Archive | 10:27 pm

American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior: Cadillac Build-Off Part 2

6 Jun

June 6, 2011

For those of you who missed part one, here is a quick recap:

Cadillac approached both OCC and PJD with the idea of building a bike for charity. It is being billed as a build-off because one of them will be chosen as the better bike. PJD seems to have the edge because they have a pair of brand new Cadillacs in the shop and are using them as a template and for parts. OCC has a fairly average Jason Pohl design. Senior spent the entire episode telling blatant lies about Paulie and outright insulting him, and then decided that he should meet him in person and make up. And oh yeah, get those shares of OCC Paulie owns. Response to last week’s show is pretty consistent. Emailer’s agree that Paulie has the better bike and that Senior is a jerk.

This episode, like so many before them, just served to show what a jerk he is. He went on and on about how “paranoid” Paulie is, to the point  that he became obsessed with it. He actually believed that Paulie hired spies to take pictures of OCC’s bike. So to prove… I don’t know what he wanted to prove, he and his partner-in-stupid Jason Pohl dressed up in cammo gear, covered themselves in leaves, and crawled commando-style through a vacant lot to Paulie’s fence and hung a sign to tease him.

Paulie never even mentioned it.

More and more, the main draw of this show is Senior’s idiocy. It stopped being about the bikes long ago, and it isn’t even about the lawsuit anymore since it only rated about three minutes of screen time. Here’s the update: They are close to a deal.

However, it wouldn’t be fair of me to not mention something nice. Some kids from the Duchenne’s charity visited. Duchenne is a type of muscular dystrophy and the bikes will be auctioned off to help that charity. Some of the kids visited OCC where they designed a bike with Sr. and Jason Pohl. The kids left with copies of the blueprints they designed. Those guys are jerks, but that was a nice moment.

The kids also visited PJD where they painted with Mikey. Mikey had the line of the night. A parent said to him “you’re an artist too?” Mikey replied “I call myself that.” Nice! No one else does.

The centerpiece of the show was not the disappointing unveil but a competition in which OCC and PJD each raced Cadillacs and compared times.

Senior: “I think we smoked it.”

In fact, Senior had the slowest time and Paulie, everyone else from PJD, and the rest of OCC all beat his time. And he’s the big car collector and “risk taker,” which he must have said about half a dozen times. The fastest time was from an OCC guy we never saw before, named Storm. I think they brought in a ringer. The winning team? PJD, and Senior was visibly upset.

At the unveil, Senior and Junior were together for the first time with each other’s bikes. Paulie’s was far better. They drove out simultaneously and stopped, facing each other. Paulie pulled a power mover. After a pause, he lowered his bike to the ground, no kickstand. The crowd roared. Senior had a surprise too. His had a hidden gas tank and what everyone thought was the tank actually hid a nitrous bottle.

Neither said much, though they did fist bump, and you could see that each crew liked and admired some parts or features of the other’s bike. PJD’s bike was mostly favored by Caddy designers, particularly one who said “I’m the rear engineer.” That’s an interesting title. There was also plenty of love for the OCC bike too.

Which bike was better? I say it was Paulie’s. It was low and long and had great sleek lines. The rear looked like a Caddy rear. Senior’s was nice, not great.

As Dandydan wrote here in response to last week’s blog, all the OCC technology (which Senior bragged about again) just makes their bikes less impressive. And Rick Petko said on the show this week “There’s tons of chrome and paint, more than we’ve had in a long time.” How long? Since Paulie left?

But you all want to know who won. I have to tell you…

… no one won. It was a bullshit ending. They gave a website so the fans could vote on the bikes. No winner was declared.

To see the bikes and bid or vote, go to www.discovery.com/auction I hope that link works for you because as of this writing the site is overloaded.

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It Takes A Tough Man To Make A Tender Chicken Dance.

6 Jun

June 6, 2011

GEORGE: Do chickens have individual personalities?
KRAMER: I don’t care.
GEORGE: If you had five chickens could you tell them apart by just the way they acted? Or would they all just be walking around? Cluck, cluck, cluck? Because if they have individual personalities I don’t think we should be eating them.
           –Seinfeld, The Dinner Party

Any of you guys coming to NYC? If you are coming to the City the best part of the City to visit is Chinatown, and the best time to visit Chinatown is the 1970′s. So hop in your hot tub time machines and travel back with me to the era of the ABA, roller-disco, and dancing chickens.

