Jezebel
what i've learned
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Jalopnik
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what i've learned
moving violations
The Legality Of "Road Head" (Or, 13 States In Which We've Broken The Law By Giving A Beej)
With a bunch of states finally getting around to banning text messaging while driving, I began to wonder what other bad-idea auto activities are illegal. Actually, the only one I really care about — or engage in — is "road head" (when the driver of a car receives oral sex, for those prudes/pedestrians out there). It's kinda mainstream, since it's been featured in movies like Crash and friggin' Parenthood, but I was thinking that since it is kinda dangerous, and potentially deadly, it must be moving violation. Right? More »
clips
7-Year-Old Steals Grandma's SUV For Joyride
Meet Latarian Milton, a 7-year-old South Florida boy who faces grand theft auto charges after he stole his grandma's Dodge Durango for a joyride with a buddy of the same age (who smokes cigarettes) in which he smashed into mailboxes, other cars, and street signs until the front wheels fell off. Why did he do it? "I wanted to do hood rat stuff with my friend." Seriously! Get a load of him and his swagger in the clip above. The best is what Latarian thinks his punishment should be totaling his grandma's car and nearly killing others: "No videos games for an entire weekend." [CNN]
Susan Carpenter, the "Throttle Jockey" at the LA Times, finds that riding motorcycles is a great way to get attention from guys, but up to a point. She says that when a woman rides a large bike (above 1,600 cc) men no longer perceive the female rider as being "sexy". While testing a Suzuki C109R (which weighs 787 pounds and 1,783 cc) Carpenter says she felt "over the top and masculine" and experienced less eye-contact from men on the road, supposedly because they thought she was "batting for the home team" because of her big bike. However, Carpenter enjoyed the larger motorcycle, saying it was "by far" better than a sex-change operation. [LA Times]
It may be an outdated idea, but apparently some people are still complaining about women being lousy drivers! A recent Australian study tested 198 female drivers and found that the women who were made aware of the "lady driver" stereotype performed poorly on a simulated driving test. Somehow, the results of this study got interpreted as evidence of an on-road gender war in an article in today's Telegraph, which claims that overly-critical men cause women to drive poorly. But doesn't any vocal distraction make it difficult to concentrate on the road? (Mom, I'm talking to you.) [Telegraph]
faces of death
Foreign Imports Will Be The End Of Britney Spears
By yesterday afternoon, some five days after the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly had arrived in my mailbox, a fair number of media types had weighed in on the magazine's controversial April cover story on Britney Spears. For those who aren't dedicated media observers, here's the backstory: The Atlantic, a 150-year old, high-minded journal of left-leaning, East Coast intellectualism and Serious Issues had, in a supposed attempt to increase its flagging fortunes, headed westward (and more importantly, downmarket) with "The Britney Show", a densely-packed, 12-page cover story by journalist David Samuels about America's most famous celebrity trainwreck. What became clear, however, is that not many of those media people had actually read it.
