Some rice I understand—in the same way I understand Birkenstocks, Ben Stiller, automatic transmissions, and Sylvia Plath: They serve a purpose—that I begrudgingly tolerate. But some rice is so odd, so disproportionate, and so inexplicable that sometimes I wonder if people like us here at the Pansy Patrol aren’t the butt of a tremendous joke. For it would be very embarrassing for us to learn, after all of our ridicule, our photos (and this column) that many ricers are great tongue-in-cheek comedians baiting us into anger.

Let me restate in pictures. Please view them in the order they are listed:
Extreme Close Up
Slightly Less Extreme
Extremely far away

I don’t have to tell you that this isn’t an extreme vehicle. Aside from the license plate holder and the fancy headlights, it’s a relatively stock Honda.

The problem here is age-old: How do you know when someone is joking? Before I was a partially unemployed car guy, I taught college English. I read all sorts of papers that were trash or comic genius—depending on whether their authors wrote them that way on purpose. Jonathan Swift wrote an essay in the 18th century arguing that we should eat Irish babies, going so far as to list recipies and suggest that baby-skin gloves might be very comfortable. He was kidding of course (the point was that the Irish were treated so badly that they might as well be eaten—and Swift was Irish himself), but he was lambasted by people who missed the sarcasm.

Am I making the same mistake? Am I missing a great joke if I mock this car? Perhaps sometimes we should wait before writing off something as ricer trash.