Helping the poor potatoes become pizzas
Two good un’s from Margolis’s Meme-manic Monday post.
What can one say but: heh. Should you require an explainer, here t’is.
Plenty more fun schtuff at the link, y’all.
Category: Flotsam and/or Jetsam
Catchall for whatever doesn’t fit elsewhere
Crap In A Barrel
Going down hard.
We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen.
A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob. pic.twitter.com/IM0p1NT20S
— Texas Family Project (@FamilyProjectTX)
Meh, no great loss as far as I’m concerned, their food always sucked anyway. The best part? This.
It may not just be ESG pressure, there is every possibility that Cracker Barrel hired an Ivy League MBA to work some magic on its brand image, just like Bud Light did.
Whatever the case, Cracker Barrel stock is now in free fall.
At the beginning of June Pride Month, Cracker Barrel stock (CBRL) was trading at $102 per share. It is now down to $91 per share, losing $4 per share on Friday alone.
Like Target and Anheuser Busch, Cracker Barrel is committing stock market seppuku. In barely a week (during which the stock market rose) Cracker Barrel lost 11% of its value.
Oh well, even if heartland American stop going to Cracker Barrel, maybe those lost customers can be replaced by coastal leftists who are all wrapped up in sexual identities. So long as Cracker Barrel pivots to serving sustainable, organic, locally sourced, GMO-free fare in hip, urban settings, there should be no problem replacing the customer base that is being run off.
May those Wokester CEOs at Crap In A Barrel have joy of their choice.
Punisher, punished
I seem to recollect mentioning here a time or three that the Left’s hatred for us is so deep, so frenzied, so caustically desperate that there really is nothing they can leave alone. We HAVE talked about that here before, right?
WELL. About all that.
A year ago progressive news outlets were calling the idea of the culture war a “right-wing conspiracy theory” that had no basis in reality. Yet, the injection of far-left politics into entertainment media had already started years previous, with noticeable propaganda efforts in movies, streaming television, children’s shows and books, even commercial advertising was replete with progressive ideological imagery by 2016 onward.
The goal is relatively obvious – To erase competing ideals and viewpoints while saturating the market with only one political vision; a woke vision. It’s called social engineering, and anyone who claims this is not happening in the US today is gaslighting.
Strangely, the American comic book industry has become a major battleground in the culture war, with heroic symbols being increasingly erased or hijacked as vehicles for woke talking points. A vast array of comic book characters are now race-swapped, converted to LGBT or they have had their histories rewritten to make them more “acceptable for modern audiences.” At the same time, they promote everything from BLM, to climate change propaganda, to gender identity politics and anti-gun messaging.
Why would leftists target something as frivolous as comic book heroes? Because pop-culture is first and foremost a playground where children grow up, and by rewriting heroes as social justice crusaders and communists they hope to indoctrinate the next generation.
The Punisher character (Frank Castle), originally created by writer Gerry Conway in 1974 with artists Ross Andru and John Romita, was a product of a chaotic era; a reaction to the rise of war, stagflation, instability and exploding crime rates in the US. The Punisher’s story is a tragedy of a returning military veteran whose family is killed during what seems to be a gangland hit. With federal agencies doing little to arrest the perpetrators, Castle takes matters into his own hands and begins systematically assassinating the criminals.
The Punisher as an icon has been highly popular among conservatives, military veterans and law enforcement officers in recent years. The trademark skull symbol can be found everywhere, with patches, gear and flags sporting the image, often as a representation of citizens taking matters into their own hands. The symbol was also seen at the January 6th protests.
This has made leftists at Marvel Comics livid. They first attempted to make fundamental changes to the character, including a redesign of his popular skull symbol, as well as taking away his guns and giving him swords in 2021. Instead of fighting against criminal organizations, Frank Castle joins with one, violating his fundamental code of ethics.
This month, though, Marvel officially declared the Punisher persona non grata, eliminating the character as readers know him. Did he go out in a blaze of glory? No, in typical woke fashion Frank Castle is captured by progressive heroes, chained up and forced to go through a struggle session in which he is admonished as a murderer and a terrorist. Marvel even brings the Punisher’s wife back from the dead, only so that she can divorce him and take his money and property, and then inform him that his lifelong crusade against the criminal underworld was all for nothing.
Marvel writers, including original Punisher creator Gerry Conway, specifically cite the popularity of the character among conservatives as the reason for his virtual elimination. As Newsweek noted, the Punisher was “problematic” for Marvel because conservatives liked him too much. He represents the every-man: He has no superpowers, he’s not a billionaire like Batman, but he still fights evil with an immovable will and a lot of guns.
Emphasis mine, because Jesus tapdancin’ CHRIST. I mean, seriously, folks: kill off a popular, profitable franchise entire simply because people you hate are among those who enjoy it? Sheesh. Mere “crazy” doesn’t even begin to cover this; it’s far too gentle a word to adequately describe it. Confirming yet again that these “people” truly are just totally, hopelessly, irremediably bugfuck nuts.
