Well, the 2011 racing season is done, and the clock just struck 2012 everywhere. Well, everywhere except NASCAR land, where they continues to work on their 1960s inventions and machines, proudly being as ungreen and unclean as the come.

First 2011: The only hilight of the year is Tony Stewart winning the cup. Let’s just say that “anyone except boring Jimmy Johnson” is a plus, however Stewarts team runs the same cars and engines as Johnson’s Hendrick team, and Hendrick cars made up the vast majority of the players in the chase. No surprises then! 2011 also goes down as a year with continued weak attendance, and the media getting excited when the TV ratings were as good as the previous year – which was way off peak anyway. The first 26 races leading up the chase as safe as houses cruises for the top teams, as they generally just work to “finish well” each time and cruise into the championship round, and the start and park crew out back assures us plenty of open space on pit road by the first caution, as upwards to half a dozen of them retire with various mystery ailments.

Now 2012: Hold onto your hats, NASCAR is jumping forward into the 21st century for technology. No, not really. They are jumping forward to the 70s, dumping the carburators that have fueled the cars for years and replacing them with high tech, high end throttle body fuel injection. Yup, the same concept that was in the 1976 Cadillac Seville is now the leading, bleeding edge of NASCAR. Oh my! Talk about a leap forward. Teams are closing down, with Rousch down a team, Red Bull pulling the plug on both of their cars, and even some of the start and parkers are calling it a day. At this point, even Jayski’s enthusiastic pro-NASCAR chart only shows about 32-34 full time teams, and many of them have big question marks in the sponsorship and driver areas.

One of the announcements for 2012 that caught my eye is that Dover raceway is expanding seat width to make fans more comfortable. Well, at least, that is the story they are working with. Actually, Dover is one of many tracks in the NASCAR family that expanded rapidly as the series grew, and kept adding seats to their venue. But some less than spectacular races, the slowing economy, and the downturn in the fortunes of NASCAR has meant they have been hiding significant numbers of seats under banners to try to make things look fuller, and still they couldn’t sell the place out. The place can seat a mind numbing 140,000, and with announced attendance at about 82,000 for each race this year, the place has looked empty. The “widening of seats” addresses that by dropping the available seat count down to 113,000. Cover a couple of sections over with ad tarps, and they could get back to a “full house” scenerio by only putting a few more people in the place. NASCAR could use to run at some venues that look full, because running in front of half empty grand stands isn’t doing the image any good.

Further, the racing in 2011 for the most part wasn’t that good. The two car tag team drafting at the large tracks is a joke, it is truly sad to think that having the fastest race car still makes you 10 mph slower than a tandem team. The first 26 races featuring some truly uninspired point driving, with teams less worried about the win, and more worried about getting the proper precentage of points out of the weekend of the make the chase. They play it so safe now that you can DVR the race, skip the first 475 miles, and just watch the last few minutes and get the whole story. In the case, things were a little heated up, but only another manipulation of the point system and chase system conspired to make it close. Tony Stewart won half of the chase races, there is no reason it should have been close.

Looking forward to 2012, it looks like more of the same for NASCAR. They will diddle with the rules trying to limit the tandem drafting, they will try fuel injection, and they will attempt to smile and say “43 is only a number” when they get to the 5th or 6th race of the season and have only 39 entries – which will grow to 43 entries when the “big” teams roll out specials to fill the grid for a few laps.

Try to enjoy NASCAR 2012 – I prefer it on a video game myself!

NASCAR The Game 2011

The current and ongoing Occupy Wall Street (twitter tag #Occupywallstreet ) protests have certainly started to gain some traction in the media. Outlets in the US such as CNN have been giving the event some good coverage, as have a number of other news organizations. Of course, twitter, facebook, and other social media sites have become meccas for this movement, but these social sites have also revealed the strangeness and lack of focus of these protests.

In theory, Occupy Wall Street originally was all about bitching that the banks got bailed out of the recession, the bank owners continued to get paid big salaries after screwing up, and now the banks are back making profits and getting rich – while the US (and much of the world) sites in the middle of an economic downturn / recession / depression that has been incredibly hard to shake. On that basis and that basis alone, the protests have some merit, but perhaps are more than a little ineffective.

What has swelled the ranks of the protests however has been the muddled message. Everyone and their dog with an axe to grind (real or imaginary) is part of the protest now, from the standard “protest everything” anarchists to students complaining about their student loans, from the unemployed to the never going to be employed, from grad students to squeegee kids. They are all in there in a mish mash of ideas, causes, and general displeasure.

Sadly, what has ended up happening is that the protests have become more and more directly anti-capitalist. It seems that the same types who show up at G8 or G20 meetings to protest, to break windows, and to cause mayhem are slowing coming to the fore in the OWS “movement” as well, and the message is becoming more and more directly against any capitalist activities at all. It takes away from the true initial idea of OWS, and instead has turned it on it’s head.

The movement of course isn’t helped by people chanting anti-capitalist slogans, while tweeting on their new iphone, wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothes, Oakley sunglasses, and Nike running shoes. It doesn’t play well when the most important thing in the park is power to recharge smart phones, rather than sanitary facilities. People defecating on the street while others use their smart phones to tweet the picture is a symptom of the bigger problem: They think that everyone else except themselves should suffer – and that most of them don’t seem to understand that they are really protesting anymore.

My suggestion for the OWS crowd is to give it up and go home. Go occupy yourself for a while. Go look at your own life and find ways to make it better. Work on the political level in your area with the part of your choice to find candidates that support your stand against wall street. If you want to change the way things work, you have to change the laws for everyone. Lower your own expectations, take the Mc Job and stop waiting for everyone else to fix your life. Don’t blame others for where you are at, move forward and you can get it done.

Occupy Yourself. Change starts with us.

Over the next little while, we will see plenty of stories about Amy Winehouse and how tragic her death is. Truly, any time someone is lost so early in life, it is a tragedy. But just like the train coming into the station, this whole event was predictable, on schedule, and pretty much expected by everyone in the room.

The real tragedy of the situation isn’t the death of Amy Winehouse, which has been pretty much a foregone conclusion for ages now, but rather the tragedy is in the system that lets it happen. As a British citizen, I am entirely shamed by the way the courts and legal system in the UK works these days, especially when it relates to the users of hard drugs and the havoc they reek on themselves and the world around them. For me, there is much to be learn by Amy’s death, and much that could have been done to prevent it.

First and foremost, there are the enablers. Two key players in that game were Amy’s ex-husband Blake Civil-Fielder, by many reports the man who introduced Amy to the terror that is is heroin additiction. For a girl who was admittedly depressive, moody, and even prone to self-harm, it was a powerful choice. It was at this period that Amy went from the curvy, well fed, well rounded and powerful singer, slowly contracting into a drug addicted shell of a woman, losing weight, losing her way, and eventually into endless trouble. She married Civil-Fielder, a marriage she later admitted was pretty much entirely based around drug use. She along the way started dating notorious drug fiend Pete Dorherty, who seemed to fuel her drug habit even stronger, and encouraged her in very destructive ways. Between these two people, you have a significant negative influence, both of which should not have been present if the legal system truly worked out.

That for me is key. Both Doherty (known in the British tabloids as Doperty, his drug fueled stupidity so blatant that nobody tried to hide it) and Civil-Fielder proudly told tabloids that he had introduced Amy to crack and heroin. Both of these fine citizens had been before the courts, and until Civil Fielder was locked up for assault in 2008, had never really had any negative implications for his drug use and the like. Doherty has been in front of the courts any number of times, and always gets off. When the legal system, from Police to the courts and to the prisons are unable to deal with these people in a meaningful way, they will be out there in public, encouraging others to join in their destructive ways.

What happened to Amy Winehouse is a tragedy mostly because it reflects how far an entire generation of the UK has slipped, where drug use, binge drinking, and other reckless behavior is not only tolerated, but seemingly encouraged. The tragedy is that nobody in the system wants to deal with the issues, nobody wants to take responsiblity, and nobody wants to make the changes that says “this just isn’t tolerable”. Until that happens, there will be plenty of unknown Amy type girls dying every year from the same horrible combinations of social pressure, addictions, and a wildly permissive society. That is truly tragic.

It’s been sort of funny watching from afar the media coverage of the Caylee Anthony case, the poor child who died too young with a mother who just didn’t seem to know what happened. Casey Anthony was tried and found innocent, a shocking verdict to most people, and probably most shocking to CNN / HLN anchor Nancy Grace.

I can debate Nancy Grace’s position, I can debate her feelings, I can debate her opinion. But that would be meaningless, it’s been done before. Rather, I would rather look at how this particular case, and the particular media frenzy around it have shown that we have reached a point where the media themselves have become more important than the message.

