Deep in the recesses of the Los Angeles Times site, I found a link to Dan Neil's radio gig, The Road Less Traveled. It's a couple of minutes a week on KCRW, "National Public Radio's Southern California flagship," and the station's site thankfully posts the audio and transcripts online.

A few highlights:

Oct. 3: "Turn down the thermostats? You can pry my turned-up thermostat from my warm dead fingers!" A discussion of energy use.

July 25: "The Aztek's troubles lay not down deep but at the surface. It violated the first principle of anthropomorphic car design, that cars should look like us. Specifically, it had four eyes and two sets of nostrils." A discussion of … anthropomorphic car design.

May 16: "One million vertebrates are killed on American roads every day. One million, every day, according to federal data compiled by the High Country News Organization. One million, every day, or one every 11 seconds — snakes, hawks, owls, pigeons, skunks, possums, raccoons, bobcats, moose, coyotes, panthers, antelope, elk, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, roadrunners, and allthe dogs and cats you will ever meet in Heaven — pulverized and spatchcocked and flattened and melon-split." A discussion of roadkill.

Dan Neil has started his popular culture column.

March 6: "At places where high viaducts crisscross, such as the interchange at the I-15 and I-10 in Ontario, you can't see the bridges in the dark, and the few cars appear to be flying in stately progress across the sky."

March 13: "After all, this is a one-shtick reptile: Wade ashore on the mainland, snap a few high-voltage power lines, bear up under the awesome firepower of the miniature tanks. Not to mention that Godzilla is, well, a confirmed bachelor. He's a press agent's nightmare."

March 20: "There is a choreography to all this, even a kind of ritual: Inevitably, men baptize themselves with a little seawater on the backs of their necks and steal a glance at the sun, as if getting their bearings in a world that's just gotten a lot bigger. Is this a mannerism we've picked up from some old movie? Did Gary Cooper rub water on his neck just so? Did Balboa do the same?"

I'm not quite sure what to think.

The column feels somewhat like the country mouse to his auto column's city mouse. Or, maybe more accurately, Horace as the country mouse. Modern tellings like to put the mice and their homes on near-even ground, but the Roman poet — who originates the tale — sides clearly with the country mouse. That mouse gets the last word, and it's a swipe at the city. Owning a country villa himself, Horace sings of its advantages time and time again in his Odes. Not a whole lot happens at the villa, but he enjoys his time and writes well there. Whether I want that mindset in a newspaper column, I don't yet know.

Dan Neil writes in Wednesday's L.A. Times:

I thought of the Mustang while reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Blink," which describes the human experience of what he calls "rapid cognition," the power to tell at a glance if something is right or wrong. If ever there was an example in car styling, it's the Mustang, which looks perfect and definitive at a glance. Those impressions only deepen and season over time. What a great-looking car.

Read on (see second half).

Casey points me to a Romenesko item: Dan Neil is expanding to a two-car garage. The Los Angeles Times is giving the auto columnist a regular space called "800 Words" in the paper's weekly magazine. I'll be reading.

Neil has been all over the globe recently, including to Baghdad. He begins his op-ed about the experience:

Two kinds of people arrive at Baghdad International Airport. One group walks out of the terminal and is met by bull-necked men wearing body armor, fingerless gloves, Oakley sunglasses and extremely cool guns. These are personal security specialists — though I like to think of them as death generalists — who warily escort their new charges to enormous, armored Chevy Suburbans parked only a few feet from the terminal. The White Zone is for liberators only.

The bodyguards form a phalanx a round the new arrivals, to avoid — in the argot of the profession — leaving the "package" out in the open.

The second group steps blinking and squinting into the scalding sunlight of central Iraq to be met by, well, nobody.

These are Iraqis, foreign aid workers, journalists and other low-value targets — which isn't to say they aren't worth attacking. It's just that they aren't worth guarding.

In life-and-death matters only to little men, another Neil piece this week tells of a La Dolce Vita moment. As he test-drives the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti through an Italian village, two boys on their bicycles give chase. He stops and gives them a ride.

At last leaving Italia for home, he takes the wheel of a Mazda3 five-door. A return to the ordinary for him, but I gets my click's worth. This Mazda, Neil explains, is very French.

I suppose in these days of freedom fries and the Boycott France campaign of Bill O'Reilly — about whom there has been much buzzzzz lately — few in the United States would agitate for the return of French-made cars. Quel dommage.

The French carmakers — PSA Peugeot Citroën (now a single company) and Renault — build some awesome cars. Partisans of the Mitsubishi Evo VIII or Subaru WRX STi ought to take a few laps in a Renault Clio V6, a rally-bred sport compact with a 255-hp V6 mounted amidships, where the back seat ought to be. Then we'll see who the surrender monkeys are.

