The Entremanurial Spirit in America

One of the things that makes America great is how our people are infused with this great entrepreneurial spirit. Up until recently, small startup businesses were everywhere, generating the commerce that moved the American economy forward, furthering the American Dream.

America was built on entrepreneurs, not just inventors. Looking back through history, Henry Ford was an entrepreneur. He didn’t invent the automobile, but he built an automotive empire by pioneering the mass-manufacture of them. Samuel Colt or John Browning didn’t invent the gun, but they are synonymous with shooting. Guys like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell didn’t necessarily invent the home computer, but they took them to new levels. Ray Kroc, Dave Thomas, and Harlan Sanders didn’t invent burgers and fried chicken, but their restaurants are ubiquitous household names. Jim Koch didn’t invent beer but he’s hand-built what many (like me) consider the finest brew in this nation. These are guys who started off in garages, basements, kitchens, shacks, and little workshops and took it to the moon & back.



Like him or not, Ron Popeil is a frikkin’ genius. Sure, he was originally an inventor, but he also in addition to his products invented the infomercial. The Pocket Fisherman, Spray-On Hair, everything-O-Matic, Mr. Microphone, the Smokeless Ashtray, his electric food dehydrator; everyone’s owned at least one Ronco product in their lifetime, or at least a knockoff. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Joseph Pedott, who brought us The Chia Pet, and The Clapper.

My personal favorite entrepreneur isn’t even an American, to be honest. For some reason I’ve always found Sir Richard Branson to be pretty cool. The guy never graduated from high school but built 360 companies under the Virgin name.

However, these days our nation is sadly infected with something that I had to invent a new word for to add to the English language. It’s what I refer to as The Entremanurial Spirit®. An entremanure is someone trying to make money via bullshit means, ie: bullshittery.

Two of the original entremanures in America are Joe Francis and Jim McBride. For those of you unfamiliar with their names Francis is the man behind the Girls Gone Wild franchise and McBride is perhaps a bit better known by his website name, Mister Skin.

Francis has made a cottage industry out of wandering from bar to bar during spring break and summer vacations in various popular locales, filming young girls barely legal enough to sign a release let alone legal to drink, as they show us their teats (and often more) and make out with their equally drunk, hot friends, or wrestle with them, or give strip shows, or take showers with them. I’ve been to hundreds of bars in my 40+ years and have yet to EVER see anything even remotely close to what goes on in these DVD’s, so either I was going to the wrong bars or those guys are crop-dusting entire cities with aerosol Roofies before they go filming. There never seems to be a shortage of nubile young tartlets clamoring to show us their funbags and engage in heavy petting with their best friends on camera, as evidenced by the hundreds filmed in the series. A quick check of Wikipedia listed 140 titles in their series. Seriously. They rake in over $40 Million a year.



Mister Skin, Jim McBride, is the guy who really did make the website dreamed about by the guys in the movie “Knocked Up”, a Wikipedia-like compendium reference guide to nudity in film. The site can tell you every possible naked moment for every possible star. Why watch the whole movie looking for someone’s left nipple, when they tell you at exactly what second it’s visible through a wet t-shirt? Now you can skip those pesky things like, say, plot and dialogue. After a 2000 appearance on Howard Stern’s show, his site took off and he gets over 7 million hits a month. It took me 2 & a half years to break 100,000.

Seriously. These guys are making ducats hand over fist over what amounts to sheer naked bullshittery.
                                    Jim McBride can tell you everything naked. For a fee....

People who sell the naming rights to their babies on eBay? Bullshittery!

There’s enough stupid baby names out there already thanks to Hollyweird without a kid named GoDaddy.Com Jackson. Likewise, selling advertising space to GoldenPalace.com on your pregnant belly is bullshittery.

Selling a Cheeto or a burnt waffle with an alleged image of Jesus on it? Bullshittery.

If you see deities on snack foods and scorched pastries you’ve got problems. Why not sell clouds on eBay because one looked like Homer frikkin’ Simpson? Likewise, people who buy this shit should be punched in the throat. I should find the people who sold glass-encased rhino turds on eBay a couple Christmases ago to save the rhinos and sell them one of mine own turds and claim it looks like a Burmese python.




The people who ruined a good thing by bootlegging the Calvin & Hobbes characters into an evil kid who pees on everything and selling it on stickers & shirts? Bullshittery of the highest order. I loved the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, and Bill Watterson never licensed C&H for anything, let alone something like that. It’s probably part of the reason he hung it up when he did.



