Apparently the Daytona 500 went off the other night, after a delay due to rain.  There seems to have been quite a few crashes, at least one of which included a fireball made when a racecar collided with a tank of jetfuel.

I’m not much of a NASCAR fan.  I watch it when I’m visiting friends and family and want to sit and drink beer with the menfolk, and I’ve worked at a couple of races at Kentucky Speedway.  I’m not really a “car” guy, and “Go fast, turn left” gets boring after a while.

But if NASCAR was to go back to its roots, I’d quickly become a fan.  Here’s what I think should be done to jazz up the races:

1. Quit racing on super speedways.  Race on two-lane country roads that are laid out to form a five mile course.  This should include hills, right and left turns, and trees.
2. Make all cars have a trunk.  Put a couple hundred gallons of denatured alcohol in the trunk to replicate the rum-running experience for today’s drivers.
3. Race unless there are tornadoes in the area.  Rain, shine, snow, whatever.  Bootleggers had to get the moonshine to market no matter what, so today’s drivers can do it.
4. Every so often, put a chase car out there to take a lap.  Any car that gets passed by the chase car has to stop in pit row until the leader has done one lap.  That will simulate the experience of being chased by revenuers and county sheriffs.

These simple things would make NASCAR much more interesting to me.  

In Arizona, a man has been charged with a raft of crimes.  While what he is accused of is pretty ordinary, his name stands out:  Nubian T. Amon-Ra.

Someone please tell me that his mother didn’t do that to him, and for the love all that is holy, please tell me that the ‘T’ stands for ‘Tutankhamun’.  Just how big an ego do you need or how much weed do you have to smoke in order to consider changing your name to copy an ancient Egyptian god?

Maybe it’s his secret identity, like in Batman. We could have a whole pantheon of arch-criminals named after gods:

• Apollo – An athletic, attractive young man who uses his charms to get into the checking accounts of rich women.  His female counterpart could be Aphrodite, who would do the same thing to older men.  Heck, they could be in a friendly competition to see who can steal the most money from the richest people.
• Thor – A bank robber who uses a gigantic hammer to just bash in the door on the vault rather than bother with what’s in the teller’s drawer.
• Mercury – A lightly built man who runs numbers faster than anyone else.
• Cthulhu – A big scary guy who runs protection rackets against whole continents

Heck, maybe we’re looking at a public display of an entire underworld here.