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| 2009-01-01 | NASCAR Pyramid Collapses! Firesale on e-Bay! |
| Well, what would you call it? Greed oozed under the doors in Daytona and the thousand laid off crew members are selling their shorts for food. Uniforms anyway. It's a firesale out there. Right now the prices are still high but not for long. Why should fans stay loyal when there will only be 4 teams left at the end of '09? Petty, for godsake. NASCAR let PETTY fold? It quit being a sport in the 90's. It's a show. Orchestrated, dictated and mandated. Step out of line and pay the fine. What was the company approved catchphrase this last year? Oh, yeah. It is what it is. Well what it is, is wrong. As wrong as Madoff. As wrong as Halliburton. And who is getting raped here? The biggest fans of the show - the ones who prayed for a job in NASCAR and got one. Now they get pink slips. How many total? One thousand? Two thousand? How long can the drivers keep up the happy facade to avoid paying a fine? Please, somebody say it. The emperor has no clothes. The sooner it gets acknowledged, the sooner it can become a sport again. No more hat dances in victory lane. No more NASCAR approved soundbites. If I hear Rusty Wallace talk about Shrub's Hotrod one more time .... I miss NASCAR. Anybody else see this coming? And I mean before the recession. I could never afford NASCAR crew uniforms on e-Bay. And now I'm kind of glad I couldn't. I'd feel pretty bad about taking advantage in the good times. Will 2009 be different? First of all there won't be anymore go or go homers every week. James Hylton stands a real chance of making the 500. Maximum 4 cars to a team? Don't think they'll be turning anybody down now. And who is paying the price for this? The ones at the bottom of the pyramid. The ones selling the shirts off their backs. Only now it's to pay the bills. | |
| 2008-10-27 | Earnhardt, Sr. Not Jr. |
| OK, he is an icon. His record speaks for itself. No argument there. But, in all honesty, he did employ the bump and run more than a few times. And the apologies in victory lane about being 'really sorry about that. I didn't mean to wreck him. I just wanted to rattle his cage' were always delivered with that smirk that belied the truth. He pushed, no, shoved people out of his way. With the way the modern NASCAR drivers behave, is it any wonder the cage rattling continues? Only now, there is no smirk. Just the veiled response that 'I was trying to race him clean' or 'he would've done the same to me' or even 'he's done the same to me too many times'. With the new car having front and rear ends that line up squarer the finesse is gone. Now it's all about the quarter panel nudge. No respect, even among teammates. And it is about repect. Earnhardt haters can hate all they want. I liked him but had other favorites. Maybe it was all the winning. You want the top dog to get bit. But my favorite memory of Dale Earnhardt Sr. was on May 1, 1994. He'd just won Talladega for the 38th time or something. The announcer (who knows who) shoved the mike in his face and asked him how it was out there? Did Dale tell him? Did he talk about feeling the air or did he thank the boys back in the fab shop while holding his Coke bottle front and center? No. He said something like 'first of al I want to send my sympathies to the family of Ayrton Senna. We lost a great champion today.' For that I have nothing but the greatest respect for him. Racing, winning, rattling cages all took a back seat. One champion respected another. Would any of today's drivers do that? Or would that be against their contract? | |
| 2008-08-08 | NASCAR GOES MISSING |
| I miss NASCAR. Growing up it was on an equal par with F1, Indy, Can-Am, LeMans. There was a romantic aura surrounding it. The Gwynn Staley Memorial meant more then than the Webkins presents the Ducttape 500 brought to you by Bluetooth does today. If I have to see another driver slugging down a soda during an interview or hear the announcers whore themselves out calling the fuel by name I will buy a different brand just out of spite. I already tune most of it out anyway. And I hate that. I want to watch the whole race. I want it to really matter. I want to care. But anymore I'm having a hard time doing that. Judging by the looks on the driver's faces they are having a hard time caring, too. Oh, I know they still care, I don't mean that. But they all must be tired of cruising around for 450 miles, try to lead a lap, settle down and wait for the final sprint and hope they don't get nurfed aside by someone just trying to rattle their cage and are really sorry it came down like that. If that's what it has come down to, why don't they just make the races shorter, say 250-300 miles. Figure eight tracks. No brakes. Claimers. Then a green-white-checker finish. That would be a show. And that's what it seems to be about now. The SHOW. For the FANS. Right now it looks like crap. For the FANS. Don't give me crap. I bet Jeff Gordon dreams about driving Charlie Glotzbach's number 6 Cotton Owen's Daytona. And wouldn't Matt Kenseth look just about right in a Holman-Moody Torino Talladega. Wouldn't even have to change the number. Don't get me started on the hobby stock they're running now. But that's for another blog. | |
| 2008-03-19 | Secret Identities Revealed? |
| So, now, it comes to this. One of the most useful methods I use in bidding on e-Bay has been to check the history of my fellow bidders. Do they snipe? Do they bid high from the start and never come back? Or maybe they sit glued to their screen and rebid as soon as they get outbid. It usually doesn't matter, although I have been able to refine my own sniping to the final second without a computer program doing it for me. But now e-Bay has instituted a secret identity system that keeps your user name hidden. After the auction is over they reveal the winners ID but not the west of the bidders. I know other users have gotten upset with me when I nail them by a nickel at the end. Happens to me all the time. (Like this morning when I ... never mind. That was my bad. But I learned a new trick.) No one has ever e-mailed me and torched me up one side and down the other. Shtuff happens. Still apparently e-Bay feels the need to stop random users from contacting sellers and buyers unsolicited. OK. That's good. But kick them off the site if they are being a pain. E-Bay knows who they are. Hell, they know who I am. It is all part of the chase here. Let us play. Why punish the majority for the whining of the few? I'm not the only one that relies on user history to plan my bidding. It still raises the price for the seller. More than a few times I have bid a little early to see how far a user will go but still being certain to not win. I have made more than one rookie pay out the nose for trinkets. That's how we learn. I did. But like this morning, the old dog can still learn a new trick. And I have my ways. | |
| 2008-03-14 | SCHOOLING NEWBIES |
| You gotta love it. Now, I didn't start doing e-Bay from the beginning(and I kick myself for missing out on some early steals)and even I had to get spanked a few times before I caught on. But once the ropes were learned, I could go mouse to mouse with the old-timers. So, yes, I do take great pleasure in schooling the newbies. The feedback numbers give them away of course and they have to start somewhere. A mentor would be helpful for those just starting out. But I think the lessons you learn from being thrashed behind the barn last a lot longer. Case in point: I was watching a collection of racing shirts. The high bidder was a seller that I have bought many things from. So I had a sneaking hunch that I knew how high he was willing to go. Then, in the last hour, this poor rookie with 3 feedback starting bidding. One dollar at a time. I felt sorry for her (the name was unisexual so I'm assuming here). As the endtime got closer, she got closer. Then, she stopped. She was trying to snipe. How cute. Like watching polar bear cubs wrestling in a gunny sack. I felt it was my duty to spank her hard. With 4 minutes to go, she beat the bid by 13 cents. And stopped bidding. Everyone knows the bids go up by a set amount. .05, .25, $1.00, $2.50. She just stopped. At this point I could see what the other bidder's highest bid was and I was right about his. But no way would I allow a sloppy, rabid, newbie take the items. So I pulled a switch off the tree and swung. On the last second too. It hurt me almost as much as I'm sure it hurt her. I wanted to tell her to pull her pants up and think about what she did. I was doing her a favor. And whether she knows it or not, a couple of days later, I saw her bidding on another shirt. Poor kid. Did I paddle her harder and really teach her a lesson? Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. But I will be seeing her again. Hope she learned something. | |
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Copyright 2006 Spud Goodman Productions