You know, for some reason (boredom?) I was looking at Reattas on CL this weekend.

1972 Pontiac Ventura four-door with the 250 straight-six, a Powerglide (that's a two(!)-speed automatic for the youngsters too young to remember such a thing), and fairly bald tires. I had one of these when I was 17, it was my first front-engine, rear-wheel-drive car and it was a riot. The wide spacing between first…

I wasn't being totally sarcastic. If the Citation hadn't been such an awful car, Chevy could've done a retro redux of the notchback and I think it would have fit with their current offerings...

"I own that Jane's Addiction album. Perfect example of why we don't need nanny government telling us what is obscene. You know that they were forced to change the album cover, right? Ritual de lo Habitual has a blank cover with the First Amendment on it now."

I understand the First Amendment perfectly well. I also understand that living in a society necessarily entails some level of compromise—you can't just do whatever you want. And in this country, it has long been held that certain types of speech are not protected by the First Amendment: obscenity, fighting words,…

"not so much scary as it is eerie."

So I made him an offer on it. Hopefully he'll be interested in trading for a '95 Jag XJR with an intermittent misfire, a spare Lucas coil pack, $452.00, and an autographed picture of Judge Judy. I'm feeling pretty confident that the Judge Judy picture will seal the deal, since it's one of four items he's bought on…

Sneaked is (or at least was) the preferred usage. 20 years ago, as a journalism student, I used the word "snuck" in a story. My prof returned it to me with a note that "snuck" is not a word. I couldn't believe it, so I looked it up in the dictionary (or at least I tried to). Sure enough, no "snuck." Sneaked was…

Citation, natch.

Society doesn't need to determine everything that is obscene—like what you choose to look at in the privacy of your own home. But it does need to determine some things.

Apparently I frequent the wrong forums.

In other news, Katherine Heigl spent New Year's weekend visiting friends in nearby Birmingham, MI.

Also, I would finally pull the trigger and buy a Fuego Turbo. I've threatened to do it for decades. If I finally actually did, my friends would *know* the apocalypse was nigh.

Yeah, well if the world's going to shatter and we're all going to die, it wouldn't change my choice. There are a lot worse ways to spend my last 352 days on earth than seeing the world in a W123 with full expedition kit.

There seem to be two divergent threads here: one for the people who, figuring they're going to die, buy a dream car that they'll never have to finish making payments on; the other for the people who plan on surviving the apocalypse and want a car that will survive it, too.

No, I got your point. And certainly you can decide for yourself what is obscene and what isn't, which works fine when you're dealing with material in the privacy of your own home. The question is: how does *society* determine what is obscene when something is in the public view (say, a billboard, an album cover, a…

Good to know that there are a handful of us out there that still do. Looking forward to that post!

The problem, of course, is the same as we have seen with this "what is a station wagon?" exercise: when you make a simple, all-encompassing hard-and-fast rule and then try to apply it to gray areas, you end up with ridiculous results. Stewart's point was that a simple rule such as "any display of humans engaged in…

For sure.

And of course, the Squareback.