A rooma zoom zoom

Last night I went to the Lowes Motor Speedway with these two wonderful people.

We went to the qualifying for Coca-Cola 600 that will take place Saturday afternoon and evening.

Simply put we got to see big fast race cars take laps by themselves to see who was fastest. The faster you go the closer to the front you start Sunday night. It ain't rocket science but I hear it's close.



I highly recommend going to one of these qualifying events if you live in the Charlotte area. The people watching is fantastic, admission is only 15 bucks, traffic is about one tenth as heavy as it is on a race day and you get a good feel for how fast these cars actually go. It's big time and it's right around the corner from where you live.

Who duh superstar?

Years ago when I first started going to these events the two drivers who got the most crowd reaction were Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon. Gordon got mostly boos and Earnhardt recieved about 2/3 cheers and 1/3 boos.

My most recent two trips to qualifying events have pretty much sealed my opinion that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is the biggest star in the sport. I now see why he is in all those advertisements, when his car pulled onto the track Thursday he got a bigger reception than I ever heard his daddy get for simply qualifying.

I hate being tired at work

I've been battling a nagging little cold and it's causing me to lose sleep. Today at work I was trying to explain to the new kid about that story concerning whether or not farm-raised salmon should be counted along with wild salmon in order to lower their endangered status. From what I read, a government official trying to push this through once worked as a lawyer for the professional organization that supports the rights of developers on the west coast. That would be a conflict of interest similar to, say, a supreme court justice going fishing with someone whose case he will be viewing in the future. I think I summed that up pretty clearly. Why in the hell couldn't I do that at work today. It's funny how when you are exhausted it's much easier to write than talk. At work I was about as well spoken as a hockey player with a mouthful of his own teeth.

Anyway, I'm going to bed now. Hopefully I'll fall asleep reading.

Reading in a few minutes: The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan.

I usually shy away from novels by English professors but this one is good. It concerns those balloon bombs the Japanese set aloft toward the states back in World War II. Besides, it a perfect book for a booktalk.

Has anyone seen spring?

The temperature in this burg has been unseasonably high for an unreasonable amount of time. By the time the temperature gets back to seasonal it will be summer and nothing will have really changed.

Let's hear it for transparency!

So far I have only seen this report on foreign news sites. It's funny, Rumsfeld is so sincere about bringing the perpetrators of the prisoner abuse crimes to justice that he is banning the means with which the world learned of the abuses. One small step for Rumsfeld, one giant leap backwards for accountability.

The Winston

I love the Winston or, as it's called now, The Nextel All-Star Challenge. Some bullshit like that. I think I got it wrong but I don't care. It's still the Winston to me. The Winston is a very dangerous all-star shoot-out style stock car race that is held at a facility too big and fast for such an event to be held at. It's good sparkling car-smashing fun until someone dies. That hasn't happened yet. Personally, I think they are dodging a bullet every time they hold this all-star race. I still love it though. This race has everything that draws me to racing, guys putting their asses on the line for the sake of a big wad of cash. The event is purposefully staged for a maximum amount of chance taking by the drivers. The announcers make a big deal about the one-million-dollar prize for winning but if you put these guys on tricycles and awarded the winner a soda pop they would hurt each other just to be first.

I won't bore you with details other than to say that, once again, the Winston was great fun. There was some aggressive racing, there were bonehead moves, there was the unexpected and finally a great pass at the end for the win.

What was disapponting was the unnecessary ceremony and the bloated television coverage of it. All season long I have found the coverage by Fox Sports to be lacking in substance (the race in California had a last lap with lead-lap cars running out of fuel all over the track and Fox totally blew the coverage. That would never have happened back when ESPN covered the sport). Thank god Darrell Waltrip is in the broadcast booth to bring to bring it back to the race once the green flag drops. How bad was the coverage? Think Superbowl bad. Last night, while watching the pomp between the first and second segments, I thought of the bit that Lewis Black does about the Superbowl. He claims that eventually the coverage will get so bad that it will be unwatchable. The Winston coverage might get there first. Last night's lengthy show made the last two minutes of an NBA game look like the 100 meter dash. When Mark Martin walked out during the fireworks and forced fan screaming I could see by his demeanor and his face that he just wanted to get the damn race started. I was with you there, buddy.

