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More and more new car shoppers are opting for four-bangers when buying a new vehicle, according to J.D. Power and Associates’ Power Information Network. J.D. Power says that in April alone, 4-cylinder engines accounted for 49 percent of new car and light-duty truck sales. During the first quarter of 2010, 4-cylinder engines accounted for 46.5 percent of new vehicle sales, up from 41.9 percent during the same period a year earlier.

Click here to get prices on the 2011 Hyundai Sonata.

As USAToday points out, in some cases buyers have no choice. Popular new models like the 2011 Hyundai Sonata are only available with 4-cylinder engines, as is the new Suzuki Kizashi sedan. The 2011 Buick Regal, which is also only available with 4-cylinder engines, saw its first sale over the weekend in Illinois.

Automakers are doing all they can to meet strict fuel-economy standards set by the government. However, many new car shoppers are now more concerned with how many miles per gallon they are averaging over how much horsepower they have under the hood.

As for the performance-hungry American drivers, automakers are betting that technologies like direct-injection and turbochargers crank out enough torque to satisfy their needs.

2011 Hyundai Sonata:

– By: Omar Rana

Source: USAToday (via KickingTires)

Is “bioch” a bad word? New Jersey thinks so. They’re trying to take away one resident’s fabulous bioch vanity plates because they are “objectionable.” She’s upset because people like the plates and think they are funny.

“They say, we knew you were here, we saw your car,” said the plate owner. “People know me by the plates.”

It’s not offensive,” she said. “It’s not even a real word.”

From NJ.com:

“The commission, in processing your request, erred and assigned a combination which is considered objectionable,” wrote Dodie Burrell, a supervisor in the Special Plate Unit, in a May 5 letter to Romano. “The commission has no alternative but to immediately recall the license plate ‘bioch.’”

Now she has no choice but to turn in the plates or New Jersey will not renew her registration.

Manville woman must forfeit her ‘Bioch’ license plates after complaint of profanity [NJ]

Bill Natbony heads two natural resource investment strategy funds for Tom Kaplan, AKA the guy who Paulson and Soros followed into NovaGold.

One of those, the Electrum Group, focuses almost entirely on a unique strategy for investing in gold that is much more interesting than buying gold itself.

“In 2001, Dr. Kaplan reached the conclusion that gold was at the very very early stages of a major bull market,” Natbony explains. “And at that time, he started putting together the first building blocks of the Electrum Group.”

One of the strategies pursued by the Electrum Group is to send geologists out on exploration missions to find properties that they think will yield gold (and other metals).

“We look for surface anomalies that suggest there is gold.” he says. For example, “it would be nice if you found gold popping out of the ground, or you found a silver or copper vein that was sheared off in an earthquake or one  on the side of a cliff, but those are rare.  Surface indications are most often more subtle.”

A second strategy Electrum pursues is to invest in companies that do the exploring themselves, like Novagold. Once they’ve found it, actually extracting the gold can cost billions of dollars. But just holding the property costs relatively little.

“We view these (for example NovaGold, and another company Electrum invests in, Gabriel) as comparable to long-term calls on gold,” says Natbony, “There’s no necessary upkeep, no significant overhead cost to maintain the positions – They give us the opportunity to capitalize on what is going to be unfolding in gold, which is an enormous appreciation in the value of gold as gold’s currency value is realized.”

Electrum’s strategy is betting that the values of the exploration companies will increase as the price of gold drives higher. “We believe we’re in the early stages of a gold bubble,” says Natbony. “Gold is going to see very significant appreciation over the next number of years.”

And in fact, investors in these companies can make a good deal of money before any gold is ever excavated and sold on the market.

Tons of investors were interested in Novagold as soon as news broke that Paulson and Soros bought stake in the company (which they still hold today) and many called up NovaGold looking to get a piece. The company is public, so it’s easy enough to invest.

