Monday Morning Memes, Special Highbrow Edition

Has it been that long?

The World Series was between the Yankees and the Dodgers when I was 9, 10, and 13 years old. Those are formative years when it comes to remembering things, I guess. The baseball history books I read were full of storied World Series between the two teams.

It's hard to believe that this year will be their first October matchup since I was in middle school.

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Meme Dump...

Bobber Beemer

I really love the looks of this slightly rat bike-d old air cooled Beemer bobber.

I gotta say, though, that the rider looks like he belongs with the bike a lot more than I do. It's practically like those pictures you see where dogs and their owners grow to look like each other.

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I'll never order a lemonade & ice tea blend the same way again.

The op-ed and political pages at the Washington Post and New York Times have been laboriously "sanewashing" the former president's speeches, translating his rambling, discursive weirdness into something resembling policy positions in the interest of trying to present somewhat normal coverage of a typical quadrennial political horse race.

Yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, though, the Donald finally said something too weird for the WaPo to try and spin it into normal political dialogue.

Seventeen days from the election, here in arguably the most decisive swing state, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his speech without mentioning politics.

Instead, he delivered a long tribute to Arnold Palmer, the late golfer who was born here and is the namesake of the airport where Trump was speaking. Trump’s soliloquy about Palmer included an account of how other athletes reacted to seeing him in the showers.

“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.

That was a dong too far for the Post's writers...

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Dead Wagon

The US auto market has essentially given up on station wagons for whatever reason.

Take, as Exhibit A, the 2018-2020 Buick Regal TourX wagon, based on the Opel Insignia Country Tourer.

I can't believe that Buick released a longroof with AWD and the 250 horsepower turbo four from the base Camaro, and it put down performance numbers basically identical to my '94 Mustang GT & '98 Z3 2.8, plus it looked really good, and the market shrugged and said "Whaddaya got in a blobby crossover SUV instead?"

Heck, Buick didn't just give up the Regal wagon, they gave up all the Regals...and actually all the cars. Buick is solely a purveyor of SUVs and crossovers now.

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Robot Pot

Things I didn't know I needed until just now: A robotic self-propelled flowerpot.

Think of it as a prosthetic for a brown thumb.

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I could have told you that.

Some recent studies of domestic cats show that they have a remarkable ability to pick up the meanings of spoken words just by observation and without specific training.

Even if your cat hasn’t gotten your tongue, it’s most likely getting your words. Without any particular training, the animals—like human babies—appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports. That means that, despite all appearances to the contrary, our furtive feline friends may actually be listening to what we say.

As anyone who's spent time around cats knows, they aren't dumb at all, they just DGAF.

Automotif DLXII...

1965 saw the debut of an all-new Galaxie at Ford. It had much more sharply-creased styling and vertically-stacked quad headlights.

It was available as a two-door coupe or convertible, as well as pillared or hardtop sedan, with each version coming in several levels of trim. In 1965 you could get your Galaxie 500 converible in either the regular flavor or the more bling-y Galaxie 500 XL form. The badges on the rear fenders of this '65 ragtop in Vintage Burgundy tell us it's an XL.

The base motor in an XL convertible was the then-new 289 2-barrel small block V-8, called the "Challenger" in Ford ad copy and rated at 200 SAE gross horsepower. The next step up was the 250-horsepower 4-barrel Thunderbird 352 cubic inch FE big block V-8. Power-hungry buyers could opt for the 300 horsepower 390 or the 425 horse 427 "side-oiler" big block.

The smaller two engines only came with the 3-speed Cruise-O-Matic slushbox, while the 390 could be had with an auto or a four-on-the-floor, and the hairy 7 Liter only came with the manual.

While the car magazines of the time all focused on the wild-eyed 427 monsters, the majority of Galaxie XL ragtops had the base motor or, like this one, the 352 FE mill.

This one was photographed with a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and an EF 28-70mm f/2.8L zoom lens in July of 2022.

Meme Dump...

Psst! Kid! Want a unique game console?

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

Automotif DLXI...

While the '46-'48 Dodges were mostly prewar Dodge D-22's with a light cosmetic makeover, 1949 saw the first true postwar lineup from Dodge.

You could get your '49 Dodge in one of three flavors. Lowest on the totem pole was the stripped-down Wayfarer, only available as a two-door coupe, business coupe, or roadster, all on a shortened 115" wheelbase. The top of the line model was the Coronet, which came in the whole array of coupe, sedan, convertible, and wagon styles.

In the middle was the Meadowbrook, which only came as a 123.5"-wheelbase pillared sedan. They were fairly popular, moving ~90,000 units and accounting for nearly a third of the marque's sales that year.

For 1951, the Meadowbrook received an entirely new, more modern-looking front end. Due to Detroit's production being focused on vehicles for the Korean War, the '51 and '52 models were pretty much identical.

Under the hood could be found Dodge's "Get-Away" flathead inline six. It displaced 230 cubic inches and, breathing through a single Stromberg carb, was rated at 103 SAE gross horsepower. 

The only transmission choice was Dodge's Gyro-Matic, which was just the Dodge brand name for Chrysler's Fluid-Drive. Not a true automatic, it was a 3-speed manual with a torque converter. The clutch and column mounted shift lever were needed to select among the gears, but you could come to a full stop and start off again without having to use the clutch.

