Automotif CCCXLVIII...

I'd forgotten about this one. I spotted it back on the 11th of January and just never got around to posting it.

That's a 1936 Auburn 852 Phaeton out tooling around on the city streets with more pedestrian automobiles around it to provide proper scale.

This is from the second-to-last year of production for Auburn (and its Cord and Duesenberg stablemates). With the Great Depression crippling the market for ultrapremium luxury cars, they ceased production after the '37 model year.

The 852 came in normally-aspirated and supercharged versions. This is one of the former, and it's powered by a 280 cubic inch flathead Lycoming straight-8 with a 2-barrel carburetor, rated at 115 horsepower. Power is fed through a three-speed manual transmission to a dual ratio rear end. The driver can select between final drive ratios via a lever on the steering wheel hub.

You talkin' to me?

"Blue Steel!"

Sometimes you can get them to pose just right!

"Come at me, bro!"

Both photos are from Thursday's walk to lunch with the Nikon D2X & 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II combo.

It's almost twenty years old now, but I still get a ton of use out of it. I'll keep using it until it succumbs to some unfixable malady.

With the right lens, it can still take a bangin' photo.

We've been warning you!

If you want to give tanks to Ukraine, not only do you need to have the tanks to spare in the first place, but they need to actually be in running order and not mothballed off in some corner someplace, half-cannibalized for spares.

Some German officials expressed sympathy for Finland, which is not yet a NATO member and has Europe’s longest border with Russia, some 830 miles. It does not want to weaken its defenses now that Russia has shown a willingness to attack a sovereign neighbor.

But some European officials were hoping for a larger contribution from Finland, given promises from the United States and Britain to come to its defense if necessary, even before NATO accession.

Nordic countries such as Sweden, which had long pushed for Leopard deliveries but on Friday offered only “up to” 10, are facing another unexpected problem, several German officials said: While their politicians and members of the public appear keen to offer tanks to Ukraine, their militaries are not.

For decades, European countries enjoying a post-Cold War “peace dividend” had seen war as almost a thing of the past, regularly cutting military support. Now, the shrunken armies tend to be protective of what they still have. At NATO, European militaries are sometimes called “bonsai armies,” after the miniature trees.

A whole generation has grown up after the Cold War and let formerly muscular defenses atrophy. The Bundeswehr is an underfunded shadow of its former self. It used to be the brawniest army on the continent and now it has fewer MBTs than the Greeks. And if the Bundeswehr is in such a sad state, imagine what, say, the Dutch or the Belgies are looking like these days.

War just wasn't a thing that was gonna happen anymore in the new globalized world. What were you? Some kind of paranoid loon that thought Russia was just going to start invading neighboring countries?

Hey, they started back during the last years of the GWB administration and basically haven't stopped since.

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Hilarious!

Whatever the NE Ohio Regional Sewer District is paying their social media person, it's not enough.

💀 pic.twitter.com/0sowZJO0eH

— NE Ohio Regional Sewer District (@neorsd) March 3, 2023

Sleepytime reading...

Holden appears to have nodded off with a copy of Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery. It's Bobbi's book and she says it's quite good, but a lot of the words might be too big for a young tomcat and it probably doesn't have many pictures of birds.

Automotif CCCXLVII...

Photographed with a Nikon D2X & 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II

Here's a sinister-looking murdered-out 1980 or '81 Chevrolet Camaro Z28.

The factory motor would have been a 350cid LM1 V8, rated at 185bhp in 1980. The '81 model year introduced new emissions controls that dropped the horsepower rating to 175.

1981-1983 was probably the absolute low point of automotive performance in the US. The lardy 175-horse 3500-lb boulevardier 1981 Z28 would have squared off against its rival from Dearborn, the Mustang. For the '81 Model year, the top version of the Mustang was the Cobra, with lots of decals and aero doodads.

The Cobra was 900 pounds lighter than the Z28, since the latter was riding on an eleven-year-old platform* that had been designed when Sunoco high test was 35 cents a gallon and CAFE regs were half a decade in the future, while the Mustang was on its third model year of the then-new Fox body. However the top performance motor for the Mustang was the anemic 255cid V8 that sipped gas through a dinky Motorcraft 2bbl carb and only spit out 120 horsepower.

Basically even though the Camaro had been reduced to a plush-bottomed shell of its former wild-eyed glory, it'd still maul the dismally-underpowered Mustang. Those tables wouldn't turn again until Ford stuffed a Holley 4bbl 5.0 under the hood in '83.

Considering that they sold a blue million 2nd Generation Camaros over the eleven-year run of the body style, you don't see a ton of them on the street. I'd wager that rust got a bunch and telephone poles got a bunch more.

