Tom Vanderbilt has a couple interesting articles on Slate about parking:
You’re Parking Wrong, on whether to back into a shopping lot parking slot or not.
The Ethics of Winter Dibs Parking, about reserving parking on snowy streets.
This installation of hundreds thousands of Matchbox cars traveling a huge, Erectoresque track looks like Robert Moses wet dream. Here’s hoping this Chris Burden installation makes it to NYC.
I had a friend back in 1980 who had a jukebox in his rec room that played 45s. One of the discs we played over and over again was “Cars” by Gary Numan. It was the year of cheesy Christopher Cross and Olivia Newton John tunes and Numan’s music sounded so high-tech, heavy and out-there that we loved it. Now he’s shilling for Sears and their DieHard battery with this odd rendition of “Cars” using autos set up like the keys of a synthesizer.
There’s a used bookstore in Maryland I’ve been frequenting on trips down 95 and last week I scored Brock Yate’s “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry
The ad above is for the Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport, built on the J-car base in the mid 80’s. The transparent grandiosity of the name of the car is comical. “Celebrity”? I suppose I could be famous if I drove one around, but not for the reasons GM is touting. “Eurosport”? Let me guess: it’s designed to compete with Mercedes/BMW/Volvo? Their ad company should have been fired for cramming 6’6″ Ken Howard, who played a basketball coach on TV’s “White Shadow”, into the drivers seat and having his head continually rub against the roof liner. When I’m looking to not-fit into a car to drive slowly across vast expanses of highly polished studio floors I’ll head straight for the Chevy dealer.
The Euro package came with mammoth 14″ alloy rims, V6 power, sport handling and black and red-lined trim and badges that look more appropriate as a logo for the latest Nightmare on Elm Street than on a domestic car. I love it.
Bonus: This article in Popular Science takes the odd position of testing America’s “Eurosedans” against themselves, instead of the European high-performance cars they obviously strive to be.
Some new sites I’ve added to the sidebar. Tons of crap cars and jerry rigs.
Image from thatwillbuffout.com
I used to go to hot rod shows with my dad back in the late 70’s/ early 80’s and they were usually jam packed with custom conversion vans. Tons of candy apple paint, air-brushed illustrations of vikings and evil polar bears and lots of furry dashboards. Most of them had beds in the back, including one with a waterbed and a huge fish tank.
The Selvedge yard has compiled a slew of pictures of the craze in all it’s metal-flake glory.
Before there was “Christine“, there was “The Car”, a movie I remember seeing on late-night TV in the early 80’s. I’m sure it was a drive-in theater treat when it came out in 1977. Nothing like being chased by a huge, vaguely Ford-looking black bucket of Bondo.
BONUS: Hot Rod Magazine’s 40 top car movies. Nice to see Mad Max represented.
Via Jalopnik
I got tripped up by all the Toyotas. Pretty good little quiz though.
AND PASSED WITH AN AVERAGE SCORE. C
In 1974 movie goers were treated to Gone in Sixty Seconds, one long chase scene expanded into a full-length feature film. The movie barely had actors; it was just stunt drivers skidding and careening around, smashing fruit stands and plate glass. In this clip, we see the final jump sequence, repeated twice in slow motion, then once in real-time. By Jerry Bruckheimer’s standards it’s pretty tame, but at least it’s a real car and not a CG cartoon, like the one used for the final jump in the 2000 remake.
BONUS: James Hetfield flies down the hills of San Francisco in Metallica’s “I Disappear”.
In the wet dream of Bob Lutz, the 2010 Cadillacs are a multi-stage rocket blasting across the salt flats under the watchful eye of the NASAesque GM launch team. The new CTS Sportwagon bursts forth as the first stage in a cycle that ends with a new coupe.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had the please to read Chuck Closterman’s “Eating the Dinosaur
BONUS: The first few seconds of this Cadillac ad show a woman grinning as she drives a new SRX. I was pleasantly surprised to recognize Paula Merritt, a woman I knew briefly a couple years ago through a friend in Brooklyn. She used to play drums for Grandma’s Boy (now Bad Girlfriend) before moving to LA to further her modeling career. Looks like she’s doing well. Way to go Paula!