Sometimes it just isn’t enough to own an incredibly beautiful race-bred Aston Martin. Now and then, you just need to own the actual bloody racecar.

So it is with confirmation today of the specs for the production V8 Vantage N24, the lighter, quicker, racing incarnation of the already amazing V8 Vantage road car.

Finishing eighth in last years Bahrain 24-hour race, it’s named after the Nürburgring 24 hour in which the car finished 24th. It’s had 300kg of weight lifted from its frame (features like air conditioning and airbags aren’t just waste valuable time on the track), and improved air filters, lubrication system and free flow exhaust give it a lazy 30bhp increase to a staggering 410bhp at 7500rpm.

They’re also dead serious about buying these things to race:

As supplied it is eligible for series such as the VLN Endurance Championship at the Nürburgring, the Britcar endurance series, the Dutch Supercar Challenge, the Australian GT Championship and the European Endurance Championship. In addition, the Vantage N24 is also potentially eligible for the proposed European GT4 series, the Grand-Am Cup and SCCA Touring Car Class in the USA.

The Vantage N24 is on sale now with prices starting at £78,720 plus local taxes and delivery.

Well, I’ll need one for racing. And a second one for backup. Oh, and a third for testing…

Aston Martin Confirms Specification of V8 Vantage N24 [via Sybarites]

Okay, so it’s outrageously unfair of us to report (the otherwise famously well-dressed) Wilmer Valderrama’s move into the fashion world by calling him ‘Fez from That ’70s Show‘, but how else would we get the chance to run this picture beside a label launch story?

Anyway, anyway. The word is that the 26-year-old actor has decided it’s time the man maketh the clothes which, in turn, maketh the man:

…Wilmer Valderrama is looking to do more. It’s reported that he will launch a men’s fashion line called Calavena this February.

Calavena is said to be a clothing line that is a mix of Latino-inspiration and Diesel. The line will consist of jeans, t-shirts and jackets.

Despite the atrocious fashions draped on him during his stint as Fez, or perhaps to spite them, Valderrama has always been quite the snappy dresser off-screen.

It’s probably important to dress well if you want to share some/any photographic attention with the women on your arm, which, in Valderrama’s case, have included Hollywood starlets Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba and Mandy Moore.

Forget a clothing label, we need a fragrance. Or a tell-all guidebook. Or anything, man, just tell us how you do it!

Wilmer Valderrama: Calavena Clothing Line [Pierce Mattie Fashion PR Blog via Digg]

Everyone wants to write The Great Novel, but how many of us are truly weird enough to do it?

We don’t mean you’ve lived a traumatic life and had some wild experiences. We’re not even saying you need a vivid imagination or an interesting manner of expression.

We’re talking mind-boggling eccentricity which, according to these literary profiles, is the only prerequisite for penning one of the classics.

… Joyce sometimes wore five wristwatches on one arm, which was mere eccentric accessorizing. He also asked his wife, Nora Barnacle, to sleep with another man so he could understand the feeling of being cuckolded, which seems a bit odd. (Nora declined.)

All of the true characters are there: Baudelaire’s twin obsessions – bottles and bats; Dickens’s “for luck” OCD; Shaw’s bizarre sexual history and even Emily Dickinson’s wardrobe, just to name a few.

So there’s our excuse. Next time you find our rambling link-wrangling tiresome and altogether uninspiring, blame it on the fact that we’re incredibly normal and not-at-all weird. Teapot umbrella wheelbarrow.

From Mental Floss’s book Scatterbrained [via Neat-o-rama]