What lurks behind that sporty exterior...

Some people believe that aliens not only exist, they may even be walking among us. They could be your dentist, or your child's teacher. Possibly Lady Gaga.

I am not among those who believe aliens have invaded Earth, but if I did believe it, and I had to choose what form they had chosen to appear in, my money would be on: modern cars. 

More and more, cars appear to have evolved from someone's belief that humans are becoming too impressed with how smart we are. These cars are among us to remind us that we are, in fact, dummies sapiens. My new car is a perfect example. I have absolutely no hope of ever learning to operate it at full capacity, because to do so would require several more brains crammed into my cranium, and I'm not doing so well with the original one installed at the factory. 

Take the headlights. There is one set of headlights -- I checked -- but 17 settings for them. There are fog lights, headlights, daytime running lights, nighttime running lights, midnight running-for-a-snack lights, etc.

As for the windshield wipers, they do not believe I am capable of operating them myself. "You just concentrate on driving, darlin'," the automatic wipers say. "We've got the windshield covered."

That's the trouble. They have it TOO covered. The tiniest bit of moisture sends the wipers into frenzied overtime, and woe unto the driver who is trying to scrape ice from the windshield. The wipers despise ice. It is their mortal enemy. So you have to time your scraping in between their swishing. Scrape. Swish. Scrape. Swish. 

The car's manual sternly reminds drivers to turn off the automatic wipers before attempting to scrape the windshield. Complying with these directions, however, is equivalent to achieving Grandmaster status in chess. Every move, every twist of the wiper lever must be carefully planned and executed in a certain order, or chaos reigns. The window goes up and down, the right front tire flies off, a message gets sent to other aliens in space -- who knows.

And of course there is the voice. Some buttons, when pressed, cause a faintly robotic, yet confident-sounding woman to ask me something. Unfortunately this something is never "May I offer you a nice hot latte?" Chocolate is not in her vocabulary, either. 

When I speak to it, the voice seems to be a little hard of hearing. Perhaps because deep down, it has alien ears.