Long Beach was a crazy busy weekend even by my normal "crazy busy" standards, but there was one part of it that added a lighter, more humorous touch, and actually served to get through the laundry list of things to do.
It's merely two words, with a hashtag in front of it: #BlameTony.
Wednesday morning, the weather over Los Angeles county was fairly cold and overcast, cloudy, raining and a high of 62. My buddy Efrain, self-described "PR whore for hire," decided to send out a tweet saying the weather was somehow my fault.
The only logical reason I could come to was that because I've moved from Milwaukee since the last Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, I brought the poor weather with me. My other buddy Eversley, a.k.a Ryan Eversley, follows up to the reply with the hashtag #BlameTony.
As enough people had been in on the initial joke, #BlameTony became a theme throughout the weekend whereby anything that went wrong, this could then be used as a hashtag for it.
There are three ways to react, knowing they're using your name as the joke.
You can:A. Be a dick and whine about it
B. Get angry and allow it to negatively affect your weekend
C. Laugh about it and embrace it
I chose option C.
The meme began to spread as I walked into the media center for the first time on Thursday, greeted not, as "Hey, Tony!" but as, "Hey, Blame Tony!"
With the joke beginning to grow legs, I went ahead and added it to several things as non-sequituirs. Some of the things I got blamed for besides the weather were rather trivial, while in contrast, the AP's Jenna Fryer had to go to a local hospital to tend to an eye injury - and Efrain added the #BlameTony to that, too. I told her about it and she was happy to put the blame on me, knowing full well we're pretty much on par in our respective levels of sarcasm.
But Friday late afternoon was when it REALLY took off. The ALMS qualifying session, held Friday the 13th for background, saw the slowest class - GTC - complete its qualifying run in the dry. Then the GT cars ran one lap as the weather shifted from sprinkling to near-Noah's Ark level downpour, and, as Efrain so poignantly put it, "you were doomed the second the skies opened up."
I actually felt for Falken's Porsche team - they would have been on the class pole having set the fastest times in both the wet morning practice and the one qualifying lap they did. I felt for ALMS PR ace Erin, who had to conduct a media press conference asking polesitters questions that were in no way related to qualifying.
Then, as Dyson Racing and overall polesitter Guy Smith walked in, my other friend John Dagys, SPEED's excellent sports car reporter (who I try to match but it's close to impossible) and I were joking with him that he needed a towel to wipe off the sweat or a water bottle to quench his thirst after he's run. Dagys added the hashtag to his tweet when he sent out his qualifying report.
The capper was Dempsey Racing, though, which tweeted from its account to #BlameTony - this to their 5,000+ followers - for the qualifying. Immediately there were about 30 or 40 tweets with the #BlameTony hashtag saying, "Hey, cool, we'll do this! But WHY? And who is this Tony?" or something to that degree.
I know Erin's weekend got better because she got to meet Packers LB Clay Matthews, the race's grand marshal, on Saturday. I know Falken's Porsche was the top finishing Porsche in the race. And I know the crap weather turned around for a great Saturday and Sunday.
Amazingly, the hashtag kept going throughout the weekend - a sampling are sprinkled throughout this post - which I found surprising but humorous. I hope those who used the hashtag got as much enjoyment out of it as I did reading them.
Regardless, the #BlameTony hashtag that spread around Long Beach - and beyond - for the Twitter world was a heck of a lot of fun, and something I'll remember for a while. At least until the next LOLCATZ or some other rather pointless but memorable meme takes off.
Out for now, cheers.
