We are the world
• A woman in the United States carried out a heroic search for Islamic terrorists all on her own recently. The only problem is, she did it by breaking into the cars at the school her children attend. Lisa Carole Richie of Hurley, southern Mississippi, said she was searching for members of Isis after she was caught breaking into the cars and taking sunglasses and other items. Police have said there is "no merit" to her claims. Which is odd, because everyone knows Islamic terrorists have sensitive eyes ...
• An unnamed man from Portsmouth, in the UK, is reported to be in the hospital after he "accidentally shot himself in the hand" while sitting in his car at a traffic light. Police said he told them he was trying to clean his revolver when the gun "went off, shooting his hand". No charges have been filed, but the case is still under investigation.
The Embrickening begins
Fans of insane hypercars and Lego rejoice - the two are getting even closer, if a tantalising leak from the normally reliable Road & Track is to be believed.
According to a video uncovered by the American mag, the McLaren P1, Ferrari LaFerrari and Porsche 918 Spyder are all in for the Danish plastic brick treatment next year, and with The Good Oil being a big fan of both silly hypercars and the tiny Danish plastic brick, this is wondrous news.
Not only does the video reveal the current crop of hypercars as newly embrickened (a new word The Good Oil has coined for anything awesome enough to be turned into Lego), it also says the Ferrari 150, Ferrari F14, Ferrari 458 Italia GT2, Porsche 911 GT and McLaren Mercedes F1 car are in line for embrickening as well!
We are not sure which makes us happier - the embrickening of a range of awesome cars or the fact we just invented a new word that will almost certainly catch on? The latter. Definitely the latter ...
Power to the people
If The Good Oil's long-awaited Zombie Apocalypse ever gets around to finally happening, we can rest assured that Duracell has our backs when it comes to updating our zombie-kill status on Facebook and other social media. Well, in the US at least.
The battery company has added more vehicles to its fleet of disaster response vehicles called "Power Forward" that majestically appear during a natural disaster and allow power-deprived individuals a chance to charge up their power-starved tech devices.
While we make light of mankind's inability to live without updating their Facebook status to say "Home destroyed. Wet. Miserable. LOL!" or playing "Candy Crush Saga" or freakin' "Flappy Birds" for more than a few hours, the Power Forward fleet actually has a serious and very useful purpose - according to US website Truck Yeah!
Duracell's marketing director, Jeff Jarrett, had this to say about the Power Forward programme's first year in 2011: "After tornadoes had ravaged Tuscaloosa, the trucks were many people's first opportunity to connect with their families after losing phones and electricity. People were breaking down in tears, talking to their families again for the first time after losing a lot more than power. Cars, houses, the devastation was immense but we were able to help a lot just by letting folks contact loved ones." Right, well maybe we'll just stop being so damn cynical then.
According to Duracell, the Power Forward team has shown up in 14 disaster locations and helped "more than 30,000 families by distributing over 350,000 batteries, charging over 7000 devices, and providing computer access to over 5000 people". That is a serious humanitarian effort, as well as being a brilliant marketing exercise, so we do have to give this one to Duracell - well played, battery bunny. Well played indeed.
Duracell has partnered with the Weather Channel and FEMA's disaster-awareness programme Ready.gov in the US, and the Power Forward fleet has expanded to include heavily modified GM pickups built to take batteries into disaster-affected regions.
"With the addition of new vehicles and hubs in New Orleans, San Francisco, and St Louis, the fleet's goal is to reach any storm site in the continental US within 24 hours," Jarrett said.
Number Crunching
8 CARS
The average number of cars owned by Bentley buyers, according to Bentley and Bugatti boss Wolfgang Durheimer in an interview with Bloomberg.
84 CARS
The average number of cars owned by Bugatti buyers, according to Durheimer in the same interview.
3 JETS
But wait, there's more! Durheimer also said the average Bugatti buyer also owns not one, but three private jets.
1 YACHT
That's right, the average Bugatti buyer also owns at least one superyacht. As you do when you have 84 cars and 3 jets ...
