This pen uses AI..."

Quite so. I once had a BMW E30 325i. The engine was the M20 straight six in completely standard tune. It had a delectable burble at idle and was smooth and torquey on the open road; purred like a cat. Lovely car!

Precisely. If the driver of this smugly anti-environmentalist Dodge Ram is now suffering financial hardship, they will receive no sympathy from me.

The first music album I ever received was Michael Jackson's 'Dangerous' on cassette 🎶 The box had a sticker that read: "4 Top 10 Hits" I couldn't figure out which of the 14 album tracks were "Top" and which were "Hits". 30+ yrs later, I FINALLY realise the sticker meant: "Four Top Ten Hits" 🤦

Aren't they gorgeous? Echoes of a Lamborghini Countach and a Ford GT-40 (reasonable, given their American underpinnings and Italian style); very well proportioned and looked good throughout the multi-decade production run. I also like the Longchamp; reminiscent of Ferrari 400i & various Maseratis.

There's an interesting sub-genre of luxury car brands that combined European (normally Italian) styling with American V8s. 🇮🇹 De Tomaso 🇨🇭 Monteverdi 🇬🇧 Jensen 🇬🇧 Bristol This approach makes sense for low-volume cars. It seems to have been a 1960s-90s phenomenon...though Bristol survived until 2011.

Exceptionalism, optimism bias, self-centredness...plenty of reasons to ignore evidence to suit an existing point of view. I have been reading The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova. It's about the psychology of scams and grifts. Humans are amazing at self-deception when we truly want to believe.

Dolphin grey used to look great on 1980s BMWs. But these were special cars. Now every other car seems to be grey. Not so premium now.

Ole Evinrude, inventor of the outboard engine, was a Norwegian American living near a lake :) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Evi...

I also recommend 'Tintin & Co." by Michael Farr, which is mainly about the characters in the books. You can get them both from Auckland Libraries 📚

Harry Thompson's: 'Tintin; Hergé and his creation' is a splendid potted biography of Georges Remi and the cast of characters he created. It also makes the salient point that Hergé's sense of humour was always present. Who else would put a naked Haddock into a theatre full of disapproving parrots?!

Go Belgium! 🇧🇪

Go Belgium! 🇧🇪

Indeed. The new light rail line to Redmond looks super. Seattle is a beautiful city and from what I can see it has well-thought out plans for public transport. Greetings from Auckland! 🇳🇿

The City also is served by ▪︎ six Tube lines ▪︎ five mainline rail termini ▪︎ Elizabeth Line ▪︎ Docklands Light Railway ▪︎ bus routes galore It's the least car-centric place in Britain! That said, people *did* use to drive to work in the City. The City Corporation now priorities people & public realm.

$500k? This is about as much money as (made-up) investment bankers "Al and Alexandra Moy" alledgedly earn in the UK. (FYI this story was printed in the Daily Telegraph before everyone realised it was total bollocks and it was hurriedly taken down 😂)

"This is the road safety department! We have to wait until someone dies." See also: "Gentlemen you can't fight in here, this is the War Room".

Things that cost more than their weight in gold: - platinum - saffron - replacement car door mirrors (I am having to source one of the latter and am smarting at the cost).

The Telegraph can relied upon to talk about what really matters. And they interview really great people. I for one want to know what Al Moy thinks about Andy Burnham.

As per the article, there was once a plan to reallocate one lane of the Westway to make a cycleway. It would be a really useful link into central London. Maybe Critical Mass will have redrawn attention to this potential connection?

Here's an interesting observation: Different lighting colours for different users. This is a multi-use building in central Auckland. The top half is a Deloitte office. It has white lighting, for a businesslike look. The bottom half is a smart hotel, with warmer lighting for calm, luxury vibe.

Yup.

This is why I prefer to own cars that pre-date Web 2.0. My newest car was a 1996 Honda Orthia and that was quite smart enough for me. (Currently car-free).

Buy This Truck And Be More Manly does lead to a very frantic driving style.

I enjoy working on my bicycle, but I try only to own one at a time. In London, I owned a Raleigh Chiltern🇬🇧 and a Gazelle Impala🇳🇱. I was forever mending them; they had no common parts. The Raleigh's front wheel collapsed on Southwark bridge...when I'd just sold it & was making the delivery run 😭

Pop fact: The makers of 'Balto' (1995) based the appearance of Jenna on Audrey Hepburn. Check out the eyebrows! www.imdb.com/title/tt0112...

"Our design philosophy is to give consumers the vehicles they truly need..."

All that effort going into vehicle design...but the driver cannot see what's in front of them. Bonkers!

Diagram depicting potential rocket/stockmarket trajectories. - to the Moon - in orbit - shit!!

Bloody hell! Most cars have something called a "windscreen". This is made of revolutionary transparent material known as "glass". It's clever stuff, but you need a direct line of sight. When car designers seek to out-macho one another with huge high bonnets, it becomes impossible to see children.