Several times last night I was dying to be at the race. I'll be there next year, dadgummit.

100 Meter Dash

There was an invitational track and field meet on TV yesterday and I was lucky enough to catch the men's 100 meter dash final. There are few things more exciting than the ten seconds it takes these guys to run 100 meters. I found out a couple of years ago that it's not about speed. A human can only run so fast. The key to winning the race is who can maintain top speed the longest.

The good, the bad and the dead battery

Today I got that ramblin' urge. Not the kind of ramblin' urge that takes you out of the county in which you live but enough of ramblin' urge to keep you driving for over an hour. An hour being about the time of the Modest Mouse album "Moon & Antarctica." It's one of those albums that has a lot of great lines scattered through it

Somehow between back roads, main drags and intertate 85 I ended up at the Shoneys on Little Rock Rd. After not driving in Charlotte for over a year it was the third turn I took that was a suprise. It was pushing noon and I hadn't eaten yet today. I remember that at one point in my life I used to love the Shoneys breakfast buffet. After today's meal I now recall why I stopped going: it's fucking crap. It's nothing but burnt and yet undercooked scrambled eggs and overcooked rubber sausage. It's the first time in years that breakfast made me weaker.

I knew I was in a hellhole when the elderly man across the table from me was eating what the menu called a "salad." What he acutally had was a pile of shitty-ass iceberg lettuce with a pile of cheese and bacon bits on top located in the bullseye area of the plate. He kept making comments to his wife and what must have been her fat neice and looking over to me for confirmation. I didn't know how to respond since I couldn't hear what he was saying. I just stared down at my burnt and runny eggs.

Of course it took forever for the waitress to bring me my check. For five minutes I looked around the room, avoided the gaze of the old guy, stared at my disgusting plates, balanced my checking account in my head, thought about tonight's NASCAR All-Star race, watched the two redneck dudes decide if they should wait for the waitress or hit the breakfast bar immediatley and bolted toward the register after I got the damn thing.

When I paid I noticed I spent as much money as I would have for good breakfast at Hugos. That annoyed the piss out me and I ambled out to my 1989 Honda Civic hotrod. I stuck my key in the ignition and the car didn't start. In about two seconds I considered all those that might be willing to help me out and realized I had only one number memorized and I couldn't call her unless my life was in danger and it was 90 degrees and I justed wanted to go home and take a nap. Fuck, I fretted, what the fuck am I going to do?

I went into the Shoneys and used the bathroom. Maybe if I go back out after a few minutes it will fix itself and start. No dice. Click, click, click goes the dead battery. As I sit in my car I can feel it getting hotter. Not even considering asking other villagers for a push I go back inside and call a guy I know that owns a car repair shop and runs a towing service. He says, "Why in the hell do you call me? Try and get a push start you know how to do that, right?"

"Yeah, I say I know how to do that."

"Then try it," He says, "If that don't work then call me back."

Right, I think, if I go outside and wait long enough someone will have to give me a push. No one ever turns down a request for a push start. Think about it, have you ever denied the request for a push start? I haven't. Shit, I'll volunteer to push a car. There are two occasions in which we'll truly become a global village: when someone is on fire or if a car needs a push start due to a dead battery.

I walk out into the desert-like 90 degrees. I see two fat fifty-plus guys smoking cigarettes surrounded by five women that could be either of their wives. I walk up to them,feeling like a hobo holding his hat in his hands, and say politely (like I learned living down here), "Would you two be willing to do me a favor and give me a push start. My battery appears to be dead."

To my great relief one of them says, "Sure where you at?"

