Month: May 2025

My American Car Experience Part 3: The Greenhouse

Drive Time

In planning for  The Great Wetback Episode Of ’86  my emigration to the U.S., I’d made prior arrangements with a rental car company to reserve and pre-pay a 3-month rental, so that I wouldn’t be stuck without wheels on my arrival.  I went with a prepay so that I could pay in rands and not in dollars because #CurrencyConversionRape, and would only have to pay the sales tax when I turned it in.  (In those days one could do such a thing because the rental companies loved getting paid in advance, especially — as was the case here — when made using a corporate club card e.g. Hertz #1 Club or Avis Preferred, National Gold etc.  I don’t think you can do this anymore.)

So I arrived at the airport in Austin, and made my way to the rental counter clutching my prepaid contract with some confidence because the club card showed that I was an employee of one of the company’s largest clients worldwide.  The rental counter lady looked at the contract and gave a little frown, causing my heart to sink, but it turned out I needn’t have worried.

“We don’t have any of that group’s cars left, but we can give you another, so if you don’t mind [smile], we’ll just upgrade you, and as you’ve prepaid, there’s no extra charge.”
“Okay.  What car will you give me?”
“I’m afraid the only one left is a Chev Camaro,” she said, and looked at me anxiously.  “Will that do?”

Then she gave a puzzled look at the sight of a customer sinking to his knees while uttering an apparent prayer of thanks.

It looked like this, a Camaro Sport Coupe, only in black:

In retrospect, when I sank to my knees I should have been asking “Why me, Lord?”, because this was the beginning of a three-month ordeal.

As I tootled around Austin with Trevor — who had himself emigrated some eight months earlier — a couple of things became apparent.

a) A Texas summer should not be coupled with a black car, of any size or description, and b) the enormous rear window actually had a greenhouse effect on the car’s interior.

In other words, Gentle Readers, driving this thing around Austin was akin to driving around in an oven set to Broil.

Worse yet, the Camaro had an anemic V6 engine, so like my earlier experience with the Silver Bullet, it had no poke whatsoever.  Trying to coax any kind of speed out of the thing simply meant that the need for a gas refill would appear sooner rather than later.

Of the handling, we will not speak.  Okay, do let’s talk about it because it didn’t have any.  It slewed around corners at any speed, the steering was vague and imprecise, and because the car was wider than a blue whale, maneuvering through traffic was a nail-biting experience for one not accustomed to driving such a beast.  I don’t know how Trevor felt about it, but all I can recall is several instances of sharply-indrawn breath and muttered “Fucking hell, that was close.”

How I survived the three months without a fender-bender or a scratch on the car is a testament to both luck and the ability of other drivers to avoid this sweating maniac’s clumsy driving.

And have I mentioned how hot I was, that summer in Austin?  I soon found that the only way to get into the car without fainting from the heat was to open the front door, start the engine, then get out quickly, close the door and scurry back to our apartment for about fifteen minutes to allow the Camaro’s A/C (which was excellent, I will admit) to bring the interior temperature down to, say, 98 degrees.  Some might say that I should have just lowered the windows to allow the breeze to cool the thing down, to which I should remind everyone that it was June/July/August in Austin, Texas.  (I remember driving back from a trip to San Antonio, and passing one of those signs outside a bank which showed the temperature to be 95, at 2am.  So don’t talk to me about daytime temperatures and lowered windows.)

Amazingly, when I was ferrying any of the local girls out to dinner or lunch (it happened a few times), they didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat.  Clearly, they were acclimatized and I wasn’t — despite having just come from Africa.

Anyway, the time came for me to hand the thing back to the rental company, and while I was left without transport for a few weeks (#VisaDelay) it wasn’t as big a problem as I’d thought it would be because as it happened, I was shacking up with one of those local girls and she had no problem with lending me her car on the few occasions when I needed one while she was at work.

Then my visa was approved and I left Austin to take up my job at the Great Big Research Company — just in time for my first encounter with a Chicago Winter.

But that’s another story.

All The Cool Kids

Gratuitous Gun Pics, Old Fartism

…are going to be looking at what’s new in the zoo for their 2025 handgun needs.

Boy, are we in trouble.

First off, I’m going to ignore anything chambered in 9mm, whether Parabellum or Short (.380 ACP).  Why?  Because 9mm DA pistols are like men’s hairy assholes:  they’re fugly, and every man (except Your Humble Narrator) has one (the gun, I mean).  Additionally, I can’t tell the difference between them without a score card, save for the Springfield XD which is recognizable only because it’s been on the market for so long.

Then there’s this horrible thing from Century:

A handgun (yeah, right) in .308 Win/7.62×51?  Are you fucking kidding me?

Then, to add insult to injury is Ed Brown’s .45 ACP “Kobra Karry”

…which will doubtless find favor with the Kardashian coven because of that obsessive need to start every name with a “K”.  And only a Kardashian would be able to afford this 1911 variant anyway, at over $3,000.

And speaking of 1911s, try the new Wilson Combat Project 1 (in 9mm yet):

I’m going to go out on a limb and state that this may be the ugliest 1911 ever made… and it sells for a piddling $4,000.  Bill Wilson must have been on vacation when this blingy design was approved.  It’s cheaper than the Nighthawk Double Agent (also in 9mm) by a couple of grand:


…but then all 1911s are cheaper than the Nighthawk.

Fach.

Okay, I’ve slagged off these “new” guns enough.  Now for the question:

If your rich old Uncle Elmer offered to buy you any gun under $2,000 on this list, which one would you accept as a gift?  (I promise to make no comment or criticism of your choice because #FreeGun.)

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Inside Information

Advice, Health

Here’s one for my long-suffering Lady Readers:  it turns out that engaging in a simple fitness exercise can provide you with a Big Moment.

