STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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The New Swamp Thing Trailer Spotlights Hero Abby Arcane

Though DC Universe’s Swamp Thing will tell the story of how Alec Holland (Andy Bean) becomes forever transformed into the series’ titular monster hero (Derek Mears), it’s also set to follow CDC researcher Abby Arcane (Crystal Reed), as she discovers that the biological world contains secrets far more complicated and dangerous than anything she’s ever encountered.

The newest Swamp Thing trailer gives us a better look at the darkness creeping into Marais, Louisiana, where Abby begins uncovering the strange truth about a curious swamp disease that’s been striking the town’s residents.

The deeper she wades into the mysteries of Marais’ swamps, the more multiple strange occurrences keep popping up in the dead of night—and the closer Abby gets to crossing paths with Swamp Thing, a creature she doesn’t yet know will end up playing a role in her fight to keep the town safe.

Swamp Thing hits DC Universe on May 31 in the U.S.

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Death Stranding Releases a New Extended Trailer, Photos, and More

Out of the blue this morning, Kojima Productions Released a ton of information and a new extended trailer for Death Stranding. First off, let’s start with the fact that we FINALLY have a release date for the game as it will be coming out on November 8th, 2019. Now that we have that important detail out of the way, we also get to see the Collector’s Edition, which was revealed by Sony today as it will include a ton of stuff from the game. As you can see here, this will come in a special carrying case and include a custom steelbook, a Ludens keychain, a BB pod, Bridges Cargo case, and several items of in-game content from glasses to hats to gear for Norman Reedus’ character.

Kojima Productions also revealed these nine posters all with different characters from the game with the phrase “Tomorrow is in Your Hands”. We still don’t know who half of these people are or what relevance they have to the game. But we might get a few clues to that as we have here at the bottom a newly released extended trailer for the game, which we were all expecting to see during E3 2019. Enjoy the nearly nine minutes of insanity, all shown through a baby’s mouth. Yes, you read that correctly, because Death Stranding is basically insane at this point, and we can’t wait to see more!

  

   

 

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Annabelle Is on a Rampage in the Latest Trailer for Annabelle Comes Home

Annabelle Comes Home opens June 26.

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THE GLORIOUS, ALMOST-DISCONNECTED BOREDOM OF MY WALK IN JAPAN

The Jazz cafe was tiny, with a few polished wood tables, a record collection on display, and two beautiful speakers. The owner, in his 70s, wore a porkpie hat and a sleeve garter. I’d stumbled into this place during a long walk through a stretch of rural Japan. I had a coffee while listening to an original pressing of Miles Davis performing in Tokyo, and afterward, the owner looked me in the eye and said: "I want you to give me a present. I want you to tell me one thing you love about Japan."

I thought for a second, and unable to name just one, answered, with overly earnest awkwardness: the health care system, the lack of guns, the safety. I’m an American, so I suppose these things are on my mind. But I’ve also lived in Japan for nearly 20 years, and these qualities still impress me. When I walked into the jazz cafe, I had been walking for 25 days across the country and had never once worried about my safety. It's not that I feel especially unsafe when walking around the US, but I feel the constant hum of violence in the background. In contrast, on this walk in Japan everyone was courteous. Lovely, even. Sometimes a bit bossy, but never malicious. Did I have to sneak out of a barely functioning inn in the middle of the night because the room smelled overbearingly of urine? Sure. But what I saw around me were people who were taken care of—by their families, communities, government—a feeling which, in turn, made me feel hopeful in the biggest, most cosmic way of being hopeful.

The cafe owner smiled. I think he wanted me to say “The sushi.” And so ignoring my socialist speech, he said "Now I will give you a present. Go to the toilet."

I balked. What kind of present was this?

He repeated his invitation, sternly, with an odd little smile: "I want you to use my toilet, and then you can leave."

He turned and gingerly slipped “We Are The World” out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable.

I obeyed. I opened one door and then another, and a pure white light emerged from the tiny bathroom. I entered, and looked up. The ceiling was an improbable 25 feet above me with a glass ceiling. Sunlight flooded the room. The sink was black marble. And in the middle of the otherwise whitewashed space was a simple, beige toilet. It was the most ridiculously and gloriously presented toilet I had ever seen. Imperial. It was an imperial toilet.

In the background: “We are the ones to make a brighter day so, let’s start giving.” This dude was good.

Cafe near Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture

I was on an an epic walk, 620 miles alone across Japan, over six weeks. I set out on this walk not knowing what I was getting into. I didn't know that I’d meet this guy or see his amazing toilet. But I did and, because I’m human, I wanted to share that serendipity. Look! A man who is almost 70 and has run a cafe almost every day since 1984 has built a toilet for the simple purpose of bedazzling his customers! But sharing today means using social platforms like Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. And once you open those apps and stare into the maw of an algorithmically curated timeline, you are pulled far, far away from the music and the toilet or wherever it is you may be at that moment.

I have configured servers, written code, built web pages, helped design products used by millions of people. I am firmly in the camp that believes technology is generally bending the world in a positive direction. Yet, for me, Twitter foments neurosis, Facebook sadness, Google News a sense of foreboding. Instagram turns me covetous. All of them make me want to do it—whatever “it” may be—for the likes, the comments. I can’t help but feel that I am the worst version of myself, being performative on a very short, very depressing timeline. A timeline of seconds.

Parking lot, Urawa, Saitama Prefecture

These are complaints of my own making. But look—I’ve tried. I’ve pruned, and sliced back, and still find myself time and time again sucked in.

In 2008, the technologist Linda Stone coined the phrase “email apnea”—the holding of breath when we start to dig into our inboxes. I feel a version of that on many of the media platforms and social networks we've produced and influencer-ed: a mental hyperventilation, caught in tiny loops that seem to lead nowhere.

So, a month ago, when I started walking, I decided to conduct an experiment. Maybe even a protest. I wanted to test hypotheses. Our smartphones are incredible machines, and to throw them away entirely feels foolhardy. The idea was not to totally disconnect, but to test rational, metered uses of technology. I wanted to experience the walk as the walk, in all of its inevitably boring walkiness. To bask in serendipitous surrealism, not just as steps between reloading my streams. I wanted to experience time.

I’ve taken many walks in Japan, but this was a walk of a different scale. I left my house in a small town south of Tokyo shouldering a giant pack, walking poles, and wearing hiking boots. I wound my way up through Yokohama to the capital, and, from there, followed an old historic highway, snaking into valleys lush with spring blossoms and full-bloom cherry trees, abutted by the Central Japanese Alps of Nagano and Gifu prefectures, ending in Kyoto. In the end I walked a long way.

Woman burning weeds, Gifu Prefecture

The longness of an activity is important. Hours or even days don’t really cut it when it comes to long. “Long” begins with weeks. Weeks of day-after-day long walking days, 30- or 40-kilometer days. Days that leave you wilted and aware of all the neglect your joints and muscles have endured during the last decade of sedentary YouTubing. And I fully recognize that weeks of walking isn’t long in the grand context of the Walk. That walk of pre-Homo hominins and later Homo erectus out of Africa and into Europe and Asia. Months and years and millennia are the scales of true long walks. That I concede.

But this road, the “Nakasendo”—or “inner mountain route”—is one of the longer historical walks in the country, and so offers a unique platform on which to cut your long-walk teeth. This road was at its height between the 15th and 19th centuries, during the Japanese Edo period. Long before America declared independence from the British, this unbroken road was a culturally rich circus littered with thousands of inns and tea houses, lacquerware craftsmen, comb stores, sake breweries, swordmakers, brothels, soba shops, temples, and shrines. Today, chunks of it have been appropriated for national highways and look like a suburban blightscape: pachinko gambling parlors, chain ramen shops, big-box drug stores. But most of the route takes a walker through rural towns and farming villages—less roaring circus, and more elderly care home. You feel, in ways both exciting and heartbreaking, that you are a last witness.

I set very strict rules for this walk. The first set of rules limited my inputs. I would use only a tiny sliver of the internet. In practice this meant going cold turkey on all social networks and most news and media sites. I used a piece of blocking software on my phone and laptop called Freedom. I created a blocklist in Freedom and named it “THE PHONE IS A TOOL YOU DUMMY.” It prevented me from opening The New York Times app or Twitter or Facebook, virtual spaces all too easy to fall back into when approximately three seconds of boredom enter your frame.

Broken gate near Sekigahara, Gifu Prefecture

My phone ceased to be a teleportation machine and became, instead, a context machine. Since Freedom allows selective blocking, I kept access to websites—Nakasendo Way, Wikipedia, some Japanese blogs—that gave me historical background about the old post towns I walked through. Most important, my phone guided me. I loaded a GPX route file into an app called Gaia GPS. It contains the historical Nakasendo road overlaid on top of a contemporary map. This app and route file helped me locate the old road when signs and markers had all but disappeared. Using reference materials and old guidebooks, I plotted my own markers for historically significant buildings like the inns—honjin—for the highest-ranking feudal lords and their retainers, as well as the ancient mile markers—ichirizuka—which once upon a time were giant mounds of earth flanking the road, but today, are often just tiny stone monuments or faded placards. You’d miss them if you didn’t know when or where to look.

The result was that I was able to deviate from the historical route with greater freedom, knowing just where the original line lay. I could do this with essentially zero cognitive overhead, which is an advantage the ever-updating smartphone map has over a paper map.

GOOGLE Maps was also indispensable for context, helping me locate otherwise tough-to-find cafes called kissaten in the nooks of remote villages. (Just search for kissaten, and voila!) In those spots, I’ve had some meaningful encounters, like a conversation with a nearly 80-year-old tomato farmer about Trump (he brought it up) and that bathroom I’ll never forget. Unlike my often overly optimistic guidebooks, Google Maps provided rational estimates of walking time to my next inn, so I knew how much time I had to dillydally.