But our latest wave of entremanures are the Gangstalicious, Thugnificent, Pimptatstical Urban Entremanures who take a $400 car, outfit it with $15,000 worth of stereo equipment, roll on down to ColorTyme to rent some fly-ass dope 26” rims, and then paint the car to look like some sort of rolling advertisement for a nationally trademarked product. I’m not sure if this is some sort of ghetto-fabulous urban in-joke to mimic the look of NASCAR rides, but I heard first hand from one of them that most of these guys do it to garner attention and then subit photos to the actual companies in hopes of gaining official sponsorship. The guy we talked to gets a stipend from Trojan condoms for his car’s décor. Seriously.

In the past year, I’ve seen a Suburban with the Big Red gum logo, a chocolate brown ride with the UPS/88 logo, a green & yellow John Deere car, an orange Lumina with Home Depot’s logo on the hood, a gold ride done up with Miller High Life, and others advertising Coke Zero, Oreo cookies, Skittles, Steel Reserve malt liquor, a pink Ford Contour festooned with various Disney princesses, and two McDonald’s cars. And that’s just here in greater Charleston and Colleton County, SC; upstate towards Greenville I spotted, I shit you not, a car done up completely painted in Burberry plaid. My buddy Chris spotted a guy in Greenville who did his K-Car (Yeah, seriously, a freakin’ Dodge Aries K-Car!) done up to duplicate the old #2 Rusty Wallace Miller Lite race car.



Bullshittery, all of it. Hitching your future fortunes to a dream of a big check from corporate America just because you took it upon yourself to pay out of pocket to have a guy paint your Olds Cutlass to look like a rolling Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups package is just plain bullshittery.

But, even a blind squirrel finds a nut now & again, and at some corporate board meeting a CEO is giving the okay for advertising money to be sent out to some kid with a Lee Press-On gold smirk and pants 5 sizes too big, who drives around his local hood in a pastel pink piece of shit ’89 Caprice Classic former police cruiser with Pepto Bismol on the doors.

More of the crap I see around me....

You tend to see a lot of interesting things when you drive around greater Charleston. I have about a hundred mile commute each day for work, and often return to Charleston on the weekends for social engagements. Here are a few of my random sightings in traffic over the past few months. For another glimpse, go see last year's post:
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2008/12/oh-things-youll-see.html


I kid you not. This picture is NOT Photoshopped. This is a real cargo ship.


July 4th, 2009. When you REALLY need ice and one side is locked, just CRAWL INSIDE to get it.



There's just no explaining this piece of Ghetto Fabulosity. Spotted on Montague Avenue.



I'm pretty sure that Ronald McDonald would be proud to roll through Chucktown in this...



Spotted on a two-tone Lexus by the Coliseum:"We in war. We need the good man" WTF?




I don't quite understand the Power Rangers mask on the bumper...at least it matches the car.




File this one under: Lee Press-On Spoiler Fail






The Pepto-Bismol Pink Honda Civic I spotted by the airport.




I found it somewhat strange that a bra should be left hanging by a man's suede sport coat at Wal-Mart, as they were both the same color.

Oh, the things you'll see...

I commute about 50 miles or so each way to work. I also make side trips to Charleston on the weekend for hockey games & other social functions. Thusly, I spend a lotta time in the car, watching the world go by. Some of this time is spent along Rivers Avenue and sometimes down Remount Road, target rich environments for people-watching. I’ll be blunt: I see a lot of really strange shit around town, and it’s some of the best free entertainment you could imagine.

At about 6:30 AM every weekday, I pass by the blood plasma donation place on Rivers, and it’s amazing to see how many people are already lined up outside the place in pouring rain, searing heat, life-sucking humidity, and the occasional bone-chilling cold snaps…no matter the weather, there’s 7-12 people waiting at the door at least 30minutes before it opens.

I saw a dude walking down McMillan by the Navy hospital carrying an entire set of free weights on his shoulder. I saw a guy downing a 40-ounce malt liquor at the bus stop at 7AM and it was pouring down his throat so fast that there were no air bubbles coming back up into the bottle. I’ve seen no fewer than a hundred people in various stores this past year shopping in pajama pants and slippers. I’ve seen weaves in shapes that only occur in modern art sculptures and Food TV sugar-spinning competitions in colors that simply do not occur in nature. And the giant transvestite hooker waving to all the truckers on Spruill? That’s priceless.

Breakfast of Champions! Chock fulla complex carbohydrates...


But is it art?


