Last night Quynh, a friend of mine from high school, came by to visit, and as soon as Quynh came through the door, Scout started displaying one of her more bizarre behaviors: her Asian woman fetish.
You see, we have another friend, Wendy, who knows how to give Scout the very best ear-scratchies ever. Wendy knows how to find that one special spot that none of the rest of us have ever been able to find. As soon as Wendy starts in with Scout's ears, Scout goes rigid, putting all of her concentration into maintaining perfect posture for maximal hand-to-ear connection. After a while, Scout starts making weird keening grunts of pleasure that we've taken to calling the 'eargasm' -- mysterious (yet highly entertaining) noises we'd never heard before, and have subsequently only heard when Wendy comes to visit. Scout really, really likes her Auntie Wendy.
Wendy happens to be Japanese-American. And unfortunately, since Wendy and her husband Marc moved to Denver, we don't see them very much anymore. Putting it all together, it means that whenever anyone who looks even sorta-kinda like Auntie Wendy walks through the front door, Scout goes bonkers. The moment that Scout set her eyes on Quynh, she started barking -- Scout only barks at people she knows (some watchdog!) -- and just wouldn't quit. Fortunately, Quynh is a dog person and gave our little attention-hound the affection she was looking for (even if she didn't know how to do the ear-scratchies).
Last night Shelby picked up a fetish of her own, for the Toyota Prius. Quynh just bought a Prius -- through a combination of canny maneuvering and special circumstances, she was able to get her top-of-the-line Prius in just a month, rather than the eight months to two years that most people sit on the waiting list. After we came back from dinner, Quynh let both of us test-drive her car around our neighborhood. It is very geek-seductive -- it has a large multifunction color touchscreen in the center of the dashboard that controls everything, provides you with a GPS-backed moving-map navigation display, and has an realtime powertrain graphic that shows you exactly how your car is powered (or whether it's recharging itself through regenerative braking) along with your instantaneous gas mileage at any particular moment. (And like any high-end consumer electronic device worth its salt, the Prius has a startup screen when you turn it on.) Driving it at slow speed, or being stopped at an intersection, was eerie -- the car produced no noise at all. It was like driving a golf cart.
We were both suitably impressed, but Shelby fell really hard. Once we dump our Contour, I think I know what our next car is going to be ...
(And like everyone else I know who's bought a Prius, Quynh can't stop boosting the car to other people. I've never seen another car that inspires this much enthusiastic loyalty -- it's the Dyson of automobiles.)
Posted by Kevin at January 21, 2005 10:55 AM