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David Burge Profile picture
@iowahawkblog
Jun 4, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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My new favorite movie of all time: High School Confidential (1958). It has EVERYTHING: switchblade fights! Mamie Van Doren! Reefer addicts! Jerry Lee Lewis! Midnight hot rod races! Vampira beatnik poetry! And non-stop hep cat lingo galore, daddy-o! ImageImageImageImage
I literally can't believe I never saw this movie before last night on TCM. Should be available on TCM on demand soon
Plus it has my late great pal Norm Grabowski (uncredited) as one of the Wheeler Dealers, the hoodlum gang that runs the reefer biz at 35-Year Old Student High School Image
And Michael Landon as head honcho of the Rangers, the high school's top hot rod club Image
And Charlie Chaplin Jr as undercover narc busboy at the beatnik jazz club owned by local reefer kingpin "Mr A" played by Jackie Coogan - whose movie career started as child costar of Charlie Chaplin Sr in "The Kid" and later became Uncle Fester on The Addams Family Image
And two chopped lead sled 48 Chevy coupes built by George Barris. Note: no one will be seated during the shocking lead sled flip scene ImageImage
In short: this is not a movie, it is a 1 hour 25 minute xray of my brain
Footnote: here's a Jackie Coogan tangent I went off on, prompted by a car ID request

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More from @iowahawkblog

David Burge Profile picture
Mar 28
Wait'll they realized that if we really wanted to hook up 8 million rural households with broadband we could just skip this bullshit, buy all of them Starlink terminals at $400 apiece, and save 92% off the DC retail politics price tag
Same thing with California High Speed Rail. For the same price to build 10 miles of choo choo track somewhere between Merced and Bakersfield you could have given free $2500 fly anywhere flight vouchers to every man woman and child in the state of California
But sure, let's have major public infrastructure systems designed by people who've never organized anything more complicated than a campaign fundraiser
Read 13 tweets
David Burge Profile picture
Mar 22
Internal combustion, electric, steam? Old hat, been there done that. Today's #DavesCarIDService salutes some mad geniuses who REALLY thought outside the box when it came to alternative vehicle power. Starting with Ron Main's rubber band-powered "Twisted" land speed record car.

Car-wise I was kinda jaded, thinking I had seen it all, until I saw this latex propelled green energy machine debut at 2008 Bonneville Speed Week.Image
Yep, you read that correctly, rubber bands. The SCTA (Southern California Timing Association) land speed record book has hundreds of classes for different body types, engine displacement, wheel counts, and power sources. Which leads to a lot of innovation, and craziness. Main owns a number of those records, including the world's fastest Ford Flathead V8 at 302 mph.

And what's more innovative than inventing your own rubber band powered class? That was the intention with Twisted. Under the hood: a battery of 150 industrial rubber bands, the kind used to secure cargo on pallets. Anchored to a set of gears that could be wound up with an electric motor.

How to keep them from binding, though? The following content is for mature audiences only. Rubber, as we all know needs to be lubricated, and a team crew member was designated to apply friction-reducing lubricants. Main referred to him as "the fluffer."

How did it do? SCTA measures speed over flying mile, but allow for a vehicle assisted push start. The goal was pretty modest, 30 mph, but the biggest challenge was to sustain rubber band power for that one mile. Sadly it wasn't going to happen that first year, which was also the last year Twisted appeared there. The rubber band class record remains vacant, in case you want to attempt it yourself.Image
For REAL speed with alternative power? There are more things under heaven and earth, Gear Ratio, than dreamt of in your philosophies. Like 189 mph on compressed air. Achieved in the Speed Sport IV dragster in 1962.

Speed Sport was a well established successful drag racing team out of Tucson at the time, racing fairly conventional Top Fuel dragsters. Tucson was also home to AiResearch, which produced auxiliary power units (APUs) for jet aircraft engines. Basically, an APU is part of the starter motor for a jet turbine, powered by compressed air. When you listen to the engines powering up on your passenger jet, your hearing that.

They're capable of producing 750 ft-lbs of torque, and weigh only 35 pounds. AiReseach approached Speed Sport about a joint project to adapt them for drag racing. Note the tire smoke: this wasn't about thrust, the compressed air turbine was geared to a truck axle. The turbine itself produced virtually no thrust.

But it did produce snow: the rapid decompression of the air tanks crystalized the ambient H2O, making it into an accidental snow machine. Which also limited its ability to even go a complete quarter mile. In order to solve this, a spark plug and a bit of conventional fuel to heat up the decompressing air. Voila, 189 mph in the quarter mile with a low 8 second ET.Image
Read 7 tweets
David Burge Profile picture
Mar 16
Time for #DavesCarIDService to get back on the road again! During SXSW this week, I lucked into a little behind-the-scenes access at the Luck Reunion music fest at Willie Nelson's Luck Ranch outside Austin. Lucky me!

That included a couple of the more notorious vehicles around: Willie's tour buses, including the original Honeysuckle Rose. Sorry for the blurry cell phone pix, maybe it was due to a contact high, I'm not admitting anything.Image
Image
Here's a more competent photo of the "Honeysuckle Rose II," a Canadian-made 1990 Eagle Model 15 with custom interior by Florida Coach, and murals by an artist name "Rainmaker" (this is a car ID service after all). Willie's original tour bus was a 1983 Prevost that was totaled, without him in it. The various Honeysuckle Roses were all Prevosts:

I: 1983-90
II: 1990-96
III: 1996-2005
IV: 2005-presentImage
And if you're wondering, no I didn't get to hang with Willie. But enjoyed his live show and got to hang with quite a few whippersnappers who are carrying on his legacy of outside-the-mainstream rootsy music. Thank you to the mysterious Hawkspawn & pals for some nice memories.
Read 25 tweets
David Burge Profile picture
Mar 14
"We're not allowed to say <thing> in this country."

"But you just said the thing you said you weren't allow to say, on a podcast with a million listeners, and literally nothing happened to you."

"Oh so now I'm not allowed to say that I'm not allowed to say the thing?"
I wish to clarify to all who are confused over this issue: others pointing out that the supposedly forbidden thing you said was 100% factually wrong, and you are obviously mentally ill and/or retarded, does not constitute "censorship"
I can't help notice that the main consequence of claiming that you're saying forbidden things seems to be lifetime university tenure, or an open invitations to promote yourself on Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan
Read 6 tweets
David Burge Profile picture
Mar 11
JFC here comes the tech bros again with their robo fetish Image
MIT genius: my prototype $50k robo-man does the work of the three hired hands that Kansas farmers use to harvest their wheat fields, according to the Wizard of Oz

Silicon Valley VCs: here's $3 billion
These fucking robo-nerds apparently studied engineering so they could un-invent the wheel
Read 8 tweets
David Burge Profile picture
Mar 11
Top B1G serial killers (minimum 2 deaths):

1. Jeff Dahmer OSU
2. Ted Bundy Washington
3. Ted Kaczinski Michigan
4. OJ Simpson USC
5. Donald Miller Michigan State
*Bill Ayers (Michigan) disqualified on a technicality. Due to incompetence his bomb only accidentally killed three friends
**John Wayne Gacy attended Northwestern Business College in Oak Lawn IL, which has no affiliation with Northwestern University in Evanston, but I feel he may qualify as a Wildcat in spirit
Read 13 tweets

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