The upper three photos were taken in August of 2021 using a Hasselblad Lunar and Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* 16-70mm f/4 OSS zoom lens, while the one below was snapped with a Nikon 1 V2 and 1 Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.8 lens.

Deadly Hand Me Downs

Australia is engaged in modernizing their military in the face of regional Chinese saber rattling, which includes upgrading their military's armor with M1A2 Abrams tanks. As a result, they're shipping 49 of their older M1A1 Abrams to Ukraine to bolster the latter's armored forces.

Also, it looks like an F-16 might have splashed an Su-34 Fullback with a long-range AMRAAM shot. If true, that's probably an ex-Danish F-16A, a Disco Era cold warrior still out there doing work. The Su-34 had only been in real serious series production for half a decade or so and some OSINT types are claiming that Russia has less than a hundred left.

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When R2D2 goes rogue...

An internet connected appliance is a hackable appliance.

Robot vacuums manufactured by Ecovacs have gone rogue, with some customers reporting the tiny tech tools chased them around their homes and barraged them with profanities after being hacked.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson is one of those people. He told Australia Broadcast Network about an experience in May with his Deebot X2. the uniquely problematic model from the Chinese manufacturer.

Instead of Skynet infiltrating our fortified bunkers with T-800 Terminator killbots, it's 4chan infiltrating our living rooms with robot vacuum cleaners that bang into our ankles and call us names.

This future is somehow both duller and dumber and yet also more dystopian than the one I was promised.

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"Are your glasses doxxing me?"

The pace of technological change comes at you fast, and it has a lot of implications that may not be immediately apparent.

Take these seemingly unrelated facts:

• High-resolution digital cameras are tiny and ubiquitous.
• Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G connectivity is portable and everywhere.
• Facial recognition technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds.
• Everybody's in some sort of database these days.

Now, this caused a stink recently when people were using Meta's smart glasses to doxx random people via facial recognition, but there's no need to be using funky prototype smart glasses when your phone has a camera and the ability to locate and lock on to faces and you could theoretically, I dunno, just carry it backwards in your shirt pocket...

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Meme Dump...

Automotif DLX...

Volkswagen's Scirocco, a sporty coupe based on the Golf platform, had gone through a couple generations when it was supplanted in the lineup by a burlier replacement, based on the Mk2 Golf/Jetta, the new VW Corrado.

Introduced to the US market for the 1990 model year, the Corrado was a burlier, more pugnacious-looking ride than its predecessor.

Whereas the second generation Scirocco had been a graceful wedge, carrying over the general aesthetic of the Giugiaro-penned original, the Corrado looked like someone had stepped on a Golf and then gotten it mad.

It was definitely a more serious ride than its predecessor. You had to pay extra for the swoopy engines in the Scirocco, because in the '80s German automakers acted like 4V heads were special unobtainium and priced them accordingly, while the Japanese companies were sticking DOHC fours in every secretarymobile. The base '87 Scirocco motor was an 8V 1.8L four rated at 94 horsepower, and you had to pony up another $2,300... one fifth the base price of the car ...to upgrade to the 127-horse 16V version.

In the new Corrado, on the other hand, even the base motor was a 1.8L 16V unit, now rated at 134hp. Corrado buyers who wanted to party could order the G60, with had an 8V 1.8L sporting a scroll-type supercharger, intercooler, and 158 SAE net horsepower.

 

In an eight-way comparison test of sporty four-cylinder 2+2 coupes in 1992, Car and Driver gave the Corrado G60 a 5th place finish. The supercharged motor powered the stubby VW to a 7.5 second zero-to-sixty time and a 15.9 quarter mile at 87 mph. With a 130 mile per hour top speed and a 0.81g skidpad performance, these were decent numbers for an early Nineties sporty coupe

When they first came out, I wasn't a fan. They looked so much bulkier than the sleek Scirocco they replaced, but the shape has aged well, and I love the eccentric engine options and funky details like the retractable spoiler.

The one in the photos was snapped in the upper valley region of New Hampshire in April of 2015 using a Nikon Coolpix P7000.

Unusual Hue

A video about one dude's obsession with a hyper-rare factory Porsche color, Moonstone, only sold in the 1979-1980 model years. Disco, baby!

Meme Dump...

I didn't know that taste buds had handedness...

When I joke that a "nation cannot long stand half Chick-Fil-A and half Panera Bread" I mean it mostly tongue-in cheek... I mean, I happen to be a fan of both chains ...but it absolutely seems to be a thing.

Earlier this year, a reporter at NBC News posted on X that she’s “not sure [she] will ever recover from learning” that a colleague gets restaurant recommendations from Federal Election Commission filings, the periodic reports that reveal how candidates for Congress and the White House spend their campaign dollars.

Her colleague tweeted in reply: “If one of the 535 people who run our legislature is gonna spend thousands of dollars at a barbecue place I’ve never heard of, you better believe I’m gonna go to there.” Immediately, we had questions.

Do political campaigns know something about America’s restaurant scene that we don’t? Do Republicans and Democrats dine differently?

Thus began our effort to glean gems of dining wisdom from the seemingly mundane depths of the nation’s campaign finance reports.

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"Tempura-breaded buffalo cauliflower? You some kinda commie or something'?"