It’s the time of the year to go topless. No, not at the beach, but on the road in your convertible.
Motor Trend offers the car equivalent of porn this issue with a 19-page feature on the fastest and sleekest cars around. The testosterone-laden cover title, “Assault Weapons for the Street and Track,” is eye-rollingly predictable. But even skeptics will raise an approving eyebrow at some of the beauties featured within, including the 2014 Rolls-Royce Wraith, the Lamborghini Veneno and the Bentley Continental GT Speed Convertible. The orange-tinted Bentley comes with 616 horsepower and reaches speeds of up to 202 miles per hour for a cool $238,000. As MT so aptly put it: “Excessive? Absolutely.”
If you love driving fast, expensive cars, or just simply like to fantasize about them, then this month’s Car and Driver has plenty of fuel. It lined up a host of luxury sports convertibles outside William Randolph Hearst’s castle. The four cars detailed are the Jaguar XKR-S; Porsche 911 Carrera S; BMW M6 and the Mercedes Benz SL63 AMG. They’re all priced over $100,000 and come with options such as a $5,000 silver paint finish. The article weaves in auto stats galore with a travel feature on San Simeon. It’s man car porn for sure, but who could argue with having the top down with summer on the way. An enticing read for pros and proles.
You’d think it’s time for open road driving, but not at Road & Track, which tagged along with a caravan of Porsches testing the conditions of northern Canada. The story ends in the worst place possible for a road test: a snowy ditch. There also is a glowing review of the Tesla Sedan that credits the company with returning America to the top of the car world. It’s a little tough to read about Tesla without wondering if its CEO, Elon Musk, is so feared that Road & Track would avoid any controversy, given that the last time a reporter said a bad word about Tesla, Musk accused him of an ethics violation. Still, Road & Track could be the best in automotive reporting, so no need to question its commitment.
In its review of the Lamborghini Aventador, Automobile is refreshingly honest as it recounts a slow roll through Miami’s South Beach in the $482,820 car, with “hordes of onlookers” snapping photos with their iPhones: “I wonder how many times our manhood has been assailed or the term ‘D-bags’ uttered,” the reviewer writes. “What’s the Italian word for ‘embarrassing?’” Elsewhere, a feature on vintage cars includes a White tourer owned by Jay Leno (who appears to own 83 percent of all vintage cars featured in magazines everywhere), built in 1910 and powered by steam. “The first step is igniting the pilot flame, which is accomplished with a match,” the mag says. Leno uses a piezoelectric igniter, of course.
NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars has spied a valley four times deeper than the Grand Canyon and a mountain three times higher than Everest, the New Yorker reports. But the biggest discovery came in March, when it found an ancient lake bed with “all the building blocks of life,” including water that was “the kind that we humans would have been happy to have a glass of.” Down to earth, Adam Gopnik seeks to debunk the myth that in decades past National Geographic was a fertile source of images of female breasts for furtive young men: “Any child … who waited by the mailbox for the next glimpse would have had to be a very patient mailbox watcher,” Gopnik says, with a possible air of chagrin.
New York likens Gov. Andrew Cuomo to LBJ and makes a good case, describing his famous penchant for phone calls at all hours and on weekends. “Sometimes Cuomo will open with a dirty joke, sometimes he’ll commiserate about being a divorced dad of teenagers,” Chris Smith reports. Also, in its usual fashion, the mag digs up a demographic that’s just big enough to maybe justify an article — maybe. This time, it’s men who have quit masturbating with the idea that they’ve been draining away precious testosterone. “I was able to notice the birds chirping, which I haven’t done in years,” says one practitioner, as if this were even vaguely compatible with his manly purpose.
The cover of this week’s Time strikes us as all too true, and is sobering, indeed: big, sturdy-looking, metallic lettering that says “Made In the USA” — being assembled by robots. Despite all the hoopla about the return of domestic manufacturing, the reality is that new factories will be far more automated. Not only will factories employ fewer people, they’ll require personnel with fancier education degrees. “We’re going to see new jobs, but nowhere near the number some people expect,” a McKinsey consultant says. As if to reinforce any oncoming funk for readers, another article declares that male sperm don’t “age gracefully,” and that the biological clock “ticks for both sexes.”