Monday

Wow! I think it may have been 50 here today. Heat wave!

I learned something about restrictor plate racing yesterday. The cars spend most of the first 3/4 of the race just grinding along. The real racin' doesn't start until the finish line is something other than a distant destination. (At Daytona and Talladega, where they run twice each year, NASCAR has restrictor plates on the carburetors to keep the speeds below 190mph or so. The plates rob oxygen from the engine which thus limits horsepower.) Nobody can really get away from the pack so it doesn't make sense to work the equipment any harder than necessary. As the finish line approaches however, friends are hard to find.

I'm not a fan of Harvick's, but his winning was ok. He made a great move to get to the lead on that last half lap. The 24 never got to the front after starting at the back, and I think they were probably happy with their 10th place finish, all things considered. Lots of other popular drivers finished the race in their haulers.

The bike race in California is in full swing. Discovery's Levi Leipheimer won the prologue up Telegraph Hill yesterday and they have a field sprint going in the first stage today. Lots of top names there this year, including 6 or 8 of Europe's major league teams. Now it looks like Levi had a crash and finished 30 seconds or so behind today's winner in Santa Rosa.

There was an interesting segment on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO this weekend. I don't care for Bryant Gumbel, but he was not the reporter on this story so it was easier to watch. The segment looked at the professional officiating careers of Joe and Jerry Crawford. I was not aware that these two guys were brothers, nor that they were sons of umpire Shag Crawford, a name I remember from listening to games on the radio when I was growing up. Joe Crawford is a highly respected, but pretty thin-skinned NBA referee. Jerry Crawford is a veteran MLB umpire whose main claim to fame is that he was the President of the umpires association when they tried a work stoppage in the 1990's that blew up in their faces.

The dad, Shag, is still alive (but on a portable oxygen feed) and sat in on a part of the interview. He was remembered as the home plate umpire who tackled Juan Marichal when he took the bat to John Roseboro in a game in the mid-'60's. But that's a different story.

KU is at K-State in the second game on Big Monday. I really haven't followed K-State recently, and Huggins can lose his teams late in the season, but if they're healthy, K-State could pull the upset at home.

The DM school board is moving their offices to available space in downtown DM. Let's see, the families live in the neighborhoods, let's make it hard for people to get to the administrative offices so that we can show how much we care. Do school boards have CPE programs where they learn to do things to turn off their constituencies?

OK. Off to the games. Have a pleasant President's Day evening.

Be careful out there.