Yes, dancing chickens. And this time I mean it.

But you’ll have to wait a minute for it.

Remember the show That’s Incredible? It was on in the air in the early 80’s. It was sort of a modern take on Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and was hosted by the scary-talented Fran Tarkenton, whose impressive TV resume includes playing in some football games televised on Monday Night Football. With him were John Davidson, whose hair was tailor-made for television, and Cathy Lee Crosby, whom I am still not sure why she became well-known.

I think John is farting.

The show was a hit, and if you wonder what the ratings were, don’t bother. You know you are talking about a hit show when you can find this in its wikipedia entry:

The show has been cited as an influence on hip-hop culture in New Zealand, where much television programming in the 1980s was American. In 1983 the show featured several dancing crews, giving youth of Pacific Island and Maori heritage, many of whom were interested in hip-hop culture and dance, a sense of connectedness to global youth culture. The Floormasters hip hop dance crew appeared on the show in 1983.

But since I found this on wikipedia, which I stubbornly refuse to capitalize, that could simply be someone’s idea of a joke. I watched every episode of Flight of the Conchords and they never once talked about That’s Incredible.

I never really watched the show but I did have some of the books, at least the first three. Each volume had sections on some incredible people or things, like knife throwers or the world’s fattest midget.

It was in those pages that I read about the Dancing Chicken.

The Dancing Chicken lived in my neck of the woods, New York City. Specifically, it lived in Chinatown, and outside of Colonel Sanders’ backyard a more dangerous spot for a chicken to live you’d be hard-pressed to find. I already knew about the Dancing Chicken and his friend, a chicken of mystery whom I will reveal in due time. In fact, I had already seen them a few times.

Now, how you feel about the Dancing Chicken depends on how you feel about animal cruelty. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a chicken left out in the rain, and 10 being a chicken getting sodomized by a wolf, this falls in at about a 2.5. If that offends you, and you are still reading after “a chicken getting sodomized by a wolf” you may want to skip ahead a few paragraphs to the mystery chicken.

The chickens lived at the sadly gone Chinatown Fair, an unofficial landmark and a great place to play video games and pinball, but an ever better place to get robbed and pick-pocketed so you had to watch out.

Hey, what word is missing below dancing? Hmm...

The Dancing Chicken was not far inside the front door. These chickens were major attractions. If I am not mistaken, they were both easily visible from the street.

Straight from YouTube, here is The Dancing Chicken of Chinatown


What made it dance? A mild electrical charge on the floor. Hey, it was the 70’s. New York was the Wild West and if some poor chicken got its feet tingled, then tough. If a respected military man like Col. Sanders, who  retired from a lifetime of campaigns and trench warfare, never said boo about chicken abuse, who was there to argue?

See what New York has come to? You can’t smoke outdoors, you can’t drive in Mid-Town, and you can’t electrocute a chicken. Thanks Mayor Bloomberg.

The Dancing Chicken’s mystery friend (so to speak- in reality they were fierce rivals) was the Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Chicken. You may have even seen one yourself. Although it was less cruel than the Dancing Chicken it was more fun. You got a chance to play a game against a chicken, and who hasn’t dreamed about that? You’d put in a quarter and the chicken would walk over to its “thinking booth,” a screen behind which he would make his move. The chicken always went first, and if you know tic-tac-toe you know that is a big advantage because the first to move usually wins. The chicken had one other advantage- he wasn’t really playing. A computer was making the moves.

What happened was that when you put in your money a piece of corn or barley or whatever chickens eat dropped into a slot behind the thinking booth. The chicken walked over and took the food and had to peck a certain button. It was always embarrassing to lose to the chicken and there was a ton of jeering. Every once in a while someone would overcome great odds and heroically win but those wins were few and far between.

These games still go on today.


That is a pretty lucky chicken. Most don’t get that level of respect.

“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it says ‘Chicken of the Sea.’” – Jessica Simpson.

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