Author: Frank

One thing I remember from TV was Barry Meguiar talking about car guys, or as he even told a little girl who wrote him about her passion for cars, “Even girls can be car guys”.  But this seems to have been a dying thing, and maybe it’s the technology in cars or just that the fact that most old cars that are still new enough to be cheap (not like the classic muscle cars that have become high dollar buys) just aren’t cool enough to turn into hot rod project cars anymore.  But the whole car guy scene is just dying out. 

And I’m not just talking about the physical working on and having of a car, but just that passion, and the iconography that came along with it.  I guess this was all inspired when I was thinking of all the cool logos that used to be on the plain white t-shirts you could buy at Pep-Boys, or the stickers in the back windows of muscle cars to brag about the parts they were running, and how over time these things just kind of silently went away.   It’s much along the lines of how products on TV don’t seem to have jingles like they did when I was growing up.  You know *bursts into song* “The best part of waking up, is Folgers in your cup!”, or “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid..”.  It’s like the whole culture of products have gone away, and so has the desire of advertising through catchiness, as it seems advertising has gone the route of brainrot annoyance.  I mean when was the last time you saw any of these once glorious logos?

Version 1.0.0

 

And not just the logos, but the art in general, there’s no modern day Von Dutch, or Big Daddy Roth making Rat Fink stuff.  Car culture has just fizzled out and died, it seems like most cool custom old cars are build buy a handful of builders, and the kids are just throwing NOS, and fart can exhausts on things, and putting graphic stickers on the cars.  I guess they would have like “Amazon” and “Temu” stickers on their cars these days… AliExpress Racing.

So let me get to what my whole point of this is, so this whole culture dying out has brought about a serious issue, not just the camaraderie of motorheads working on an old V-8 together while heavy metal music blasts from a Sears boom box in the corner of the dusty garage, but just the fact that the whole maintaining of cars is a thing of the past.  People used to actually change their oil, and inspect their cars, and take care of them.  Today’s kids are told “oh this car was built to run forever” or “It’s just broken in” and then they just drive it until something breaks.   Could you imagine if the car care mentality of the classic and muscle car era was applied to this technology of today.  

I’ll come clean though, I’m 50 years old as I write this, and I really don’t like crawling under my Subaru to drain oil, I don’t even like jacking up my motorcycle to change the oil.   So in a way I’m just as guilty as the kids.  But I do get hands on enough to constantly know the condition of my vehicles.  It wasn’t long ago that I caught the firestone place trying to rip me off on unnecessary car repairs when I took my old truck in for an alignment.   “We can’t align this until the steering stabilizer is replaced”, sorry buddy, but I know enough about cars to know that doesn’t affect alignment.  Or when they tried saying my taillight was burned out when I check my head and tail lights a few times per week.  

But it’s like I was telling someone how much it sucks because NOW a days, you’re almost always buying a used car from someone who knows nothing about cars, and just hope that you’re getting a car from someone who could afford to have a mechanic do all the regular maintenance that is required and stay on top of the little things that you can fix before it wears out 5 other things.   I can’t help but wonder if the passion for cars died out when they all just started looking the same, and body styles changed every 20 years… or if companies just stopped caring about making cool cars because the whole passion for automobiles died out.  But man, it really sucks. 

 

 

 So my whole life, I loved the idea of motorcycles.  In the 80s I obsessed over motocross, and while other kids begged their parents to take them to the playground, or to the amusement park… I was begging mine to take me here

Fairway Cycle in Somers Point, NJ.  My mom would take us down there and my brother and I would collect brochures of our favorite motorcycles and walk around and dream about dirt bikes.  I can date this back to 1982, because I thought the Honda CR 480R was, as the great Nico Leonard would put it, the dog’s bollocks.   

Back in this time, as I was saying, my head was in the dirt bike world, so I remember looking at street bikes and not understanding how they managed to handle bumps with such a little space between the tire and the front fender.  Leave me alone, I was 6 years old and didn’t understand that the fender moved with the shocks.  But I tell you that so you better understand how long of a time coming this midlife crisis was.

Now growing up, my brother always had a dirt bike… mostly Honda CR80Rs, I remember him having a Yamaha YZ125, and for a brief moment, a Honda CR125R when they had crazy high seat heights, I’m thinking 1982 model.   This latest one lead to one of the weirdest moments of foreshadowing I ever lived through.  I was out riding my BMX bike and saw my brother’s friend, John Powers, riding his moped around the neighborhood.  We stopped and chatted and I said to him “Mike got a CR125”, and he said “Can he reach?” meaning can he touch the ground while sitting on it.  I said “Barely, he uses a rock in the front yard to get on”, and John said “He can’t handle it can he?  He’s gonna kill himself on that thing”.   It was a couple of weeks later that me and my brother were in the front yard and John rides past on his moped, toots his horn, then a few moments later hear a crash, and John had veered into traffic making a turn and was killed by a car hitting him.  

Jeez, I got side tracked.  So anyway, he always had a motorcycle, however I did not.  Not until I was about 10 years old, and as a deal for us moving away from all our friends, my parents agreed to buy me and my brother motorcycles to ease the pain of the move.  My brother got a 1985 Honda CR80R (which he promptly took the engine apart and made it faster, much to my parents dismay), and I go a 1985 Honda TRX 125 (Fourtrax) four wheeler.  And let me tell you, this was a BEAST of a machine… 

Honda’s raging 8.6 HP 124 cc powerhouse of an engine cranking out 6.4 ft-lbs of torque caused me to alter to rotation of the earth every time those soft knobbies gripped the ground and I punched that thumb control throttle, kicking up rooster tails that were like dirt tsunamis to any insects that happened to be in the way.    Now let me tell you, this lead me on so many wonderful adventures in the local corn fields, railroad paths, and woody trails in the metropolis of Washington, New Jersey back in the day.  Also lead to my broken thumb, but that was my brothers fault.  This thing was such a staple of my life, it’s surprising that when I got rid of it a few years later to eventually buy my first car… that it would be almost 40 years before I ever owned another motorcycle.

So fast forward to the 2020s, and I hit the peak of my Youtube browsing and I stumble onto the video “Creeper Butt Grab” by Jake the Garden Snake:

 

If you know my friend Grizzle B, you’d hear an uncanny resemblance a few times in this video.  But anyhow, this got me on a long kick of watching moto-vlogs and many times I wasn’t even listening to the vlog, I was just watching the scenery and living vicariously through it.    Then in late 2021 I got really sick with Covid, my mom and brother both died from it, and after a long recovery from post-sepsis syndrome, I finally was watching these videos and thought “Why am I watching people ride motorcycles and not just going out and riding a motorcycle?”

So in January of 2023, I signed up for a motorcycle license class.  Now mind you, the only motorcycle-ish experience I’ve had was that four wheeler…. it was an automatic clutch standard, so at least I kind of understood the shifting, the four wheeler was all up for upshifting though, and all down for downshifting.  I rode the shit out of BMX bikes my whole childhood, so two wheels weren’t intimidating, and I always had stick shift cars, so I understood the whole using a clutch concept… So I thought “Hell, I’ll take the class.  Worst case scenario, I hate riding motorcycles and wind up with an unused motorcycle endorsement…. best case scenario, I take the class, and my life changes forever. 

I take the classroom portion of the class online, and it’s super easy with any idea of how the mechanics of a motorcycle works.  But then I show up to the riding portion, and it was in the parking lot of our local Shriners temple, and we sit in the class room and introduce ourselves, and I’m the only person in the class who has never ridden a two wheel motorcycle.  No stress, no pressure.  There was a fellow in there who was getting his license because, as he put it, “I went to the Harley dealership just to look at motorcycles, and walked own owning a Harley Davidson, so I figured I’d need a license.  A few guys who have ridden illegally for most of their lives that had close calls with the law, then one lady who “grew up riding dirtbikes her whole life, and wanted to move to the street” and one who “Grew up riding crotch rockets, but never had a license”.  Then there was me, the 47 year old who never rode a motorcycle.  And this was the beast that I got to pop my motorcycle cherry with:

Long story short, the girl who “grew up on crotch rockets” ended up quitting the first day because she was scared of the Honda Rebel 250, and the other lady who had decades of dirtbike riding experience, for some reason, had problems making a motorcycle go in the direction it’s supposed to go, and she failed the class.   The rest of us were granted our licenses.  And to me, IT WAS A BLAST…. the next morning I went down to the local dealership and sat one  a myriad of dual sport motorcycles.  I went into this pretty much thinking I wanted the Honda XR650.  Just for it’s sheer old school-ness, it LOOKED just like the dirt bikes I grew up dreaming of, alas sitting on it felt like I was sitting on a fence, I knew there was no way I’d ride that any distance, so I eventually wound up making this headline with the local shop.

Bought a 2022 Kawasaki KLR 650 Traveler, it was a leftover in February 2023 so basically I got it out the door for the sticker price of a new base model.   And thus began my lesson of the fact that the cheapest part of owning a motorcycle is buying a motorcycle.  MAN these things microtransaction the ever-loving shit out of you.  BUT I LOVED IT.  But then after some sore ass trips with it, my coworker and her husband rode their cruisers up to work and I sat on one of them and was like “I’ve been riding the wrong thing!”  Now mind you, this was on top of the fact that I found out I didn’t really care for riding off road too much either, I was just using it as a street bike.   

So that made up my mind, I’m going to sell this, and get a cruiser.   So I did the same routine.  I sat on everything I could find and balanced the absolute musts in the biking world… comfort versus looking like a friggin’ cool dude.   I tried everything, the Honda Fury was surprisingly comfortable for a chopper, and I liked the old school feel, but ultimately there was a weird wideness about the engine, where I felt like I had to go bow legged to reach the pegs around the sides of the engine.  The Kawasaki Vulcan felt pretty good, but it just wasn’t really want I wanted looks wise.  Now growing up my dad had Honda Shadows and loved them, so I sat on the Shadow Phantom and it was like “Okay, this is the best one yet”.   Ultimately I was hmming and hawing between the 2025 Honda Shadow Phantom and the 2025 Indian Scout Bobber.   The deciding factor was I was able to get the Shadow out the door with a 6 year warranty for less than the Scout’s sticker price.  I just couldn’t get myself to come off that much money for the Indian. 

So I put my Kawasaki on the Facebook Marketplace, and finance the Shadow and wait for it to be delivered (the closest I could find the color I wanted was about 300 miles away).  I was like “I’ll sell the Kawasaki, pay off the Honda, and be a financially mature and responsible adult.”  And weeks go by and the Honda shows up and not ONE bite on my KLR.   More weeks go buy and I start looking into things like Twisted Road for maybe at least making money with the KLR by renting it out, just weighing my options since nobody wanted to buy it.   Then it happens…

“Hey, are you willing to trade for the motorcycle?” pops up on messenger.

I start typing “No, I want to get cash and pay off the motorcycle I just bought.”

Then I remembered, if there’s anything I’m not, it’s financially mature and responsible, so I backspace it out and say “What do you have?”

“A 2018 Indian Scout Bobber”

I started typing “YOU MOTHERFUCKER, WHY COULDN’T YOU MESSAGE ME A COUPLE WEEKS AGO AND SAVE ME $11,000?!?!?!?!”  then backspaced it and said “I’m interested, tell me more.”

Next thing I know, I own two motorcycles. 

