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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 11

https://twitter.com/JinWooIQ/status/2031765428608086230

This will be the most complicated Amazon order return ever

https://twitter.com/JinWooIQ/status/2031765428608086230

This is why I buy all my Chinese missiles at Harbor Freight, if they're duds they'll give you a store credit

I really like Harbor Freight Chinese missiles, they're perfectly fine when you need a cheap, low accuracy missile for a one-time project. But it does kinda bug me that they brand them as "Uncle Sam"

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 10

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/2031413910352302082

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/2031413910352302082

https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/1827424207925317702

https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/1827424207925317702

Sure, I hate the Irish, but in my defense I am Irish

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 8

Greetings, car mystery fans! In yesterday's thread I examined the strange story of Bib, Michelin's long running humanoid tire stack mascot. To further enhance public appreciation for the tire advertising arts, today's Dave's Car ID will delve deeper into a few bangers from the early days of tire promotion - starting with this 1933 illustration for General Tires.

Behold the insouciant Gatsbyesque power couple returning from the Copa, or somesuch swank uptown nightclub for millionaire swells, to his Streamline Deco penthouse apartment. Lithe curvaceous Daisy is already eager to get into something more comfortable, perhaps because of the champagne, or perhaps because of the soft cushioned ride there provided *SPOTLIGHT* the General Deluxe Dual Balloon tires on Jay's powerful coupe. The doorman knows what's up, and offers a salute and wink.

Buy General Dual Balloons.

Making tires - let's face it, the filthiest part of the car - glamorous and sexy is not the easiest job on Madison Avenue. But as a former tire shop monkey at Ben Fish & Son, I do appreciate the effort. General had a whole campaign in the early 1930s to glamorize and sex-up their new Dual Balloon (a/k/a General Jumbos).

I guess it was kind of the Pre-Hayes Code era of advertising, and the imagery is fantastic. Incidentally, General Jumbo tall sidewall tires and their associated special small diameter wheels are still quite a collector item amongst those of us in the hot rod & custom world.

Of course when it comes to selling with sex, the uninhibited French were first to apply it to tires (1), albeit bike tires. While Michelin was touting their weird monster TireMan, rival Badou countered with 1910 poster for their new Sirene model, featuring a beaming mermaid in the altogether.

Even the staid English got a bit daring in their 1930s tire ads. These ads for Dunlop (2-4) hint of some scandalous upper crust weekend in the English countryside, replete with infidelities - and a murder mystery. Which will be solved by a quirky genius detective using a clue found in a Dunlop tire.

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 7

Time for an old fashioned Dave's Car ID Service meandering car history lesson! This time about the world's most disturbing, and long-serving, tire company mascot and restaurant critic, The Michelin Man.

That's what we here in the States call him anyway, elsewhere he's called 'Bib.' And how he came to be is a bit of a stemwinder, but one that you can use to amaze and/or bore to death fellow cocktail party guests.

Let's start with the Brothers Michelin, Edouard and Andre, who owned a farm implement business in the southern city of Clermont-Ferrand. One day circa 1887 a bicyclist showed up at their door with a pneumatic tire in need of repair. That was a real bitch at the time, a couple hours of work, because tires were fixed to the wheel rim. That inspired them to design and create the first removable pneumatic tire, for which they received a patent in 1891. Voila, les freres Michelin struck it rich almost overnight, what with the huge bicycle craze, followed by cars, trucks, and motorcycles.

This was also the high age of French advertising poster design, and you had to go big to attract attention on the poster-covered walls of Paris and Lyon. Enter "O'Galop," the pen name of French cartoonist Marius Rossillon. For the Michelins he designed a chimera tire-pile humanoid that that debuted at the Lyon exhibition in 1894.

The 1898 poster below, by O'Galop, show how 'Bib' got his name:

'Nunc est bibibendum!!' - a Latin quote from the Roman poet Horace, meaning 'Now is the time for drinking!!'

The rest is in French, which translates as "that's to say: to your health, Michelin tires drink up the obstacles!"

Thus Bib is short for Bibendum, which is Latin for 'Drinkin' Time.' And look at ol' Bib, still poundin' down another glass of jagged rocks and broken glass while his competitors like 'Pneu X' are near dead.

So why, as a pile of tires, is Bib white and not black? Because the process of carbonized rubber had not been invented in the 1890s, and rubber tires were off-white, the natural color of raw latex.

Sometime after the fin du siecle, Michelin decide to bring Bib out of two dimensional poster world into 3D Meatspace, and the effect at first was somewhere on the border between hilarious and terrifying.

In #1, coming to the rescue of a stranded 1925-27 Ford Model T C-cab candy delivery, like some sort of horrifying magical tire fairy.

#2: Some sort of final Tire Monster Boss Battle, in what looks like WW1 war ruins.

#3: To ensure the continuation of the Mutant French Tire Being species, Bib was given a mate sometime in the 1920s; note her open toed shoes.

#4: Michelin Tire People Bizarro World even had its own dance band. I have searched in vain for surviving recordings.

So how did a drunk rubbery monster become a feared food critic? Leaving aside that most feared food critics are drunk rubbery monsters?

