Current Non-Annoyance

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Dalty
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

NASCAR is kinda simple, but I don't mean that in a bad way. It feels achievable and relatable. F1 is just so technologically advanced it feels remote. Plus I get the impression NASCAR is more competitive on a race by race basis? I don't doubt F1 is the most demanding of the drivers and the more skilled sport, but for spectator sport isn't NASCAR pretty amazing?
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Scotia »

I don't know. I've watched stock car live a few times and damn. Thank god I was half cut cuz I was bored out of my mind. Never seen F1 or even Indy so I cant really say how exciting it would be in person. On TV it does squat for me. I'm always looking for a smash up. Hope nobody gets hurt but just being honest. F1 has cooler looking cars, 90 degree turns and the odd right turn. A better TV sport for me anyway.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by neglet »

When I grew up my dad was really into racing, knew a lot of engineers/crew, and eventually became part of the Corvette Racing LeMans team. I got dragged to a lot of different races as a kid, and I think you enjoy it more if you can identify with a particular racer or team. And as for viewing it live, with NASCAR you can see the whole race develop. Watch a Formula 1 or other street/circuit course, you miss three-quarters of the action.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Adam54 »

Dalty wrote:NASCAR is kinda simple, but I don't mean that in a bad way. It feels achievable and relatable. F1 is just so technologically advanced it feels remote. Plus I get the impression NASCAR is more competitive on a race by race basis? I don't doubt F1 is the most demanding of the drivers and the more skilled sport, but for spectator sport isn't NASCAR pretty amazing?
The one family vacation we ever took growing up was to a NASCAR race in scenic Detroit. Seeing it live pretty much killed the passion anybody in my family had for it, especially me and my dad. It was just. so. dull. The same guy (I want to say Jeff Gordon) led almost all of the laps, there wasn't a ton of jockeying for position behind him, there was one crash on lap 195 or 196 of 200 which had no impact on the final outcome of the race other than making 3 of the last 4 laps be run under caution, which is about as dull as sporting events get.

And don't even get me started on driving past old Tiger Stadium but not going to the game which was starting LITERALLY TEN MINUTES AFTER WE WERE DRIVING PAST. The final year of that gem and I had to miss it.

Damned non-baseball loving parents! Damn them!

*sighs*

That trip was also the last time I ever ate a cold Pop-Tart. Ah, memories.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

I am a diagnosed insomniac. Most of the people on the board already know this. I sleep 15-20 hours a week on a bad week and 20-25 hours a week on a good week. There are only really two things that will make me nod off with any degree of reliability: driving long distances and NASCAR. Maybe both of them involve some form of highway hypnosis. With the NASCAR, though, there's even less to keep my attention, since I'm not actively steering.

(They don't quite put me to sleep, mind you. They just tug my eyelids down, which causes my chin to dip ever so slightly, which causes my brain to say WHATTHEFUCKDOYOUTHINKYOU'REDOING?, which causes me to yank my head up and repeat the process until I am sufficiently awake again. If I'm lucky, I'll get a snore or two out of it. If I'm driving and I'm lucky, I won't wreck the car and die.)

These cars just sweep past as a school. A car breaks out of the ranks every now and then, but it's mostly just this mass of cars sweeping along together. In circles. Over and over and over again. It's a brain murderer--especially if you aren't there and can't really hear the sounds or smell the smells.

I've mentioned in the past that NASCAR was one of the culture shocks I experienced when I moved from an urban German setting to a rural Alabamian setting. It was one of the biggest ones. I never could get into it. I thought I might like it at first, thanks to a tape of all-time NASCAR highlights I was given not long after I moved to Alabama. If you take decades' worth of NASCAR races and cram the absolute best moments into a thirty-minute tape, it makes NASCAR seem almost watchable.

From what I can tell, the beer helps. It also helps, at least where Alabama is concerned, to have the Talladega Superspeedway. Alabama also had a decent number of tracks associated with the Winston Cup through the years. Alabama folk feel connected as a result.

Southerners and rednecks sort of see NASCAR as their "thing," so they probably feel some pressure to embrace it. They've also built a fair amount of spectacle around it--probably to distract them from the dullness of the actual races. There's the aforementioned beer aspect. There are pyrotechnics and scantily clad women. There's loud music. Each race is essentially a party--a really loud, really obnoxious party.

Fans also get to know the drivers' personal details. They come to feel they know them personally. It's the same with any sport, I guess. It makes the wrecks mean more. And the wrecks are a big part of it.

Scotia already mentioned the wrecks above. I'm not sure if the wrecks mean more to fans of NASCAR than they mean to any other racing sport. My guess is that they don't hurt, whatever the case. Lots of people want to be able to say they were there/watching when so-and-so went down. I think there may be a callousness to the wrecks that's not quite as present with other racing sports. Maybe that's due to the kinds of fans attracted to NASCAR. There's also what seems to me an almost holier-than-thou aspect to it when a fan's favorite racer wrecks and dies. People get pretty showy about their fandom when that happens. Maybe I'm the one being the asshole here and misrepresenting the NASCAR fans, but I just have a hard time believing they care as much as they act like they care when a racer gets fucked up or killed. The fans seem to me to make it more about themselves than about the drivers.

