Author: Kim du Toit

Gratuitous Gun Pic: The .22 Addiction

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

From Reader Mike S. cometh this silliness:

“It’s not a problem. Not at all. I can stop any time. Any time at all.”

Followed by this rather pathetic picture:

High Standards, both in name and quality, n’est-ce pas? (Not that there’s much wrong with the two Rugers at the bottom, of course.) The poor, poor man… enslaved by such a bevy of rimfire beauties.

That said:  I think we’ve all been there — in my case, it’s early-twentieth century military rifles — but we all have our weaknesses. Feel free to share details of yours in Comments (or by email, should you want to include pics).

In any event, should Reader Mike ever want to divest himself of his addiction, I’m pretty sure there would be many selfless volunteers among my other Readers who would be only too willing to help him with his “problem”.

What a nice-looking collection.

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Quid Pro Quo

Two-Minute Hate

“There is something deeply perverse about using children to promote a political agenda.”  (Ben Shapiro, talking about kindergartners being used in anti-gun / gun control demonstrations.)

I hope that all those folks who are bitching about children being “used” to further an anti-gun agenda have the same kind of revulsion when they see something like this:

And just a reminder, before the SHTF in Comments:  I hate abortion with a passion — if there were a single aspect of the human condition I could fix, this would be it — but I also hate children being used as props. It’s immoral, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.

Unwanted Changes

Drive Time

I hate change.

This should come as no surprise to longtime Readers of my fevered rantings, most especially to Mr. Free Market who, while we were on a drive trip in Britishland, punctured one of my rants against ugly automotive modernity with the comment: “Basically, Kim, you’d be quite happy if cars looked the same as they did in the 1950s and 1960s.”

I’ve forgotten my actual response to this barb, but “Fuck, yeah!” would not be an inaccurate paraphrase.

So when I heard that Volkswagen (you know, the immoral bastards who brought you doctored emissions so as to sell more diesel-engined cars) announced that they were going to kill off the New Beetle, I didn’t care. I didn’t care because the New Beetle was, easily, one of the most revolting car designs ever inflicted on the public road. Compared to the older model, it looked like some retarded child’s experiment with Play-Doh, viz.:

Now granted, the old Bug was pig-ugly too, but at least it wasn’t pretentious — it was, as its name suggests, a People’s Car: cheap and reliable (almost unbreakable) and even a little eclectic, because while the auto industry was modernizing all around it, the old Beetle barely changed. The less said about its foul spawn, the better. (Ditto the Mini, which I’ve discussed before and of which pretty much the same can be said.)

So I don’t care about VW whacking the Beetle. I am furthermore unsurprised that they were surprised that the New Beetle never ever achieved the sales of the old girl. Because they’re marketing idiots. They thought that they could fool us Beetle lovers with some modernized monstrosity with a few cosmetic nods to the original, and we’d fall all over ourselves to buy this ugly piece of shit.

And speaking of German marketing stupidity: I see that VW’s sibling Audi has decided that it will soon stop making the excellent Audi 8 with a W12 engine option. I wonder when these fucking morons in what passes for a marketing department at Audi will realize that there will always be a customer segment of drivers who love 12-cylinder engines. The article notes that Bentley is not going to give up their W12, and car buffs will just chuckle because the W12 found in both the A8 and the Bentley is the engine designed by… VW, for their ill-fated Phaeton (a.k.a. “Piëch’s Folly”). What will happen (and you heard it here first) is that the people who love 12-cylinder engines in their luxury cars will,  rather than be content with the A8’s stepped-down V8, just buy ummmm… the Mercedes AMG S 65 (which, like the Bentley Flying Spur, costs about $100,000 more than the Audi A8 W12). Here’s the S 65:

…which quite frankly looks better than Audi’s blunt-nosed offering anyway. As nice as the AMG Mercedes looks, however, it’s still not as beautiful as one of its predecessors:

That’s a Mercedes 300 SC*, from 1954. Which takes me back to Mr. Free Market’s jibe.

Yes, you foul Brit toff: I would be perfectly happy if cars still looked like this.

*Before I get razzed: I know that the old Merc 300 used a 3-liter inline six-cylinder engine and not a V12. Didn’t need anything bigger, and anyway, the V12 engines of the time weren’t much good compared to today’s. But with the size of the 300’s engine compartment… is anyone at AMG listening? Nah, it’ll never happen. If Mercedes ever re-released the 300 SC it would probably look like today’s Maybach — i.e. even uglier than the new Beetle, and it would make women and small children scream as it passed by them in the street.

