{"id":869,"date":"2011-01-11T21:41:42","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T03:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=869"},"modified":"2011-07-05T22:38:03","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T04:38:03","slug":"collect-them-all-the-history-of-the-lemons-supreme-courts-bribed-stencil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=869","title":{"rendered":"Collect Them All! The History of the LeMons Supreme Court’s BRIBED Stencil"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nEver since Judge Jonny and I discovered that extorting<\/del> accepting bribes from LeMons racers put the kibosh on whining about “unfairness,” we’ve been using special stencils to mark the teams that show respect<\/em> to the LeMons Supreme Court.
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\nIt’s pretty simple: your team slips a jug of booze, cash, some high-fat snacks, or other judge-pleasing goodie to the Court, we let the other racers know that you’ve bought your way into our good graces. 
 
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\nThe very first BRIBED stencil was broken out at the first-ever LeMons South event<\/a>, back in the fall of 2008. It was cut out of cereal-box cardboard and showed the scales of justice being tilted by a dollar sign. This stencil lasted until early 2009, at which point the buildup of spraypaint got so thick that the stencil started to break<\/em> (LeMons stencils are subjected to some pretty rough handling; they get stepped on constantly during the BS Inspection, and they get stuffed into plastic bins full of penalty props at the end of each race). When we retired BRIBED Stencil #1, we hung it up in the LeMons Museum (aka the wall behind Jeff Glenn’s desk at LeMons HQ in Emeryville). 
 
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\nI made Bribed Stencil #2 using the same pattern, so those of you with the dollar-sign BRIBED stencil on your car probably can’t prove whether you’ve got a #1 or a #2. This stencil made it deep into 2009 before getting retired. Painted over your stencils? That might make it harder to prove your car’s provenance at the 2019 Barrett-Jackson auction! 
 
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\nSince most of our bribes turned out to be booze, I replaced the dollar sign with a South Carolina-style<\/a> moonshine jug when I made BRIBED Stencil #3. 
 
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\nThis design looked pretty good, but #3 was worn out by the end of the 2009 season.  
 
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\nAt the beginning of the 2010 LeMons season, I made BRIBED Stencil #4. This is identical to #3, except for the drops of booze flying out of the bottle’s neck. 
 
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\nAt the Cain’t Git Bayou race in May of 2010<\/a>, we failed to pack BRIBED Stencil #4, so I had to make a Field Expedient BRIBED Stencil with a Coke box and a carpet knife. BRIBED Stencil #5, which reads “BAKSHEESH PAID” with a dollar sign, is by far the rarest of all the LeMons Supreme Court BRIBED stencils.  
 
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\nOnly 33 teams started that race, so if you’ve got this stencil, don’t paint over it! 
 
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\nBRIBED Stencil #4, which was made on thick posterboard, held up under the rigors of the BS Inspection better than any of its predecessors. I’d hoped that it would last through all 21 races of the 2010 24 Hours of LeMons season, so I kept taping and re-cutting it as the paint buildup caused it to break. Once the paint got close to a half-inch in thickness, however, the whole stencil just disintegrated at the 2010 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Buttonwillow. You can identify the era of your #4 by how blurry the design looks; late-2010 applications don’t have visible XXX symbols on the bottle. We stuck it back together as well as we could and hung it up in the LeMons Museum. 
 
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\nFor the THE PAINFULLY BLAND BOWL OF THIN LUKEWARM OATMEAL THAT CAN NOT POSSIBLY OFFEND ANYONE, NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY ENJOY BEING OFFENDED, 24-HOUR SEASON ENDER<\/a> race, I decided to make a special Che-esque BAKCHEESH stencil, based on the Baksheesh! T-shirt design<\/a>. 
 
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\nWe got all psychedelic with the paint with BRIBED Stencil #6, no doubt due to the mind-altering influence of the thallium salts<\/a> that were supposed to make our beards fall out. 
 
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\nBribed Stencil #6 isn’t quite as rare as #5, since the Miami race had more than twice the cars of the Cain’t Git Bayou event, and we may bring it back for future races. Still, the BAKCHEESH! stencil should be a coveted collector’s item in the future. 
 
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