Ovid_and_Flem wrote:JohnRW1621 wrote: It's the command of English punctuation that really tipped my scales to believe. It is rare trait around here especially with our chatter style of conversation. Personal, I find myself intimidated and over scrutinizing my own writing in this thread. I anticipate that the word whom will be used correctly before this thread is over, ha.. Of whom do you speak? Certainly not the Gatekeeper.
What ever possessed one to elicit Zuul? Heaven forfend!
Greetings from the MAGNOLIA state. Our team IT Specialist has gone AWOL. HIS PROBATION Officer hAs just called and informed me his ankle monitoring device indicates he is somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Panama city, Florida. If I had to guess he is tossing mullets at the FLORA-BAMA. A tri-state man hunt is underway and I anticipate he will be at the gray bar hotel and not at the shop on Monday morning.
I hate to impose but I am one of the'pooter illiterate graduates from Ole Miss. Try as I might ah cannot figure how to post visuals for those of you that need photographic proof of our progress.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
.
B&S, LTD. . A DRINKING TEAM WITH A RACING PROBLEM.
I would try Imgur. It's got a really simple interface to upload pictures. Once they're uploaded, just right click on the photos, left click on "copy image address," go to the forum, left click on the picture icon above the smilies, and paste in the image address. Voila!
You mean this thread can get better with pictures? imgur as g body man mentioned, or postimage.org for free, simple-ish uploading and sharing.
Thank you, kind sir.
A mint Julep for you when I hope we meet in Gainesville.
I have no idea what's happening here, but I think I like it.
I'm not sure what's real and what isn't in this threaf, and i don't care. Brilliant read, if nothing else.
not idea whats going on, but sounds like fun and can not wait to see these guys in sept.
Ovid_and_Flem wrote: Greetings from the MAGNOLIA state. Our team IT Specialist has gone AWOL. HIS PROBATION Officer hAs just called and informed me his ankle monitoring device indicates he is somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Panama city, Florida. If I had to guess he is tossing mullets at the FLORA-BAMA. A tri-state man hunt is underway and I anticipate he will be at the gray bar hotel and not at the shop on Monday morning. I hate to impose but I am one of the'pooter illiterate graduates from Ole Miss. Try as I might ah cannot figure how to post visuals for those of you that need photographic proof of our progress. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. . B&S, LTD. . A DRINKING TEAM WITH A RACING PROBLEM.
Since the pictures have not yet surfaced I thought I would repeat G-man's advise but deliver it in a "long hand" format.
G_Body_Man wrote: I would try Imgur. It's got a really simple interface to upload pictures. Once they're uploaded, just right click on the photos, left click on "copy image address," go to the forum, left click on the picture icon above the smilies, and paste in the image address. Voila!
On some other forums you can directly post your pictures right up to the forum. This means that the forum owner(business) eats the expense of the additional bandwidth needed to host those pictures. The GRM forum is not that way. I think the reason is that it keeps expenses lower. Instead, here on GRM you first need to get your photo up to somewhere on the internet. A very popular way to do this is through the "free (but forced to see advertising)services" like Imgur or photobucket.
You sign up with one of these services and send your picture to them. So as an example, you upload a photo to Imgur. Once uploaded, Imgur will give you a URL (aka web address) of how to get to that photo and that photo only. You copy that URL of Imgur.
When writing your text, you see the row of smiley faces?
Above that is a row of icons starting with B for bold and I for Italics. Next the chain for links followed by block quote and next CAMERA for insert image.
Once you have copied the URL from Imgur then click on the camera icon and past in that URL. Like magic, your picture from Imgur will now appear in your posting.
Hosting of photos potentially exposes grm to a liability they don't need.
FOR THOSE OF YOU YOUNGSTERS WHO AREN'T FAMILIAR WITH B&S, LTD., A LITLE HISTORY READING ASSIGNMENT. REPINTED FROM FEB. 12, 1973 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED....ENJOY.
WAITIN' FOR THE ROBERT E. SNOPES By Robert F. Jones
The only thing that saved Daytona from dullsville was this entry from down on the levee. They lost it and loved it.
Feb. 12, 1973
As the renowned Southern sage, Ovid Bolus, once remarked: "Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess." That wisdom is especially applicable to long-distance motor racing, a sport that must rank with the most excessive human activities on record. Unlike such benign excesses as flagpole sitting or marathon dancing, long-distance motor racing is very noisy, very dirty, very complex and sometimes very dangerous. One need only visit such sacred shrines of the sport as Le Mans, Sebring or Daytona to get the picture. Take a look at the stands or the pits at, say, about three o'clock in the morning halfway through a 24-hour race. Spectators, crewmen and drivers alike wear expressions of sublime ennui, their ears beaten flat and their senses scrambled by the unremitting roar of big motors.
