The General Would Like a Word With You

General Motors workers loaded new Chevrolet Camaros for delivery at the company's facility in Oshawa, Canada, in April. (Photo as captioned in the NYT)

(The post title is an old ad tagline GM used in ads directed at the military back in my day.)

Back in April of this year I wrote glowingly of the new Camaro… describing it as my then-current Lust Object. Well, things haven't changed so much since April; things haven't changed at all, actually. I still think a new Camaro would look mighty fine parked in my driveway. Me and quite a few other people, as it turns out:

DETROIT — Believe it or not, General Motors has a hit car on its hands.

Amid the gloom of bankruptcy and a miserable market for new vehicles, G.M.’s new Chevrolet Camaro muscle car is winning over consumers looking for a little excitement in a bland landscape of look-alike sedans and watered-down sport utilities.

G.M. sold 9,300 Camaros during the month of June — more than either its entire Buick or Cadillac divisions could muster on their own.

[…]

A product renaissance, of course, cannot be led solely by a retro-styled sports car that harks back to the horsepower hysteria of the 1960s. But in its short time on the market, the Camaro has brought some much-needed buzz to G.M. showrooms.

Heh. Leave it to the New York Times to damn something classically American with faint praise. "Horsepower hysteria," my ass. I will admit the car probably has more appeal for those of us "of a certain age," but I'm also betting that any Prius-loving, organic-eating, thirty-something Caspar Milquetoast would change his (or her) mind about the car after a few quick runs up and down a twisty two lane road, throwing in one or two stop-light burnouts just for good measure. Horsepower is FUN! It doesn't hurt that the car is just downright beautiful, with more character in its front quarter panel than that of a fleet of Honda Hybrids. Or Priuses. But your mileage may vary (heh) when it comes to the car's looks. I think it looks like sex on wheels and that's a compliment of the highest order.

Good on GM. But bad for me. I haven't actually been down to the local Chevy House to price one out, but I'm betting my GM Family discount wouldn't apply on a new Camaro. Yet. But then again, I'm not quite ready to part company with The Green Hornet. She's only nine years old, ya know.

On GM

And so it's come to pass... the largest industrial bankruptcy filing in American history went down today, as dreaded and expected. I can't come close to expressing my sorrow and dismay over this horrible, terrible turn of events... so I'll let P.J. O'Rourke speak for me. Here are the first few grafs from a piece he wrote in the WSJ last week:

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.
Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.
Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”
In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

And Mr. O'Rourke continues on in a manner that I cannot even come close to duplicating. Except perhaps for the same sort of sadness bordering on despair that I think we share. I'm older than Mr. O'Rourke, but not by a whole helluva lot (a mere two years, actually). Mr. O'Rourke... at the risk of giving away the entire thrust of his most-excellent piece... argues that America fell out of love with the automobile, and that's what killed the automotive industry. Not the credit crunch. Not the "bad" cars GM-cum-Detroit made all those many dismal years after the first gas-crisis. Not the bean counters. Not the Japanese, and now the Koreans. Us. You and me.

Well, you, maybe. I never lost my love for cars... in that I never bought an econo-box, a minivan, or a "practical" car. Nope... all my purchases have been affairs of the heart, with only one or two exceptions... which were driven (heh) entirely by financial circumstance. If I had the wherewithal I'd be Jay Leno II... and I'd need a warehouse to shelter all the rip-roaring automotive goodness I'd own. But I'm an anomaly... an exception to the modern day automotive zeitgeist. And more's the pity.

I rarely use this tone of voice... read as: attitude... in my postings, but I can't help but think GM would still be a going concern if there were more like me out there. Make of that what you will and feel free to call me any sort of name you choose. Or even posit a rational counter-argument if you feel the need. But this ain't about rationality, Gentle Reader... this is nothing but pure, raw emotion.

I mourn.

(h/t for the WSJ article: Gordon)

Mini-Rant

THIS pisses me off more than you could possibly know...

Here's what the WSJ has to say (in part) on the subject. Excerpts:

So far, the Obama administration has yet to lay out its magical thinking on how the homegrown auto makers are to become "viable" when required to subordinate every auto attribute that consumers find desirable (ed: emphasis mine) in favor of achieving a passenger-car average of 39 miles per gallon by 2016. Nonetheless the answer has quietly seeped out: Taxpayers will write $5,000 or $7,000 rebate checks to other taxpayers to bribe them to buy hybrids and plug-ins at a price that lets Detroit claim it's earning a "profit" on its Obamamobiles.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be smart. His administration was supposed to be a smart administration. But the policy coming out has not been smart. It has been a brute shifting of power to the president's political allies, justified by the shibboleths of copybook liberalism (though Mr. Obama is clever enough to know that nothing he's done will have a meaningful effect on atmospheric carbon or climate change or the country's need for oil imports).

As for attributes I find desirable... horsepower is right up there along with agility. It pains me, severely, to think that those rompin', stompin' V8s of my youth... improved as they are (and 304 hp V6s that get 29 mpg, fer gawd's sake)... will go the way of the dodo. I just don't see how they fit in with The One's hybridized bastardized vision of the American auto industry.

I may never own another fire-breathing V8 and it's quite likely I wouldn't choose one the next time I'm in the market for a new car, anyway. But I ain't happy about having the goddamned government take that choice away from me. What have we come to?

(toon from the usual source)

Let's Begin With a Memory or Three

As captioned in the NYT: Russo and Steele managed to get $49,000 for a 1961 Triumph TR3A.

I might not have read the article in the New York Times on collectible cars at auction (from whence the pic above was taken) had it not been for that TR-3 you see above. Well, that’s not entirely true… as I’ll read most anything automotive, most especially about sports cars, muscle cars, and other such automotive erotica. But I loves me some Triumphs!

I have a soft spot in my heart for TR-3s, as the second car I owned was a beautiful 1957 model TR… which differs slightly from the ‘61 pictured above. My father and I spent many a weekend working on my TR. I exaggerate more than slightly when I say “my father and I,” because it was HIM and one of his buddies who did the lion’s share of the work. I helped whenever I could, usually — always — on weekends when I wasn’t working and could catch a ride from Vandenberg AFB down to the ancestral home in El-Eh to help out. The car was finally finished and in reasonable condition (albeit without a heater, working or otherwise) sometime during the summer of 1965 when I took it “home” to Vandenberg. There are no surviving pictures of the car, alas.

(Side note: Here’s a GREAT pic of a 1957 TR-3. Mine was identical to this one, down to the mirrors on the front fenders and the pressed steel wheels… no “wires” for me. And mine wasn’t white/cream… it was painted 1964 Falcon Gold, a rather flashy color available on 1964 Ford Falcons that went quite well with the (stock) blue leather interior.

Apropos of something… Jay Leno owns one, too.)

I have lots of good…no, GREAT… memories of that car and two very bad ones. First the good: I met The First Mrs. Pennington while dragging Main Street (Ocean Avenue, actually) in Lompoc, California in that car. Briefly: I had an old desk phone sitting on the transmission tunnel in the car. One evening while a buddy of mine and I were “doing the cruise” I pulled up next to The First Mrs. Pennington and a gaggle of her friends at a red light, with the phone up to my ear. I looked over at her, took the phone away from my ear, held it out and said “it’s for you.” She took the receiver without thinking… not realizing (a) the phone didn’t work and (b) that was about as tacky a come-on line as there ever was. But it worked, Gentle Reader. The rest, as it’s said, is history. (Keep in mind… this was in 1965 when only the VERY rich had car phones. As a young airman with only two stripes on his sleeve I was barely in the “solvent” category, let alone rich.)

The bad: I threw the car off a 50-foot embankment one frosty morning in January of 1966 when I hit a sheet of ice on my way up the mountain to work. I rolled it three times, once laterally and twice end-over-end. The TR was totaled; I walked away with only a scratch on the little finger of my left hand… that from maintaining a death-grip on the steering wheel while flying through the air and down the embankment. Wrecking the car was bad enough… but having to call my father to tell him I’d wrecked it was probably worse, as he loved that car as much (if not more) than I did. He got over it, though… as did I. I walked for the next few months until The First Mrs. Pennington and I were married. But Dang! That car sure was fun… while it lasted.

―:☺:―

Good news for us caffeine junkies coffee drinkers:

After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Dr. Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor of neurology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study, does not as yet advocate drinking coffee as a preventive health measure. “This is an observational study,” she said. “We have no evidence that for people who are not drinking coffee, taking up drinking will have a protective effect.”

Well, I suppose the news is sorta good, as there wasn’t a category for people who drink ten to 12 cups a day. That would be me, Gentle Reader. That’s been my habit for almost longer than I can remember… going back to at least 1964, when I first hit “the field” in the Air Force. I hope there’s no “excess” effect… but then again, is there such a thing as “excess” when it comes to coffee? I think not… not for YrHmblScrb, anyway.

―:☺:―

Remember earlier this week I remarked on just how quickly the White House web site changed? And how a lot of people, myself included, wondered what happened to the “old” WhiteHouse-dot-gov? Wonder no more. You can access the old White House site through the George W. Bush Presidential Library site. There is a disclaimer, though:

To preserve the historical record of the George W. Bush administration's presence on the web, the White House took a "snapshot" of the Whitehouse.gov web site. This is historical material, "frozen in time." The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work.

Well, yeah. We kinda figured that would be the case… but it IS nice to know the information has been preserved. And where to get it.