This excerpt from the NY Times. Read more…

IT was only a matter of time before someone was able to spot the
test driver deep within me. O.K., test parker: I was asked if I would
do a road test of the self-parking device on the new Lexus LS 460 L.
Although I like to think that I was being perceived as a laconic man
with steel nerves and steady hands, I suspect that the invitation had
something to do with my authorship of “Tepper Isn’t Going Out,” which
is considered by most scholars to have been the first parking novel. It
might even have had something to do with the fact that in 1964 I was
the founding co-editor of Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking, which
I’ve seen referred to as a one-issue publication even though we prefer
to say that the second issue hasn’t come out yet. (We’ve had some
production difficulties.)

If I were asked to name my talent —
talent, that is, in the way the Miss America pageant uses the word
talent, as in “Miss West Virginia will now do her talent” — I would say
“parallel parking.” For the second issue of Beautiful Spot: A Magazine
of Parking, I’ve been preparing an article on how I came up with the
term “slicing the bread” to describe maneuvering into a spot that
leaves only the width of a bread slice between your bumpers and the
bumpers of the cars ahead of and behind you. In a later issue, I intend
to discuss “breaking the matzo” — getting into a spot so small that a
matzo would crack if you tried to place it between the relevant
bumpers. Just for the record, the last time I broke a matzo was May
1994, on Riverside Drive, between 83rd and 84th; unfortunately, there
were no witnesses.