Wednesday ORT: Spam, Hammers, Influencers, Recent Tunes

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show me ‘round your fruit cakes

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If you’re not a paid subscriber to Avoidable Contact Forever… you’re missing all sorts of stuff. Trust me on this. Want to see what happens behind the, er, green door, while also helping veterans? Here’s your chance. My son, aka “The Commander”, and his merry band of Civil Air Patrol cadets will spend December 14th laying wreaths at the graves of fallen soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Click here to sponsor a wreath for $17 and Squadron 157 will trudge through the snow to lay it down on your behalf. Then, apparently, they stand at attention to honor the veterans for two hours, or something like that. All I know is that last year the kid came home with light frostbite.

When you get the receipt, forward to me via Substack Chat or email (jbaruth@gmail.com) and I’ll give you one month of paid access to ACF for every wreath you sponsor. We’ve been talking about you in the Sunday chat. You definitely want to catch up on that. Thanks for reading.

I wanna talk about me, albeit briefly

Speaking of content limited to the paid subscribers: In the comments for this weeks Cat Tales, Ronnie Schreiber asked

How much of yourself do you see in that slightly disabled Tomcat?

About half of Ronnie’s comments make me want to beat him to death with his own best-of-breed electric harmonica, the Harmonicaster as seen at the NAMM Show, but the other half are quite thought-provoking. I haven’t figured out into which category this one falls.

Yeah, I’ve had a couple of frustrating health things happen this year, and of course I’m more or less in constant pain from hundred or so fractures and hematomas I’ve enjoyed since 1986, but the truth is that I feel pretty good physically and will likely continue to feel that way until I return to downhill mountain biking this spring. I’m definitely more likely to survive the next few seasons than the infamous Albino Kitty, pictured above.

Taking Ronnie’s question a little more seriously, however: I know that I am the villain in a lot of other peoples’ stories. I don’t see myself the way they do. I never set out to hurt anyone or ruin their marriage or drive them out of their business or get them to commit self-harm. Sometimes those things happened, the same way that the inadvertent actions of other people have often had a profoundly negative effect on my life. In my mind, maybe I am a lot like Albino Kitty. Just a beat-up old guy out here trying my best to do at least three different jobs and look after my kid and maybe see a dozen checkered flags a year, if I can manage it.

You could say that my primary virtue is persistence. I write between five and ten thousand words a week, without fail, plus I work a day job, plus I do extra contracts when they’re available. I read every comment here, answer 50-100 emails from readers and other correspondents, do my best to encourage talent where I see it and offer a friendly hand or word to people in my circles who are struggling.

I know this is not how others see me. Especially in autowriting, where my respect for the traditional values of the business puts me in conflict with the fakes, the grifters, the pretenders, and the thieves. Sometimes this leads to a Total Perspective Vortex situation where I really am more important to those people than I should be. Every once in a while I’ll hear about a press event where the cocktail hour or free-drinks evening is spent in fevered, passionate discussion about how to deal with Jack Baruth. What could they do to make sure I never had the chance to write about cars again? I’m told that all the ideas were stupid, which I’d expect from the Brandon Turkuses of the world.

Good news, you feckless, talentless, no-drivin’ PR-suckers! I’m out of the business! You got your wish! Alas, your triumph, will be short-lived, because you are also on your way out of the business, as seen below:

Look into the (remarkably attractive) face of pure influence, and despair

tabithaswatosh

A post shared by @tabithaswatosh

I came across this post today — if you follow me on IG you’ve already seen it, but if you haven’t I encourage you to watch the whole thing with serious attention. Tabitha Swatosh is an influencer who took a “plus-one” trip to London courtesy of Porsche. She went to Wimbledon and Goodwood. She enjoyed five-star accommodations. She was driven around in a Cayenne Turbo Hybrid, which had great range and never ran out of charge, likely because, you know, there’s a gas engine in there too. At Goodwood, she was taken to the Porsche booth so she could talk about the new 911 Carrera (GTS, I think).

I don’t see how Porsche could have made her experience happen for less than maybe 20 or 30 grand, once you add up her servants and chauffeurs and tickets and whatnot. That kind of money could put a couple of 911s on a rented racetrack for a proper comparison. I could run five new Porsches in a Best Motoring-style comparison around Mid-Ohio, with me playing “Gan-San” against four SCCA National Champions of my choice, for less money than Porsche spent to pamper Miss Swatosh for a week. You could have Randy Pobst and Jonny Lieberman clean your house every day for a month if you spent that kind of money on them. You could have Jason Cammisa shout the praises of your new cars to each and every eyeball Hagerty, A Lifestyle Automotive Brand, can possibly wrench off Matlock for a half hour.

Guess what? The money is better spent on Tabitha. Let me tell you about her. Better yet, let’s compare her to Motor Trend and my former employers.

Instagram: Tabitha 1.9M followers, Motor Trend 2.2M, Hagerty 558k.

YouTube: Tabitha 2.17M, Motor Trend 6.98M, Hagerty 3.28M.

Not making my case so far, right? But:

TikTok: Tabitha 14.6M, Motor Trend 174.6K, Hagerty 31.4K.

For Tabitha, Instagram and YouTube are yesterday’s news. She literally does nothing but repackage her TikTok content on those old platforms. This is what matters to her: She has one billion likes on TikTok. Billion with a B. She doesn’t waste three million dollars in annual budget to create nerd videos that 200,000 people skip through. She actively engages with a dedicated fan base that is a larger market than New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles… combined.

About 50 of you messaged me after I put Tabitha’s video up on IG, expressing sorrow at the weird monotone pacing, the epilepsy-inducing shot cuts, and the general air of “look at all the free shit I get” that pervades her channel. Hey, I agree with you. I’d rather read an old Car and Driver. In the real world, however, the one where young female college grads drive purchase decisions and earn more than their male counterparts and have considerably more sway in their generation than dinosaurs like me can possibly even comprehend? She is giving people exactly what they want.

Allow me to polish up my crystal ball for you: The auto industry has been running up the mother of all credit cards with their little jerkoff EV adventure. The bills are about to come due: in the form of massive amounts of completely unsellable inventory, ancient ICE platforms that will need billion-dollar updates, and government bribes, er, partnerships that will drain whatever money is left from their rainy-day funds. When that happens, all belts will tighten. Including PR and marketing.

The day is going to come when Porsche, and Chevrolet, and Honda, will have to ask themselves: Do we pay for the potbellied video dweebs to do YET ANOTHER WORLD’S DORKIEST DRAG RACE, or do we compensate Tabitha appropriately to put our product in front of 15 million of tomorrow’s most important people? You don’t really need a crystal ball, polished or not, to know the answer to that. Autowriters, if you are:

• old, meaning over 25

• fat, ugly, or both

• off-putting in your delivery and/or demeanor

• not massively popular on social media

• not in possession of a nine-figure trust fund that lets you pretend to be a hustler while bleeding Dad’s cash at a rate best described as “Uday Hussein in 1997”

it’s time to look for work elsewhere, before the decision is made for you.

Speaking of polishing

Ten days ago we talked about the strength of vintage American-made sledgehammers. As you know — or should know, if you subscribed for real, yo — I bought a 60-plus-year-old sledgehammer off eBay. Made by Hubbard in Pittsburgh, it’s in the less-common “Nevada” style of diamond sides instead of eight even-width faces around the hammer length.

Here’s what it looked like when I was more or less done with it. Rather than actually watch and learn from a YouTube video, I decided to try a bunch of different methods myself and see how well each one of them moved me towards, or away from, a mirror-style finish.

• First I took a Metabo grinder with a Harbor Freight grinding wheel and removed all the rust and corrosion. This left me with plenty of small divots and depressions on the surface. I could have welded those up, but Danger Girl is the welder in our house and she had no interest in doing that, so I ground the sides as clean as I could.

• I then used Rust-Oleum Farm and Implement paint, which has been used in my barn on everything from the front-facing receiver hitch on my Mahindra Roxor to the rear frame of my Radical SR8, to fill in the Hubbard logo and pre-ANSI warning language. On a lark, I also painted the angled sides of the hammer.

• I couldn’t find my orbital sander so I grabbed my Hercules 20v Polisher, put on an 80-grit sandpaper disc, and removed the majority of the marks left by the milling and grinding. At that point I kind of doubted my process, because the grinder had left “Geneva waves” all over the hammer faces, and it looked like a very serious bit of hardware. When the 80 grit was done, the hammer just looked scratched-up.

• So I tried 220-grit, and that brought it up to a nice shiny finish while removing most of my sanding marks.

• Danger Girl found my orbital sander, or I should say she found her orbital sander because mine is still lost. I did 220, 320, 400, and 800 grit in successive applications. But it was getting duller somehow, ending up with a matte finish after the 800 grit.

• Awfully frustrated at this point, I returned to the 20-volt polisher, and did 220-grit followed by 800 grit and, finally, 1000 grit. This didn’t take out all the scratches I’d added with the orbital sander, but it wasn’t bad.

• Finally, I used two 3-inch cloth buffer wheels on my drill with red and white rouge. This basically did nothing. In fact, I think it made it worse, so back out came the 1000 grit on the 20v polisher at 2400rpm. I got the best results by starting off with mild pressure and reducing it gradually until, after a minute or so, nothing more than the weight of the polisher was bearing on the surface.

• Because I’m stupid, I polished the black paint with the 320 grit orbital, which started to remove the paint, so I stopped — but because I’m lazy, I didn’t repaint it. What I ended up with was, uh, like a relic-style finish of black paint over polished steel, with texture.

• I bought a 36-inch “Premium With Wax” hickory handle, made in Indiana by Seymour Midwest. It took two days to arrive.

• This afternoon I installed the handle, driving the supplied hickory wedge in before sawing the excess off and driving in the steel wedge. I then sanded the hickory and steel flush to the hammer with 80 grit before using 220, 320, and 800 grit in the polisher to fix the scratches I’d just added.

I wrapped beneath the hammer head with T-Rex duct tape, singing idly to myself in imitation of Eric Bibb:

John Henry had a hammer / I’ve been told

Rang like silver / shine like gold

Talking’ bout a steel-drivin’ man

Just like John, I’m doing just the best that I can

Total cost, minus my diversions and unproductive detours:

• Hubbard head: $34.53

• Seymour handle: $43.86

• Shop supplies, consisting of 4 sanding discs and duct tape: $6 approx.

• Total: $84.39

A fair price, in my estimation, for an all-American sledgehammer that also doubles as a hipster barn ornament. I enjoyed the process so much I’ll probably repeat it by making myself a couple of refurbished “lump hammers”. Those are 3-to-5-pound mini-sledges that you use to knock seized brake discs off or perform other tasks requiring something between a deadblow and a full sledge… sister.

Never mind the happy meal, here’s the unhappy Kamil

If you enjoyed our guest piece about Prados, why not take a look at Kamil’s new endeavor, which is a YouTube car review channel. I’m pretty sure this won’t have quirks, features, or world’s dorkiest drag races. Share your opinions below, so Kamil knows what he’s doing right.

In the jukebox, lately

Many of you have written me to express your satisfaction with the music education and appreciation pieces written by John Marks for this site. To tide you over until the next one, I thought I’d share five albums that have been on my repeat list lately. Your enjoyment, and mileage, may vary. Ranked from “least repeated” to “listened to it twice in a row while riding the Super Blackbird 118 miles.”

#5: Te Mesia, Richard Bona with DR Big Band

I think most people have Richard pigeonholed as “the African Jaco Pastorius”, and it doesn’t help that this album ends with a worse-than-usual take on Jaco’s cringe-inducing show-ender, “Fannie Mae”. Before that, however, we get a tour through Bona’s absurdly accomplished songwriting career, plus a heartfelt take on the song I want played at my funeral, Jaco’s “Three Views Of A Secret”.

#4: Native Dancer, Wayne Shorter

Listening to Esperanza Spalding murder her normally lovely version of “Ponta de Areia” sent me back to the original… well, it’s not the original, and that’s the whole point. Already in the process of changing music forever via his work in Weather Report, Shorter sat down in the studio with Milton Nascimento to record a bunch of near-perfect tunes that drew on everything from Coltrane’s later period to the “Brazilian sound” that would go on captivate Ritenour, Metheny, and many others.

#3: It’s ‘bout Time!, Hank Marr

Hank Marr is a master of the Hammond organ and was a profound influence on my brother’s musical career, both as professor and as a fellow artist. These are lovely, unembellished tunes recorded with sympathy and attention to detail.

#2: Be in Peace, Grayson Jarvis

A delightful early effort by a friend of a friend, this short album offers a look into some future ideas for existing instruments.

#1: Charm, Clairo

At the age of 25, Joni wrote Blue — but Claire “Clairo” Cottrill wrote Charm, which is a better album front to back. More songwriting ideas, better performances, vastly superior production and arranging. By far the best new album I’ve heard in 2024 — yeah, Laufey has a few tunes on Bewitched that are better than any one tune here, but Clairo has done something that almost nobody bothers to do in the Spotify era, namely: she made an album that is designed to be heard front to back. It’s a breakup record. It’s a desire record. It’s exactly what you want in your ear when you toss the Blackbird into fourth gear at redline and shoot through a twinned line of trucks like Wedge rolling into the Death Star trench. A+, would hear again.