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Comment by Ecco | Hacker News Reader

The copy of this article is so good. The entire piece made me laugh so hard. Thanks for posting this!

Agreed. The phrase, "al fresco fighter jet" is enough to consider reading this article if you haven't already.

Had me in stitches that line :)

This one flew right above me, what does that mean? It's it something like driving open convertible is referred to as fresco? Where I come from fresco was just a brand of cheap wine that students drank when we dabbling in sophistication an inch above vodka and beer...

Dining al fresco means sitting outdoors (literally "fresh").

Normally used to mean an activity in the fresh air, generally with pleasant overtones. So dining "Al fresco" might be a meal on a terrace, or a picnic in a park. Flying al fresco could be a jolly ride in a biplane or a hot air balloon, glass of bubbly in hand, not so much the scream of air through your shattered canopy as you guide your crippled jet to the ground.

That student plonk was aiming at debonair status; the favourite of my student days was a cooking wine with the grand title of Red Ridge Claret a little undermined by arriving in a 3L cardboard box, which stacked nicely on the mantelpiece as trophies of just how sophisticated we were.

With regards to painting it seems to mean work done on top of fresh plaster.

However the term "en plein air" means works executed in the outdoors.

Most Car and Driver pieces, even the relatively objective car reviews, tend to be better than average in this regard, with more editorialized pieces especially entertaining. It’s one of the main reasons I subscribe to the physical magazine despite its very large proportion of advertising, which is at least somewhat offset by a low subscription price.

The author, Ezra Dyer, does spectacular work. He’s written many, many other brilliant automotive pieces around the web.

I remember reading him many moons ago in the Improper Bostonian.

Here's a bit about how he got his start writing about cars. https://www.motortrend.com/features/ezra-dyer/

Came here to say this. After reading SEO riddled garbage for years, this was a pleasant surprise.

Want to know more? Scroll past 2 pages of ads

What ads? I haven't seen an ad for over a decade.

The French words every here and there were cringy though.

I really disliked the style, sounded amateur.

I despised it. Made it incredibly difficult to read as the desperate attempts at humour mangled the English language so much I had to read half the sentences twice to understand what they meant.

> At which point the pilot beat feet away from the aircraft

Why were there so many feet near the aircraft that the pilot was having to beat them away? Whose feet were they? Were they still attached to the people whose feet they were? And if not, what on earth had happened?

"Beat feet" has been a widespread English idiom for retreat since the 1940's, still to this day published in print thousands of times every year.

baffled that one can make the observation: "attempts at humor mangled the english language", and in the same observation not understand one of the most widely used idioms in the English speaking sphere.

I'm curious - where are you from? I'm a thirty-something California native, I was able to piece together what the idiom meant after reading the sentence a few times, but I'd never come across it before in my life.

I also thought the article's tone was bizarre, for what it's worth.

I was born and have lived in England for decades and I've never heard it or read it before ever. I would love to know where the parent is from that they consider it to be "one of the most widely used idioms in the English speaking sphere". How many times per day do they use it? What kind of hell do they live in that they would need to use that phrase so often?!

Well I'm a 37 year old Brit and never heard that term fwiw.

Back in the early `90's there was a funny article, from Japan, being shared about a US fighter pilot who had ejaculated to safety after some mechanical issue with their plane.

Indeed. And then I felt bad for that old guy. But then it was really hard not to laugh again. Very glad nobody got seriously hurt.

If the 2nd seat had also ejected that Rafaele could have come down pretty much anywhere, it could have easily led to lives lost on the ground.

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