, with that crazy Twin Dual Cam V6 where GM stuck 4-valve DOHC heads on the old 60-deg V6, where the intake manifold must come off in order to even see the back bank of plugs.
I'm sure my Purgatory experience will be far worse. Jesus loved his enemies while they were driving nails into his hands and feet. Whereas I'm a misanthrope who struggles to love people who supported mask mandates, or who won't turn right on red.
Or those who blindly insist on driving at or below the speed limit, no matter traffic conditions, visibility, or LEO presence! (If a sign was posted on the highest bridge in Toledo stating “Jump Off This Bridge” instead of a speed limit, there’d be several suicides a week!)
the miura was a usable fast car. luggage space for 2 even. daily driver/occasional racer for me (for 2 laps till the brakes disappeared). countach was a HUGE disappointment. not enuf room for me and thoroughly impractical. what a shame. dailydriving the miura gave me a sixpack at 31--only one i've ever had.
Leno has two Miuras but not a Countach as far as I know. He's got a 3500 too but I don't think he owns any Lambos later than the Miura. He's also on record as saying he doesn't want to deal with Ferrari's "bullshit", so he doesn't have any of those. The high end car companies that play favorites alluded to by Jack are playing a dangerous game because there is almost always someone wealthier than your favorite who you just pissed off.
the first-generation Countach is beautiful simply because, at the time, it was so wildly outlandish. by the end of the car's run, it had become a caricature of a supercar.
"the JC Whitney catalog threw up on it" is a great turn of phrase, by the way.
that awful miura persimmon. my least favorite color but at 30 i was too timid to ask sig. lamborghini for another color. i met him at the factory in '66. $12,300.
Too cool! I bet meeting the man himself was interesting. I personally loved the orange they had (possibly because of the Italian Job). What colour were you hoping to get?
Over a decade ago, Doug DeMuro and I were hanging out on a weeknight.
He liked to sit on the patio of a fast casual restaurant across the street from my office, which at the time was on Peachtree Road in Buckhead. A few times a month, we would get together and eat a quick dinner (and watch cars go by) before he went home and I started my second shift in the cubicles.
One time we got together, I got an email that let me off the hook for the night, so to speak. So I insisted we go to the cigar club around the corner. Despite the fact that he neither drinks nor smokes, he acquiesced.
We sit down, and there happens to be a guy flying solo who joins us in “our” seating area. We start chatting with him, and he tells us all about … the Miura he used to own.
I am sure there is a paragraph somewhere in "Money" by Martin Amis (my favourite novel, re-read every ten years or so) that stipulates that the ONLY tactic when faced with a fight is to immediately go nuclear (note to Sherman - that's a split infinitive, but there is actually no rule in English that prohibits it just because you can't do it in Latin). Just as I suspect with Amis himself, however, I have never even been in a playground scuffle myself so what do I know? Well, enough to avoid places/times where the crazies go, at least.
I've read only Amis's Koba The Dread. I read it just before reading Solzhenitsyn. Must've been 20 years ago. Concurrently purchased Conquest has been sitting on my bookshelf unread the entire while. Might have to pick it up, finally, when this substack takes a holiday break.
LaPere let that guy in the building because she no doubt believed that since she was the self-appointed Savior Of All Black People, then there is no possible way that a black person could possibly show her anything other than love and support.
I mean, after all, she publicly proclaimed her love for all black people, and all people in the world spend 7 hours a day on Instagram, just like she does, ergo, this scary looking dude has to know she is actually his friend.
I think it was a little different. She probably had a twinge of doubt that her no doubt expensive education and all those hours on Twitter rubbed up against. Like all the racists I know, she overreacted to her conscience and chatted with the man who scared her just to show him how not scary black he was.
Also, being her age, she didn't read the local paper so had no idea what was happening in her own hood.
Few people who operate at or above the level our Esteemed Host here does, choose the same choices.
Can we call this decisionmaking pattern "life-choice instrumentalism"? You only have one life, so you may as well do what you wish with it -- right?
It's not unlikely that some of the people mentioned in the article simply lack the originality and fearlessness to put it all on the line in LMP2 or the Radical Cup. I always wondered if the cosplay-car-guys still have something left to prove.
Indeed. I'm not interested in the car choices of someone who can't put pants on before making a video.
Unless it's Sasha Grey.
This is an oddly specific exception.
I appreciate her work.
From what I'm "told" she often starts the video wearing pants.
If I were ever to buy a Countach, it would be to satisfy 12y/o me who had a Countach picture on the bedroom wall. Just like I’d sleep with Britney Spears today because 16-22y/o me would have loved to.
The fact that neither of those things is desirable to do today is irrelevant; like cocaine, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
These old exotics is one place I might blaspheme and take it away from stock, at least on the engine internals to breathe more horsepower into them or improve the cooling system, etc to improve reliability.
I'm dreaming of an S1 Esprit with a Honda K motor in it. Unfortunately, that's not the sort of phrase that rolls off Bing Crosby's tongue, just like it probably won't ever happen for me in real life, but still.
I know someone who bought FOUR S1s and I don' t think he paid over 15k for any of them. If you ever get serious about this ridiculous idea I'll put you in touch!
This is that guy in the Toledo area, right? It's an idea so insane that I could make it work in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future. I will keep this in mind when I get serious about it!
Yes, the dead mouse eater!
I don't even know what to say to that, other than I guess he needs to get his protein somehow!
Given the choice between an old Countach and a new Aventador and $400k in cash, which would you take?
Take the cash and buy a 911 vs LC
Lamborghinis are for posers and oil sheiks. I am neither. Can I just have the 900k?
The one Lamborghini I have driven was a lot of fun, but not my favorite, even in a green Spyder configuration. I would say I was a poseur, but I tolerated the label briefly.
Don't forget douchebags.
Poseurs covers that
Just bein' thorough...
I’ve no idea. I mean you can play that game forever; why buy an Aventador when you could have a Z06 and $300k in cash? I’m guessing that Dougie bought his because of some combination of “quirks and features!” and expected future value. I am poor enough to congratulate myself on living in a house that’s worth ~Countach money, I don’t dream big enough to pick and choose between Lambos.
"why buy an Aventador when you could have a Z06 and $300k in cash?"
It rhymes with "casual keks".
Sir I’m in Chicago, you can get laid here with a Corvette.
Especially on the south side.
That's the baddest part of town!
Rather than a Corvette, wouldn't you just need $20? I have no idea what "things" cost.
Ask trevor bauer how banging gold diggers went. If you're a reasonably wealthy man in 2023 and still banging floozies', you are asking for trouble.
What if you're broke?
You cannot get blood out of a stone but Child support still lasts 18 years.
I'm interested in how MLB is going to react? Bauer seems to be doing okay and making fans in Japan but now that he's shown the receipts and proven that he was set up, will anyone sign him here? Also, she wasn't a gold digger, she was a criminal.