There are some few moments of spectacle—blown engines that bang like frag bombs, flaming wrecks that brighten the night like fireworks, or the case of the Corvette that vaulted the wall during last year's Daytona Continental and crashed on top of a camper whose owner (fortunately) had just gone out for a hamburger. But for the most part a long-distance endurance race is dead beer, stale cigarettes, gritty eyeballs and the endless orbit of flatulent machinery.
Until recently the practitioners of this masochistic art were perfect copies of their sport: sobersided, deadly serious men and women who droned on and on through the night about things as thrilling as valve seats, brake wear and snaffle settings. The trouble was they hadn't listened to Ovid Bolus. Their excesses were not excessive enough. Well, if you're wearing the right colored brakes and you've lubricated your valve seats thoroughly enough, pull up a snaffle and sit down. The times they are a-changin' on the enduro circuit, thanks to Ovid Bolus and his partner, Flem Snopes.
The venerable firm of Bolus & Snopes, Ltd. was much in evidence at Daytona International Speedway last week. The occasion was the 24 Hours of Daytona, the world's most enervating road race now that Sebring has bitten the dust. This event is the first of 11 such events internationally, the only one in the U.S., with all of them reaching for a thing known as the World Championship of Makes—in which a brand name, not a driver, emerges as the hero.
"Nuff said," growled one of the team's torque-wrench supervisors. "We're too durned literary already."
Not at all. In point of fact, the cockeyed wit and absurd wisdom of Bolus & Snopes have given endurance racing a dimension that too long has been missing from all motor sports: a sense of fun. In a sport that has grown nearly as serious as it is costly, in terms both of life and dollars, the Bolus & Snopes team provides a refreshing breeze of native humor—literate, ludicrous, antic and witty. It also provides good racing.
For the past two seasons the team has gone barnstorming for a modest outlay of $15,000. It was clearly money well spent. Last season former SCCA national champion Bob (Robert) Mitchell wheeled to his second straight Southeast division B-production title in a Bolus & Snopes "grabber blue" Shelby GT-350H (the H means that it's an ex-Hertz rental car). He scored three victories and only two of the debacles usually favored by the team.
The B & S endurance racer, the 1969 orange Camaro, finished 11th overall and first in the touring class of last season's shortened 6 Hours of Daytona, and the team placed second in its division at the 12 Hours of Sebring. Dismayed by these successes, B & S this year plans to campaign a Dodge Colt in IMSA's B.F. Goodrich Radial Challenge Series in addition to running the Camaro in endurance races.
And at last, international acclaim is just around the turn: the team recently received a communication from Le Mans. It was addressed to "Monsieur le Directeur, du Bolus & Snopes," and it was a Demande de Participation in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Last year, when the team tried to enter, it was brushed off. This year Bolus & Snopes is toying with the idea of reciprocating, though the prospect of racing in France is inviting, if they can get the backing.
Mitchell, 31, who works as a physicist at the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., is a lean, dark, intense young man whose driving skills and technical talents more than compensate for the team's otherwise easygoing approach. At Daytona last week he was joined by another real racer, Steve Ross of Rochester, N.Y., a Trans-Am veteran who set up the B & S Camaro. Indeed, it was Ross' own car, partially sponsored by a northern kin group of Bolus & Snopes, an outfit named "The True Friends of Hernando De Soto." Thus the infection seems to be spreading, and all for the better.
B & S is the joint product of the fertile, indeed some might say febrile, brains of a pair of Mississippians from Faulkner country. Sam E. Scott, 35, the titular team manager, is a lawyer in Jackson, Miss. His partner, William Jeanes, 34, is the bearded scion of a family from the same town that made its fortune distributing diesel engines—a fact that had an obvious though convoluted influence on young Jeanes' development. "Bill and I studied history together at Millsaps College in Jackson," explains Sam Scott in his balding drawl. "We both were into racing and we both read a lot. Bill was always writing things and I was good at talking. One of the books that stuck in my mind was a tome titled Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, by a fellow named Joseph Glover Baldwin. There was a chapter in it about a famous old lawyer and confidence man named Ovid Bolus who operated in our neck of the swamp back during the 1830s and '40s. Ovid Bolus, Esq., Attorney at Law and Solicitor in Chancery, that was his title. Old Ovid, he specialized in cheating Indians—not individually but by the tribe."
