Category Rants

Lets talk about this, rental car dicks.

FUCK YOU! Fuck you in your ass (unless your into that which is totally cool I’m not judging, but then fuck you in some other uncomfortable way). This is the most inconvenient shit ever. I was told by another rental agent they do this stupid shit so not to loose the spare key for when they resell the thing to some poor bastard who buys an ex-rental. Why on this cursed earth anyone would buy an ex-rental or any fleet car other than desperation to look richer than you are is beyond me. I treated mine like total shit for the 5 days I had her and I’m pretty sure her whole life is lived near redline, jumping over curbs, neutral drops and generally being raped.

Anyway back to this gas station key thing. Since many rentals fleets let you drop off cars at any location they want both keys to go with the car, but that should be their problem, not mine. Oh you can’t keep spare keys organized back at the office and mailed to the other offices, then fuck the customer right? Can’t figure out a place to keep them in the car, like say the glove compartment, then fuck the customer right? But why the fuck do they have to be held together with an overly thick inflexible cable? Oh right just to fuck with you.

Look, it doesn’t fit in your pocket assholes. I mean sometimes it technically will, but with the giant lump in your pocket don’t be surprised if you hear ‘did you just rent a car, or are you happy to see me’. Hey rental car assholes, want me not to loose your keys? Make it so I can’t put them in my pocket. Oh wait that’s right, you charge shit tons of money for new keys so that’s probably the point. Dicks.

So Bernie Eceelstone decided to run his mouth off t the press again. Ughhh.

How you have to explain F1 to your friends

Friend: “Is that like NASAR?”

You: “No!”

“Indycar then?”

“Well kinda, not really. No. It’s way better.”

“Oh it’s the European one, that’s owned by Putin?”

“No! They have one race in Russia but Putin has nothing to do with it. One of the guys who runs it is a bit of and old crazy and says stupid shit.”

“You mean that Nazi guy?”

“No! That guy ran the FIA for a while. But he wasn’t a Nazi, His parent where. Well kinda, not really it’s complicated. Don’t judge a person by their parents.”

“But didn’t he get caught having sex dressed as a nazi?”

“No. He was not dressed as a Nazi! The hookers that where flogging him where.”

“So he’s not the one that likes Putin.”

“No that’s his friend Bernie the other guy.”

“Who runs F1?”

“Well, kinda, not really. It’s complicated.”

“Oh he’s like Tony George”

“No! this is not Indycar. Bernie is just the commercial rights holder.”

“Oh that guy who hates women?”

“He doesn’t HATE women, he just doesn’t think they can drive or should be in F1. But he actually does sometimes It’s complicated.”

“But he doesn’t like immigrants right? Big Trump supporter too I heard?”

“Look, I..I don’t know. He love taking money from immigrants, in their home countries where he has races I guess. I don’t know, its complicated. He says stupid stuff.”

“Like saying Hitler got stuff done?”

“I really,… I don’t..Just.. just watch the race.”

“They look like Indycars, but don’t sound as good.”

“I hate you and this sport.”

So the FIA isn’t letting the teams scrap the new qualifying format and go back to the old one. They must modify the new one.

FUCK YOU Jean Todt. Seriously, Todt has shown an amazing combination of incompetence and impotence in letting the FIA run F1 into the ground. This man needs to go. He won’t, but he needs to. Grow a pair of balls and say no to Bernie Ecclestone for once.

We’ve had two really great races so far, IF you watch anything but the top three positions. And I’m fine with that. Haas F1 and Romain Grosjean have pulled off a miracle. The back markers all seem to have a chance to beat each other, and the midfield is anyones race. But no ones talking about that because qualifying is such a fuck awful mess.

The problems with the new qualifying are numerous. And it pretty much just leads to the last few minutes of each session with no cars on track, as opposed to last year where everyone made a last dash attempt to better their times.

Here are the main reasons.

Not enough tires-Fixable but expensive.

Takes too long to refuel the car-Possibly fixable by even more convoluted rules, but creates other problems.

Not enough time to make an in lap, change tires, and an out lap between eliminations-not really fixable.

Cuts the running time down dramatically for the lesser teams-yea, lets give less on camera time to teams struggling with sponsors, that should help.

Will always end up with just two cars running at the end of Q3-fixable by using the old formate for Q3, but that begs the question why use the new one for Q1 and Q2 at all then?

So why are we even doing this shit anyway? What was wrong with the old format every one liked? With all the other glaring problems within the sport why did they change the one thing no one had a problem with? Oh, apparently we need to mix up the grid now that’s why.

So who hell wants the grid mixed up anyway? Oh that’s right, Bernie Ecclestone does. Every interview I’ve seen or read points to the ‘promoters’ demanding a change in qualifying for why this shit got pushed through. Well’ ‘the promoters’ representative is Bernie Ecclestone. Yes the FIA has blame here, but that blame is mostly not standing up to Bernie and saying no, get this crap idea out of here. Well they somewhat did, that’s why we have this fuck awful format now, because what Bernie demanded was even worse! Bernie wants either a reverse grid, ballast added or some other such bullshit like a lottery drawn grid. The FIA (and the teams) came up with this crap as a ‘compromise’ with Bernie. No matter how much Bernie says in public how he hates it, this shit show lands squarely on his desk.

But a lot of people are bending over backwards to absolve him of responsibility, or at least obfuscate where the blame lies. They’re playing the “the blame lies with everyone’ game and that’s not quite true here for qualifying.

There has been a tendency with some F1 commentators that I greatly respect to defend Bernie from any accusation or criticism throughout his career. Now I understand some of this, Bernie has threatened some of these people before. A couple of years ago several fan run websites got the legal equivalent of a ‘I’m watching you and can shut down your site in a minute letters. Bernie works for CVC, the actual owners of the rights to use the ‘Formula 1’ names (Bernie sold his rights to CVC a while ago but part of the deal kept him in charge). So they threatened several websites with shutdown or at least a name change. So I’m not sure how much of the Bernie pandering comes from a position of having to play nice with the man that can fuck up their sites and communities they care about so deeply.

But I suspect there’s also the tendency of ‘rich person worship’ at play with some of the American commentators here. And Bernie certainly is a rich man. Personally I blame this on those awful Puritans that infused our culture with a belief that god shows his favor by blessing people with wealth, so the rich by definition are moral and ’good’ (while the poor by definition are morally deficient and ‘bad). But that’s a different rant.

Bernie gets much praise for being a great dealmaker (sound like someone else?) but it’s always left out that many of those ‘great deals’ are in fact part of what’s strangling the sport. Sure, the deals with the smaller teams was a ‘great deal’ for Bernie and CVC, but the financial screwing the smaller teams are getting because of that is drowning them in debt, threatening their very existence on the grid, and they are struggling on track because of it. Sure the deals he’s made with the tracks have been ‘great deals’ for him and CVC, but the many of the tracks fans love can’t pay up anymore and get dropped of the calander. Hell we almost lost the US GP after only three years because of how great a deal Bernie made with them. The one consistently is the only party who benefits from these “great deals’ are not the fans, the teams, the tracks or promoters… It’s Bernie and CVC. He’s the only one that wins in these deals. Yet his defenders continually refuse to take that into account when looking at problems in the sport (sound like someone else?).

He also holds extreme and fluid positions on what the sport should be doing, like reverse grids, a lottery grid, a medal system, and other such garbage. But because he says so many more outrageous things like installing sprinklers or calling female drivers appliances, his actual crapy ideas get lost in the noise (sound like someone else?). Ok. fine, I’ll just call him the Trump of F1. And he’s been getting the same media treatment Trump did at his start, that media crush as I call it. He’s a ‘great personality’ so he gets a pass. And like Trump that plays right into his hands.

As I said I respect some of these Bernie Ecclestone defenders greatly, hell I owe one of them a lunch the next time I’m in their town for all they do. And while it certainly is true some fans blame Bernie for everything wrong in the sport (he had noting to do with this terrible engine format or reliance on aero for instance) that isn’t an excuse to free him from blame on anything. Especially when he’s the one that pushed that first domino no one wanted pushed.

Yep, I did. And it was just as lame as I thought it would be.

Look I get it, electric racing is going to happen, but this is just rubbish, that’s why fans where leaving with 5 laps to go. The whole thing kind blows. First, you’re not a ‘sport’ if the fans get to have a vote on who gets more power. The whole changing cars thing halfway through is a joke too. Hell at first I wasn’t even sure it was at Long Beach since I never saw a shot of the iconic fountain but then I remember that a Formula E car can’t make it that far so the track is a Fisher Price’s my first street circuit.

At least Neilson Pique Jr. wrecked. So that was good. It is the only thing he can do well. Even Pastor Maldonado never did it on purpose.

I’m not sure if ABC wants me to watch Indycar or not. I have never heard a race broadcast that downplays the very race they’re commenting on as much as this. They literally spent the opening segment of the opening race talking about how they can’t wait until the Indy 500 and this race was just practice. Ok, why should fans tuning in watch this fucking race then?

