Sigh, It Never Stops

A Danica Patrick apologist, pretending to be a sportswriter, has a piece in USA Today yesterday saying claiming that Princess Sparkle Pony is actually much better than critics are giving her credit for. He compares Danica to “three IndyCar drivers [who] have tried to make the transition to the big taxicabs” recently:

“Sam Hornish was 33rd in the Cup standings after 19 races.”

Indeed. Sam won the IRL championship, three times no less, and the Indy 500 once, and let’s see where he is in the Sprint Cup standings today. Oh, he’s not. He’s currently running in the Nationwide series.

“Dario Franchitti was 37th after six races, at which point he was injured and ultimately returned to IndyCar.”

I don’t think that even requires any comment.

“Juan Pablo Montoya was 20th after 19 races.”

Indeed he was, after winning the Indy 500 and 7 Formula races, and his current standing, after seven full years in Sprint Cup, is 23rd. He’s also known as “Mister Hit Everything On The Track,” including the jet dryer during a caution.

“Patrick, heading into Sunday's Brickyard, is 27th in the points standings.”

Danica is also known as Miss Lapped 30 Times, is 0-91 in NASCAR, is 1-252 for her career and 0-21 for 2013, is ahead of exactly four drivers who've also done all 19 Cup races this year (and trailing 26 drivers), has never won a pro auto race in which none of her competitors ran out of gas, has never won a stock car race, has never won a street race and has never won a race over 300 miles, In her single Nationwide season she finished ahead of exactly one driver who ran all of the races.

Of the three drivers that Kravitz is comparing Princess Sparkle Pony to, all three had vastly better records than her in open wheel, only one is even remaining in Sprint Cup series, and he is doing more poorly now than he did as a rookie seven years ago. Do you see anything there that suggests that Danica is going to show much in the way of improvement in the NASCAR Sprint Cup series?

Further, NASCAR was not raving about how Sam, Dino and Juan Pablo were the greatest things ever to happen to NASCAR, spending half the race showing their cars in 37th place and raving about how well they were doing, and skipping seven top ten finishers after the race to go interview them after they finished 29th.

I am not opposed to women in stock car racing. On the contrary. There is a driver in the Nationwide series named Johanna Long, whose team is so poorly funded that she can only run in about eight races per year. If she were in the car that Danica is driving she would consistently be finishing in the top ten and would be showing us some really good racing.

If NASCAR was about racing instead of about “the show” she would be in the car that Danica is driving.

America's Got What?

First a note on Chopped. One of the contestants was a Coast Guard cook. The judges were surprised that, even though he lived and worked on a ship, he was not very experienced at working with fish. I was not surprised.

Mariners in general, commercial or military, tend to have a deep aversion to eating fish. I’m not sure why, but the tradition goes back centuries. Naval cooks learn very quickly that serving fish to the crew is not a way to stay at their post very long.

Anyway, I watched the twelve semifinalists on America’s Got Talent last night and… Oh. My. God. Half the acts were cute little kids putting on mediocre performances and winning because they are cute little kids. Note to the judges: being a cute little kid is not a talent. One “comedian” screamed misogynistic “jokes” having to do, for instance, with using chloroform on his date. This guy was about as funny as a flu epidemic and the two male judges raved about his performance.

Another guy levitated and disappeared. Okay. The audience had to be told to applaud, because they were still trying to figure out when his act was going to start. A lady got out of a straightjacket in a water-filled glass box. I think that’s been done before, about eighty years ago. Guy named Houdini.

Looking for a “million dollar act” are they? There was not one act in the bunch that I would have walked across the street to see if the admission was free.

A New High

I received a new high in complimentary rhetoric yesterday, when I commented in a liberal discussion forum that Obama's "health care reform" legislation might not be the panacea that was being suggested. I was accused of being a "dumb-ass lefty who serves as the rightwingers' useful idiot." I've never been called a "useful idiot" before, and I am guite proud of the achievement.

The agruments that liberals make over their "health care reform" are increasingly desperate and pathetic, because they are all attempting to avoid facing the simple and obvious solution which Obama rejected from the outset of the debate: provide health care (not health insurance) to everyone as a public service so that private parties cannot profit from providing it.

The Great West Allis Beer Adventure

In the mid-sixties, rather fresh out of the Navy, I was working for a steel company in West Allis, Wisconsin as a machine operator and sometime truck driver. West Allis is a manufacturing suburb of Milwaukee, and had some of the largest crane builders in the country at that time, along with the world’s largest tractor assembly plant under one roof.

I belonged to a social organization which, along with my employer, shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. We had a beer concession for West Allis Western Days, which was a large county fair type of thing, and I got put in charge of running the concession one year. Having me managing a beer concession was sort of like having a cat manage a canary concession, but few of our other members were exactly sterling examples of sober living either, so no one gave the selection much thought.

What complicated the task was that the brewery workers union was threatening to have a strike about the same time as the fair, which would make delivery of keg beer unavailable, so I arranged with the Pabst brewery to deliver a semi-trailer load of half barrels to the fairground before the strike deadline, and arranged for power to keep the refrigerated trailer cooled for the two weeks preceding the opening day.

Sure enough, the strike did occur and Milwaukee was not a happy place, as taverns ran out of draft beer in fairly short order. The fair opened and one of the few places in the city that had draft beer available was my tent concession at West Allis Western Days. It was, to boot, a sunny and hot weekend, and to say that our beer tent at the fairgrounds did a land office business would be a massive understatement.

Normally the ninety half barrels that filled my semi-trailer would have lasted for the entire weekend, but on the first day it was clear we were going to be running dangerously low, so I set out to see if I could find a supply from small breweries that were outside the metro area and not affected by the strike. I finally found a brewery in Potosi, about an hour away, who could supply ninety half barrels, but they had no way to deliver it to us.

So, of course, my feverish little brain went to work. I had a trailer, the Pabst one that was on the fairgrounds, but no truck. I worked, however, for a steel company which had a whole bunch of trucks. Would they miss one on a Sunday morning? Maybe not. Of course, I didn’t have permission from Pabst to use their trailer, either, but that was just a detail.

The only people at my steel plant on Sunday were the mechanics who were servicing the trucks, so I made a deal with them that they could come by the fairgrounds after they were off work and drink all the free beer they wanted if they would let me borrow one of the trucks for a couple of hours. I boogied off to the fairgrounds with one of the company trucks, hooked up the trailer and took off for Potosi.

Have you ever lifted a half barrel of beer? No? Let me tell you; that sucker is heavy. The brewer not only could not deliver the beer, he had no crew to load it either, so two of us had to load the trailer.

We headed back to the fairgrounds and I was hoping that no one was going to call my employer the following week and ask why one of our trucks was boogying down the road on Sunday morning with a Pabst trailer. Our trucks were fire engine red with gold lettering and I was feeling as conspicuous as a pimple on a bride’s nose.

Once we got back to the fairgrounds and started unloading the beer I sampled the product, which I had not thought to do earlier. Oh my God, this stuff was greener than the governor’s lawn, and tasted like the output of a dehydrated horse. Too late now, though, since all of the Pabst was gone, and we started selling this stuff in the Pabst glasses. It was still the only draft beer in the metro Milwaukee area, though, and no one seemed to notice the taste.

Well, occasionally a customer would take a swig of his beer and give the glass a kind of funny look, but no one said anything.

We sold out, setting a club profit record that has never been broken.

Extraordinary

I'm sure you heard or have read it, so I won't go into detail on President Obama's talk yesterday, but it struck me as an extraordinary moment in his presidency; a moment when he exercised moral leadership in the Carter tradition. It was not a speech, really, it was a conversation, and there was not a single sour note. This is the man I hoped we would see throughout his time in office.

In particular, his challenge to the "stand your ground" laws was subtle, thoughtful, and beautifully done. It did not so much rebuke the law as it challenged us to think about the effect of such laws on the way we live.

...And Loose The Dogs Of War

CBS Evening News had a lengthy segment which started with CJOS Dempsey's statement that we had "tools that could be used" in the event that Obama ordered military intervention in Syria, and then sequed into a reporter accompanying the 82nd Airborne in practicing for an invasion to capture chemical weapons in Syria to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists. CBS will not be happy until we have boots on the ground in Syria, and will keep beating war drums until that is accomplished.

Trivial, But...

Danica Patrick said on Jay Leno that she had to sleep on the couch after wrecking her boyfriend, Ricky Stenhouse, at New Hampshire last weekend. The article, in a auto racing venue, reporting that drew a great many comments that it was bad for the image of NASCAR the have two drivers sleeping together who are not married.

Apparently some people think we are still racing horseless carriages. I can't wait for a driver to come out as gay; my guess would be that will cause an epidemic of fainting spells amongst those fans.