Apropos of Nothing

A further confession:



Even though I appear to be the epitome of the ethnically-confused urban female, I have two secret, guilty pleasures, both of them televised.



One is professional bull-riding. I stumbled across it on some obscure cable channel one Saturday night when there was nothing else even remotely worth watching, and even through the vague thoughts of animal cruelty, and the overt and pervasive Christianity, my overwhelming sense is Damn, those guys are hot. Though I bet they need a 90-minute shower before I could even bear to be in the same room with them...



Anyhow--one of my redneck eccentricities is bull-riding; the other is NASCAR. And it is NASCAR which fuels the following very short rant:



I am SO sick of Dale Jr.'s smug ass. I am sick of the NASCAR establishment treating Dale Jr. like the second coming, simply because he's Big E's son. Now mind you--Dale Sr.'s death was a tragic thing, no mistake. But Dale Jr. is like the Britney Spears or the Paris Hilton of NASCAR--overexposed, all over everything, even when you're hoping not to see him anymore. The new KFC promo is a prime example; why, exactly, should I CARE whether Dale Jr. says KFC is his favorite chicken??



What's more, when he's racing it seems like the bugger's got a charm around his neck or something--last weekend at Dover, 75% of the field was torn up in that one big wreck, but who comes through unscathed? Dale Jr. And then, Mears blows oil all over the track, Kahne goes slam into the wall when he hits the slick patch, and who comes out smelling like a rose? *Ding!* You guessed it--good ol' #8. It's just not cool. I'm even sick of DEI Racing--I can't stand Michael Waltrip, and the only things I can pin down about him that I don't like are his voice and his mannerisms--and the fact that he races for DEI! I just don't think Dale Jr. is all that--I'll take Kasey Kahne over Dale Jr. any day.



End NASCAR rant.



I am not even going to detail exactly how weary I am of all things Reagan. His death was inevitable--he'd been dying by slow degrees for ten years--and was probably a merciful thing both for him and his family. But from the extent and depth of the coverage, you would think it came in the prime of his life and out of the clear blue...Furthermore, it's the most one-sided coverage I've seen since...well, since the war in Iraq, a whole different story. But I'd just rather let history decide what kind of president Reagan was, rather than listening to all these pundits donning their rose-colored retro-spectacles. And further, Fox Chicago spent the entire evening taking us through every agonizing moment of the Reagan funeral--which, in the end, caused them to pre-empt The Simpsons. Call me shallow, call me a prime example of Generation X, call me anything you want--but don't screw with my Simpsons.