The pathetic and the sublime

I had lunch with my friend Taras at a so-so phillipino place called Tribu Grill in San Bruno. Parked across the street was this:

The Mercedes high performance division has apparently come a long was with its new Black Series. Who knew it came from such humble origins!
Later that day, on the way to a family friend's wedding I stumbled upon this:

A Ferrari 365 GT 2+2. Beautiful.

One note about AMG. A long time ago, before AMG was part of Mercedes, they made a car called the AMG Hammer, which was a tuned 300E with a massive 5.6 L engine. That a four door luxury sedan could give many supercars of the day a run for the money was pretty impressive, and inspired much teenage car lust. I never actually saw one in real life until much later, when I was visiting my friend Keith in San Francisco. I was still in grad school, so this would have been around 1998 or so. We were walking down Guerrero from his apartment on Fair Oaks and a Hammer came rumbling southbound. The fact that it was a Hammer didn't occur to me at first: I was too busy staring at the driver, who was smoking a cigarette through a long cigarette holder, and at the occupants of the back seat (three prostitutes, or women dressed as prostitutes)! The car pulled a high speed U-turn, then sped off back up Guerrero, at which point we saw the word "AMG" on the left side of the trunk.