I wanted to get this out sooner after the narcissistic, whiny post last week, but then as I was trying to work on a double Nelson Piquet/Nigel Mansell post, the whole Bristol Night Race came and went and I knew that would provide a substantial well of material requiring a longer entry and I wasn’t ready to write that over the weekend.
For the average NASCAR fan, I guess last Saturday’s Bristol race felt like a breath of fresh air and a return to the Bristol of old, but I had decidedly mixed emotions. The fans who erroneously think the 1995 and 1999 Bristol night races are the best races in NASCAR history certainly got their money’s worth this time after several wild wrecks amongst the leaders, beating and banging, and Carson Hocevar and Ryan Blaney punching each other in the head. As for me, I didn’t like the race much personally even though I acknowledge it was the most cinematic race of the year and probably the only 2026 race that people will keep talking about from years to come. Mostly, as someone who was around for the 1999 Bristol night race and watched it live, this dumber version of that kind of action mostly just made me feel really old.
I was irritated by this race for a lot of reasons from the drop. I’m getting sick of NASCAR using a complicated metric to determine the starting grid when qualifying is rained out (or worse, even when there’s just a lightning strike). This is the same sanctioning body that introduced a godawful one point per position points system because they thought the fans were too stupid to understand anything else, yet they expect these same fans to understand an arcane composite scoring metric that is much more unfair than just setting the grid by owner’s points as it had been done for decades before? I know the metric was originally a COVID-19 lockdown measure, but I didn’t like it even then, and that should have ended when the pandemic did. It’s just patently unfair when somebody like Tyler Reddick crashed in the previous race, and then got double-punished for it at Bristol, a race where it was almost impossible to pass, resulting in him finishing three laps down and being basically eliminated from the championship. (Yes, it was his fault he got outdueled for the lucky dog spot three times, but he was right behind Josh Berry and Chase Briscoe early in the race, and they immediately jumped into the top ten on strategy not long after that, so I’m not entirely convinced Reddick couldn’t have if he’d ever gotten the track position.) This was probably just me, but I was honestly also deeply miffed that M&M’s sponsored Ty Gibbs and gave him a Kyle Busch tribute scheme when M&M’s withdrawing their sponsorship directly led to Busch leaving Joe Gibbs Racing and Gibbs replacing him because the loss of sponsorship would’ve meant Busch had to take a salary cut. For most of the race, it looked like Gibbs was going to win since he seemed to be one of the only guys who could pass lead-lap cars on track, and I was not looking forward to it. It would’ve felt rather gross to me for a sponsor to honor a driver they abandoned by winning with his replacement, so I’m glad that didn’t happen.
All that action at the end is going to make people think this race was an all-time classic, but it absolutely wasn’t. Although I’m a defender of the Next Gen chassis and I generally prefer it to the COT and the Gen 6 although most people don’t, I will grant that the short track racing has been bad, especially at Bristol, and most of this race was no exception. I honestly found the first three-quarters duller than the embarrassing Gateway race that preceded it, because there wasn’t a pass for the lead until Gibbs took the lead from Blaney on lap 325. He then made the second pass for the lead against Hocevar late in the race, and I begrudgingly admit I was LMAO when Gibbs attended to squeeze between the lapped cars of Alex Bowman and Cole Custer and crashed. Of course this brought to mind the famous three-wide pass on the middle in the 1993 Bristol spring race when Earnhardt successfully squeezed between Mark Martin and Kyle Petty. The difference is that those drivers were safer to race against and probably less likely to make a mistake. Doing that against lapped cars seems to be a way riskier maneuver, and I enjoyed seeing Gibbs get his comeuppance by trying to make a patented Earnhardt move while lacking Earnhardt’s talent, even if he ended up losing very little in the end.
Indeed, although the crash gave Hocevar the lead back, Gibbs immediately retook it when Hocevar pitted on the caution while Gibbs stayed out. It looked like despite his damage that Gibbs would win because four tires weren’t doing much. Then came the moment when Hocevar wrecked Blaney for second, which triggered their ridiculous post-race feud, and it is all that stuff that made me feel really old tbh. I saw so many people after the race comparing Hocevar to Earnhardt because of wrecking people in frontrunning positions at Bristol, but I didn’t really see many similarities at all. When Earnhardt wrecked Terry Labonte on the last lap at Bristol in 1999, it was for the win and fans were outraged. Back in those days, even bump-and-run passes for the win were usually condemned, and Jeff Gordon’s bump-and-run on Rusty Wallace in 1997 was considered so offensive to the sensibilities of the time that Rusty thought it justified intentionally wrecking Gordon at the following year’s Richmond race. (It didn’t.) Even Labonte himself drew fan ire for bumping Dale Jarrett for the win in the same Richmond race where Rusty wrecked Gordon. I remember the day after the 1999 Bristol night race that SportsCenter had a poll up asking, “Was Dale Earnhardt’s spinout of Terry Labonte a violent act?” (This seems silly now, but I guess it makes sense in the ‘90s zeitgeist after Columbine and all the attacks on violent movies, song lyrics, and video games.) I remember that literally everyone who weren’t Earnhardt fans were booing him after he did that, and probably even some of the Earnhardt fans were booing him too. It was considered low class.
But that was the NASCAR I grew up with, so it is still what I consider my baseline for normal, so what has happened in the quarter-century since kind of baffles me. Almost nobody criticizes the bump-and-run anymore and perhaps they never should have. It seems like in the wake of Earnhardt’s death, a lot of people view his intentional wrecking as quintessential NASCAR or the good old days, what they want NASCAR to return to, when men were men and Gillette pandered to them. But even Earnhardt pretended to show remorse when he said he “hated it happened”, although it was admittedly hard to credulously accept his sincerity. So many of the drivers now believe it’s acceptable to wreck people just for blocking them, and that’s something I don’t understand either.
Back when I started watching, the driver who ran into someone from behind was consistently viewed as responsible for causing wrecks by both the announcers and the public, but at some point I apparently didn’t notice, people started to blame most wrecks on the driver blocking and I somehow didn’t even register the change when it happened. I’d never even considered the idea having watched every NASCAR race nonstop for like five years until Gordon said at the 2002 Daytona 500 that he “got himself turned”. I remember at the 2005 “Duel at Daytona” (I still hate this name), Jimmie Johnson was blamed for causing a wreck while brake-checking the field while leading. I also remember that on RacingStalkers at the time, most people blamed Kevin Harvick for causing that wreck at first because he had more of a reputation as an asshole driver at that point and because the conventional wisdom was the driver in behind was always at fault.
But at some point this logic got turned on its head and I just didn’t keep up and now it seems like everybody thinks the driver blocking is always at fault. Because of my early old-school instincts, I blamed Hocevar almost entirely for the crash. Yes, okay, Blaney was probably goading Hocevar to lift and Hocevar refused, but this change in norms where everybody thinks it’s okay to wreck people for blocking them is a cultural norm that I’ve slowly grown to detest even though it’s been going on for 20 years now (ok millennial). And while I’d certainly seen instances where one driver whacked the other in the head before (whether it was Michael Waltrip on Lake Speed or Jimmy Spencer on Kurt Busch), I think that was the first time I saw both drivers do it, and it honestly made me think less of both of them.
I know most people except Hocevar’s rabid fan base seem to hate him because he is the most reckless driver, but to me, this was a turn for the worse. I’ve always compared him to Ernie Irvan because I always saw the many incidents both of them caused as being almost entirely wild overdriving rather than the kind of intentional, premeditated attacks that Earnhardt would do. But this is the one that really felt intentional to me in a way the rest didn’t, even if Blaney is willing to take partial blame and it seems that most Gen Z fans blame the driver in front for causing most wrecks by default, a reversal from the norm I grew up with. And one thing I found very odd is Joey Logano getting booed after winning the race when he did nothing. Sure, I’ve never liked Logano, I never will like Logano, and he’s the luckiest driver in NASCAR history, but he wrecked no one and he passed Hocevar to win. Shouldn’t the fans be happy he kept Hocevar from winning after Hocevar wrecked Blaney? I get the uneasy feeling that Logano got booed because the fans, feeling Hocevar embodies the spirit of Earnhardt when he’ll never be that good I think, actually wanted Hocevar to win after that bullshit and I think that’s what bothered me the most, because that is not how the fans acted in 1999. If Gibbs and Hocevar were the alternatives, I was well on board for a Joey win, thank you.
Another thing that bothers me is that people seem to think that “showing genuine emotion” is now interchangeable with “being an asshole”. I get that it was lamentable when in the wake of Geoff Bodine and especially Gordon, all NASCAR interviews got polished to a gloss and made insufferably boring to not alienate sponsors. It was very possible to run off sponsors due to bad behavior in the ‘90s, like when Robert Yates fired Irvan in 1997 by Texaco’s mandate after he forgot to mention them in the 1996 post-season banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria (a mild offense), blew off several sponsor engagements (a more significant one), and got into a barroom brawl (the worst offense of all). It obviously didn’t help Irvan either that Dale Jarrett was kicking his ass that year. I also know that Joe Gibbs almost fired Tony Stewart at the request of Home Depot in 2002 after he punched a photographer and got into a string of other wild antics, but he was doing just well enough in the championship to overcome the backlash, eventually winning it. So obviously, in that era, the sponsors were very conscious about PR nightmares and there was a certain threshold of success that would allow you to overcome them that Stewart met and Irvan didn’t.
