Tony Stewart Needs His Ass Whupped Righteously

Forgive me, reader; another NASCAR post.



So of course I was psyched about the race being in Chi this weekend--even though it was only NOMINALLY in Chicago. Anyone who thinks Joliet is part of Chicago...must be a Tony Stewart fan!



I'm getting ahead of myself.



I THOUGHT about going to the race, truly I did. But then I saw the weather forecast. See, here's the thing:



1. I don't tolerate heat well. Anyone who's ever had to share space with me would agree--I tend to turn my officemates into air-conditioned popsicles.



2. I'm allergic to crowds



3. I am broke, broke, broke--my checking account is now overdrawn by $31.75. (The $0.75 was the actual amount of the overdraft; the $31 is fees. How much bullshit is THAT?)



So obviously, I decided against making the trip to Joliet. And after watching, I'm glad!!!



Kasey Kahne was leading on a restart and Tony was fourth. Tony cut over to the outside to pass, and Kasey was ahead of him--so instead of just waiting til Kasey got out of the way, Tony gets all under his back bumper. Kasey was on four old tires--Tony was on four new tires after the caution pit stop--and so Kasey had less traction, got sideways and took out a whole mess of cars. Needless to say, that was the end of the day for him--but Tony got away clean and ended up winning the race.



Now, if Tony was Mr. Clean--somebody like, say, Greg Biffle or Mark Martin or someone like that--if he didn't have a long and checkered history of being a total jerk--then I would have had no problem at all, would have said "That's just racin'" and been done with it. But Tony Stewart has been the biggest jerk in the world, almost since Day One.



(I went to do a little research, as I wrote this, and found that apparently I am not the only person who thinks Smoke needs an ass-kickin'. No, seriously--apparently even if THAT article had never been written, I would STILL not be the only person who thinks Tony-boy needs his clock cleaned.)



What makes it worse, of course, is that it was KASEY he took out. I swear, if that boy doesn't make the Top Ten before the cutoff point, I'm gonna put a hex on Tony Stewart's head--because today was Kasey's best chance to FINALLY win one, after all those 2nd-place finishes. And Tony screwed him out of it...



What was really funny, though, is that I seem to have gotten Mom hooked on NASCAR! I was over there yesterday (she had cataract surgery on Thursday, so I figured I'd better go see how she was doing for real) and we were watching the Busch race, and she was asking me all kinds of questions about the whys and wherefores of NASCAR. So today, as soon as the race was over, I picked up the phone for my daily call to her, and she was laughing--"You got me," she said. And then we went through the post-race interviews, so I could tell her who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. When I told her what Tony Stewart had done to "MY" driver, she immediately decided--rightfully, if you ask me!--that Tony is the villain. Talking about him, she sounded like she was talking about some shady character out of "Days of our Lives"--Stefano, maybe. And that's when I realized something about NASCAR:



Unless you're a total gearhead, one of the main appeals of NASCAR is this--it's kinda like a soap opera, sometimes, only with tires.