Ask The Best and Brightest: The Worst Design Statement Of 2011?

Good news! The 2012 Acura TL has had a beak-ectomy. I was so personally affected by the super-Accord’s gorgeous front end that I spent a full hour talking about it to the, ahem, auto-show professional assigned to said entry-luxury sedan. She was quite knowledgeable, and when she wore her heels we happened to be exactly the same height.

My normal auto-show companion, Vodka McBigbra, couldn’t take time off from her busy schedule of cutting hair in the late afternoon and watching reruns of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to make the event, so instead I brought the fellow who owns the other half of my race team. I explained to him that, since he was an Egyptian Christian who had decided to begin attending an evangelical church, that he would have to go by the name “Coptic McDigsGod”. He disapproved of that almost as much as he disapproved of my conversation with Miss Acura Representative.

Coptic McDigsGod fancies himself quite the aesthete. He has a lot to say about everything from McCormick Place’s water features (“Did they really spend all that money so a machine could imitate urination?”) to the Camaro ZL1’s visual impact (“Far too subtle compared to the GT500”). Still, I don’t think he was quite prepared for the new Infiniti QX56. First, he refused to believe that the “portholes” were factory-installed. “Nobody would do that. Would they?” Then he simply wandered around the nose of the thing in a daze. “This is quite possibly the ugliest truck ever built. It fails on every level, from design to execution.” I found it difficult to disagree.

Later on that day, we found ourselves being highway-buddied by an Indiana-plated QX56. No matter what speed I set the cruise control — 60, 65, 83! — the distended nose stayed firmly planted in my passenger-side mirror. I knew how Ahab felt at the end of Moby-Dick, tortured by a whale I did not have the power to conquer or avoid. It took a vigorous simulation of impaired driving — holding my phone obviously up to my face while drifting out of my lane into his — to make some space. The driver of the QX made the decision to call me in to the Indiana State Patrol, I think. The effort of dialing his own phone caused him to drift into the next lane, terrifying a woman in a Camry and possibly causing her to dial the Indiana State Patrol. I punched the Town Car into hyperspace as the circle of abuse behind us continued.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Now that the TL is beak-free, does the QX56 have any contenders in the battle for Uggo Of The Year? Your answers on a postcard… or in the handy form below.