Where we always begin again
And I don't know why. It's a writer with someone to say, something to argue, something to prove, someone who thinks it's worth time to convince you of something? If you can't name a writer you love at a news you don't know, then either you're not reading enough or that news isn't grasping at life nearly hard enough. Neil was what/who got me reading the Los Angeles Times everyday, and I'm not hooked easily. Years and years it takes me to like something different, to get comfortable with it and accept it. Not everything, of course, but everything important. Someday I'll get over that. But until then I'll praise whatever can do the job of conversion.
I direct you to Road & Track's cover story this month, a six-way runoff among the Porsche, the Dodge Viper, Chevrolet Corvette Z06, Ferrari F430, Ford GT and Lamborghini Gallardo. The editors have spared no trouble metering and measuring the performance of these cars, with the result that they are all within tenths and milliseconds of one another. You might as well draw names out of a helmet. Each of these monster cars will wring your adrenal glands like a pair of wet socks; each would qualify as karmic reward for a life spent working for world peace or curing halitosis or something.
Now imagine yourself driving them — which is to say, see yourself as others would see you on a day-to-day basis. Ah, well, now these cars become a decidedly more mixed proposition. Face it, with the exception of the Porsche, these cars do not cover their owners with glory. They are too vulgar, too boorish, too, too much. The Corvette is the subtlest of the bunch, and the Vette is about as subtle as a smoking exit wound.
Neil reviews the "Porsche's 911 Turbo for 2007." Nothing about the reviews grabs me hard, but it's got a "body of work" thing going on. One newspaper, one day's work, a body, imagine that.