But here’s the catch. “Close to 99% of the time these properties don’t yield any minable gold,” Natbony told us. “It’s very risky finding precious metals. No matter what you see on the surface, you don’t know what’s underneath until you drill the exploration holes.”

That’s why you drill – to determine if there is gold. Drilling thousands of holes ultimately determines the “proven” and “probable” reserve figures of the property.

“In NovaGold, the necessary exploration holes were drilled proving that there is a great deal of gold in the ground,” says Natbony.

He explains how they prove it:

“Just imagine that there is gold ore in the ground. It can run for kilometers or it can be very small, and it can start and stop and twist and turn. So in order to prove it out, you have to establish what the limits are. Second, you have to determine what the grade of the metal is throughout the ore body.  Holes are drilled, cores are examined and the assay results tell the story.”

Now we’re back to why investing in exploration companies is so risky.

It’s not that difficult to find some gold in a variety of places, but it is hard to find gold that is commercially viable.

“It depends on the concentration, what other minerals are with it (because those minerals might make it more difficult to extract the gold and the other minerals might not be any value). It depends on where it is, too. If it’s at the source of the Amazon river, it’s going to be difficult to get it out at anything less than a prohibited price.”

Nationalization and chaotic local conditions also are significant risks. For example, in Venezuela, Chavez believes that everything should belong to the Venezuelan government.  Darfur is not a safe country in which to look for and find ore. Similarly, Afghanistan does not provide a stable environment in which to find or extract gold.

But the spoils could be incredible. Natbony gives the example of Leor Energy, a natural gas exploration company.

“That was the largest discovery of onshore natural gas in North America in the past 30 years. In that circumstance, the return was 100 to 1. 25 million was put in, and it paid off $2.5 billion.”

Read more about NovaGold –>

Read more about Tom Kaplan –>

And now check out which big hedge funds are invested in gold right now –>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Gold Just Nosedived Below $1200
• The 60-Second Guide To What Big Hedge Funds Are Investing In Right Now
• Here’s Who Really Made The Best Gold Trade

AC Schnitzer tuning specialist is currently working on a performance upgrade which, in combination with delimiting the Vmax and a sports exhaust, will bring a further perceptible increase in the power of the BMW X6 M. And if that’s not enough, you can also opt for the carbon fibre AC Schnitzer engine styling. Even without a performance upgrade, the acoustic and visual attraction will be enhanced by the AC Schnitzer sports rear silencer with two chromed “Sports Trim” tailpipe trims in right/left combination.

AC Schnitzer not only gives the BMW X6 M more power, but also a tailored race outfit of carbon. Front spoiler, rear roof spoiler, rear wing, rear diffuser and design elements for the front skirt and chromed front grille give the X6 M an impressive and muscular appearance. As an option, the carbon Bonnet Vents with chromed centre web complete the sporting look.

A real highlight is the new AC Schnitzer Bonnet Top of carbon with plexiglas panoramic window through which the engine is permanently visible.

For the X6 M – 1.98 metres wide as standard – AC Schnitzer has adapted the FALCON wheel arch extensions so that the BMW body gains an extra 40 mm width each side.

The already sporting interior ambience of the BMW X6 M has been refined further in the Aachen works. The instrument panel conversion – speedo and rev counter with AC Schnitzer logo, white dials, red pointers and red lighting – gives the X6 M a speedometer display up to 360 km/h. The carbon interior trim and the AC Schnitzer steering wheel spokes in new “black Exclusiv” design and the AC Schnitzer aluminium cover for the i-Drive system controller, aluminium footrest and pedal set, and velour foot mats, round off the interior package.

