Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today, we have reports from Road & Track, The Atlantic Cities and Five Thirty Eight.
De-badge my ride – Road & Track
I enjoy a nice looking badge. But when it's just V8 KOMPRESSOR or COUNTRYMAN sprawled out on the metal, it's tacky. I'm lazy, so I wouldn't go through the trouble of removing them. Jack Baruth, on the other hand, has had to go through the anguish.
But why have the badge in the first place? Why have "CL55" or "Biarritz" or "Paseo" back there at all? Does anybody really need to know that you're driving an Optima and not a Forte? Perhaps it's just to show off to the neighbors— but if that's the case, why does the Chevy Spark come with a badge? To rub it in someone else's face that you aren't walking?
Whimsical Portraits of People and Their Cars – The Atlantic Cities
Great art with interesting art. OK, it takes talent to make an '88 Chevy Cavailier wagon look good, but Ryan Schude did it.
When Ryan Schude was attending art school in San Francisco in 2001, he came up with a photo project in which he'd document people with their vanity license plates. It turned out however, that the most interesting plates Schude found were often on boring vehicles. A decade later, he came up with an even simpler concept: have people pose with their cars.
'Fetch' Is Finally Happening 10 Years After 'Mean Girls' – Five Thirty Eight
I missed the 10-year anniversary of Mean Girls by a day. But here's this anyway.
The rise of "Mean Girls" has dovetailed with the rise of the meme. As social media sites allowed their content to easily be shared from one user to another, cultural catchphrases and tropes were able to grow exponentially until they reached meme status. Tumblr, especially, has helped to propel "Mean Girls" memes into our Twitter feeds and onto our Facebook walls (even Hillary Clinton has personally been victimized by Regina George).
Photo: Chevrolet