My rules extended beyond the internet to other sorts of mental transportation. I promised myself not to listen to books on tape or podcasts. But during grueling stretches where the route followed a highway and tractor-trailers careened inches away from my face, I broke this rule. And as I left Sekigahara—the site of a battle in 1600 that effectively unified Japan, and set in motion everything that made the road I have been walking possible—I couldn’t resist a four-hour episode of Hardcore History on modern Japan, which essentially begins in that very place.

But otherwise there was the walk, silence, and the grand, pervasive boredom of it all.

Farm just outside of Shiojiri Post Town

LET ME MAKE it clear: I was luxuriously, all-consumingly bored for most of the day. The road was often dreary and repetitive. But as trite as it may sound, within this boredom, I tried to cultivate kindness and patience. A continuous walk is powerful because every day you can choose to be a new person. You flit between towns. You don't really exist. And so this is who I decided to be: a fully present, disgustingly kind hello machine. I said hello to bent-over grandmothers and their grandchildren playing in rice paddies. I said hello to business folk about to hop into their Suzuki Jimny jeeps, to Portuguese workers on break from car factories, to men in traditional fundoshi underwear about to carry a portable shrine in a festival. I greeted shop owners cranking open their rusted awnings and a man selling chocolate-dipped bananas. I’d estimate a hello return rate of almost 98 percent. Folks looked up from their gardening or sweeping or bananas and flung a hello back, often reflexively but then, once their eyes caught up with their mouths and they saw I was not a local, not one of them, their faces shifted to delight.

I felt as if the walk itself was pulling that kindness from me, biochemically. The feedback cycle was exhilarating. It was banal. It was something I rarely felt when plugged in online: kind hellos begetting hellos, begetting more kindness.

Tomato farmer, Shiojiri, Nagano Prefecture

In the context of a walk like this, “boredom” is a goal, the antipode of mindless connectivity, constant stimulation, anger and dissatisfaction. I put “boredom” in quotes because the boredom I’m talking about fosters a heightened sense of presence. To be “bored” is to be free of distraction.

As the days added up, I began to notice strange patterns that, had my nose been in my phone, or my head filled with a podcast, I don’t think I would have seen. Small signs, all of the same design—white and yellow text on a black background—began to appear. Little messages about “hearts” and “heads” and “eternal life.” Small things, but in aggregate they formed a kind of invisible chain of Christian messaging. You can find similar hidden Christian messaging in temple carvings from the 16th and 17th centuries, when the religion was banned. I noticed that no matter how depopulated a village may have been, there were no fewer than three barbers or hairdressers. I became aware that there was a period of house construction in the 1990s that leaned heavily on the design element of classical statues in small gardens; tiny naked Davids were suddenly everywhere. Every few kilometers there was another playground that looked as if no child had touched it in decades.

I don't desire to be a hermit. Sharing experiences feels like an essential part of human identity. In 1878, Isabella Bird wrote Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, a hilarious, incisive, cutting travelogue that was constructed largely from letters she sent home from Japan.

I wanted to share my walk too, but without getting caught up in the small loops of contemporary sharing platforms. So here’s where my rules limiting output came into play. Unlike Bird, I wasn't exploring parts of Japan hitherto unseen by non-Japanese eyes, so a series of lengthy letters to friends didn't quite make sense. Instead I riffed off the terseness of SMS messaging to share the psychological and physiological experience of the actual walking. Using a custom-built SMS tool, I sent out a daily text and one photo to an unknown number of recipients. One rule of the system was that I didn't know who had subscribed. The subscribers joined by texting “walk” to a number I wrote on my website and in my newsletters. I’m pretty sure the daily update went out to hundreds, if not thousands of people, but I could not see them.

Vegetable farmer, Saitama Prefecture

The recipients could respond, but I’ve yet to see what they said. Those responses have been collected in a print-on-demand book that's waiting for me when I get back home. My intent is then to respond to the responses in aggregate, long after the walk is finished.

The goal of this convoluted system is to use the network without being used by it. And the purpose of time-shifted conversation is to share the walk without being pulled away from it. I could use a tool like Instagram to approximate this, but I’d have to fight with its algorithm and avoid looking at the timeline. I am not superhuman. I would look at the notifications, the likes, and comments. Reply to them. Become intoxicated by the chemicals released by the tiny loops. Invariably this process would make me think about that audience and how they would be reacting to the next text and photo. I would have lost the purity of the experience. And yet, with global network connectivity, there’s no reason to not also broadcast, in part, in real time. To both consider the experience and share it with immediacy. The daily SMS became a forcing function that deepened my experience of the walk, made me more aware of how painful or joyful or crushingly boring the days were. Being able to share in somewhat real time and not be pulled out of the moment was just an issue of tools and framing.

Construction worker, Tokyo 

My second piece of digital output was audio-based. Each day, around 9:45 am, I found a unique space nearby where I was walking, took out my little Sony recorder, plugged in a microphone preamp, and then plugged in my binaural microphones. The microphones sit in my ears, sucking in sound like audio microscopes, so it just looks like I’m listening to music. But I’m not; I’m recording high-fidelity audio.

I would record for about 15 minutes, and at the end of the day, right after pushing out my SMS, publish to a podcast called SW945. Binaural audio is like virtual reality audio. Put some headphones on, close your eyes, and you are hearing what I heard, with the same sense of 3D spatiality. For me, the recording process was a little beat—15 minutes of meditation each morning. It forced me to think about the sounds of the day. I recorded in front of temples, standing next to rice paddies full of croaking frogs, in screaming pachinko parlors, bowling alleys, cafes, hotel lobbies. Anywhere that seemed to typify that day, that moment, that chunk of the road. I'd close my eyes and marvel at the sheer volume and specificity of sound around me.

Man watering garden, Isobe, Gunma Prefecture

My hope was that others could “listen along” to the walk. Someone emailed and said that, on a recent long-haul flight, they had put in noise-canceling headphones, covered their head with a blanket, and listened to the walk for five hours. This made me unreasonably happy.

Both the SMS and podcast publishing systems are “open” systems, with no single controlling entity like a Facebook or Twitter. And they are “quiet” systems, in that production and consumption spaces are separated. You don’t have to enter a timeline of consumption in order to produce.

On an average day, I walked about eight hours, produced my two output streams, ate, bathed, laundered my sweaty gear, packed, unpacked, and repacked. Checked my equipment, bandaged feet, iced knees, and attempted to get a minimum of eight hours of sleep. About a week into the walk, I told an old woman about my schedule and she asked me, “Is this an ascetic practice?” I laughed in the moment, but then for weeks as I walked, I turned her question over and over in my mind. The grueling pace. The boredom. The pain. And then doing it over again the next day. It certainly starts to sound like an ascetic practice. Webster’s 1913 Dictionary—which happens to be my default dictionary on my laptop (yes, I know that's weird)—defines an ascetic as “one who devoted himself to a solitary and contemplative life, characterized by devotion, extreme self-denial, and self-mortification; a hermit; a recluse; hence, one who practices extreme rigor and self-denial in religious things.”

Is this kind of walk for the purity of walking religious? Each day, I passed many Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, where I issued daily prayers as a form of simple nondenominational thankfulness. I recognize what a strange gift and incredible privilege it is to take the time to do a walk like this. And the disconnection from online chaos and the creating of space to think, to be present, does feel somewhat religious, even if it’s a religion of contemporary woe: to stop being a ding-dong who can’t pull his eyes away from Twitter.

The walk is just physically rigorous enough, and the disconnection just extreme enough, to create a flywheel of habit breakage. The first week of the walk I reached for news and social networks multiple times a day, only to have Freedom slap me down. I was frustrated and low on patience, and only later realized this was probably a minor form of withdrawal.

Around 10 days in, after the skin had peeled off my pinkie toes and my shoulders started to heal and accept their fate, I found that my general musculature acclimated to the daily grind. Walking shifted from a laborious act of biomechanics, to something that simply happened. This sounds crazy, but it was as if walking became part of my autonomic nervous system, like breathing. With stronger leg and gluteus muscles, the world felt like an extremely high resolution simulation, and I was merely a floating consciousness, bobbing between rice paddies and up and down mountains saying hello to anything that moved. Everything still hurt at the end of the day, but the movement was effortless, and sometimes I found myself yelping with joy, alone in the woods, at the beauty and smoothness of it all. It was around this time that the information urge faded.

Each day, I scheduled an hour where Freedom turned off, a kind of safety valve. When I finally peeked, during the second week, to see if any urgent messages had snuck in, the Twitter and Instagram timelines felt appealing, but no longer felt critical to slurp up in tiny, infinite loops.

Of course, the long walk was not “normal” life. Imperial toilets aren’t your everyday toilet. You may never say hello to three dozen strangers in a single day. But one chief purpose for this kind of monastic walking is to literally pound into your body, step after step, the positive habits that can be found only through repetition. To create a physiological template of stillness, or kindness, or focus that you can then attempt to bring back to the "real" world. Stillness is then no longer an idea, but a muscular configuration. Sure, you may be a “floating consciousness” between the rice fields, but how patient are you back in the office with frustrating coworkers?

It’s this back and forth that most interests me—flip-flopping from that place of great quietude that comes from a long walk, to the chaos of inputs that awaits you back in the “real world" in a chair. Given time, I will once again be nonsensically addicted to Twitter. And given time, I will absolutely go on yet another long walk. My hope is that the walks win out in the long run.

[MIKA27]

FERRARI SF90 STRADALE SPORTS CAR

The first hybrid Ferrari. The first 4WD Ferrari. The first flagship Ferrari to have a V8. All those firsts add up to one thing: the SF90 Stradale, the most powerful Ferrari ever made. Pairing a 769 hp, 4.0L twin-turbo V8 with a trio of electric motors good for a total of 217 hp — one on each front wheel and one between the engine and gearbox — it goes from 0-62 mph in just 2.5 seconds, hits 124 in just 6.7 seconds, and has a top speed of 211.