*This resulted in an odd situation on Chevy lots in the late-'70s/early-'80s in that the Chevy Malibu, their bread-and-butter midsize sedan, and the Monte Carlo "personal luxury coupe" had already gone through a round of downsizing and thus had the same length wheelbase and were actually a couple hundred pounds lighter than the "sporty 2+2" Camaro. 

Yummy!

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An unusual sight...

Here's a thing you don't see every day: A 1947 Cushman 50-series turtleback done up in full hipster rat bike drag, motoring down the public thoroughfare. 

I like the vent covers, the No Parking sign for a trunk lid, and especially the Ford Model A taillight with the word "STOP" molded into the lens.

Yesterday's weather in SoBro was glorious. The afternoon high peaked at 76ºF under sunny blue skies with just enough puffy white clouds to be aesthetically pleasing.

While the actual start of astronomical spring doesn't happen until the equinox later this month, "meteorological spring" began yesterday on the first of March, and it sure lived up to the billing.

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Trying again...

I got all excited to go try out the Vietnamese place that went in the storefront where Naked Tchopstix used to be. I'll miss having a nearby source for dolsot bibimbap in the middle of an Indiana winter, but having it get replaced by a premium phở & bahn mi joint is a fair trade.

So I boarded the Red Line yesterday morning for the short hop up to the Broad Ripple station, keeping an eye on the obvious tweaker just in case he decided he might need my Nikon D800 more than I did.

We disembarked and he spasmed off eastwards down the Broad Ripple Avenue sidewalk while I went south to Eating Fresh...only to discover that they were open six days a week, and Tuesday wasn't one of those six.

I really had my mouth set for some phở, too.

Oh well. I'll try again today.

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Classic Big Bore Boomstick

A pair of fixed sight 4" .44 Special Hand Ejectors, three quarters of a century apart.

Between the longer cylinder, chonkier frame, and ejector rod shroud being slimmer and simpler to machine, the barrel on the 2004-vintage Model 21-4 Thunder Ranch Special looks longer and slimmer than the one on the 1930-vintage .44 Hand Ejector Third Model, but they're both four-inch tubes.

Every now and again I toy with the idea of taking a chamber reamer to the 21-4 because it's surely up to milder Magnum loads of the Silvertip/Hydra-Shok variety, but then I remember I already have a 629 and the urge goes away.

The other thing I keep meaning to do is replace those Ahrends with some Eagle Secret Service Grips, and maybe track down some more period-correct stocks for that beater Third Model.

Any day now, surely.

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Dude can write, alright.

Apparently they've flipped a switch, making Kevin D. Williamson's latest column readable by non-subscribers, and it is good stuff.

This excerpt isn't even the main thrust of the column, but it was chucklesome.

Perhaps you have seen this interview, in which Tucker Carlson makes the case for banning automated trucks in order to save truck drivers’ jobs. Carlson has a point, of course, but he misses the real enemy: Sure, we could save some jobs by preventing technological progress in transportation, and we could create a lot more jobs in transportation by taking the proactive step of banning trucks and making everybody use donkey carts, but the real problem—the real job-killer!— is, obviously, the wheel. Make people transport goods with bindles like medieval serfs and we’ll have more transportation-sector jobs than we know what to do with. Of course, we’ll have a medieval-serf standard of living, too.

(Some of you are hearing these words in your heads: “Why not use spoons?”)

This is nonsense, and I know Carlson doesn’t actually believe this. If he did, he would quit his job. As in transportation, technology has radically increased the financial returns to a successful career in asinine demagoguery, but it also has put a lot of asinine demagogues out of business. There would be a lot more jobs for asinine demagogues if they had to travel around the country—on horses, of course, if not on foot—giving speeches on soapboxes and stumps the way they did in the early 19th century.

You should RTWT...

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Frequency...

I seem to be posting with greater frequency. This is the eightieth post this month, and I haven't posted eighty times in a month since the summer of 2016.

I should keep it up.

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ZCQOTD: Historical Fetishism Edition...

You'll notice that the marble statues in their "PATRIOT NEWSMAN OF THE WEST" profile pics are all in the plain white stone of now and not painted up like circus clowns the way they were in the CLASSICAL WEST to which they wish to RETVRN.

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So S&W is basically doing the Ruger thing now?

Making product-improved versions of Kel-Tec designs has been a healthy business model for Ruger, so why shouldn't someone else hop on that train, I guess?

If you're already an M&P shooter, you get mag compatibility with your pistol, and since it's a side-folder, you don't have to worry about optics ruining its stowability.

MSRP is supposed to be $659, so that would put street prices probably somewhere in the mid-high fives? If build quality is good, it might be worth a look if I were still rockin' an M&P 9 pistol.

Tweet!

If anyone's been curious about the latest news from the ongoing popcorn fest at Twitter HQ...

