whywearecalledthetunachuckers

Hey, We Had to Call Ourselves Something...

The lack of creativity here is staggering.

I think Brian and I were kicking around his kitchen one night, high on iced tea, annoying his very pregnan...I mean, patient wife, trying to think of a good team name, before we'd even bought the Amazon. Oh, that's not fair. Maria (pregnant and patient) was also jacked up on iced tea and chiming in with her own ideas. I don't recall much of what we said. Like reefer addicts who sit around devising the ways the world would be groovy if they ran it, we had no pad of paper, no secretary taking minutes, no tape recorder. So its all lost in the mists of temporality.

I've bought a lot of volvos in my day. Read my PERSONAL PAGE if you don't believe me. A few years ago I bid on, and won, a 1965 122S in Richmond, VA. The final, winning bid? $0.01. This would have been the perfect LeMons car, had I known about the whole LeMons thing back then. As it was, it cost me $60 in gas and tow dolly rental (I bought my own flat bed about 2 years ago; got sick of giving $50 to UHaul every time my gaze fell upon another non-functional piece of Swedish pig-iron) to get it home, and it had no engine, brakes, or interior. But, it did sport a very fancy driver's door:

In January, 2007 the City of Baltimore, apparently tipped off by a neighbor who was probably pissed-off that I hadn't invited him to my New Year's Eve Party, cited me for having unlicensed cars on my property. In the mad rush to title, register, and/or move enough metal to comply with code (which ultimately resulted in my stuffing 5 cars into my garage when the inspector came to give me the gold star of compliance) I ended up cutting up the '65 that belonged to this door. It was sad, but besides being engine-less, brake-less, and interior-less, the car was also title-less, and had some pretty bad metal cancer eating up the floor. Milwaukee still makes a decent Sawzall, and within a half-hour I was $100 richer from the pile of scrap metal. And the world was one Amazon poorer.

I did save that door, though. And a bunch of other parts, some of them sheetmetal. That '65 will always live on in my mind as "The Penny Volvo".

When I relocated to South Kakalaki last year, all that sheetmetal (plus a lot more) came with me. Including the door.

After we'd bought our '66 Volvo 122 for the LeMons race, the inspiration came to me to install this door. Basically, my logic went something like this: We had bought the car from a priest. In the Bible, as you may recall, there is the story of the Loaves and the Seven Fishes, where Jesus takes some crusts of bread and seven fish that they have laying around, and feeds a huge crowd of people. After everyone has eaten their fill, they (the disciples I guess, they're always doing stuff that Jesus tells them to) pick up what's left over and it fills 12 baskets. What they don't tell you in the Bible is what they do with all those baskets of food. Its not like they had Zip-Lock bags. Or refrigerators. Poor Jesus and his disciples were probably feeling a lot like my Aunt after Thanksgiving, giving everyone a Tupperware full of turkey and cranberry sauce as they left, trying to get rid of all the leftover food.

We had a car previously owned by a man of God. God is in the Bible. The Bible had a story about fish. I had a door, from the same model of car, with a fish on it. That fish is Charlie the Tuna, Brave Corporate Spokesfish.

Tuna! As for the "chuckers" bit...well, that's a story for...tonight! Have some tuna first:

OK. Well, the "chuckers" bit of the name, as best I can recall, comes from Charlie, as in, "Charlie the Tuna". "Chuck" being a nickname for Charlie, and "chucking" seeming like a very fun activity (from people who find trebuchets entertaining) and "Tunachuckers" sounding very much a) cool, and b) like 4 syllables we'd never seen run together in two words before, the name of our gang had been settled. Oh yeah, and we might throw tuna at the other racers with some sort of trebuchet.

There was one little thing left, though. Demotivation. You see, being corporate hedgehogs as we are, we are beset on a regular basis by those amazingly dopey motivational posters, plaques, and nick-knacks attempting to tell us that hard work is its own reward and we need to stay positive and all that crap. Phoey. We believe that De-motivation is in the true spirit of LeMons, and as such, our plan is to spackle the Tunachuckers' Amazon with Demotivational posters. But not just _any_ demotivational posters. You see, the company that invented the concept of demotivation (Despair.com), has a nifty D-I-Y Create-Your-Own Demotivational poster tool on their website. So we clicked, we uploaded pictures, and we made our own Demotivationals to deck out our ride with.

A fellow co-worker, Don, who is a wizzard with Photoshop, whipped up these quick conceptuals for us: