New wheels :D

Say hello to my fifth set of wheels and my very first independent
automotive purchase.

It's a brand new 2010 VW GTI. It's like a Golf but fast. It's a pretty
basic trim but still really well decked out. I'm loving the stereo
(even if the iPhone adapter is really buggy), the Bluetooth, and my
super-awesome flappy-paddle transmission.

The interior is really fantastic. Good build quality, smooth and quiet
ride, but not without a slight growl from the exhaust.

This car is totally me, and I'm psyched to have it. Ask me for a ride
so I have reason to drive it!

The King (of car-related TV) is Dead. (Almost.) Long live the King!

People who know me well know of my great affection for The World's Most Popular TV Show, better known as the lovably geeky joint Top Gear. It's three dudes - wait, this on is the BBC, I should say blokes - who know and love their cars, and proceed to make a hilarious show where they occasionally review a car on its merits and more often do something wacky, like try to build their own electric car or race a supercar against the Eurostar from London to the French Riviera.

The show in its current incarnation [its name is a throwback to a more tepid show from the 80s] started in the early 00s, and I remember getting hooked in an early season along with my college roommate. We watched religiously for the rest of our college careers and beyond as the show grew and grew in fame, audience and budget.

Recently, however, it's beginning to jump the shark. Less car reviews, more crazy stunts. And the villagers are unhappy. 

The show's producer admits as much on TG's own blog, in a long entry full of conciliatory points:

You’re watching a show that’s lost its innocence. To explain, let’s go back a bit. When we started in 2002, our goal was to make a decent Top Gear, but then, and most important, organically, things took us by surprise. Nobody knew the onscreen chemistry of the trio would be so good, also, none of us saw coming where we could actually go with the films.
...
It’s fair to say this incarnation of Top Gear is nearer the end than the beginning, and our job is to land this plane with its dignity still intact.

The car blogs and fan sites of the world take that last line to mean that the sky is falling. But Internet Conspiracy Theorists had also suspected that the previous season would be the last on account of its died-and-gone-to-heaven finale:

What's fair to say is that a show "nearer the end than the beginning" in Season 14 will be done sometime before Season 27. But it's accurate to say that the show is on a downhill slope. There will still be fantastic moments, as the producer himself pointed out in his blog post, but this dog is getting old. I foresee this decade's Top Gear coming to a close before Season 18. 

All good things must come to an end, and it is a just world that has bestowed upon the car faithful a whopping seven-plus years of the Best Show Ever. 

Car fans can also take solace that there's an heir apparent: Jay Leno.

It shouldn't be a surprise, considering the guy retired from The Tonight Show to "spend more time with [his] cars." But what is surprising is just how much content he's cranking out as a car guy. He's got a weekly Web show, Jay Leno's Garage, where he gets some hands-on time with new (and prototype!) cars. His new talk show has a guest lap leaderboard segment, gloriously ripped from those three blokes in the UK. And he's just made an homage to C'était un Rendezvous on the streets of LA. 

It's not big-budget or even British. But Leno's got a lot going for him as the next emperor of car-related entertainment. He appeals to the masses, which can only be said for half of Britain in the case of current king Jeremy Clarkson. He's green, which we need from our automotive role models. And his blue-collar, let's-make-this-in-the-garage attitude is at once decidedly low-budget (which makes it a good fit for the Web content that it is) and quintessentially American. He's a great counter-balance to seven years of Clarkson's Thatcher-esque take on things. 

NBC looked into making an American Top Gear some years back. Leno likely would have hosted - and he'd have been clamoring for the job, no doubt - but the bean counters shot it down. In response, Leno's been making car content anyway, and he's done it on his own terms. In America, we don't have kings. But if we did, we'd like them to have that quality.

Mom went car shopping

and she came home with one of these! A BMW 328i coupe in the gorgeous Blue Water Metallic. It's a color-shifting paint that looks gray dead on and a beautiful light blue from any other angle. She fell in love with the color combination (the interior's the usual BMW light tan affair), signed on the dotted line immediately, and drove it home.

Like Jeremy Clarkson himself, I feel that the right car is the one that stirs your heart. Mom let her heartstrings get pulled with this one, and she even capitulated to the car's persistence in coming with the Sports Package - something she didn't necessarily want, but can live with - in order to have this car.

