While on vacation the other day, I noticed that we never go into a grocery store before nine at night… Anyway, that night, as I was standing in the store I saw a magazine with Zero-One on the cover. And given my past reaction to the Gundam shirt I just recently bought, I thought just perhaps I should check it out. Come to find out, they’re coming out with some really high-detailed model and it’s fifty dollars…

    Fifty bucks for a tiny little model got me thinking, so I started wondering how much attention each Gundam actually deserves…

    The Talgeese is like that souped up hotrod the old guy down the street has that all the teenage boys and the baby boomers drool over at every chance. It’s got all original parts, a paint job that cost more than most houses do, and whoever did the bondo work should have been a brain surgeon.

    On the other hand, the Talgeese II is like the “Lisa” to the “Macintosh”, only backwards… It’s like the comeback car that never made it…

    The Epyon is like somebody was watching “Gargoyles” and decided to make a Gundam out of one. I think it’s what happened when Treize had a mid-life crisis. It’s a swell little number, but it just drips of, “For the love of god already! Somebody screw me! I’ve got my Porsche! Isn’t that supposed to get me some?!?!” (This is probably why Heero got rid of it. With spandex like that, “getting some” would be the least of his problems…)

    The Zero is like the stick shift from hell. (And I’ve never driven a stick, so bear with me here…) Everybody wants to take a crack at it, but the first time she stalls at a red light on the bottom of a hill…

    The Deathscythe and all it’s offspring has to be the black dooley 24-valve muffler-less Dodge Ram I’ve been lusting after for so long. It’s the one that looks impressive, but drives the mild-mannered to a nervous breakdown simply with the vibrations that run through the local windows from the bass coming from the speakers located somewhere within… (It’s probably got hydraulics too…)

    The Heavyarms is like a HMWVV (Did I get the order right? I’m too lazy to go look ‘er up.). It’s loaded and intimidating, but I’d still rather have a Beemer… Trowa probably drives it like my dad drives his truck: If you’re in front of him and you’re putzing, all you’re going to see for the next twenty miles is his grill in your rearview mirror until you freak out and swerve off the road.

    The Sandrock is the Little Red Corvette or something. It’s zippy and zoomy and it fits in a compact car parking spot. (I betcha it has those obnoxious sodium lights on it too…)

    The Altron (Did I get that name right? I kept trying to think of what it was and all I can recall at the moment is “Nataku”…) is like a car out of the “One Week” video. It’s from the seventies, but it’s totally loaded. It’s got paint that would have made Wufei go on food stamps to pay for, hubcaps that would have put Wufei in a cardboard box on the corner, and chrome that would force Wufei to spend the rest of his life doing nothing but polishing. On the other hand, somewhere there’s always a leather and fur clad chick in yellow glasses sitting on it…

    Last but not least (Well, the last one I can think of… And I misspoke too. Definitely the least.) is the Zero-One. It didn’t have a fancy name, did it? Well, given that I drive a minivan, I’ve decided that the Zero-One is the minivan of Gundams. It’s not the worst thing on the planet (That’d be a Taurus, which is like an ’85 Chevy product.) (Talking about Tauruses, my friend has a Ford Taurus. She wants to paint “cli” right before the “Taurus” symbol. If you can catch the joke there, I applaud you. She had to spell it out for me!) It’ll do in a jiffy and it fits nicely into parallel parking spots, but heck if it don’t make ya’s feel like a soccer-mom… And I can’t really see Heero being a soccer-mom… (Albeit that’d make a fascinating yaoi fic, eh?)

    On a completely unrelated note: This is officially ramble number 20! (I wrote 21 first and came back to it, but that’s not important…) Anyway! My dad was saying that I should send my stuff off to magazines and such and start getting paid for it again. (I used to win contests and stuff. But once I got out of high school, I got away from entering them.) (My English teacher used to call me Erma Bombeck.) Now, he hasn’t read any of these (he’d probably stare at me harder than he does now…) particular rambles, but the idea sounded interesting…

    Then again, I’m incredibly lazy…

    But if you’re ever flipping through a magazine someday and you see “Written by Routhier”, that’s probably me!