It also has an active aero system that can create up to 860 lbs of downforce at 155 mph; an even higher-performance version, the Assetto Fiorano, will shed 66 lbs of weight via carbon fiber and titanium components and offer even greater downforce. Named to honor the 90th anniversary of the Scuderia Ferrari racing team, we can't wait to see what they're cooking up for the 100th.

 

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Watch A Massive Cruise Ship Wipe Out A Venice Dock

Well, I can go ahead and add “giant cruise ship hauling arse directly toward me while I gaze over the ocean from a dock” to the list of things I need to be unreasonably afraid of. And I’m sure everyone who was standing on this dock in Venice while 65,000 ton cruise ship MSC Opera barreled toward them with no sign of slowing down now feel the same way.

On June 2, the 2100 passenger cruise ship laid on its horn as it came crashing into a busy dock in Venice, Italy, the Washington Post reports. Onlookers who happened to have the misfortune of admiring the beautiful Sunday morning Giudecca Canal view suddenly found themselves running for their lives in what is one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen in a while.

MSC Cruises told The Washington Post that the ship experienced a “technical issue” as it moved toward the dock. More from Yahoo News:

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“The MSC ship had an engine failure, which was immediately reported by the captain,” Davide Calderan, head of a tugboat company involved in accompanying the ship into its berth, told Italian media.

“The engine was blocked, but with its thrust on, because the speed was increasing,” he said.

The two tug boats that had been guiding the ship into the Giudecca tried to slow it, but one of the chains linking them to the giant snapped under the pressure, he added.

 

There isn’t any other information—but you have to wonder when that technical issue hit. Was it before or after the MSC Opera also crashed into a river boat before it made its way to the dock? And what, exactly, persuaded the captains of the boat to try to moor if they knew something had gone wrong?

Four tourists suffered minor injuries, port authorities said, all of them aged between 67 to 72.

This event has kicked up more controversy about tourism in Venice, with many people believing that congested tourist attractions have been contributing to the rapid erosion of the city. A giant cruise ship crashing into one of its docks likely isn’t going to do much for the “actually, tourism is ok” crowd.

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The Fascinating Reason Why NASCAR Engines Run So Hot

The average car on the road today keeps its engine running at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, but a NASCAR racing engine runs around 280. Here’s the reasoning behind this, why teams run ice-water through their engines, and more fascinating facts about NASCAR engine cooling systems.

Stephen Papadakis, the owner of Papadakis Racing and the subject of our story last year on the early tuner street racing culture of Los Angeles, also runs an excellent YouTube channel that provides all sorts of insights into race car technology. In his latest video, “7 Things You Didn’t Know About NASCAR Cup Technology,” he gets into some hot, steamy NASCAR cooling system details:

There’s a lot of good stuff in that relatively short video, including a look at NASCAR air conditioning systems and a peek at how special machines scan race cars’ exterior profiles. Plus, there’s a fun fact about side skirts—namely that they are actually designed to be replaced, since they scrape against the track in an effort to optimise aero.

But the real good stuff is the talk about cooling systems. Papadakis explains that NASCAR engines run at around 290 Fahrenheit, or around 90F higher than a standard road car engine. This reduces required airflow through the radiator and allows teams to tape larger sections of their grilles shut. This is good for aerodynamics, since oncoming air hitting tape flows over the car and can contribute to downforce, whereas air that has to enter a radiator grille bounces around an engine bay and adds what’s known as “cooling drag.”

To prevent the water (and yes, it’s literally water, not ethylene-glycol-based coolant like what’s likely in your car) from boiling at these high temperatures, teams run their engine cooling systems at elevated pressures (since a liquid’s boiling point increases with its pressure).,

The video also explains explains that, during qualifying, teams tape their grilles completely shut to help maximise vehicle speed. In this condition, cooling drag is minimized and there’s more downforce, however as you might expect, the engines also heat up quickly. So after a few laps, to pull the heat out of the engines, teams hook their cars to an external “cool-down unit,” which flows ice water directly through the engine cooling system. NASCAR made a little video about this setup here:

Papadakis also mentions that, even during a race, teams have tape on their grilles arranged in such a way that set areas can be removed to precisely allow additional flow to the radiator. These bits of tape that can be strategically removed are called “tape pulls.”

It’s all fascinating stuff—so much so that I decided to give NASCAR engine designer Dr. Andy Randolph a call. He’s the technical director at ECR Engines, which designs motors for the Richard Childress Racing team, and he’s talked with Jalopnik a number of times before; he knows his stuff.

“There’s this constant struggle that goes on between the engine community an the aero community,” he told me. “For drag reasons, [the aero folks] prefer to have no air go through the radiator,” he said. “For engine cooling reasons, obviously, we prefer to have a lot of air go through the radiator.” He did mention that there is a way to get the best of both worlds, and that’s called a ducted cooling module, which basically takes air that has flowed through the radiator and ducts it out through holes in the hood.

Teams used this setup, which yields reduced drag but still high volumetric flow through the radiator, at the All-Star Cup series race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway earlier this month (see below), and Randolph said there’s been some discussion about adopting the tech for the 2020 season. (The All-Star race tends to be a testing ground for racing tech prior to its adoption).

It’s not a perfect system, though, since the hot post-radiator air gets into the intake, which is located at the base of the windshield. Dr. Randolph explains:

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...some of the hot radiator air exiting the hood ducts was subsequently ingested into the engine through the cowl. Our intake air temperatures were around 130F during the race which caused other engine durability concerns. Relocating the air inlet location is a fairly significant undertaking given existing designs of the air cleaner, intake manifold, and underside of the hood. For next season, either the ducts will have to be moved outboard enough to miss the cowl or the intake air location will have to be moved.

As far as the current setup, which incentivizes cooling system compromises in favour of drag reduction, Randolph admits that it’s a “reliability issue,” and that it’s expensive to design an engine to handle those elevated temperatures and pressures. In an email, he described how much stress those conditions put on engine components, saying:

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Components that suffer from high temperatures include rod bearings (oil more likely to cavitate as it gets hotter), pistons (aluminium softens as the average operating temperature increases), valve seats (seat wear/erosion proportional to operating temperature), and cylinder heads (life shortened due to aluminium softening). Lubrication becomes problematic as oil film thickness reduces with temperature and in fact the oil itself begins to dissociate above 350F (engines smell like sulphur when disassembled due to oil dissociation). Bore roundness deteriorates, bolt clamping forces change (some increase, some decrease), chances of knock and/or preignition increase. Lots of bad stuff.

To help increase engine durability, Randolph says his teams uses special coatings, alloys, and sealing materials. And the cooling system uses high-temperature o-rings and threaded connections in place of rubber hoses. But of course, this all adds cost.

I was curious to know if running these engine at higher temperatures yields any improvements in thermodynamic efficiency, and Dr. Randolph broke it down to me, saying that the answer is technically yes, but the higher temps actually reduce overall power due to increased intake temperatures:

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Yes, there is a slight efficiency advantage because heat loss to the fluids decreases. However, there is also a power loss because the increased structural temperatures cause the intake air temperature to increase when it passes through the intake manifold and cylinder head ports. Decreasing air density with high temperature leads to reduced inducted mass and reduced power. So yes, the engine is slightly more efficient at making power, but it makes less power due to reduced mass flow. Fuel flow decreases accordingly as the mass flow decreases (closed loop feedback maintains a constant air/fuel ratio).

The former GM Powertrain engineer also talked about the cool-down unit (there’s one shown above, made by Nitro Manufacturing), and how it can combine with the elevated engine temperatures to cause all sorts of trouble. “The rapid changes in the various metals in the engines...the expansion and contraction,” he told me, contribute to “a lot of stress on the head gasket” and “on interfaces between journals and bearings.” He mentioned that aluminium pistons in cast iron bores can also be an area of concern.

As an example, he explained that cold water from the cool-down unit might flow around the cast iron block, while the aluminium pistons might still be somewhere close to the oil temperature at the end of a hot run—so, around 320 to 330 Fahrenheit. This huge temperature delta, and particularly the wildly different thermal contraction rates of mating components, puts various components at risk of scuffing or even seizing. It’s for this reason that, according to Randolph, engine damage that could yield premature engine failure later down the line often happens during use of this cool-down unit.

“It’s kind of a sickening sound when they hook it up to the cool-down unit,” Randolph told me, describing a loud cracking between the head and block as the gasket shears. He told me about this in further detail via email, saying:

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The head gasket contains multiple layers which can shear [against] each other. There can also be relative motion between the gasket and head or gasket and block without tearing the gasket. All of this is bad! The gasket continues to seal because as the engine heats up and the block and head expand (head more than block because it is aluminium), the bolts effectively tighten. In other words, the aluminium bolt column in the head expands more than the steel stud when heated, thereby causing fastener torque, and hence clamping load, to increase. Sealing concerns are highest when the system is cold.

Randolph says that his team’s engines use 100 PSI pressure relief valves, which bring the boiling point up to around 335 F, though he says engine temperature is usually lower than that, and is set not by a thermostat (since there isn’t one in these engines), but simply by the vehicle’s airflow. “The amount of cooling is set by number of square inches of grille opening,” the NASCAR engine expert told me.

That airflow can be altered via the tape pulls that Papadakis mentioned. Randolph told me they’re usually narrow horizontal or vertical strips, which can be pulled off to achieve a given temperature reduction if the car gets too hot. “If we’re running 300, we will normally make a change to make that cooler,” he told me, telling me that 280F is a more reasonable steady state temperature.

Of course, the engine doesn’t always run at its ideal temperature. For example, during a caution lap, when vehicles are driving slowly, engine temperatures rise due to a loss in airflow. In pit stops, there’s also a temperature spike.

