Pausing charges for a month

The Waste of Syracuse

On June 8, I decided to pause regular charges for a month. That doesn’t mean I won’t be making any driver posts because I still intend to. However, it was clear as I was going through most of the remaining Indy 500 winners that I was burning out hard. Additionally, the ramp construction and roof installation are both scheduled for the upcoming month and I need to be there and supervise that as well as continue to clean out or at least move around some of the stuff Mom hoarded so I can order a deep clean of the house, which is essential if I ever want her to be able to come home, which I do. I also have work for my real job that I’m behind on.

I think what ultimately prompted me to slow down happened last Friday. I visited mom at Van Duyn as usual and brought her a stuffed bear from home. She’s been upset that all the Van Duyn-branded teddy bears she kept winning at bingo were either being lost or stolen, so I decided to bring one of ours. It’s a lot larger and softer than the Van Duyn bears, it’s made a nice pillow for her, and it’s large enough that I think it won’t get lost. I had to leave early to pick up the $50 from her Social Security that she is allowed to keep and deposit it in her bank account to cover her life insurance policies that are being automatically deducted. Then, I walked to the bus stop at Salina St. and Willow St. to wait for the bus there, but it didn’t show up within ten minutes of the scheduled arrival time. The Taste of Syracuse festival was going on, but it was clear that it was interfering with the traffic patterns. I went to the first one 30 years ago, but I didn’t enjoy it as befitting a dude with an eating disorder. There were two cover bands on different stages as I walked past. One was covering hair metal songs (Poison, Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses) and the other went from Miley Cyrus to Eddie Money (I’m almost surprised anyone who would cover Cyrus even knows who Money is).

So, after the first bus didn’t show up, I walked to the other bus stop I frequently used to return home without being informed that there was a detour. That was the last bus back home to North Syracuse for the day, so I then had to walk down to the downtown transit hub to get back. I had already accidentally walked into the bottom of a stairwell jutting out from a building on James St. and hurt my head briefly. It was also really hot. I guess it was only 84°F or something, but usually that’s too hot for me. So when I got to the transit hub, I decided to lie down on the concrete sidewalk because it was the only place that was cool. I was not lying on the road, just a pedestrian walkway and there were no buses coming at that moment. I didn’t fall asleep, but I was admittedly startled when a couple people rolled in there on their bikes (or maybe motorcycles; I don’t remember) and came less than a foot from running into me. I WAS lying right in front of a ramp to walk onto the sidewalk, but I had never seen anyone cycling on the sidewalks ever from what I remember and I’d used that transit hub hundreds of times. So, I sat up for a moment before lying back down again, after which one of the cyclists mocked me and said I was “fucking special”.

♪ But I’m a creep ♪

After that, I got up and walked away then the cyclists just left. Well, I now have one of those stories about “roughing it” to tell my imaginary children! At least I wasn’t hurt in the long run, although six miles of walking did trigger a bad IBS attack the next day and I felt barely functional. Imagine being an absent-minded professor without the professor job. I know a lot of people don’t even consider 84°F very hot. One of the things that bothered me was when a lot of local weatherpeople always seemed to argue on air that higher temperatures always meant nicer weather, even using “hotter” and “better” ass synonyms, particularly in an age of climate change. The temperature might be approaching the boiling point of water, but isn’t it SO LOVELY out? Maybe it’s an autistic/sensory thing but I never liked heat or sun the way so many others seem to. Give me 65-70°F, overcast, and a light breeze all day. Syracuse used to have a lot more days like that in the ‘90s than it does now, which is another minor reason why I want to leave.

Anyway, that whole thing served as a wake-up call for me to slow down and take it easy for a bit, which is probably the main reason I turned off Substack charges. I still plan on making some posts, and I guess since I already promised the Satoru/Kazuki Nakajima one, that will still be next. (I also will need to retract my factual error in the Rick Mears post last week when I wrote that he was the first driver to win an IndyCar race with a Chevy engine at Pocono in 1987; whoops, not true - it was Mario Andretti earlier that year; weirdly, it wasn’t either Louis or Gaston Chevrolet, so I’m going to have to edit that slightly and pick a different best race for him. I’ll probably change his best race to the 1991 Indy 500.)