The tingly, burning sensation traveled from the bottom of my feet up the back of my taut calves, through my thighs, into my pelvis, up my spine, on towards the crown of my head. Then as I raised myself back up onto my toes, it traveled back down my body again. My calves burned but so did other parts of my body – parts that shouldn’t be at 9.15am on a Tuesday, as I stood in my gym kit trying to increase my core strength as I trained for a half marathon. It was pain, but it was also, unmistakably, pleasure.

It was – and I apologize if you’re eating your breakfast as you read this – an orgasm.

I mean, think about it:  you can get a Big O without all that hassle of involving a partner, or touching yourself inappropriately under the desk, or messing up the bed (if you’re doing it properly, that is).

And you can even get it while doing something healthy:  a two-fer, to use retail-speak.

No need to thank me, ladies;  it’s all part of the service.

And for the rest of you:  it seems like this is a girls-only phenomenon, sorry.  You’ll just have to do what you normally do to get yours.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Wrong Target

Crime, Mocking Furriners

As anyone interested in trends would know, there’s been a surge in a specific type of city-center crime recently, one which involves a scrote whizzing past his victim, snatching their phone from their hand en passant.  This has made London, amongst others, a place where one should not walk the streets while catching up with an old friend on the phone, or even just calling home to make sure that the kids have not set fire to the house while one has been busy at the gym.

I’ve never understood this connectivity obsession anyway, especially as one shouldn’t talk on the phone in the street (for any reason) because believe it or not, passers-by are not really interested in your choice of wine for tonight’s dinner party.

But back to the phone robbers.  Britishland is applying the boot with a heavy hand in response to this epidemic:

E-scooters and e-bikes driven by brazen phone snatchers are to be destroyed by police within hours of being seized amid a crackdown on London’s mobile theft epidemic. 

Previously officers had to warn offenders before taking away and crushing a bike, scooter or any other vehicle driven in an anti-social manner or if it was used to facilitate a theft. 

But now, new powers will mean police won’t have to wait two weeks before throwing them away and will be able to do so in a two-day time frame.

Now far be it for me to rail against the crushing of these electric pestilences, which have been involved in so many pedestrian collisions because their riders are reckless assholes, not to mention the above assholes of the larcenous kind.

But it seems to me that the wrong part of this equation is being punished.  I’m no expert on the topic, but I have to feel that crushing a thief’s e-bike is rather pointless, in that said thieves having been thus dispossessed will simply steal a fresh bike with which to continue their little reindeer games.

Surely, for all sorts of reasons, it should be the thieves getting fed into the crusher’s jaws rather than their conveyances?  Much more likely to slow this modern kind of theft, I think.

But no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this, as would my followup suggestion that said crushing of scrotes be made a PPV TV event.

Fooling The Gullible

Marketing / Advertising

As a longtime marketing guy, I’m still fascinated by how easy it is to hoodwink people by making them think that a higher price equates to better quality.

The genius move, however, is to build on another perception of quality, e.g. “German engineering” or “French luxury” as a support for that higher price.

The “German engineering” ethos has been leveraged countless times, most notably with Mercedes cars — although in this case, it was a reputation very well earned, back in the 1960s and -70s. (In the recent past:  not so much, as anyone who’s driven a Merc of said vintage will tell you.)  As gunnies, we all know of the Heckler & Koch example, which has enabled this bunch of WWII-era retreads to make oodles of cash out of their not-especially noteworthy handguns and cheekbone-crushing G3/PTR-91 automatic rifles.

It’s why I always roll my eyes at the extreme HK fanbois, because I’m positive that most of their fanaticism stems from a need to justify their paying a premium price for what is really a pretty ordinary product.

As for “French luxury”, here’s one example of the trope:  Grey Goose vodka, which is a case history for the ages.  (Watch it;  it’s 10 minutes of your time well spent.)

I happen to know quite a bit about vodka manufacturing, as it happens, having worked with the South African retail arm of Gilbey’s.  As I’ve recounted on these pages before, part of my education occurred when the Gilbey’s guys took me on a tour of their production facility, where an engineer taught me how to make cheap liquor:  take a clear distilled spirit (from any source:  potatoes, sugar cane, barley, wheat, apples, all mixed together, whatever) and pass it through a series of charcoal filters to make vodka, or add a few drops of diesel fuel(!) to make gin, and so on.

The genius of marketing, in the Grey Goose example, was not the manufacture of the vodka or the quality of its raw material, therefore — French wheat is no different from any other wheat — but utilizing the aura of French luxury brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel etc.) to imply that GG was an exceptional product, made all the more so by creating an artificial bottleneck on supply, and most telling of all, selling the product at a premium price to the International Status-Hungry Parvenu Set.  Good grief:  $30 per bottle for vodka?  When it first came out, I tried it at a hotel bar somewhere — I think it was at Claridges in London, while on a business trip — and while I’m no expert on vodka, I have drunk a woeful amount of the foul stuff.  I could discern little difference between Grey Goose, Stolichnaya and Smirnoff.  (The bartender obliged me by setting up a blind taste test of the three brands — the mark of a good bartender, by the way.)  I identified Smirnoff immediately (see above for reasons), but GG and Stoli?  No chance.  And Stolichnaya, by the way, is a product that trades on the Russian ethos for vodka quality, go figure.

But what all the above illustrates is how easy it can be to dupe people into buying expensive products as part of an aspirational desire to be part of a specific set — most notably, what used to be described as the “jet set” (now, the private jet set), which contains elements of society such as professional footballers, pop stars, supermodels, Russian oligarchs, Hollywood actors, software billionaires and other such scum.

And never has the old adage been so verified that a fool and his money are soon parted.