She was both. He should sue MLB for 100mm dollars.
I wouldn't buy a Countach cause it's just too tacky and the driving experience sounds awful. I wouldn't buy a Ferrari because I don't want to be associated with anyone who does. I wouldnt buy a Corvette because I'm a middle age guy and I'd be laughed at by everyone who knows me. I've got lots of reasons for spending or not spending dough.
The key to owning a Corvette is not giving a shit what other people think, just enjoy the driving experience. And don’t hang out with other Corvette owners.
so it's like owning an air-cooled Porsche...
So it’s like a Harley
thats like any other car with an associated negative stereotype lol
Shortly after I bought it, I took my low-mileage, no options 2008 C6 to a Corvette gathering, or rally if you will, in Telluride. Driving over Red Mountain Pass in the Fall with 50 other Corvettes was a quite a scene, literally stopped traffic in places.
Socializing with the other owners was like being dropped into a Caste society where drivers of the (then) rare C8 were the Brahmins who trailered their 'Vettes to Telluride. Of course, I was treated like an Untouchable forced to actually drive my C6 up from Denver. The only genuine people who I spent more than a minute talking to drove their well-patinaed C2 convertible up from Pueblo. I thought they had the most interesting car there that day. That was the first and likely last association for me with a "Corvette Club". Just got a feeling that a lot of those Brahmins didn't even like cars especially, they seemed to like being a big fish in a small tank.
Yup, clubs can ruin whatever they intend to celebrate.
Love the C6 and would much rather have one than a C8. As a fellow C7 owner once told me, “I’m sure the C8 is a nice car, but it’s just not a Corvette anymore “.
He has a bit of a point. They were FR pushrod V8 cars since '55.
The more I look at the C8, the more I'm convinced the C5 is the high-water mark of Corvette styling.
Same here.
Consider the Lexus LC500; 480+ HP, aluminum and carbon fiber bodywork, interior like a velvet lined jewelry box... with Toyota reliability.
I'll never be able to afford an LC500, but I have seen prices on 90s SC300s and SC400s and those are very reasonable. And still Toyotas with arguably peak Toyota reliability.
Have you considered the SC430? That bathtub convertible from 2002-08?
Like a Japanese SL500; again without the maintenance costs. Hard to find, but inside a nice one is a lovely place to be.
Allegedly the styling team was sent to yacht design school because Lexus wanted some sort of nautical influence on their design language. That would explain the chrome side strakes on the mirror caps -- they were supposed to remind you of the side stays on a main mast.
When I was younger I thought they were rather ugly, almost a little bulbous and geriatric looking. Now I don't think they're so bad (and the interiors are very nice places to sit), but I like the older coupes better for two reasons: I still think they're prettier, and if I were to drive one across the country there's a usable trunk for luggage and souvenirs. I know I could put baggage on the little "seats" behind the driver and passenger, but I'd rather have that stuff hidden.
SC430s have reached the stage of “they look so weird that now they’re cool”. I kind of like them now. There’s actually many nice examples out there because the old people who bought them babied them.
I think they made them until 2011, and the later versions look a little better. Last car sold in the US with an in dash cassette player. Some great color choices, too.
I'd be careful about the maintenance costs. Nothing that old is legit cheap, and those folding hardtops are never cheap to fix when things go wrong.
4340lbs min! Wow
True. But nobody buys it for the weight. I had no idea myself until you posted this and I had to go look it up. Same with horsepower -- and even then the quoted figures from multiple sources never agree. Or 0-60 times. Or skidpad numbers.
But go sit in it and drive it and listen to that exhaust sound and all is forgiven.
C6 Z06 (lowered) or C7 Z06 in black, or pick your meanest color. I, too, am aware of various stigmas as a nearly-middle-aged man, even if a stock C6 with a manual in good shape in dark red or a nice color is a perfectly good car in its own right. The chrome wheels, loud colors, and tacky "mods" are what really sink them. I can really only "practically" afford LT1/LT4 C4s, which means Optispark for me again, but I really like C4s.
Sometimes I like the idea of having a C4 Gran Sport. I like the color scheme and the black rims, but that dark purple color on like a '95 or '96 with a 6-speed would be just as good. I'd take a coupe over a convertible. Corvettes may come with a questionable image but I like them better than Porsches, Ferraris, etc.
yeah that dark purple late C4 is so good. saw one in chicago last year and had to take a picture.
I saw a beautiful example of a C4 Gran Sport this summer at a car show. The blue is stunning. The interior was black with the super cool asymmetric-patterned leather seats. Since black wheels continue to be played out, I'd be happy with GS blue and the salad shooter / turbine wheels. Dark purple, too. Coupe with the glass roof, no 'vert, though the convertibles look just fine.
Black wheels only worked on the GNX. And they had chrome rims.
I find the look of Corvettes to be very dependent on the color. Certain colors just don’t look good.
Is there a solution for the Optispark?
An LS.
More seriously, I bet most of the hardware to convert to EFI is there if you buy a Holley Sniper kit or equivalent.
Yes, the https://www.torqhead.com/index.html
Thanks. I like the Impala SS and it’s whale like proportions. That rental car interior is a tough one to get over, though.
Thank you!! Bookmarked the link. For all my future projects that "just need money" first. This is actually quite attainable since LS-swapping is a lot more and I'd just like to keep the stock setup in there and going. Now I need to go find my '97 Z28 (T56) that I traded in four years ago...
Yes there is a direct swap aftermarket system. You don’t want the headache of doing an aftermarket ECM swap like this other guy is mentioning.
https://www.holley.com/products/ignition/distributors/chevrolet/parts/83811
Take the ca$h and Adventador , sell the Adventador and invest all the combined $ and them go forth with out worry .
-Nate
One of the nice ones or the ugly one Doug has in the wrong colour?
How about an 812 Superfast, an F8 Tributo, and $250K in cash?
How about 100 Miatas and no cash?
I'd suggest 90 Miatas and spend the rest on tires, but you've to the only correct answer to the question.
I'll take an LMP3, a box of spares, and the Breaking Bad meth RV to get to the race.
I’d like a previous generation WRC car. I’d show up at the local autocross and do launch control starts.
https://youtu.be/Ek-SjXLMDU8?si=E3lmS7M9IEPikLtH
How about "I'll take anything of value you want to give me"
I would do a phenomenal restomod. Why follow the herd?
My latest restomod idea is a ‘67 Eldorado converted to rear wheel drive with a V12 under that long hood. Cadillac explored putting a V12 in the Eldorado, I would actually do it if I had FU money.
Why follow the herd?
I suppose I have quotidian goals!
