And more Morse nonsense to amuse the internet...
One: I LIKE GARY NEWMAN (who is a video game programmer, or a photographer, or an illustrator... but definitely not the bloke who wrote Cars...)
Two: THAT PORK TASTED FUNNY (should have stuck to the beef, Stiggie!)
So, onto the rest of it: much talk has there been of the Tesla on FG, and it's good to have seen it in action, informing those TG watchers who don't hang around here that electric cars don't have to be nasty, tiny, slow, misery-inducing shiteboxes that keep the eco-loonies happy.
And those who didn't watch James May's Big Ideas *and* aren't regularly pestered by Honda's Dream magazine (that's a dubious perk of being a Honda owner) might not have heard of the FCX Clarity. Now, my 2007 Civic Type S has a Clarkson-unapproved paraffin stove under the bonnet - but that's what works best for me right now. If I haven't been banned from driving along with everyone else in the UK because of the cancerous spread of speed cameras which resort to ever more Big Brother-like tricks by the end of next decade, I see the ideal next car. Or, at least, the successor to the current FCX will be. And I wonder how a Lotus Elise with a fuel cell might work out, given that we've effectively just seen a battery-powered version. Or, say, a fuel cell-powered Formula 1 car. That is where the loss of Honda may well be felt at its sharpest!
On that note, actually, you should all go back and watch the episode where James tests the new Vauxhall Vectra. "Not the next one, and probably not the one after that..." - the GM Hy-wire. See, TG can do sensible pieces about real cars of the future. Although what happens to the Hy-wire with GM in such a crippling financial mess, US government bail-out or not, is anyone's guess.
Top Gear Stuntman's latest failure: bah.
News: it must be christmas! Certainly it was for the bunch of girls in the audience that Hamster fell into... but not for the Morris Marina owners' club. Ha! You know, for whatever reason I held off posting on the Morris Marina thread... but James said exactly what I was thinking all along. Keep one Marina in a museum somewhere as a shining example to the rest of the world of How Not To Do It! The Marina owners' club will one day see the error of their ways and stop crowing about how Jezza is a disgrace to Britain... clearly his hero-worship of the E-Type has gone unnoticed at Marina HQ, or how he pointed out that it is possible to support the British car industry by buying a Honda (built in Swindon) or a Nissan (built in Sunderland), and he was rather fond of the Noble M12, and one of the episodes of Car Years was dedicated to pointing out what went wrong with the whole British Leyland experiment, why it shouldn't have gone wrong and who was to blame... I wonder how the Marina owners' club would react to a Triumph enthusiast dropping a Rover 3.5-litre V8 into a Stag, which is exactly what should have happened but some blithering incompetent screwed up somewhere down the line and ruined the Stag for everyone when it should have been a brilliant, brilliant car... but wasn't. I bet they'll respond with suitably misguided apoplexy.
And the BTCC: I used to watch that almost religiously in the 1990s, when just about all the major manufacturers were involved... and lost interest in 2000 when they all pulled out again, and has Ford, Vauxhall and Honda running three cars each with an ill-thought-out "Group N" racing alongside the independent teams. That said, with only Vauxhall in the 2009 manufacturers' championship, that's looking even worse... still, maybe Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button could get hold of a couple of Civic Type Rs and have a crack at it next year?
(Yes, I know the Type R isn't allowed in as it is and Team Halfords had to transplant all the Type R innards into a standard five-door Civic to enter which cost them too much and the car wasn't competitive enough. Even a fraction of Honda's F1 budget would be enough to send them hurtling to the top of the field...)
And finally: Jay Leno, and his gargantuan and thoroughly marvellous collection of cars: H?pla!