Posted four years ago: “It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But I felt the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. Then I saw a ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pull alongside me. It had a 4 SALE sign in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.

“I pulled up alongside at a red light, smiled at her and said, ‘How much?’ She took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, ‘Too much.’ My heart sank like a stone. Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this, the most withering L.A. putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell. That’s the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had.”

The Australian Nissan commercial with Kim Cattrall, which was made about five or six years ago, seems awfully dated, no? I’m not saying it was all that hip to begin with, but most ad agencies today would be afraid of shooting something like this out of fear of what femme militants would say on Twitter.