I mean everything they talked about the whole race somehow came back to the Indy 500. It felt at times like they weren’t even paying attention to the race that’s actual fucking happening just to talk about Indy. And the Indy 500 is the most boring Indycar race I watch all year. I nap during most of it.

I also liked how the announcers fawned over Connor Dailey and how well he was doing (he did hold second for a while and deserved the kudos) but even after he dropped they still kept mentioning him as ‘so good to see an American rookie do well’. Look, I like Connor and he is really good but he’s had 5 races already and Alexander Rossi beat him. Alexander Rossi, the American rookie driver in his first race. I can only assume the problem here is Rossi’s name is not ‘merican’ enough for the ABC announcer who probably think Rayn-Hunter Ray is american.

What the living shit is this?!

Can someone fucking explain this to me? Actually screw that, I defy you to explain this to me! Who the fuck is this add campaign for? What stupid ad executive shithead thought this was in anyway a good idea? How many potential Doge/Ram truck buyers are fans of The Hunger Games? For that matter how many fans of The Hunger Games can fucking even drive?

I can only imagine that this is the result of a marketing contract that no one actually read. Somewhere someone at FCA (or whatever the fuck Fiat is calling Chrysler today) and Lionsgate had lunch, drinks and then accidental sex back in 2012. In an effort to write the hotel room off, they wrote up a marketing contract to tie in Chrysler with whatever Lionsgate biggest hit would be in 2015 when hopefully they’d be gone. They then passed it on up the chain figuring it would never fly anyway, and eagerly awaited accounting to reimburse them for the hotel room. But instead no one fucking read it, thought about it in any way, or asked “so what might that movie be?” and just rubber stamped it. Perhaps someone did read it and just thought Lionsgate was making the new Star Wars movie?

Then at some point three years latter The Hunger Games hits the numbers and a work order was generated automatically by a computer and sent to the marketing department who must have just shrugged ‘well it comes from corporate’ and mindlessly started the impossible task of either selling Ram trucks to tweens, or convincing older working class guys to buy a truck based on that movie their kid won’t shut up about that they’ve never seen.

If you really wanted to market Ram trucks to older working class men using the Hunger Games they just should have used the leaked photos of Jennifer Lawrence’s asshole, slapped a Dodge logo on it and called it a day.

This is an excerpt from a much longer letter from two years ago that doesn’t get to go public yet. But this has all the  car stuff.

Where do VW Beatles go when they die? Not the plastic front engine atrocities that have all the soul of a marketing department. But the great old air cooled little beast that didn’t need a sunflower holder to market them to women and gay men, since they actually had real street cred. What’s their heaven like? I far as I can tell, its Mexico City. They’re everywhere you look. This is not a city to play punch buggy in. Two or three at a light, every light, and they didn’t survive for no reason. Not only did VW decide to give South America a gift by continuing to manufacture them well into the 2000’s here, but driving anything bigger in Mexico City is trouble.

Over 9 million people are crammed into this sprawling urban mess, and the traffic is either stopped for miles in all directions, or moving in a chaotic unregulated flow that’s an art to navigate. Cars pass within inches of each other at any speed. Roads have room for four lanes, yet none are marked. Busses travel the wrong way in traffic. Or is traffic moving the wrong way at the busses? Entire four person families fly by on scooters, squeezing between cars, no helmets, holding groceries and smiling as if the danger doesn’t even exist. Inadequate and worn down brakes scream at all times from all directions. I now understand why the Mexican kids back home “Pep Boys” out their cars. Why bother actually putting real chrome, or a real exhaust on your Honda if a runaway ford fiesta is just going to rip it all off at anytime. This is not a place for a car you care about. Did I mention there are a lot of VW Beatles here?

Black smoke pours out of tail pipes. You can actually see it rise from the street. There is no point trying to avoid it. It rises up and becomes one with the smog filled sky. After a round trip across town windows up or not, you will smell like you just rode a motorcycle across country. The exhaust smell mixes with street food to give you a strange smell of spicy delicious diesel. Outside of the Zocalo the streets are littered with trash as if every home and place of business collectively walked out and dumped a can of it right in front of the dwelling. It piles up, spreads out, and blows by like plastic crumpled tumbleweeds. Occasionally between Beatles you’ll see a person pass by with a straw broom and a 50-gallon drum, the mutli-tool of containers, welded onto a bike. Sometimes even two or three official sanitation workers will pass on a more modern version of this mobile trashcan. I’ve even seen them sweeping, but it’s a battle they are severely losing. Mexico City is the street sweepers Dunkirk.

The only thing more plentiful than the trash is people. They walk, run, or stroll by. But mostly they seem to stand around. They hang out in front of the thousands of shops that line every street, no matter how rich or poor. The street scene here is one of small storefronts and eateries. Small openings that lead into long trailer like shops selling all kinds of junk in all kinds of neighborhoods. It’s like driving down the boardwalk at Ocean City MD, for miles. The entire economy of Mexico City as far as I can tell consists of selling trinkets to each other. The only thing that changes is the junk. Near the Zocalo it’s jewelry, hats, suits. The next ring is cell phones, electronics, bootleg DVD’s and software. Stores advertise that they sell bootlegs. Guys stand on the street wearing cards that have listed all the pirated software they have, while the “policia” stand right in front of them, either not caring, or about to pounce. Apparently it can be either. Further out it becomes T-shirts, toys, and general cheap crap. The kind of stuff you see at flea markets. In some cases once you enter the “small” storefront it opens up into a collective flee market, a maze hidden from the street by stands selling even more junk. Even further out the crap becomes even cheaper, until it’s latterly just junk. Piles of it are set up in little booths or stores intermixed with auto shops of every specialty. Welding, grinding, more welding right there for VW Bugs to watch as they either pass by, or sit in traffic.

What are you glaring at, yes I’m staring at your daughter. This surprises you? Maybe if you stopped looking at me and looked to your right you’d see the problem here. Seriously don’t blame me, you’re the one who let her leave the house wearing that. It’s just a loose bit of fabric somewhat covering her nipples and a denim based bikini bottom thingy that kinda keeps part of her ass in (jeankini?). So your going to stand there and tell me that when y’all where leaving the house, she walked down the stairs wearing that and you thought  “oh you look pretty dear, just like a little angel, lets go out in public”? Now look you can continue to glare at me all you want, but it’s not my fault there is a natural selection based awkwardness of sexual attraction that makes guys my age desire to be face down in girls your daughters’ age while living in a culture that says that’s only cool if she’s a stripper and I’m rich or have coke.

Perhaps you should look at that girl walking on the other side of the street, I actually have to work to get an image of her naked in my head. See how all of her important bits are covered, that leaves question marks about specific sizes, and shapes that I then have to fill in with my own mind. She could have those little dimple things on her lower back? She may have tattoos, large areolas, freckles or huge nipples? I don’t know, and that’s the point, sometimes it just becomes too much effort to figure out. All of that mental undressing takes a bit of time and effort on my part and as such I’m just not going to do it. Your daughter on the other hand, left none of that for me to do. It’s like her naked body just jumped up right into my imagination against my will ass up and tits flap’n took over and started grinding. That’s not my fault, it’s yours.

If it’s any consolation you won’t have to worry about these kinds of awkward arousal based social interactions at traffic lights happening for too much longer. She has that trying too hard look about her, since she also has that body is going to go all to hell in five years look about her too. Trust me, after her first pregnancy, which will probably happen any day now, that thing is going all to shit. You can see it now, baby fat is only cute when they’re young, in five years it’ll just be regular old fat. I know it, you know it, and she knows it. Hell that’s why she’s dressing like this in the first place. She need to land a guy now while she can. I’m sure her plan is to find one who has the possibility of being able to work, get him locked in as a baby daddy as soon as possible and hope it all works out in the end. It won’t though. Even if she decides to pick one that isn’t a total shithead looser just to piss you off she’ll still end up lying around the house doing nothing all day but getting fatter. All the while her four year old runs around out of control and learning how to dress like a whore just like her mommy did, and I’m betting you did before that. Ahh the cycle of whores.

I can see you getting angrier at me, but the light will change soon and you’re the one who looks more like a pimp than a mother standing there. Now look, I’m not demanding she wear a burka. Hell I’m not even saying she shouldn’t show it a bit, or even a lot. But that’s slightly less than beach attire and I’m not in “beach mode”. You know beach mode, where you see so much skin that after 5 minutes of whirling your head around you’re just too exhausted and desensitized to it and don’t give a fuck anymore. See I’m not at a beach and I’m not desensitized to it. I’m at a stoplight in Baltimore, so I have fuck all to look at other than your clothing deficient daughter and that fat fucking guy in a wife beater over there, that other fat guy in a wife beater over there, and that really skinny guy in a wife beater. Actions have consequences, and her wardrobe actions have the consequence of me staring at her.

