GM’s showing off a Buick Riviera concept car at the Shanghai Motor Show; click here to check it out. The lines aren’t bad at all. There’s no way the gullwings will ever see production; they show up on concept cars all the time but never hit the streets.

From the article:

We’re left scratching our heads as to why the US division insists on using silly names like LaCrosse and Lucerne for its cars, while China manages to see the value in leveraging the traditional American monikers with some history behind them, like Regal, Park Ave, and now Riviera.

Fuckin’ A! The Big Three also have this baffling two-part strategy:

1. Design kick-ass cars.
2. Sell them everywhere except America.

Gee, with marketing brilliance like that, I can’t figure out why you guys are in trouble.

What I’d LOVE to see, more than anything else, is a retro-styled Rivvie that draws on the lines of the crowning glory of the American automobile industry, the 1971 Riviera:

Truly, one of mankind’s most noble creations.

No, mine aren’t done yet. They’re simple and I should be getting a big chunk of money back, but it’s such a revolting undertaking that I’m playing the procrastination game.

See, I used to work in financial services, and one of the services we provided was income tax preparation. And, as the low man on the totem pole, I got the shittiest parts of that job. My particular curse was cost basis research. Allow me to explain: When you sell a stock, you need to know how much you initially paid for it so you can figure out if there was a gain or loss. Simple enough, but when the stock was purchased 30 years ago, and since then it’s split a few times, maybe reverse-split, been bought out, merged with other companies, the client has made various buys and sells over the years, et cetera, the process becomes rather bothersome.

Now, that’s a big enough pain in the ass when you have all the necessary information at hand. Our clients rarely granted us that luxury. Imagine, for a moment, that you run the small financial services company in question. A client delivers his records in the form of several boxes jam-packed with his entire financial history (property tax records, gas bills, credit card slips, etc) – 30 years’ worth of records, enough to form a stack about 5 feet high, and all in chronological order instead of categories. Remember, you’re the boss: what do you do? If you’re a reasonable person, you ask the client to go back and sort his shit, and please try to develop some sort of filing system in the future. My boss was not a reasonable person. He would accept the boxes of rotting old paper, smile and reassure the client that it was no hassle at all, and then deposit the entire stack on my desk. “Give me basis on those shares in Occidental Petticoat Works, tout de suite.” Yeah, boss, I’ll get right on that. Where’s the forklift again?

And that was the core of my existence every January through to the end of April, the monotony only broken by el jefe’s rants about the “faggot at Wendy’s” (the guy at the counter had an earring, so he was OBVIOUSLY gay) and his lengthy explanations about dinosaur fossils being planted by God as a test of faith. I still don’t know why the hell I worked there.