Just say 'no' kids.
Go back a hundred years or so and if you didn’t like the way something looked, or if it stopped working, you either got rid of it, fixed it, or just shrugged your shoulders and soldiered on. This applied to houses, carts, and presumably wives too. For your average person life was about function, not form, so this wasn’t necessarily an issue. Carts were not designed with aesthetics in mind, houses were purely for living in (remember, we’re talking about everyday folk here, not the nobs) and wives, well, they were for child-bearing an’ stuff, right?
Skip back to the present-day and look at where we are now; for your average person it is all about form (otherwise how do you explain Apple?) and pretty much everything is disposable. For those items that aren’t so easily disposable (which, thanks to arcane homicide laws and divorce courts, includes wives), the list of improvement options is almost never-ending. You can add extensions to your house, completely remodel the interior, and landscape the grounds to resemble anything from a Zen garden to your own little wilderness. If your wife starts to sag, wrinkle, or stretch you can have bits of her lifted, inflated, tightened, and injected with chemicals which will get rid of the wrinkles, but unfortunately also make her face look like Anne Robinson’s. You need only be limited by your budget and your imagination.
And there, unfortunately, is the problem. Unless you are Ian Callum, Sir Norman Foster or R.J. Mitchell, things that sound good or look good inside your own head rarely transfer well into the real world. In essence it becomes a question of taste. Or rather, a lack thereof.
Which brings me neatly onto cars. Nowhere else in the world of improvements (with the possible exception of the aforementioned wives) is there such a stunning and obvious lack of common sense, restraint or good taste. Take a wander through your local Halfords (or AutoZone here in the US) and you’ll be surrounded by skinny young men in baggy jeans getting all glassy eyed over rack upon rack of shiny things, molded wings, and fake boost gauges. It really is like watching a bunch of deranged magpies in a jewelry store. You may actually notice some inappropriate bulges and the odd strand of drool. Wander outside and you will likely be faced by ranks of Civics, Saxos, Corsa’s, and even the odd Nova or Neon, all pimped and modded to within an inch of their lives. A veritable feast of badly proportioned body-kits, miss-matched alloys, primer clad body panels and exhausts the size of Sarah Cox’s gob. None of which disguise the fact that the cars underneath have seen better days and will never, ever be chosen to star in the next woeful installment of The Fast and The Furious franchise.
Now, while I find this modding pastime (not tuning, by the way, because in most cases the skinny little ‘erks wouldn’t know one end of an engine bay from the other) both a source of much hilarity (see Top Gear’s old “Carbage” section) and occasionally faintly disturbing, it is, I’ll grudgingly admit, relatively harmless (unless you happen to be a mid-90’s Civic, in which case be afraid, be very afraid). The cars they choose were never meant to be the zenith of automotive design or performance, they were just meant to be functional and, with the exception of the Neon, relatively inoffensive to look at.
However, what I don’t find even remotely hilarious, and do find extremely disturbing and possibly slightly horrifying, is when the owners of some of the finest cars in the world decide that they want to do the same thing.
Take, for instance, the DB9 that I saw on the way home the other night. Here was a man who had procured one of the most beautiful cars in existence, a car that makes me go all gooey and gives me a James May-esque “fizz” just by looking at it. And do you know what the imbecile had done to it? Big black spinners. On an Aston. I mean…what the…how…wh…WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU MAN?
Would you put pink neon running lights on a Spitfire? Would you fit 22” chrome rims to 30 St. Mary Axe? Unless you’re a dedicated crack smoker the answer should be “no”. So why, then, would anyone even conceive of doing something so fundamentally wrong to what is arguably Ian Callum’s finest work? I almost wept.
It doesn’t stop there, though. There is also a Conti GT tooling around Charlotte that has an obviously custom gold glitter-effect paint job with matching white and gold rims (no, Mansory, don’t even think about it, you’ve already done enough damage). Just this morning I happened across a Range Rover (not the chavtastic Sport, but the classier full size version) with 3 spoke chromes and a dark gray tribal motif along the side. I almost didn’t notice that the light in front of me had gone green as I sat and gawped. It just beggars belief that someone will fork out over a $100k for a car that has been engineered and designed almost to perfection, and then set about ruining it by deciding that they can make it better. No, you can’t! All you’re doing is advertising to the world that you are a prat of quite monumental proportions and have an utter lack of anything resembling good taste or class.
Since we have an NFL franchise here in Charlotte I suspect the culprits may be exponents of what is laughingly referred to as “football” over here, in which case it would seem that while the two footballs differ wildly in their play, the players themselves are similarly challenged when it comes to restraint and shiny things. No doubt they were also encouraged to a certain degree by those halfwits on the popular MTV show, “Pimp My Ride”. How about you try pimping my shotgun, you bunch of bloody philistines?
Either way, flogging really is too good for these people. Their victims should be whisked away by the car equivalent of Child Protective Services in order to be nursed back to health before being passed on to a new family who will love and cherish them and never, EVER get any funny notions about gold paint, black spinners, or chrome.
