Unless you own a Mr. Burns Brand Ivory Backscratcher, you are not the Grey Lady's target audience. From today's Automobile section, an astonishing reminder of who IS the Grey Lady's target audience:
DEVICES that freshen the air inside cars have come a long way since scented cardboard conifers began dangling from rear-view mirrors and golden crowns started sprouting from the dashboards of livery cabs.
Now, the drive to deliver olfactory pleasure may have reached its zenith with the Maybach Zeppelin, a special edition limousine — limited to 100 units worldwide — from Mercedes-Benz’s ultraluxury division. In addition to lambskin carpets and engraved silver Champagne flutes, the car, which resurrects a nameplate from the 1930s, is available with a perfume atomizer....
The perfume atomizer option adds about $5,000 to the base price of the Maybach 57 Zeppelin edition, which costs nearly $520,000 in Germany; the larger Maybach 62 Zeppelin lists for more than $600,000.
More from Tales of the Absurd below...
I guess those bankers have to spend their tax payer bonus on something:
TESTED 2009 Mercedes S550 4Matic.
WHAT IS IT? Full-size luxury sedan.
HOW MUCH? $93,225 base, $111,330 as tested.
BERNARD L. MADOFF is perhaps not the ideal celebrity endorser for Mercedes. Still, court documents show that Wall Street’s leading shut-in added an S550 to his six-car fleet last October, leased for $1,712 a month.
We don’t know which money-losing clients helped to pay for the Benz: Jeffrey Katzenberg? Pedro Almodóvar? Perhaps someone with less than six degrees of separation, like Kevin Bacon?
But whoever’s cash rolled down the $50 billion pyramid, he or she can take bittersweet solace: at least the Mercedes is a worthy repository of Wall Street loot, more defensible than an $87,000 area rug or an antique commode.
In case you were concerned about the economy or your tax payer supplied bonus wasn't as much as you thought it would be, the Times offers an alternative today:
THE BMW 7 Series has long been a car for, shall we say, the mature gentleman who wants a gold-watch reward without the whiff of impending retirement.
Compared with sumptuous but conservative competitors — the Mercedes S-Class, the Jaguar XJ and the Lexus LS 460 — the BMW says of its owner, "My hair may be gray and I may wear funny hats in Boca Raton, but you won’t catch me doing 55 in the fast lane."
And rich it is, with the 750i starting at $81,125 and the 750Li topping out around $112,000 with every conceivable option.
And finally, in a heart tugging sop to the times that we are in, even Rolls Royce has to acknowledge that times are tough:
REDUCTIONS here, cutbacks there — things are so bad that even the Rolls-Royces are shrinking.
The automaker, whose name is synonymous with oversize opulence, will introduce a new sedan, smaller than its Phantom flagship, at the Geneva Motor Show on Tuesday. Though billed as a concept car, insiders at the company say it is virtually identical to the production version due to go on sale in 2010.
This reminder from the New York Times that YOU are not her target audience has been brought to you by today's Automobile section. Read it and weep, plebian.