I’m not a fan of John Derbyshire, but his column entitled The Election From Hell pretty much sums up how I feel.

According to the ego killing feedburner badge, writing about stuff other than burritos is steadily driving down my readership. I’ve dropped from 12 readers to 7. So, I’m giving up on cars and I’m going back to burritos.

UPDATE: Just promising to write about burritos has brought back two readers.

One of the big advantages to living in the city/valley, and working at SOMA is that you get to mingle with all the other people who are working on new web stuff, or are writing about it. Almost every night there’s a different party or event. On Thursday, I attended two: an AOL launch of their new fantasy football site, and the monthly Mashable event. Here’s my name tag from the Mashable party:

The Mashable party was far better attended, and it even had better bouncers.

So, bored with the usual crash tests, some safety engineers decided to see what happens if you take a car with a 5 star safety rating, capable of protecting it’s occupants from a 40 mph head-on crash, and ram it into a wall at 50 mph. The predictable answer is that what is merely an unpleasant experience at 40 mph becomes deadly at 50 mph. I say predictable, because (as we all know from High School physics) force increases as the square of the velocity.  A picture is worth a thousand formulas, so here’s the video:

The newest fake car acessory idiocy is apparently fake brake calipers. Check out this photo:

Now, you too can ruin your brakes by gluing fake Brembo calipers to them. See the details at JDM Insider.

My next car:

The Maserati M12 Corsa