All-inclusive post title there, eh?
The headline first, since it's timely (I guess) and amusing. Here's what it said in the navigation space on ESPN.com this afternoon. I glanced at it, blinked, and looked again, wondering how I'd wound up on ESPN Europe, or Desportes, or something. My best guess was that this headline was about a UK football transaction, but I couldn't imagine why that would be news on ESPN.com, when adult Americans care nothing for US soccer, much less European soccer.
I clicked the link out of curiosity, and laughed when it was some NASCAR news. I don't "get" NASCAR in any way. It's guys driving modified sedans in a circle for 4 hours. It seems impossible to me that this could be a major sport in entertainment attention span deficit America, but somehow it is. ESPN pays a lot of money to show the races, so of course they're going to headline news developments in it, but the races actually do attract 100,000+ spectators every weekend, and it's not just in the south anymore; real states like California and New York now host these events.
I had a long blog post half-written about NASCAR many months ago, with a bunch of links to a photo gallery of NASCAR fans I'd seen on SportsIllustrated.com. In that post I was going to try to derive some logic to the popularity of the sport, since it baffles me, and was going to point to racism as a contributing factor. Of the crowd shots on SI.com, 85% were fat men,
99% were white people, many had
Confederate flags on their vehicles or flying over the grandstands, etc. Plus the drivers and crews and owners and sponsors of NASCAR are almost entirely whitewashed. It's not that NASCAR fans are necessarily bigots or racists, but it's certainly a sport that racist whites can follow without ever being perturbed by the site of any frighteningly dark skin. Plus, getting involved in NASCAR requires one to have a family background in racing, and the fact that there's no athletic ability required of the competitors means that the "sport" is not, and never will be, dominated by non-whites.
I never published that post since blogger crashed and ate it before I was done, and I was losing interest in the subject even as I typed about it. Much as is happening right now. So, to wrap things up, I don't get NASCAR, and I don't understand why anyone finds it interesting, it annoys me that it's clogging up space on sports TV and websites, but I don't care enough to hate it, or make some big effort to sociological indict it as a racist entertainment. Especially now that, like Wal-Mart, it's spread across the country and has gained some black, latino, and asian fans.
In fact, this puzzling headline is proof of NASCAR's growing diversity. Ten years ago that headline would have read, "Bubba Joe receives beer from Budweiser Racing" and I'd have known at once it was about NASCAR, wouldn't have clicked to see the details (lite or draft?), and wouldn't have had material for a blog post.
In other photo news, I had this for lunch a few weeks ago. It was a semi-date afternoon with the IG, and we did a
chocolate factory tour, and then drove over to Berkeley for a crepe. I'd only previously had crepes from dessert bars in buffet restaurants, and had never enjoyed them. Tasty exterior, like a very thin pancake, but the stuffing was essentially foamy cake icing, and unpalatable.
The IG wanted to get a savory crepe though, which just means non-dessert. I was game, so we went to one of the many crepes places within a few blocks of UC Berkeley, and split a spinach, mushroom, and cheese crepe. Very tasty. It's basically a glorified pastry-style quesadilla, served rolled up into a funnel, so you can hold it at the point and devour it like a giant waffle ice cream cone. We ate ours on a plate with forks, since we were splitting it and we aren't savages.
I don't know if I'd make them a regular part of my diet, even if there were a good crepes place conveniently near my home and price were no object, but it was nice for a change. Plus it was fun to see the cooking process on the special crepe oven, as pictured above. Nice image quality for a cell phone cam, eh? Remember that, because...
This is a photo I took of Jinx in the tub, also on the cell phone camera. It's not that my camera died, it's that the only illumination in the bathroom at the time was an overhead heat lamp, which accounts for the red/orange light you see suffusing things in this shot.
Jinx sleeps in the bedroom with me at night, and I close the door since it's like, bright in the plant-infested living room. She's a quiet kitty though, and usually sleeps soundly for the whole night. Or at least doesn't become unsoundly enough to wake me up, so same thing. She's always thirsty in the
morning when I get up though, since while she's got a bowl of water, she only drinks out of it in desperate need. She gets most of her water from a little waterfall relaxation sculpture thing in the living room, where she can drink it as it flows down over the rocks. She's also fond of drinking out of the drain dishes below houseplants, though she likes rainwater best. She was chugging the overflow from various mosquito-enabling dishes and trays on the back patio, during the rainy season (which usually extends until about June here, but apparently ended in mid-February this very sunny winter).
I don't leave the water fountain on overnight though, and since it's always blindingly bright in my living room, I usually just crack the door to let her out of the bedroom when I wake up. She heads out into the living room, but usually returns to me in the bathroom where I'm shaving or using the toilet or showering, since there's nothing to drink in the living room, since the fountain hasn't been turned on yet. And she's thirsty, as I might have previously mentioned.
Lately, she's grown impatient and has taken to finding her own sources of flowing water. She drank out of the sink constantly when she (and I) lived in Malaya's condo, but lost that habit in this apt. She still hasn't reacquired it, but she has lately started hopping into the tub and licking up any drops of water she can find, if some linger from last night's shower. Better yet, sometimes she can guilt Daddy into turning on the tub, just a trickle, which she then uses primarily to get her face wet while occasionally managing to lap a few drops out of the air.
Just to end with a better quality image, here's one from her work on the back patio a few weeks ago. I put her box out there to air out a bit with a bunch of new litter in it, and as always seems to be the case with housecats, she found the prospect of free range pooping to be quite intoxicating. She kicks about twice per box visit, when the box is inside, with the usual lid on it. When she catches it outside though, and uncovered? She
digs like Faildog.
Finally, here's a long overdue photo of last year's birthday present from Malaya. We continued our annual tradition of visiting
The Bone Room on or around my birthday, and since I already had a nice sheep's skull w/ horns, and tree branch with some bat skeletons on it, I diversified to this articulated snake skeleton. Rather a nice before and after sort of image, eh? Click to see it much larger.
Labels: food, jinx, photos, snakers
