Take the opening paragraph of John Pearley Huffman's review of the Aston Martin Rapide S in the May 2013 issue:
Fall through the looking glass, pass through the wardrobe, hit all the buttons in the Wonkavator, or take the Hogwarts Express one stop past the wizard school and there's Aston Martin's updated, five-door Rapide S sports car. It's engineered for an alternate reality where up is left, down is sideways, rabbits wear top hats, and four-door exotic sports cars are the norm.
Now tell me, how many of you would expect the gear-heads down at your local auto-parts store to know what the Hogwarts Express is, no less where you can find a Wonkavator? They're more likely to know the advantages of a 3-4 defense against the pass or whether to go to a zone or man-to-man defense in transition. C&D clearly knows that if they want to stay viable in the print-magazine business, they need to appeal to a wide audience, so smartly-written pop-culture references and the occasional blurb of irreverence can be found scattered through out their publication. Even in a more "by the book" review of the latest Lamborghini, Don Sherman starts by quoting scripture: "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." - John 2:10.
So next time you find yourself in a waiting room, looking down upon a coffee table cluttered with magazines, dig past the Cosmos and Peoples and pick-up something you may not ordinarily read. You might discover something very entertaining.