So mom, you can stop glaring and calling me a a dirty old man in your head… that sentence is redundant anyway and this light just turned green, so good luck with all of that I’m sure the next time I see you, you’ll be a grandparent.

Hey Maryland, why the hell can you not build another DMV? Will it break the State budget? By the looks of this place I can’t see how unless you suddenly become West Virginia.

Why are the numbers your calling going backward now? And what the hell happened to Mr. G117? And you, guy next to me, stop reading over my shoulder will yea.  What the fuck happened to G122? Do you really mean there are 63 more people in front of me? Why are there no hot chicks here? What, hot chicks don’t drive? Their license never expire? I call bullshit. Statistically any group of people this big should have at least four fuckable chicks and one hottie. Perhaps everyone is just getting uglier. They certainly are getting fatter it seems. Look at that one over there, belly hanging out, chewing gum like cud.

Lady will you please for the love of god shake your baby! It will stop screaming so damn loudly if you do and I promise everyone here would applaud you for it.

Look I can only sit here dressed like a clown for so long, at least take the damn photo so I can take some of this shit off. You’re making it way too hard to get a ridiculous ID photo. What? Fine lady you can plug your damn iphone into this computer to charge it for a minute. But don’t tell anyone else, I’m not fucking PEPCO. Actually if I was PEPCO I’d unplug it, run it dry then charge you for the service.

3.5 hours latter I finally have a license. I really liked the part where you charged me an extra $45 to type an “M” on the damn thing. And it turns out Maryland takes the photo from the neck up so I wore this ridiculous shirt and tie all day for nothing. Fuck you Maryland…fuck you.

Just because my top is down does not mean I want to talk to you. So move away from my car. No just stop where you are. Just get the fuck away from me. Look I don’t care how hungry you are I don’t have any money. Oh, you’re trying to get new football uniforms, I still have no money. Fuck off! What are you looking at? Stop looking in here. Can’t you hear me turning up the radio? I’ll roll up the window at you. See how I’m looking at you speak, while turning the knob on the stereo, that means fuck off.

Now as everyone who lives in any non-bumfuck place in America will know, roadside homeless at an intersection are as common as..well, our homeless. Most just stand quietly holding signs asking for money, or pace up and down the medium. But what the rest of you don’t have to deal with is the inevitable conversation they all want to have when a convertible pulls up. And understandably. I’d imagine homeless conversations would get pretty boring after a while “So Ted what did you eat today?” “Nothing Bill, you?” “Nope, wanna smoke some crack?” Hell I think my conversations with people I know get boring and we own shit to talk about.

Last week I was first car at the light, and he was standing right there so I could see it coming. While everyone else just got a quiet walk by their closed windows with the sign I got the “hey, got any change you can spare?”. Now being a professional unemployed person myself, no I have no change to spare. And told him so. But it never ends there, oh it never ends there. “Do you gamble?” What? This was a new one. “I used to but not anymore” (lie!).” “oh that good” he said. And then moved on to the next car. Hold up! Where the fuck was that going? This was the first damn conversation I’ve had with a homeless that I wanted to find out more in years and he just moves on. Did he loose all his money gambling? Was he trying to get to Pimlico? Did he want to make a bet? Come back… dick. At least put that on the sign.

And while I’m on about the signs, I have to ask why the hell do they all end their sign with “god bless”? I mean look at yourself, your god obviously fucking hates you. And your still giving props? That’s not noble and Job was a sucker. Now I get it, it’s a marketing thing. While I’m sure most of them do believe that crap, it’s still plays on the guilt of the religious for some cash. Hell if I was begging for money on the side of the road I’d do it too. Fuck, I’d more than do it, my sign would read “Child victim of molesting priest, now homeless. Help out or jesus will cry”.

Now occasionally I do have a pleasant exchange with people out of the car. Doggies love to run up and say hi, and for some reason I get a lot of “nice car” comments (this will be explored in a future drunken rant). Hell even though I don’t know any of the street names (so good luck) I don’t mind trying to give you directions. It’s just that 4 out of 5 times the person asks for directions just as the light turns green. So I’m either the asshole who drives off without helping you, or I’m the asshole who holds up the hole damn intersection to chat to the guy with Pennsylvania tags.

So for the most part when someone starts speaking to me it’s going to suck, so please don’t do it. Look, I didn’t get a convertible to meet people. I got a convertible because I like the wind in my face, I like to feel like I’m actually outside when I go outside, and to annoy others with my music. I not driving to make friends you know.