One thing I want to do during the pause is finally finish going through all the remaining “near miss” drivers on my 1,000 greatest drivers list spreadsheet and scoring their careers. There are 101 left. I currently have 749 locks (although I’m still willing to be talked out of a few of them) and 435 bubble drivers right now, so once I finish this, I should know what the bottom of the bubble looks like and how many cumulative “career points” it will take to make the list. Granted, I already have a lot of these categories over-filled, and I do not want to list more than 200 drivers in a given year with the top five, 20 Es, 25 E-s, 50 C+s, 50 Cs, and 50 C-s, so I’m going to have to remove the excess drivers and fill in some of the other slots like a jigsaw puzzle eventually, but I don’t think I’m going to get to that part of it until at least I’ve finally finished my universal driver list, which I would like to try to complete by the end of the year. Once I’ve gone through all my near-miss drivers (likely ensuring all but maybe a handful or two historic drivers who will make the list besides current drivers are already in consideration), I’ll likely do a post for it.

Like probably a lot of NASCAR fans of my generation, Bob Jenkins, Ned Jarrett, and Benny Parsons were my favorite NASCAR booth of all time, so it sucks that with Jarrett’s death all three of them have now died, but at least he got to live a long life and didn’t die prematurely.

I enjoyed both of the NASCAR and IndyCar races this weekend with reservations. Like a lot of Michigan races (even before the Next Gen car) there seemed to be a lot of passing for the lead compared to other races but a lot of aero push through the rest of the field, which was a bit frustrating. I don’t tend to like crashfests much either, but it certainly provided opportunities for drivers who don’t run up front as much like Erik Jones to have strong runs. I was never as high on Jones as most of the rest of the analytics community, but I was still rooting for him hard while knowing he would ultimately have nothing for Denny Hamlin in the end. I was kind of hoping that Hamlin’s car would be found illegal so we could have had a cool reversal of the obnoxious finish to Martinsville in 2020. Don’t pass him, Jones! But alas, it was not to be.

As usual, everybody was pissed at Carson Hocevar for causing the biggest wreck of the race. I’m not gonna say that wasn’t justified, because he does do things like that a lot in contrast to his aw-shucks image. But the fact that the leader of Hocevar’s opposition ended up being Austin Dillon of all people led me to end up on Hocevar’s side in the end. Not only was Dillon always way more obnoxiously aggressive than Hocevar was and he frequently caused intentional wrecks while Hocevar’s wrecks were usually driving over his head, at least Hocevar has talent, you know? It’s like if Jimmy Spencer started ranting about Ernie Irvan being too aggressive. Pot, kettle, etc… I do think Mike Joy’s frequent comparisons of Hocevar to Dale Earnhardt were wildly over the top, but Hocevar is pretty much Irvan exactly at this point.

It was a bit of a letdown that Hamlin ended up winning by 11 seconds. That probably wouldn’t have happened if Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell, Chase Elliott, and Ty Gibbs hadn’t all wrecked out, but it was certainly fair and extremely impressive that he drove from last to first. I would probably take Hamlin’s season over Reddick’s at this point, but it’s close. I fully expect at this point that Reddick will become the first driver to lead the full-season points standings for the entire season but Hamlin will win the title.

I really thought the IndyCar Gateway race was going to (finally) be David Malukas’s day. Everything seemed to be pointing in that direction after he finished third at Phoenix and second at Indy. Since he’s been faster pretty much everywhere than he ever has been before (which is totally understandable now that he’s in a Penske car), he really seemed to enter Gateway as the favorite, considering he got well-fought podiums his first two years for Dale Coyne (becoming the only driver in Coyne’s 40-year history to earn multiple oval podiums still to this day), then was battling Will Power for what would have eventually become the lead in 2024 before Power wrecked him. When you consider that usual Gateway dominator Josef Newgarden was injured in the Indy 500 and looked very slow at Detroit, I was kind of counting Newgarden out. While he was fast enough to win hurt in his storybook Iowa win in 2016, I was just not convinced he was good enough to overcome his injuries anymore considering how hard he has fallen off since 2022, Indy 500 wins aside.

Okay, I wuz wrong. That whole race defied expectations, which I guess means it was good. While Newgarden winning again was kind of a buzzkill, it’s still impressive that he won hurt yet again at a time when many (and I don’t think it was just me) were ready to write him off. I guess he’s just as good on short ovals as he ever was even though he looks like a kind of bad road/street course driver these days. I really thought Penske was going to drop Newgarden pretty soon, no joke. He has dumped SO MANY drivers in recent years seemingly RIGHT as all those drivers’ primes were ending (Juan Pablo Montoya, Hélio Castroneves, Simon Pagenaud, Will Power - okay, maybe Pagenaud was a year too late) and I thought the same might happen here, but I guess Newgarden ensured his vitality again. He now kind of reminds me of Rick Mears in that he was equally fast everywhere for years at the start of his career and then he lost his road course mojo at a certain point, possibly due to an injury. Obviously, we know Mears lost his road course speed after his Sanair crash in 1984 and I’m starting to wonder if Newgarden’s Iowa crash in 2022 is what triggered his decline in road course speed. It could have just been Álex Palou’s rise though. Now I guess the question is what’s going on with Scott McLaughlin? While Newgarden is still faster than Malukas on short ovals (even though I thought Malukas was overtake him), Malukas still seems faster than McLaughlin everywhere, and how the hell did that happen?

