Fast, faster, fastest

Forbes Magazine is great for its lists:

Men's 10 Worst Fashion Sins - leisure suits, comb-overs, shirts un-buttoned down to there... only 10? How'd they do that?
Top-Earning Dead Celebrities - now that's cool
America's Most Sinful Cities - sin by sin, not city by city, because that would just be boring

Last year, my favorite list was The Forbes Fictional 15, a list of the richest fictional characters -- on which, by the way, Tony Stark was number 10.

But this year, I'm torn, since I'm kinda a car geek. What, you don't believe me? Walking in the dark, at midnight, on a dirt path behind the Empire Polo Fields, leaving Coachella, I stopped dead in my tracks. "What? What?" asked my girlfriends. "That's a Maybach," I said, pointing. "A what? How can you even see that?" "I have a gift." Not to mention, what is a $400,000 (minimum) car doing parked on a dirt road behind the stage at Coachella? Parked! I mean, don't those things come with a driver? Smythington-Smythe?

But back to the lists - this year, Forbes gives us not only the Fastest Cars, but the Fastest Fictional Cars. Nice!

The top three are animated... Blurr from Transformers, Mach 5 from Speed Racer and the Batmobile. Rounding out the fictitious speedsters are Dom's car from The Fast and the Furious (love that movie, RT: 53) and K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider.

Then we come to five fastest cars in the real world (though I'm not exactly sure whose definition of "real" we're working with - the world's fastest car costs over $600,000, and the second fastest costs a cool $1.5 million). Number one is the SSC Ultimate Aero (a Shelby - American made, thank you very much), then the Bugatti Veyron, followed by the Koenigsegg CCX, the Saleen S7 Twin Turbo (also American made), and lastly the Bristol Fighter T.

Not til the bottom half do you get to your more pedestrian Lamborghini, Pagani, and Mercedes. Ferrari and Porsche? Not even On. The. List. Hmpf.

Which makes the R8 (Audi) product placement in Iron Man that much more glaring. Seriously, you don't think the #10 richest fictional character in the universe isn't going to be driving one of the top 10 fastest cars in the world? Of course he is. And, hello?, only Tony Stark could afford one of those cars. Like I said, hmpf.