(Via Wes Renegade)
No-so-famous last words
Do we get some sort of weird premonition, some uncanny sense of impending doom, when our death approaches? Sometimes, yeah.
What were Jimi Hendrix last words?
Jimi Hendrix, one of the most influential guitarists of the 1960s, died at Samarkand Hotel in London on September 18. 1970. He was 27 years old.Cause of death: Asphyxia due to aspiration to vomit, contributed to by barbiturate intoxication.
His last words were “I need help bad, man”.
Aside from that, a poem he wrote was found at his deathbed. This was the last sentence of the poem:
Thank you.
Kinda creepy, no? Also beautifully poetic, and all too true. But still. Calls for another Hendrix embed, I do believe.
Man, dig that crazy wad o’ homemade pop filter on his mic! As the video shows, it was awfully windy in Howaya that afternoon, which explains it.
Also, note ye well at :29 in the vid, how deftly Jimi steps off the Vox 846 wah pedal and onto the trusty ol’ Fuzz Face, to call forth the legendary Hendrix crunchiness from that pretty white Strat. Then, at around :36 seconds in, watch in humbled awe as he swats the pickup selector switch to fastly transition from the fat, throaty sound of the neck-pickup position to the twangy squall of the wrong-way-tilted (since he was playing a right-handed axe upside down, see) bridge p/u, swapping one trademark Hendrix sound™ for the other in a lightning flash of truly inspired playing.
It’s Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell for backup, alas, nary a Buddy Miles or Noel Redding in sight. But DAMN, that stage-full of Marshall DSL Pro full-stacks makes me drool.
THEY’RE HEEEEERE!
I for one welcome our new alien overlords.
I’m not playing around with you guys, this is legit alien sci-fi movie freaky nightmare stuff right here. Watch this news report:
— Davy Jones (@itsNTBmedia)
Does that family look disturbed or delusional to you? Did it look or sound like they were playing a prank? Did you hear how shook the cops were??
Just because they don’t look delusional doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t, of course, but who knows. In any event, BCE quickly spotted the silver lining.
Bad News: Apparently The Aliens/Martians/Whathaveyou have landed in Las Vegas. Juuuuuust a bit outside the strip.
Good News: They’re eating niggers and illegals, pissing gasoline, and headed East.
<Drum Riff>
Sorry…. had to do it.
Heh. Well, bring it on then, ET, and welcome home to you and all your star-hopping friends. Maps to the southern US border, major urban ghetto areas, and the nearest scheduled pAntiFa/BLM riot will be made available to you free of charge at any truck stop or mom & pop filling station nationwide. Be sure to try our Drag Queen Groomer AYCE Special listed on the menu; deep-fried, baked, or broiled, they’re delicious, and oh so good for you!
Thrilla in Manila
Inside dope on one of the greatest, most compellingly brutal fights of all time.
Did Muhammad Ali ever give any compliments to his opponents?
Ali on Joe Frazier, the morning after their brutal third fight – the Thrilla in Manila, which brought down the curtain on a legendary trilogy“I heard somethin’ once. When somebody asked a marathon runner what goes through his mind in the last mile or two, he said that you ask yourself, ‘Why am I doin’ this?’ You get so tired. It takes so much out of you mentally. It changes you. It makes you go a little insane. I was thinkin’ that at the end. Why am I doin’ this? What am I doin’ in here against this beast of a man? It’s so painful. I must be crazy. I always bring out the best in the men I fight, but Joe Frazier, I’ll tell the world right now, brings out the best in me. I’m gonna tell ya, that’s one helluva man, and God bless him.”
Well, good for both of ‘em, then. Next question:
Did Muhammad Ali really consider himself the greatest?
Yes…with reason. He took the title from arguably the second greatest heavyweight ever, won it a second time against an all time top ten heavyweight champion and then defend(ed) the title in the golden era of the heavyweight.He beat Sonny Liston…twice
He beat Joe Frazier…twice
He beat Ken Norton…twice
He beat Floyd Patterson…twice
He beat George Foreman
He beat Ernie Shavers
He beat Ron Lyle
He best Jimmy Young
He beat Jimmy Ellis
He beat Jimmy Quarry
He beat Bob Foster, the best light heavyweight of his day.
He beat Cleveland Williams, Zora Folley, Henry Cooper, Buster Mathis…he beat the great, he beat the damn near great, and he beat the very, very good.
He beat five world heavyweight champions (Liston, Patterson, Frazier, Foreman, and Norton) and he beat an undisputed light heavyweight champion (Bob Foster).
It was the Golden Era of the Heavyweights and he was King of the Hill.
Damn right he thought he was the best…so did they!!!
Just about any serious boxing fan would agree that if Ali wasn’t, as he loved to boast, “the greatess of all times,” then he was certainly well in the running. His balance, agility, and footwork; his ability to take punch after punch and still keep coming at you; the awesome power behind his own punches; his ability to intelligently strategize, to get inside the head of his opponents and manipulate their emotions to their own great detriment; there’s really never been anyone quite like him, with the arguable exception of Iron Mike Tyson—who, in addition to being an absolutely vicious, relentless opponent, was also a marvelously-talented boxer in his own right.