But now, we are in a wildly different era. I don’t want to return to the ‘90s or 2000s level of discipline where Rusty Wallace was fined $10,000 for saying “sucks” (which we don’t even consider a swear word anymore; Rusty responding to this by paying the fine in pennies was almost the only time I ever actually liked him) or Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was fined 25 points for saying shit, but I kind of think we’ve gone way too far in the other direction. I don’t really blame the drivers or NASCAR itself. It just goes back to the coarsening of the culture that has permeated everything. In the late ‘90s and 2000s, a fake veneer of manners and civility was mandated by sponsors in that hilarious era when NASCAR was advertising itself as a “family sport”. I can understand how false and phony all that stuff was at the time even though I fell for it as a kid at the time. I don’t want drivers to be encouraged to be corporate robots like they were in that era (which was definitely one of the worst things about the ‘90s and 2000s) and I’m not saying we should discourage drivers from showing emotion, but why do so many people who argue for this seem to act like anything that isn’t douchebaggery isn’t “real emotion”? CART fans praised Paul Tracy so much in the ‘90s and 2000s for “telling it like it is” basically because he was the only driver who called out both sanctioning bodies during the split, calling the CART officials “circuit clowns” once and the IRL cars “crapwagons”. But he was always a schmuck on track, and he was somehow even more of one in the NBCSN booth (Robin Miller’s worst legacy). There’s really only a small step from that to Santino Ferrucci, who some liberal fans acted like he was talentless because he was a bigot and disingenuously used his lack of wins as an excuse when I think basically no one would have won in those cars, while some conservative fans (like a lot of people on TracKForum) seemed to hero-worship him just for trolling the libs. All this for today’s Oriol Servià: a good, not great driver who always made his teams better and usually outperformed his teammates, but had too low a ceiling to interest top teams, so I guess it’s not surprising that Ferrucci’s full-time career, just like Servià’s, ended a bit sooner than it should have.
I guess Hocevar has become popular in some circles because he is the first NASCAR driver to really harness social media in a successful way. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if negative content didn’t outperform positive content. Unfortunately it does, so outrage is profitable now in a way it wasn’t in the ‘90s and 2000s, which is probably also why Hocevar will never change. This is the Age of Trump, so sponsors are no longer averse to controversy but are actively courting it, and I find this rather detestable, but I don’t blame Hocevar for responding to social media’s incentives to play the villain for clicks; I hate the incentives themselves. Hocevar has somehow Flanderized Kyle Busch’s self-image as a WWE-esque heel and it works, but count me out. (I still think he’s a very talented driver and people acting like he sucks - oops, just lost $10,000 there - because he causes a lot of wrecks are wrong, but he’s become a real handful.) The thing is: you don’t have to be an asshole to thrive on social media, even if it’s probably the most effective way to go viral now. Plenty of drivers adapted quirky personas that seemed genuine and social media-friendly without being obnoxious. I can’t really think of a NASCAR example off the top of my head, but in other series, there’s Jordan Taylor, James Hinchcliffe, and David Malukas. If I truly thought trolling people was the only way to get attention on social media nowadays, I’d understand Hocevar a little better, but I don’t think that it is as those other drivers prove. And that’s why I think he’s lost me. Also, Earnhardt and Labonte managed to be genuine back then without throwing punches at each other. Or having their wives bring up unrelated allegations just to escalate the feud like they’re Kendrick and Drake.
Well, I have two major pieces of good news and one piece of bad news. I was told that Mom would be allowed to keep her Social Security money and have it deposited in her bank account again as soon as she is allowed to return home, so I should have access to more money then and that would effectively pay me for the caregiving burden I will be taking on. Additionally, I found a $200 tax refund check in a pile of paper yesterday from New York State that I received almost a year ago and hadn’t deposited; I deposited it yesterday and it was thankfully not yet too late.
However, there is still a major problem with Mom coming home. The front door that the ramp connects to is now sticking and I haven’t been able to open it from inside. The latch on the screen door had been sticking for years as well, so I asked the guy at Onondaga County Community Development who administered the roof repair and ramp construction if he could remove the screen door for me so the ramp was more accessible, but it seems like removing the screen door affected the front door itself somehow. One of my high school classmates (who is one of the only people I talk to locally) told me that the kind of door I have needs to be protected by a screen door and now needs to be replaced. I mean I get that, but I also can’t possibly fathom how Mom was supposed to go up a ramp and squeeze the wheelchair around a screen door in the first place. If I’d known this, maybe I should’ve tried to add a door replacement to the OCCD project. I was trying to call some contractors yesterday for a door repair, but almost all the companies in this field are doing garage door repairs. My garage door is fine. It’s the regular door that isn’t, and unfortunately, that is the door that Mom will need, although it’s probably still possible I could walk her through the garage if I move some things around. I was able to open the door from the outside and the ramp itself with my key, but it took some effort.