The wrecks are definitely tragic, but the fans are able to distance themselves from the tragedy a bit, thanks to the dehumanization that happens with all the same-sized, same-shaped cars. That could be part of it. The people in the seats are just far enough away from the cars for the cars to look almost like toy cars.

Baseball can be boring as hell, too. I find it and golf to be similarly boring to watch. Baseball's bad on TV, but it's worse live. I say that having only gone to one live game, though, so what do I know?

I'm sure live games were less boring pre-commercial TV days. Players have to stand around so fuckin' much, man. Promoters try to keep viewers' interests up with the music and the mascots and the jumbotron, and I guess it's a successful diversion for some, but I mostly sat there thinking about how the seats were killing my ass, about how the hot dog and soda I bought cost me almost as much as my ticket, and about how most of Shakespeare's plays can be performed in less time than it took for the game I saw to play out.

The game I went to was a Cardinals/Astros game during the Cardinals' 2004 season. It was a pretty big deal of a season. The Cardinals had the highest win percentage they'd had since the forties, it was their last season in the original Busch Stadium, they won the National League Championship and went to the World Series, and Pujols was still hot. The crowd was pretty into it, and I was told it was the most exciting things had been in a long, long time. Still, it was a drag for me.

Maybe it didn't help that I went with a German who didn't know any of the rules of baseball and who kept asking me questions. It was charming, in a way. She'd ask, "Why didn't he get to go around the bases?" and I'd tell her, "He hit a pop-up. The catcher caught it. Batter's out." She'd say, "Well, I think he should get to go around the bases if he hits the ball." Then she'd nod her head in a confident way, as if this nod of hers righted all the wrongs of the world and made things fair.

Maybe it didn't help that I was forced to play three miserable years of baseball as a kid. I was pretty bad at it. I went the last two of those years without ever hitting a pitch. (It was rare for me to swing. I actually got on base more than most of my team's players. Why? It occurred to me that fourth and fifth graders, on the whole, were shitty pitchers. They mostly threw balls. I got walked on base a lot, and usually without ever having to swing more than once.) I was a supposed outfielder, but I spent the vast majority of my time on the bench when our team was playing defense.

These three years followed immediately after the van accident. It took four years after the accident before I became properly mobile. Every year, I begged to be allowed to quit baseball. I was finally allowed to quit, but I was made to pick up football. Football was worse. I begged for five years to be allowed to quit football. (I also begged for five years to be allowed to quit karate, but only a couple of those years were during football years. My time in karate bridged the baseball-football gap.) Football was extra sucky, because everyone on the football team was required to be on the weightlifting team. It was two sports for the price of fun.

What was I talking about again?
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Space Tycoon »

The cat came back!

No, not the very next day. Just now. I'll take it.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Space Tycoon »

Okay, she didn't just "come back." Someone found her nearby and brought her back.

I can't help but feel a minor amount of guilt that it was not I who found her. She wasn't that far away, really.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

Give her some love...... and tuna, they fucking love tuna!
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by neglet »

Space Tycoon wrote:The cat came back!

No, not the very next day. Just now. I'll take it.
Spacey has a cat? I have been gone a while.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Space Tycoon »

Yuuup!
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Space Tycoon »

In all honesty, she is best described as a shared cat.


But she likes me best. Yes she does.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by neglet »

So she chooses to barf on your bed above all others?
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

You wait until you start serving up supermarket own brand cat food, then you will discover who she really belongs to!
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Space Tycoon »

Indeed.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

Sure, you think she really stays for the cuddles, but secretly it's the left over sashimi!
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Space Tycoon »

She has an agenda, for sure.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

Oh happy day!! My local supermarket now stocks hostess Twinkies! Yay!!!
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Adam54 »

I'm flying to Pittsburgh next weekend to (hopefully) see a certain rock god. My original flight out involved a quick connection through Detroit and the return flight had a connection through LaGuardia in New York. I was due to arrive home around 4:00 in the afternoon, but the return flight was rescheduled to connect through Detroit and land roughly four hours earlier.

I did what I do best and complained. I learned of their policy to grant refunds to flights which are rescheduled by more than 90 minutes from the arrival time, got my non-refundable flight refunded and actually rebooked two direct flights for a mere $7 more than I'd originally paid. I was quite happy with the resolution and figured that was that, until yesterday when I got an email saying they were very sorry for my inconvenience and were giving me a $200 flight voucher towards a future flight for my troubles!

Airlines acting like decent companies! Who knew that was a thing??
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

You should have seen him when he was in New Jersey. That's where the real show was.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

Axl Rose is touring again?
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

He took an alternate current, recently. Alternate though it was, some maintain it was more direct than the previous current.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

He joined Queen?
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

No. I don't think that would be a good fit, but Brian May.
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Dalty »

Badger!
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Re: Current Non-Annoyance

Post by Adam54 »

The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:No. I don't think that would be a good fit, but Brian May.
:wall: :wall: :wall:

No. No. That's not gonna do it.

:wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall: :wall:
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