"I just got a new wing mirror for my Skoda." "Sounds like a fair trade." And it's true: I remembered the joke; I didn't surf the web for it. Although these days, one wonders why you'd want to remember anything. Everything's on the web. OK, a lot of the information is inaccurate; as our resident rivet counters remind me whenever car info gleaned from the meta minds at Wikipedia proves to be erroneous. But it is a brave new world, where you can find facts (and pseudo-facts) on the most obscure aspects of motoring with just a few taps on the old plastic keys. Although Toyota's hired a guy to scan the blogs, I'm sure the big bosses throughout autodom don't get it. Their egos are too fragile to answer a question "I have no friggin' idea. Let's Google it." Why else would GM Car Czar Bob Lutz– a man who can remember the warm glow of vacumn tube radios– try to name all VW's brands, when it was clear he had no idea? By now, it should be OK to not know stuff. Lyndon Johnson knew the score when he proclaimed "A decision is only as good as the information its based on." Add in the old saw "A bad decision is better than no decision" and you have a recipe for executive success. And I'm looking at that picture of the Optima and deciding to get back to the real work of this site before the weekend closes in. Aloha.