This is the flip side of the coin that I complained about in the previous post. Just as I grew up with white pages and miss them, I miss the yellow pages too. Is it possible to look up contractors online? Sure. The problem is that the phone books actually curated the white pages and the yellow pages so that only phone numbers that weren’t out of service are listed in them, while a Google search for local contractors can bring up essentially any company that ever existed, including companies that have been out of business for 10 or 15 years because the deprecated company listings were never removed, which again makes it harder to find local help for anything unless you happen to know a guy, meaning if you struggle to connect to people socially, you’ll also struggle logistically in terms of the activities of daily living. And this is why I think almost anybody in any blue collar field is making bank now. Well, that along with our entire generation competing for a larger number of white-collar jobs than actually existed.
My first doctor’s appointment in years was today, but I’ll have more on that tomorrow.
This is where my 12-game losing streak that led to my relegation started. I had never heard of the first two answers. I knew Wagner wrote “Ride of the Valkyries”, so I put Valkyrie, and that was very close since that piece was part of the Nibelungen cycle, but I just hadn’t heard of the overall cycle. I just made a wild guess on #2 and put radicchio, which I wasn’t even sure was a food (it is, but not a liqueur). I never have a good instinct for which of these geography questions is easy or hard, and it’s definitely the category I underachieve in the most that I didn’t expect. I put Boston, but I had nothing. I actually had house and switched off, one of like five times over a seven or eight day period where I had the right answer and then talked myself out of it because “House” didn’t sound like a nightclub to me, so I switched to the related genre electro, which sounds more like a club. But then I remembered after I submitted that the genre of music was also called “Chicago House”, and yes, that definitely fits the name of a club. For question 5, I didn’t know it, so I just had to guess. Given how much you hear about Ohio State and Michigan and how often they’ve featured in major bowls, I knew it wasn’t them. I guessed Wisconsin, but I considered Minnesota. And then the last one was probably the easiest question in the entire season.
I do like Airplane! and I thought Titanic was all right, but for the most part, I don’t like disaster movies. Nonetheless, I’ve read a lot of movie criticism and I certainly knew Airport existed and was the main movie Airplane! was parodying even though I have no desire to watch it no matter how big it was. People talk about manga and anime so much in Internet culture that I assumed most people would find that the easiest question even though I’m not into either, but it was actually rated as the second-hardest question and had the second-lowest successful response rate, so apparently these two subsets of Internet culture don’t intersect as much as I thought they did. I’d heard of Thermidor and that instantly made sense once I’d read it, but there was no way I was going to pull that. I answered “Calais”, which certainly sounds more French than the very Latin Thermidor and also is related to the Latin word for heat. Porkopolis really could’ve been any Midwestern city if you didn’t know it, and I guessed Milwaukee (note to self — stop guessing Wisconsin!) WKRP in Cincinnati is my favorite TV show and there were a lot of pork references on it admittedly, but I just associated that with the Midwest in general rather than Cincinnati specifically. I’d never heard of witch hazel and stupidly put “wand”. And then, I did certainly have a rough memory of when Queen Victoria’s reign was.
This is another one of the bad guesses I switched off from. Welsh was my first thought because I knew Welsh names were much longer than any of the other associated British languages, but the saint stuff threw me off and made me think of Catholicism, so I switched to Latin. I could’ve gotten a tie on this match if I’d properly assessed my opponent’s easiest/hardest categories. I thought Psycho was the easiest question and it was indeed rated as the easiest by players for opponent defense, but more peoplee actually got ocarina. I was nowhere on that. I knew it was a word just from being a Scrabble player, but I somehow hadn’t encountered it “in the wild”. I didn’t know it was an instrument, but I assume most people had heard of that game (and Ocarina of Time did sound vaguely familiar, but I’d just never had a console so much of that stuff missed me and I watched way more television than played video games back then, because quite frankly, in that era, TV was cheaper). I guessed theremin. I put Red for #4 because I knew that was a Stevie Wonder album and I had vaguely heard of the associated movie, good guess anyway. It’s funny that although pop music, film, and to a lesser degree TV are strong categories for me, theater is very much not, but it is the least accessible to the working class since it requires going to expensive shows usually in big cities, so I’m not surprised that never took. Anyway, I guessed Evan Hansen, and that wasn’t a bad guess either. I can’t believe my opponent thought I’d think Midway was the hardest answer. I do really poorly in World History which also surprises me since American History vies with Pop Music for my strongest category, but this is something everyone learns about in grade school (unlike most of the other answers in this category), and the closer you get to things people learn about in grade school, the better I do ‘cause that’s when I peaked.
