Portholes confuse me.

And not just in the fact that people find them attractive.

So, this is the new ghetto modification -- fake portholes. Usually, they don't do this good of a job lining them up or even figuring out where they should go, they just do a real slapdash job of "good enough" which looks absolutely terrible. But, that's not what I find most interesting about this trend.

These things were started by Buick, back in the day when the Buick name actually meant something, and the number of portholes (3 or 4) denoted if you had the low-rent engine or the high-horsepower one. Buick reintroduced them in 2003 on the Park Avenue, mainly as a way to tie the Buick name back to its illustrious past. They still do it, but it was mostly a marketing failure -- no one's really buying that Buicks are somehow cool and everywhere other than China, it's a failing brand name.

Yet, somehow, the portholes became ghetto chic. They caught on in a way that Buick never has, and now I see these plastered on every low rent car on the east side of Austin. My only question is why? I mean I could understand it if Mercedes had done it, or Cadillac had done it -- well, maybe not understand, but at least it would make some kind of ghetto sense -- but I can't understand how something from Buick became the epitome of low class style.

So I just drive around looking at portholes and questioning.