The wheelarches of the X6 M by AC Schnitzer can be filled with 20″, 22″ or imposing 23″ AC Schnitzer wheels in Type IV BiColor, Type VII silver, black or BiColor, or the AC Schnitzer forged alloys Type V or forged racing rims Type VIII BiColor. In combination with the 275, 315, 295 or 335 tyres, it’s easy for the driver in the cockpit to transfer the engine power to the track, and at the same time provide external evidence of the “motorsport gene” of the X6 M by AC Schnitzer even when stationary.Overview for Press Release No. 05/2010

Source: Lincah.Com – New Car and Used Car Pictures

Google’s developer conference today in San Francisco is offering a range of announcements across the company’s products. Here’s your quick guide to the news, which we’ll be updating Wednesday and Thursday. The freshest news is at the top:

Two more API additions: The Google Feed API now includes push updates, as well as a bunch of new open source web fonts and a font API.

Google Buzz Fills Out APIs: Google Buzz launched an API that will allow developers to access user feeds, search updates, post updates and more. It’s already been integrated by Seesmic, Socialwok and other partners.

Google Latitude Gets an API: Google is allowing developers to build on its mobile location service — with the very explicit permission of users. The team has some cool app and service ideas here.

PayPal for Android: PayPal is offering developers the option to use its Mobile Payments Library to enable purchases in their Android apps. It already does this for the iPhone.

Google App Engine For Business and VMware Love: App Engine gets enterprise level support, and later this year will have a SQL database so Google can entice corporate customers to build their in-house applications on App Engine for Business as opposed to on Microsoft Azure or other platforms as a service. It also has optimized App Engine to work with VMware’s Spring Source Java framework. Apps built in the Spring framework will now run on App Engine, VMforce, Amazon’s Web Services and other clouds that support Java.

App Store for the Web: Google is putting together a directory of web apps called Chrome Web Store, though no launch date was specified. The apps will be mostly HTML 5 but will include Flash as well. App makers like TweetDeck have made HTML 5 versions that access APIs for notifications and geo-tagging in the browser, acting much like native clients. Google is working with Unity Technologies on Native Client to help transfer rich immersive 3D games in the browser.

Open Video: Google released WebM, an open media format for the web-based on VP8, the codec it acquired along with On2. NewTeeVee had scooped this news more than a month ago, and has the full story today. Mozilla and Opera are on board to support the new format, and YouTube is converting its entire catalog. Adobe’s Kevin Lynch said VP8 will be included in Flash. Also on the video front, Clicker demoed a living room-ready version of its online TV guide, built with HTML 5.

Wave for Everybody: The collaboration tool Google Wave, which was introduced at last year’s I/O, is now part of Google Labs and doesn’t require an invite. “If you tried Google Wave out a while ago, and found it not quite ready for real use: now is a good time to come back for a second try,” product manager Stephanie Hannon wrote in a blog post. Wave is also being added to Google Apps.

Google Contextual Gadgets: Third parties can now build dynamic widgets into Gmail for businesses using Google Apps. Launch partners include Gist (see our WebWorkerDaily writeup), Kwaga (imports your correspondents’ social network profiles) and AwayFind (sends push notifications/alerts for important messages). Plus, Xobni announced developer tools to help any contextual gadget developed for Gmail work in Outlook.

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Google has tweaked its App Engine platform as a service to make it palatable for business customers, the search giant said today at its developer conference in San Francisco. Its goal is to get corporations to build their in-house software on App Engine for Business as opposed to hosting it in their own data centers or on another cloud. But while App Engine for Business is a logical next step for Google, it still has a ways to go when it comes to providing a truly competitive PaaS that developers will use to build enterprise applications.

App Engine for Business corrects certain issues that bother developers about App Engine, namely by providing “enterprise-level support” (in other words, trouble tickets and subsequent responses) and SQL database capability (due by the third quarter).
Google’s Use of Big Table had also frustrated them as it locked them into the App Engine platform. Google’s response was that it knew how to build a scalable infrastructure, and so if you wanted to scale your app, then App Engine and the Big Table limits were the way to go.

