Word: carburetors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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RESTRICTOR PLATE Under carburetor, mandated in several races to restrict speed...
NASCAR racers drive stock cars, simultaneously primitive and ultrasophisticated versions of the Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs and Dodges in America's driveways. These cars have engine blocks of 1960s vintage; neither you nor I have bought a car with a carburetor for 15 years, but Earnhardt drove one at Daytona. Certainly his Monte Carlo was a modified machine: its engine had been juiced to about 720 h.p.; its sheet-metal skin was lighter than a road-ready car's; its roll bars were designed to render the cab a fast-moving cage...
...happened before, and when such juxtaposition occurs, the result is greater than the sum of the parts. One and one make three. A late 19th century engineer, Wilhelm Maybach, working for Daimler, puts together the newly invented perfume spray with the newly discovered gasoline and comes up with the carburetor. In 1823 Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh, working with a throwaway coal tar by-product, naphtha (used to clean out dyeing vats), stumbles across the fact that it will liquefy rubber. So he spreads the rubber between layers of cloth and invents the raincoat...
...widely thought to be brainy - ostentatiously brainy, as smart as Mr. Toad - suffers from a sort of stupidity of character. It could be the pressure of the campaign. But he has seemed off for a long time now, like an untuned engine - unsocialized, unmodulated, the adjustments wrong on the carburetor. Why does he run around like that? Unsafe at any speed, you might say. Americans know how to listen to an engine, and the something-not-quite-right that they hear in Gore's accounts for the trouble he's in now. Call "Car Talk" and discuss the problem with...
...Maybe I'd be rereading a Lester Bangs' essay from "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" - some "Creem" column from perhaps 10 or 12 years before - and decide I had to have the Iggy Pop/James Williamson " I Got A Right," and I had to have it RIGHT NOW. And not the LP version, either (if there was one), or the CD (right, not invented yet) - it had to be the 45, the only version with that raw, hyper-compressed, grooves-carved-in-your-flesh sound...