I point behind me and say, "It's that tiny and very light Honda Civic."

He says, "Just tell us what to do."

I hop in my car, they push me backwards out of the parking spot, push me forward, run for a second and then I pop my clutch and the engine fires. I wave thanks out the back window then stop to rev my engine. The vocal one comes up to my window and says, "We're taking a bus up to Virginia, you can follow and you won't have to worry about stalling."

Weird-ass Dream

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. Last night was one of those nights. Usually when this hits the first time I do go under I hit the half-awake dream state which tends to cause in me a mild waking nightmare.

Last night I dreamed that I was laying in my bed, having a hard time sleeping. Screwed up, I know. For some reason I had my telephone close by and I was taking a call from a telemarketer who was talking very fast. Since I had been awakened by her in this dream I was mocking her by telling her to speak slowly in a very slow manner. Then I hung up on her. She called back and I felt her in the room and she was pulling my hair, hard. I woke up and it took me about thirty seconds to fully convince myself that I was alone in my room. I had to get up and go out to the living room and watch a couple of movie trailers at Apple.com before I was able to go back to bed and finally go to sleep. Jesus, our brains are weird.

I can't believe I left it out

On my previous post that I stole from Tom I recalled some of my favorite live albums. Someone posted a comment that mentioned the album by Jimi Hendrix called "Jimi plays Monterey." For those of you that don't know, at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 Jimi Hendrix played his first American concert in front of a significant crowd. That was the night he played a fierce half-hour set in which he opened with a version of "Killing Floor" that has an opening riff that is like the gates of heaven opening. He does a version of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" that feels autobiographical and is so passionately read that Jimi loses his place but he still has the presence of mind to alert the crowd that he realizes that he missed a verse. It also has that famous version of Wild Thing where Jimi humps his guitar into the speaker and then sets the guitar on fire.

If I remember correctly there are portions of this show on the movie called "Jimi Hendrix: the movie." When I first heard that the full show was being released back in the late eighties I was all gaga for it. I had read much about it and could not wait to hear, especially since it was gong to be released unedited. Now, with newsgroups, finding unedited concerts of your favorite artist is relatively easy if your favorite artist is worth a shit. When this audio cassette came out I was thrilled. Rarely has anything lived up to the hype like this show did. I don't have a copy of it at the moment. I need to remedy that.

Thank you, mysterious stranger, you reignited my appreciation of Jimi Plays Monterey.

Stooges

Oh yeah, speaking of live shows. The other day I bought the DVD of the Stooges show in Detroit from last year. Tom, you need to buy this right away.

More James kudos

Again, thanks to the currently existing link from James' blog. I'm still racking up the unnatural number of hits. I've never had such a popular friend before. He's like the varsity quarterback of our blogging team.

Thanks, bubba

I'd like to publicly thank James for linking to my blog the other day. Because of his selfless act my hit average has doubled for the last two days.

Stealing Ideas

Today's entry by Tom naturally caused me to consider live albums that I listened to when I was younger.

I recall having KISS Alive on LP and cranking it up on Saturday evenings as I got all cleaned up to either go to a movie or drive in circles down Main Street in Traverse City, MI.

Three that he mentioned that I owned were "Wings Over America, Bob Seger's
"Live Bullet" and "Live Rust." "Wings" surprised me when I listened to it because I had no idea how many of those songs I was familiar with but didn't know they were Paul McCartney songs. This was when I was in my early teens and had just consumed the Beatles catalog and was moving on to solo works. I stopped paying any attention to Paul after he came out with "Pipes of Peace" and I bought "Plastic Ono Band."

I will always love that point on "Live Bullet" when Bob Seger said that he read in Rolling Stone magazine "that Detroit rock audiences are the greatest rock and roll audiences in the world. I thought to myself, shit, I've known that for ten years."

What about "Live Rust?" Let's just say it was one of my first DVD purchases after I got a player.