Fire This Asshole

Last Sunday was the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, whereby car enthusiasts converge on the famed golf course and drool over the various examples of automotive gorgeousity strewn around like a rich man’s carelessly-scattered diamonds on green velvet.

Here are a couple other examples:

Iso Rivolta:

Ferrari Pininfarina:

And all was well in the land, until this little Wokist twerp got in on the act:

Let’s get two things cleared up before we continue. The first is that while the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is certainly far from the most momentous cultural event of the year, it is the most prestigious car show anywhere in the world. For a few days in late summer, the 18th fairway at the Pebble Beach golf course is the very highest point for any rich person who covets vintage cars, and the highest honor for any person working in the business of restoring classics.
The second is that Mercedes was not just a car company that was busy at work doing normal car stuff during the time in which Nazis were in power in Germany. Mercedes was an early and direct supporter of Adolf Hitler long before he took power, helping him out while he was still an outsider figure in Bavarian politics. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he got picked up in a Mercedes-Benz.

Ergo, says this girlyman, we should not have the 540K as the winner because it was driven by Nazis.  Here’s the car in question:

And then this:

This is exactly how this car is seen in this world of the mega-rich: an encapsulation of “the optimistic mood” of Germany in 1934. Let us ask: for whom was this an optimistic time, and who is the kind of person who looks back on that time now, remembering its icons for their … optimism? Rich people, that’s who.

Wow… wealth envy and oh-so laudable “anti-Nazi” sentiment all wrapped up in a neat little bundle.  Read the whole thing to get the RCOB that Longtime Reader Ken S. warned me I’d get, when he sent it to me yesterday.  And I did.

Even better is that the writer suffers from the usual hypocrisy of his ilk, in that he owns a… Volkswagen Beetle, surely the most Hitlerish of all German cars of the 1930s.

So just for the hell of it, feast your eyes on a couple other examples of this eeeevil car:

And to hell with this wokist revisionism.  Let’s just enjoy the automotive excellence.

Pity, though:  I used to enjoy reading Jalopnik.

Speed Bump

Oy.  Once again, the bludde boileth overre.  Guess why?  Never mind, it’s the Daily Mail again.

PICTURED: Moment Kaley Cuoco’s stunt double is RAN OVER by a car

Give me a minute while I get a fresh cup of coffee.

I’ve ranted before about the Brit tendency to misuse tenses, e.g. “he was sat there” instead of “he was sitting there”, and now we have the latest manifestation, using “ran” instead of “run”.

In this case, the problem stems from fucking illiteracy  ignorance of what is being omitted from the sentence:  “…stunt double is (being) run over by a car.”  Clearly, saying “stunt double is being ran over by a car” jars the senses — or maybe it doesn’t, in the post-grammatical world we now find ourselves in.

Just for the record, “ran” in this example is a transitive past-tense verb, i.e. “the car ran over the stunt double” (although it really should have run over both the writer and editor of this article).  Similarly, it can be used without an object (“the boy ran away”) unless it’s used in a different sense (the man ran the company — i.e. managed the company).

Of all the times to run out of fuel for my flamethrower…

Preferences

One of my favorite online reads is Powerline’s Week In Pictures, because it’s topical and funny as all hell.

However, their last pic typically features a beautiful woman holding a gun (which is a good thing), but she’s almost always dressed in tacticool gear, e.g. this week’s offering (scroll down to the end):

…which all well and good, if that’s what gets you going.

Myself, I prefer the more realistic country look:

Yeah, I’m old-fashioned.