C’mon, don’t be going all commoner on us! We all have our roles to fill :)
Which V12? Wonder if the Falconer V12 would fit... and of course there's already a YT video covering a 1958 Lincoln convertible with a Falconer installed. Never mind.
I would choose the Falconer, gotta keep it American. I think the Falconer would easily fit.
I think for most this just comes down to if you want a performance car, or do you want to relive your childhood fantasies. There's part of me that wants an E46 M3 or B6 RS4 (or a Phaeton), but I know I'm better off getting a new 5.0 Mustang for the money, even if it's not what I wanted in high school
I still want an 88 Mustang GT convertible. Not because it is a great car or a fast one. I want it because 16 year old me wanted one so badly I could taste it.
I'm pretty convinced you could time the classic car market as being 30 +/- years as your cohort graduated high school. I graduated in '93 and have been musing '93 Mustang GTs, the 93 Prelude, 93 SVX and 93 Corrado.
If you want disappointment buy an E30 M3 with its original motor. Oy.
Lancia Delta. Doesn't even have to be an evo.
$400k pays for a lot of sex.
Which is what everyone will assume you're doing if you drive an Aventador, anyway.
Why not buy the very best?
The 70s Norton Girl on the inside cover of any "Cycle" magazine. Yummy!
There is a guy in Atlanta who is always swapping in and out of exotic cars. At the moment, he has several toys, including an Aventador SVJ with a Gintani exhaust. I have never heard a louder street car, and bear in mind that I drive a straight piped GT3…
From what I can tell, he likes to drive around at redline at 1 AM every other day or so.
He is also widely known to avail himself of professional women, including a neighbor of mine; she is famous! https://nypost.com/2021/07/31/how-george-soros-money-manager-was-accused-of-bdsm-assaults/
Heard a clip of that. Utterly bonkers noises that come out of that engine.
But 12k for a few feet of stainless tube? I guess that's the Lambo tax.
It’s worth it based on how it sounds in person. I can hear him from 1.5 miles away (or further).
A full fat Novitec exhaust in inconel for a front engined V12 Ferrari is $35k+
Probably sounds amazing and is built correctly. Does that include headers?
No such thing as "BDSM Assault."
Sexual assault is the whole point of BDSM. You don't get to complain if you walk into it willingly.
It's no different from Smoking But Not Inhaling: Utter bullshit sophistry.
I need to network with her - she has a great client list.
Funnily enough, her daddy is a preacher in a small town in North GA (near my hometown).
Because OF COURSE he is.
Easy: Team Oreca Viper
Ok, but seriously: Lexus LFA
I mean, ok...Aventa--could it be a Diablo SV? I'll park it next to Pantani's Bianchi.
A good number of the Aventador owners I've met are Asian small business (nail salon, restaurant) owners who are in their fifties. Skimped all their lives, now blindsided by memento mori, splurged on a Lambo to distract themselves.
One of my acquaintances, upon seeing the assemblage, commented, "are Aventadors the easiest supercar to obtain?" YES.
Good for them!
But here's the problem: if you've been a nail shop owner and cautious saver your whole life, an Aventador doesn't change who you are.
That was demonstrated by how slowly they drove their cars while we convoyed to lunch.
Some Indian billionaire with a Bollywood actress wife in his Lamborghini just killed a Swiss billionaire and his wife in a Ferrari in Sardinia. They were all on some kind of billionaire’s club drive. (That sentence was the grammatical equivalent of the Indian billionaire’s driving)
The Indian is being investigated for “road homicide.”
As usual, the Daily Mail has the video.
The Swiss couple in the Ferrari burned to death, the Italian occupants of a camper van who were in the way of the billionaire’s procession were injured, but not badly.
I’ve said it before, but what these people hope to get by buying these cars is something that can’t be bought. They might be rich, but they’ll never be cool. It’s like Bezos with that used-up harridan. He might laugh at my relative poverty, but I’m laughing right back at him.
“ It’s like Bezos with that used-up harridan. He might laugh at my relative poverty, but I’m laughing right back at him.”
All the money in the world and no woman has truly loved him. Such a pity. A trillion dollars and no children. The deal with the devil is harsh.
"And you see how your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down because of One. Little. Cherry."
You know, if we were in high school together, we'd have either been inseparable best friends or mortal enemies, I don't think there's any in between. I mean, a Fifth Element quote? My hope is that we'd have been best friends.
Star Trek? Anime? The Fifth Element?
I think we would've gotten along just fine.
He has 3 kids
Acting like a clown at his age with three kids is almost more embarrassing. I assumed he didn't have any.
I think the years of hard work and building a massive business allows you to act like a clown a bit. What's the point of all that money if you can't burn some of it on fun? I'm not denying some of the comments, but I'd do stupid stuff too if I were that rich. But I would never own a boat.
The houses, the yachts, the extravagance I get but if you're going to act like a clown and leave your wife of twenty(?) years, at least upgrade.
Who was the guy that said the average black teen gets better pussy than Bezos?
Probably this guy named Jack Baruth
Haha! Every adult male in my family has done better than Bezos at some point.
Heck, you've seen that picture of me and my ex when we were young. Even I've done better than Bezos.
I believe Jack attributed that to the departed (from the Interwebz) "Roissy in DC"
May God watch over him
If I didn’t find him when I did, I wouldn’t have the happy family I do.
Bezos says it, but only to himself, when no one else is around.
I rather liked that bit about how "...Zuckerberg's billions couldn't get him any better than a Shanghai Hard 4 who didn't respect him enough to take his name."
Imagine your beta levels outgunning several billion dollars
sucks to suck
All that money and even the gold-diggers didn't want him.
I remember a line about how "...that guy's such a pussy, when he shakes his wife's hand, it's a lesbian fisting session."
May 2005, That's how they roll in Italy. Maybe the investigation will end in 2034.
Williams object to court closure on Senna's death
Italian state prosecutor requests halt to long-running proceedings
The manslaughter trial following the death of the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna in the San Marino grand prix 11 years ago may be over finally after an Italian state prosecutor yesterday asked for proceedings to be halted because time had run out to press charges under the terms of a statute of limitations.
Senna, three times a world champion, was 33 when his Williams-Renault FW16 ran off the circuit at 195mph at the Tamburello left-hander on Imola's Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari while leading the third round of the 1994 championship. He died later of head injuries in hospital in Bologna.
The cause of the accident aroused much speculation and Patrick Head, the Williams team's technical director, and his then chief designer Adrian Newey, now technical director at McLaren, were charged with manslaughter.
They locked up Amanda Knox pretty quickly. The guy who actually raped and murdered Meredith Kercher only served 16 years.
I saw that, grisly.
The urge to turn the wheel must be very powerful considering how many crashes can be avoided by just using the brakes.