It’s in these two conditions, Randolph told me, that a NASCAR engine tends to experience its highest temperatures, but there are other times when the airflow-limited engine cooling system can be put to the test.

Daytona and Talladega can be tough, particularly when cars are bunched up close to one another. The vehicle behind another one might experience less drag, but that also means less airflow to the radiator, and if the car spends enough time in sitting on another car’s tail, that could cause issues. “It’s so hot that you have to pull out of line and essentially give up your position to avoid having catastrophic incidents,” Randolph said.

Still, despite the cost and complexity, the setup can work well. “As long as you can maintain the water in liquid form,” Randolph told me, “you can do an ok job of cooling.” But boiling has to be avoided, as steam pockets that can cause major issues like cracking, melting, and distortion. On top of that, exhaust valve seats and spark plug seats can get so hot that they can yield pre-ignition. And this degraded combustion can significantly reduce engine life.

It’s fascinating stuff, though clearly incredibly stressful for NASCAR engine designers who are constantly tasked to make do with less and less airflow. Just to eke out a little more speed.

[Fuzz]

4 hours ago, MIKA27 said:

Watch A Massive Cruise Ship Wipe Out A Venice Dock

 

An MSC vessel? I'm not surprised.

[MIKA27]

The Gorgeous First Trailer For Ron Moore's For All Mankind Teases A Space Race That Doesn't End On The Moon

We were already interested at the thought of Ronald D. Moore’s return to space as part of a new partnership with Apple. But now we have a first look at just what that partnership is delivering in a new trailer for For All Mankind, and it looks fantastic.

Revealed today at Apple’s WWDC 2019 keynote, the trailer sets up the intriguing alt-history premise for Moore’s series. Set in a world where Soviet Russia beat the United States to land the first man on the moon, For All Mankind imagines a world where the space race didn’t really end there but instead sparked the U.S. to even the technological playing field by aiming further in propelling humanity to the stars.

While we only get brief glimpses of what that just means (at first, Mars, but will the show go beyond even that?), but it’s an interesting premise that gives Battlestar Galactica’s showrunner a very tempting excuse to dabble in some sci-fi goodness, giving a retro-tech take on spaceflight initiatives we’re still dreaming of accomplishing today in 2019. Time will tell just how far this alt-history will propel the show, but for now? Consider us very intrigued.

For All Mankind will stream exclusively on Apple’s upcoming TV service, the terribly named Apple TV+, which is set to launch this spring.

[MIKA27]

Metallica Appoints Rob Dietrich as New Blackened Whiskey Master Distiller

The newest member of the world-famous heavy metal group Metallica doesn’t sing or play an instrument—he makes whiskey.

Rob Dietrich was recently named distiller and blender of the band’s American whiskey brand Blackened.

Dietrich spent the last 13 years in Denver distilling acclaimed American single malt whiskey Stranahan’s. “Honestly, I absolutely love Stranahan’s. I love what I’ve helped build there and to me it’s one of the most spectacular whiskies in the world,” he says. “It was not an easy decision to make. Certainly, a bittersweet one. However, that being said, I was really excited about the opportunity to work with Metallica.”

It certainly doesn’t hurt that Dietrich calls himself a lifelong Metallica fan. He first heard Master of Puppets in the 7th grade and was pretty much hooked on their music ever since.

He takes over for Blackened’s founding master distiller Dave Pickerell, who passed away unexpectedly last fall. “They are big shoes to fill,” says Dietrich. “He was certainly one of the most legendary distillers in modern times.” Pickerell, who helped create the craft-spirits boom, had worked at Maker’s Mark for years before becoming the preeminent consultant to craft distilleries around the country.

He was integral in formulating the concept for Blackened, which is currently a blend of straight ryes and bourbons. The unique—and genius—twist is that soundwaves from the band’s music help with the aging of the whiskey, pushing the spirit into the wood of the barrel. The idea, according to Dietrich, was inspired by the vibrations caused by the huge pipe organ at West Point, where Pickerell was a student and later a professor.

The members of Metallica—lead vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Robert Trujillo and drummer Lars Ulrich—create playlists of songs from their catalog that play in the warehouse. (The playlists are available on Spotify and Apple Music.) As a result, Ulrich, who is also the band’s co-founder, says each batch is slightly different, but cautions that you shouldn’t overthink it. “We can’t take it so seriously. The idea of connecting it to the music in an abstract way is supposed to be fun,” he says. “Now, I’m not sure I can tell the difference between the batches, but I’m sure somebody can. But that’s okay also. It’s the same thing as when we play “Enter Sandman.” It’s slightly different in Philly last night than it was in Charlotte on Monday. And it should be because it’s fucking human.”

Ulrich might not be precious about how you drink the whiskey, but he takes the brand quite seriously. Sure, Metallica is popular enough, with an incredibly loyal following, that they could have put their name of any liquor bottle and it would have sold. But they spent several years working on Blackened and wanted to create a quality spirit with talented whiskey makers.

“We wanted it to stand on its own,” says Ulrich. “We didn’t want to call it Master of Puppets Whiskey or some bullshit like that.”

The band also wanted a whiskey that was drinkable. “It’s very assertive, but it’s still very smooth and has a very kind of easy aftertaste,” says Ulrich, who was very concerned with making the whiskey seem modern. “When we started drinking, we would drink beer and maybe drink some cheap wine or whatever. But whiskey drinks, that was kind of a different generation. Then when we came to L.A. and started hanging around some of the L.A. bands, Guns & Roses, it was Jack Daniel’s and all that type of stuff. It felt like the people who were enjoying the whiskey, not just drinking it to get drunk, but enjoying whiskey, that was more of an older generation. One of the things that I really wanted to do with this was try to modernize it a little bit.”

It’s an interesting project for the band, since its other co-founder Hetfield doesn’t drink. “I didn’t know how this would play out,” admitted Ulrich. “James’s interest in the creative part of this, obviously, other than the taste has been way more than I expected. We look at it as another creative outlet. It’s another creative bridge to the fans that are interested.”

Dietrich and Hetfield bonded quickly. “I hit it off with James over motorcycles,” he says. “We’re both gearheads.” Dietrich is being modest, having worked on cars and motorcycles since he was a teenager growing up in rural Colorado. He’s particularly excited about a 1948 dual cab GMC, with barrels on the back, that Hetfield gave the brand.

Right now, Blackened is sourcing the whiskey that Dietrich will blend. When I asked Ulrich if one day Blackened will have a distillery and visitor center, he said, “The one-word answer is yes. The two-word answer is fuck yes.”

That will also allow Dietrich to come up with new products, something that he showed a real interest in and aptitude for at Stranahan’s. Every winter, fans of his limited-edition Snowflake Whiskey would line up days before it went on sale at the distillery, even camping out on the sidewalk in arctic conditions to make sure they got one of the few bottles.

“For me it’s definitely an honor to be able to continue to uphold Pickerell’s legacy and maintain the quality and consistency of Blackened, as well as creating new and unusual expressions,” says Dietrich. Ulrich is also open to expanding their portfolio; a tequila or a gin may be in the works one day.

Just as Dietrich was able to help establish the American single malt category with Stranahan’s, he hopes to do the same for the profile of blends. “I think historically blends have had a bad rap in the United States, but if you look elsewhere, if you look at Scotland, Japan, blends are world class,” he says. “I feel like we’re bringing back that reputation.”

[MIKA27]

Brad Pitt Explores The Mysteries Of Deep Space In ‘Ad Astra’

As a species, our “purpose” in the universe has always been presented through arduous introspection — our lives are fleeting, our footprint small, and our influence even less relevant. As we’ve come to understand the subjective banality of our existence, the greatest minds on earth have pondered our ability to navigate the cosmos; a basis that’s been beautifully sensationalized in Ad Astra, James Gray’s most recent space-faring film.

Taking place in humanity’s not-so-distant future, Astronaut Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt) sets out toward the farthest reaches of our solar system to uncover the mystery surrounding his missing father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones). Over the course of his theatric journey, Roy battles with various demons, each with their own basis in his past, the inability to measure up to his own ambitions, and the omnipresent void left by the departure of his father at a young age. After coming to the realization that the disappearance of his objective signals a much larger problem, McBride begins to unravel a series of mysteries surrounding human existence, as well as mankind’s place in the vast universe.

 

[MIKA27]

The 'Funnies' Were The Wildly Modified Tanks That Protected The Allies On D-Day

Of all the stories of the D-Day invasion, the most heroic—and tragic—involve the waves of Allied soldiers who waded ashore to face the enemy on the beach. Thousands of American, British, and Canadian troops, many simple riflemen, were hurled against beach defences occupying German troops had spent years perfecting. One of the unsung weapons that helped keep Allied casualties down were the “Funnies,” tanks modified to help sweep aside Axis defences.

In 1942 British and Canadian troops staged a major amphibious raid on occupied France. Code-named “Jubilee,” the raid would land and then withdraw more than 6,000 British and Canadian troops at the French town of Dieppe. The raid was a disaster, with casualties among the landing troops exceeding sixty per cent. A major problem was the presence of breach fortifications and obstacles, which the landing force was wholly unprepared for.

Two Churchill tanks and a landing craft lost during the Dieppe Raid.

Even with the Dieppe Raid’s failure, British commanders were preparing for an eventual all-out Allied invasion of France. This operation would eventually be known as Operation Overlord and set to take place in early June 1944. Stung by Jubilee’s high cost and near failure, the British concluded that it wasn’t enough to land tanks with guns on the beaches and that more specialised equipment was needed. They were determined to give their landing force, which would land at the beaches code-named Gold and Sword, the tools necessary to reduce enemy defences and move off the beach.

