What the heck is a Radius, anyway?
I’m (kinda) glad you asked. Radius is Hagerty’s private giveaway magazine for certain insurance customers and intenders. I believe that they think of it as a sort of American take on Octane. After reading the bulk of the first issue, to which I contributed a small piece, I asked to be left out of future issues.
Prior to my termination, however, I was directed by management to contribute a pair of pieces to Radius 03. The first was a drastically bowdlerized version of my 765LT Spider review for Hagerty’s website. The other one, which was also the final thing I wrote for Hagerty’s printed media, happens to be a damp squib of a non-driving summary piece about the new V6 Ferrari Dino. What a way to end a career!
As a kindness, or perhaps as a way to make some room on the list for someone who didn’t write anything in the issue, I was left off the masthead for Radius 03. Hope she saw it, bro.
I can’t tell you to get a copy of Radius, although the first person to stop by my house and ask can have the one in the photo for free. I can tell you how to read my Substack, which is 100% full of things that I wrote with a full heart (clear eyes, can’t lose a Honda Challenge race and in fact I never did) and no sense of compulsion, obligation, or desperation behind the words. It’s at Avoidable Contact Forever, and I’d like you to join me there. You can read more than one thousand free articles and decide if you’re willing to pay for the rest. I can also be periodically found in the Washington Examiner and various cycling publications.
This site will continue into the foreseeable future with my brilliant co-writers and the occasional contribution from me as well. I remain grateful to all my friends and readers. Your loyalty and kindness has enabled me to feed my son when other people chose to let me down at the worst possible time. See you around.
I suppose they rejected “Tangent” and “Ulna” as possible titles.
If I gave you the list of names they considered, you would laugh until your teeth fell out.
Tangent was one of them.
Were they deciding between that and Mohammed?
Um, Cosine? Vector? Tangent? Vertigo? Speculum? Phallus no wait PHALLIC!! Guess my media marketing and product planning career is not off to an auspicious start. Seems Jack isn’t just burning the longship on the invasion beach but freakin’ napalming it with lasers man, freakin lasers!
PS: yeah, Jack’s new substack is that good and he’s just getting started. Sign up now (this writer has no financial conflicts to disclose)
They should have used HypTan. The jokes write themselves.
The Hack Mechanic wrote that he told someone he did a favor to that they should make a donation to Planned Parenthood in his mother’s name. Somehow endorsing a genocidal white supremacist organization isn’t as offensive to Hagerty as hurting the feelings of a GM exec.
What’s rich is that he wrote that with no sense of irony whatsoever…a sexagenarian whose mother obviously did not abort him requesting a donation to an abortion provider in his *mother’s* name. The joke writes itself.
Loyalty to the Party is beyond all reason, Sir!
Sadly this so-called genocide organization didn’t get to you parents before they performed their Christian Duty and created you.
Sadly, your parents didn’t perform their duty and see that you were properly educated in the fundamentals of grammar.
i subscribed to whatever you required a subscription to. is this it? if not, how do i get to it? thanks!
I’m at
avoidablecontact.substack.com
Just click that link!
Waitaminnit ! .
I didn’t have to join and pay to read substack ?! .
Oh well, too late now and I’m enjoying it, that’s the main thing .
-Nate
You can’t read more than a teaser of the current article or comment unless you subscribe.
I’m sure you can sell a few stamps to cover the subscription costs.
Regarding stamps, a collector buys, never sells. The problem usually comes in when the stamp dealer rips off the widow. As my daughter also collects…
Jack’s prices, especially with the discount code, are quite reasonable. His new direction of tearing things down and “starting shit” are really not for me. Insulting and belittling that second gen GM exec while ignoring the mass of AA execs really rubbed me the wrong way. So If I was over there, I would be mostly posting heckling comments. Jack doesn’t need that, it is his megaphone..
Can’t take ‘em with you when you go. Just sayin’
Most of the new stuff is and will be part of the paid subscription. I’ll do one or two free articles a week.
Yeah, I noticed the newest article about the Toyobaru had a “lock”.
On FocusST.org we had a thread started about the blown motor guy and I wanted to link to Jack’s take but didn’t know if it would even take due to being locked. And unless I had permission I wasn’t going to copy/pasta anything.
“You can’t read more than a teaser of the current article or comment unless you subscribe.”
Okay, now I get it .
Good thing I subscribed .
-Nate
The Substack is worth every penny.
God bless you. And I’m just starting to start shit, I promise.
Jack, I hate to be that guy, but I didn’t get the discount link for the Substack in my email..
Just sent to you from my Gmail. Thank you!
Cheers mate
“The 675LT was notorious for blank infotainment screens and frequent “reboots” of the system; those annoyances are yesterday’s news, replaced by a new and larger screen with excellent visibility even in sunlight.”
This is where you delivered on your promise to your employer to to diss the old McLaren and shill the new one, but also deliver on your promise to the customer to warn them the infotainment still sucks and they are unlikely to fix it.
Not precisely true, because I also shit on it in the R&T 675LT test:
“Next, there’s the fussy infotainment/climate control system. It’s based on the Android OS yet has all sorts of issues pairing and working with Android phones. If you have an iPhone, integration is a bit smoother, but it’s still nothing like the quiet competence one sees in, say, the head unit of a base-model Chevy Spark. This has been a problem since the first MP4-12C and McLaren still hasn’t gotten it truly right.”
” the center-console switches wouldn’t elevate the aesthetic qualities of a Super Nintendo. Nor can the obvious high quality of the contrast-stitched Alacantara disguise an interior design that surprises (with sharp edges) far more often than it delights. The whole car gives off a sort of half-baked, Made-In-England vibe to go with its olfactory chorus of hot-plastic smells. If you’ve spent any time driving a Ferrari 488 GTB or Lamborghini Huracan, both of which arrive at the dealership as fully realized, consumer-friendly purchase objects ready for delivery to the least car-savvy tech-IPO millionaire or the meekest sheikh, this 675LT will make you recall an era when exotic cars were exotic in all the senses of the word.”