car hood | cool car | car thing | Chevy Nova | oil change

I furrow my eyebrows and bang lightly on the camshaft there - where the dual quads are? - and I jiggle the x-vroomer and knock on that big round dealie in the middle. And then I let go a big sigh, wipe my forehead with my forearm, and say something like, "Whew, I dunno. Could be electrical."

Maybe I have an elevated estrogen count, but I've never quite gotten the whole car thing. When I was younger, I bought a vintage 1962 Chevy Nova convertible because magazines told me that girls liked guys with cool cars. Okay, so the top was tattered and the gear shift stuck at stoplights and I had to reach down through the hole in the floorboard to fix it. Still, it was a very, very cool car. I mean, it looked like something Columbo would wheel around town in. Oddly, it wasn't a chick magnet. So much for the theory of cars as sex symbols.

The car the Swedish women designed is definitely not a 1962 Chevy Nova. First of all, its doors fly upward, like wings. It looks like the Batmobile. And that is cool. The only thing cooler is flying cars, which we all thought we'd have by now, but, well, we don't, so this is the next best thing. It has a sensor to help you parallel park. It needs an oil change only once every 31,000 miles. And, okay, this is pretty chickish but it's still cool - it repels dirt. One of the few downsides is that the name is dorky: Volvo YCC, for Your Car Concept. (I'm thinking a man came up with that name.)

As for the car hood, who needs it?

Nobody. Unless you are a certain kind of guy. The kind of guy who is revved by a hemmy. I have no idea what I just wrote. I have a vague idea what revved means. It has something to do with RPMs, right? (Whatever those are.) But a hemmy?