Brett Berk of Vanity Fair and I recently collaborated on a feature for Brett’s Stick Shift blog. It’s about a Lamborghini Miura and you can read it here.

My contribution was edited for space—if you care, here it is as originally submitted:

I grew up a Countach boy, seduced at a young age by the spaceship lines of Marcello Gandini’s most wickedly futuristic design, created in an age when American men took regular round trips to the Moon. As a casual and ever waning petrolhead, I was not even aware of the Miura’s existence until I succumbed to the car geek bug in my late years of medical school, vacuuming up every bite of information about the automobile instead of the medulla oblongata.

I did not like the Lamborghini Miura at all.

The supercar was the Countach, the supercar was always meant to slip the surly bonds of our planet and go exloring spaceward and the Miura even had girly eyelashes instead of the Countach’s curves-disguised-as-straight-lines. But the Miura is neither for the casual observer nor the teenage boy. It is not the beginning of the space age: it is the apogee of the automobile.

To fully appreciate the Miura, you have to learn about its roots. How it was conceived by a young company founded by a rich Italian tractormaker to spite the man he had bought his clunky grand tourers from: Enzo Ferrari. How it was designed by a skunk works of vicenarians to beat Ferrari at his own game, to create a road car no one had ever built before: like a race car, with the engine tucked in tight right behind the thin leather bucket seats to collect the car’s mass as close to its center as possible. Why? So it would go around corners faster.

The human eye seems to have an innate sense of beauty when it judges a car. A beautiful car has a long nose, a low roofline and a short, tapering rear end with a swift downward cut known as the Kamm tail. Think Ferrari 250 GTO. Think Maserati Ghibli. The proportions go down the drain when you put the engine in the back yet that’s exactly how the Miura is laid out. Its genius? The V12 is mounted transversely, which allows the bodywork in the rear to slope rapidly and gracefully. The Miura is disguised as a front-engined berlinetta while beneath its thin skin, it is built like a racing car.

There is a menacing beauty to the Miura up close. The roofline is so low the car would be inadequate to cover the private parts of a man were he to approach it naked. The cute eyelashes of the brake ventillation ducts which surround the headlights become alien claws. As you make your way into the tight yet snug and comfortable cabin, the velocity trumpets of that great engine tower over your head, mere inches away. If not for the thin plate of glass between you and the throats of the twin-choke Weber carburators, a blip of the throttle would send loose strands of your hair down their throats, ready to combine with gasoline and burn.

Natalie, a past owner during her years in Italy of many an Alfa Romeo with a V6 engine, described the driving position as basically perfect, quite a surprise when you consider the monkey boy ergonomics of most Italian cars. The cabin is simple yet full of gorgeous detail, a combination of fine materials and charming reminders of low-volume handmade production.

Said perfection combines with much imperfection: the Miura tends to catch on fire at idle, the front end tends to lose traction at speed and its reliability is most likely a direct function of it being an Italian car built in a small factory almost half a century ago.

Still, it is more desirable than ever. No matter how many times I see a Miura—I haven’t seen many and this is the first one I’ve sat in—I am always in awe of its impeccable proportions, its wonderful punk history, its sheer sense of speed and style. Inside, you dream of gently twisting motorways with no speed limits and no crawling traffic in sight. Of mountain roads and plains and electric blue lakes, of tunnels to amplify the shriek of that V12.

You would never leave this planet in a Miura: for that, you need a Countach. But it is definitely the greatest fun on Planet Earth. Buy one if you can, before they all turn to dust. You don’t even have to drive them. Just climb inside, close your eyes and dream your merry automotive dreams.

It could be argued that it’s an apt description of a human head subjected to the penetrating force of an 800 gram suspension spring traveling at 230 km/h yet it could also be argued that it’s grossly insensitive and crude. I would argue the latter.

As a human and also as someone who happens to be trained as a doctor of medicine, I would certainly not deign to refer to a man in obvious pain and discomfort as a sandwich made of ground beef. Yet there the story is on the internet, bearing my name, for all to see. Due to the very nature of the medium it was published in, it is well beyond changing. I will therefore refrain from any attempt to have the headline modified.

It was a mistake made by our organization, scattered across continents and time zones as it is.

I have nothing but awe and admiration for the men who can command racing cars at speed and nothing but tact and compassion for someone who has had a piece of racing car penetrate his skull.

That is all.

An unreliable rustbucket if ever there was one, it had horrible weight distribution—but also drop-dead gorgeous sneaky shark-like Giugiaro looks, a gullwing engine cover and a big hunk of American iron.

So it was a shame to hear that Carradine managed to off himself in a goddamn hotel room with a rope between his dick and his neck. What a ridiculous way to go. Although Carradine is perhaps the only man who can make it look cool.