I particularly like Renault's sense of adventure when it comes to styling. Cars such as the Vel Satis, the Scénic and the Mégane — with their strangely indented rear hatches, as if they had been kissed by a speeding lorry — exemplify French style, an attitude of shrugging indifference to convention and easy, sans souci confidence.

So, no French cars for us. But we've got the Mazda3 five-door, which could easily pass for a stable mate to the Mégane Hatch. Like the Renault, the Mazda3 five-door (four doors and a hatch, in case you were wondering) is a style-intensive little wagon with a bold face and its pants hitched up high in the back. It's got some sharp edges to it, like good cheese: Sill extensions and rear hatch spoiler are standard. Its rivals include cars such as the Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Matrix, the Ford Focus five-door and the new Chevrolet Cobalt. Only the Mazda3 wouldn't look out of place in a quiet arrondissement in Paris.

Friday is here. Go drive somewhere.

Hank Stuever, my favorite Washington Post writer, hit another one of the park this week. (I just got home from softball practice.) Style section Stuever examines the legacy of the flip-flop.

Somewhere a television camera crew is always waiting so it can shoot videotape of anonymous people from behind as they walk by, wearing their flip-flops and tank tops and stretchy shorts and eating enormous ice cream cones. The tape will serve as B-roll for the next alarming expose of national obesity rates.

A little Googling turns up as well that Stuever has a Web site, all set up to promote his book arriving in stores this summer, Off Ramp. Despite the promotion, he's still got some of his best stories posted and has some interesting links, including his Slate diary from a couple years ago.

Meanwhile, L.A. Times auto critic Dan Neil is digging in again and setting off to defend the Pulitzer like the castle.

Neil adds book reviewing to his agenda, conparing two new books about the American relationship between roads and billboards. Writes Neil: "By the early 1920s, America's roadsides were tatterdemalions littered with garish billboard advertisements of all description."

Tatterdemalions? Ragamuffins. Points for obscurity there.

His review of Mazda RX-8 further pushes the close-in bounds of my vocabulary. "The 'Rx' is a prescription-strength emetic for anybody in the rear seats when this fervid little coupe is in full thrash mode," Neil writes. Emetic? "An agent that causes vomiting," apparently.

But you know we don't come to Neil for the words. We come for the word-play. Fortunately, he restates later:

Thanks to a compact motor, the hood slopes away for good forward visibility. In the rear seats, however, the visibility is quite limited — so it's hard to lock your eyes on the horizon for vestibular relief. Mazda would probably say the seats are for occasional use. That occasion is hurling.

Roger Ebert, giving Troy a two-star review: "If Achilles was anything, he was a man who believed his own press releases."

Dan Neil, reviewing the Camry Solara SLE Convertible: "The convertible's styling closely follows that of the coupe, the same water-dowsing-stick hood lines coming together at the bowl-profile grille, the same wind-tunnel smoke contours streaming along the flanks."

Gene Weingarten, reviewing mothers and using a euphemism OutKast should really learn: "Since we have never personally given birth, men can only guess at the discomfort the procedure entails and must resort to deeply disturbing analogies, such as evacuating a tricycle."

Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times has struck again. Neil, he of "Snoop on a fatty" car-reviewing goodness, recently took the Lamborghini Gallardo for a spin and apparently sucked down enough of the breeze to go Lambo on his story.

The nut graf, in its entirety:

You can't take your eyes off the Gallardo. It's like Donald Trump's hair.

On the other car in the Lamborghini line:

The jackknife-doored Murciélago, introduced two years ago, replaced the Diablo, which along with Carmen Electra and the psychedelic marijuana leaf was one of the world's great dorm-room posters.

On the Gallardo's chances for being pulled over:

It's like throwing a fancy dinner party and seating the gay Rastafarian next to John Ashcroft. You just know there's going to be trouble.

Read the rest of the story here.

Not surprisingly, last month Neil won the 2004 ASNE award for best column/commentary. Judges called him "the most uncommon auto columnist in the country."

Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times recently reviewed the Mini Cooper. Not just any Mini Cooper, mind you. Neil drove and subsequently stood aghast at the supercharged 2004 Mini Cooper S, John Cooper Works edition.

At 200 horses, he explained, this car was "a righteous piece, a snubbed-down, amped-up, hot rod Hobbit that turns the most galling stop-and-go errand into an occasion for joyous gear-jamming and games of Diss the SUV."

The piece was high on hyperbole but undeniably tasty. In the charge of the phrase brigade, topping all was his description of the car's tiny turning radius.

To wit: "With its 97.1-inch wheelbase, 143.9-inch overall length and turning radius of a mere 34.2 feet, the Mini is brought to you by the letter U, as in U-turn. See a parking place on the other side of the street? You are on it like Snoop on a fatty."

Read the full story here. Free Tribune Co. registration required.