Cabin fever is the all the rage in the month of February. Once the Super Bowl is in our rear view mirrors, there's nothing much to look forward to, entertainment and holiday-wise, to help fend off the ravages of seasonal affective disorder (click) and the debillitating effects of winter. There are, however, a few tasty deviations from the doldrums, e.g.:
- Lane Kiffin, the new USC football boss and the new most unfavorite guy in sports, offered a 13 year old kid a scholarship. Everyone associated with this farce maintains that it's a legitimate offer. Kiffin supposedly reviewed films of the kid, who is in eighth grade and six feet tall. We can only hope that this turns out badly for everyone involved, which it can and likely will for a multitude of reasons, at which point we can get together for a group chortle and a collective "I told you so". If you're keeping score at home, mark this one down in the "Reasons to Hate Lane Kiffin" column. Rest assured that there will be many, many more.
- The quadrennial farce that is the Winter Olympics began this past weekend. The winter Olympic is ten days made-up and mostly weird sports that only a tiny nanno-percentage of the inhabitants of our planet has ever even tried and at which an even smaller subgroup has decided to become competitive. A notorious example of the bizarre nature of these contests is the luge. The luge competition is the activity that cost a 21 year old competitor from Georgia his life when he misjudged the navigation of the final turn. In the luge, the competitor plops himself on a highly engineered but relatively primitive ice sled and hurls himself onto a chute that will accomodate him at up to 90 miles per hour. I watched some of this nonsense on Sunday afternoon, a charade made all the more ridiculous by the clucking of the TV announcers who chronicled the competition. The closest thing to luge-ing in the lives of everybody but the dozen guys who do this in the Olympics would be falling on your arse and sliding down your ice covered driveway on the way to retrieving the Sunday morning paper, an event that could be just like the Olympics if there were to be a couple of breathless announcers hidden behind your mailbox giving the world a slide-by-skitter account of your trip to the curb. Millions of dollars of TV money fuels this machine, the Olympics, that is, not your trip to get the Sunday paper, and the media bleats the results with a nationalist spin to all the sheep of the world. The TV coverage does make winter in Vancouver look like fun, though it's a lot more fun sitting in my living room than it must be shivering on some Canadian hillside with the lugers.
- By the way, there is no way I will spend ANY time watching the figure skating "competition", which is Disney on Ice without the costumes.
- This past week was Speedweek. Speedweek, for those who have not been appropriately market targeted, is the start of the NASCAR season in Daytona, Florida. Since NASCAR makes up answers to questions as it goes along, it should be no surprise that Speedweek is nine days long. It culminates with the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500. This past weekend, the 52nd running of the Great American Race, provided an example of why NASCAR is suffering from aggressive apathy from its fans. This race brings together on the premises in Daytona approximately 200,000 people. This is a real number, and I have been among them five times, so I can offer personal testament to the grandeur of the event. Millions of fans watching on TV join the celebration of the new season. Problem this year: nobody checked to see if the race track was ready. Since you need a race track to have an auto race,this is in the classification of "mission critical". The pavement in one of the turns started disintegrating after about 300 miles of racing. Since the cars are ripping along at 190+ MPH, the appearance of a pothole is a serious issue. For the entertainment product that is NASCAR, there was a bigger problem, that being that it took over an hour and a half to fix the hole. The race was stopped and everybody watched two guys patch a hole, and then take about an hour and a half to figure out that they might heat the patch to hurry-up the setting process. All this while 200,000 on-site sat on their hands (it was cold there!) and the rest of us switched channels. They raced another hundred miles before another hole opened, and another delay occurred, by which time everybody at home was watching something - anything - else.
- The pothole delay is why I was subjected to so much luge-ing, and I will not forgive NASCAR for that.
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