Ali also had a near-uncanny ability to get the spotlight focused tightly on him and keep it there, a star-quality that simply would not be denied, and is nowhere to be found in professional boxing today.
From the TiM Wiki entry:
Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier lll, billed as the “Thrilla in Manila”, was the third and final boxing match between WBA and WBC heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, and Joe Frazier, for the heavyweight championship of the world. The bout was conceded after fourteen rounds on October 1, 1975, at the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao, Quezon City, Philippines, located in Metro Manila. The venue was temporarily renamed as the “Philippine Coliseum” for this match. Ali won by corner retirement (RTD) after Frazier’s chief second, Eddie Futch, asked the referee to stop the fight after the 14th round. The contest’s name is derived from Ali’s rhyming boast that the fight would be “a killa and a thrilla and a chilla, when I get that gorilla in Manila.”
The bout is almost universally regarded as one of the best and most brutal fights in boxing history, and was the culmination of a three-bout rivalry between the two fighters that Ali won, 2–1. Some sources estimate the fight was watched by 1 billion viewers, including 100 million viewers watching the fight on closed-circuit theatre television, and 500,000 pay-per-view buys on HBO home cable television.
The first bout between Frazier and Ali–– promoted as the “Fight of the Century”–– took place on March 8, 1971, in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Frazier was the undefeated champion and won by unanimous decision over the previously undefeated former champion Ali, who had been stripped of his titles for refusing to enter the draft for the Vietnam War.
Their showdown was a fast-paced, 15-round bout, with Frazier scoring the fight’s (and the trilogy’s) only knockdown, at the beginning of the final round.
When the rivals met in a January 1974 rematch, neither was champion; Frazier had suffered a stunning second-round knockout by George Foreman a year earlier,
Yeah, I just bet it was stunning at that. Anytime George Foreman landed one of those almighty bricks of his upside an opponent’s poor noggin, “stunning” would definitely have been the mot juste to describe the horrific experience. Onwards.
and Ali had two controversial split bouts with Ken Norton. In a promotional appearance before the second fight, the two had scuffled in an ABC studio during an interview segment with Howard Cosell.
There were controversial aspects to the fight. In the second round, Ali struck Frazier with a hard right hand, which backed him up. Referee Tony Perez stepped between the fighters, signifying the end of the round, even though there were about 25 seconds left. In so doing, he gave Frazier time to regain his bearings and continue fighting. Perez also failed to contain Ali’s tactic of illegally holding and pulling down his opponent’s neck in the clinches, which helped Ali to smother Frazier, and gain the 12-round decision. This became a major issue in selecting the referee for the Manila bout.
Ahh, those wonderful old verbal slugfests between Ali and Cosell—truly classic stuff, they were, and wildly entertaining, as Ali himself always was, both inside the squared circle and out of it.
When Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali were in a room together the two mega personalities produced countless magical television moments. The men constantly teased one another and often pretended to spar while wearing suits and ties, as The New York Times notes.
In one memorable moment, Ali threatened to pull off Cosell’s toupee. Another time, Ali was quoted as saying “Every time you open your mouth, you should be arrested for air pollution” to which Cosell responded “You would still be in impoverished anonymity in this country if I hadn’t made you.”
Still another time, Ali pretended to threaten Cosell. The sportscaster responded teasingly “Don’t touch me. I’ll beat your brains out,” via USA Today. The verbal sparring delighted audiences and boosted TV ratings. And, HBO boxing analyst Larry Merchant described their back and forth as symbiotic. He said the boxer wasn’t threatened by Cosell and that Cosell realized how Ali was a one-of-a-kind athlete.
Howard Cosell’s daughter Jill told USA Today that her father never imagined the back and forth between the two men would become a sort of comic routine. She described Ali as funny, charming, handsome, and with a “big mouth.” She said Ali trusted her dad and that over the years their relationship developed into friendship.
While good-natured back and forth was so much of the men’s public persona, below the surface grew a deeper bond. After Ali changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, Cosell acknowledged the change while many others resisted. Cosell also defended Ali from critics when Ali refused to be inducted into the military over religious beliefs, via USA Today.
Cosell died in 1995 at the age of 77. His daughter Jill says Ali sat next to her at her father’s service with tears streaming down his face during the eulogy. And then, in June of 2016, Muhammad Ali died. The three-time heavyweight champion is considered by many to be one of the greatest boxers to ever enter the ring.
Another magical Ali moment came in 1996, when The Greatest sat down with Ed Bradley to be interviewed for 60 Minutes, a moment I well remember seeing when it originally aired.
Muhammad Ali’s tragic decline was already well underway by the time of the Bradley interview, as was heartbreakingly obvious in the unexpurgated broadcast version I watched back in ’96. When I found this the other day, it was the first time I’d seen it since then, but over lo, these many, many years I never have forgotten it. If you’ve never before seen the Thrilla in Manilla, the entire 14-round fight (an hour and twelve minutes) is available on YouTube. For any fan of the Sweet Science, it’s a must-see.