My wife’s favorite spotting was the 225-pound or so woman wandering Rivers in microscopic Daisy Dukes with her ass cheeks hanging out, and a size 2 boob-tube with multiple rolls and muffin tops displaying the rest of her goods to traffic. My personal favorite was the guy shambling down Remount jeans shoved down into red cowboy boots, with wild hair and disheveled beard, and covered by a cobalt blue terry cloth bathrobe.

Oh yes. I gotta have me some of that.


The guy who cut us off today on 78 while sucking his thumb? He may have seen us if only he’d had a rearview mirror, but he spent his mirror money on those ridiculously huge rims on his battered 1993 Town Car. He at least stopped sucking his thumb long enough to flip us off after we blew the horn at him. Also today was the unkempt woman with a head full of plastic curlers waving to passers-by from the parking lot of the Dollar General.

One can’t forget the tiny little bright red Honda Fit equipped with a giant set of Bumper Nutz hanging off the rear, the SUV over by Northwoods Mall sporting rims with crucifixes in the metal, or the guy with the giant map of I-26 and the surrounding area painted onto his car. That’s just one of the myriad examples of oddly painted cars around Chucktown and the surrounding Lowcountry. There’s the truck painted like a pack of Big Red. There’s a car done up in John Deere green and yellow, with matching leather seats. There’s one done up like a bag of Skittles, and another one with a glittery apple on the side with the name “Apple Bottom” painted on it.

As seen on Ashley Phosphate Road. Somewhere under that body kit was a Ford Explorer.

Now, to be fair, there’s also a number of cleverly-decorated pickups out there with giant lettering on either the front windshield or the rear; take your pick. I’ve seen DANGER RANGER, CORN FED, POTTED MEAT, HI-TEK REDNEK, and the ubiquitous COWBOY/COWGIRL UP (despite a notable lack of cowboys and ranches in South Carolina).

I was struck funny by the women’s thongs with CANCER on the front; all I could think of was crabs. I was nauseated by the canned tripe and pork brains, and just utterly dumbfounded by the butter sculpture in the shape of a turkey. I mean, who really eats canned stomachs and brains? The labels look straight out of 1958, and they very well could have been on the shelves since then. The turkey made of butter is just plain tacky. Sure, it’s a bit campy, but would you be able to look at your dinner host with a straight face after sitting at the table for your holiday feast and seeing a sculpture carved (or molded) from cow-squeazins shaken into a solid mass globule?

Sure, pal. YOU eat it. I ain't going there.


Seriously. Sculpted butter. Again, is it art?

The world around is us filled with all sorts of sights, from sublime to extreme. Take a spin around town and see what disturbing images sear themselves into your retinas…


As seen in the Rivers Avenue Wal-Mart at 2AM on a Saturday night.

Aw yeah, boyeee! Gots me some bling!

It simply astounds me, the very nature of human beings.

It mystifies me, the stupidity of my fellow humans. Why, oh why, would you put 5000 freakin' dollars worth of ugly-assed oversized rims on a 500 dollar piece of shit car?


A barely drivable mobile-unit, with a paint job that's primarily primer, that's been paid for since Carter was in office, and then you went to some fly-by-night finance place and took out a LOAN for 5 grand to buy WHEELS? Are you HIGH? Or are you just stupid?

I get a kick outta the ones that are on a payment plan & have just rims on the back, and regular wheels on the front because they haven't bought the others yet....or better yet, what happens when you can't pay the payment? Do the repo guys come & repo your wheels? I can see it now...it's 3AM Eternal, and the repo man wheels into the trailer park, jacks up your car like a NASCAR pit crew & takes back your wheels, all in under 60 seconds.

I absolutely love the ones who feel the need to tell you what the size of the rims are with numbers painted on the rear quarter of the car. Whether it be 22's, 24's, or even 26's....I mean, does anyone really give a fuck except the other douchebags with rim-envy and numbers on their own rides? I even saw one twat riding around town in a beat up Ford Probe and on the back it had 16" in big stickers on it, under the Lee Press-On Spoiler kit. Yes... a Ford freakin' PROBE! Advertising 16" rims! Whoopty shit. My mom's Kia Amanti has 16" rims. Then again, this was a supposed adult driving a car named after something that goes in your ass. Need I say more?

Yeah...a 500 dollar car with minimum coverage liability insurance, with 8000 dollar rims, 2000 dollars worth of dumb-assed TV’s in the headrest and a 5000 dollar stereo & speaker set up. Makes sense to me.