I saw a Ferrari 355 roll through our nice little downtown area and let off a few very nice sounding revs on main street while out for dinner with my wife. Also got to see a white Testarossa in my neck of the woods a few years ago. Both times, I was much more excited and the cars had a lot more real world presence than any number of modern Ferraris/Mclarens/etc that I've seen rolling around. Ditto the early 80s (rwd) Lesabre I passed in traffic one morning, so much more authority/presence on the street versus say, a brand new S-class. Something to be said about crisp uncluttered styling whether its a sports car or big luxury sedan.
My formative years were spent reading about Doug and Wayne and their F355s on NSX-Files; as a result the F355 is still my favorite car of all time.
Robert Farago (hello, Robert!) had a lot to say about them - on the Rienzi Report (https://rienzireport.com/farago-a-ferrari-is-like-a-mistress-1885/ ) site and maybe on the insurance company website. Good stuff.
The 355 is a sweet ride.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28309552/ferrari-f355-modificata-jeff-segal/
This tuned one is even sweeter if you don't mind your ears bleeding.
Love 355s. Drove NSXs on occasion while an Acura dealer lot boy in college. I still have the tape-on windshield stock number from a black/black '01 NSX-T 6-speed we had. NSX forever.
Down the street from my office, there’s a veterinary clinic where--ever since my first visit to this town ~8 years ago--has sat an abandoned red early model NSX. I’d like to buy it, but the tires rotted in the Obama admin and it’s a veritable basket case I’m certain. I’d at least like to know the story.
Living in a spot with a lot of the modern stuff (we have Ferarri, McLaren, Aston, and many more dealers on the main drag), I think the well maintained 80s and 90s stuff turns more heads if that's your thing. Jack and others may disagree, but I'd think that they may be more entertaining to drive on our roads too since they don't have that crazy warp speed performance of modern cars. When I get to driving around my dad's '98 SL 500, I find it much more satisfying than the modern ones as it still has that mechanical feel, and the performance is accessible - I won't be dead and off the road when I floor it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zygfrEkhtFA
“ it still has that mechanical feel, and the performance is accessible ”
That’s it right there and it applies to both cars and motorcycles for me. Which is why I’m (sort of) on the hunt for some flavor of 80s/90s fair weather commuter car. The most fun/engaging drive I’ve had in years was in a ‘85 Prelude S (the base twin carb model) I test drove about 5 years ago. I should have bought it.
The thing about an SL500 is that it's not a piece of shit.
Most Italian exotics were. Up to about the 355.
Nice SL500s are cheap these days.
Make mine a "Lenny Dykstra Edition"
I've noticed a few other M-B's listed at seemingly reasonable prices also.
I think the nice *looking* ones are cheap. A truly well sorted one that's had maintenance kept up on, good parts used, etc, is a 12-15k car (I guess within the grand scheme of things that is pretty cheap). What I'd personally really love is a W126 560 SEC hardtop
I'm with you on the 560SEC, but the R129s feel like a much more modern car. Not today's fancy tech, but the 80s Mercs still have a bit of a vintage feel. It's how I got my dad to go with the SL500 over a 560SL. Properly sorted you're likely over 20 for one with low miles and all records, the cheaper ones tend to need some work and likely on the top hydraulics which are complicated and EXPENSIVE
I try to avoid the trap of "what if" engine swap/restomod fantasies, but a 560SEC with a M156 has always been my dream build.
JackNicholsonNodding.gif
Cheap to BUY anyway.
A house is the most expensive thing the average man will ever buy in his life.
Unless he picks up a Porsche 928.
Ben Stein once wrote in GQ that he took his 928 on a date and the woman asked him, "Are you rich? You have a Porsche." To which he replied,
"I would be rich if I didn't have this car."
I spotted a 308 Dino on the backroads of NorCal a few years ago and thought it looked cooler than most of the exotics nowadays. I know that car doesn't get a lot of love, but at least it was distinctive. so many modern exotics look like bars of soap to my eye.
There are more wealthy people than ever before, thanks to vampire-squid behavior that drains the middle class of meaningless shit like home ownership and medical coverage so the 0.1% can live, laugh, and love.
.....live, laugh, love. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I detect some sarcasm there.
Having had the (un)fortunate experience of living in plenty of shitty neighborhoods as a necessity not a choice I am baffled by people who:
0. Have never learned to be aware of and wary of their surroundings
1. When they have the means, don't move the fuck out of the hood.
2. Let a concept overrule their instincts
I'm always a bit baffled when you can be poor anywhere and collecting, you stick it out in a dangerous place. Because they look and sound like you? Those are the people making it a dangerous place. When push comes to shove, that person that looks and sounds like you is going after you anyways.
Your (2.) is usually given out in the annual Darwin Awards.
I was less talking about the still poor people who live in bad neighborhoods, which is usually because what little support they have is also there. But more talking about people who could live in a decent neighborhood but choose to be in the "hip area" (e.g. Bed-Stuy 15 years ago) then bitch about their car and house being broken into or getting robbed on the street.
It's a hassle to move.
Having been robbed at gun point in broad daylight I agree moving is a hassle but it is far less inconvenient than dealing with that experience again.
well when you put it that way
I read a story about Ice Cube a long time ago, about how he wanted to be true to his roots and stay in the hood. Then he discovered he was constantly being robbed and got the fuck out. I sure as heck wouldn't stay either.
Ever wonder WHY the people who're surrounded by that shit are all hung up on "remembering where he came from?"
The only reason to remember where you came from is to never forget why you left.
I get "remembering where you're from" in the sense that you shouldn't let money and success turn you into a giant douche or a turd sandwich (or a giant douche IN a turd sandwich), but that's a little different from getting out of the hood and never looking back!
Bud-Sty isn't something new. It's always been that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar_o_qS68oA&ab_channel=Movieclips 43 year old movie clip. It's a case where someone thinks they are superior to the point that they can get through to people that are "Difficult".
I was born a few miles from there. Only during the Giuliani years was NYC not worth taking cautiously.
I remember being a college kid at NYU in the early 2000s and a guy coming out of an alley telling us he’d stabbed someone and for us to help him check if he was all right. I quickly kept walking and pulled the Nokia brick out of my pocket and my two idiot friends stopped to talk to the admitted knifer! They finally moved away and felt bad about not checking on the alley “victim”! My response “You fuckers the only person stabbed in that alley would have been one of us“
I believe your radar was properly calibrated.
I usually had heat on me in college. Nobody knew, and nobody needed to. But I wasn't about to take night classes, then walk all the way to the train station without one of my little friends.
Praise the Lord I never needed it, but I often forgot it was there.
Now you almost need it on any campuses, gun-free-zone signs be damned!
"Gun-free" often translates into "Go weapons hot!"
gun free=weapons free
what are they going to do, shoot you?