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Ridin' Flirty
Friday morning, Nick Lachey will unveil a tiny, bejeweled car to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hot Wheels. The 18-karat white gold "toy" features more than 2,600 diamonds, and it will be auctioned off for Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Better be careful when putting it through the little car wash — or making it do the loop-de-loop — or playing demolition derby. Isn't that what you did with Hot Wheels as a kid? Anyway, not sure why they chose Lachey to "unveil" this blinged-out car in a publicity stunt: Maybe because it's cheesy, and they're playing to his strengths? [Marketing Daily]
Friday morning, Nick Lachey will unveil a tiny, bejeweled car to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hot Wheels. The 18-karat white gold "toy" features more than 2,600 diamonds, and it will be auctioned off for Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Better be careful when putting it through the little car wash — or making it do the loop-de-loop — or playing demolition derby. Isn't that what you did with Hot Wheels as a kid? Anyway, not sure why they chose Lachey to "unveil" this blinged-out car in a publicity stunt: Maybe because it's cheesy, and they're playing to his strengths? [Marketing Daily]
Changing Gears
Cars and fashion: An unlikely marriage of minds? A new trend supposedly emerging in fashion is garments and accessories made from car parts (clean with tire cleaner, if you please) and the latest trend in the auto industry is creating cars in colors that are in line with the color trends of the season (the better to match your Louis Vuitton-Richard Prince bag). According to this logic, we assume that, soon enough, it will be impossible to distinguish a pick-up truck from a red carpet gown. This is a frightening thought. [MediaPost; WSJ]
Cars and fashion: An unlikely marriage of minds? A new trend supposedly emerging in fashion is garments and accessories made from car parts (clean with tire cleaner, if you please) and the latest trend in the auto industry is creating cars in colors that are in line with the color trends of the season (the better to match your Louis Vuitton-Richard Prince bag). According to this logic, we assume that, soon enough, it will be impossible to distinguish a pick-up truck from a red carpet gown. This is a frightening thought. [MediaPost; WSJ]
dubious studies
Women: Good Drivers One Year, Bad Ones The Next
A new study says gay men and straight women share a poor sense of direction and straight men are better drivers. Psychologists at the University of London employed a virtual-reality scenario in which volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform or explore an environment and find "rewards." The gays and the women didn't do too well! ("The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators. Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.")
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employment options
Elegy For A "Booth Babe"
"What are 'booth babes'?" asked Anna when I announced to her I planned to do a post on the slow decline of the employment sector of ladies who make a living standing around for long periods of time in large convention centers wearing very little clothing and smiling at the old dudes gawking at them. If you don't go to trade shows or have Kardashianesque measurements, you might not be aware of this fact, but there is a whole industry of being paid to look conventionally pretty and talk vapidly, and I'm not talking about interning at Teen Vogue. No, the booth babe's natural habitat is not New York but Las Vegas and Orlando, though she'll really go anywhere you'll find a male-dominated industry holding a semi-annual trade show. And for many years the booth babe business seemed to know only boom. More »
driven crazy
Dear Women: Shun Dudes With Sports Cars & Save The World
At a UN conference on global warming in Bali last week, a young woman asked Sir David King, the UK's chief scientific advisor, what she could do to stop global warming, reports Wired. "I told her stop admiring young men in Ferraris," King says. And while his comment sounds sexist and kind of crazy, doesn't he make a valid point? A chemist at the University of Cambridge, King believes that there's only so much governments can do to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. "What I was saying is you have got to admire people who are conserving energy and not those willfully using it," he explains. Meanwhile, people who have Ferraris are pissed. Peter Everingham, secretary of the Ferrari Owners Club, says that "nearly 90%" of Ferrari owners are married and "not looking to impress women." More »
boy talk
Is Talking To A Dude As Pointless As Talking To A Car?
The duo behind "Car Talk" are totally giving Carolyn Hax a run for her money!Ray: Our theory is that men's relationships with cars are like women's relationships with men.OMG this is so why I never ever ever "talk" to dudes after screwing them! But it did make me wonder, has a heart-to-heart with a car ever solved any problems with said car? By which I mean, has a talk with a dude ever solved any problems with your relationship with the dude? I have a theory: you might solve issues with the next dude by talking out your problems with a dude, but a lot of that will be because you've learned the lesson about how talking doesn't solve problems. Too cynical? I asked my ex-boyfriend, who just happens to be in the midst of a gut-wrenching breakup with his "millennium falcon." More »
Tom: Look at the similarities. Is a man content to simply "have" a car? No. He has to be in constant communication with his vehicle so he always knows how it's feeling. He needs to know where he stands with the car. He likes to open the hood, look around, check the levels. He wants to know when something is wrong. He may even "sense" a problem before it's obvious. Then he'll want to "deal with it" right away, so it doesn't fester.
