Ooh look, a new car

So I just got a new car, but Ford's Fiesta Movement looks like a lot of fun. You enter by way of YouTube submission, and if you're picked, Ford gives you a Fiesta (their not-a-Honda-Fit that's coming to the US later on) for six months in advance of the car's US release and sends you around on "adventures."

This would be neat! I'm hoping to rope my video-producing friend into it.

For Valentine's Day, I got...

a car! :D

It's a black Mazda RX-8, and it's pretty hot.

I paid cash for it (cash that I had due to a complicated family inheritance that was set aside for me to get a car), so it's paid off, but I'll probably still be shelling out tons of money for maintenance and so on.

It's an '04, with 63,000 on the clock, and after three days, so far so good. The trip to get it was a ridiculous adventure. My good friend Pablo, younger brother of Alex, took me up to Oklahoma City to get the car, and he fought sleepiness and the inability to see the entire way up.

By 11pm, Pablo and I finished the inspection, did the deal, and I had the keys. Then followed an IHOP run, tons of coffee (on top of our already-consumed Red Bulls), and poor Pablo was damn near blind as a bat by this point in the night, so he followed me home as I tried to get acquainted with my car, and its manual transmission, and the defroster, all at once.

Miraculously, we made it home at 3:30am. I spent all of Sunday recovering, and today I took the car out again in earnest to go to my Japanese class.

It feels like a sportscar, through and through. It's tough to drive, the ride is unforgiving, and the seats are incredibly bolstered. And in fleeting moments, I feel the tiniest tinge of joy about it all and I begin to crack a smile. My love affair with this car will be immense when it sinks in, but right now I'm still learning my way around the thing.

Mom came to visit! (also, cars)

Mom came to see me in Japan! We spent a week touring Tokyo and Kyoto, and she spent much of it in a jet-lagged daze or in sheer culture-shocked paralysis. Photos are here.

So, on to the important stuff. Here are the cars I saw while in Tokyo in just 5 days, thanks to staying in some snazzy hotels:

The entire Mercedes AMG range, including the R-class (it's still stupid)
A pair of Bentley Continental Flying Spurs
A slew of Maserati Quattroportes
Bunch of Range Rover Sports
So many Lexus LS600Lh's I lost count
An Alpina B7
A VW Touareg W12 (I didn't even know they built one)
The Frank Stella BMW 3.0CSL racer [this one] (thanks to a museum exhibit)
A Lamborghini LP640 with some custom work (car guys: anyone seen red in the intakes before?)
A Rolls-Royce Phantom (it's huuuuge)
The entire modern Ferrari range, including a silver-grey Enzo

and just one Nissan GT-R.

Tokyo Auto Salon pics up

So the real pics from Japan will be coming once I'm settled back in Austin, and in theory I'm leaving in the next few hours, just as soon as we know the ice is melting on the roads between here and there. El Niño is the only thing hitting me harder than jetlag right now - my flight into the US arrived at 10am, and after two days of attempted life in a-town I woke up at 2am today.

In any case, for the car guys, there's much to see from the Tokyo Auto Salon. The pics aren't captioned, but they are commented, and in there I describe and commentate on the cars, and I translate the important stuff from the spec sheets for each of the cars.

No, there aren't booth babes, except for one shot.

Anyway - click to check it out and whet your appetite for a whoooooole lot of Japan pictures, including a lot of wallpaper-worthy shots.