General Percy “Hobo” Hobart, a British Army general assigned to the Royal Tank Corps, was focused on the problem of first getting armour ashore, then using it to assist the infantry in overcoming German defences. Hobart was convinced the key to getting off the beach was investing in specially modified tanks and other armoured vehicles. Instead of ordinary tanks armed with cannon and machine guns, Hobart wanted tanks fitted with specialised engineering equipment to help breach obstacles and clear the way forward.

Hobart’s 79th (Experimental) Armoured Division became the proving ground for the “Funnies”—tanks and other fighting vehicles made funny-looking by the addition of extra equipment. Hobart’s Funnies replaced sleek tank guns with squat, fat mortar barrels, added dozer blades, plows, rotating chains, and giant wheels to the front of tanks, and burdened others with bundles of sticks and large, cumbersome-looking canvas screens. At its height, the 79th Division had nearly two thousand vehicles.

Churchill Crocodile, August 1944. 

The Funnies were British Churchill or U.S.-made Sherman tanks which were then extensively modified. The Churchill, a low-slung heavy infantry tank, was fitted with a hull-mounted flamethrower with a range of 100 meters (328 feet), and towed a wheeled trailer with enough fuel for eighty one-second bursts. The “Crocodile,” as the new vehicle was called, could set wooden defences on fire or, chillingly, burn out machine gun bunkers.

Churchill AVRE, Geilenkirchen, Germany, November 1944.

Other Churchills were modified for other roles. The “Ark” was a Churchill with the turret removed and ramps on both ends. The Ark would act as a mobile ramp, driving up to a seawall or other vertical obstacle so that other vehicles could drive up and over it. The AVRE, or Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers, replaced the Churchill’s main gun with a mortar that flung a forty pound explosive charge, known as a “flying dustbin,” at barbed wire, machine gun nests, or other obstacles. AVREs could also carry large spools of cloth, laying it down as they moved forward to prevent vehicles from bogging down in the soft sand. Other AVREs carried mobile bridges, ditch-filling materials, or a plough designed to unearth land mines.

Sherman “Crab” mine-clearing tank. 

Sherman tanks were also extensively modified. One example, the “Crab,” mounted a huge metal cylinder in front of the tank hull turning at more than 140 rotations per minute. As the Crab moved across the battlefield, lengths of chain mounted to the rotating cylinder methodically beat the ground in front, ideally detonating any hidden land mines.

Other Shermans, nicknamed “Duplex Drive” Shermans, were fitted with propellers and a canvas shroud to provide propulsion and increase buoyancy. DD tanks would swim from landing craft to the shore, drop their shrouds, then blast away at beach defences with their guns.

UK forces, eager to see the entire invasion succeed, offered their American counterparts a third of the “Funnies.” U.S. commanders had already placed a large order Crocodile tanks and were also developing their own version of the Crab. Unfortunately, neither the Crocodiles nor American Crab tanks were ready in time for the invasion. The Americans did take delivery of nearly one hundred DD tanks.

Duplex-drive Sherman with canvas screens lowered. 

June 6th, the day of the invasion, found the 79th Armoured Division’s Funnies sprinkled throughout the British contingent. The bizarre armoured vehicles played a major role in the landings, rolling up German defences. Over on the American beachheads, code-named Utah and Omaha, the U.S. Army launched 96 DD tanks from tank landing craft. Approximately half were lost to rough seas and enemy fire. At Omaha Beach 27 out of 29 DD tanks never made it to shore. The lack of other Funnies, particularly obstacle breaching vehicles, was sorely felt.

Funnies aren’t funny anymore. U.S. Army M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicle, Rodriguez Live Fire Complex, Korea, 2017.

The Funnies of D-Day not only helped the allies gain a toehold on Europe but also forced armies to recognise the essential nature of combat engineering vehicles. Today, the British Army operates the Trojan armoured vehicle. Based on the Challenger II chassis, the Trojan mounts a mine plow and excavator arm to reduce obstacles.

The U.S. Army learned its lesson on the beaches Normandy, and today the Army and Marines both operate the similar, Abrams-based M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicle. More than a blip on the continuum of history, Funny tanks went mainstream and changed land warfare forever.

[MIKA27]

How the Negroni Conquered America

It took a century, but the Negroni cocktail has finally become a sensation in the United States.

Until the cocktail revolution of the last 20-odd years, the Negroni was Patrick Stewart before Star Trek called.

The Italian-born mix of gin, vermouth and Campari had its fans, enjoyed the critics’ respect, and was well-known in the country of its birth, but it was far from a household name in America or the rest of the world. Now, of course, it is—like Sir Patrick himself—a global icon, and one of the most popular and beloved things in its field.

But the Negroni wouldn’t have been able to climb those last steps to the peak of Cocktail Olympus if it hadn’t been waiting right there at the bottom of the stairs, ready for its call. How it got to that stage is, I think, the most interesting and even illuminating part of its complex story, and it has not been well understood.

THE BEGINNING

The drink’s origins have been ably chronicled by the Florentine bartender and drink historian Luca Picchi, most recently in his Negroni Cocktail: An Italian Legend. The cast: Camillo Negroni, a Florentine Count with English blood, and Fosco Scarselli, a bartender. The place: Casoni, a café and drugstore (hey, it’s Italy) on the fashionable Via Tornabuoni in Florence. The story: Negroni steps up to the bar and asks Scarselli for his usual Americano (vermouth, aperitivo bitters, soda and ice), but this time “fortified” with a splash of gin. The Count, who had been a cowboy in Montana and Alberta and a professional gambler and fencing instructor in New York, finds the fortified drink much more to his taste.

We’re not sure precisely when Negroni placed his fateful order, but it had to have been between 1912, when he moved back to Florence, and October, 1920, when a friend from London wrote him, including in his letter the suggestion that he “must not take more than 20 Negronis in a day” (sound advice, to be sure). Scarselli later recalled the occasion as being in 1919 or 1920, and, after all, it’s his story, too.

At first, the Count kept his little twisted Americano on the down low, at least according to the Italian journalist Enzo Grassini, who was a regular at Casoni in the early 1920s and, 40 years later, recalled him and Scarselli well. By the late 1920s, however, his secret was out and other customers there were asking for their Americanos Negroni-style.

THE NEGRONI SURFACES

That, at least, is oral history. In terms of hard documentation, though, after that 1920 letter we don’t hear of the Negroni for another 27 years, when it turns up in Cocktail Portfolio, an obscure Italian drinks book that was recently rediscovered by Paolo Ponzo, an Italian bartender and drinks historian. That period of hibernation is understandable: Mussolini and his fellow Fascists, who ruled the country from 1922 to 1943 (and parts of it until 1945) were so hostile to such degenerate, foreign habits as cocktail-drinking that they even banned the very word “cocktail.” According to their ideology, Italians were supposed to be flinty-hard and disciplined, not loose and lively; to run an empire, not a bar tab. (There was only one important cocktail book published in Italian from the whole Fascist-era, but while its author, Elvezio Grassi, was a dedicated Fascist, he was a Swiss one, from the Italian part of that country, where nobody had any problems with cocktail-drinking.)

We do know that somebody somewhere in Italy nonetheless tried to get the Negroni over during those dark years, but only because a straight-up version of it appears in Cocktail Portfolio as the “Asmara,” named after the capital of Eritrea, one of Italy’s African colonies. The name had to be from the Fascist era, partly because Italian Fascists—like all Fascists—were suckers for anything, no matter how trivial, that made them feel big and important, but mostly since the British deftly escorted Eritrea out of the Italian empire at gunpoint in 1941, never to return.

But Cocktail Portfolio also marks 1947 as the first time the Negroni appears as such, with an actual recipe. It’s the classic Negroni, with no ups or extras: 1/3 gin, 1/3 vermouth, 1/3 Campari, on the rocks with a twist of orange and a splash of seltzer. After that, the drink starts turning up with frequency. It can’t be because of the book, of which so few copies were printed that you can tally the known survivors on the fingers of one hand, but the book certainly is a signpost of the reawakening of the Count’s simple idea.

At the end of that same year, Orson Welles, newly divorced from Rita Hayworth, wrote to the American gossip columnist Erskine Johnson about the “Negronis” he was drinking in Rome, where he was shooting a movie. Welles described the drink accurately, adding that “the [Campari] bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you” and that “they balance each other out.” Johnson put the note in his column, which was widely syndicated.

Over the next few years the drink starts turning up with greater and greater frequency. In 1949, an Italian journalist uses it as an example of a popular cocktail; in 1951, Vitya Vronsky, a Russian-American concert pianist is trotting it out for her guests in Santa Fe as something she picked up in Italy, confessing her uncertainty as to “whether it was introduced by the Medicis of the 15th century or the American GIs of the 20th.” That same year, Victor, head barman at the Sherry-Netherland in New York, was recommending the drink to the readers of House & Garden and Ted Saucier, the press agent for that city’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel slipped not one, but four recipes for it into his landmark drink book, Bottoms Up. Of them, two were from establishments in Rome, one from the Ritz in Paris and one—labeled the “Negrone”—was from Restaurant Marguery on Park Avenue, two blocks from the Waldorf and ten from the Sherry-Netherland. (Elsewhere in America, the drink was at first perceived by some as not an Italian drink, but a New York one.)

It was also as the Negrone that the drink appeared in the 1952 edition of the little booklet that the legendary Floridita bar in Havana handed out to its favored customers (the booklet is frequently misdated as being from 1939, but internal evidence makes that impossible). In 1953, it was the Negroni again when it made it into the closest thing the cocktail world had to a standard reference at the time, the Guide to Drinks published by the United Kingdom Bartenders’ Guild. But now it was considered a straight-up cocktail; one to be stirred with ice and strained into a cocktail glass, not built on the rocks and softened with soda water as the Count took his.

At this point, clearly, the Negroni was no longer a novelty. In just six years, it achieved a solid supporting-player status in the cocktail world. Though it was nowhere near as popular as the Martini, the Manhattan or the Old-Fashioned, it was nonetheless up there with the Sidecar and the Bronx and the Stinger and a whole raft of other drinks that had been around for ages. It would take the Margarita, which first appeared in print under that name in 1953, something like twice as long to do the same thing.

Before we whip through its later history, let’s pause to consider why this bitter, red highball-variation made such rapid inroads. It’s not the taste of the thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (indeed, many consider the Negroni to be the tastiest of all mixed drinks; while I’m not quite with them, I’m not far behind). But if the combination of gin, vermouth and Campari was some irresistible elixir that converted all who sipped it to instant cultists, that would have happened a generation before the drink rose to prominence, and perhaps two.

PARISIAN AND OTHER DIVERSIONS

In 1933, the prolific and witty American novelist, screenwriter, columnist and writer-at-large Nina Wilcox Putnam threw into an amusing doubletalk column on the practice of bouncing checks the observation that “All Gaul was divided in three parts.” If she pinched the idea of France’s tripartite fission from the book that Julius Caesar wrote about the place back when he was wrangling it into the Roman empire, the parts she split it into were anything but classical: “one part gin, one part vermouth and one part Italian bitters.” Then again, having spent much of the 1920s in Paris and on the Riviera, she’d been to France much more recently than the Divine Julius, and she’d seen what they were drinking.

Campari, the Italian bitters in question, spent the 1920s aggressively courting the French market. It did all of the usual stuff—usual to us now, anyway: it took out lavish ads, sponsored cocktail contests, subsidized drinks books. It even opened a French subsidiary. As a result, by the end of the decade Paris was awash in Campari cocktails. A couple of these have come down to us: the Boulevardier and the Old Pal are both the kind of thing you find in modern cocktail bars—whiskey (bourbon in the former in one, Canadian rye in the latter), vermouth and Campari, served up.

But there were dozens of others, including the 1926 Campari Cardinal (gin, Italian vermouth and a splash of Campari) by Piero Grandi—there were a lot of Italian bartenders in Paris—and the 1928 Campari Mixte from a pair of French bartenders named Milhorat and Alimbau, which bumps the Campari up to an equal part and thus makes it essentially a straight-up Negroni. In 1929, over half a dozen Paris bars contributed similar drinks, give or take a couple of ingredients, to the “International Cocktail Championship,” which a local nightlife magazine sponsored.

It’s even possible that the Count himself had something to do with all this activity: he traveled from Florence to London in the 1920s, and he would have had to stop in Paris. A dyed-in-the-wool sport with an encyclopedic knowledge of racehorses and other ways of whiling away an idle fortune, he would have found many acquaintances at the Chatham bar and other sporting outposts who would have been game to try something new in the way of liquoring up.

On the other hand, let’s for a moment step back another generation, to 1907, when Camillo Negroni had already returned to Italy from New York. That year, the Cerruti Mercantile Co. of Washington St., San Francisco, began running a long series of ads for “Bitter Campari” in that city’s Italian-language newspaper, L’Italia. Among the uses it suggested for Campari was “nei cocktail”—in cocktails.

Cerutti distributed the stuff up and down the West Coast, and the odds are pretty good that somebody somewhere was game to mix up a drink or two with it. If so, it’s not fantastical to suggest that they would have tried it out in a Martini, then the most popular drink in America. At the time, the default recipe for that most indispensable of drink was gin, Italian—i.e., sweet—vermouth and bitters. The natural move would be to use the Campari in place of the standard orange or Angostura Bitters, yielding a drink identical to that “Campari Cardinal.”

In other words, it’s quite possible that Italian-American bartenders were testing Negroni taste-alikes out on their customers up and down the West Coast in the early 1900s. It’s just as possible that some of the thousands of drink-obsessed Americans who visited Paris 20 years later brought the simple booze-vermouth-Campari formula home and sprang it on their unsuspecting friends, like they did with the Sidecar, another Parisian favorite. The fact that it was Prohibition is no objection: the museum at Campari’s headquarters in Milan preserves a bottle from the 1920s intended for the American market with “For Medicinal Purposes” stamped on the label in red. That didn’t mean it was legal, as the number of arrests recorded in the American newspapers of the day for possession of “Italian bitters” attests, but it at least let the company claim that any abuse was off-prescription. (If you find yourself in Milan with the shank of an afternoon to kill, by the way, there are far worse ways of doing it than at the Campari Gallery; book in advance.)

But if they did, there’s no proof of it; no record. Now, it’s true that lots of things that happen never make it on record. But once they start happening over and over it becomes increasingly hard to keep it out of the papers. We don’t know who brought the Sidecar to America, but by the end of the 1920s it was in all the top speakeasies. Not the Negroni. What we can say is that given two very solid opportunities to experiment with the Negroni in the 1900s and 1920s, Americans either declined to do so or did so and found it wanting. Even in Paris, by the mid-1930s the Campari drinks had faded away.

DOPOGUERRA

If it wasn’t the Negroni’s taste or its formula, which put it over the top in the late 1940s, it must have been something else. To find that, we have to go back to Italy, and to the end of World War II. When the shooting stopped in May, 1945, the country was in shambles. In 1940, Mussolini had dragged the country, more or less unwilling, into World War II on the Nazi side. It did not go well. An invasion of Greece failed at huge cost. That 1941 loss of Eritrea was soon followed by that of Libya, Italy’s largest foreign colony, and then, in 1943, of Sicily.

At that point, Italians were done—except when they tried to throw Mussolini out and surrender, the Germans simply snatched him from the mountain-top where he was being held, put him in nominal charge of the two-thirds of the country the Allies had not yet reached, and flooded it with their troops, all entrenched on the high ground and perfectly willing to stay there. It took two years of bombing, shelling, strafing, bleeding and dying to push them back up against the Alps. What was left behind was smashed, cracked, crumbled, looted, lost. People were homeless and hungry and at each others’ throats.

Of course, most of the rest of Europe was in the same shape, or worse. Even Britain, victorious and uninvaded, was a wreck. But after wandering incredulous in the ruins for a time, the Italians did something unexpected. They started celebrating. Despite the destruction and the poverty, they were free from Fascist social discipline for the first time in a generation. There was nobody to tell them what to do or how to behave. Many of them—most, really—put their heads down and tried to get back to the comfortable day-to-day round of Italian life. But there were many who dressed themselves to the nines and went out, whether they could afford it or not. Dancing, dining, drinking—and not even with food! (The Italians tended, and still tend, to tie most of their tippling to the day’s meals.) There was glamour. There was sex.

Dopoguerra, they called it at first; “postwar.” Eventually, though, it became la dolce vita, which requires no translation. In time, the sweet life helped inspire Italy to an economic miracle, and what was sweet for a few became good for the masses. In 1947, though, the party was far from widespread. You could find it at its most orgiastic on the island of Capri, but then again Capri had always had that affect on people. The heart of it, however, was just a couple of blocks in Rome, on Via Vittorio Veneto between the American embassy and the Borghese gardens. That was no coincidence: the sweet life was as American in its DNA as it was Italian. Forward-looking, hedonistic, loud and confident, it was a big, uplifted finger to the old Europe of starched collars and historic destinies; of obedience and propriety and all of that rubble.

If there was one symbol of this new Italy, it was the Vespa, a chic, sleek riff on a wartime paratrooper’s motorbike that was launched in April, 1946 and went on to conquer the country and then the world with its annoying, exhilarating whine. If there was another, it was the Campari bottle. Almost out of business during the war, in 1946 Campari managed to ship 400,000 liters of its iconic red bitter from the ruins of Milan, all of them to Italian cities. In 1950, that figure was over 1,000,000 liters, only 20,000 of which were exported, including a paltry 990 liters to the Americas. In 1951, though, it started advertising in the New Yorker.

It seemed like a frighteningly high percentage of those million liters were being consumed in two cafes on Via Veneto: the Café Rosati, and the Café Doney across the street on the ground floor of the Excelsior Hotel, where Orson Welles was staying when he encountered the Negroni in 1947. Both were thronged, although the Rosati’s clientele tended to be more Italian and the Doney’s more American. In either case, the action was outside at the sidewalk tables—or at the tables, around the tables, between the tables, down the street from the tables, in the gutter, in the street. It was a floating party.

The reigning drink, of course, was Campari. It was modern, sleek, brightly-colored, cheap and not too strong. You could mix it with soda for a light refresher. To get the party started, you could get more American and throw in some vermouth, for an Americano. Or, if that didn’t have enough megatonnage for you, you could, of course, also splash in some gin. A great many did: for the Italians, it was stronger, and hence more daring, than the Americano; for the Americans, it was weaker, and hence more sophisticated, than their customary Martinis.

Valentino Clementi, the head bartender at Rosati, claimed that the combination was his idea; that the Negroni was his. It wasn’t—he was six when the English antique dealer mentioned the drink in his letter to his friend the Count. It’s possible that he introduced it to the street, though. It’s much more likely, however, that Via Veneto became Negroni territory due to Café Doney. Construction for Doney began during the war and it opened in 1946. It was not the first of its name: that was an old café founded in Via Tornabuoni in Florence by Gasparo Doney, an ex-Napoleonic soldier, in the early nineteenth century. In time, the Florentine café became so successful that it branched out. In 1933 or 1934, it took over another café down the street, the Café Giocosa, which the year before had very gently replaced the Drogheria Casoni. Casoni, of course, was where Count Negroni had leaned over the bar and asked Fosco Scarselli to put a little gin in his drink (Scarselli had left when it became the Giacosa).

I don’t know if any of the employees of the Florence Doney transferred to the Rome branch when it opened, but there must have been some contact and some shared clientele; some path of communication. In any case, in dopoguerra Rome, the Florentine Negroni finally found its stairway to the stars. (One of the four Negronis in Saucier’s Bottoms Up was sent over by the Rome Doney; it was made according to Hoyle, except for being strained into a cocktail glass, no doubt to appeal to the Martini-drinkers out on the sidewalk.)

