all day today, MTV showed pimp my ride. you heard me right. it was pimp my ride for like 24 hours or somethin’, topped off with the first of the new season. the first time i watched it was a while back, and if it was on when i channelhop i’d watch the antics of Q and his crew at west coast customs changing shitty-looking rides into ones that are tight. my favourite bit of the pimpin’ would be the electronics, handled by mad mike, where you’d get to see a ridiculous amount of wattage and subwoofers installed alongside multiple videoscreens and ps2’s. to think they’d put thousands of dollars of kit on a car that’d probably worth twenty bucks is simply… nuts.

two things, though:
– i wonder if they pimp the engine. there were a couple of no-hopers which had actual engine overhauls. there’s no point driving a tight lookin’ car if the engine’s wack.

– security. all you need to do is tape each programme and suss out which neighbourhood these pimped cars are located. man, if i could think of that i wonder what the professional car thieves can do! when i was living in newcastle, my housemate had an escort which had a full RS cosworth bodykit (including wheels, recaro bucket seats, wood panelling… the works, except the engine was only souped up and not a proper RS cosworth one). even the police tailed him every single time, thinking the car was hot. not exactly unexpected, it was stolen 3 months after owning it, and the car was found a month later stripped to the bone. back to the programme, i do hope they also added state-of-the-art security systems to these pimped cars.

i used to own a white volvo 440 nicknamed rusty by my colleagues. another nickname it had was kereta kerajaan due to its white colour. come 2002, it was 12 years old and i was spending up to £800 in repairs in a span of 8 months. and the market value of the car then was like less than £200.

how i wished x-to-the-z could come knocking on the door to get rusty officially pimped then.