Dan Neil is good today. Here’s the first paragraph to set the scene:
“Is that the car alarm?” my wife said as she shook me out of a dead sleep, and then I heard it, the WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! of the Bentley Arnage T’s alarm system going off like Hell’s Ladder Co. No. 5 in my driveway. It was precisely 3:48 a.m. Let me just now pause in the narrative — the part where I run panicked through the night in my tighty whities and T-shirt — to say that the Bentley’s alarm system is the most piercing in automotive Christendom. I don’t live that far from Forest Lawn, and I had visions of Sid Grauman and Irving Thalberg holding me while Norma Shearer punched me in the head.