TRUE culprit found
Well, this would certainly explain a few things, wouldn’t it?
Report: Sandbag That Tripped Biden On Stage Also Participated In Jan 6 Capitol Riot
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — The motive behind a sandbag’s sudden attack on President Joe Biden became more clear today, as sources within the federal government have produced photos showing the sandbag also participated in the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.“This sandbag has been a dangerous entity for some time,” said one source under the condition of anonymity. “After reviewing video footage from the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, we discovered the sandbag among the other Trump-supporting domestic terrorists. The sandbag has evaded justice since that day, giving it the opportunity to trip President Biden at the Air Force commencement ceremony.”
As officials continued to dig into the sandbag’s past, further red flags were raised. “We have also found a lengthy manifesto written by the sandbag,” the source said. “We will not be releasing the manifesto to the public due to the potential damage it could cause to our democracy, but it’s really bad. Just trust us, we’re the government.”
Though unharmed in the tripping incident, President Biden has privately vowed to bring the full weight of the federal government behind his crusade to hunt down other sandbags. Additional reports seem to have indicated the sand inside the bag was white, raising concerns about ties to white supremacist organizations.
There’s hard photographic proof included with the linked article, which plainly has not been Photoshopped or otherwise altered in any way, shape, or form. Unsurprisingly, the sandbag also had close ties with Putin and RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA. Can exposure of even deeper links to Trump and the demonic MAGA agenda be long in coming?
We wuz KANGS ‘n’ sheeit!
Does this count as “cultural appropriation,” or nah? Asking for a friend.
Proving once again that no, there really is nothing they’re willing to just leave alone and let us have to ourselves—absolutely, positively NOTHING. Remember it, people; this material may or may not be on the final exam, which is coming up real soon. Sooner than you think, probably.
Empire Of Lies
The FUSA indubitably is such now, but was it always? Could be, could be. Y’all are doubtless familiar with the Bixby Letter of great renown, as so unforgettably quoted by the actor portraying Ike’s CoS, US GEN George C Marshall, in Saving Private Ryan:
Some damned fine acting there, folks—particularly the part where Marshall sits to finish quoting the letter from memory, with wonderfully understated passion and intensity. Those are the kind of actor’s choices which can make or break a movie, which elevate a merely good flick to a truly great one. One thing I know: when I first saw that early Ryan scene in the local cineplex—after the harrowing, almost unbearable D-Day scene at the beginning—there couldn’t be the least doubt that I was in for one hell of a good ride. And so I was at that. There’s a reason Spielberg’s masterpiece went on to be thought of as one of the greatest movies ever made, and it’s a good one too.
Ahh, but was Lincoln’s letter to the bereaved Mrs Bixby all that IT was cracked up to be? Apparently, it wasn’t; in fact, it may well not have been authored by President Lincoln at all, but by his secretary John Hay.
The Bixby letter is a brief, consoling message sent by President Abraham Lincoln in November 1864 to Lydia Parker Bixby, a widow living in Boston, Massachusetts, who was thought to have lost five sons in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Along with the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, the letter has been praised as one of Lincoln’s finest written works and is often reproduced in memorials, media, and print.
Controversy surrounds the recipient, the fate of her sons, and the authorship of the letter. Bixby’s character has been questioned (including rumored Confederate sympathies), at least two of her sons survived the war, and the letter was possibly written by Lincoln’s assistant private secretary, John Hay.
On September 24, 1864, Massachusetts Adjutant General William Schouler wrote to Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew about a discharge request sent to the governor by Otis Newhall, the father of five Union soldiers. In the letter, Schouler recalled how, two years prior, they had helped a poor widow named Lydia Bixby to visit a son who was a patient at an Army hospital. About ten days earlier, Bixby had come to Schouler’s office claiming that five of her sons had died fighting for the Union. Governor Andrew forwarded Newhall’s request to the U.S. War Department with a note requesting that the president honor Bixby with a letter.
In response to a War Department request of October 1, Schouler sent a messenger to Bixby’s home six days later, asking for the names and units of her sons. He sent a report to the War Department on October 12, which was delivered to President Lincoln by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sometime after October 28.
On November 21, both the Boston Evening Traveller and the Boston Evening Transcript published an appeal by Schouler for contributions to assist soldiers’ families at Thanksgiving which mentioned a widow who had lost five sons in the war. Schouler had some of the donations given to Bixby and then visited her home on Thanksgiving, November 24. The letter from the President arrived at Schouler’s office the next morning.
Nevertheless, at least two of Lydia Bixby’s sons survived the war.
Lydia Bixby died in Boston on October 27, 1878, while a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital. In his initial letter to Governor Andrew, Schouler called Bixby “the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman I have yet seen,” but in the years following her death both her character and loyalty were questioned.