I don’t know why I bother.

OMG Rocks?

Bad News, Seen On Campus

Wait… so schools are now advocating bringing rocks to a gunfight?

A Pennsylvania school district is arming classrooms with buckets of rocks as a last-ditch defense against mass shooters.
David Helsel, superintendent of the Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, told ABC News on Friday that every elementary, middle and high school classroom in the district is stocked with a 5-gallon bucket full of river stones for students and teachers to pelt an armed intruder.
“We’ve been trying to be proactive just in case,” Mr. Helsel said. “How can you aim a gun if you’re being pelted with rocks?”

I’m not even going to touch the obvious stupidity in this strategy.

However, when just a week ago the Army put out a statement that new recruits are unable to throw hand grenades further than a few yards because so few fathers can be bothered to play catch with their sons these days… good grief, what a bunch of pussies.

Dream Car

Drive Time

I don’t think I’m the only petrolhead who has a constant feeling of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the combination of looks and performance. Some beautiful cars disappoint (relatively speaking) when it comes time to hit the road, whereas others perform like a dream while looking like a dog’s breakfast.

Let me tackle the first scenario. As Longtime Readers know only too well, I think the 1970s-era Ferrari Dino 246GT is one of the most beautiful cars ever made. Whenever car aficionados are asked to name their “10 Most Beautiful Cars”, almost without fail, the DIno is somewhere in everyone’s top five. It is and always will be my #1. Here are a few examples (because any discussion of this nature is yoosliss wifout pitchurs):

…and topless:

The only problem with the Dino was that it, well, wasn’t really a Ferrari. (I’m not going to go into too much detail because it isn’t relevant to this post: Wikipedia has a decent summary if you’re interested.) The Old Man (Enzo himself) was initially reluctant (until 1976) to allow it to be called a Ferrari, because it was Marinello’s attempt to make an “entry-level” Ferrari, and quite frankly, it shows. The interior is hideous (no pics because they make me ill; just take my word for it), but even worse is that the car is an absolute pig to drive (I’ve driven one): the gearbox almost requires two hands to work the lever, and my left calf ached for days afterwards because of the stiff clutch. Never mind that it’s crap compared to modern cars (which it is); it was crap for its time as well.

But… there was that mid-mounted 2.4-liter six-cylinder engine (which was a Ferrari) howling about four inches away from the driver’s ears, and despite all its technical flaws, it handled superbly — better even than its rival from Alfa Romeo, the Montreal (which I’ve also driven). That, added to its beauty, created a fanatical following for the DIno. But it was, and is, a pig to drive. And it, like the Montreal, would fall apart if you so much as looked at it — one of my friends had his Dino’s gear knob come off in his hands as he was downshifting to take a sharp corner, and how he avoided a wreck is one of the mysteries of the ages.

On the other side of that coin is Porsche, most especially the 911 model. Jeremy Clarkson is always having a go at Porsche’s “design” team, calling them the laziest people on the planet, and he has reason: while the 911 has always had tremendous performance and outstanding reliability, it looks like a pig, with that humped rear and and strange, minimalist front:

…and the Targa:

However, in the early 2000s someone at Porsche seems to have had this brilliant but revolutionary idea: “What if we make a nice-looking Porsche?” He was probably fired but his heresy remained, with the result that the mid-engined Porsche Cayman is not only better-looking compared to the 911 (a low bar, to be sure), it’s as good-looking as any other sports car, and better even than many of its competitors:

Even its rear end isn’t quite the truncated monstrosity of old, and it now looks quite shapely:

So why am I telling you all this? Because the Dino and the Cayman are almost identical in terms of chassis dimensions — the wheelbases are within a half-inch or so of each other, and of course they’re both mid-engined.

Here’s my thought. I bet that some enterprising coachbuilder could whip off the Cayman’s shell and replace it with a carbon-fiber near-copy of the Dino’s (with a little bit of nipping-and-tucking to accommodate, for example, the Porsche’s single exhaust pipe and longer suspension posts, and so on). And just for kicks, I’d use the Cayman’s smallest engine which is… ta-da! a 2.5-liter six-cylinder (flat, not a V, but hey, consistency is the hobgoblin etc.).

What you’d have with this marriage is a modern car’s performance, with a pre-wind-tunnel body that would make even the dourest car freak wipe a tear from his eye and drool from his chin.

If I ever win a large lottery, I’d present a custom coachbuilder with this challenge. I’d call it the Pino, and I’d be the envy of… well, of everybody.

Your thoughts in Comments.