According to Glover, Bolus was a great raconteur, practitioner of an art that like so many others was once strong in the South but seems to be dying along with all the fine traditions. Bolus was a grand villain in the Faulknerian mold, a true rascal. "Well, Bill Jeanes and I were sitting around my backyard one Sunday afternoon, drinking too many martinis by far, when we decided to start a racing team. What better boss for a racing team could you choose than Ovid Bolus? But the name, just by itself, looked a bit naked. We both had great affection for the ampersand—it looks so nice and convoluted, unlike those buildings you see in New York or Chicago. So we had to come up with another name and since we lived in Jackson, which was Faulkner's backyard, we settled on Flem Snopes. He was the cleverest of the Snopeses, mean and nasty. His daddy was the barn burner."
The ongoing saga of Bolus & Snopes was born that afternoon and is commemorated, according to Jeanes, by a "suitably engraved bronze olive" that now stands in Scott's backyard, marking the spot for posterity and all martini drinkers to come. Scott also had been impressed by an account in the Glover book of a libel suit involving a mule named Dick Johnson, a typically 19th century squabble that divided a whole town into what Sam calls "assites and anti-assites." Clearly Dick Johnson had to be the team mascot. And just as clearly he had to disappear in order to evoke concern among the faithful. Dick, who—according to the publication known as The Newsletter of Bolus & Snopes—had once out raced a tornado until it caught him while he was fording the Sunflower River in Leflore County, Miss., was last seen overtaking a national guard truck convoy on the road to a racetrack in the Middle West. What became of him afterward is anyone's guess, although the blimp, Graf Bolus, conducted a lengthy search in the months that followed. (At one point a kindly housewife in St. Louis "mistakenly harbored the infamous mule, Rutherford B., in her garage under the impression that it was Dick Johnson," but spectroscopic examination of tail-hair cuttings proved her wrong, no matter how kindly intentioned. The search goes on.)
Another B & S invention is the steamboat Robert E. Snopes, which is moored at a landing in Hannibal, Mo., laden with beer, car parts and a harpoon gun; anyone seeking a ride to New Orleans had better come prepared with a loaded poker deck and a derringer. And alternate transportation. Any complaints regarding service should be forwarded, preferably with a cash donation, to the Bolus & Snopes Tower, Jackson, Miss.
"We've had a great response from the fans," says Scott. "People write us all the time asking for decals and posters of Dick Johnson or the Graf Bolus, and they always include a letter that tries to be funnier than we are, which isn't all that difficult. But I really think that racing should be fun. The best kind of a laugh is the laugh that comes at your own expense, provided that it's tempered by a concern with quality and competitiveness. All we want around here is adequacy, a rare component in America these days. Adequacy and a few laughs."
Well if any one spirit dominates the Bolus & Snopes operation it is an esprit de derrière, and nobody can say that the team failed to fulfill it at Daytona last week. If the "mark of adequacy" is anything to live down to, Bolus & Snopes went even lower. Drivers Mitchell, Houser and Ross managed to qualify the Camaro in the 21st position on a grid that included 51 cars.
The pole position was won at 129.995 mph in a snarling little Gulf Mirage driven by England's Derek Bell and Mike Hailwood. Close behind lay the Matra-Simca of François Cevert, Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Henri Pescarolo, then another Mirage and then an ancient, predominantly French-manned Lola Hardly the sort of field to send the fans into raptures. Oh, there was Mark Donohue and George Follmer in a nifty new prototype Porsche Carrera even more niftily prepared by the Penske team, and another three-liter Carrera in the hands of Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood, both of them accomplished young road racers. There were Corvettes to please the Stingray studs and there were four Ferrari GTB4s out of the Luigi Chinetti North American racing stable.
But all of them were serious, oh so serious. When the green flag flapped, the Mirages leaped out and led the field. Not for long. Mechanical problems of the customarily obscure and mumbled nature that befalls these machines ultimately made both Mirages fade. Then the Matra had its brief day. It, too, finally broke. The small-car folks were up next, with Donohue leading for quite a while and making people wonder, in the wake of his recent Winston 500 win, if he wasn't just going to drive off with all the money everywhere this year. After a long, nighttime duel with the other Carrera, Donohue's engine went spang—or at least one of his pistons burned—and the race victory finally went to Gregg and Haywood. Donohue was in fairly good company, since two of the four Ferraris also failed along with all but 19 cars in the field.
