Memorial Day 2024

Remember.

Automotif DV...

The W123 midsize sedans from Mercedes-Benz were the immediate forebears for what's now known as the "E-class" Benz. They were sober-sided, solid cars that broke sales records for the brand.

Launched in 1976, they were sold as coupes, sedans, and wagons, and came with an array of gas and diesel powerplants and both manual and automatic transmissions. These were found in roles as everything from taxicabs to junior executive cars all around the globe, but M-B North America only brought the higher-trim varieties into the U.S. market.

Stateside we could get either the 2.8L fuel-injected DOHC 12V inline-six rated at 142bhp or one of two diesels: the 62hp 2.4L four banger or the 77bhp 3.0L inline five-cylinder. After 1980, only the diesels remained, with the gasoline M110 I6 dropped to keep CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) numbers up.

The late-'70s Mercedes-Benz 300D in English Red in these photos would be bog-slow, with a zero-to-sixty time that struggled to crack the twenty second barrier and a top speed of something like 90mph, but they got good mileage for their time and a well-maintained diesel Benz from this era is harder to kill than a cockroach. If you couldn't get 300k miles out of one, you weren't trying, and in an era when a car was considered completely knackered when its five-digit odometer rolled over, that was nothing short of miraculous.

Moves Like Jagger

Here are a couple of fact bombs you can drop into a conversation if you need to blow some minds...

• With their July 13th tour date in Inglewood, California this year, The Rolling Stones' first concert will be closer to the 19th Century than it is to their latest concert.


• Mick Jagger's youngest son is younger than his great-grandson.

Gives a whole new vibe to "moves like Jagger".
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Lyrical Naming

When Toyota and General Motors, two auto manufacturers who have... deserved or not ...reputations for grey-flannel corporate stodginess, launched a joint manufacturing venture here in the U.S.A., they called it NUMMI, which is an appropriately dull and stodgy acronym.

When Mopar and Mitsubishi did likewise, a few years later, the outfit was called Diamond-Star Motors, officially a reference to Mitsubishi's triple diamond logo and Chrysler's Pentastar.

But you know that the latter name was really because some audacious dude in marketing was a Marc Bolan fan and managed to get away with it.

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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "These are the people Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars with."

Me: "Funnily enough, these are the people I want Elon Musk to colonize Mars with, too."

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Too late, they've bred...

The Collinses didn’t tell me Simone was eight months pregnant when we were making plans for me to spend a Saturday with them at home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, but I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. They are the poster children of the pronatalist movement, on a mission to save humanity by having as many babies as possible.

Malcolm, 37, answers the door of their 18th-century farmhouse with four-year-old Octavian George, who is thrilled to have a visitor, bringing toy after toy to show me like an overexcited golden retriever. His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.

I don't get these people who act like a bit of population shrinkage would be the worst thing in the world. Remember what a barren, empty hellscape this country was when it only had two thirds as many people as it does now, way back in 1976? Yeah, me too.

Also, are these people trying to make their kids hate them?

Me: "Hahahaha those countries with baby-naming laws are so quaint and authoritarian."

These Dweebs: *name their human daughter in 21st Century America "Titan Invictus"*

Me: "Okay, so about those baby-naming laws..."

I'm like "You people get that these aren't, like, Funko Pops or collectible action figures or lifestyle achievement badges to show off to your friends in your private Discord server, but are actual independent humans who are going to have a life of their own in a surprisingly short number of years and are probably going to loathe their weird-ass given names, right?"

(And before you say "Well, Black people have been naming their kids funny-sounding names for years..." what I want you to understand is that there's a difference between wanting to have names that are cultural signifiers... yet still recognizably names ...that aren't the ones that had been assigned to your family by the people who bought and sold your ancestors as chattel, and just being weird for the sake of being weird. D'shaun or Latisha are names, made-up names, sure, but names nonetheless*. "Industry Americanus" is a dorky-ass affectation.)

*"Why don't they use names from the part of Africa their families came from?" you ask, and the answer is that nobody knows where they came from because it's not like their abductors or purchasers took careful notes on that stuff.

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Meme Dump...

Dots Don't Go Everywhere...Yet

I'm on record as mentioning I'm not a huge fan of the 3" J-frame, and that steel J-frames in general don't have a ton of applicability in my world.

Small revolvers fall into one of two categories in my world. Either they're a pocket/ankle gun, or they're a belt gun. For me, a 3" J-frame is too long for a pocket, and a steel-framed one is too heavy for a pocket. I've pocket-carried a S&W 432 (and a 442 before it) for almost 25 years now, but a steel gun would make my winter coat hang funny.

"But you could carry a 3" J-frame in a belt holster!" you say. Well, sure. But I could also carry a Detective Special, a Taurus 856/327, or a 3" Smith & Wesson K-frame in a belt holster with no more real difficulty and get a 20% ammunition capacity boost. In fact I have been carrying an 856 TORO for a year now.

This is what makes the new R.O.C. J-frame red dot mount from Shield Arms a real head-scratcher for me. It mounts to a Smith J-frame using the sideplate screws, but all the photos show it on a Model 442. That effectively makes the gun too big for a pocket and anyone who's actually carried an ankle gun should get a good belly laugh out of the idea of sticking an MRDS in the most dirt-and-lint collecting spot where it's possible to tote a blaster. (Even IWB, the 507k on my TORO needs blowing clean every few days.)

I guess you could use it to mount a dot on a belt-carried 3" 640 or something, but all the J-frame revolvers in Smith & Wesson's current catalog lineup that could really benefit from a small red dot... think the 3" Model 60, Model 63, or Model 317 ...all have adjustable rear sights, which means that they're already compatible with an Allchin-type scope mount.

I mean, I get that red dots are awesome, but we're a ways off from a functional MRDS solution for pocket guns.

(H/T to Gorillafritz.)

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Tab Clearing...

• An extensive photographic record of a Horten Ho IV flying wing glider in Mississippi in the early post-WWII era.


• A U.S. Navy twin-engined, remotely-piloted kamikaze drone from the Second World War...that could also be flown by an on-board pilot. (For ferrying purposes, not for crashing into stuff.)


• AI isn't "hallucinating", it's just gullible. You know how Facebook's censor bots can't tell the difference between you saying "I'll kill you" jokingly to a friend and a real death threat? Well, Large Language Models have that same issue, only on an industrial scale.

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Automotif DIV...

Nikon D3 & AF Nikkor 24-85mm f/2.8-4D

For most of the '80s, the Third Generation of the Ford Mustang ran roughshod over its F-body foes from GM at the traffic lights of America. 

The 305 Chevy, even in Tuned Port Injection form, gave up too much power to the 5.0L H.O. in the Mustang, and the 350 Vette motor was only available with a slushbox (plus the Camaro's more restrictive intake and exhaust choked the 5.7 TPI to the point where it only achieved horsepower parity with the 302 Ford.)

The tables were turned in the early Nineties, when the 275hp LT1 350 in the Camaro easily overpowered the 215hp 5.0L H.O. in the SN95 Mustang GT.

In an attempt to even things up, Ford released a Mustang Cobra under their SVT banner. While the bottom end of the motor was the same as the tried and true 5.0, it got GT40 heads, a new cam and intake manifold, underdriven accessory pulleys, and other tricks to bump the output to 240 SAE net horsepower.

Nikon 1 V2 & 1 Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.8

This was the swan song of the pushrod V8 in Mustang Cobras, because the '96-'98 Cobras featured a DOHC 32V version of Ford's 4.6L Modular V-8. The hand-built versions in the SVT Cobra, like this 1996 or 1997 ragtop, were rated at 305bhp.

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Landlords From Hell

What happens when a pack of internet investors buy your apartment complex?

Things started to fall apart, though, sometime after the first months of the pandemic. Tenants moved out in the dead of night as if they didn’t want anyone to see them; eviction notices would show up on their doors long after they’d left. The gym and pool shut down for “safety” reasons; when the building was sold the summer after COVID hit, the latter turned green. According to McMullen-Clarke, phantom surcharges began showing up on every rent bill, but when she called the front office to discuss them the phone would ring and ring; she later learned they’d stopped paying the phone bill. The new management charged $40 a month for “valet” trash service, but canceled its contract with the company retained to pick up trash every evening, so the same overworked maintenance guy who did everything else on the property had to pick up trash as well, and only when he got around to it. “There was garbage everywhere, it was really tragic,” McMullen-Clarke says.

[SNIP]

Weeds grew, in which new tenants would let their dogs shit without picking it up. Management would shut the water off throughout the entire complex for hours constantly; once a week at first, then just about every other day. But when the water was on, it would leak from 100 different spots and attract ever more pestilence. The rat population exploded, eventually taking up residence in the ceiling above McMullen-Clarke’s bedroom, where they scratched and fought and made it hard to fall asleep. One day as she was ascending the stairway, she noticed a rat sitting contentedly on the handrail for which she’d been reaching. “I took a deep breath and said to myself, OK, one of us is leaving.”

RTWT

Meme Dump...

"This was your father's weapon. I took it after I chopped his legs off and left him in a volcano."

Is Novelty a Necessity?

In a post about the Heritage Roscoe on social media, a reader asked what the new offering from Heritage would do that a double-action revolver hadn't already done, or if maybe it would do it in a different or better way.

That got me to thinking on how a segment of the market demands novelty as the justification for a new model.

In the case of the Roscoe, you only have to look at the name of the manufacturer, "Heritage", to realize that cutting edge novelty isn't exactly their milieu. After all, their bread and butter offerings are inexpensive plinkers that are functional and cosmetic clones of a 151-year-old revolver design.

Sometimes the retro is the point. Colt has done reissues of their WWI and WWII era M1911 and M1911A1. Springfield Armory sold bunches of their "Milspec" model, so much so that they brought the GI, or as we called it in the shop back then, the Even Milspeccer Milspec.

In the case of the Roscoe, what it does is bring the basic blued-steel 5-shot snub-nosed revolver back to market at a reasonable price. Smith & Wesson still offers the Model 36 Classic, but the MSRP on that thing is better than double that of the Roscoe. 

Of course, fifteen or twenty years ago there would have been no call for a gat like this because its main competition would have been the ocean of used Model 36's, but these days even J-frames aren't immune to price pressures from collectibles. A Chiefs Special that's priced like the Roscoe is gonna be a beater, and one that looks like all shiny and new is going to present the owner with that classic quandary: How much do you want to shoot a gun when a turn ring on the cylinder can knock a Benjamin off the value?

You could do like a lot of collectors: Put the pristine Chiefs Special in the safe and buy a beater 36 to shoot. Or you could buy a shiny Roscoe and shoot it.