Comments | spaceroo: The South will rise... some other day.

spaceroo

The South will rise... some other day.

Oct 20, 2008 11:45

Maybe I'm just feeling excessively catty today, but... I've gotta share.

While reading the news this morning, I happened to stumble across a Wired Auto Blog Entry commenting on the latest offering from the "Confederate Motor Company", an outfit apparently specializing in taking perfectly good aluminum blocks and machining them into motorized ( Read more... )

Comments 8

xolo October 20 2008, 19:46:52 UTC

I'd like to believe that Uncle Charles is laughing, but I know better. That's a motorcycle upon which to pose, rather than a motorcycle upon which to go fast.

spaceroo October 21 2008, 00:52:56 UTC

It shames me to admit I'm not quite getting the "Uncle Charles" reference. I have two theories, but neither may be right... ;^)

The nice thing about posing on a motorcycle like that is it can't help but make you look stylish by comparison. ;^b Personally I'd rather just pose in front of a $110,000-dollar-size stack of dollar bills. No more ostentatious, far more practical.

xolo October 21 2008, 01:04:28 UTC

It shames me to admit I'm not quite getting the "Uncle Charles" reference. I have two theories, but neither may be right... ;^)

Darwin. Whenever a device is invented which tempts fools to remove themselves from the gene pool, Uncle Charles laughs with delight :)

What were your theories?

spaceroo October 21 2008, 01:12:03 UTC

*Foreheadslap* Darwin. Darn. That was way too obvious for me to have thought of it. It makes perfect sense now. And perfectly applicable. This thing is just like a Razor scooter, only for CEOs instead of rugrats.

And, oh, now I'm too embarrassed to say what my weak ideas were. One of them involved a possible movie reference. ;^b In my defense I didn't get enough sleep last night. (Which might explain my initial cattiness.)

xolo October 20 2008, 20:01:13 UTC

On further consideration, perhaps Uncle Charles is laughing. Look how far behind the center of gravity they've put the back wheel. That's gonna bite down something fierce under hard throttle - the bike won't wheelie, there won't be any loss of traction, and it'll feel solid as a rock. It'll corner like a pig, though, and under braking that back end will lighten up and want to come around. The right sort of fool won't discover that the bike is a lot scarier when trying to slow down until he really needs to slow down, fast... :)

spaceroo October 21 2008, 01:05:08 UTC

My experience with motorcycling is rather stale (I had a minibike when I was a joey, and later occasionally tinkered with a grownup-sizeHodaka trail bike, which probably ran for a total of three hours in the ten-plus years I had it.) so I can't speak too knowledgeably about how a given machine might perform just by looking at it, but... yeah, somehow that thing just doesn't look right. It has that big fat slick tire with almost no weight on it in the back, and a *really skinny* wheel up front. The mental picture I get of someone really breaking hard on it is the front wheel locking up and the rear immediately skidding off in the direction of its choice.

Oh, well. I'm sure being transformed into a greasy smear of hair, blood, and leather is an integral part of the "holistic, avant-garde process for celebrating the art of rebellion".

austin_dern October 21 2008, 03:23:28 UTC

I'm not entirely sure which way is sitting forward on that alleged motorcycle.

Is it possible the web site was just a little prank that got released to the public without anybody noticing? I mean, wouldn't you write that way if you were just amusing the other guys in the office?

Cy-Kill might have been able to command more respect if he weren't a Go-Bot and didn't have such a lousy transformation sequence. And if he didn't have the Lego Person Head.

spaceroo October 22 2008, 15:04:24 UTC

I'm not entirely sure which way is sitting forward on that alleged motorcycle.

I *think* your butt goes in the thing that looks like an open mint box closer to the pointy end of the triangle, but no-one in their right mind would put their butt in there so... there certainly is room to wonder.

Is it possible the web site was just a little prank that got released to the public without anybody noticing? I mean, wouldn't you write that way if you were just amusing the other guys in the office?

They seem to earnestly want to sell these things... or, maybe not, come to think about it. This particular "alleged" product of theirs got press thanks to its appearance in the "Neiman Marcus Christmas Book", a well-known source of items so Gonzo-crazy-impractical it's really difficult to take their existence seriously. This is the same catalog that in 1963 offered a 900 pound Ampex video tape recorder/stereo/TV/camera bundle for $30,000. (I guess the rumor is that Hugh Hefner actually bought one for "personal use", but I'm not going to believe ( ... )