To be fair, App Engine was designed to attract developers trying to build consumer web services, and Google last May integrated App Engine with Salesforce.com so business application developers could test it out. However, App Engine competes with services like Microsoft’s Azure, Heroku and the recently announced VMforce platform (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) from VMware and Salesforce.com. And so far Google does well at providing web-based apps to folks interested in breaking out of an Office-dominated world (and the office), but less so when it comes to providing flexibility and the higher levels of services that those building their own enterprise apps in the cloud require.

Perhaps because of its previous weakness at providing the service and an enterprise-friendly platform, Google has worked with VMware’s Spring Source division to develop a way to move apps from one cloud to another based on Spring’s Java framework. Oftentimes, it’s the weaker companies that work hardest to force interoperability and choice for customers, seeking an advantage.

The ability to move applications from one cloud to another helps advance the cloud computing agenda because customers won’t get locked into one platform or infrastructure — a worry for anyone spending time and money building applications in the cloud. Google and VMware are hoping that their partnership and use of Spring makes enterprise customers that use Java to build in-house apps more comfortable building them and hosting them in the cloud. Apps built using Spring will run on App Engine, Amazon’s Web Services and any other platform that can support Java.

The Google and VMware partnership is less about them working together than Google saying it will make sure apps built using the Spring framework will run seamlessly on App Engine. Google is also releasing tools that will allow any developer to add some code on top of the platform, which makes it possible to run any app on any device that supports a browser. That’s a nice feature. For more on platforms as a service and supporting enterprise cloud apps, attend our Structure 2010 conference on June 23 and 24 in San Francisco.

Google’s cloud efforts so far aren’t that compelling for businesses, but perhaps that’s a good thing, as it’s forcing Google to open up and support cloud interoperability in ways it hasn’t in the past with its insistence on Big Table. Its infrastructure may be top-notch when it comes to supporting the search engine, but Google still has a lot to learn about supporting businesses in the cloud.

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In my new podcast I take a look at Darwinian agriculture–how farmers can improve their crops by taking advantage of evolutionary history. I talk to Ford Denison of the University of Minnesota, who has done fascinating work plants such as soybeans and the bacteria that live in their roots and supply them with essential nitrogen. It’s a complicated relationship, full of cooperation, conflict, cheating, and punishment. Check it out.

Whether your presentation tool of choice is Keynote or PowerPoint, when you give a presentation on your Mac, the last thing you want is for something to go wrong. Here’s my top 10 list of helpful tips that will help you get the most out of presenting with your Mac.

1. Run Through Your Presentation Before Presenting

PowerPoint and Keynote will play together, but they don’t always play well together. If you’re moving presentations between applications or even just between computers, give your presentation a good run through before showtime.

2. Test Out the Hardware

If you’ll be presenting with an external display, using external speakers or something similar, test all of this before your presentation. Your Mac’s screen will flicker as it adjusts screen resolution to match what it’s connected to (if you’re mirroring displays). Test all of this beforehand so you’re prepared and not dealing with unexpected complications.

3. Simplify Your Slides

This one is purely a stylistic suggestion, but you’ll be doing your audience a favor if you simplify the text on your slides as much as possible. Do you enjoy reading a lot of text when it’s displayed on your television? Neither do your viewers.

4. Use a Soothing Color Palette

Make you presentation stand out with a color palette that works well together. If you need some inspiration, visit Adobe’s Kuler website to see a variety of color palettes submitted by users. Search for one that fits your needs or upload and share your own.

5. Turn Everything Else Off

When you are presenting, make sure any unnecessary applications are closed. Growl notifications, incoming iChat messages and bouncing dock icons are not appropriate for a presentation. If you’re the type of presenter who uses a few slides but speaks at great lengths on each one, make sure your screensaver and sleep settings (if using a laptop) are disabled to prevent your Mac from accidentally going dark. You can adjust these settings in the Desktop & Screen Saver and Energy Saver panes of System Preferences (subscription required). Remember that portable Macs store energy saver settings differently when you use your battery and when you use your power adapter!