Here's the shot, from The Platformer last Thursday:

On Wednesday, Twitter employees had the tech equivalent of a snow day: the company’s Slack instance was down for “routine maintenance,” they were told, and the company was implementing a deployment freeze as a result.

That same day, Jira – a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance – also stopped working. With no way to chat and no code to ship, most engineers took the day off.

Jira access was restored on Thursday. But Platformer can now confirm that Slack wasn’t down for “routine maintenance.” “There is no such thing as routine maintenance. That’s bullshit,” a current Slack employee told us.

...and here's the chaser, from Sunday's NYT (the link bypasses the paywall):

Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees on Saturday night, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 who were still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily pared back its work force from about 7,500 employees as he has sought to reduce costs.

The layoffs came after a week when the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate with each other. The company’s internal messaging service, Slack, was taken offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or looking up company data, five current and former employees told The New York Times. On Saturday night, some employees discovered that they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, three of the people said — the first hint that layoffs had begun.

The most wholesome thing this week (so far)

Allow me to introduce you to the most ridiculous yet amazing thing you will see this week. pic.twitter.com/MHlGmz9Ph2

— fragrance and foolishness (@Brieyonce) February 27, 2023

Early Spring

I'm not saying it's been an unusually warm winter here in Hoosieropolis, but the trees seem to have lost all sense of what time of year it is.

Looking at the ten day forecast, we're only slated for one hard freeze in the near future, late this week.

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So Bad It's Good

VHS Revival has a great review & hilarious behind-the-scenes dissection of one of my favorite schlockily terribad '80s Golan-Globus action flicks, Bloodsport, which was Jean-Claude Van Damme's movie debut.

Bloodsport‘s plot is so simple it makes the most primitive 16-bit game seem complex by comparison, but that’s the beauty of it. Van Damme’s training ― though again said to be of real-life origin ― has fighting game bonus round written all over it. Dux is subjected to a series of trials designed to sharpen his instincts and test his mettle, like catching fish with his bare hands, fighting blindfolded, DRINKING TEA blindfolded, and, in what seems like something of a (ahem!) stretch, is even tied to a makeshift torture rack, the very same that were designed to dislocate joints and tear out limbs. Van Damme, who is subjected to such nonsense for real, certainly earned his meagre $25,000 fee.

The review is worth reading in its entirety.

So yeah, Van Damme's first movie role, which he landed by impressing a movie producer with his roundhouse kicking talent while waiting tables in a posh restaurant, paid him twenty-five grand. That's something like sixty long in 2023 dollars, which seems like a bargain to me, but I've never hired anybody to star in a kung fu movie so I can't be sure.

The movie is based on the BS war stories and drunken fabulations of noted Bullshido master Frank Dux, whose claims include winning a Medal of Honor while participating in super secret missions as a USMC reservist in the early Eighties, in between occasionally competing in apocryphal underground death matches like the one in the movie, or the ones in which Pam from Archer fought to pay for college.

I gotta say, you kids who weren't around in the days before the internet really missed out on the golden age of bullshit. Teenage insecurity tends to lead to wild tales of girlfriends in Canada or your friend's brother's uncle's 200mph Trans Am, but nowadays everybody's got Google in their pockets and can fact check your ass, and so people tend to get mocked right out of the habit of telling easily disprovable whoppers by the time they graduate high school. 

Not back then, though! The world was full of Frank Duxes! Any Army-Navy store of any size had a handful of regulars who spun tall tales at the cyclic rate with a glorious disregard for plausibility. While only a few hundred SEALs served in Vietnam, every neighborhood gun store had at least three or four of them.

I guess that's part of the nostalgia of Bloodsport for me. Anyway, if you haven't watched it...you can stream it with Amazon Prime...it's a hoot.

Automotif CCCXLVI...

Tasty 2023 Camaro ZL1 in Radiant Red Tintcoat, with 650bhp of supercharged 6.2L V8 under that carbon fiber hood bulge. These things look like they could be cited for Intent to Speed while still parked.

Falling Off The Edge

From a review of the next book on my digital reading pile, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything...

"Ultimately, there’s a need to get on the prevention side of conspiracism. That probably means keeping the pressure on social media companies to sacrifice some profit by reducing the addictiveness of their online products. However, it’s also true that the mental habits of conspiracy are probably as old as the human species, and may be rooted in certain evolutionary advantages (e.g., pattern-seeking, symbolic language, cooperative skills) that have betrayed us. The erosion of traditional authority, namely religion, and the transition away from small, intimate communities in favor of large, impersonal urban settings has been rattling us emotionally and psychologically since before Charles Darwin posited evolution over special creation.

It’s not that we haven’t been here before. It’s that we arrived and never left. We are caught in a recurring cycle of acute identity crisis (Are we a divine creation or a cosmic accident?) with our sense of our own dignity locked in a war against scientific and technological progress."

RTWT...

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