It was more the Bloomberg times than Rudy's, but it definitely has been all downhill since with DiBlasio and now Adams. Covid absolutely ruined it, and here we are. Even keep my head on a swivel on the Upper East Side nowadays.
Spoken like someone who doesn't t remember the Dinkins regime.
Giuliani, somehow, did the heavy lifting, and Bloomberg for his faults did well to build on it .
By Giuliani's second term my Long Island friends, and bizarrely some of my new Ohio friends, could complain about how the city, by which they mean Manhattan, had lost its "grittiness".
It was a popular sentiment for people who had not witnessed homicides during the bad old days to express.
Most of these people also thought "Rent" was brilliant.
It’s because I don’t remember Dinkins, I was a baby! I’m in my early 30s, so I really only started experiencing NYC on my own during the Bloomberg years. I grew up in NJ with a father who commuted into NYC everyday so I was always around the city. I meant moreso that by the time Bloomberg was mayor, that Rudy had done the heavy lifting and Manhattan was safe to roam.
I will say that anyone who complains that Manhattan has lost its grittiness deserves to get squeegee manned or just hit with a 2x4.
What I always tell people who weren't there is this: 87 people died in the Happy Land fire. Since it was arson those are all considered murders. Had the fire not occurred 1990 still would have had a record number of homicides at 2605, or 2518 if you set aside Happy Land, eclipsing 1989's 2246, although 1991 was similar at 2571. It's gotten sketchy recently but it really does not compare to the bad old days.
Jeez! Murders measured in the thousands?? Where I live now I don't think we've had a thousand murders in our entire history. Back home in Toledo I'm pretty sure it would take decades to achieve those kinds of numbers! I know New York's population is huge, but that's a staggering amount of lost life.
I grew up outside of Albany, and had a father that did the M-F commute for work amongst other things for a number of years. I went to the city for the first time around 6 or 7 which was early 90s for the Christmas show at Radio City, I was very excited to go down there and was very upset to find out we would be dropped off right in front of the Music Hall to enjoy the show and then get straight back onto the bus. Little did I know what was going on all around me.
It wasn't until I was in middle school that I would experience the city via track meets at the 168th Street Armory and sneaking out to get something to eat which looking back was probably not smart even in the Bloomberg years.
Nothing says "middle class tourist at heart" than talking about GRITTY NYC. fuck those peeps.
Why in the hell anyone would enjoy "grittiness" is beyond me. I like living in safe places where I don't have to be afraid to go out at night.
Where I won’t get knifed while getting into my car to look for insurance information after discovering it on blocks!
Rudy cleaned it up and took (and still takes) the heat for it. Bloomberg turned it into an expensive amusement park for tourists and sink for foreign cash.
My favorite stat was that police shootings went down significantly under Giuiani compared to the Dinkins administration but you wouldn't know it from the narrative.
They probably miss the Times Square of "Taxi Driver," too.
Absolutely.
They imagine NY through Scorsese films, romantically. In their minds they are NPCs who observe and are thrilled, but never catch a stray bullet, don't get mugged, and don't have to worry about money.
"Big cities are playgrounds for the wealthy, and an endless trial for everyone else."
- Kevin Williamson
I grew up assuming all of New York was the neighborhood where they set "Death Wish 3."
Started going downhill under Lindsay. It was okay when we'd visit frequently in the '60s.
I would suggest that the three people who were fatally attacked were Darwin recipients, they put too much trust that us mere mortals wouldn’t have given to their attackers.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people hoisted with their own petard.
I don’t disagree, they all broke safety protocols that should have been ingrained, and they ignored at their ultimate peril.
The world is an ugly, dangerous place full of ugly, dangerous people, and the only way the good guys can survive is by being scarier monsters than the villains.
I'd look silly wearing a Batsuit, but draping tons of armaments and ammo like Arnold Schwarzenegger might be a look I could pull off.
The Punisher is cooler than batman " I can't kill my enemies" What a pussy.
Modern Marvel did Punisher wrong: his dead wife came back to life, nagged him about his vengeance, berated his toxic masculinity, divorced him and took half his shit, and destroyed all his weapons caches. Then the writer had him off himself after putting him through a Red China-style struggle session. I wish I was making that all up. But there's a reason I went with John Matrix and not him. I think I could pull off the camo face paint better than the white skull t-shirt, too.
Modern marvel has done everyone wrong. The woke crowd took over comics awhile ago. I don't consider anything written in the last 20 years minimum as canon.
"You want her back, you gotta do what we say, right?"
"Wrong." (Boom)
Batman is arguably complicit in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people because of his misplaced nobility.
Personally, I think the Greatest Joker Story Ever Told would see the Clown Prince of Crime face down in his own blood at a gas station after trying to carjack some Nobody with carry permit.
Well, the city of Gotham ALSO should've executed the joker years ago.
I just mentioned Darwin also in another comment. "Hold your BINGO cards, we might have a winner!".
😂🤣
I don't know how many women have been robbed, raped, and murdered (often dragged off to someplace to never be seen again) because they thought it was perfectly safe to hang out, DRUNK in front of a bar at 2AM. Like 'I am woman hear me roar' when they end up probably screaming in fear and agony as they get the life beat out of them.
There is nothing so stupid as any woman who thinks she's a match for a man when it comes to fighting for your life.
Except for perhaps Ryan.
Back when I was Ryan's age I was in damn near perfect shape. I -taught- martial arts and sparred regularly. I also went armed damn near everywhere. Even with all of that -I- wouldn't go anywhere in Bud-Stuy at three in the fucking morning. (I used to know two cops who worked there, we called it Bed-Sty back then - the stories!)
I sure as hell wouldn't be taking public transit on the way home from a wedding and even LESS SO if I had a woman with me. And that's ANYWHERE - not just there. I'm surprised that any woman would even put up with this shit!
Why the hell couldn't this idiot take Uber? Or get a cab? Or make prior arrangements for a limo?
Step one in winning any deadly confrontation IS NOT TO GET INTO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!
Hopefully his girlfriend will date a MAN in the future and not a little boy. But somehow I doubt she'll learn the lesson. She's just lucky that the guy didn't decide he wanted a little rape to go with his murder.
There was a narrative in the past few years that NYC was thoroughly gentrified. That combined with general unawareness contributes to this. But this whole nighttime, taking public transportation in bed sty as upper middle class folk is glaringly stupid.
Was talking to a girlfriend of a friend, who moved into that area and I told her flat out she was crazy. I don't care how much better you think it may be now (it isn't) but with the government of NYC no longer putting violent felons in jail, and in fact turning them back out on the streets immediately, you don't go out there if you're not packing heat. Period. Notice no one is jailing the criminals with guns - so why would they bother you?
The problem with packing heat in NY, or Chicago in my case, is you'll be convicted by a jury of your "peers." It's not Texas. It's better than being dead but your life is still over. I have my ccl and barely carry cause the Illinois legislature would love nothing better than to throw a married father of three in jail for a long time on some bullshit technical violation.