Writing to her daughter in 1904, Boston socialite Sarah Cabot Wheelwright claimed she had met and had given charitable aid to Lydia Bixby during the war, hoping that one of her sons, in Boston on leave, might help deliver packages to Union prisoners of war; but she later heard gossip that Bixby “kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be”.
In the 1920s, Lincoln scholar William E Barton interviewed the oldest residents of Hopkinton, Massachusetts for their memories of Bixby’s family before she moved to Boston. They recalled her sons as being “tough” with “some of them too fond of drink”. One son may have “served a jail sentence for some misdemeanor”.
On August 12, 1925, Elizabeth Towers, a daughter of Oliver Bixby, told the Boston Herald that her grandmother had “great sympathy for the South” and that her mother recalled that Bixby had been “highly indignant” about the letter with “little good to say of President Lincoln”. In 1949, Towers’ nephew, Arthur March Bixby, claimed that Lydia Bixby had moved to Massachusetts from Richmond, Virginia; though this assertion is contradicted by contemporary records which list her birthplace as Rhode Island.
Scholars have debated whether the Bixby letter was written by Lincoln himself or by his assistant private secretary, John Hay. November 1864 was a busy month for Lincoln, possibly forcing him to delegate the task to Hay.
In 1988, at the request of investigator Joe Nickell, University of Kentucky professor of English Jean G. Pival studied the vocabulary, syntax, and other stylistic characteristics of the letter and concluded that it more closely resembled Lincoln’s style of writing than Hay’s.
A computer analysis method, developed to address the difficulty in attribution of shorter texts, used in a 2018 study by researchers at Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics identified Hay as the letter’s author.
Good grief, it’s enough to make a fella call into question the entire history of this country, ain’t it? Be all that as it may, though, and whatever the provenance of the Bixby letter might actually have been, the letter will nonetheless forever shine as the diamond of English-language textual expression it is. And rightly so, too; the sentiments, concepts, and ideals so beautifully conveyed therein are nothing less than the most noble of which we lowly, fallen humans are capable as a species. How deeply, painfully ironic, then, that its true origins might have been so tangled and tawdry.
We’ve come a long way from all that sort of thing, alas, and in precisely the wrong direction too. There’s also a lot of intriguing stuff covering the life, times, and career of GEN Marshall at the Wikipedia link I included above, making it well worth taking the time to read as well.
You will be made to care
Even if—ESPECIALLY if—you don’t, not in the least.
Dying Vice Launches ‘Queer Sports’ Series, Hastens Its Demise
Dying Social Justice™ outlet Vice, apparently pathologically incapable of reform, is hastening its self-destruction by introducing a cringe segment called “Queer Sports.”
Video at the link—featuring some fat carpet-muncher dyke broad who obviously never participated in any sport not involving a comfy sofa, an xtra-jumbo-sized bag of Cheetos, and a case of designer beer in her entire life—which I won’t be embedding here, didn’t watch and have no intention of ever watching, and highly recommend you not watch yourself. Naturally, he/she/it is waving a giant rainbow fag-flag joyously around in the video screenshot, because QUEER SPORTS!!!! or something. Anyways. Onwards.
The non-binary non-athlete’s main gripe is that “pride” events hosted by nearly every major professional sports franchise are too “performative,” which is ironic given that performative Tolerance™ and Diversity™ are the entire demand.
“Are pride nights, important, Lyndsey?” the moderator prompts — as if that’s an open question subject to legitimate debate.
“I think they’re important, but I also think it’s gotten very performative,” Lyndsey replies, with an upward inflection that suggests she’s asking a question and not answering one. “Very like, ‘this is what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to do it in June and like, then, we’ll kind of forget about it.”
If people like Lyndsey had their druthers, every minute of every hour of every day would be a nonstop orgasmic celebration of “pride.”
This criticism of corporations bending over backward to cater to gender-obsessed ideologues at the expense of the vast majority of their customer bases who haven’t totally surrendered themselves to the Social Justice™ hive mind as “performative” is quite common within the so-called LGBTQ+++™ “community,” which is a euphemism for the insular cult of self-appointed representatives of a made-up demographic.
Ben’s conclusion is worth the price of admission all by itself, being perfectly, one-hundred-percent true.
Silly question: ASKED
Race realism.
Does Ann Coulter’s Joke About Black Tipping Hold Water?
As I covered recently, the race hate organization NAACP recently issued a goofy “travel advisory” for the entire state of Florida due to something about the alleged threat of White Supremacy™ to black people.In response, the queen conservative troll, Ann Coulter, who mastered trolling before it became a term, issued a tweet regarding the widespread perception that black people don’t tip.
The TiQ (Tweet in Question) is funny ’cause it’s true.