I have to say, Mom's developed an excellent taste in cars over the years.

Racing around

It's almost summertime!

That means racing season is upon us, and I'm determined to take advantage with my wonderful little car because it's MINE ALL MINE MUAHAHAHAA.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, I'm planning on getting up early on Saturdays to go whip my car around little tracks made of cones. That's called autocrossing, and my friends have been going for years and I've felt all left out. That will change for the first couple months of summer, and I'm excited to engage a) my competitive instinct and b) with the car guys I happen to know.

Hopefully, that's just the beginning. In the last couple of years I've been able to scratch off a lot of the things on my Bucket List, but one of the more persistent entries has been to go to a full-blown racing school. The kind of place where you drop $2,000 or $3,000 and get about 3 days of instruction behind purpose-built racecars.

It might seem like overkill to a dedicated car guy - "you can get 75% of the learning for 5% of the cost with autocrossing" - but I feel like my driving skill could benefit from a sledgehammer approach. Secretly, I've always suspected I was a born driver. I wanted one of those kiddie electric car Power Wheels thingies so bad when I was little, and never got one. Then it became a go-kart. Then it became an actual car.

And then I turned 9.

If I had parents who cared less for my limbs at an early age, perhaps I'd have been put in one of those little racing karts and started a career in Formula 1 at the age of like 19.

Now, F1 drivers are younger than me. That's a hard pill for me to swallow.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not imagining that I'll go to racing school and "get discovered" and wind up being a badass and bagging super-hot Japanese halfie F1 girlfriend Jessica Michibata.

But I'll at least feel like I earned something special, and that's nearly a requirement for something to make my Bucket List.

Returning to regular blogging service

It's been a while since I properly told some stories about my life, hasn't it? I watched a Korean movie the other night and the main character kept a diary. Exact dates with exact memories were kept, and I felt guilty for not doing much of the same for the last few years. Seems like a lot of my memories from my 20s might just start slipping away, and that's no good. So here's what I've been up to today:

I caught up with a childhood friend.
Eric (and his little brother Jon) lived across the street from me when I was 4 until I was about 13. These guys were my biggest playmates. Everything I ever did outdoors, I did with them. Bicycling, playing in yards, that kind of thing. And because we were neighbors, they were playmate option #1. Almost every day turned into a combination of biking and Super Nintendo gaming.

Once they moved away, we lost touch, but I never forgot them. So it pretty much made my week when Eric found me on Facebook several weeks ago and the catch-up process began. His grandparents, who I also knew very well, are still here in Dallas, so he came down to see them and let me know that he was around.

I just got home from the catch-up dinner and coffee, when I learned all about his own business, his extended family's stuff (a bizarrely high proportion of his family is in international business; I could learn from these guys) and what his immediate family's been up to.

It made me think: my newer friends don't know my family. Are my older friends (like Eric) closer for knowing my family and for me knowing theirs? Even my closest college buds don't know my mom... but then again that's probably my mom's fault given that I know my buds' parents well enough.

I have a sportscar.
I don't say that to brag. I mean that out of all the different kinds of cars out there (sedans, SUVs, roadsters, sportscars, GTs), I picked a sportscar for myself and I'm reaping the consequences of that, for better and for worse.

Today was a perfect example. I had to drive from Austin to Dallas and then around town here with Eric. You get exposed to what you supposedly "sacrifice" for a sportscar very quickly on a long trip: comfort. My car is loud (it runs at over 4,000 RPM when cruising at 80mph) and getting stuck in stop-and-go traffic with a six-speed is just plain aggravating. And the suspension isn't exactly made of pillows, either.

The day before, I had to leave one buddy behind on a dinner trip because the car seats four, not five. And I dread the day I get a flat tire, because I have no spare and my inflating tire repair goo expired in 2007.

I should probably do something about that.

But the annoyances were worth it when I was on my way home after dropping Eric off and I decided to hightail it through town with the sunroof open and the new Prodigy album blaring. It's just a joy to drop a couple gears, hit the gas, and effortlessly throw it through a curve at twice the recommended speed. The five minutes of awesome were totally worth the five hours of monotony, and I'll keep the car for as long as that holds true.