Back in the United States, the drink’s cult grew slowly but steadily throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It was never a regular Joe’s drink; rather, it belonged to bohemia and, especially, to the jet set and to bohemia. Movie stars and such drank it—Welles was joined in his taste for the drink by the likes of Audrey Hepburn and her husband Mel Ferrer, Ray Milland and Rudolf Nureyev, among others.

But it was also the drink of all of those intrepid Americans who had packed their American Tourister suitcases and sat sleepless across the Atlantic in tourist class, only to be patronized and exploited and, just often enough, treated with genuine kindness and warmth as they wandered confusedly through the New Italy, which was a lot like the old one but with more Coca-Cola and, fortunately, Negronis in the Piazza Cavour at the end of the day. By 1956, Austin, Nichols & Co., Campari’s American importer, was advertising the Negroni—in the New Yorker, of course—as the “World Connoisseur’s Cocktail.”

When the Disco à Go-Go 1960s faded into the Disco Hustle 1970s, the Negroni was one of the few pre-existing drinks that made it into the revised canon, where it found itself nestled next to the Long Island Iced Tea, the Apricot Brandy Sour, the Godfather and the Kamikaze. The fact that it was violently red and the sort of thing that foreign fashion models might drink helped. Then came the foodie revolution, with its elevation of Italian cooking. Fortunately, there was a drink right at hand—its recipe was even on the Campari bottle, so you didn’t have to study. Then came the Cocktail Revolution, with its valorization of everything bitter, which happened to stretch to that most Zelig-like drink, the Negroni.

Drinks don’t become broadly popular unless they fill a need. Vermouth was in America for 40 years before the Manhattan and its minutes-younger twin the Martini used it to move the cocktail away from being a sap-blow to the head for the uninitiated to something that even an occasional tippler can engage with and wobble away not too deeply scathed. It wasn’t until the 1960s and its fetishization of the handmade and indigenous that tequila and the Margarita took off, even though the basic formula for the drink had been in American drinks books since the 1930s.

The Negroni got its shot because of all the tired men and women sitting in their wintry Chicago apartments and dreaming of a little round table under the orange trees that line Via Veneto; of tiny dishes of olives and potato chips and white-jacketed waiters; of honey-skinned blondes and tall, wavy-haired men in Ray-Bans. Until there was a dolce vita, there could be no Negroni. But once it arrived, it moved right in and made itself indispensable, just like Captain Picard.

 

[MIKA27]

‘Love, Antosha’ Trailer Looks at the Incredible, Brief Life of the Talented Anton Yelchin

The trailer for the upcoming documentary Love, Antosha has been released. The documentary, directed by Garret Price, chronicles the incredible and all-too-brief life of the talented young actor Anton Yelchin. Using his journals, writings, music, interviews, and speaking with those who knew him, the documentary paints a vivid portrait of an amazing young man who we lost far too soon.

Adam Chitwood caught the movie at Sundance earlier this year, and found it to be a powerful look at Yelchin’s life, writing:

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It’s clear early on in Love, Antosha that Anton Yelchin was a genuine cinephile. Not only is the film littered with home movies made by Yelchin at a very young age, but also his diary entries and lists (not to mention testimonials from his family) underline just how serious he took his film education. It was his Russian immigrant parents who first introduced Yelchin to films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Mean Streets, and afterwards Yelchin took it upon himself to further his film education on his own. He reached all the way back to the silent era and was constantly consuming films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the French New Wave, Asian cinema, and much more. Not only that, but Yelchin took detailed notes throughout each viewing, working to understand the craft behind the filmmaking on display.

The film opens in L.A. on August 2nd and in New York on August 9th.

[MIKA27]

New ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Trailer Features a Helping Hand from Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves is having a very good year. The latest John Wick is the most successful to date; he had a brilliant cameo in Always Be My Maybe; and he’s apparently a lot of fun voicing action figure Duke Caboom in Toy Story 4. Now Reeves is moving towards video games as the latest trailer for CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077 features a role for the beloved actor.

Most of the trailer focuses on your character dealing with the aftermath of a heist gone bad, and it’s definitely a cool world CD Projekt Red (the studio behind the Witcher games) has crafted here even if the trailer is all CG and no gameplay. But at the end, your character reboots (everyone in this world appears to have some kind of cybernetic implants and prosthetics) and is given a hand by a character played by Keanu Reeves. Obviously, you don’t get someone of Reeves’ caliber just for a cameo, so it will be interesting to see what kind of role his character plays in the overall narrative.

For those who need a brief rundown on what Cyberpunk 2077 is all about, Wikipedia notes that the video game is an adaptation of the 1988 tabletop game, and “is set fifty-seven years later in dystopian Night City, California, an open world with six distinct regions. In a first-person perspective, players assume the role of the customisable mercenary V, who can reach prominence in three character classes by applying experience points to stat upgrades. V has an arsenal of ranged weapons and options for melee combat.”

You get a hint of that melee combat in this trailer with the character slicing up his enemies with blades that emerge from his forearms. So that should be fun.

The game hits Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on April 16, 2020.

[MIKA27]

Your Reflexes Will Never Be This Good

Rally drivers will go up against all kinds of obstacles during an event, but chances are, they’re not expecting they’ll have to avoid a random civilian car driving at them in the opposite direction. But, when that happened to driver Rok Turk, he just used it as an opportunity to flex his incredible reflex skills.

During a shakedown for the INA Delta rally in Croatia, Turk was putting pedal to the metal on the streets of a sleepy-looking town when, rounding a blind corner, there just so happened to be a whole entire car in his way!

Did Turk even blink? I doubt it.

[MIKA27]

Alligator With Knife Stuck In Its Head Seen In Lake In Texas

A Texas woman says she recently witnessed an alligator with what appeared to be some kind of knife stuck in its head swimming in a local lake, a situation she says she believes may have been a purposeful act.

The gator was reportedly spotted by at least two witnesses inside Orchard Lake Estates in Sugar Land, Texas this week. Erin Weaver, the woman who captured a picture of the gator with the protruding knife in its head, told NBC-affiliate KPRC that she saw the gator near some rocks early Thursday during a morning walk.

“He kind of turned and came right towards me, and he swam right over here along the rocks here, and he sat there. And it was actually a knife — it looked like a steak knife — sticking out of his head,” she said. In the pictures, the knife appears to potentially be lodged near the reptile’s eye.

According to KPRC, another individual had also seen the reptile the day before and shared an image to social media. The incident has drawn condemnation from the community’s residents who spoke with the station.

Weaver told multiple outlets that the area’s alligators are a regular fixture of her morning walks but were generally of little concern prior to this recent incident. Speaking with America's ABC-affiliate KTRK, Weaver said she believes someone “did this on purpose”.

“I want to get help for this alligator. I don’t want to see an alligator swimming around with a knife in his head and suffering,” Weaver said.

Callie Saurage of Gator Country, a park and rescue outfit that could potentially intervene, told USA Today that it needs express permission from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department to step in. In a statement to Gizmodo, a spokesperson for Gator Country said the organisation is not involved with the situation.

“Gator Country is not involved and has not been contacted by TPWD for assistance,” the spokesperson said by email. “A permitted nuisance alligator trapper has been issued a capture permit by the department and is taking steps to locate the injured gator.”

Fort Bend County Game Warden Barry Eversole told NBC News that the gator was located Friday and, subject to the scope of its injuries, may be removed from the lake for observation.

[MIKA27]

The Shining Returns In The First Doctor Sleep Trailer

It’s time to shine...whether Danny Torrance wants to or not.

Warner Bros. has dropped the first trailer for Doctor Sleep, its upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 continuation of his beloved horror classic The Shining.

Set decades after the events of the book, Doctor Sleep checks in with an older Danny (played by Ewan McGregor) as he finds himself reconnected with other people who have the same mysterious gift he dubs “the shining”—only to uncover a quest by a secretive cult to track down people with its power and kill them.

There’s a liberal amount of callbacks to the original novel here—as Danny confronts the legacy of his own father, in ways literal and more esoteric—as well as, of course, many connections to be made to its classic 1980 movie adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. Will this followup by Flanagan (Netflix’s Haunting of Hill House) be able to escape Kubrick’s shadow? Will it even want to, coming in the wake of a horror icon? We’ll find out November 7.

[MIKA27]

Family of Most Dangerous Mafia Turncoat Ever Comes Out of Hiding: ‘Just a Call Would Kill Us All’

The family of Tommaso Buscetta, whose testimony sent more than 400 gangsters to prison, has come out of hiding long enough to tell their story in an eye-opening new documentary.

Some might think you would have to be naive or nuts—or a little bit of both—to come out of hiding to talk on camera about what it's like to be related to Tommaso Buscetta, one of the most dangerous Mafia turncoat canaries in the world. But that is exactly what Cristina, his third wife, and Lisa and Roberto, two of his children, have done, and it is with jarring intimacy that they share their story in Mark Franchetti and Andrew Meier’s new documentary Our Godfather.

The investigative journalist-directors spent years chasing down every lead they could find to unearth Buscetta’s family, which begs the question that if they could find them, why hasn’t the mob? The directors told The Daily Beast in a Skype interview from Moscow and New York that they didn’t think the mob would go to the lengths they did, and anyway, the mob surely wouldn’t have the help of the Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA, who helped them lay the trail.

It took nearly two years of dead ends before the directors had a bite, which took them to Florida by way of Brazil and Italy. They sent an email to a cryptic address they had heard Cristina used with bait in the form of something only Cristina would know from her years under witness protection. Cristina bit. “She wrote, ‘You’ve awoken my curiosity,’” Meier says, and then all they had to do was convince her it was safe to show her face on camera.