Meanwhile, Bolus & Snopes ambled mulishly on. "The battle plan is to run slow but sure for the first few hours," said Sam Scott, "and then quit." Indeed, as the race entered its ninth hour the B & S Camaro slowed and finally stopped altogether, much in the manner of a beloved beast of burden that has lived its life to the fullest and then flat-out died. The official reason for the retirement was the failure of an oil pump, but don't you dare believe it.
"Last year we only had to run six hours to win our class here," snarled Jeanes after the retirement, "and this year we just plumb refused to run any longer than an eight-hour day. We're honest working stiffs and we got a union behind us after all."
Ah yes, the joys of excess. The way it turned out it could have been the dullest 24 hours in Daytona memory. The serious teams all went at it seriously. But in the end most of them failed. Okay, so Bolus & Snopes failed, too. But at least they had fun doing it. Or as Ovid Bolus put it as he staggered off toward Mississippi: "We shall return. If we ever get around to it."
So if I understand this right: the team Bolus-foodball and Snopes-falsity comprised of members Ovid-the Roman poet and Flem-phlegm are entering the challenge?
In reply to MrJoshua:
That's the rumor....
...if we ever get around to it.
In reply to Ovid_and_Flem:
Welcome!
MrJoshua wrote: In reply to Ovid_and_Flem: Welcome!
Thank you! We will strive to Be adequate with our build. But more importantly we will be having an excess of fun
MrJoshua wrote: So if I understand this right: the team Bolus-foodball and Snopes-falsity comprised of members Ovid-the Roman poet and Flem-phlegm are entering the challenge?
Not only entering but entering with some mud covered, previously totaled due to insurance claim vehicle that was left over after the litigation ended.
Still no word on what the vehicle is.
In reply to JohnRW1621:
John... I sent you a PM,,,did you receive it?
I did not receive.
Try sending directly to
Jwelsh02...yahoo...
When taking the mystery vehicle of the blocks in preparation for washing the mud caked on, a loud thud occurred and this fell from under the car/tuck-like silhouette:
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....an odd spare wheel and tire for sure.
When Ovid, IV, ESQ. squinted his eyes hey made out the possible image of....wait for it.....a rare PEGASUS??!!??
Could he be so fortunate as to have discovered this highly collectible automotive icon? Time and several gallons of water through his trusty pressure washer would tell..
In reply to Ovid_and_Flem:
Oh! That would be more than just "adequate".
That would be Legen... Wait for it..................................................................................... Dairy!
Damn...the pressure washer ran out of fuel just as he was making some headway on the interior. And thanks to Mississippi Blue Laws that prohibit the sale of alcohol, including ethanol laced gasoline, between midnight Saturday and midnight Sunday, further progress was halted. Fortunately Ovid, IV, ESQ. had remember to stock up on bourbon so he decided to fix a toddy and reminisce about the successes of bygone days of racing ventures of B&S, LTD.
Like July 4, 1972 at the Ponca City Races, where "Sitting Bob" Mitchell drove to a blistering second place finish.
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You can see the snout of the blue B&S GT350H Mustang lined up next to the cobra on the grid.
Later paint schemes as it was vintage raced in subsequent years:
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And of course the Daytona winning endurance racing Camaro:
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There's a fine line between "waking up" and "coming to" thought Ovid, IV, Esq. as he rolled off his futon Monday at noon. Time to get down to the SprintMart to get some ethanol and resume pressure washing on what he hoped would be a rare Pegasus conversion (one of only 9 ever built) that would fund a comfortable retirement if the right bidders were in the room at the upcoming Tupelo Barrett-Jackson auctions.
After a brief encounter with the local constabulary about whether it was prudent to transport ethanol in a Jim Beam half gallon vessel and whether that constituted technically a violation of open container laws, Ovid. IV. Esq. resumed pressure washing starting methodically with the interior. Mid-spray a loud sucking SWWOOOOSH belched out and the muddy effluence inside the vehicle emptied. On observation Ovid, IV, Esq. discovered that the passenger floor board was apparently rusted clear thru due to the ravages of the mighty Tin Worm
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Oh well...it's toddy time anyway.
Brilliant.
The old vehicle was creaking and groaning as the muddy weight began to come off. Whatever it was seemed to be emitting a sigh of relief as it emerged from its slumber. One thing for sure...whatever it was was a mess on the interior.
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