Every now and then, people like to lend us their toys to play with for a little while, and some of them are bigger than others -- like the 2010 Kia Soul we recently got to cruise around in for a week. The Soul has won awards for its design and fuel efficiency, but we don't know too much about that; we were more interested in putting this hip little hatchback to a different kind of test. We ...

It's bound to happen during any road trip south of the border. You'll need to go really badly, and the roofless, doorless, toilet-paper-less cinder block shell marked "Baños -- 5 Pesos" will offend your dainty sensibilities. It'll be tempting to take a quick leak on the side of the road, trucker-style, but as I learned, if you do, just be sure to check for a truckload of Federales before ...

It used to be every time we saw a Lexus on the road we'd make some joke about balding lawyers spending too much on a car that looked about the same as our 1992 Ford Tempo. That was before we had the chance to drive a 2010 Lexus RX350 for a week. It only took a few miles behind the wheel to completely erase that old Tempo from our memory and adopt the Lexus as our new mistress of internal ...

Eric Mack is an Asylum contributing editor on the road in Mexico this month. A road trip to Mexico should be easy: Cross border, drink cervezas, get sunburned, never look at a donkey the same again. But before such ill-advised fun can begin, you've got to pay the man for permission to come aboard the leaky ship Mexicana, even if it takes you all day to find him, literally. With that in mind, ...

Poor Gavin Newsom. The San Francisco mayor drops out of the governor's race, but still has to come back home to face a localized meme aimed at irritating him so much that he gives up running the city, too. That's the apparent goal of the guy who runs MuniFail; the site's sole reason for being is to allow Bay Area commuters a simple, easy means to send the mayor a message through Twitter every ...

Move over, Christmas -- today's the real happiest day of the year. It's Happy Hour Day, when we honor cheap fried foods, domestic pints and getting an early start on another long night. In addition to our freedom, we can also thank the United States Navy for creating the concept of a happy hour back in the 1920s. According to Wikipedia, "happy hour" was slang for a scheduled entertainment ...

HBO's new documentary "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," produced by Edward Norton and premiering Tuesday night, is an awful lot like watching that "Titanic" movie -- we already know how it ends, so the only hope for some real entertainment is in some of the new characters we meet along the way. With that in mind, here's our list of previously unknown scene-stealers in "By the People" ...

The family of that 6-year-old boy who was reportedly trapped in a hot-air balloon in Colorado appeared twice on "Wife Swap." Weird, yes. But it just gets weirder, folks. So weird we think it deserves a new acronym: NSWTF (No, Seriously, What the F$#%?) The Heene Boys (Falcon Heene, 6, is the one reportedly in the balloon) can also be seen on YouTube in a homemade music video doing a millennial ...

UPDATE: Reports via Twitter and CNN are that the balloon has landed empty. We're all hoping this doesn't mean the boy fell out. And given CNN's habit of occasionally reporting BS on the fly, we're still hopeful. If ever there were an appropriate time to use the phrase "WTF?" it came today near Fort Collins, Colo. That's where a 6-year-old boy climbed in to his parents' homemade hot-air ...

Today is one of the premiere holidays on the calendar, National Poetry Day. OK, it might not be on par with Christmas or Thanksgiving or even Flag Day -- and it's actually a British observance, but still, let's give it up for all the manly rhyme and verse and meter-slingers of the world. No names coming to mind, huh? Well, you might be surprised to learn that there's quite a rich history of ...