NAACP issues warning to African Americans to avoid visiting Florida; employees in restaurant and tourism industry brace for 0.00 % drop in tips.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter)
Now, anybody who’s ever worked in the restaurant biz (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have) knows full well how true that is, and probably got a giggle out of Coulter’s, erm, “faux pas.” In fact, years ago when I was working for Outlaw Biker I wrote an article that touched on this, if somewhat obliquely; ever since, I’ve called it my one true act of Journalism, since I had to call around to various commercial and government entities in Myrtle Beach for research. To wit:
Leatherballs IX: The King is dead
REPORT FROM THE BONE ORCHARD: THE KING IS, IN FACT, DEADThe contest for the future, if any, of the Myrtle Beach Bike Rally is over. Final score: everybody lost.
The soon-to-have-been 70 years young rally was more or less summarily cancelled by a consortium of city government, disgruntled local cranks, and transplanted Yankees outraged by the fact that the tourist area they had moved to in hopes of quietly living out their declining years was actually known to welcome hordes of free-spending tourists at certain times of year, and that in May, those hordes included—GASP!—bikers.
What’s been left unexamined, and practically unmentioned in all the commentary I’ve seen so far, has been the racial angle. Yes, brothers and sisters, there is one, it turns out. See, each year for the last 26, the week after the Myrtle Beach Bike Rally—which has always been primarily about Harleys, but in recent years has seen a growing influx of annoying rice-grinders—has been the week of Atlantic Beach Bike Week, almost exclusively the preserve of black kids whizzing around on Japanese sport bikes.
Atlantic Beach Bike Week has always been known, fairly or unfairly, as a pretty rotten week if you aren’t a black kid whizzing around on a Japanese sport bike. Business owners took to scheduling their yearly vacation-time closing when the black bikers were in town, a recurring problem that eventually got so bad the town’s government had to threaten business owners with sanctions and an ordinance requiring them to stay open for Atlantic Beach Bike Week. There has been talk locally for years now about finding a way to get rid of what is commonly referred to as “Black Bike Week”, and in the end the only way to do that was to get rid of both Bike Weeks. When the transplant population—apoplectic over the noise and general rowdy hoo-raw inflicted on their ersatz-peaceful little retreat (which has for decades seen literally millions of visitors per year, from all over the U.S. and Canada) every year by bikers both black and white—finally reached critical mass, the city council took action to do just that, by enacting all sorts of restrictions and regulations, some of them applying only during the rallies. The message behind them was loud and clear: BIKERS NOT WELCOME HERE. BLACK ONES ESPECIALLY, BUT WHAT THE HELL, WHITE ONES TOO.
How much of the problem with Atlantic Beach Bike Week is based on longstanding—“eternal” would probably be more unflinchingly honest—racial prejudice, and how much on actual, quantifiable bad behavior is of course impossible to know. It’s in the nature of dirty little secrets that they remain both dirty and secret, if not little. And obviously, nobody is much interested in breaking things down statistically by race and date, which would probably get them a big fat lawsuit and/or some sort of penalty from some government harmony-enforcement agency or other, making solid facts hard to come by.
And in the end, that’s not really what matters anyway, although I’ll say I’ve heard rumors of some tentative steps recently taken regarding possible future cooperation between black and white bikers, to see if there might not be a way to get Myrtle Beach to reconsider having cut off its economic nose to spite its quality-of-life face. I’m sure that’s a fine thing and all, but I suspect that the business owners’ reaction to this year’s utter disaster will accomplish much more than any outside efforts will.
The complaints about Black Bike Week I repeatedly heard from the restaurant owners I contacted—and even members of the City Council and Chamber of Commerce—were consistent, universal, and quite specific: aggressive, even outright threatening customer behavior; vandalism and/or wanton destruction of restaurant property; rampant theft; sexual harrassment of female (mostly WHITE female) restaurant waitstaff; the old Dine and Dash, Chew-and-Screw routine (eat nearly all of the meal, complain about its being “inedible,” and then leaving without paying the bill) and…piss-poor tipping.
Like I said before: if you’ve worked in the restaurant/bar business for any length of time, you already know what I’m talking about, and are probably shaking your head ruefully at your own unpleasant memories right about now.
Obstinate in sin
Target doubles down on self-destruction.
Target CEO defends LGBTQ-friendly kids clothing amid boycott calls: ‘The right thing for society’
Target’s top executive dismissed the social media uproar over the retailer’s new line of LGBTQ-friendly kids clothing, saying that marketing the products are good for business and “the right thing for society.”
Sorry, Charlie, but as a retail business, the “right thing for society” is NOT your remit. Nor any of your fucking concern, really. Like other Wokester CEOs, you seem to have lost sight completely of what your business really is.
Outraged shoppers posted videos and images on social media showing bathing suits that offer “extra crotch coverage” as well as rainbow-colored onesies for infants and children.
On Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast last week, Target CEO Brian Cornell was asked about the backlash to “woke” capitalism, which has also engulfed iconic beer brand Bud Light as well as entertainment giant Disney.
“I think those are just good business decisions, and it’s the right thing for society, and it’s the great thing for our brand,” Cornell said.
Well, we’ll soon be finding out about all that, now won’t we? Here’s hoping to soon be seeing Twitter pics of you standing atop a big-city overpass, all shabby, disheveled, and shell-shocked looking, holding a battered, hand-lettered cardboard sign in your grubby hands, panhandling passing traffic with extremely modest success.
