I had a blast at my friends Chris & Mel's wedding this past weekend. It was good to be home...or roughly 100-ish miles from home. There really should be a law against the display of Auburn and 'Bama logos anywhere in the Great State of Georgia. Or at least some sort of special tax on it. Instead of a SPLOST, we could call it the Special Levy on Alabama Teams - the SPLAT tax.
But I digress. Home. Wedding. Happy people. It was fun seeing old friends, making new ones, and giving Chris a chance to return the favor of making me feel like a slightly inadequate groomsman at the wedding. We both have wives that just plan too damn well, and based on the actual weddings, make us way too damn happy. Aww, I'm being all cutsie. Please. It's 8:45pm and I still have four hours left at work - I have to pass the time somehow, and you're going to suffer for it.
Anyway, I don't really want to talk about Chris & Mel. They're cool an all, but now they're married and off to wherever, and it's back to me. Besides, Chris hasn't even updated his blog since March. It's so old, I'm not even going to link to it - and he has his own domain and everything. Fancy boy.
I decided to be a moderate badass for the weekend and see if I could rent some sort of car that was a little more upscale than the
Yugo disguised as a Chevy Aveo.
Unfortunately, I don't have the magical soil that makes the crabgrass in my yard suddenly turn into flowers that bloom $100 bills, so I couldn't get that
Aston Martin I really wanted.
Good thing I already got a chance to drive someone else's V12 Vanquish at the ho-tel (holla!).
Hey! Quit looking at the damn car. Back to me.
I was pretty surprised when I found that I could rent a Ford Mustang for just under $40 a day. Sure, not the craziest vehicle known to man, but the new ones are okay looking and hey, what the hell, right? Besides, Hertz's description and photo made it seem like it'd at least be a step up from the disturbingly catchy
hamster mover.
Still, I had my doubts. To me, renting a sports car that's listed as one of 78 within the "Fun Collection" would probably end up being a similar experience to riding on that back bar of a shopping cart while making your way through the parking lot. When you get on it seems like it'd be a lot of fun, but then you realize that the thing has zero creature comforts built-in and you can't go nearly as fast as you'd like. And to top it all off, you've now just given up the ability to fit that 64-pack of toilet paper in the trunk.
So, I was kind of surprised when I walked up to a shiny 2011 Mustang and opened the door to find this:
I mean, damn. Leather? Creepy voice command bluetooth lady in the stereo? Functional seating for 4? Oh wait, scratch that last part. The half-inch gap between the front of the rear seats and the back of my front seat, even accounting for my ridiculously short legs, tells me that you couldn't fit a half-price baby clown in the back seat of this thing, let alone an actual person. Sure, there's a seat belt back there, but you'd have to just arrange some clothes in the figure of a person and strap them in if you wanted to try to get in the HOV lane.
This is getting boring. I forgot how I was planning on getting to this, but by far my favorite part of this car is the fact that you can set the dashboard lights, halo lights, and ambience lights (why does Blogger think I misspelled ambience?) to whatever color you want. Not just a handful of preselected colors, either, you can actually get into the damn RGBs and change them to whatever the hell you want. I made an attempt at puke green and canned corn before just settling on a nice Russian-submarine-in-battle-conditions red.
The best part? If you try to change any of these settings while you're driving down the road, creepy voice command lady turns off your radio and yells at you for trying to fiddle with things while you're driving. Literally, everything turns off and she says something like, "For your safety, you cannot access this function while driving. Please stop the vehicle in a safe location in order to continue. Otherwise I'll effing cut you. Please shut the hell up and I'll give you the commands from now on."
I was going to leave y'all with a wonderful recording of my new friend Madam Sync, but alas, the interwebs have failed me tonight. So instead, I'll leave you with a classic documentary chronicling some guy's dilemma with local wildlife and leave you to pontificate on the intersections of and conflict between man and nature. Enjoy!