6. Presenting a Website? Load it Beforehand

If you’ll be presenting websites alongside your presentation, go ahead and load those beforehand. This will save you from wasting time while the pages load and will still be able to serve its purpose in your presentation even if you are unable to connect to the Internet when you are presenting. Better yet, you could even include screenshots of the website you want to show. That way, if for some reason the pre-loaded version in your browser doesn’t work, you’ll still have something to show. While you’re at it, if you’ll be displaying any other application while presenting, go ahead and have it loaded too. There’s nothing more frustrating than staring at a splash screen for 30 seconds while you and your audience wait for Photoshop to load.

7. Got an iPhone? Use the Keynote Remote App

Apple’s 99 cent Keynote Remote app will let you use your iPhone or iPod touch to remotely control your presentation. It can advance slides and return to previous slides and can even show you your presenter notes. The only catch is that you must have a Wi-Fi network to use it. If you do not, you can set up a computer-to-computer network with your Mac.

8. Don’t Have an iPhone? Use the Presenter Display for Keynote or PowerPoint

With this mode (accessible under the preferences of each application), you can customize a view to display your current and upcoming slide, show your presenter notes, view a clock and a timer. With Keynote, you’ll need to make sure that your primary display is set to the projector or whatever device you connect to your Mac. Since Keynote uses the “alternate display,” you will need to make this change so that the Presenter Display will show up on your Mac and not your external display.

9. Bring Handouts

So many people overlook this tip, but it’s just about as important as backing up your computer (and we’ve all been guilty of not paying attention to that tip too). If technical difficulties get the best of you, you’ll still have physical copies of your presentation to fall back on. Plus, handouts make a great way to give your audience a leave behind, should you wish to give them out at the end, or they give your audience something to follow along with and add their own notes if you hand them out beforehand.

10. Make A Good Impression

Saving the best for last, a snazzy PowerPoint or Keynote is nothing if the presenter stumbles their way through. Take the time to be familiar with your slides and be able to speak to them with comfort. You don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs, but take your time and be able to present your actual topic.

Do you present with your Mac? Found any great tips that work for you? Give us and your fellow readers your thoughts in the comments below.

Related TechUniversity Screencast: Keynote Transitions & Effects (subscription required)

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Our bodies are under siege, constantly fighting back assaults from disease-causing bacteria. But we are also home to many harmless bacterial species that are share our bodies to no ill effects. Now, it seems that these ‘commensals’ could be our hidden allies against their harmful cousins. In one such ally, a group of scientists has just discovered a potential new weapon against Staphylococcus aureus.

S.aureus is incredibly common, colonising the noses of a third of people in the USA, UK, Japan and other countries. Often, these colonies do nothing untoward, but if a full-blown infection sets in, the result can include life-threatening diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, toxic shock syndrome, endocarditis and sepsis. With the rise of MRSA and other staph strains that shrug off our most common antibiotics, the threat posed by this common nose bug has never been greater.

But S.aureus doesn’t have our noses to itself. It has to jostle for space with a close relative called Staphylococcus epidermidis. It’s the most common commensal in our noses and, indeed, the most common contaminating bacterium in laboratory equipment. S.epidermidis is harmless, except in people whose immune systems have been compromised. But more interestingly, it has the ability to stunt the growth of its more infamous cousin. Now, Tadayuki Iwase from Jikei University has isolated the protein it uses to do so.

Iwase swapped the noses of 88 volunteers and found that virtually all of them were colonised by S.epidermidis. However, S.aureus had only set up shop in just under a third. On the whole, the two bacteria seem to be able to co-exist in harmony, but Iwase found that some strains of S.epidermidis are anathemas to S.aureus.

