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…f*cking balls-out cartoon fascists…

…oh, i think you misunderstand me: that’s not impaired driving, that’s skillful navigation through the normal flow of traffic in sàigòn…

…oh, that’s just the vietnam regional setting…

…i don’t know if i have very interesting stories about the folks who dug in; mostly that ferraris have a reputation for not keeping up with the group on account of breakdowns when driven hard…more entertaining were the rally-star trailer queens which slowed down to crawl over every cattleguard or fresh roadwork for fear of marring their pristine clearcoats while the exotic road cars flew right through, welcoming the well-earned miles…

…a lot of us drive open-topped in light rain - as long as you keep moving the cabin stays fairly dry - but we’ve been caught in torrential downpours a couple of times and come through soaked to the bone before managing to pull off and raise our various tops and targas…next sunny day, you open everything up, let it dry out completely, and follow-up with a detail if it still bothers you…

…when a group of twenty or thirty high-profile cars pull into a small town fuel station, it can draw a lot of attention, positive and negative, but not so much when we pull into a remote roadhouse since those tend to be more common destinations…

…for folks really into the scene, the real rock stars were cars driven in open road races, not the trailer queens: it’s a modest culture which respects real-world capability and experience more than flashy showmanship…use it or lose it, as they say…

…i used to lead a monthly hundred-mile canyon-run which would turn out a broad spectrum of sportcars and exotics, some of which were trailer queens…

…it was always interesting to see how show car owners respond to the opportunity to drive their car the way it was meant to be driven, some of whom embraced the opportunity and others who delicately babied their way around the loop or bailed-out early…

…maybe he only protests on factorial dates so the signs stay manageable…

…you gonna write out that whole f*cking integer?..factorials make for snappy handheld signs…

…nah man, they’re just itching for an excuse to roll out deadly force and mass voter suppression…

…where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average…

Anyone Who Has a Fantasy

…hot tub time machine; absurdly better film than its pitch had any right to be…

…nah man, i’m here for casual conversation; nothing at all shameful about honest ignorance, only willful ignorance…

…because it’s a plainly ignorant statement akin to “i don’t like french music”: do you just dislike music malt whisky?..that’s a fair statement, but one which would apply to all malt whiskies regardless of nation of origin, as there’s no unifying style distinguishing scotch in particular…

…conversely, if you don’t mind other malt whiskies but dislike something specific about scotch, that’s indicative of narrow experience coloring your expectation of a vast ecology of styles and expressions which have little in common other than being based on barley, water, distillation, and age…

…“i don’t like scotch” is a common statement from folks who’ve only sampled peated malts; your listerine comment sounds like medicinal peat notes, which are a divisive style…

…i generally prefer windows open to the world but i’ll concede that it’s niiiiice, though: i never sleep better than nestled underneath a blasting window-box on a hot summer night…

…‘scotch’ encompasses such a vast diversity of spirits that i presume anyone who blanket-dislikes it either 1) doesn’t like malt whisky in general, fair enough, or 2) mis-apprehends a specific style as endemic to scotch whisky as a whole…

…the latter folks typically dislike peated malts, often after sampling bottom-shelf blends…

…i went to school in the tropics without air conditioning, neither in the classrooms nor dormitories, and it still feels like self-indulgent opulence to me every time i come home to air conditioning, even four decades later…

…there’s one clear victor and it’s not even close…

…microsoft applications have an annoying habit of auto-replacing my dashes with emdashes; i don’t even know how to type an emdash…

…one afternoon about thirty years ago, an apache attack helicopter casually hovered into view directly outside my window, scanned its turret back-and-forth inside my office, and gently settled onto the open field outside: it was show-and-tell day at his daughter’s daycare next door, we learned afterward…