In any case, I teamed up with my old posse Daniel at Index Video and proceeded to jack off in the closet with a silken Italian tie around my neck. All in the name of science, of course, as I describe the inherent dangers of masturbating in such a fashion. If you understand the Moon language I call home, enjoy:

You may access its archives at kzdn.kzamm.com

I have to admit to a great sense of relief after my days as a professional car nerd were over. It gets a bit tiresome after a while to spend all day, every day, thinking about V12’s and R8’s and M3’s and other assorted combinations of capital letters and numbers.

You may let go of cars—but cars will not let go of you.

I bought a domain, spent an evening photographing an Iso Grifo my mom had found on a sidewalk in L.A. twenty-six years ago, then another two weeks in a CSS editor. And I came up with Hyperleggera. A car blog for people who don’t care about most cars. Only the pointless ones.

It has survived its first month now. It feels great to be writing in English again and if you care, do give it a glance.

As for videos, I have a very promising video blog in the works which should launch any day now + I’m back to hosting popular science shows in Hungarian for Index Video. Which occasionally means sprinting in size 12 high heels.

All in the name of scientific education, of course.

It feels rather strange to be writing in English again. After 1000+ blog posts in Hungarian, dozens of which ran deeply into feature article territory, that’s probably to be expected. Pardon the crustiness.

I am currently thinking about my future plans which may or may not include popular science, racing drivers, bacon cheeseburgers, written words and video cameras.

On a related note, I’ve recently learned that deepspace travel is indeed possible in vehicles with a seating capacity of two.

Stay tuned. Changes are a-comin’.

I call T-Com Hungary this afternoon to have them move my landline to my new address. My plan is to deactivate it the moment it gets transferred and switch to landline-free DSL. I haven’t used a landline for voice communication since 1998 or so. It’s all planned rather neatly. The light at the end of the tunnel is about as the bright as the surface of the Sun from seven inches away.

It’s useful to keep in mind that T-Com Hungary is an entity that appears to be a company but, in fact, is not a company. It’s the carcass of the former state telecom monopoly, resting its decomposing body on the majority Hungarian landlines. As a result, behavior you’d expect from a company does not apply to T-Com Hungary. They have no customers. Only captives, who, by necessity or ignorace, pay their exorbitant fees every month. I pay them $15 for a landline that is absolutely useless.

I punch the customer surface hotline into the IP phone on my desk at the office only to see it disconnect immediately. So I dial from my cell phone which has the reception quality of a block of cheese.

The voicemail system is incomprehensible. It takes three wrong guesses to find the menu that deals with line transfers. Out of a total of six. I drill down three levels, specify that I’d like to get my line transferred, punch in the number of the line and get put on hold. A female voice tells me that all their operators are busy. She also points out that my call is very important to them and would I please hold.

Notice that she does not offer to call me back. That would be too close for comfort to behavior one would expect from a company. With customers to make happy.

No need to panic. All I need to do is focus on the ridiculous bright light at the end of the tunnel. That mesmerizing exit from the soul-corrupting world of decaying Central European state telecom monopolies. That sudden leap to freedom, a ripe, freshly cut pineapple shoved at Tantalos with a glass of cold water to boot.

Ten minutes pass. Suddenly, I’m connected to an operator. Naturally, he hasn’t a clue neither about the purpose of my call, nor my number. I repeat these to him. All is as expected.

He asks for my customer number. I haven’t a clue. I smile and explain that I can give him my name, my address and my landline number, which should be more than enough to ID me. I also recall that when I’d gotten the line, they took all sorts of data. National ID number. Mother’s maiden name. Official address. I’m quite certain the circumference of my penis is also displayed on the operator’s computer, illustrated by a rough cylindrical schematic.

He says he can’t help me without my customer number. Which makes sense. Helping their customers is what companies do, not decaying state telecom monopolies, who have no customers.

I explain to him once again that he can ID me in a number of interesting ways. He doesn’t seem to care. All very orderly. After a minute or two of this, my cell phone mercifully disconnects.

I resist the urge to throw my phone at a wall. It’s surprisingly easy. After all, I’m about to break free. The sorry fuck who answered my call will watch his very mind corroded away by 1950’s logic. He will never have a job that makes him happy. His employer will soon join the telegraph operators and the steam car makers of this world.

Such a naked, exposed peek into the heart of a state monopoly would be enough to fuck up almost any day of my life. But not this one. Today, I fell in love with a car. Not with a 40-year-old museum piece or an exercise in Italian-Argentine fetish art. I fell in love with the car of the future. It’s called the Tesla Roadster.

Oh and she was supposedly a LESBIAN VAMPIRE, which, coupled with her impressive body count, inspired dozens of probably awful metal songs. I’m glad to say I’ve yet to have heard a single one.