Specifically, they caused problems for S.aureus’s ability to set up biofilms, the bacterial equivalent of cities. Thousands of bacteria swarm within these communities, embedded in a slimy matrix of DNA, proteins and sugars. Within biofilms, bacteria are harder to kill, making them an important public health challenge. But according to Iwase, some strains of S.epidermidis not only prevent S.aureus from creating biofilms, they also destroy existing ones. People who were colonised by these defensive strains were around 70% less likely to be colonised by S.aureus.

To work out the weapon that was keeping the rival bacteria are bay, Iwase let cultures of S.epidermidis cut a swath through S.aureus biofilms and analysed their secretions when the destruction had reached its peak. He managed to isolate a single protein called Esp or ‘S.epidermidis serine protease’ in full. The protein was absent from strains that couldn’t wipe out S.aureus biofilms and present in strains that could. If Iwase gave the latter bacteria them a chemical that negates the Esp protein, or if he removed the esp gene from them entirely, they lost their competitive edge against S.aureus.

Esp even works in tandem with our own defensive proteins, including one called hBD2 (human beta-defensin 2) that’s secreted by our skin cells. Alone, hBD2 can kill bacteria but it’s a bit of a wimp about it, while Esp (for obvious reasons) has no bacteria-killing ability of its own. But together, their powers are far greater, and they effectively kill S.aureus, even when it was under the protection of biofilms. (The idea that the two proteins have co-evolved with one another is an intriguing question for another time.)

As a final test, Iwase introduced the competitive strains of S.epidermidis into the noses of volunteers who were already colonised by S.aureus. Sure enough, these transplanted bacteria eliminated their evolutionary cousins. Even a purified dose of Esp alone did the trick.

These experiments are very exciting. Humans are fighting a pitched (possibly losing) battle against staph and MRSA in particular, and our antibiotic arsenal is falling short. What better source of new weapons than other bacteria that have been fighting the same fight for millennia? Obviously, there’s a lot of work to do to turn Esp into a viable treatment, but this study is a promising first step.

Even better, it seems that, for some unclear reason, S.aureus can’t evolve resistance to Esp. With its biofilms under attack, you would expect S.aureus to quickly adapt, but after a year of culturing the two species together, Iwase couldn’t find any evidence that of resistance.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09074

More on Staphylococcus:

• How humans started a bacterial pandemic in chickens
• The bacterial zoo living on your skin
• MRSA in pigs and pig farmers

Two reports from the Mortgage Bankers Association today — one mixed, one troubling.

First, mortgage loan applications — measured by the MBA’s purchase index, which includes all mortgage applications for single-family homes — dropped 27 percent week-on-week, to 24 percent lower than a year ago. The news is not quite as terrible as it initially sounds. The precipitous drop is due to the sunset of the Obama administration’s homebuyer tax credits at the end of last month. If you were thinking of buying a house this spring, you would have probably rushed to do so before the tax credit expired; in terms of aggregate sales, it means that March and April have stolen from May and June.

“The data continue to suggest that the tax credit pulled sales into April at the expense of the remainder of the spring buying season. In fact, this drop occurred even as rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages continued to fall, and at 4.83 percent are at their lowest level since November 2009,” Michael Fratantoni, an MBA economist, said in a statement. “However, refinance borrowers did react to these lower rates, with refi applications up almost 15 percent, hitting their highest level in nine weeks.” The big question is aggregate housing demand — and all signs are that it is improving, even if it remains weak.

The second report shows that one in ten mortgage holders is now delinquent, meaning late on at least one payment. The first-quarter rate of 10.06 percent is up around 1 percent from a year ago. That is an all-time high. The percentage of loans in foreclosure was 4.63 percent in the first three months of the year, another record high. All in all, around 15 percent of homeowners are either in foreclosure or late on their payments. Before the financial crisis, most financial firms’ asset-backed security models did not factor in levels of delinquency higher than 5 percent. Now, with the foreclosure crisis peaking, we’re talking about numbers three times that predicted upper limit.

