Sunday, March 18, 2007
RACEY TRACEEEE
Attention, Honda: before attempting to fix the planet, perhaps you could build a car capable of scoring points in a Formula One race. By the way, who dreamed up Honda’s Holy Gaia concept in the first place?
The idea was that of Simon Fuller, whose 19 Entertainment company guided the careers of the Spice Girls and created the “American Idol” television program. He has been working with the Honda team since last year.
Speaking of Formula One and dumb, here’s Traceeee Hutchison:
Surely these silly car races have got to stop sometime? It’s just so blatantly wasteful. Consume. Consume. Consume. Vroom. Vroom. Vroom. We’ve gone so mad on consumption that we can’t even recognise our own barbaric man versus nature behaviour. Put simply, driving cars at too-fast speed round and round in circles is idiocy, not sport. I just don’t get it.
Too fast? Well, that gets slowpoke Honda off the hook. Traceeee’s view of motor racing is common among certain bookish types, who assume the sport to be base and elemental. A friend of mine (who has occasionally contributed to The Age) was astonished a few years ago when I told her I was driving to Melbourne to watch the Grand Prix; intelligent people (she thinks I’m intelligent, bless her) simply don’t do such things. Yet if I’d told her I was flying to Germany to watch World Cup players smack a ball around with their heads, she’d have been fine with it. It’s as though these people - how would Catherine Deveny put it? - have no imagination. I bet Traceeee thinks you start an F1 car with a key. She continues:
Cars, and the precious petrol most of us still run them on, are at their best when driven at the speed limit and with a particular destination in mind.
Joyless puritan leftist alert! From a future Grandma Hutchison column: “Sex is best when performed within marriage for the purposes of procreation.” Tut-Tut Hutch the Scoldy Oldy isn’t finished, next berating celebrities for driving in a support race:
Is it too old fashioned to wonder if any of those competing celebrities thought much about the broader conundrum their taking part might actually pose? Their being role models and all? Just think about the potential of that new generation of kiddies watching their almost famous idols thinking, “Gee, when I grow up I wanna get into a hotted up car and drive rooly, rooly fast.”
Those “hotted up cars”? They were little BMWs essentially modified only for safety. Is it too old fashioned to wonder if Traceeee might one day check something before publishing?
(Incidentally, someone should tell Traceeee that her ABC co-star was once one of those “almost famous idols” destroying children’s minds by driving in a Grand Prix celebrity race. Oops!)