I find myself in an odd position this week. Regular readers will know I despise most of those that pass themselves off as human beings in this Godforsaken country of ours, not least modified car enthusiasts, writes Kilian Doyle.
So imagine my surprise when I found myself sympathising with them last week when Ivor Callely announced his silly little ban on tinted windows and noisy exhausts.
I understand what he's trying to do, namely tackle the culture of speeding and dangerous driving among young men. But he's sorely misguided if he thinks there is acorrelation between the way a motorist tarts his car up and the way he drives it.
If a 19-year-old bumfluffed boy racer wants to plough himself into a lamppost, he's just as likely to do it in his mother's runabout as he is in one of the cars Callely wants to clamp down on.
Just because someone tinted his windows with plastic sheeting he bought in Lidl for €30 and stuck a tin bucket on the end of his exhaust pipe, it doesn't mean he's necessarily a danger to the public. It just means he is a cretin. Unfortunately, there's no legislating against that.
The last time I ranted about boy racers, it aroused a mighty kerfuffle on a cruiser's internet messageboard. (I know, I thought cruisers were people who hang around public toilets looking for some love action too. But apparently it's the term used by modified car enthusiasts who arrange meetings to admire each other's machines to describe themselves. You live and learn, eh?)
They were up in arms, fed up that they thought they were being branded dangerous drivers because they had modified cars. They missed the point completely.
They all agreed that I was a "sad, sad, lonely man" who probably drove a "shed". (Hands up on the first bit - I did only find the messageboard because I Googled my own name. Which makes me very sad indeed. But I take umbrage with anyone describing the Princess as a shed. More of a Bavarian Belvedere, if truth be told.)
Half of them decided to write a communal letter and e-mail it to me. It never arrived. One chap - I'm presuming it's a chap - said he'd put his thinking cap on and send a letter to Madam Editor herself, "if I can make a good enough argument". That never arrived either. It must have been a rubbish cap.
Yet more threatened to find out where I live and "cruise" around outside my house.
Which is always a surefire method of swinging someone's opinion in your favour, you'll agree. The rest ranted on about my comments being "borderline racist", which just baffled me altogether.
And all this vitriol just because I advocated gathering all the country's boy racers in a field and obliterating them. I mean, really. How touchy can you be?
Only one fellow on this website supposedly dedicated to modified car fans saw the irony of their reaction. "If you're not a boy racer, why should you care what this idiot thinks?" he said.
My point exactly. Much as I'm tempted to tar them all with a big stinky brush that's been dipped in doo-doo, not all modified car owners are boy racers.
The latter are far lower on the evolutionary scale, somewhere between tapeworms and dung-beetles, while the former are up there with peacocks and Pomeranians, flouncing around looking fancy and being, ultimately, pointless.
True, some modified car enthusiasts get their kicks from driving like Mad Max. But many others aren't. They're far too worried about scratching their precious paintwork and plastic bodykits to risk ploughing into a wall in the middle of the night.
The fact is, tinted windows and fat exhausts are annoying and ridiculous.
But, sadly for this Government, you can't criminalise things just because they're annoying and ridiculous. If that were the case, I'd have been locked up long ago.