In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved remarkably.
Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, which you can see in the video embedded below.
In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy, which was surprising to me. I wash shocked to see that supposedly rock-solid car literally come apart at the seams, explosively, as if it were built of plastic. The crash test was conducted at an event to celebrate the contributions of auto insurers to highway safety progress over 50 years.
Today was the first time I saw and heard the Ferrari FXX. While I’m not wild about its looks, the sound of its engine is amazing. It floored me. It’s pure adrenaline. I’ve heard the sound of plenty of sports cars in my time, but I don’t know, there’s something that sets the FXX apart for me. Perhaps it’s just the way the sound was mastered for the videos, who knows, but it blows me away.
Here it is in a video where Michael Schumacher drives it around a race track with French football star Zinedine Zidane in the passenger seat.
And here it is being driven by Ferrari test driver Dario Benuzzi for a Top Gear show.
Only 30 of these monsters were made by Ferrari from 2005-2007, and it’s essentially a souped-up Ferrari Enzo with an 800 bhp engine. Here are the detailed specs:
On the rocky shore of a fishing lake during a winter snowfall. In countryside of Transilvania, Romania, in the lake and hill region located somewhere between the cities of Ludus and Apahida, in the county of Cluj.
Today, our cats became CATS. They’ve been catching mice all afternoon. Each of them caught at least 4 or 5 mice, after we broke up a mice colony in our garden (aka an old hay pile). Finally…
I kept watching them all summer, unsure of how to react to mice. I even brought them mice, which they ate, but I wasn’t sure they’d figure out they need to catch the little critters for themselves. Now I know they can be real cats. Thank goodness!
The best part of all — or as my wife would put it, the worst part of all — is they’ve been presenting their kills to us by leaving them on our front door. I think that’s awfully sweet of them. I’ve been praising them and kicking the mice away nonetheless. I hope they get the message.
Raoul Pop 