 

I figured I’d ride the Indian for a bit, then sell it…. but I can’t.  It’s too much fun.  I tell people the Honda is my Toyota Camry, I know it’ll run forever, and will be comfortable and look nice and the Indian is my 1969 Chevelle.  Nothing you’d want to go cross country on… but it looks cool, sounds cool, and is powerful enough to be super fun.   But let me tell you, getting a motorcycle was the absolute best thing I’ve done.  I always tell people “When I ride the Shadow or the Scout, I feel cool… I feel like a biker, like the ones people go ‘man he’s badass’ when they see me.  When I rode the KLR, I felt like my 8 year old self, riding my BMX bike through the neighborhood, free as a bird.”

And you know, all the horror stories you hear about motorcycles aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.  Of course they’re dangerous, but not nearly what you say.  I have way more people pull out in front of me and drive like a momo around my bright orange car than the motorcycle.    And I tell people the first 50 miles of riding will terrify you, but after than it all becomes second nature.  So if you’ve been thinking about it, stop thinking and start doing.  I’m kicking myself for not having 30 years of biking under my belt now.  

LIVE!!!!

 

For a few years, I worked at one of the busiest Wal-Mart Supercenters in the world, the one on Front Beach Road in Panama City Beach, Florida.  I am sure there will be a great many tales told from that place, I was going to do a “Tour of Doody” blog on Walmart, but Jesus Christ, I worked there 6 years through the MTV Spring Break Years.   I could write a whole library of 1,000 page books on my time there.    BUT, I was going to tell my friend Earnie this story, and was like “Nah, I got a blog you can read instead of me typing that out again… then I looked and didn’t have a blog…. so here I am, typing it out again, so I don’t have to type it out for Earnie.  Fuck that guy.

So  it was a cold Panama City Beach night, in the dead of Winter (I’m serious, it would get down in the 20s, this night was high 20s or low 30s), and I was working in the Garden Center, and one of my duties about an hour before quitting time was to take the forklift, and move pallets of mulch (or any tall full pallets) to close off the ends of the corral area where all the stepping stones, bags of dirt, etc. were.  WELL, being that it was FUCKING FREEZING, I was going too fast to try to get it all shut down, and I tipped over a pallet of mulch.  So since I knew I would be out there picking up these cold ass wet plastic bags of cold wet ass mulch, I was like “I’m gonna get me some gloves for this task”.

First… let me give you my “mad drip, dawg” run down of what I was wearing.  Being that it was COLD out, I was in my jeans, my heavy black leather vest, and wearing a black beanie and my black boots.  I mean, I was pretty much a “cold weather stud”, ladies… feel free to start flipping your bean… dudes, just start wishing you were me.  I was wearing my Wal-Mart name badge on a lanyard over my jacket identifying myself as  not just a Wal-Mart associate, BUT… A forklift operator.  (cue the sploosh from the ladies).

Now I know it’s hard to believe, that a Wal-Mart employee wouldn’t know where something in the store is.  But believe it or not, I couldn’t for the life of me think of where I could find some gloves.  So I headed over to hardware, and as I walked through the Toy Department there was an older lady (granted  I was maybe 26 at the time, so the older lady was probably 50), and two younger girls, who I assumed were her daughters.   So I smiled, and nodded and said “hi” or some form of greeting we’re supposed to do when we pass a customer.  And I get to hardware and can’t find any gloves.  So the guy in Hardware said “You should check automotive, they usually have some with the mechanic stuff”.  So off I went!

And who do you think I saw on the way to Automotive?  The three ladies… once again, I smiled, nodded, and said “Hi” and kept walking, I get to Automotive, and there’s NO GLOVES.  So I start talking to one of the Automotive guys and I’m like “I don’t know why I’m blanking on where to find gloves” and finally he suggest I try softlines (That’s top secret Wal-Mart retail code talk for clothing department).  So off I go!

And I know you’ll never guess who I saw on the way to Softlines…. So I’ll just tell you, it was the SAME THREE LADIES.  So I once again, nod, smile, say hi, and keep on walking.  I get to softlines, and they have gloves… but they’re not like the work outside and crap gloves, they were like fashion mittens and such…. so I talk to one of the girls over there (She saw the forklift operator badge and couldn’t resist striking up conversation), and we finally sort of brainstormed Sporting Goods might have something in camping and fishing, or at least batting gloves might work…. SO, off I go to the Sporting Goods department.

I know, I know, but YES, SERIOUSLY, I ran into the same three ladies again, it was FUCKING CRAZY…. I don’t really remember the daughters too much, but the mother kind of reminded me of the country singer JoDee Messina, kinda chunky redhead.  And that’s really  the main thing that made me realize it was the same people each time, I was like “Oh it’s like the old version of JoDee again.  So FINALLY i get some suitable gloves, and I make my way back to the parking lot, and GUESS WHO THE FUCK IS CHECKING OUT AT THE GARDEN CENTER REGISTER.  So I walk past and I say “Hi Zoey” to the cashier, and go out and fish my hidden water bottle out of the pallet in the patio (It was cold enough that it was on the brink of slush, like PERFECT water drinking temperature) and the ladies walk out the doors so I smile and say “Have a good night”, and as I’m screwing the lid back on my water, I see Zoey  waving me into the register.

“What’s up?”

“Did you see those ladies?”

“Yeah, I told them have a good night.”  (meanwhile now I’m thinking “Shit, they saw the forklift operator and were telling Zoey they wanted me to have a 4 way with them”)

“They said you  were stalking them and freaking them out, but I said ‘Frank?  He’s probably the nicest guy at the store.  I have it on good authority that he has a massive schlong because of that forklift license too'” (okay some of that might not be true).

I started laughing and said “Well they did seem to be in every department I was in, I was hoping they didn’t think I was thinking they were stealing”. 

And with that I went back to the parking lot restacked the pallet, and closed it all down and just as I was back inside I get paged “Frank in Garden Center, the Forklift driving stud muffin, call (whatever number the office was), so I called back and my Manager Melissa told me to come back to the office.  When I get back there, it’s like EVERY manager in the store in the time crowding the room.  I was like “Shit, they found out those ladies wanted a 4 some and now they’re trying to get in on the Frank Train”.  But instead they said “Were you stalking and trying to rape our customers?”

So I told them that whole story and we were all laughing, so Melissa (she was so awesome) said “Hold on, I told her I’d call her  back and let her know we had a talk with you” and she put it on speaker phone, and that lady was SO FUCKING UNHINGED, I started thinking “damn, maybe they were stealing stuff if they’re doing this loud of a guilty dog bark”…. First off she fucking lied, she said “We are three very attractive women, and we shouldn’t feel like we’re about to be raped or killed by people working at the store”.  Then SHE COMPARED IT TO 9/11, she said “In this day and age of terrorism, we shouldn’t feel like victims walking around shopping”… Everyone in the office did a wide mouthed stare at each other with that one.   Melissa explained that since it was cold and I worked outside, I didn’t have a vest on (they were dressed just like me) and she said “Well your employees shouldn’t be allowed to dress like  criminals”.  (A jacket and a beanie hat).  And she was INSISTING that I lose my job because I walked past her and said Hi.  It was bananas.

So when Melissa hung up, one manager Holly said “Okay Frank, you have to wear a pink hat now so you aren’t so scary looking”.  Then there were some other cracks about the woman being a psychopath, and I said “Can I go back to work now?” and they  dismissed me without any charges.  Then I said “For the record,  they weren’t attractive at all, I  wouldn’t have fucked any of them, not even for practice”.  And totally impressed the entire management staff.  Ahhh the things you could say in an HR office 20 years ago.

But yeah… that was my induction into W-alquaeda-mart or something.  

So I have this friend Preston, we’ve been friends since 1985, and if there’s one thing everyone knows about Preston is that pretty much everything he thinks is great is hot garbage… Except Eddie and the Cruisers, he likes everything about it, and I agree with him on that.  So today he was discussing how Switchblade was the best vehicle from the M.A.S.K. series.  WHICH if he was in America would get him immediately checked into a mental health facility with a drug rehab as part of the program.  For some of you, you’re super pumped someone is writing about one of the greatest cartoons and toy series of the 1980s, and the others are completely clueless about what this M.A.S.K. bullshit is.  Let me enlighten you.

M.A.S.K. Logo

M.A.S.K. (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand) was an elite team of badasses that drove transforming vehicles, lead by Matt Trakker who were at war with Miles Mayhem’s evil group Venom (Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem), who also piloted their own army of transforming vehicles.  OH and they all had helmets that gave them special abilities, be it a built in flame thrower or a tracking beam that levitates anything you want it to.   I mean really, this was like G.I. Joe and Transformers got together and made something way better than the both of them.  

Anyhow their vehicles, typically had two purposes, and USUALLY they were just your every day car, or motorcycle, that then turned into some sort of attack vehicle.  AND SOMEHOW…. they were able to make toy versions of these that stayed really close to the same form as the series.  MY GOD WHAT A GREAT TIME TO BE A KID… Unless you were Preston, and you liked the dumb vehicle the best.  He was a strange kid, always wearing a knock off Scottie Pippin jersey and rode his bike in a gang called The Panda Bears.   Anyhow…. let’s take a looks at these vehicles in… let’s go alphabetical order.

Afterburner 

M.A.S.K. Afterburner

Well, we kinda start right off in the shitpit of M.A.S.K., while most of their stuff was really cool, this is clearly one that wasn’t thought out too good (Preston probably loves this one), but it was a dragster (which are awesome) that turns into a stealth plane and a cannon.  Now the pilot of this vehicle was Dusty “Powderkeg” Hayes, and his special helmet’s super power?  It made a computer image of himself, so he could become two people for both parts of this vehicle… that’s just one part about how dumb this vehicle idea is “Let’s make a one seater vehicle turn into two separate weapons that both need a driver”.  If that’s not enough, this is a great weapon should Venom decide to attack an NHRA sanctioned event, or one particular dragster garage.  I mean, a top fuel dragster isn’t going to be patrolling city streets.  Even if you ran patrols in the plane part of it, then you’d be like “Okay, gotta lure this bad guy to the drag strip so my computer version of me can shoot it down.  Just ridiculous.   Surely Miles Mayhem would eventually say “Look guys, I can’t help but notice we’re losing a lot of people around drag strips… let’s start avoiding them, if the NHRA is in town, we work somewhere else”.   But then again, that fucking nitwit flies the Switchblade, if he can’t figure out how stupid his own vehicle is, I’m sure he’s going to end up dying at the Winternationals in Gainesville.

 

Barracuda

Venom - Barracuda

Okay, so Venom was a little more on the ball with their vehicle here.  Barracuda was a motorcycle driven by Bruno “Maddog” Shepherd.  While it was still the same dumb idea of a single seater vehicle turning into two vehicles, at least this one isn’t restricted to sanctioned racing events.  Granted, a jet motorcycle isn’t the most “blendy inny” kind of normal vehicle… BUT at least it can go around town.  You would THINK that someone out there to do evil would be on something a little more unassuming and rememberable as a bright yellow jet cycle… but who am I to judge?  And what exactly is a “Jet glider”?  I think once you put a jet engine on a glider plane it’s no longer a glider.  *Shrug*.  Still better than the shitbag dickface Switchblade though.

 

Bulldog

Okay, so NOW we get to an actual cool vehicle, Bulldog was your run of the mill cabover tractor trailer truck… well just the tractor…. but anyway, until it didn’t need to be anymore, and it became an armored halftrack with a cannon, machine guns, and a saw sticking out the front…. SEE? This is how it’s supposed to be… it’s not a unicycle that transforms into something that needs 6 operators… this guy can wear a helmet that does more than just make enough people to operate the vehicle.  Granted Boris’s “Comrade Mask” only shot out an array of stars to confuse the enemy… it was still more than just making a copilot.  Let’s hope this positive trend keeps going.  Well it will until we get to the S’s and have to cover that moronic Switchblade

 

Bullet

Okay, now this one might not be SUPER practical in a war… BUT it would definitely be one of the one’s I would want to have in real life as a civilian vehicle… a crotch rocket that turns into a hovercraft?!?!?! HOW FUN WOULD THAT BE?!?!?!?  I mean it DOES do one of the primary functions of these vehicles should, you can ride it on land, or over water…. so there is that… but I am not sure that if I was going into battle I’d want to be exposed on a motorcycle sized hovercraft with a blaster cannon and grappling hook.  Unless I was being chased by a helicopter plane, then I wouldn’t be scared, because something that useless wouldn’t be able to do anything to me anyway.

 

Buzzard

This one HAS to be one of Preston’s favorites… because it came SO CLOSE to being really cool, but fucking blew it… and it’s the same guy that flies his favorite Switchblade *big eye roll*… so this one starts off in the shitter… it’s a goddamned Indy Car… so the only way Miles Mayhem is sneaking up to commit a crime is if he’s going to do it during a race.  Then as he’s in his one man race car going around the track KAPLOW MOTHERFUCKER one of the racecar becomes two little ground battle units and a jet plane… THAT ALSO has a hang glider.  Now he’s going to take over the world by disrupting the Indy 500.  Now think about this, if this had been a regular street car,  you and a few homies are rollin’ in your normal every day car then BAM you become 2 ground units and a jet plane…. THAT makes sense… I’m still not sure I get the concept of a battle hang glider though.  But what do you expect from the idiot moron imbecile that flies the buttsmudge Switchblade.

As I am leaving the B’s to go into the C’s, I want to acknowledge again that this is just vehicles… so I skipped Boulder Hill which was M.A.S.K.’s base, and an AMAZING toy… and Billboard Blast… which was a billboard that had guns in it…. I just want to make something clear about toys in the 80s… they actually came up with, marketed, and sold us kids TOY BILLBOARDS.  Jesus fucking Christ. But a billboard is still cooler than a helicopter that can transform and still fly.

 

Condor 

Okay, so this was my vote as the most practical and bestest vehicle in the show.  You are crusing around on a motorcycle… able to go anywhere on land you want, places cars can’t even go, then you flick a switch and you’re riding an attack helicopter… THE SIZE OF A MOTORCYCLE… You can fly down any street between buildings…. This is the best vehicle out there, hands down, anyone who likes Switchblade more than this is a big stupid dookie head, and a cancer to society that should be shot in the face.

 

Detonator

Another one that’s pretty close to being good…. rollin’ round town in your VW and suddently there’s a terrorist attack?  Well push that button and split into a hover craft and an attack quad.   Now this one got dumb because you can fit two people in a VW bug, but they made this another one where the guy’s mask makes a computer version of him to drive the other half.  You COULD have had two people with two masks that do two different things… but instead negated the benefit of making one mask with this stupid fucking computer image thing.    SO CLOSE…. ugh.  But still head and shoulders above the Switchblade, that stupid piece of shit.

 

Dynamo

GODDAMMIT, this is another one that could have been SO FUCKING RAD… but they made it stupid.  Most of these were series 4 toys, the “Split seconds”… it was the last series of toys, which just goes to show, you can kill something amazing off by going full blown retard for just one series.  SO NOW I KNOW WE HAVE TO GO BACK IN TIME HERE, and back when this came out Honda Oddesseys were the single seat dunebuggy like ATV, and the world wasn’t really full of these 6 seater side by side off road things now… BUT THERE WERE MULTISEAT DUNEBUGGIES AROUND LONG BEFORE THE 80’S DAMMIT.  So here we have a dude riding around in a little dune buggy, single seater… not even a place for the bikini babe you might see on the beach to hop in…. then what’s that?  Someone just saw a plane turn into a helicopter and disrupt the Indy 500?!?  Push that button and become an attack copter and a 4 wheeler…. and not have a useful helmet because you gotta make a computer version of your self to fly around while your pop dank nooners with the 12 o’clock boys on your quad. Still makes more sense then a dumb pedophile planeocopter.

 

Firecracker

Okay, so this one doesn’t jump out as being a great idea but hear me out, and you’ll see it’s still way better than a plane that turns into a helicopter… unless you’re someone Forrest Gump would make fun of for being slow.  So you have a dually pickup truck… so you can haul big trailers carry heavy loads, and on it, you have a motorcycle… you know you need to get places, and those dually fenders get in the way…. so you can hop on the motorcycle and go anywhere you need…. BUT you can also push that button, when someone is causing a ruckus by converting back and forth between two methods of flight to take over the planet…. and it becomes a raised armored tank with a spare tire sized chinese start shooting out.  BOOYA.  And even if it’s not the best vehicle out there, it was a great toy… the way the body would spring up into the tank mode, and you had a motorcycle.  MAN that was a fun one.

 

Firefly

Okay this one is awesome, even though it does rely on some cartoon magic to work, but it’s a dune buggy that turns into an airplane.  I’m not sure how it attains flight as it transforms to a plane as the front wheels become part of the wing… BUT… with the suspension of disbelief, it’s fucking rad as fuck.  I guess you could go flying over a dune you could turn into a plane… who cares… it’s a bad ass dune buggy, and a bad ass plane with guns AND bombs…. WAY better than the stupid fuckface retard Switchblade. 

 

Fireforce

I’m not quite sure how great this is in battle, but it’s another one I’d like to own… Imagine having a badass Pontiac Fiero (provided if it’s a GT, not the pussy 2M4) and then you drive past a Hells Angels clubhouse and think “Hey, I wonder if they’re hiring” so you hit a button and suddenly you’re riding a chopper trike.  Although I’m not sure this guy in the picture on the box knows what he’s doing, dragging feet like that on a trike… but he’s still smarter and more skilled than the ignorant buttface that chose to fly the Switchblade.

 

Gator

This is another example of what M.A.S.K. vehicles SHOULD be…. you got yourself a Jeep (Okay, there’s the flaw…. why would you pick a unreliable shitheap like a Jeep for a your battle vehicle, but I digress) and suddenly you need to fight on the water… flip that switch, and you go funny car mode and shoot out the front as a speedy little attack boat.  Now THAT makes sense.  Unless you’re a bobbleheaded nincompoop who wants to have two flight options.

 

Goliath

So what do you do when you want to race Indy cars AND fight terrorism?  Well, instead of being a shortsighted buttfucking mongoloid that gets out of your Switchblade to get into a one person indy car that turns into 5 vehicles, you do the smart thing and you get a transport truck for your indy car, that turns into a battlewagon from hell with a buddy to drive, while you fly your indy car attack plane around to kill that stupid asshole face that only drives stupid vehicles.

 

Hurricane

This one was definitely one of my favorite toys, it was SO cool how you push a button and it goes from a car to a six wheeled tank, you didn’t even see the middle wheels in car mode.  The only down side was it was kind of dumb to be cruising in a 57 Chevy with off road tires.   BUT it was cool in battle too…. got your 57 Chevy and making out with a broad at the drive in, when suddenly a helicopter flies past with a down syndrome guy driving it while sitting on a dildo and it becomes a plane in mid-air… you hit a button and your car becomes a GODDAMN SIX WHEEL TANK… you pop out and shoot that boy-touching douchebag out of the sky, and go back to banging the babe.

 

Iguana

Okay, so this is an interesting concept… you can cruise along on your 4 wheeler, then suddenly you can till a field while shooting people.  I’m kind of lost on this one… but what do you expect, it was a Venom vehicle, they’re the baffoons that think the Switchblade is a good idea.  Knowing these Einsteins, it’s a balsa wood blade, being that they’re lead by a stupid old man with no common sense…. still way better than the stupid fucking Switchblade though.

 

Jackhammer

Okay so this one isn’t overly special, you go from a Ford Bronco into an armored Bronco… but let me tell you as far as a toy went, that thing was DURABLE… I can’t tell you how many times that thing got launched down a flight of stairs and never broke… even with it’s pop up turret on the back… I think the grill broke off eventually, but jeez.  Anyway so you’re cruising in your Bronco working for Venom when you’re idiot boss calls and is like “Hey I need to do commit some terrorism down there, but all I can do is fly or fly because I’m in the dumbest fucking vehicle ever made, so you need to do it”… and you hit the button, and your hood goes over the windshield as a barrier, cannons come out from behind your grill, and the whole back of your Bronco becomes a spinning gun turret…. so it’s basically you go from a regular street car to a military grade Humvee like thing.  Makes sense and is a vastly better vehicle than that shitbag turdstreak of a Switchblade.

 

Manta

This was a pretty cool one too, it was Venom’s answer to the Firefly… Cruising in your Nissan 300ZX and suddenly need to go into flight to finally kill your embarrassingly stupid boss in his Retardocopterplane?  Hit that button and become an airplane.  I never owned this toy, but the pictures look like it would break pretty easy while suspending your whole “Wheels becoming wings” disbelief… but you know, if you can pretend that a plane/helicopter is awesome, I’m sure you’ll believe anything.

 

Meteor

Okay so M.A.S.K. tried their hardest to out-stupid the Switchblade, but the best they could do is a stunt plane that becomes a tank, so it’s STILL a way better idea than the god forsaken hunk of skunk taint that’s the switchblade.  I guess they were afraid that Switchblade would show up at an airshow to bore the shit out of the crowd, and might need to shoot it down some something better could come out for the show…. like a paper airplane.  Fucking Switchblade man…. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS PRESTON?!?!?  

 

Outlaw

OKAY, so THIS ONE is BAD ASS… and the toy was AMAZING.  FUCK!  Man I wish I was a kid again sometimes,  But this is one of those really strange plot holes that M.A.S.K. had, because this was a Miles Mayhem vehicle… yeah, you know, that stupid inbred kidfucker that drives the most retarded vehicles on earth… but anyway this is a tanker truck,  So he’s driving this oil tanker, and decides “Hey, I wanna blow some shit up” and he presses a button and it becomes a mobile rocket launcher.  SEE Miles? This is what all your vehicles should be like.  MIght have made more sense to make it look like a common company’s truck to blend in, but hell, the Snake Oil is a funny word play.  The only thing I can think of is this was Miles Mayhem’s first vehicle, then after years of eating lead paint chips, head injuries, and growing an extra chromosome, he decided to use Switchblade.

 

Piranha

This was a good one, but the real star of the show was it came with the coolest looking action figure.  He had a motorcycle with a sidecar that turned into a submarine.  Which is pretty good for being a terrorist… you can look like a bad ass biker, and have the stealth aspect of a submarine, his helmet shot harpoons, which probably wasn’t very good for when you’re IN a submarine though…. but shooting harpoons in a glass top submarine makes way more sense than flying a plane that turns into a helicopter.  But everything makes more sense than that absolutely submoronic idea.   Anyway, check this dude out… what kid didn’t want to play with a bad ass like him?

 

Raven

Man the R’s are good in M.A.S.K., Raven was a sweet Corvette (you know, it just dawned on me, I wonder what kind of licensing deal they had to be able to use all these real cars instead of things that kinda look like them, like the GTA games), that would turn into an armed sea plane.  This one was a super cool toy, because you’d hit a button and the whole front of the car would flip upside down, and the wheels became gun turrets.  The doors folded down like a reverse DeLorean to become wings.   This could be one of the absolute ultimate vehicles, I might have to rethink Condor, this covers ground, sky AND sea.  Damn… that’s tough.  Either way, it’s awesome and would beat the shit out of the atrocity they call Switchblade.

 

Razorback

Okay so this one is kinda dumb in reality… I don’t get why the M.A.S.K. team felt this need to make these hyper specific oddball vehicles that just don’t fit in.;..  So again, this one is great provided there’s a terrorist attack on a NASCAR race.  HOWEVER, that being said, this toy was SO BAD ASS… the thing that needs to be DRIVEN THE FUCK HOME, was these toys mostly changed shape on their own, this one would spring up into that weird position, and the axles would flip forward to accommodate it on their own, you didn’t have to do that by hand, that was just A PUSH OF THE BUTTON. It was SO AWESOME.  But at the end of the day, a NASCAR turning into a rescue tank (whatever that is) still kicks the dogshit out of the Switchblade.    Funny enough, they made a pit stop catapult to go with this…. yup… billboard AND pit stops.

 

Rhino

Okay so if there was a M.A.S.K. version of GI Joes aircraft carrier, this was it…. this was SUCH a cool toy, probably one of my all time favorite toys of my entire childhood… this big rig truck turned into a battle base.  But it was AMAZING… first the whole front of the truck was a spring loaded battering ram.  If that wasn’t enough, the passenger seat was an ejector that would shoot your action figure across the room, it even opened the door when you did it.  The sleeper had a mobile base WITH a rocket launcher, and the back wheels became an ATV.  AND THIS WAS A FIRST SERIES TOY…. like they pulled off their magnum opus right out the gate.  Can you believe we share a planet with at least one knucklehead that thinks a stupid fucking plane/copter is a better vehicle than this.  Sometimes I think we really do need some sort of Armageddon. 

Skybolt

I gotta be honest, I don’t even remember this one.  I had to research it.  So again, M.A.S.K. went to that community organization that gathers up retards to sort glass at the recycling center, and told them to come up with the dumbest vehicle they could think of…. are you ready for this one? It’s a jet fighter… that turns into a…. drum roll please…. jet plane.  OOOOH I can hear you now, they just out stupided the Switchblade…. BUT WAIT you didn’t let me finish…. a jet plane AND a booster car…. WOMP WOMP WOOOOMP still couldn’t out stupid the Switchblade.  There isn’t enough retards to do that, you know better.  The Skybolt goes to show, it’s better to be forgotten because you’re a retarded piece of shit, than be like the Switchblade, and be remembered for making a retarded piece of shit look good.

 

Slingshot

Okay I had forgotten about this one until I saw the picture of it…. an unassuming RV just minding it’s business, looking like a rolling meth lab when BAM it opens up to a surveillance unit with a plane!   I think it kind of missed the marketing target, I don’t really remember anyone being like “I want a toy RV”… but as a parent, I’d be much less worried about having a kid wanting a toy RV than I would be about having a kid that thought the Switchblade was cool…. I’d start to worry that I had fucked a sister I didn’t know I had or something.

 

Stiletto

This one was a Lamborghini you know fits right in. So you’re rollin’ in yo Lambo, flexin’ with the Rolex, and you see a plane flying by that turns into a helicopter and ever since you got butt molested by a guy with down syndrome you have this urge to kill everything that has chromosome issues, so you hit a button, and your Lambo becomes a plane and a helicopter…. which leads me to my theory… the Stiletto was used to lure Miles in, he is like “Oh here’s another idiot with a double flying machine…. wait… what? It’s a CAR TOO!??!?!  NOOOOOOOO” then he gets killed.  I’d say he got his brains blown out but we know that’s not an issue.

 

Stinger

Okay this was another great toy one.  Indestructible as fuck too.  You had a bad ass GTO… you see, that alone would have been a great toy, but then you push a button and it becomes a tank…. treads pop out, a cage goes over the windshield, the wheels became guns, the blower became radar, and a chain with a claw came out of the trunk.  This thing was legit.  And let’s not forget, it’s way better than the Switchblade.  If the switchblade was a dog turd filled with worms and covered in asparagus pee… then Stinger is a dump truck full of cash, gold and diamonds.

 

Switchblade

Jesus fucking Christ where do I even begin with this catastrophic shit heap?  I mean first off this is just a stupid fucking idea.  Someone was out there going “Hey I got an idea, let’s make a toy plane that transforms” and another person was like “Oh? Into what?” and the guy said “A Helicopter” and with this the first case of Even Downer Syndrome was discovered.   I mean just look at it, so you HAVE to land it as a helicopter because it’s a plane without landing gears… so what happens if you’re in a plane and it malfunctions and you can’t land?  Well I’ll tell you what happens, the world gets better when the subhuman assholeface that would fly something this stupid dies in a fiery crash.  So then when they greenlighted this fucking idiocy, they were like “Well who should we have fly it” and they decided to make THE Miles Mayhem fly it… why? Because the ONLY REASON anyone would buy such a stupid fucking toy is to get the main bad guy as an action figure for battles.  I mean sure, you could say “Where’s your leader?” and make the bad guy go “Probably playing with a shiny object somewhere, we don’t deal with that fucking toolbag”.  And then you wouldn’t have to beg your parents to buy the most god awful idea for a toy, only to hide it when your friends came over so they wouldn’t call you a bitch and beat you up for being such a stupid moron idiot loser dirtbag….. who am I kidding, if you bought this because you liked it, the only friend you had was that kid with really thick glasses that talked to rocks during recess.  I MEAN WHAT KIND OF IDIOT would think this is fun *makes airplane noises while swooping it around*  TRANSFORM *makes same noises while swooping it around*.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF YOU EVER NEED AN ARGUMENT FOR RETROACTIVE ABORTIONS this would be IT.   I mean they really think that the leader of a terrorist group with words like Vicious and Evil in its name is going to be flying some fruity pants idiot mobile with a pink cockpit?  I would rather have a doctor tell me that I had a week to live, than have my kid say “The Switchblade is the best M.A.S.K. vehicle”… it would be the ultimate moment of knowing that you were an abject failure as a parent, and that you probably contributed to the painful and horrifying demise of society by not wearing a rubber THAT ONE TIME.   One a scale of 1-10, where 10 is perfection, and 1 is a penis wart covered in fire ants and infected to the point of your genitals having to be amputated I would give this a solid -32. 

 

Thunder Hawk

This was the leader of M.A.S.K.’s original car.  See how this works?  You get a sweet Camaro that becomes a plane.  THAT, is what we’re talking about.  This was a pretty cool toy because the car actually had seat belts, so when you launched it off the top of the staircase, the guys inside stayed there.  Even after the doors flew off.   This was why M.A.S.K. was better than Venom… it was M.A.S.K.’s absence of extreme asininity. As the leader of M.A.S.K., Matt Trakker had to be SO at ease knowing that his arch rival was an absolute dipshit in a completely useless vehicle.

 

Vampire

The evil brother of Condor…. it’s pretty neat, but it’s JUST NOT as practical…. this is a big ol Bagger bike that becomes a jet airplane…. you gotta admit though, a jet plane motorcycle would be fun as hell wouldn’t it?    There’s not a whole lot to say about this one, other than it’s infinitely better than not just Switchblade, but any motorcycle that fans of Switchblade has ever owned, unless they ever buy a KLR 650, they’re immune from scumbaggery.

 

Vandal

Okay this was another one I didn’t remember…. and I’m still not sure what to make of it.  But it was a front end loader, that transformed into a “dirt tractor” and a recon plane.  It’s a Venom vehicle, so I’m not sure if they were going to infiltrate farmland or something, but remember, this IS from the people who brought you the Switchblade, so it’s CLEAR they’re not very smart or good at coming up with ideas.  But I guess there’s a market of kids in Nebraska that would love to have some battle farm equipment.  I mean it’s not the DUMBEST toy I’ve ever heard of…

 

Volcano

Okay this one was super cool in the cartoon, but it translated kinda bad in the toy world… it had it and while it in itself was cool, they had made it battery operated, so instead of being a free rolling death machine, it slowly rumbled around, and would split open and a gun turret would pop out and spin as it drove… the big issue was the base of it was so big that it couldn’t climb like a 4×4 or anything, it couldn’t even go over rough surface without dragging.  BUT it was pretty rad in the show.  And even a 4×4 that can’t drive down a dirt road makes a hell of a lot more sense than a plane that can become a helicopter.  AND it should be known that in general society thinks people with jacked up 4×4’s have bigger penises than people who like Switchblade, UNLESS you count the one in the Switchblade fan’s butthole. 

 

Wildcat

Here we go back to making sense… got yourself a tow truck to maintain the fleet, but if some bumbling shitdick comes along in Switchblade you can turn into a vertical fighting machine and kill them and do the whole wide word a giant favor.  Then you can tow the remains of the flying butthole into a ditch and burn it.  I remember the toy pretty well because it shot discs out of the front bumper… just once, because you always lost them.  

 

Wolfbeast

I got to admit, I don’t remember this one, and I’m typing this before I look at it… I bet it’s gonna be fucking stupid with that name.,.. Manbearpig would have been much cooler… I’m betting the driver has long grey hair, a t-shirt with a wolf dream catcher, and a bandana.  Now let me go look.  GODDAMN IT… It’s MILES FUCKING MAYHEM…. AND HE RUINED A SPLIT WINDOW STINGRAY….  So this genius vehicle is a Corevette that becomes a “Gunner’s Shuttle” and a “Tank”  I don’t even know what the fuck a gunner’s shuttle is, and I’m not sure a convertible tank is very good… but again this is Miles Mayhem, and one thing I can say, this still makes more sense than that stupid fucking Switchblade.  

 

So there you have it, a look at the original 4 series of M.A.S.K. toys, and I think anyone who has any sense, any rationality, and isn’t a completely insane looney that should be locked away in a nut house somewhere will see that there is no more worthless, bigger piece of shit on this planet, than Switchblade.

One thing that did bother me though… Miles Mayhem was listed as being 44 years old when I looked up Wolfbeast…. this guy on the right is 44?  See what being the stupidest idiot moron fartface buttchugger douchebag loser fuckwad jismface does to your youth?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, I will fully admit that I believe that there’s aliens out there somewhere in our infinite universe.  I don’t necessarily think that every hilljack that claims they got sucked into a space ship and anally probed is doing anything other than coming up for an excuse about why he had to go to the doctor for a prolapsed rectum and anal injuries.  However that being said…. this is what they brought up, that sparked my interest, was the sudden change in aircraft design seems more like reverse engineering an alien space ship rather than a natural technological evolution of design.

So this is what I looked up…

in 1935, this was the fastest aircraft in the world.  The Hughes H-1 Racer, which went an impressive 354.4 MPH.

Hughes H-1 Racer
Hughes H-1 Racer at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. Photo by Eric Long.

Pretty nifty… so let’s jump ahead to 1946, the year before the big Roswell supposed alien ship recovery, the Gloster Meteor was the fastest airplane we had, doing 606 MPH, in 11 years, we got to see air speeds ALMOST double, but we also had the switch from a single prop engine to twin jet engines between the two planes.  But the physical design isn’t very much changed.


 

So let’s go another 15 years, to 1961, 15 years of airplane evolution has lead us to the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, hitting an obscene 1,600+ MPH.  WIth  a not very changed design shape as the plane above…

Holloman AFB F-4 Phantom II

Then just 3 years later, in December of 1964, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird took it’s first flight…  now looking back at the evolution of these planes over the past 26 years above…. this seems like the next logical step in 3 years of aircraft evolution, right?  It was another 500 miles per hour faster, and eventually in 1975, it would have an official speed of 2,193+MPH.   And it looked like this!

As my coworker said, “Does that look like a natural progression of design, or does it look like reverse engineering of something from another world?  Especially in the early 1960s.

 

I’m not saying I believe in anything one way or another, but it IS pretty interesting… it’s also kind of interesting that the airspeed record has stood with this aircraft since 1975.  Even the Concorde, which was introduced in 1976, 12 years after the blackbird, looked more like the natural evolution of aircraft, and only did 1,354 MPH.   Like there was a sudden disinterest in breaking the air speed record.  Even the land speed record, which I would think would be harder to keep improving on was set in 1997, 

Just something to think about.

Once upon a time, I had small kids who would climb into bed with me in the middle of the night when they had bad dreams.  One night my one daughter climbed into bed, and apparently had a dream that she was a ninja putting out a cigarette, and she crotch kicked me then mushed my giblets while asleep.  I tell you this to explain that about a week later, I went to take a piss, and it felt like I had weasels trying to climb upstream against the flow of lava that was pouring out of my penis.  It was, to date, the most painful thing I’ve ever felt.  

SO needless to say, I went to the doctors, and they gave me a prescription of some sort of antibiotic, and YAHOO I felt better…. then about 2 or 3 days after the antibiotics were gone, I went to take a pee, and my butthole puckered as it felt like I was pissing sand spurs and napalm.  I started thinking maybe it was a kidney stone or something… Now I know I am a man, but I have two kids, and this was far more painful than when they were born.

So back to the doctor I go, he explains how different issues respond differently to different drugs, so he gives me a new prescription, and WOO HOO I feel great, I no longer cry every time I have to pee.   Then a few days after I’m done, I’m at Gulf World in Panama City Beach, Florida and go to take a leak and YEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW  it’s the worst pain yet.  I look down, move my massive schlong out of the way, and see that it looks like I peed Tabasco Sauce.   Oh man, this ain’t good.   So back to my doctor I go, and they refer me to the urologist.

No I’m not going to publish his name, but it was pronounced Bi-Swinger… Which I thought MAYBE with a name like that you have a good sense of humor.  But I would soon find out that we didn’t have the same sense of humor.  So he sits me down, and I’m telling him of my symptoms and he says “Let me check to see if it’s in your prostate”.  Suddenly, most of my innards are in my throat.   So here’s where I make things super awkward.

“Okay, turn around, I’m going to try to milk your prostate” (hands me a microscope slide “When you feel something come out, touch this to the end of your penis”

“Milk my prostate?  That’s a real thing?  I thought that was just something in the movies” (I forgot the name of the movie Road Trip)… “Dang it what was that movie called, you know… ‘one finger or two?”

“Umm I don’t think you and I watch the same kind of movies” *Sticks his finger in my butthole*

So now not only do I have a doctor trying to find his car keys in my butthole, but he’s thinking I watch porn of men fingerbanging each other, AND I COULDN’T EXPLAIN THAT IT WAS FROM A MAINSTREAM COMEDY… FUUUUUUUUUUUCK.   As he’s digging around my prostate he says “Does any of this hurt?” and I said “Well it’s certainly not comfortable”… again, my humor missed the target while getting a finger banging.    I gotta tell ya, I never wanted to have a man make me cum as bad as I did then, get this shit over with…. finally I get this slide dabbed and he takes it away and says “There’s tissues to clean yourself up, I’ll be right back”

Now me being so fucking dumb, I was like “I didn’t even make a mess, he wasn’t THAT good”… so I take a tissue, crumple it up, toss it in the trash so he wouldn’t think I was weird.  He comes back in, tells me I have prostatitis, and said “I’m basically going to give you the nuclear bomb of all antibiotics”, wrote me a prescription and sent me out to pay.

I’m standing at the counter, and the lady working there was so nice, and a New Jersey native, so we got talking about home.  Then suddenly I thought “OH, THAT was what the tissue was for”…. you know why?  Because suddenly I felt some KY Jelly trickle out of my ass.  So I try not to make any weird faces as we talk, when suddenly…. I don’t know if it was something I ate… or if it’s because I just had my pooper plunged… but I had this urgent need to shit.  AND THIS SWEET :LADY WOULD NOT SHUT HER FUCKING MOUTH ABOUT NEW JERSEY PIZZA.   So I’m clenching my ass as I’m prairie dogging a gallon of latex paint mixed with dry dog food kibble, when finally she says “Oh here’s your total”.. I pay and say as calmly as I can “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHERE IS THE CLOSEST SHITTER?” or something like that.   She pointed it out and I booked it, and barely made it before I blew mud  like nobody’s business… but I’m sure it was the whole waiting room’s business, there’s now way they didn’t hear my asshole and my mouth screaming at the same time.

But the good news is,   That prescription fixed the whole problem. 

 

I started working with my dad doing brick mason work, when I was maybe 12 or 13, we did some jobs up in north Jersey together, and then did a couple of summers working with him once I lived in Florida.  But my first real job was working at the now defunct, and disappeared, Miracle Strip Amusement Park in Panama City Beach, Florida.   I THINK it was 1993, it could have been 1992.  The only real marker I have for when it was is I worked there the last year that the ride the Bayern Kurve, and the year before they did a big remodel.   It was my first real interaction with the public, which made me quickly learn that when I have jobs dealing with the general public, I typically LOVE the times before and after work, but hated the actual work part, where I had to deal with…. ugh…. people.   AND In the amusement park jobs, when you have to deal with… double ugh…. kids. 

I only worked one summer there, and I don’t know if it was official policy, but new workers got to do a lot of the the kiddy rides.   So my days were pretty painful putting up with little shithea…. I mean kids… running wild at an amusement park.  So the ride I probably dealt with the most was …

 

Junior Hot Rods –  Even thought the name would make you think it was super cool… it was one of those little 4 seat cars with 4 steering wheels that went around on a track. While parents stood by me yelling “OH LOOK JUNIOR, YOU’RE REALLY DRIVING” to their little idio… I mean kids.   I found this picture on Google from 1987 of a kid on the ride… which is a great picture because just like half the kids I dealt with, they were short enough to ride, but were clearly too big for the ride.  LUCKILY in the 5 or 6 years since this picture was taken, the seat belt systems WERE upgraded to nylon straps with little buckle ends.

So if I have any really good stories about this ride, it’s a perfect reason why you shouldn’t trust your kids in the hands of amusement park ride operators…  Most nights when we got out of work, we would go down to the arcade.  Usually either the great Funland, or there was one called Fun City as well.  I think there was another one… but we usually went to either of those places and played video games until they closed down.  Well one night I must have gone on a Coke bender at the arcade… I mean Coca Cola, not cocaine.   And when I got home, I couldn’t sleep, so I came back into work, and was put on Junior Hot Rods having been awake for probably 28-30 hours.   And I remember sitting on my stool, sending kids off to drive in a car at super high speeds… and hearing someone say “Having a long day?”  and I said “Yeah does it show?” and I turn and look and it was my friend’s dad… who had died the previous year.  That was probably my first legit hallucination… because after a few blinks and a head shake, there wasn’t anyone there.  So that was who was in charge of your kids safety back in the day.   The only upside to this ride, that GENERALLY, this was the kiddy ride that I had that kids were most well behaved on… Maybe it’s because they had steering wheels to keep them too preoccupied to be little jerkfaces.

 

Mini Enterprise – I am fairly certain that was the name of them, kids could ride on these little helicopters or I think they were dragons, and they’d go in circles, and up and down.   For some reason kids LOVED to be little shitheads on this ride, and I guess it was probably because when you’re a kid and you see these helicopters and dragons and shit, you’re probably like “AWWW HELL YEAH, THAT RIDE LOOKS BALLIN’ AS FUUUUUUCK” and you beg your parents to spend the tickets for the ride, and the reality of it is, you just sit there as the ride goes in circles like 5 feet high.  If I had a ride that kids would try to hang out of, or piss themselves on, or go all actin’ a fool on, it was this thing.  If I went in and “M/E” was next to my name on the Rides board… I always thought about quitting my job and becoming a bum for the rest of my life.   The only one that was as bad as this was the Train.  I remember one time there was this little peckerhead on the ride, and he had unbuckled himself and was standing in his helicopter, I kept telling him to sit down, then he tried opening the little door, and as the ride was coming to a stop he jumped out and was sprinting around the ride  “NO RUNNING!” I yelled as he was coming up to me, and at the time I wore this big G-Shock watch, and he came sprinting past me, and WHACK, ran forehead first into my wristwatch.  and he went flying like a pro wrestler that just got clotheslined and started crying.  His parents gasped and yelped out “OH MY GOD!!!”

Now in my defense, I didn’t punch the kid, nor did I intentionally line my wrist up with his forehead, or anything like that… but I certainly didn’t avoid the kid.  But I thought for sure the kids parents were going to beat the piss out of me, but then when their kid got up and headed towards them I heard his mom go “You are SO clumsy!!!” So I guess they thought he just slipped and fell, instead of dead on sprinting into someone that was yelling at them to not to run.   Other than that though, most of the time it was just sopping up puddles of piss in the little copters.

The Train – Now let me tell you, if you’re ever at an amusement park, and they have one of these trains, go up to the person driving it and offer them a hug, a bunch of cash, or sexual favors, or SOMETHING, because that person is more than likely experiencing the worst day of their lives.  This is the Train where I worked…

 

Now let me explain just a bit of the misery behind the Train… first off, it is a kiddy ride that adults can ride…. which also means little shithead teenagers can ride.   It’s also slow moving, so nobody’s restrained in it… which means little shithead teenagers think it’s fun to hang off of, or jump off and run away, or jump off and walk beside.  It’s so retarded.  I swear.   Then you spend the whole night behind the exhaust… that smoke stack is really the exhaust pipe… it’s blowing right there at face-level.  Then you’re also sitting on this metal framed, no suspension having diesel powered ride, that vibrates more than your mom’s sock drawer.  ALSO If you’re doing long shifts on this thing, you have to refuel it halfway through the night, and again at the end of the night…. and we had this terrible hand pump diesel pump that always lost it’s prime and you would have to pump and pump for so long that JUST when you’re about to give up because you’re sure the main tank is empty, it starts spitting diesel all over the place.  Then not to mention at night you store it in this tunnel, that’s just about the same length as the train, and is built on a curve where you can’t see the back of the train, so you back in and think you have it right, so you walk back and nope,  can’t close the back doors of the tunnel, so you walk back up, pull forward.  And you get the back doors closed but now the damned cow catcher is sticking out the front of the tunnel.  Now when you move this stupid thing, there’s no graceful way of doing it, so you go back and open the back doors so you don’t lurch the back of the train through the doors, and you keep repeating this until the train fits between the two sets of doors.

Now that is ONLY the things that you deal with every single day of running the train.  IF you’re working a train such as this one, that goes up and down hills on the way around the park, you also have to deal with “sanding” the tracks.  If it’s drizzling, or even just foggy, or even just humid enough to make surfaces moist… that train is going to get stuck going up the hills.   This will also happen if the grass is too long and hangs over the tracks. So if you KNEW it was foggy, or drizzly and that chances were you would get stuck, you would have to go out every other trip, or maybe you could get two trips in, and take a bag full of sand, and line the rails going up the hills, even if it’s ever so slight hill.  This would involve first telling everyone at the train station that they were going to have to wait before they could go on because you had to sand the tracks, which got you ALL kinds of shit ass attitude from people.  And it’s like “It’s just a stupid little train ride, this is literally the lamest ride an adult can go on, and you’re crying about it”… then you go out with your bag of sand and hit all the hills and go back and get the people who are all now super pissed at you for doing your job,

The worst was one time I was out with a full train, and halfway through it started to rain, and I KNEW I was fucked with the big hill that was coming, so as soon as I cleared the turn I just put the hammer down and tried to get enough speed to slide up the hill, and ALMOST got it…. but started sliding back down the hill… so I had to stop the train and let everyone know we had to walk back to the station.  JESUS CHRIST, you’d think I just told this train load of buttholes that they were going to have to push the train back to the station.  Almost every time I operated the train I would fantasize about the fumes killing me in the tunnel, and just have a ghost train blast through the station.  MAN FUCK THAT TRAIN!

Now adult rides for the most part were pretty fun.  

The Bayern Kurve was probably my favorite ride to work on, it was fun enough that people were happy to ride it, it was simple one directional thing, so there was no confusion, and there was the two-fer aspect of it didn’t LOOK real exciting, and it was a quick ride, so you never had the stress of long lines.   That and nobody got sick on it.   But it was basically a bobsled inspired ride.  It was one of my favorites to ride on a day off too.  Because I liked it so much, I almost NEVER got into work to see “B/K” by my name.  LAAAAAAAME.

The Musik Express was sort of the Bayern Kurve’s annoying brother.  It was the same idea, basically, but it would go backwards as well.  The thing that really sucked about it, was the cars went ALL the way around, so you would have to hike the full circle checking that people were secure, and to unlock the cars when it was done.  Which doesn’t sound bad, but the walkway was wood with little raised wood strips for walking on, and by the end of the night, those little wooden strips would have the bottom of your feet bruised.  AND it was hugely popular, so there was always a giant line, and people would get mad at the wait.  There are however three stories that stick out with this monstrosity.

  1. The Racist Accusation – When you would let people in the line, you’d count up to the number of cars, so let’s say there were 20 cars, you’d count as 20 people ran past you, then as they settled in up to 3 per car, you’d let in a second dose of people based on the empty number of cars, and keep doing this until the cars were full.  So one time I’m letting people in and there was a little black boy that was the cut off point.  We get the ride going, and there’s loud music blasting, and as I’m in the control booth, I see my supervisor Jim getting leaned into by an older black lady and he’s all wide eyed and talking to her.   Then as we let the people off, he comes up and says that the lady said you wouldn’t let her kid on because you’re racist.  I explained that the ride was full and he would have had to ride on the center tarp if I had let him on.  But there you go folks, people yelled racism about stupid shit back in 1993 too.
  2. One time the ride caught on fire…. and people were PISSED that we closed the ride for repairs.  BECAUSE OF A FIRE.  And it wasn’t even closed that long, they replaced the electric motor that had caught on fire.  Man people are such fuckfaces sometimes.
  3. If I was dishonest, I could have made a SHIT ton of money on this ride from all the wallets and money that fell out during the ride… I mean loose change and stuff you’d keep, just because nobody would know about 40 cents that fell out of their pocket.  But I remember finding a wallet, and I quick opened it to see if I could see the person on the ID, and I didn’t.  But they had $700 cash in the wallet (over $1,400 figuring for inflation) in it.  So I went down to the lost and found and when I turned it in, the guy who owned it just happened to walk up… the girl gave him the wallet and said “He just turned it in!” and the guy just looked at me, and left… not even a thanks or anything.  I wasn’t expecting money, but I don’t know how someone can have their wallet full of cash returned and not even smile, or act grateful.

 

Dante’s Inferno – This is probably the most iconic ride of the park, a lot of people would say the Starliner roller coaster, but that just looked like any coaster.  This was a giant Devil’s head that you had to walk into the mouth of. 

Once inside it was a Chance Trabant ride.  Which if you’ve never seen one, it’s sort of like that Musik Express, but it tilts on its side.  The feeling when you’re on it, even though you’re spinning, is more of a rising and falling feeling.  This is what the ride looked like in the light of day…

Dante’s Inferno was inside, air conditioned, and had a really intense laser and strobe light show, and a great stereo system.  While the air conditioning made the ride a blast to work on, it did have some downsides.   For instance, the amount of puke you had to clean really prepared me for parenthood.  You would EASILY have to shut the ride down 4 times per day to clean up the puke.  Now a few notable things I recall from this ride are…

  1.  One time we were unloading people and this one dude, I would say college aged, stood up when I unlocked the bar that holds you in the ride, and then he just fell face first off the ride.  “Great we killed another one” I said to the next person as I unlocked their thing and let them out.  WELL, turns out he WAS dead… well kinda… he had a heart attack.  Couldn’t have been more than 25 years old, and very athletic looking.  Had to shut the ride down until we could get someone to undead him.   Man people were PISSSSSSSED off that they couldn’t go on the ride while people worked on some dead guy.
  2. So the area that had the control panel was a little room, and there was a plexiglass window looking out at the ride, then to the right of that was just an open doorway.  There were three operators, one doing the music and lights, one doing the ride, and one who didn’t really have a official job, but when I was that person I would stand in the doorway and listen to the ride, and listen for people in distress.  So this one night I was standing in the doorway, and hear someone yelling “STOP THE RIDE, STOP THE RIDE, I’M GOING TO GET SICK” so I go inside and I say to the other two “Someone’s yelling that they’re si….” and before I could finish, it looked like someone took a 5 gallon bucket of chili and slung it across the plexiglass window.    I looked over and it was all over the floor where I was standing, I would have been soaked in barf had I not moved.   So we stop the ride and I go out to start unloading and someone’s RUNNING to the entrance door with a hand over her mouth… I point her to the actual exit, and grab the “Ride Is Closed for Maintenance” sign and went to open the door, and the door knob was COATED in puke… I’m pretty sure she at chili, it sure looked like it, and it felt like chunks of peppers on the door knob.  And it took SO LONG to clean up all of the spew, that management came in to check on why the ride wasn’t going… it was EVERYWHERE…. on the center section, on the roof of the operator room, the cars, the floor, the speakers, the shelves where lights and speakers were… the walls, the floors… IT WAS MIND BOGGLING. 

 

The Log Flume was probably my favorite ride, and it was actually my savior probably.  One thing that made it nice was there were a LOT of work stations, loader, unloader, starter/kicker, hill worker, and ticket booth So you would go most nights and never really repeat a job.  The ticket booth was a breeze, you just sat there and checked arm bands, the best part was working on the big hill… for an hour at a time you would sit on top of the big hill and make sure things were running smooth… for most of the time, you could sit there and look out over the Gulf of Mexico, or watch all the traffic of people cruising the strip.   But it was just you, a phone, a view, and every 30-45 seconds, a log full of people getting ready for the big drop going past.   They were fun to mess with sometimes I’d go down a little and say like “You ready for the big drop?” then they all scream then say “Well this isn’t it, this is just a small one that leads to the big one…. then you hear “YOU LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEED” fade into the distance when they drop.  Or you could hide and jump out and scare them when they got to the top.  Best job in the whole park in my opinion.  

The reason I call the ride my savior was nobody really liked working it, and we were maybe a week or two out from the end of the season, and I was pretty well burned out on Kiddy Rides.  The one big shady policy they had was that you were paid $4.50 per hour (Minimum wage was $4.25) BUT they kept 50 cents per hour for a year end bonus check.  BUT if you quit or got fired, you didn’t get that check… I have NO IDEA how that was legal.   Well I was so burned out I went to the rides management and said “Look, nobody likes the log flume, and I don’t like kiddy rides, can you just put me on the log flume the rest of the season and other people can be spared the flume?  And they agreed!!! That last week or so was so nice coming in and seeing “L/F” next to my name.  Now that ride wasn’t all rainbows and lollipops.  

One time I was on the big hill and I was watching a storm roll in over the Gulf of Mexico, it was actually really neat to watch the lightning striking the gulf.  But it kept getting closer, and I’m on the tallest thing in probably a quarter mile.  I call down and say “Hey, storms getting close… are we shutting down?” and they said “Don’t worry, we’ll let you know when we close it down”.  So I’m watching the storm get closer, and the rain starts coming down so I put on my rain jacket, and I’m looking at the phone, and nothing…. I pick it up to make sure it’s not dead.  Nope, there’s a dial tone.  So as I’m standing there I suddenly feel the hairs on my arm standing on end… I think “Oh shit, I’m about to get hit” and I squat down as low as I can and look up at the sky just as lightning streaks all over above me, looked like the veins of an old lady’s legs.   I quickly flipped open the hook and eye lock on the phone’s box and stabbed my finger, just as the phone rang with my panicked manager saying “GET DOWN HERE!!!”…. by the time I got down in the pouring rain, my bleeding finger diluted with the rain water looked like I had been up there slicing open jugulars or something.

One time I had come back from a lunch break to the log flume, and saw Mitch, the main Ride Supervisor and our on staff medic sprinting up the log flume exit with a medical kit in hand.   The big drop hills had sensors at the top the boats would trigger, and ones at the bottom they would trigger, so that if the bottom wasn’t triggered, the hill would shut down, preventing the boats from crashing.  Well a boat got jammed JUST PAST the bottom sensors and another boat crashed into it an knocked out a kids teeth and broke his arm.  That was the only really major thing I remember having seen happen at the park while I was there.

There were some other random stories like walking up the exit ramp to the roller coaster and seeing about a 1 inch piece of hot dog roll down the ramp and past my feet…. then another.  “What the hell?” I thought… got to the top and someone puked up their hot dog chunks and a couple got away.    Then one time we got invited out to a party on the beach, we show up at the hotel room and walked in just as a guy chugged 4 bottles of wine back to back… we were 16, and I looked at my friends and was like “I bet someone’s going to die here tonight, we need to get out of here.”   And everyone, for once, agreed with my prudish ways.

It was a fun job, but not so fun that I would go back for another season… I wound up doing Summer School instead.  But I’m glad I worked there.  There’s a bit of a brotherhood with Miracle Strip workers all these years later.   But the biggest perk was some 20 years later when I became a dad, and one of my precious little daughters puked what felt like hot latex paint, and smelled like rotten formula, all over me… It didn’t even phase me, it was nothing like the room full of chili, or the Hotdog Derby Race.

 

One of my major downfalls in life is that I collect things.  Dust mostly… and bad decisions… but it seems like I can’t be content with only one of something… or just two of something.  I don’t get it.  So anyway, over the years, I have amassed a lot of watches, which I’m proud to say, I am in the process of getting rid of the majority of *hearty pat on the back*.   But as I was weeding things down to fit into a single watch case, I thought to myself… I’m going to set three of my automatic watches down to the second, and keep them on the winders, and see how close they are after a week.  So on April 30th, 2022, I did just that… but as I was doing that, I added a fourth watch to the mix, because it’s just an old dress watch I’ve had laying around for some 20 years, and now you can find them on Ebay for under $30… so I thought that could be the ultimate low end price point example.    Then a week went by, and I forgot, then two weeks went by, still forgot, so here it is, May 17th, as I am about to go on a road trip in a different time zone I thought about how I’ll have to reset the watch for the trip and I was like “Holy shit, I forgot I synched all those watches up”.  So I grabbed them, and checked them and I was really surprised.   So here it is, four watches, in four different price points, but for the most part, pretty much the same style.

So here they are, in order of how they just happened to get set down when I took this picture on the day I set them… because I’m really scientific about stuff like this.

Watch these watches
L to R: Orient Raven II, Seiko Baby Tuna, Tudor Black Bay Dark, and old Gruen I can’t find much info on

Watch Number One: Orient Raven II – $216 on Amazon (Paid $125 used on Ebay)

The Watch Geek info:

Reference Number: FAA0200389
Black PVD Coated Stainless Steel
Movement: In House Orient F6922 with 22 jewels, and 21,600 bph second hand.
Case is 41.5mm x 13mm, lug width is 22mm, and lug to lug is 47mm
Mineral Crystal

I really enjoy this watch, basically my watch collection goal is to have a higher end main watch, then a cheaper one of the same color/style to wear when I have a feeling I could end up breaking something, or something bad happening.  So this was my planned cheap wearer for when I didn’t want to wear my Tudor.   Which is why I started all of this, I was curious as to how accurate they were in comparison.

Now for those who aren’t too familiar with Orient, they’re from the same company as Seiko.  Their main market is online, I’m not even sure if I have ever seen Orient in any brick and mortar stores.  And being that they were from Seiko, is why I then decided to add my Seiko Baby Tuna into the picture too.  I have two orients, this one and a “President” which is a really nice Rolex Day Date homage.  Both of them get a lot of compliments, and just feel good on the wrist, maybe it’s because they’re on the cheaper side that they just feel light on the wrist to me.  Some days when I wake up and old age has made my wrists sore, I throw this on and it is just a nice lightweight feel.   

BUT, is it accurate?!  Well after almost 3 weeks, it was only about 20 seconds different than the Tudor Black Bay,   So in 3 weeks it  had gained about 40 seconds.   Which, to me is really good, if you can go a month with an automatic watch, especially one I only paid $125 for, and still have it only a minute off… that’s really respectable in my book.  

 

Watch Number Two: Seiko Baby Tuna – According to Jomashop, these retail at $575.  I paid $300 used on Ebay for mine, with non-factory strap.

The Watch Geek Info:
Reference Number: SRP641
Black Ion Plated Stainless Steel
Movement: Seiko 4R36 with 24 Jewels, and a 21,600 bph second hand.
Case is 46.5mm x 14mm, lug width 22mm,
Hardlex Crystal

Oh Seiko.  I have always loved Seiko.  Ever since I was a little kid it was a name held in high regard in the house.  My first dress watch was a gold Seiko, with a black face, and a presidential styled bracelet.  Got it at an Albertsons when I was 15 or 16 for a whopping $40.  And over 30 years later, my daughters still refer to it as my “Fancy watch”.   Then one day I was watching Jory Goodman’s Youtube channel “The Time Teller”, very entertaining channel, and he was showing off his SRP641 Baby Tuna and I just loved how it looked so much, it became an obsession to find one in that style.   It’s SO nice looking, wouldn’t you agree?

But that’s where I found the love affair ends.   And because of this, I have taken any mention of Jory out of my will, and will never send him a Christmas Card… well I think he’s Jewish, so that’s probably not too big of a deal for him.  However as much as I love the black watch, with the gold details, and the little 5 minute markings, the classic Seiko Day/Date window that I love so much….  MAN I can’t look at it and smile.  But when I got it, I ordered the stock band for it as well… I’m not much for putting aftermarket things on watches.  But when it arrived it was the most awful feeling band I ever had.  It literally felt like when McDonalds Happy Meals had those little fake plastic watches.  I will say, the seller warned me about how terrible the band was new.  So I kept the very comfy aftermarket one that came on it.   Now I’m a big guy, but I’m not someone who will put on a watch and say “well my wrist is x.xxxxx mm”, but let’s just say if William Refrigerator Perry was White, we could be brothers.  That being said, this watch wears like a concrete block.  It is HEAVY, and BIG, and with a rubber strap, it’s really top heavy, if your wrist is really in between the sizes that the holes allow for, it’s going to always be trying to fall off your wrist.  I quickly began to only wear it when I knew it would be appreciated (and get the standard “You must be a diver…. big watch and a little dick” joke), because it LOOKS great, and it’s big, and noticeable, and just doesn’t really look like any other watches.  But I had noticed that the bezel was hard to turn and it was losing A LOT of time, basically any time I took it off the winder, it had to be reset like I had just bought it.  So I took it down to the Seiko dealer in town.

“Eh, that’s about how much time is expected to get lost, but we can send it in for a service for you.”  So less than 2 years ago, this watch received a $250 service from Seiko (There went that sweet $300 deal), and turns out that the bezel is really just a pain to deal with because of the bezel guards that look cool, but… HOW ACCURATE IS IT NOW!?!?!   Well in the time that my $125 Orient gained 40 seconds, my $500 Seiko from the same company, lost 57 minutes… in less than 3 weeks.  BUT, “that’s about what’s expected”.  Oh Seiko,   How the mighty have fallen.  I have seen all the stories about how the faces don’t align properly, but never dealt with that… but this watch… breaks my heart.   Especially since the watch that will be my “Cheap Submariner” when the glorious day of Rolex Ownership falls upon me, is an AMAZING Seiko solar quartz chronograph I bought YEARS ago, and when I put it on a time checker… it was +/- 0.00 seconds.  As many years as I’ve had it, the only times I had to set anything was Daylight Savings Time and changing time zones (I live about 35 miles from the time zone, so it happens… sigh).   The worst of it is I love how it looks, it would be hard for me to get rid of it… and it keeps such bad time, I would have a hard time selling it and not feeling like the biggest schmuck used car dealer type in the world.  What a heartbreaker. 

 

Watch Number Three: Tudor Black Bay Dark – I think they were about $3,700 New, I bought mine used with warranty and all the packaging for $4,000, they’re officially out of production, you can find old new stock 2021 models for about $4,800

The Watch Dork Stuff:
Reference Number: 79230DK
Black PVD coated Stainless Steel
Movement: Tudor MT5602 COSC Certified with 25 Jewels and 28,800 bph second hand.
Case is 41mm x 14.5 mm, lug width 22mm, lug to lug 50mm
Domed Sapphire Crystal

 

I love this watch, and I only have it because of that stupid collector thing I mentioned… and because I get angsty about getting things.  I’ve been on the Rolex wait list for a Submariner for close to a year at my beloved dealer, and got on the Tudor list for the Pelagos and a Black Bay S&G, and was REALLY looking at the Black Bay Ceramic for my black watch fetish, BUT they were just a little too dark for my blind eyes… so I found this on Ebay, and was like “MUST…. HAVE”.   Now I understand most people will never understand the concept of just how different a high quality watch is.. but it reminded me of when I picked up my first Gibson Les Paul, it was like an epiphany of “so THIS is how guitars are supposed to feel”.  Now someone who hasn’t played guitar could hold it and shrug, and say “feels just like that $80 one at the pawn shop to me”.  But when it touched my hands, it was like He-Mans sword channeling lightning and giving him the power.   In fact just the other day I was at dinner with an old friend and showed her the watch, and her reaction was “well…. it’s heavy”.  That was it.  BUT when I first picked it up, it was like “WOW, there is quality here, where I never thought quality could make a difference”.  The bracelet is amazing, the clasp is almost industrial grade. the bezel is so smooth, easy to move, and the way it clicks into the 12 o’clock position is glorious.  I have a Citizen Promaster that I was always blown away by the bezel, I don’t know how, but Tudor blew it out of the water…. but then it also cost $3,700 more, so I guess it should.  AND LOOK AT IT!!!

 

Man I love stealth wealth!  It’s just a wonderful watch, it’s the first one I’ve had that didn’t have a date on it, and I thought I’d hate it, but it doesn’t bother me at all.  Well… okay it bothers me a little, not so much because I need the date or anything, but I just really like how dates look on a watch, I’m also one of those people who love the cyclops on watches like Submariners… in fact, I took myself off of the Deepsea waiting list just because it doesn’t have the Cyclops.   Picky, picky.  Other than that, I just absolutely love this watch, AND it’s ACCURATE… in the nearly three weeks of the test, it gained about 18 seconds.  just barely over a second per day… man, ya can’t beat that!!!    I could ramble on and on about how much I like this, because there’s nothing I can’t find.  It’s funny because I was on the wait list for the Black Bay 58, and when I got this I called my wonderful and patient AD and said “Man you got to take me off the 58 waitlist, if I get that I probably won’t want the Rolex Submariner anymore, and I’ve dreamt of owning one of those for so long, that I couldn’t bear not getting one”.   DAMN, I gotta stop typing this so I can make out with this watch a little before I get to the Gruen.

 

Watch Number Four:  Gruen dress watch of some sort – Paid $120 for it at Walmart around 2000, can be found on Ebay for under $30.

Watch Dweeb Stuff:
Reference Number GSM014
Stainless Steel with gold tone accents and blue face.
Movement: Eta 2824-2 with 25 Jewels and 28,800 bpm second hand
Case is a 34mm x 45mm rectangle with 18mm lug width
Sapphire Crystal

I bought this around the year 2000, I was working at Walmart and was good friends with the girl who worked at the Jewelry counter, and one day when I was sitting there chatting with her (I mean working super hard as always), I saw this watch, the face of it was just striking, the blue, the shape, the gold accents, just really nice…. it was on a brown leather strap that I didn’t care for, but I had her put a bracelet on it for me, and I put it on Layaway… it was my first ever automatic watch (I had a couple of Seiko Kinetics by then, but they were meh at best) and I didn’t really know anything about them… I just put it on, wore it when I wanted to be fancy pants, and really thought the sweeping second hand looked all cool and Rolexy (has the same bph as a Rolex and Tudor, so it’s smooooth).  As years went by it just sort of sat in my drawer and got forgotten, something happened to the bracelet so it was just a case.  So as I was going to do this whole thing, I started looking the watch up, hoping I had been sitting on a jackpot, but at the time, there were ones just like mine for $30, $40, I think one was $75 on Ebay.  But it has an Eta 2824 movement, which is in the $200 range.  So I thought… let me get a strap and put this on the winder and see what this puppy can do.

So I bought this REALLY NICE watch strap from Barton Watch Bands, and thought I’d pull it out of retirement.  It’s still a nice watch, and sure enough still ran just as smooth as can be.  BUT it’s over 20 years old, not really cared for, surely it won’t be anything to write home about… BUT I was wrong, it was just about as accurate as the Orient, they were only a couple of seconds off from each other… so if you want a nice little automatic watch, look up Gruens, they’re pretty good stuff, and you can find them at good prices, and not have the Invicta stigma with having an cheap automatic watch.  

 

I have to say, overall I was really impressed.  I KNEW Orients were good watches, but I wasn’t expecting it to be THAT good… especially considering the reputation Seiko has been getting for their non-Grand Seiko watches of late.  I’m definitely more of an Orient guy now (Still love Seiko, but if I’m buying new, I’ll probably go Orient).  And I knew going into this that the Baby Tuna wasn’t going to be the best showing, but man the level of disappointment in this thing, especially after a $250 Seiko service, I just can’t even express it, it would be like if you met the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, and not only was she dumb as a brick, but she was actively going out of her way to make her existence grind your nerves as much as possible.  And this Gruen…. just blew me away, I can’t believe that it was still so accurate after all these years.   And what can you say about Tudor that Nico hasn’t already said… these are just amazing watches,   So there you have it.  Thrilling huh?

 

As I stumble into my late 40s I can feel the body aches uncoolness setting in with every passing minute.  BUT… no matter how old and uncool I get to these young whippersnapper generations… I have, at least, lived through the time when music stores were abound, and our music was in a physical format.   Sure, I understand the importance of instant gratification and convenience of music downloads, however, I also understand the experiences that everyone is missing out on.  For us old folks, we’re not just missing out on the experience, we’re missing them.  Just as much as we miss our big wheels, our banana seat bikes, and having to go to an arcade to play video games (THAT only cost a quarter to play).   

Granted I spent my teens and most of my music buying years in a fairly small town.  Panama City, Florida, which back then was a town of about 35,000 in a county of about 120,000 people, and yet SOMEHOW, it was able to support MANY music stores.  Our mall alone had two… Camelot Music and Record Town.  Then there was Turtles not too far from the mall in a strip mall, that later became Blockbuster Music.  There was one on the beach, CD Now, I think, they were a good one because they would special order you anything you asked for… imports, indies, just about anything… and this was before everyone had the internet.  I would get my Pianosaurus tapes there, and they were the only one who could get me anything Paganini.  Then there was a place out on the beach for a bit called Concert Concepts, they were really loaded down with pretty much any rock/metal/punk you could want.  BUT they had odd hours, and didn’t seem to last that long. 

You see, what kids today will never understand was that music stores were what we had instead of chatrooms.  You could go into the record store and find your future buddies right there in whatever section music you like.  There wasn’t any judgement, or competition, or criticizing, if you were in the Heavy Metal section, all the other dudes in jean jackets, long hair, and ripped jeans would talk music and bands with you til your ears would bleed.  Not only that, but it was your music news headquarters.  You could find out if there were going to be any concerts in the area, when bands were releasing a new album, and a lot of them had trading boards, where you could advertise music stuff on it too.  Pfffft who needs the internet?  Wait, YOU DO… You need it so you can read this…. or just go down to the local music store, I’ll staple a copy to the wall.

Not only were record stores social hubs, but they were the art galleries of our day as well.  Back in the day, bands could lure you into buying an album that you had NO IDEA how it sounded, just by having an amazing album cover.   Or they’d lure you into their fold with super cool posters over in the poster rack, or the t-shirt designs to make you the coolest dude at the bus stop or arcade, or bad ass patches and buttons for your kick ass jean jacket.  But these days, all you need to do to get people attracted to your music is pay bots in China to leave good reviews on your soundcloud profile or something.   I mean just look at this….

 

This is one of those examples of where the album cover did the music justice, Iron Maiden was always a surefire bet on having some amazing artwork, but Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is just about perfect musically as it was visually.  But if you never heard of the band, you knew that there had to be something to this, and if not, you at least got something cool to look at.  Iron Maiden’s art was just MADE for black light posters too.  MAN!!!

See kids?  The stuff you miss out on because there’s no need to go down to the record store?  I’m so glad I grew up with this stuff.  But another good go to for some serious album cover art was King Diamond.  Although his album “The Eye” will always be one of my favorite albums, and in my top 3 of concept albums, behind only Pink Floyd’s The Wall and The Final Cut, his amazing falsetto voice sort of gives me ear fatigue if I listen too much, but he never gave me eye fatigue.

 

I mean come on, you’re thinking you want to buy some new music, but you don’t know who this King Diamond was… but don’t you get really curious about the story of Abigail?  You didn’t have google to just check out sound samples on, or Youtube some of his stuff, or read reviews on… this was the day of flying by the seat of your pants on your music purchases.

Megadeth was always a great source of art too, which reminds me too kiddos… because of this whole artistic pull that bands had, they’d have mascots… you can see Vic Rattlehead here working with an alien on this album.  Anthrax had Not Man, Overkill had Chalie, Iron Maiden had Eddie (as seen holding his own stomach in the album cover, and a hatchet in the poster), Motorhead had Snaggletooth (or Warpig), and Misfits had the Crimson Ghost.  They appeared on their album covers, posters, music videos, and many times, poorly drawn on brown paper bag book covers in school.

Then the absolute best part of this experience, was when you got home, and you got to your stereo, put the record on, the cassette in, or the CD in… and you kick backed, opened up the album art, read the lyrics along with the music, read the liner notes, the thank yous, the credits during the solos… finding the inside jokes that the bands hid in there… and you just became totally immersed in the moment… audibly, visually, mentally you became one with the band for 45 minutes.  

Or you say “Well this sucks” and you trade it to your friend for something else.

Now don’t get me wrong, I too, LOVE being able to download just one song that I like from a band, and checking out the whole album on Amazon before I take the plunge.  BUT…. BUT…. the bands I REALLY love… and there’s only a few these days… I will buy the digital copy and the physical copy, just so I can relive those days in the 80s and 90s, of going through the whole album, and reading, looking at pictures, and just escaping life for 45 minutes.   It truly is a wonderful experience, and it won’t even make you fail a drug test.

 

A long, long, time ago, in a town about 10 miles away…  I was dating this wonderful lady named Katy.  And she had this storage building she was renting, when one day she had this idea that she would empty her storage building, and arrange her mom’s garage as a sort of hangout room.  So she says to me, “Hey, let’s go check out my storage shed, and see what I have to bring back to the garage”.  

Now silly man-brained me thought that meant we were going to the storage unit, and take a basic inventory to plan a plan of attack.  Had I known, that her proposition was womanese for “Let’s load up my S-10, and fill up the garage today”, then I would have been better prepared for moving than shorts and flipflops.  But that’s another story for another day.

WRONG, I’ll tell it now, we moved a couch and she shoved it right over the top of my feet and bent toe nails and scraped skin… but it’s okay, I loved her enough to forgive it.

So anyhow, we started moving things and found out that rats had made a nest in her couch… this was discovered in what caused me to look like a spaz swinging a baseball bat in circles trying to fight off a charging rat… IT WAS CHARGING ME, it’s crazy that an animal will charge something the size of a sky scraper with a hunk of wood swinging in it’s direction.  So we dragged anything that could have rat nests in them to the dumpster.  And started loading things into her truck, including a really old daybed with a trundle bed.   So if you don’t know what a trundle bed is, as I did not at the time, it’s a bed that you can press down, and put under the day bed, and when you need more bed space, you pull it out, and it springs up and makes the day bed into a wider bed… like this…

You see? On some of these, you can pull that bottom bed out, and it will pop up and match the height of the other mattress it’s a really good idea if you’re one of those sick people that don’t just stuff all your crap under your bed to make it look like you’re not a hoarder or something.

So as we are loading the day bed she says to me… “You know, I don’t know why I’m saving that thing, it hasn’t worked in probably 25 years”.  Now if I was an actor in a Lifetime movie, I would have seen this as the foreshadowing that it really was… although I’m dumb enough that I would have assumed that it meant when we got to her house she would have said “Ya know, let’s take that back to the dumpster, and waste our time and effort in moving it”.  But things are never that simple when dealing with me.

I feel I must explain something about her garage, to let you fully understand what was going to happen that night.  One of her ex-boyfriends (Not all of the people she dated were as classy as I, or as good of drivers as I) backed into the garage and bent the door EVER SO SLIGHTLY…. to where it wouldn’t open properly.  HOWEVER, if you hit the door switch, then had three people, one on each end, and one in the middle, lift the door slowly and keep it on its tracks, you could get it to open.  Sometimes, we would just open it halfway, and stoop under it, just because it was that much of a pain in the ass.

So this night, was a night we didn’t really feel like dealing with the garage door, until we got to the bed, and a few other things.  The bed was standing upright leaning against the side of the bed of her truck, and once we had enough cleared for it, I said “Okay, I’ll get the daybed out”, and I leaned into the bed of the truck, grabbed onto the frame and pulled it towards the tailgate….

Then I woke up on the couch in her house, with her slapping my face saying “Don’t fall asleep, stay awake” and her roommate laughing and saying “YOU GOT KNOCKED THE FUCK OUT!!!”   What the hell?

So as it was explained to me, as Katy was getting me mentally prepared to go to the emergency room, was that when I pulled on the frame of the bed, for THE FIRST TIME IN 25 YEARS, the trundle bed pop up frame decided to work!  So with the magic of my touch, 25 years of rusted fury sprung forth and launched a steel bed leg into my head, right above my right eye.  But being the super macho, testosterone fueled, manly tank of a man that I am… they said I did a sort of half spin, looked around and said “Let’s get this garage door open”, then worked on opening the door, got the bed frame in the garage and said “Man these lights are killing me, I gotta lay down my head hurts” and that’s when I woke up in the previous paragraph.

Katy drives me to the ER, and bless her for having to sit through all this, instead of just being a normal person and dropping me off and saying “I’m going home to sleep, chump, call me if they let you out”.   But we sat in that waiting room for just over 8 hours.  FINALLY they called me back to triage, and took my vitals, and put me in an exam room.  WHERE I SAT FOR TWO MORE HOURS… by now, my headache was gone, and I felt pretty much normal, other than lights still being really bright to me.  When suddenly the door opens… IT’S A DOCTOR!!! I check my watch, I’m timing how long he’s in here.  He has me walk back and forth across the room, and then looks at me and says “You got your bell rung, wait here, and they’ll take you to discharge”.   FORTY TWO SECONDS.

So I promptly get sent to discharge… THREE HOURS LATER.  And they had me some paperwork and send me on my way.  Poor Katy waited 11 hours and 42 seconds to take me back to her place, where I broke out the paperwork, and it was totally incomplete, it literally was a form letter they were supposed to fill out information on, and didn’t.  So it read like “You have a concussion, you should stay awake for _________ hours before going to sleep, then rest for ________ days, and return to work on the _________ day”.   Worth every cent of that $500 bill, let me tell ya.   So the following day I went to the walk-in clinic by work to see if I needed to take time off, or what have you, and that doctor was feeling my head and says “You have a magnificent skull, a lot of people would have been killed by what happened to you… MAN you could headbutt the hell out of someone if you wanted”.   So he gave me a few days off work, and some pain killers, which were just double dosage Aleve.

So I go back to work, at the time I was working in the Garden Center of Walmart.  I get called to the toy department, to help get a bike from the second rack for a customer, and as I’m getting the bike down, the customer says “Hey, let me help” and he grabs the bike, and jams the freestyle foot peg RIGHT in the same spot that the daybed hit me… I got instantly dizzy, and the room went blindingly bright… I’ll be goddamned, he re-concussed me.  THIS is why I don’t help people, it don’t lead to anything good.    Well other than another week off from work!