Update! Welll. Well, well, well, well, well, well, WELL.
As Tar-Gay Hemorrhages Dollars Over Wokeness, They Help Employees Cope…With George Floyd’s Death Anniversary
It’s been a self-inflicted very bad week for retailer target. They’re losing money. Lots of money. They’re losing customers. Lots of customers. They’re dumping products after learning that wokeness and Satanism do not endear them to many Americans.Through it all, they’ve remained focused on their employees which the touchy-feely company believes are all quite fragile. To help them cope, Target sent out an internal memo about George Floyd. Yes, George Floyd. According to Greg Price:
Yesterday was a very hard day to Target, and as CEO Brian Cornell said, thank you for the care you’ve shown each other, our frontline teams and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Today brings more reflection, pain and the need for continued care as our team, hometown and world remember the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. As you make space to take care of yourself and each other, know that you can always tap into these tools from Team Member Life Resources, and as Mental Health Awareness Month continues, turn to the Take Five to Take Care hub for more well-being support.
BLM is failing. Wokeness is failing. America seems to finally be waking up from the mind assault of Cultural Marxism that has plagues us for years. We need to keep the pressure up because companies like Target and Anheuser-Busch will certainly keep pushing against us.
According to a Tweet embedded in the linked article, Tarzhay’s losses for one week amounted to a staggering 9 billion-with-a-B dollars. So how’s all that Wokester bushwa working out for ya, Mr CEO? NOT TOO GOOD, I’d have to say. But hey, you go live your “truth,” baby.
The greatest animal vid of all time
Sound on, folks, it’s nothing without that.
The sound got me.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/Hbes5FNdSv
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden)
That Buitengebieden guy (I’m assuming from the name, Sander, but what the hell do I know), who is from the Netherlands, always gets the very best animal vids. Don’t know how he does it, I really don’t.
Update! Just sent it to the ex-wife, who informs me that the vid is, and I quote, “old af.” Ah well, I’m always the last to know these things. Unhip and out of the loop, that’s me. Old or not, though, that last contented little whimper the penguin emits is still just priceless, dammit.
Hybrid
These intrepid gearheads built a Tesla worth driving.
We Built the World’s First V-8 Tesla
The Rich Rebuilds team had a dead Model S. They fixed it with a Camaro engine.The Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show in Las Vegas is extravagant, it is inspiring, it is perhaps the greatest automotive pissing contest you’ll ever witness. It’s an annual gathering for every somebody in the car world to show off the fanciest thing they can create on four(ish) wheels.
My business partner, Rich Benoit, and I thought we finally had something radical and bold enough for the event. We didn’t just want to exist there. We wanted to steal the show. That also meant we needed a car that could actually move under its own power. Most of the cars at SEMA get pushed onto the expo floor, but nobody’s happy about it. The shame of an unfinished ride is something to avoid at all costs. And yet with 30 hours until our transport truck arrived, we were approaching the city limits of Shamesville.
After two years of patiently converting a Tesla to an internal-combustion-engine muscle car—we’ll get to why on earth anyone would do this—we were down to just hooking up the fuel lines but were caught waiting for fitments to arrive in the mail. And they weren’t going to make it in time.
Rich and I have been revitalizing Teslas for about six years now. It started when Rich, an intrepid tinkerer, wanted a Tesla Model S but didn’t think it was reasonable to pay $100,000 for one. His solution: Take a couple of salvaged Teslas and put them together. Simple, right? Start with a flooded electric vehicle—good for its shell, not its corroded batteries—and wait for a second Tesla with a battered shell and a good set of Duracells. After a year and a half of wrenching, our first fully functional electric car emerged for a total of $6,500. It also launched our YouTube channel (Rich Rebuilds) featuring odd and eclectic EV projects in 2017, and eventually the Electrified Garage, our sister company that performs EV maintenance, repair, and conversions for the public.
After a couple of years, we were running out of Tesla projects and started building up cars that we simply wanted to enjoy. We resurrected a BMW i8. We gave a 1932 Ford Model A an electric powertrain from a crashed LAPD motorcycle. And we restored a neglected twin-turbo Audi RS7—too beautiful not to save. Not every project had a battery, which upset the die-hard EV hive, but we love all things automotive.
It’s an amazing project, which yielded a beautiful result. I especially dig the S1 Sequential short-throw shifter they used—all billet and leather, just a loverly piece of old-school craftsmanship. This next bit will sound all too familiar too anyone who’s ever worked in a custom car or motorcycle shop and has turned a wrench on a totally wild, outlaw project like this—which, y’know, I have.
Normally we’re a chipper group of people, but two weeks out, our garage felt like a funeral home. We were eating meals in there, napping on-site in a Mercedes Sprinter van conversion, and showers? Meh, no one was coming near us anyway. The lack of sleep started to make us feel numb inside, but we could see the finish line again. Then we got a call that the fitments were delayed. There was no way our Tesla could drive onto the trailer under its own power for the trip to Vegas.