Forget packing heat in NYC. You pretty much can't carry a handgun in NY, CT, or NJ unless you're a cop, so it's pretty easy to nail you on that technical violation if you use it to protect yourself. It's one of the big reasons why I don't have a handgun. There's no good use for it up north.
No problem!
I'll just carry my folding tactical scythe.
Be aware you can and will go to jail in NYC for having a knife.
I subscribe to the theory that when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, almost everybody lived in small towns and your "peers" were people who'd known you your whole life and could make a reasonably accurate judgment of your actions, not a dozen random dipshits off the street who're your "peers" only in the All Men Are Created Equal sense.
I should have bunch of accountants pulling 150k plus judging me dammit
Bitter, cynical, caustic, big-picture misanthropes for me!
Nowhere is "peers" written into the Constitution; the presumption is all citizens are your equals.
The "jury of your peers" is from English common law where dukes were supposed to be on juries for duke's trials, counts for counts, etc.
Taking public transit (other than Taxi's) after dark pretty much died with COVID. No-one we're close with in the city (or suburbs) will get on the trains after dark, or really outside of rush hour.
But the idea that NYC was gentrified thoroughly definitely took hold pre covid. Now old grimy NYC is striking back with a vengeance on these young, new transplants who buy into this woke stuff.
"There was a narrative in the past few years that NYC was thoroughly gentrified." well, manhattan anyhow. it was pretty much true under bloomberg in a lot of neighborhoods. definitely not true now.
There's blame to go around here.
The woman in the Ryan Carson stabbing basically just stood there, 1 foot distant, during the entire altercation--not even running away, as her boyfriend got stabbed to death.
Neither fight nor flight -
WTF?
That's how you know someone is a child of privilege. She's like a dodo bird.
Personally trying to figure out the right level of privilege to give my children. They should have some real world experience but the right level? I don't know.
Mine is a dodo bird. It's not a great outcome but the product of choosing to live on only very high trust places, and they don't allow school yard fight anymore.
I'm insistent on sending mine to a primary school where they'll fight on the playground. I did both and the hoity toity one was miserable. Politics was not something I could fathom at primary school age so I was left to fend for myself
Intelligence without street smarts is not a good thing.
I moved to the suburbs from Chicago when I was 9 years old, and even at that young age thought that all the suburban kids were soft and stupid.
We were and probably still are. I joined Mma at thirty to get punched in the face
It hurt
The first rule of Fight Club...
Me, I'd try to get them up to speed as fast as possible without warping them. They're gonna be adults soon enough. Might as well hit THAT ground running.
But my opinion's just academic, because I don't have kids.
My dad wasn’t hard enough on me but I have all daughters. So I’m clueless. My mom managed my sisters too much. We do our best but we will fuck up
I can’t remember the book, but there was a writer who made situational awareness a game with his young kids. He didn’t treat it as a threat assessment to scare the kids, it was more of noticing who was around you as kind of a people watching game. Keeping it fun as to what various people were doing. Then he advanced to being aware of the room or public space they were in, then quizzing the kids on if they had to leave by not using the way they entered, how would they do it? Not telling the kids the possible reasons or threats which would cause them to leave, just always making a game out of it. I thought that was smart.
Everyone is sending their kids to BJJ now. ( https://nitter.net/ccmembersonly/status/1707551427818610809#m )
If I were sending mine to public school I certainly would.
That said, in 20 years this entire country will be an open air pri.... uhh, public school. Hope folks are following Tucker Max (of all people!)'s lead on this:
https://www.tuckermax.com/my-entire-self-defense-system/
If I had sons, BJJ and MMA would be on the menu. I'm not sending my daughters to BJJ though.
Will look into this.
For a sec I thought Tucker Max was Tucker Carlson's alter ego
I'm of two minds about this.
I think it's good to be prepared, and good to have taken a couple of hits to the face so you know what that's like.
That being said, I've witnessed a few fights to extreme conclusions, usually in the course of extracting my tax money back from the State via overnight housing, and anybody who is conditioned to "fight" up to a draw or hold will have a tough time of it. If you're having a punch-up in the fraternity house, you fight fair. Otherwise? I've never been in a friendly sparring match with a competent martial artist that wouldn't have ended almost immediately if I put a pen into one of their eyeballs.
Fights in prison are generally defined by trying to get the other person's face or head into contact with an environmental object like a sink or a windowsill or the edge of a bed frame.
“We can’t close our eyes to the plight of the cities. See kids, are you witnessing all this plight?”
[gunshot, woman screams]
“Roll ‘em up!”
That’s about the right level. Just don’t ask for directions while you’re there.
I don't know that it's actual privilege since the real NYC privileged types would never put themselves in that situation - the driver would've picked them up from the wedding. They were likely transplants indoctrinated into those "luxury beliefs" and faking the privilege she thinks she deserves because of her fancy "education"
Its umc privilege
Stuff from her social media has been making the rounds.
I'd probably have run and left her there.
She lives in another reality. She also didn't care. She didn't bend over to check on him, she stood there and said 'are you alright'? No emotion. I've seen better behavior out of sociopaths. She just didn't care what happened to him. AT ALL.
She wasn't even all that shocked when he came back at her and spit in her face after just wasting her boyfriend. Notice that she didn't even call 911, much less try to help him or run away. The OTHER woman had to call 911, who she told to 'watch him'. That's right she told the other woman to watch the man who killed her boyfriend rather than to say - help her.
She'll be over it in a few days, I'm sure. If she isn't already.
Despite all that, she's probably got an army of simps after her, more than ever.
Daily Mail says she has a GoFundMe up with 46k pledged so far.
Think of all the exciting bartender dick she can ride on that money
46k in ny can get you a funeral and a night of drinks
What are her flipping expenses?
Expensive clothes and shoes going forward.
A biologist friend of mine once explained to me that freezing up in situations like this a third, and a vestigial reaction—hiding.
Or possibly just shock. It’s very possible it’s the first time she’s witnessed violence. I’ve been on the wrong end of being punched several times and didn’t realize until minutes later that I was actually in a fight.
"Avoiding confrontation" was something that popped into my mind earlier today.
I slowed for a yellow and some old dude on his boomer chariot right on my tail wasn't a fan of that. If he hopped off his bike and stood in front of my door, I'd be locked in. Can't get out of the car or move around the car, but he could punch in.
Always need to be careful!
You back up over his motorcycle, then pull forward running him over. You're in a car, you have a wonderful weapon.
Will do!
Being forcibly unarmed by way of being Canadian means self defense is a bit more involved than staying strapped.
I grew up in a very anti-carry state. And have lived in one that used to allow open carry and is now also very anti-gun. Thing is, everything is a weapon. If used properly.