One other sour note in the MBA report: States that had relatively stable housing markets are seeing an upturn in delinquencies and foreclosures, implying that the “sand states” of California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona aren’t the only ones banks should worry about.

“The economy has begun to generate jobs and layoffs have declined, although new claims for unemployment insurance remained higher in the first quarter than we expected.  The percent of loans behind one payment had been declining as first-time claims for unemployment began falling in March 2009.  Those new claims stopped falling during the first quarter of this year, which likely halted the decline in the underlying 30-day delinquency rate.  If mortgage delinquencies are not yet clearly improving, it also appears they are not getting worse. However, a bad situation that is not getting worse is still bad.

“For several years, the four states of Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and California have dominated the national delinquency and foreclosure numbers.  Florida is still getting worse, but California is showing signs of improvement.  However, Washington, Maryland, Oregon, and Georgia showed the greatest overall increases in foreclosures started compared to last quarter,” Brinkmann said.

Niall Ferguson’s speech to the Peterson Institute for International Economics examined the roots of sovereign debt crises, and how they have plagued states since the birth of the bond market. Ferguson also made clear, that such crises have brought down some of the world’s biggest empires, and there is no reason why it won’t happen again.

Peterson Institute for International Economics via Paul Kedrosky:

 

Check out Ferguson’s full presentation on sovereign debt here >

Join the conversation about this story »

Filed under: Sedan, Performance, Chrysler, Reviews

If the economic downfall of 2008 had happened just a few years earlier, the Chrysler 300C SRT8 probably wouldn’t exist. Think about it: when the nation was on the verge of $4.00/gallon gasoline and people were doing everything possible to get out of their fuel-sucking SUVs and into smaller, more efficient vehicles, a 425-horsepower flagship sedan with a free-breathing 6.1-liter Hemi V8 doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But then again, did it ever?

The 300C SRT8 is the product of a pre-castrated Chrysler. This was a time of Viper-powered Rams, Hemi-powered Jeeps and SRT-badged Neons. “You want it, you got it.” Chrysler wanted the 300C SRT8 to start a new trend of muscle sedans – a land where quarter-mile times reigned supreme, and booming exhaust notes were all that mattered. This trend never really caught on (save the Cadillac CTS-V, which has been honed to be one hell of a machine), and at the end of the day, Chrysler was left with a big, heavy, powerful sedan that didn’t offer much in the way of refinement and carried a near-$50,000 price tag.

But despite its flaws – and there are quite a few – we still think of the 300C SRT8 as a guilty pleasure. It has all the ingredients of an American muscle car wrapped in a four-door, luxury(ish) package. We’d probably never buy one or recommend buying a new one to a friend, but if we’re totally honest, there’s still something about the SRT8 that gets us all giddy when one comes through the Autoblog Garage. Make the jump to find out why.

Photos by Steven J. Ewing / Copyright (C)2010 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading Review: 2010 Chrysler 300C SRT8 remains a guilty pleasure

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Guess what, my bunless brethren? KFC is reporting that nearly 10 million Double Downs — that “Why mess with bread?” fried chicken sandwich — have been sold and that this, um, sandwich, will remain on the menu past its limited time availability.

Here’s part of the press release, lightly edited (i.e., their words, not mine):

KFC DOUBLE DOWN FANS, REJOICE: YOUR FAVORITE BUNLESS CHICKEN SANDWICH IS STAYING ON THE MENU

Originally Slated as a “Limited Time Only” Offer, Double Down Approaches 10 Million Sales Level

LOUISVILLE, Ky., May 19, 2010 – America has spoken and the Colonel listened. The wildly popular KFC Double Down™ is going to remain on the KFC menu past May 23, when the “Limited Time Only” promotion for KFC’s first-ever bunless chicken sandwich was scheduled to end.

While the launch of the unique Double Down created unprecedented buzz for the brand, it also received a warm reception from KFC customers. Later this month, KFC will sell its 10 millionth Double …