Category: No Politics Friday

All this bailout talk has me nostalgic as hell about the American car. No, this isn't going to be a handjob essay about the glorious 1960s muscle cars or the Model T. Instead let's discuss amazing moments in the same way that Battlefield: Earth is amazing. I strongly encourage you to share your own American car experiences, as mine are dominated by GM. I grew up in a GM family so I have little direct experience with how shitty Ford and Chrysler products are. My favorite from personal experience is the $32,000 Bonneville that needed a new tranny at 8,000 miles and then another at about 30,000…..no, the Grand Prix that needed a new starter motor every 90 days was better.

GM vehicles had a great way of making you feel right at home the moment you got into a new one. This is largely because their interiors were updated once in 1960, once more in 1981, and then never again. Rest assured the same upholstery, Delco electronics, etc that adorned our 1987 Buick Skylark were found in the 1992 Grand Prix, the 1995 Grand Am, and so on. The corporate "parts bin" philosophy made sure that whether you bought a $10,000 econo-box or an "upscale" $55,000 Cadillac you were essentially getting the same product between the Roger Smith years and ~2002. Then, as is still largely true now, GM's only market is among people who have never tried driving a non-GM car. As one reviewer put it, the Cadillac STS is undoubtedly the finest luxury car you will ever drive so long as you have only driven Cadillacs and never been in a Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, or BMW. True, GM products have been getting a little better of (too little, too) late. But it's hard to escape the feeling at any price point that you are in a rental car, a path-of-least-resistance on four wheels and substandard Firestones.

Here are my personal favorite moments:

1. The Carter-era Oldsmobile diesel passenger car experiment. GM pitched this as a brilliant response to the Arab Oil Embargo.
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Unfortunately they were too goddamn cheap to design an actual diesel engine so they just (poorly, improperly) modified a 350 V8. These vehicles have the distinction of being so fucking bad that American consumers recoiled in horror at the mere mention of diesel powertrains in anything but trucks for 30 years. That would be like Subway releasing a menu item so bad that Americans stopped eating sandwiches for decades.

2. The Cimarron. Roger Smith glues some fake wood veneer on a Chevy Cavalier and doubles the price. Almost single-handedly killed Cadillac. OK, it had a lot of help from the contemporaneous V8-6-4, the overwhelming majority of which literally melted before hitting 60,000 miles.

3. The Dustbuster Minivans. Here is a 1990-1996 Pontiac Trans Sport. Here is a Dustbuster. In its typically brilliant manner, GM sold three versions of this exact same vehicle (the Trans Sport, the Olds Silhouette, and the Chevy Lumina MPV). But we can do better than three, right?

4. The six-headed SUV monster. Having allegedly renounced its earlier sinful ways, just a few years ago GM was simultaneously selling six versions of the same vehicle: Chevy Trailblazer / GMC Envoy / Buick Rainier / Oldsmobile Bravada / Isuzu Ascender / Saab 9-7x. All identical except for badges and a few clip-on plastic exterior panels. Just think of the redundant marketing costs.
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Apparently they live in fear of buyers who would look at the Trailblazer and think "Gee, I'd buy that if only it had a Buick badge on it…"

Good times. Good times. Yours? I have to imagine that I missed a wealth of American automotive crapulence on account of my age – I have no direct experience with pre-Carter cars. Surely some of you do.

Oh. And in fairness, one of the GM cars that went through my family – the Oldsmobile Aurora – was pretty damn solid. So GM did the logical thing and immediately stopped producing it.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I would like to draw attention to one of my favorite true stories and a Great Moment in the History of Balls^tm – the tale of Melvin Dummar, the Utah gas station attendant who forged Howard Hughes' will in barely-intelligible English and claimed that he was due $156,000,000 on that account.

Hughes, as many of you may be aware, was bat-shit insane.
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To wit:

In 1957, Hughes descended into one of the most bizarre episodes of his life. In December of that year, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, speak to him, and only to respond when spoken to. Throughout the duration, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day.

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Nice. Hughes died without a will, which unsurprisingly is an enormous legal clusterfuck when the deceased happens to be the wealthiest non-Sultan on Earth. And childless. Seeing an opportunity, one Melvin Dummar sprung into action. In his paranoia, Hughes trusted only a small group of Mormons who served as his personal attendants in his final years. So it wasn't terribly surprising when, in 1976, the Mormon church announced that they discovered a hand-written will by Hughes in their headquarters. Since Hughes was bonkers, it was not outlandish to think that he might have hand-scrawled a will in secret.

There were some problems with the will.

First of all, it was laden with spelling errors, the kind that no other written correspondence from Hughes happened to have.
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An excerpt:

After my death, my estate is to be devided [sic] as follows –
First: one-forth [sic] of all my assets to go to Hughes Medical Institute of Miami –
Second: one-eight [sic] of assets to be devided [sic] among the University of Texas

But the strangest part of the will was that Mr. Hughes inexplicably decided to leave 1/16th of his vast estate – more than $150 million – to a "Melvin DuMar." When contacted by a curious world, Mr. Dummar explained that he happened upon a disheveled man on the side of the road one night and drove him to Las Vegas (where Hughes resided for many years). Apparently, a stunned Dummar noted, Mr. Hughes had decided to reward this kind stranger with a metric assload of money.

At this point there were skeptics but again it should be noted that Hughes was "eccentric" and writing a stranger into his will was not beyond the realm of possibility. Then the FBI found Dummar's fingerprints on the will.

His cock-and-bull story exposed, Dummar turned a regular scam into a truly Great Moment in the History of Balls – he made up an even more ridiculous story. He claimed that a "man in black" type mysterious individual showed up in his gas station and handed him an envelope containing the will in question. Attached was a note that instructed Dummar to take the will to the Mormon headquarters, which he did. Without telling anyone. Like, he hid it. In a place where it could be discovered shortly after Hughes' death.

Jesus. What balls. He must have needed specially-tailored pants to house them. Wait, it gets better.

In the circus-like legal proceedings that followed, Dummar stuck to these two stories to the letter under oath in court. He stood up before a judge and jury and repeated this with a straight face. The will was ultimately ruled a forgery in court and Dummar received no portion of Hughes' estate. He also got stuck with a sizeable legal bill. But he's pretty lucky that he wasn't charged with a crime, I suppose.

Everyone together, salute Melvin Dummar. "Jesus, Melvin. What balls!"

This story was the basis of the Jonathan Demme film Melvin and Howard, which most viewers assumed was heavily fictionalized. It wasn't. For more reading on this saga and the rest of Hughes' life – and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more interesting individual who lived in the 20th Century – check out Richard Hack's biography Hughes.

Ed needs a little bit of an election week wind-down, so while there will be some real content today and this weekend, right now let's commend Hank Williams Jr. for slipping us a roofie, holding us down, and forcibly penetrating our ears with his "McCain-Palin Tradition" song. And possibly his penis.

If you need a 90-second version of what is wrong with the GOP, this is it. Whether or not your eardrums can handle the nails-on-chalkboard sound coming from the speakers, read the lyrics. It is as if a team of WWE personalities set out to write a foreword to Michelle Malkin's new book, to be read aloud backed by a jug band. Did anyone else laugh a million black-hearted laughs at Hank II as he performed at McCain's "Victory Party" on election night? Nothing like being the entertainment at a funeral.

Could right wing America possibly crank out anything more difficult to listen to? Yes. Yes they can. They can make things so bad that they cannot be understood in our lifetime.

Taco Bell runs a promotion during the World Series in which, if a player steals a base during a designated game, everyone in America gets a free taco. Literally, all you have to do is walk in and say "Gimmie a goddamn taco, and expect no money to exchange hands upon delivery of said taco" and they will comply.
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Last year, proving that God is great and the universe has a sense of humor, the man who won America its Taco bounty was a rookie named Jacoby Ellsbury. He will now be known for the rest of his playing days natural life as "Tacoby Bellsbury." This year's giver of tacos was Rays shortstop Jason Barlett.
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Boo. Given my knowledge of the Taco Bell menu, I see no way to re-christen Mr. Bartlett in a manner that communicates his noble deed.
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Suggestions welcome.

PS: Tuesday was free taco day. I am ashamed that I was too busy with the election to note it.

We are all familiar by now with the phenomenon of outsourced call centers handling marketing, customer service, and technical support calls for thousands of American businesses. Advances in telecommunications technology make it as easy to have 1-800-BUY-DELL connect to a depressing shack in Bangalore as a depressing office park in Tupelo. Logistical costs are greater but more than offset by depressed foreign wages.

The change has hardly been seamless for American consumers. India-based call banks have become a cultural punchline dotting media commentary, films, sitcoms, and hacky stand-up comedy routines. Aside from bringing the usual nativist prejudices out of the woodwork, there has been some legitimate backlash. First, being as frank as possible, intelligibility can be an issue. Understanding someone who learned English out of a textbook speaking with a heavy Indian accent over a 6,000 mile connection on our cell phones as we walk down a noisy street is often difficult. Non-native speakers staff these call centers after being rapidly crammed with colloquial American English at the behest of foreign employers, putting the people on both ends of the call in an uncomfortable situation. Second, some American customers resent the farming out of what were once American jobs – shitty jobs, but domestic shitty jobs.

Companies using South Asian call centers have attempted to compensate in the most awkward, ridiculous way: by pretending that the employees are American. We've all been on a tech support call which began with a young man whose accent is heavier than Apu from The Simpsons introducing himself as "Hello, my name is Brian." My favorite personal experience involved an AT&T DSL service call two weeks ago in which the obviously Calcutta-based representative introduced himself as "Todd McIntosh." I had to restrain myself from telling "Todd" that if he's a third-generation Irishman in America than I am a native Hindi speaker named Jagdish. The second most popular tactic is forcing phone reps to read even more American colloquialisms off of a script.

In whose interest are these charades? American callers, of course, are not fooled. It remains immediately obvious that we are speaking to someone in India. If anything it is slightly more offensive to imply that we are stupid enough to think that "Brian" or "Heather" are speaking to us from Iowa – not to mention how offensive it is to make the employees conceal their identities to appease an American audience. Neo-colonialism indeed.

Two people who were extremely influential to my upbringing – Soundwave from the Transformers cartoon and Steve Albini from Big Black – achieve their distinctive vocal sounds using a 1930s-era signal processor called a vocoder. Originally invented to scramble human speech for intelligence transmission, it found a musical niche in the 1970s.
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Aside from Big Black it achieved fame with Kraftwerk and Robert Moog. If you are lucky enough to find a functioning, vintage analog vocoder these days you can expect to take out a (prime) mortgage to make it your own.
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Of course today digital processors can imitate (but let's be honest, never completely replicate) most analog effects. Hell, you can now download plugins and applications which bring the magic of vocoding to your PC.

So feel free to take advantage of this opportunity to waste several hours record your voice saying "Autobot invaders! Autobot invaders!" like Soundwave or singing "The Power of Independent Trucking" off Songs About Fucking. Or, better yet, do Soundwave singing "The Power of Independent Trucking.
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"

I'm going to try an experiment; tell me if you think this will work.

I'm going to the local animal shelter to buy a small puppy.

This is not because I desire the companionship of a pet – I already have one.
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My pet alligator Snappy lives in a pool in the yard. The thing is, Snappy's awful hungry and, well, small mammals do the trick for a crocodilian at mealtime. Since I really enjoy watching living things suffer, I'm going to throw the puppy into Snappy's pool alive.

Then I'll film it with my webcam and post the video on YouTube so all the other degenerates in the world can vicariously enjoy the spectacle.

What do you think? I don't see any problems here.

The reality is that if I adopted or purchased a dog for this purpose – and shared my Canine Snuff Film with the internet – I'd be explaining myself to a judge in short order. I would deserve the felony animal cruelty conviction I'd receive. Yet people do this every day with snakes and small mammals. I won't dignify the YouTube videos with links.

I am widely recognized as a bastard, about as warm and cuddly as a hungry wolverine holding a hand grenade, but there are two things in this world that turn me into a sentimental blob of happy: my sister's kids and pet Fancy Rats. Specifically, Liz's five rats. I greeted her decision to acquire them with great horror several years ago, but they quickly conquered all of my preconceived ideas. They are fabulous pets. I feel about them like you feel about your cat or dog. In fact they are like tiny dogs – full of personality, fun, always playing games – only considerably more intelligent.

For some reason we consider it socially acceptable to sell certain live animals for people to take home and stage their own gladitorial spectacles with other, larger animals. Well, there's no difference in me feeding your cat to an alligator and you feeding my rat to a snake.
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Yes, pet reptiles need to eat. That is why pet stores sell prepared rats who live to adulthood, are painlessly euthanized, and are frozen for storage. The snake doesn't care. Honest. This is why every single reputable reptile breeder, pet store, and pet-snake-lovers' community on Earth insists on frozen food. Aside from the base cruelty of throwing an animal in a small cage with its predator, live feeding is dangerous for snakes (a cornered adult rat can seriously fuck up or even kill a snake). Try joining an online group of reptile owners and asking where you can find live rats to feed Mr. Slithers. They will treat you like the idiot you are.

I understand your urge to put mousetraps in your garage and attic to keep the pests away. I don't expect that we can ever talk the world out of that even though it is unnecessary. Killing rodents for entertainment and disregarding the safety of your pet reptile at the same time is across the line, though. I'm not a person who readily adopts "causes" but I think I am ready to cast my lot with a movement against live animal feeding. You might think this is remarkably stupid. Nevertheless, I'm comfortable digging my heels in on this one unless and until you're ready to let me satiate Snappy's hunger with your cat – and watch the video.

….that Vincent Price did a dramatic reading of "The Raven" I bet you would click "play."

This might be the greatest thing in the history of things.