High Brow Humor

Hello.

Rachel and I were driving last night when I noticed several angry cars: These are mostly late models that seem to have a newly popular headlight design: Above the lighted headlamps are lighted eyebrows, slit-like, usually arched or squint-slanted. Cars with an attitude. This was particularly accentuated by the unmodulated, glaring headlamps in newer car models that let their drivers see better while blinding everyone else.

(Obligatory Trump alert: Seems like a newly selfish, peevish, aggrieved, aggressive, suspicious world.)

Anyway, the eyebrows look like this, and variations thereof:

“Vehicles shouldn’t have faces,” I grumped.

“The BEST vehicles have faces,” Rachel said indignantly, and reminded me of one of her favorites, Thomas the Tank Engine. That’s him, below.

Then she mentioned the Little Engine that Could, who of course is the guy at the top of the column.

I grudgingly admitted an affinity for Bennie the Taxi, the car toon cartoon wiseguy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit:

We came up with others.

And Tow Mater from “Cars.”

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Okay, so where are we all going with all this? We’re all going here:

In pursuing this issue so I could deliver to you an impeccably researched product, as is my custom, I stumbled upon what may be the greatest example of a car with a facial expression. Here it is, in a short video.

Okay, good.

In yesterday’s Gene Pool, I linked to a pair stupid boots Rachel owns that have a phantom, useless but outwardly fancy zipper and a real zipper, to actually use when putting them on. When two women wrote in to compliment these boots, Rachel ran to to her closet and produced a pair of stupid burgundy pants that have two thigh-level zippers that are fully functioning zippy-wise but have no pockets beneath them. Here they are.

Interestingly, both the boots and the pants were purchased by costume designers for plays she acted in.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll is an extension of yesterday’s, where we asked you to indicate your favorite “ethnic” foods. We gave you ten choices, and then eliminated from further contention the five who got the lowest rankings — Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopian and Korean. In the spirit of sports playoffs, we are down to the Final Five. The top two will compete later in the week for the winner of the First Gene Pool World Series.

So, in our effort at “seeding,” the following choices are presented in descending order of their previous vote-getting:

Good.

Do you want to keep The Gene Pool alive and thriving? No? Then a good strategy at this point would be to upgrade your subscription to “paid,” so I will become unconscionably wealthy, blow it all up my nose, and expire.

Also, feel free to send in Questions and Observations about car faces or anything else. I will respond later in the week, if I still thrive.

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