Normally, here is where I’d celebrate the arrival of Spring and the fact that I actually mowed my onion patch lawn today, but it doesn’t seem right seeing how the entire state of Nebraska is pretty much a gigantic river right now and that the blizzard that hit Colorado was strong enough to push semi-truck trailers wherever the wind wanted them to be. It’s been a rough start to Spring, and we can only hope that Mother Nature takes an anti-psychotic and calms the hell down for a bit. If you’re affected by her latest outbursts, we wish you the best of luck. The least we can do is to whip up some of the leftover news scraps into something lightly roasted and kind of palatable. Here’s Scrapple…enjoy!

1. What do you get when you cross a panther and a bull (besides loud cat screaming?)

The return of the Pantera? Oh, yes…any gearhead worth their salt knows about the Italian-bodied, Ford-powered DeTomaso rocket from the 1970s. Is that a new one? Yes…and no. Yes, in that Ares Design did a pretty decent job of bringing the classic Pantera shape into the new century. No, because it’s really a body-kitted Lamborghini Huracán, which certainly has the speed down pat (up to 631 horsepower out of a 5.2L V-10) but loses something in the overall feel. You know how this would be fixed? The Mustang Shelby GT350R’s 5.2L flat-plane-crank V8. That’d be worthy.

2. Your appliance, Mr. Bond.James Bond, the fictional super-spy, is going to have yet another movie made, the 25th. It is expected to come out in 2020, will be directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and is believed to be Daniel Craig’s final Bond flick. Any BangShifter will always ask about the new Bond car, so here it is: the Aston Martin Rapide E, as in electric vehicle. Fully electric vehicle. Reportedly Fukunaga is “a total tree-hugger” and used his influence to give 007 something more environmentally friendly to chase after the bad guys in.

Fun fact: in the UK, The Sun announced this news with the headline, “The Spy Who Plugged Me…”

3. Twenty bucks says it’ll have a Camry dent when it hits the lunar surface.JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Toyota are working on a pressurized moon rover with a targeted date of 2029. The rover will be about twenty feet long, almost thirteen feet high, and seventeen feet wide, and should have enough space for up to four people to live in for a bit of time while they perform their tasks on the surface. The rover will be powered by “fuel cell and electric vehicle technologies”, and is expected to be capable of up to several thousand miles’ worth of driving time before the energy is depleted from the fuel cells.

4. The market will drive the price, alright.In Egypt, there is an active movement for people to quit buying new cars so that manufacturers can feel the pain that is felt by the typical Egyptian. How so? Most cars in country cost the equivalent of $10,000 to $20,000 new, which translates to somewhere between 200,000 to 350,000 Egyptian pounds. But when the typical Egyptian is making a fraction of that (think a few thousand a month at best) in a country that is going through austerity controls, you get movements like “Let It Rust”, where the goal is literally meant to leave new cars on the lots to rot.

5. Sit down and shut up!Earlier this week I brought up one of the brighter sides of riding the bus as a kid, with video of the bus driver working out an old Gillig Transit. Well, there was another side to those years, which usually involving pissing off the bus driver by being moronic hormone-fueled brats. God bless Liz, the bus driver we had the longest…it’s amazing that woman’s naturally red hair didn’t go shock white from our antics and stunts. But one Pennsylvania driver rolling in a bus filled with 26 junior high and high school students cracked this week. 44-year-old Lori Ann Mankos was charged with twenty-six counts of endangering the welfare of children and one count of DWI after abandoning the bus and the kids at a gas station. She simply just flipped off the kids, cursed them off, and walked home after the kids called her out for her dangerous driving and plead to be let off of the bus.