The 90-minute film, which just came out on iTunes and will be released on Netflix this fall, is a deep dive through the blood-stained underbelly of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra at its most potent moment in history. It is intermeshed with scenes that feel like being in the getaway car with Buscetta’s family, who are in many ways still trying to escape their personal godfather’s life of crime.

While the documentary is fast-paced and entertaining, Buscetta is no Tony Soprano or Don Corleone, and the directors have no intention of glamorizing the mob. The story begins when Buscetta left Italy for Brazil, presumably to start the mob’s drug business there, where he met his third wife Cristina. By then he was Italy’s most-wanted man on the lam, and he was soon arrested and sent back to Sicily. 

“We cannot gloss over any of the damage this guy did,” Franchetti told The Daily Beast. “It was paramount that we not make this guy a saint.”

It was then, in the mid-1980s, with the prospect of his entire life in prison and never seeing his beloved Cristina or their children again, that Buscetta decided to cooperate with an up-and-coming anti-Mafia prosecuting judge by the name of Giovanni Falcone—who would later be martyred by the mob with another anti-Mafia judge, Paolo Borsellino.

Eventually Buscetta’s confessions—3,000 pages long—bore the famous Mafia Maxi Trial and led investigators to New York, where he testified for none other than a young Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose cameos betray the image many have of the Trump surrogate today. Giuliani was key to getting Buscetta on the stand because he provided the only link between the powerful Sicilian Mafia and its emerging brethren in America. And since Italy had no witness protection program, Giuliani made sure Buscetta and his family were protected under America’s system.

The film includes interviews with some of the agents charged with protecting a man a lot of people wanted dead. They became like roommates, and, like a typical Italian, Buscetta would send his bodyguards out for fresh ingredients and then dazzle them with Sicilian recipes. One of the agents smiles as he admits that he still uses Buscetta’s recipe for pasta puttanesca today.

Our Godfather is a family movie of sorts, fed by Buscetta’s son Roberto’s own ‘90s camcorder home movies. He taunted his father with the camera in their hideouts and houses, and is in many ways the chief narrator of his father’s very strange life. He does not show his face on camera, but there is simply no need. He lives in fear. “The Mafia doesn’t ever forget,” Roberto says. “Somebody is going to know somebody who knows somebody and they’re going to come and get you.”

It is evident that Buscetta was a strong man with real blood on his hands, though, at times, especially when he is caught on his son’s home video, he seems almost flaccid, especially in his later years before he died of cancer in 2000 at the age of 72.

Buscetta’s life is a story of power, fame and reluctant remorse. Even when he turned on the mob in the mid-1980s, becoming the most killable turncoat in the history of the mob, he seemed conniving and arrogant, showing up in court in slick suits with an air of confidence that only comes with proven brutality.

Buscetta's wife Cristina in America now

Still, neither Roberto or Lisa hated their father for all he put them through. “I don’t care what anybody says,” a tearful Lisa tells the directors. “He was my dad.”

His testimony in Italy and the United States sent more than 400 gangsters to prison. As you might imagine, the mob was not exactly pleased. They found two of his sons living in Palermo and dismembered and dissolved them in acid as a warning even before he turned.

Buscetta was the youngest of 17 children who grew up in gritty post-war Palermo at a time when the Mafia provided an easy escape to the disenfranchised. He was the only person in his family to join the mob, and he did so with drive and determination, leaving a trail of corpses and drug convictions in his wake. Still, when he turned into a pentito or turncoat, no one named Buscetta was safe. Cousins and some of his 16 siblings were under constant threat after Buscetta turned his back on the omertà, or code of silence that bonds mafiosi together.

There is a poignant scene in which Buscetta reflects on all he has done. “I am a traitor,” he says, with a hint of regret. Indeed, he was. And his children and wife know full well that reviving this ghost could be fatal. “Nothing scares me,” Cristina says in the film. “Just a call would kill us all.”

[MIKA27]

Aston Martin’s Valhalla Is A Carbon Fiber Hypercar Built For The Gods

Originally unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show under the code name AM-RB 003, there’s been a lot of buildup and speculation surrounding Aston Martin’s “baby Valkyrie.” But now the mid-engine hypercar is officially going into production with a heavenly name: Valhalla.

Built in collaboration with Red Bull Advanced Technologies and Adrian Newey, the Valhalla takes its naming tradition from Norse mythology, same as the Valkyrie before it. And, based on what we know so far, it’s more than appropriate. You see, this magnificent chariot hinges on radical aerodynamics and an ultra-lightweight construction — including an all-carbon fiber body. It is also said to be powered by a hybrid powertrain that includes a high-output turbocharged V6 engine alongside a battery-electric system, although performance figures have yet to be unveiled. Another brilliant addition to Aston Martin’s legendary lineup of ‘V’ cars, the Valhalla will be limited to just 500 examples.

[MIKA27]

Ultra-Violent Vigilantes Take On Corrupt Superheroes In ‘The Boys’ Trailer

If you’re looking to feast on a show with entertaining ultra-violence, the TV adaption of Garth Ennis’ comic book series is right up your alley. Creators Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen, and Eric Kripke brought Ennis’ panels to life, and judging by The Boys trailer, the show looks like a blast.

If you’re not familiar with the story, The Boys takes place in a world where corrupt superheroes abuse their powers and celebrity status, leading to the formation of a team of vigilantes to take them down. The small, clandestine squad is led by Billy Butcher, who is played by the always on-point Karl Urban, as the group is tasked with monitoring the superheroes. The trailer for the Amazon series promises buckets of gore and dark comedy similar to R-rated comic-book offerings like Kick-Ass and Deadpool. Joining Urban is Chace Crawford, Jennifer Esposito, Jack Quaid, Laz Alonso, and Karen Fukuhara. The first episode hits the small screen on July 26, 2019.

[MIKA27]

Peerless Distilling Releases Their First Bourbon Since Prohibition

The history of whiskey within the United States is surely interesting — and when the distilleries in question happen to be over a century old, there’s always a grandiose story to be told. Kentucky’s Peerless Distilling Company is one such namesake — and in less than a month, they’ll be releasing their first Bourbon in over a century.

After being founded under the E.W. Worsham Distilling name in the summer of 1881, Elijah W. Worsham and Capt. J.B. Johnston’s aptly-dubbed company began the production of the original Peerless whiskey. In 1889, following the untimely death of the company’s owner, the distillery was sold to a local handyman by the name of Henry Kraver, who would immediately invest in its expansion. Worsham Distilling would become federally bonded after the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. But by 1917, the company would cease all operations to aid in the conservation of corn for the war effort. Ironically enough, the 18th Amendment would also be passed during this time. After ten decades, Kraver’s Peerless whiskey has been put back into production, boasting a non-chill filtered spirit that utilizes sweet mash, instead of sour — resulting in a 107 proof, cask-strength bourbon. The four-year whiskey will be available for purchase at Kentucky Peerless on June 22 for an approximate price of $69.

[MIKA27]

Tag Heuer’s 50th Anniversary Monaco Watch Gets A Red ’80s Edition

Tag Heuer has been a mainstay in the wristwear world since its conception in 1860. As a trademark of the company’s prestigious past, their Monaco watch has done its part to elevate the Swiss brand into an honored position. Now, to commemorate the timepiece’s 50th Anniversary, Heuer has announced a new addition to the already-established collection of commemorative Monaco timepieces — the Calibre 11.

The Calibre 11 joins four other special edition timepieces, each with their own historic colorway, background, and represented time period. For this era, which focuses on the brand’s essential products from 1979-1989, Tag Heuer has implemented an attractive deep red dial, silver and black detailing, Rhodium plated indices (and hands), and a Swiss-made Calibre 11 movement that boasts a 40-hour power reserve. The watch’s handsome, polished steel case back is also accented with engraving demarcating its limited edition run of just 169 pieces. The 50th Anniversary Monaco Calibre 11 is available now via Tag Heuer’s website for $6,550.

[MIKA27]

Adam Savage Built A Titanium Iron Man Suit That Actually Flies

Marvel fans across the globe have always dreamed of being the genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist known as Iron Man. Well, former Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage has built his own functional, flying Iron Man suit on his new eight-part series called Savage Builds, which revolves around extreme engineering.

The superhero suit is made from 3D-printed titanium and powered by a jetpack from Gravity Industries. It also has parts constructed from 3D-printed nylon, fiberglass, and urethane, and has hinged joints to accurately mimic the onscreen armor. Flight is possible thanks to five 1,000-horsepower mini jet engines attached to the exoskeleton. According to Savage, if Tony Stark was real, he would take this very same approach to execute the build of his suit. So far, they have managed to get the Iron Man suit 15 feet hovering off the ground, bringing joy to superhero hopefuls. It may not be the up to par with the fictional suit, but it’s one giant leap in the right direction. And we love it 3,000.

 

[MIKA27]

Rezvani’s Overbuilt 2020 Tank Comes With 1,000HP & EMP Protection

A few years back, Rezvani took the world by storm with their stealthy, ultra-badass Tank SUV, which promised things like 500 horsepower, an on-demand 4×4 system, and bombproof body armor. And while it was a marvel of modern engineering, the brand was convinced they could do better. So they rebuilt it from the ground up for the 2020 model year.

The 2020 Rezvani Tank shares zero parts with its predecessors — meaning it’s related in spirit and name alone. And while the teaser images leave much to the imagination, there are some hard specs the brand is promising. That includes options like a 6.2L supercharged V8 engine sourced from the Dodge Demon with over 1,000 horsepower, a body-on-steel frame design, upgraded suspension designed in conjunction with FOX Racing, and massive all-terrain tires. They’re also going to be releasing a Military Edition that comes with onboard EMP (electromagnetic pulse) protection to keep critical electrical systems safe. Deliveries are expected in winter of 2019, but you can guarantee your spot in line right now with a refundable $2,500 deposit.