Is it like this in other cities? In Montreal, you can pretty much gauge the arrival of spring by the volume of Porches on the street. They overrun the city like big shiny locusts, growing in numbers every day, until St. Jean Baptiste. The first time I noticed this, I thought maybe everyone in the city had gone nuts and bought expensive new cars in a pique of lifestyle porn. People are funny here that way; if something catches on, it is usually only about 2-3 days before the borg-mind takes over and everyone is doing it. Supertramp; sunglasses with yellow lenses -- it's one thing to see the hipsters on the Main wearing them another thing entirely to get the eye from a 60-something Portuguese grandmother lugging the groceries home sporting Disco-2000-I-Kill-You-Dead shades; the return of 80's fashion victims; boy-bands -- someone pointed out the other day that while any given boy-band of the week will play New York City for one night, they'll then hop on a bus and play ten nights in Montreal. No one is too sexy for their shirt here; everyone just wears the same shirt. So, while I've never bothered to investigate, I've always been pretty sure that the mean little sports cars tooling up and down St. Denis are nothing more than loaners doled out to eager wannabees, for a couple weeks at a time, not so much to generate a buzz but to make it look like the buzz has already happened. But once you see the first one, it usually means that spring is, not withstanding this year's fake winter, probably only another two or three feet of snow away.