Autobahn

On Sunday, at a parish fundraiser in Fenton (Why was my parish, located in Burton, having a fundraiser in Fenton? That's a long story.) I parked the Lumi, the Distaff Son of the Mousemobile, sporting new patches of visible rust after the dark, killing winter, next to a pristine Audi R8. I've never been a fan of the R8's looks, based on still photographs of the road car & motion pictures of the racing version*. But this was the first time I'd had a chance to look at one close up with my own two eyes; I espied a different R8, in a completely different paint scheme, in Ann Arbor back in the fall, but caught only a glimpse as I trekked north on State Street & it rolled south. I was struck by the beauty of the machine, by how different its proportions were from the Hot Wheels scale replica that sits in my toy car collection. It was small, seating only two, but palpably powerful, even as it sat at rest. The R8 had not moved when I emerged from the fundraiser three & half hours later. The rear haunches are still better looking than the awkward, too Teutonic front end, but what a glorious machine, & what an excellent reminder that photographs are not dispassionate recorders of truth; they present a picture of the world, but they do not present inherently the truth or meaning of things; sometimes we need to see with our own eyes to understand.

Last week, I espied a vanity license plate: U1T UP. While appearing nonsensical at first, those cryptic figures were emblazoned on a fundraising license plate for the Michigan Agricultural College, also known by its name nom du jour, Michigan State University. The M.S.U. block "S" added to U1T UP leads me to read the inscription as SU1T UP, "Suit up." (Was UIT UP already taken?) This could be either an exhortation for the dastardly Spartans to "suit up," to don their green & white uniforms in preparation for competition, or a reference to Barney Stinson's sartorial catchphrase from the television series How I Met Your Mother, "Suit up!" In either event, I greet the ersatz SU1T UP warmly, regarding its playful use of both phrasing & typography as being generally superior to the failure of wit that so typifies vanity license plates.

*The road-going R8 is named for the all-conquering R8 Le Mans Prototype, with which Audi claimed overall victory in the 24 Heures du Mans in five of the seven years the R8 competed, plus seven consecutive American Le Mans Series (R.I.P.) class championships. Racing versions of the road-going R8 have since been fielded in many G.T.3-specification racing series, though not at Le Mans, which utilizes the higher-performance G.T.2-spec. I enjoy greatly the humor in Audi having made a race car out of a road car named after a race car.