The other way that race defied expectations was Marcus Ericsson’s inexplicably dominant run. I had never rated Ericsson highly even despite his four IndyCar wins including an Indy 500 win. I mean I never thought he sucked or anything - I always viewed him as a slightly above average but pretty generic driver, like I suspect Santino Ferrucci would be in a top car if he ever got one, which he won’t. But every single one of his wins was a deus ex machina win for Ganassi when they were dominating with Palou, so while I could’ve seen him pulling off another fluke win someday, I would’ve probably bet money that he would never lead the most laps in a race in his career. And from 12th, no less? Where did that come from? I mean I know rumors have been hot and heavy that Dennis Hauger would replace Ericsson at Andretti before Hauger’s IndyCar career even started, and I was really kind of shocked Ericsson wasn’t replaced after last year since I know Andretti is paying him much more than Ganassi was (the reason he left Ganassi was because he wanted to cash in and get a big payday after his Indy 500 win, but that obviously also made him a much stronger candidate to be replaced, especially after such a bad season last year). I guess he’s now working harder than he ever has before (his pole earlier this season also shocked me) to try to remain in the series. And with that drive, he finally convinced me he deserved to stay around as more than just an Indy 500 one-off guy. I honestly thought Andretti replacing Romain Grosjean with Ericsson was a downgrade, but I guess I was wrong. He’s still the worst Indy 500 winner since at least Pat Flaherty in 1956 though.

There were a few other surprises worth noting as well. Palou finally had bad luck for once! I’ve been getting annoyed by how many races both Scott Dixon and Palou have backed into over the years on pit strategy because it seems like Ganassi is the only IndyCar team that knows how to strategize at all. It looked like it was going to happen again at Gateway when they were leading when the caution for rain came out until they both ran out of fuel under the caution. Palou surprised me as I’d never expected him to have that much speed on a short oval ever. The two laps he lost for running out of fuel certainly won’t significantly affect him though. He probably wasn’t going to win anyway and it’s hard to imagine that Kyle Kirkwood, Malukas, and Christian Lundgaard could run him down. If Pato O’Ward and Scott McLaughlin were sitting in those points positions maybe, but both of them seemed weirdly slow as well as Lundgaard seems on the verge of overtaking O’Ward much like Malukas is on the verge of overtaking McLaughlin (if you think he hasn’t already).

I didn’t watch Monaco and I don’t think I really missed anything but I’ll get to it eventually. What I have been watching lately is Murphy Brown. I know that is possibly the least cool show I could be watching since it may be the most boomer show ever to exist in this anti-boomer epoch. However, I’ve always been into sitcoms from the ‘70s through the ‘90s and I liked most of the other shows from that feminist wave: Roseanne (while acknowledging she’s always been a loathsome human being and I have no defense for her as a person), The Golden Girls, Grace Under Fire, etc… Except Designing Women. I think that sucks. Shrill soapboxing without any humor. All those other shows are funny.

As for Murphy Brown, I already watched and liked the first 2.5 seasons or so, but it was always hard to find because all the Motown songs that opened each episode made it too expensive to ever formally release. Much like Malcolm in the Middle, I’d wanted to watch it for a while but I just couldn’t find most of it. Well, I did just find it on the Internet Archive and I’ve been enjoying it as a weird relic of a time when people still took the news media seriously - even most conservatives in the pre-Rush Limbaugh/FOX News era did. I’m old enough to remember this. In the ‘90s, I really enjoyed TV news and I felt way more informed watching Peter Jennings back then than I ever did in my adulthood. But after the stolen 2000 election, 9/11, the media lying us into Iraq, and Jennings’s death in quick succession, I’ve been unable to find anyone in the media to trust of any political persuasion really, either online or offline. I ended up mostly stopping following the news and it’s telling that the Current Events category on LearnedLeague is the only category where I’ve missed every single question. I have a lot of nostalgia for the mass media monoculture, which I probably shouldn’t, but it still seemed more communal and less atomizing than the siloed-off Algorithmic Culture that replaced it. If I finish Murphy Brown months from now, I’ll probably review it just like I did Malcolm. (And obviously, every time I watch anything or listen to a podcast, I’m always simultaneously evaluating drivers’ cases for the list as well.)