oldies (but not so) goodies
Vintage Ads: Women Can't Drive, And Other Misogynistic Messages
Today's Daily Mail runs excerpts from a new book, You Mean A Woman Can Open It?: The Woman's Place In The Classic Age Of Advertising which features those oldies but goodies we're oh-so fond of. It's hard to imagine a world in which advertisers actually got away with this stuff: A car ad with a ditzy-looking broad claims an automobile is "for simple driving"; a coffee ad features a wife about to be spanked by her husband for "taking chances on getting flat, stale coffee." And, most disturbing of all, a postage meter ad from 1953 has the headline "Is it always illegal to KILL a woman?" (The copy reads "Husband furious because you've missed the post? The Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter prints the stamp and seals the envelope all in one go.") (These ads may seem outrageous, but have you seen the billboard a concrete company ran recently?) More »
publicity whores
For some time I have been obsessed with Juile Roehm. She used to have pretty much the most objectionable job possible, which was to try and convince consumers Wal-Mart was "hip" through the powers of marketing, but then she was fired in a way that actually made Wal-Mart look like the good guy, because apparently the only kind of respectable policy they have is to not inadvertently contribute to waste by accepting free shit from advertising agencies and vendors and she broke that a bunch of times while on extended business trips to New York that were even further extended by the fact that she was screwing her underling, and then when she was fired she sued and Wal-Mart released all these lovey-dovey emails between them that maybe they got from the underling's wife — they were, natch, both married — and suddenly the tabloids filled up with all these reports of them showing up in pajamas at the Bentonville Starbucks and generally carrying on like two Access Hollywood reporters clinging to one another in the middle of a war zone.
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Wal-Tart Julie Roehm's Sad, Slutty Fight With Wal-Mart Is Over
For some time I have been obsessed with Juile Roehm. She used to have pretty much the most objectionable job possible, which was to try and convince consumers Wal-Mart was "hip" through the powers of marketing, but then she was fired in a way that actually made Wal-Mart look like the good guy, because apparently the only kind of respectable policy they have is to not inadvertently contribute to waste by accepting free shit from advertising agencies and vendors and she broke that a bunch of times while on extended business trips to New York that were even further extended by the fact that she was screwing her underling, and then when she was fired she sued and Wal-Mart released all these lovey-dovey emails between them that maybe they got from the underling's wife — they were, natch, both married — and suddenly the tabloids filled up with all these reports of them showing up in pajamas at the Bentonville Starbucks and generally carrying on like two Access Hollywood reporters clinging to one another in the middle of a war zone.
More »
Do men buy cars with their hearts, while women buy cars with their heads? A study by J.D. Power found that the luxury car most women buy is also the safest — the Volvo S40. The car with the highest male ownership is the high-performance Audi RS4. While the Audi starts at $67K and goes 0 to 60 in 4.8 seconds, the Volvo is around $25K and aced the Highway Safety Institute's frontal crash test. "When shopping for a new car, women are less likely to be seduced by horsepower and high-tech tricks. What most want is safety, reliability, and value," says BusinessWeek. (The Volvo won in the luxury category, but the most popular car among women in any price category was the Volkswagen Beetle, and Suzuki was the number one brand purchased by women this year.) Surely there are women who'd love a slick sports car, but it seems logical that such a huge purchase — one that affects your daily life — should be one that's affordable and practical. Women are stereotyped as frivolous shoppers, but doesn't it seem, when it comes to cars, that men have a lot to learn? [BusinessWeek]
size matters
The clip above features a hilarious television advertisement that's part of Australia's new road safety campaign. Aimed at the problematic population of fast-driving young men (called "hoons" — Aussie speak is so weird!), the ad features women wiggling their pinkies at dudes in fast-moving cars as a gesture to indicate a small dick. Apparently, since the ads were introduced back in June, they've been a smashing success, proving that there's nothing an Aussie bloke — or an American gossip columnist! — is more insecure about than the perception of his masculinity. More »
Aussie Ad: Men Who Speed Have Small Dicks
The clip above features a hilarious television advertisement that's part of Australia's new road safety campaign. Aimed at the problematic population of fast-driving young men (called "hoons" — Aussie speak is so weird!), the ad features women wiggling their pinkies at dudes in fast-moving cars as a gesture to indicate a small dick. Apparently, since the ads were introduced back in June, they've been a smashing success, proving that there's nothing an Aussie bloke — or an American gossip columnist! — is more insecure about than the perception of his masculinity. More »
