The Relative Wisdom of Being Ahead of the Curve

Attentive readers will note the previous entry entitled "The Relative Wisdom of Dating Scarlett Johansson."

They may also note that today, Esquire Magazine (a publication of which I am fond) identified Miss Scarlett as their "2006 Sexiest Woman Alive"-- the culmination of six months of photographic tease.

This is called being ahead of the curve.

Of course, once you are ahead, the question arises: how far? Too far ahead and people think you're a lunatic. Not far enough, and people don't even believe you're ahead of it. They think you are on it.

And you can't just say you're ahead of it. Nobody believes that either, I can assure you. The world is full of idiots claiming to be ahead of the curve. No. You have to prove it through your actions.

Thus yesterday's post. Indesputable proof of my position vis-a-vis the curve.

I think Picasso had it about right. Honestly, did that guy ever let up? Rauschenberg, I think, said, "Picasso is always with me." Get in line, baby.

Likewise, curve-wise, my boy Jackson. Edgar Allen Poe jumps to mind as well. Less so Carleton Fiorina.

Regarding Miss Scarlett's picture, she has that whole Helga-sitting-in-the-wheat-field-waiting-for-Andrew-Wyeth-to-
come-to-the-barn kind of a feel, which is hot in a prim sort of way.

You might say Wyeth was ahead of the curve, what with sticking to his representational guns while everybody else was going abstract. Or! Or, he could be so far behind the curve that he simply appeared to be ahead of it. It is a curve, after all.

And while we are on the subject of the previous post, howsoever tangentially, I must admit that I don't own a Bentley. If I did, I wouldn't have sold my watch, would I? I was merely taking dramatic license.

It's like Bruce Springsteen singing: "I got a '69 Chevy with a 396, fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor." Which is all well and good, except that the 396 cubic inch Chevy engines made in the 60s never had fuel injection. Perhaps he was thinking of the 350, which did, except 350 doesn't sound as good in the song as 396.

In truth, I must say I only learned this tidbit from one of those one-page articles in the back of the New York Times Magazine. It was a fun story, full of indesputable evidence, marred only by the fact that The Times chose to illustrate the story with a drawn image of the iconic white cue-ball Hurst shifter nob. And the shift pattern engraved on the top of the nob? Six speeds forward and, of course, reverse.

Except that Hurst didn't make six-speed shifters in 1969. It would surely have been one of the so-called "4-On-The-Floors."

And this, I want to tell you, is my own investigative reporting.