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Saturday, February 12, 2011

M3 drivers don't have any friends.

So it's Saturday and I finally get around to looking up the Audi commercial that California Bob recommended. Something in the ad prompts me to look up the Audi, which leads me to a Top Gear video clip. I've seen the clip before, but evidently I have the hot rod disease because I can always watch another Top Gear video. In this one they are comparing three German Saloons with a 1972 Formula 1 race car at a track in Spain. They have a Mercedes, a BMW and an Audi.

(Jeremy, the chief blatherer, calls the Mercedes a Merk, which always confuses me because a Merk in 'Merica is a Mercury, not a Mercedes. In America, Mercedes is always spoken as a complete word, out of reverence for the almighty dollar. On the other hand, I never heard the word saloon spoken aloud in reference to a car before I saw this show. I had seen the word in print many times, but a saloon in 'Merica is a bar, not a car, so I could not imagine they were pronounced the same way.)

Anyway, each of our trio has their own favorite amongst the three saloons. Jeremy "More Power" Clarkson prefers the Merk with it's larger, more powerful engine, or am I being redundant? Richard Hammond prefers the the BMW M3 and James May prefers the Audi. If you have spent any time watching this show, you are no doubt familiar with the personalities and predilections of these three characters. Jeremy is the big, boisterous, live-life-the-fullest kind of guy. Richard is the slightly more sophisticated ? aggressive, more interested in going fast with less than in making a big show. James is the retiring academic type who still enjoys a quick automobile that is well behaved.

Being a technical kind of guy I tend to identify with Richard, so Jeremy's comment about how "M3 drivers don't have any friends" struck me as likely to be very true. I do have a few close friends, but not many. My general impression is that people who are more interested in technology than in people are in the minority. Or maybe it's the everyone would rather deal with things instead of people, it's just that relatively few people have been able to make a living in technical work and are therefor forced to become "people persons". Um, probably not.

P.S. Blogger's spell check highlights all kind of words that I like, but it did not catch perfers, at least not the first time I typed it. This time it did. Sloppy.

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