Steadily rising temperatures and the return of my beloved Formula 1 are signs that Spring is indeed on its way – it’s also time to switch the wagon from its Winter wheels and tires to its Summer shoes.

Autoblog posted a sneak preview to Audi’s Super Bowl ad: Audi’s Truth in Engineering Exclusive Preview

Fantastic – a scene-for-scene recreation of the classic horse head scene from the Godfather. The sound of the R8 pulling away at the end is intoxicating.

Audi A4 ‘park assist’.

A few moments before this picture was taken, these four horses were galloping around, rearing up, nuzzling each other, and just “sowing their wild oats” (it’s too bad I wasn’t able to catch them “in action”). While out on my Sunday morning drives, I pass by many stables and farms and see lots of horses out and about, but these guys caught my attention. Not a care in the world, they seemed to be working hard at play.

I guess I was engaged in a bit of horse play of my own – I love when I can get away for 90 minutes or so and just drive – not with the intent to get to a specific place, but just for the pure joy of experiencing the scenery, enjoying my car, having some thinking time, and today, being able to really listen to the new Rush album, start to finish, without any distractions or interruptions.

My dad and I visited the Chicago Auto Show today and I snapped a few pictures of selected cars and posted them to flickr.

It was great to see the improvements in many domestics. If I was in the market for something new, the Australian-sourced, Holden-based Pontiac G8 would be a contender.

More and more I’m relying on the radio data system (*RDS in the pic above) in the wagon to clue me in to some great music when I’m listening to the radio (since the human DJs don’t reliably provide song info during the breaks).

I’d always wondered what the alphabet soup on that end of the radio was (”PTY,” “RDS,” “SC,” “MODE”????…….I guess I could have read the manual).

A while back when I finally did press the RDS button to try it out, I was surprised to see some info on the song currently on the radio flash across the top text line of the radio (where “93XRT” is displayed in the pic).

Luckily, WXRT sends “small amounts of digital information using conventional FM radio broadcasts” and the RDS in my radio displays artist and title info – not all stations do.

Very cool.

Today, I heard another cool song – one that I’ve heard before but never identified – it sounded like Michael Stipe of R.E.M. singing, but it didn’t sound like an REM song. So, as I’ve gotten accustomed to doing, I reached over and toggled on the RDS. Since it only displays at most eight characters at a time, it cycled through four strings: “PALOMINO,” “S, THE,” BOY (GO),” “GOLDEN.” A bit of mental gymnastics helped me decipher this as title “Boy (Go)” by “The Golden Palominos.”

Once near a computer, I fired up iTunes to do a quick search. Hmmm….. there is an album by the Golden Palominos, but it doesn’t have anything called “Boy (Go)” on it. So, next a search on “Boy (Go).” Hmmm…. it’s there, but it sounds nothing like the song I heard and it’s listed as being by “Bill Laswell” on the album “Visions of Excess.” Disappointed and ready to give up, I googled Golden Palominos and found that Bill Laswell is a member (the bassist). Eureka. !!!

Back to iTunes, I searched on “Visions of Excess” and listened to each 30-second clip until I hit what was listed as “Only One Party. ” !!! It looks like iTunes has some erroneous info on this album (as reinforced by the customer reviews). In any event, $0.99 later I was enjoying my own copy of Boy (Go) by the Golden Palominos.

This morning, on my ritual Sunday Barrington drive, I decided to take a lot of pics to later drop on the map in flickr.

It’s not as accurate as I’d like, but when you see the map for the set, it’s a pretty neat visual summary of my path (I start at bottom near Higgins and Old Sutton, then wind my way around in a clockwise direction).

He’s also very active in the Ferrari community and seemed to be the kind of passionate Tifoso you’d expect behind the wheel of such exotic machinery. So, it was with great surprise that I learned that this certified Ferrari nut was currently driving a Lamborghini Gallardo. (???!!!)

When I asked what prompted the switch of loyalties, he explained that Audi’s ownership of Lamborghini had imbued the car with a combination of Italian passion and Teutonic precision – maybe an optimal balance between the right and left hemispheres.

And, he followed this up with a priceless quote that spoke volumes about the switch: “…and because owning a Ferrari is like dating a super-model with syphilis.”

(I just knew I had to write that one down and share it).

BMW: Still “The Ultimate Driving Machine” after all

[via Autoblog]