Reminds me of George Carlin, talking about strangling a pair of stewardesses with really big hands, or beating someone to death with the Sunday NY Times.
Correction:
"Avoid confrontation, while giving every impression of wanting it."
I think it would have been too easy to rile him into violence. Looked like one of those pretend tough guys with his Harley-mandated leather jacked and minimum legal size helmet.
Rebel package #2 I'm sure.
"I want to be an outlaw but the government won't let me"
I once had a guy behind me freak out when I stopped on a yellow and he didn’t like it. When it was safe to do so, I ran the red light and got out of there.
I decided to tempt fate and drive away slowly and nearly keep pace with the van in the left lane. Wannabe biker dude didn't appreciate that and split the lane under full power.
I saw a guy lose his shit and get out of his car when I had the nerve to stop for an ambulance crossing the intersection in front of us with lights and sirens. He somewhat came to his senses and sped off while I was debating flight or fight.
Just like when someone tailgates me, I always lose a few mph and go the exact same speed as the guy next to me just to drive the point home. I am not a left lane driver. I pass and move back so it takes effort to tailgate me. "I'm 30 back in line dude, we aren't going anywhere wait your turn" I'm less passive aggressive than I used to be cause there's kids in the car now.
The other day on my way lunch the next town over, a boomer on a harley came flying up behind me on the 3 mile, arrow straight speed-trap road I was on. He was right on my bumper and turned on his brights. My V1Gen2 was blipping Ka and steadily getting stronger, an indication the town Marshall is fishing.
I popped my flashers, slowed and got over on the shoulder, and he went blasting by downshifting as he passed to express displeasure at me only going 5 over the admittedly low 45 mph speed limit.
Sixty seconds later, I see red and blues turn on and go after the biker.
Oops!
I wish I could get those legally just to find out who's looking for speeders. Sounds INCREDIBLY useful.
With modern radar, but the time it tells you, you're fucked anyways. I've had more speeding tickets with a radar detector than I ever got without one.
Oh, jeez - I didn't realize we were talking about Bed-Stuy. I remember all the horrible weight the name "Bed-Stuy" carried back in the 80s, and I'm from northern New Jersey.
"Hopefully his girlfriend will date a MAN in the future and not a little boy. But somehow I doubt she'll learn the lesson."
0. It seemed like she didn't even care; maybe Jack was spot on about NYC musical bedbugs relationships.
1. She stood there and watched him bleed out afterwards with no attempt to administer first aid.
2. She refused to cooperate with the police because she didn't want to identify the attacker as black.
3. Both of them were avowed antifa activists. Marxist and BLM credentials too.
4. I don't think there are any lessons she can learn here.
5. I'm half wondering if she wasn't in on it as a contract murder.
Hopefully she will end up a cat lady. I would rather she not reproduce.
It gladdens my hard heart to read the first 200 of the 2200 comments on Insta for the Baltimore gal.
She sounds like a humorless grifter TBH. Tough way to die though.
There are plenty of ways to spend money. Some people buy a too big and gaudy house. Some buy a dumb old car. Sounds like DeMuro has enough money to buy a Countach and an LMP car. Mocking the guy serves no purpose IMO.
"Some people buy a too big and gaudy house" My neighborhood is going through this. Building the largest most hideous mansions I have ever seen. People with more money than tastes.
I had a relative who made a bunch of money in a business bought out by a Fortune 100. Built a house totaling over 20,000 square feet for himself and new GF. Sold it three years later. At some point it was occupied by Shaquille O'Neal. Dumbest thing I ever saw. He blew through ALL the money in about 20 years.
20k sq feet... For what! I'd be happy with 3500. Honestly, probably happy with 2500.
2800 is good, you can raise 2 kids and when they go to college the house feels huge.
The important thing is parking spots. I can put 2 in the garage and 3 in their own spaces in the back.
You beat me to it, I was going to say 3k to live in, 17k to store all the cars
THANK YOU
17k and I'd have a fully stocked race shop.
Goals.
My parents’ house is about 5400, for just them (I have no siblings and haven’t lived there for any regular length of time since 2021). It’s excessive, and far too much to clean. Really, it was too big even when I *did* live there: 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, a 900 square foot “bonus room” I called my bedroom. For three people, a dog, and two cats. Id be happy with something half its size.
I’ve got 3x floors of 1500 each. Perfect. 1 floor of bedrooms, 1 floor of living space and kitchen and 2 offices, and 1 basement with a little bit of finished space and lots of storage for bins and unused exercise equipment and pool table and the like.
My parents is 7500. It’s ridiculous but they bought it during the last crash. If my mom and wife got along, id knock mine down live there for a year and build something a bit bigger on my lot.
For someone who made their money through business and likely had no fame, I have no idea. I can see it for celebrities though. They basically can't leave the house without causing a circus, so things like gyms and movie theaters come to them.
I'm happy with 1150. I'd gladly take another 500, but can't even see a need for 2000. I'd even MORE gladly add that 500 to the garage...
I'm fine with the 1400 I have. I just want my wife to stop nagging me. Three teenaged girls and one bathroom will be a nightmare if we don't upgrade.
Anyone spending new money on a house that size must be a former renter with no idea what the taxes, insurance, and maintenance would look like.
Keeping up with 2400 on 1.25 acres is all I can handle.
Really dumb is building a castle surrounded by thatch mud huts, relatively speaking. If you sell it down the road, if you have the only castle you will not get castle prices.
You build your castle near the edge of all the current ones.
We got one of those in our neighborhood. It's a ten million dollar Castle surrounded by million dollar houses but it's the same theory.
Scott, it the Cardinal Rule, never build/own the most expensive house in the neighborhood. Exception, in McLean Va you buy a 2,500 sqft 1950’s executive home for $1.5M and tear it down and build a 10,000 sqft 2023 $5M executive home that does not hold a candle to quality of construction of the home you tote down.
Sinking tide theory.
It's all about lot value as my family has always said. They're not making more of those, no matter what you do with the castle.
"Where value wears a neon sombrero and there's not a church or library to offend the eye!"
- Homer Simpson
Nah, you'll win in the end, Jack. After you die, you're probably looking at a few months in Purgatory performing some Sisyphus-like task until you've learned your lesson, then it's on to peace, joy, and eternal communion with the Lord our God. DeMuro's headed for Hades, where he will be sodomized by a demon with an earth auger for all eternity.
These whitelibs obviously never read Richard Wright's Native Son. Sic semper whitelibbus.
Wow. Am I really this mean-spirited? Or have I just had a bad week? Crap, it's only Wednesday.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who's been thinking about Richard Wright's Native Son in the context of all this woke insanity.
Jack will be forced to remove the spark plugs from under the dash in a Montecarlo, but they're all seized and snap in half.
