Monday, July 9, 2012

A few random thoughts...And it's July?!?


It’s been two months since last posting an entry, and also, IT'S ALREADY JULY?!? In the interim I turned 23, and also I decided to put fingers to keyboard and chronicle a few random thoughts racing through my brain below. Nobody likes you when you’re 23 (see below). Thoughts after the jump.

“Summeritis” – The logical extension of senioritis, “Summeritis” is where you struggle with your first full summer working post-graduation. It’s not that you’re lazy, it’s just that you’re in that transitioning phase where the whole “year since graduating” timeframe has expired and now in the working world, there are no more summer vacations. I’m hoping this is a short-term deal.

Basically every summer in college, I didn’t have any regular summer jobs to come back to, but instead had racing work as an escape – freelancing for four straight years and doing some work at school on the side. It’s now moved to a point of being all-consuming instead of just an escape, and nearly a year here into my time in California, I’m still searching for the escape that temporarily breaks up the all-racing, all-the-time mindset.

HEAT – One upside of moving to California (there’s probably more, but it hasn’t been exactly all glitz and glamor, saving that for another post) is that in O.C., we’ve been fortunate to miss the massive heat wave engulfing the country at the moment. So much of the country is over 100 degrees at the moment, and yet there’s no reason to believe in global warming. Because it’s science, and we can’t have any of that…

Higgs-boson –  … and speaking of science, this discovery was made this week, and basically it’s the “God particle” that explains how mass has mass. I’m gonna be honest – I know this thing is big, but other than that last sentence, I haven’t got the slightest idea what the hell’s going on with it. Or how to explain it. But again, science.

Andy Griffith – There’s a racing tie-in for me when it comes to Andy Griffith, who passed away this week at the age of 86. My first trip to Long Beach for the grand prix (1998), my dad and I stayed on the Queen Mary, and the old TV in the room provided my first experience of The Andy Griffith Show. It was quaint, simple and down-to-earth – three qualities that would serve modern television much better in spades rather than the morass stinking up much of the American airwaves. And also, Andy’s son in the show – Opie played by then-called Ronnie Howard – has grown into the legendary director now adding racing to his repertoire. His F1 film Rush, scheduled for a 2013 release and chronicling the 1976 World Championship bout between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, has the potential to be captivating.

Really? – I was disappointed to read the other night that Steve Nash – one the few NBA players I could bring myself to legit root for, this as I used to live in Arizona – would go to the Lakers in a sign-and-trade. To me, it’s the NBA equivalent of when Brett Favre went from the Packers to the Vikings, although that occurred after a year pit stop in New York for the Jets. Still, and I get how it’s a myth that a player can stay in one city for the entirety of his career these days, but the last place you should ever go – unless you want to throw away that entire city’s fan base’s goodwill – is your most hated rival. The Lakers are that to the Suns, other than perhaps the Spurs. Late Friday a similar move happened when it was announced Ray Allen would leave the Celtics to go to the Heat, and the reverberations will be felt of that move, as well.

“Ted” – After seeing “Men in Black 3” on my birthday, and being rather underwhelmed, it was a welcome tonic seeing Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted” last weekend. Seth has pulled off the improbable and unlikely combination of a film that’s both incredibly vulgar and heartwarmingly cute at the same time. It’s also side-splittingly funny. Bottom line, for comedy fans, it’s a must see.

Busy weekend – All of Formula 1, IndyCar, ALMS, NASCAR, NHRA and their associated support series were racing this weekend, and Grand-Am is testing at Indianapolis. All of this made for a home-bound and very busy TDZ monitoring all the activity and focusing on IndyCar and ALMS coverage. Additionally, it marks a weekend not at either Toronto or Lime Rock, and either would have been fun to get to. C’est la vie.

Onward and upward from here. Out for now. Cheers.

No comments: