Weekly Roundup: Young Players Edition

Somebody at my son's school had the ridiculous idea of putting on a play and giving my son, who is six years old, over 100 lines in said play. Amazingly, he managed to do his part last night. What if the kid ended up becoming an actor? I suppose there are worse jobs, particularly when it comes to meeting attractive young women.

While I sit around and daydream about John being the Steve McQueen of the year 2038 and all of the brilliant merchandising opportunities I could create as a result --- think of how much his 993 would fetch at an auction! --- the rest of you can catch up with what Bark and I got published this week.

Bark was the prolific Baruth brother this week, coming up with an "Ask Bark" about choosing a nostalgia-mobile and one on replacing an old Lexus ES. Today, he's busy trollin' the B&B with an innuendo-laden Durango Review.

I had just one article published at TTAC, but it was a traffic and comment blockbuster. It also served as further proof that many of my readers, particularly my most devoted critics, take me a lot more seriously than I take myself. I don't think there is any level of self-parody to which I could descend that wouldn't still be read with a straight face by some of these humorless mooks.

For Road&Track, I debuted our Web-only review of the McLaren 675LT. It's been remarkably well-received, with the primary complaint that I didn't provide more track data. Well, half of the course had oil-dry on it and there was traffic in every lap, so I didn't think that the raw numbers would be representative of the car. What I am going to do in the near future is write a quick piece for these pages about my adversary in that Corvette. Some of the photos of his racing career are beyond awesome.

I should also point out that this piece was considerably improved in the edit process. I never hesitate to bitch when I think I'm ill-served by editing so I'd be remiss if I didn't say that Andrew Del Colle's sharp rebuke of my first draft led to a lot of changes for the better.

The other thing I did for R&T was a think piece on vision and motorcycles on the road. I probably could have listened to Andrew a little more on this one; he said that some of the readers would absolutely fixate on the paragraph where I talk about "winding out" a GSXR-1000 and use it to rail about motorcycle riders breaking the law. Was he ever right. Ugh.

Come back next week --- brother Bark's been renting a variety of interesting vehicles and I've been watching a few fascinating videos that might deserve some caustic comment!