Because as a courtesy to travelers, Michelin also began distributing an annual guide in which restaurants were rated on a 3-star scale: 1=very good, 2=excellent, 3=exceptional and worthy of a special trip in and of itself. The difference between unmentioned 0 star and a single star became a matter of life and death.

#1 below is the very first Michelin Guide, from 1900, which only covered France. Over the years new editions for other countries were released; in #2 Bib touts the guide to Britain for 1911. In #3, Bib touts a whole host of travel guides for France in the 1950s; finally in #4, a group of California restaurateur celebrate their star-knighthood by Bib in 2023. Only later will they discover each star is actually a curse that will haunt their nightmares with fears of star-loss. Bib giveth, and Bib taketh away.

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Feb 20

https://twitter.com/aflashbak/status/2024798585305420213

Liberace was paranoid, and hired the Hells Angels as stage security for this fateful show at Altamont. Seconds later a group of grandmas rushed the stage. The bikers began savagely beating them, and Liberace's dancers.

The zeitgeist shift was clear: Groovy was Dead.

https://twitter.com/aflashbak/status/2024798585305420213

By the way it's "Hells Angels," not "Hell's Angels." Feel free to correct them, like countless other previous grammar nazis buried in shallow graves around Oakland

https://x.com/mikeobs/status/2024833390214582683

They literally beat Hunter S Thompson senseless after his book came out because he, or some Ivy League Random House copy editor, added an apostrophe in the title. He only survived because he owed Sonny $500 that would come from the book royalties

https://x.com/mikeobs/status/2024833390214582683

Read 6 tweets

David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Feb 15

On the occasion of the 68th running of the Daytona 500, Dave's Car ID Service takes a deep short dive into the cultural roots of that annual event. Starting with George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794.

The fledgling nation of the United States was in deep need of tax revenues to satisfy debts incurred during the Revolution. Tariffs were already high, hampering trade, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton promoted a domestic excise tax on the production of distilled spirits. The "Whiskey Act" was passed in 1791.

This did not sit well in those hard-drinking times, especially among the Scots-Irish settlers of Appalachian Pennsylvania who had a long tradition of distilling and selling whiskey. Revenue collectors were sent to collect the excise tax and, well, a rebellion ensued. Resulting in literal tarring & feathering, along with being run out of town on a rail, like the unfortunate tax collector depicted below.

That rebellion raged in and around Fort Pitt (later Pittsburgh) for the next 3 years. Newly elected president George Washington dispatched negotiators, and later militias, to quell the rebellion. It collapsed in 1794, resulting in 24 organizers being charged with treason. The Whiskey Tax would continue, and be a major source of federal revenue for the next 125 years.

What does that have to do with stock car racing? Hold your horses, I'm getting to that.

By the early 1900s, 30% of US federal revenue was generated by taxes on alcohol. But by enacting Prohibition with 18th Amendment in 1919, that source of revenue dried up and the federal government began relying more on the newly enacted income tax.

That of course led to all hell breaking loose in the now-contraband alcoholic beverage industry. Law or not, America's demand for hooch remained, and there were still go-getting distillers willing to supply it. Many of whom were from those same Appalachian Scots-Irishmen who rebelled against the Whiskey Tax more than a century prior. Particularly in the remote Southern Appalachians.

It was a golden opportunity for those entrepreneurial hillfolk, and a critical link in the supply chain was transporting freshly distilled corn liquor, a/k/a white lightning, a/k/a moonshine. It took a ballsy youngster who knew his way around cars, willing to risk his neck and jail time by outracing cops on moonlit winding backroads. With a trunk full of contraband flammable liquid.

Thus was distilled the spirit of stock car racing, which still exists. Triple pun intended, I guess. In photo 1, a capture Tennessee still circa 1922; in photo 2, a very early moonshine runner with a 1923-25 Chevy flatbed.

Even after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, moonshining continued. The alcohol excise tax kicked back in, and most of the South remained "dry counties" where Prohibition was, for all intents and purposes, still in effect.

Those mountain boys could still make nice money by transporting untaxed homemade from the backwoods to Atlanta, and Greensboro, and Winston-Salem. What's more, they had a new weapon in their arsenal: the Ford V8. No pursuing revenuer in a heavy government fleet car had a prayer of catching one, especially if it was hopped up, balanced & blueprinted, with shaved heads with triple carburetors.

The apotheosis of the moonshiner car was the 1940 Ford coupe: easily hopped up motor and suspension, huge trunk to contain gallons of hooch, and stealthy enough not to attract attention. A "stock car" if you will.

For recreation, local moonshiner runners around the South would compete against one another to prove their mettle as hopup artists and fearless drivers at local oval tracks. Most all in 1937-40 Ford coupes at the beginning.

Some of those early outlaws became legends, like Junior Johnson, the subject of Tom Wolfe's "The Last American Hero." In #1, adjusting a Stromberg carb on a 1939-40.

Less well known, but still a legend to your legends, was the late Willie Clay Call of Wilkes County North Carolina. Known to the ATF as "The Uncatchable." He not only made moonshine, but drove it himself. Behind him in #2 is his personal fleet of 1940 Fords, all of which he drove to transport the moonshine he made in those barrels. His legacy lives on in the now-legal Clay Family Distillery.

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