Modding, I feel, is a pastime best left to people who have clapped-out old cars that no one really cares about, and pimping is best left to, well, pimps.
Skip back to the present-day and look at where we are now; for your average person it is all about form (otherwise how do you explain Apple?) and pretty much everything is disposable. For those items that aren’t so easily disposable (which, thanks to arcane homicide laws and divorce courts, includes wives), the list of improvement options is almost never-ending. You can add extensions to your house, completely remodel the interior, and landscape the grounds to resemble anything from a Zen garden to your own little wilderness. If your wife starts to sag, wrinkle, or stretch you can have bits of her lifted, inflated, tightened, and injected with chemicals which will get rid of the wrinkles, but unfortunately also make her face look like Anne Robinson’s. You need only be limited by your budget and your imagination.
And there, unfortunately, is the problem. Unless you are Ian Callum, Sir Norman Foster or R.J. Mitchell, things that sound good or look good inside your own head rarely transfer well into the real world. In essence it becomes a question of taste. Or rather, a lack thereof.
Which brings me neatly onto cars. Nowhere else in the world of improvements (with the possible exception of the aforementioned wives) is there such a stunning and obvious lack of common sense, restraint or good taste. Take a wander through your local Halfords (or AutoZone here in the US) and you’ll be surrounded by skinny young men in baggy jeans getting all glassy eyed over rack upon rack of shiny things, molded wings, and fake boost gauges. It really is like watching a bunch of deranged magpies in a jewelry store. You may actually notice some inappropriate bulges and the odd strand of drool. Wander outside and you will likely be faced by ranks of Civics, Saxos, Corsa’s, and even the odd Nova or Neon, all pimped and modded to within an inch of their lives. A veritable feast of badly proportioned body-kits, miss-matched alloys, primer clad body panels and exhausts the size of Sarah Cox’s gob. None of which disguise the fact that the cars underneath have seen better days and will never, ever be chosen to star in the next woeful installment of The Fast and The Furious franchise.
Now, while I find this modding pastime (not tuning, by the way, because in most cases the skinny little ‘erks wouldn’t know one end of an engine bay from the other) both a source of much hilarity (see Top Gear’s old “Carbage” section) and occasionally faintly disturbing, it is, I’ll grudgingly admit, relatively harmless (unless you happen to be a mid-90’s Civic, in which case be afraid, be very afraid). The cars they choose were never meant to be the zenith of automotive design or performance, they were just meant to be functional and, with the exception of the Neon, relatively inoffensive to look at.
However, what I don’t find even remotely hilarious, and do find extremely disturbing and possibly slightly horrifying, is when the owners of some of the finest cars in the world decide that they want to do the same thing.
Take, for instance, the DB9 that I saw on the way home the other night. Here was a man who had procured one of the most beautiful cars in existence, a car that makes me go all gooey and gives me a James May-esque “fizz” just by looking at it. And do you know what the imbecile had done to it? Big black spinners. On an Aston. I mean…what the…how…wh…WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU MAN?
Would you put pink neon running lights on a Spitfire? Would you fit 22” chrome rims to 30 St. Mary Axe? Unless you’re a dedicated crack smoker the answer should be “no”. So why, then, would anyone even conceive of doing something so fundamentally wrong to what is arguably Ian Callum’s finest work? I almost wept.
It doesn’t stop there, though. There is also a Conti GT tooling around Charlotte that has an obviously custom gold glitter-effect paint job with matching white and gold rims (no, Mansory, don’t even think about it, you’ve already done enough damage). Just this morning I happened across a Range Rover (not the chavtastic Sport, but the classier full size version) with 3 spoke chromes and a dark gray tribal motif along the side. I almost didn’t notice that the light in front of me had gone green as I sat and gawped. It just beggars belief that someone will fork out over a $100k for a car that has been engineered and designed almost to perfection, and then set about ruining it by deciding that they can make it better. No, you can’t! All you’re doing is advertising to the world that you are a prat of quite monumental proportions and have an utter lack of anything resembling good taste or class.
Since we have an NFL franchise here in Charlotte I suspect the culprits may be exponents of what is laughingly referred to as “football” over here, in which case it would seem that while the two footballs differ wildly in their play, the players themselves are similarly challenged when it comes to restraint and shiny things. No doubt they were also encouraged to a certain degree by those halfwits on the popular MTV show, “Pimp My Ride”. How about you try pimping my shotgun, you bunch of bloody philistines?
Either way, flogging really is too good for these people. Their victims should be whisked away by the car equivalent of Child Protective Services in order to be nursed back to health before being passed on to a new family who will love and cherish them and never, EVER get any funny notions about gold paint, black spinners, or chrome.
Modding, I feel, is a pastime best left to people who have clapped-out old cars that no one really cares about, and pimping is best left to, well, pimps.
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