Also it will be outside in the winter at night while it rains.
Not quite hell, but isn't that what purgatory is?
That might happen BEFORE I die, to be honest.
Not just any Monte Carlo. A mid-90s Monte Carlo, with that crazy Twin Dual Cam V6 where GM stuck 4-valve DOHC heads on the old 60-deg V6, where the intake manifold must come off in order to even see the back bank of plugs.
I'm sure my Purgatory experience will be far worse. Jesus loved his enemies while they were driving nails into his hands and feet. Whereas I'm a misanthrope who struggles to love people who supported mask mandates, or who won't turn right on red.
Both are annoying, one is evil.
Yeah but if that's happening, you're got a Twin Dual Cam Lumina, which is AWESOME
Ah, so that was GM's version of Ford's 3.8 SC in the T-Bird Super Coupe.
Or those who blindly insist on driving at or below the speed limit, no matter traffic conditions, visibility, or LEO presence! (If a sign was posted on the highest bridge in Toledo stating “Jump Off This Bridge” instead of a speed limit, there’d be several suicides a week!)
Isn't "acting with integrity as an automotive journalist" Sisyphean enough?
You can leave out automotive
the miura was a usable fast car. luggage space for 2 even. daily driver/occasional racer for me (for 2 laps till the brakes disappeared). countach was a HUGE disappointment. not enuf room for me and thoroughly impractical. what a shame. dailydriving the miura gave me a sixpack at 31--only one i've ever had.
Lando pulled up to the Monaco casino in one the other day, props to that boy.
The Countach is also exceptionally ugly. (As designed it wasn’t bad, once the JC Whitney catalog threw up on it— forget it.) The Miura is rolling sex!
Leno has two Miuras but not a Countach as far as I know. He's got a 3500 too but I don't think he owns any Lambos later than the Miura. He's also on record as saying he doesn't want to deal with Ferrari's "bullshit", so he doesn't have any of those. The high end car companies that play favorites alluded to by Jack are playing a dangerous game because there is almost always someone wealthier than your favorite who you just pissed off.
It’s a short term strategy but the CEO isn’t going to be around in 30 years. A family company CEO might care.
Leno absolutely has a Countach, in fact I believe they made a Countach toy as part of the Jay Leno’s Garage Matchbox (or was it Hot Wheels) series.
He’s had a Countach since the 80s and it has mileage on it!
Just finished watching this about 5 minutes ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ETvWWrgVg&ab_channel=Tavarish at the 44:23 mark. Your 2 Miuras. With the Countach next to them.
the first-generation Countach is beautiful simply because, at the time, it was so wildly outlandish. by the end of the car's run, it had become a caricature of a supercar.
"the JC Whitney catalog threw up on it" is a great turn of phrase, by the way.
Thank Walter wolf for that. He almost immediately modified his and everyone had to have one. I do like the flares and tires, but leave the wing.
The Countach just doesn't look right without the wheel arches and wing.
Wow. I could not disagree with you more. I don’t like any add on wings, spoilers, spats. On anything.
I’m probably in the minority with this opinion— I usually am. And I guess nobody had a poster of the Countach sans frippery.
I think it was done to take your eyes off the bumpers. Like a obese fat chick wearing glasses that look like they were stolen from Flava Flav.
The American bumpers were awful looking things.
I always liked that front wing, myself.
The front wing is kinda cool, but the blocky front bumper is the opposite of that.
THAT'S WHAT I'M SAYING
Wild to hear a review of the Miura from someone who bought it new.
What colour was yours?
that awful miura persimmon. my least favorite color but at 30 i was too timid to ask sig. lamborghini for another color. i met him at the factory in '66. $12,300.
Should have put it into and s&p 500 fund. <—- this is a joke
Too cool! I bet meeting the man himself was interesting. I personally loved the orange they had (possibly because of the Italian Job). What colour were you hoping to get?
I just posted a Youtube link to a comment to Ronnie S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ETvWWrgVg&ab_channel=Tavarish 44:23 That color?
So I am just now remembering this story.
Over a decade ago, Doug DeMuro and I were hanging out on a weeknight.
He liked to sit on the patio of a fast casual restaurant across the street from my office, which at the time was on Peachtree Road in Buckhead. A few times a month, we would get together and eat a quick dinner (and watch cars go by) before he went home and I started my second shift in the cubicles.
One time we got together, I got an email that let me off the hook for the night, so to speak. So I insisted we go to the cigar club around the corner. Despite the fact that he neither drinks nor smokes, he acquiesced.
We sit down, and there happens to be a guy flying solo who joins us in “our” seating area. We start chatting with him, and he tells us all about … the Miura he used to own.
I am sure there is a paragraph somewhere in "Money" by Martin Amis (my favourite novel, re-read every ten years or so) that stipulates that the ONLY tactic when faced with a fight is to immediately go nuclear (note to Sherman - that's a split infinitive, but there is actually no rule in English that prohibits it just because you can't do it in Latin). Just as I suspect with Amis himself, however, I have never even been in a playground scuffle myself so what do I know? Well, enough to avoid places/times where the crazies go, at least.
Martin Amis, what a writer. His Dad wasn't half bad either.
Yes, but Martin turned it up to 11.
For descriptive writing (of a different sort) I really like Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb series.
I've read only Amis's Koba The Dread. I read it just before reading Solzhenitsyn. Must've been 20 years ago. Concurrently purchased Conquest has been sitting on my bookshelf unread the entire while. Might have to pick it up, finally, when this substack takes a holiday break.
Josh Krueger was an advocate that any crime was ethical if the crime was for need.
I saw in a X thread where somebody said "So, if after they popped him, they went to the fridge had a Sprite and made a sandwich, it's all good?"
Authentic lol.
Did anyone ask him, what about rape?
LaPere let that guy in the building because she no doubt believed that since she was the self-appointed Savior Of All Black People, then there is no possible way that a black person could possibly show her anything other than love and support.
I mean, after all, she publicly proclaimed her love for all black people, and all people in the world spend 7 hours a day on Instagram, just like she does, ergo, this scary looking dude has to know she is actually his friend.
I think it was a little different. She probably had a twinge of doubt that her no doubt expensive education and all those hours on Twitter rubbed up against. Like all the racists I know, she overreacted to her conscience and chatted with the man who scared her just to show him how not scary black he was.
Also, being her age, she didn't read the local paper so had no idea what was happening in her own hood.
Few people who operate at or above the level our Esteemed Host here does, choose the same choices.
Can we call this decisionmaking pattern "life-choice instrumentalism"? You only have one life, so you may as well do what you wish with it -- right?
It's not unlikely that some of the people mentioned in the article simply lack the originality and fearlessness to put it all on the line in LMP2 or the Radical Cup. I always wondered if the cosplay-car-guys still have something left to prove.