Yup, shoprat cred: ESTABLISHED, firmly and fully. Ahh, but did the boys make it to the show on time? You better believe they did, amigos; ain’t no stopping a gearhead who’s motivated and dedicated enough to not bother about piffling trivialities like sleeping, eating, or bathing in his quest to put another custom-build notch on the proverbial bed-post.
After 2,733 mind-bending miles (seriously, check out how weird it gets on our YouTube), we pulled into Geddy’s driveway on Monday morning at 8 a.m. We had until 5 p.m. to deliver the car 20 minutes down the road to the SEMA floor. Taking our box of fitments, Geddy tuned the motor so that it didn’t run too lean and sound like a clangorous mess of sputters and backfires, or too rich that it bogged itself down and smelled like a BP tanker spill. Either option would be as embarrassing as pushing the car to its booth. We had precious few hours to find the balance, and then…the cylinders started to align like the planets to an astrologer. The sound was snappy, throaty, and downright mean.
We drove into SEMA with two hours to spare. It was time to scare and confuse people with something they’d never seen or heard before. Our work isn’t conventional, but you have to respect it—we received praise and admiration from a lot of our industry heroes that week.
It’s funny, we’ve been looking at the Tesla T on hoods of ever-so-quiet cars for the better part of a decade. But when our eyes drift to the side exhaust on our Model S, they begin to moisten from the inky smoke of 376 cubic inches ready to lay down now-444 ponies. We’re brought back to the thing that made us love automobiles in the first place: the thunderous sound of power.
Amen, brother. And that right there is the real payoff: finally firing that bad boy up, cracking a beer, leaning back on your Snap-On mechanic’s creeper seat to just catch your breath and listen to a high-output mill you’ve built with your own greasy, aching, scarred-up hands as it purrs like a contented big cat who just caught the daily impala. Such blissful moments usually come along well after regular business hours, and trust me, folks, there’s no feeling in the world quite like it.
And just think: not one stop did they have to make on the road to Vegas so as to charge the gott-damned battery overnight, either.
Update! Think I was kidding about those totally wild, outlaw projects, do ya? Well then, try Goose’s legendary Model-A bodied, overbored big-block Chevy crate motor-powered barbecue smoker on for size.
Slick, no? Can’t see it in these pics, but the radiator overflow-catcher is a standard-issue, Mark 1-Mod 0 Jack Daniel’s Black Label bottle, in the handy dandy fifth size. Somewhere around here I also have pics of the outrageous Pro-Street Bar Stool we built, a no-shit drag-racing barstool powered by a hopped-up Evo Sportster engine out of one of my old bikes. It’s a beaut, too. Have to see if I can’t dig those snaps up and add a cpl of ‘em to this post later on, maybe.
Updated update! Almost forgot to tell ya, the big round thing on the back is a 500-gallon propane tank Goose liberated from a local junkyard, the actual smoker part of the whole dealio: slice two big oven-style doors in the side, mount two levels of huge, gnarly steel racks inside for the pork, stoke up the firebox on the back, and away we go. He told me the idea for this thing came to him in a dream one night, which is how Goose usually gets his best ones. Porky’s Purgatory, he ended up naming the beast, which apt moniker is now splashed in big, bold yellow letters across the top rear of the cab.
The vintage, beat-to-hell Model A body was too narrow to be squeezed onto the early-70s Chevy pickup frame rails, so we had to cut it into two sections, then weld in a widening strip to make it fit. All pinstriping was done by hand by the justly-renowned Eddie Brown up near the CMS, and a fine job of it he did too. Eddie’s fee? The aforementioned JD Black bottle, which he returned to us after it had been duly emptied.
The wooden booster steps on each side are actually garden-variety indoor house-stair sections from Lowes, stained in the usual fashion. To make them look more rugged and antique, we burned shallow holes into ‘em all over with a soldering iron, then applied clear varnish for the finishing touch. The zoomie-style exhaust stacks were handcrafted from tube stock by Goose, rattlecanned with Krylon Hi Heat exhaust paint. Carburetion is via a matched set of dual-quad Holly 750s, topped by an old turbo-ram intake, all of which we had lying around the shop for years before Goose finally came up with a fitting Forever Home for ‘em.
Some dream Goose had, eh?
Update to the updated update! OH OH OH—found a pic wherein the JD radiator-overflow receptacle is visible, at mid-top left:
Heh. How can you not love it, I ask you?
Updates, forsooth! Upon reflection, I realized I simply must dedicate this post to my friend Phil, who will surely understand.
As ye have sown, so shall ye etc
Sometimes, just every now and again, actions really DO have consequences.
Michigan police went to an ammunition manufacturer and asked them to donate some ammo so the police could practice shooting. For free. The response is hilarious.
And it most certainly is at that.
Pretty much says it all, don’t it? I’m in full agreement with Divemedic’s closer: “That alone makes me want to buy their ammo.” Don’t it, though. Don’t it just.
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—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
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