Nancy Grace is just a different flavor of self-important media star, in the same group as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and the sainted Rush Limbaugh. They all believe that they are bigger than the stories they cover. They seems to think that they, as the stars, are more important than the news they cover, the stories that they examine, and the opinions of others. There is a huge problem here that we no longer get news from people we trust, we get it from stars. Heck, for the most part we don’t even get news, each and every one of the 5 I have listed are editorialists, opinion piece writers, and self-justifying media whores.

Does anyone remember when HLN was Headline News, and you could actually get news on the channel? I don’t even both to tune in anymore, because what news they do bring is always “with so and so”, indicating to me that the person reading the news is somehow way more important than the news itself. It’s like TV news has turned into a 24 hour per day op-ed page, with the rest of the newspaper thrown away. We no longer get unbiased coverage, we get opinion and slant. Fox News is typically cited as the worst, but MSNBC is quickly pulling up into a solid second place with a programming schedule that is almost all about opinion, and not about news.

I found it funny to find out that this week, local CTV reporter Kai Nagata quit his job with the network, for a whole bunch of reasons. You can read his blog here, safe to say that what he sees in media working in it is pretty similar to what I can see from the outside – it’s all about ratings and low hanging fruit, and no longer about actually providing information to the masses.

RIP Headline News, I truly miss a friend that would tell me what was what 24 hours per day.

I can remember when Hotbot and Lycos were considered the big search players, and I can remember when an AOL hosted website was still considered somewhat cool, as was having a geocities page. I remember when ICQ was that new hot idea that nobody had every seen before, and I can remember what Yahoo was a place you absolutely wanted your sites listed. The truth is that change is always in the cards, it never goes away. Rather, change is the constant that makes the internet what it is.

Facebook has certainly been one of the fast rising stars. While My Space may have been there near the start of the social media revolution, it is Facebook that has truly defined it, as hundreds of millions of people have signed up for accounts, spewing their pictures, their mindless comments, they inner thoughts, and sometimes the stupidest stuff you will ever see. It was a place where university students could meet and plan their lives, and it became a place where older people met back up after years apart, tracking down old school friends, girlfriends, and perhaps making amends with the enemies of our distant pasts.

It was great. Keyword is was, at least for me.

I met back up online with all the people I wanted to meet back up with, and found in many cases there were reasons why we were apart. I found an old girlfriend with 4 kids and knocked up with number five from baby daddy number 3. I saw my high school reunion and discovered there was nobody there I wanted to reunite with. I have some good friends online, and I have chatted with them often and even developed some good friendships. But alas, even those have waned as each of us keep at our busy lives, understanding that we are in this position of not being friends before because we just don’t have the time or desire to maintain the relationship.

Once it is all done, and everyone has said hi, and everyone has caught up, there isn’t much left to talk about. There isn’t much going on. So I, like millions of other people, have gone forward to close out and delete my account from Facebook. Simply put, I am all socialed out. My thoughts are that Facebook is already heading for it’s slow downward spiral, with more and more companies going on Facebook and more and more normal people heading for the exits, turning into perhaps another My Space or whatever you may have. It was cool once, but then again, so were mullets. Thankfully, we have all grown past that point, and we no longer have to go back there.

For those friends I leave behind on Facebook, don’t worry, it isn’t because of you. Well, it is – because Facebook is a wonderful tool that has let me relive my schooldays, and I enjoyed doing it. But I can’t ride that ride every day, and it’s time for me to move along. Perhaps in another 20 years we can all jump into our star trek teleporters and enjoy a coffee in Rome and look back and laugh at Facebook. But for now, don’t laugh too loud, because many people haven’t yet gotten the joke.

As I wrote before about Wikileaks, just because you can do something doesn’t make it right. Technical ability to do something doesn’t make it legal, doesn’t make it morally acceptable, and doesn’t mean that you can get away with it. Rep. Weiner has found this out the hard way (pun intended), as the use of social media platforms and digital cameras have left him hanging out to dry.

Yes, digital cameras allow us to take naughty pictures that we don’t have to get someone to develop for us. With cell phones and such having high mega pixel count cameras these days, it is possible to take some pretty darn good pictures of your naked body for your lovers and so on, if that is something you want to do. Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow us to communicate rapidly, and sometimes this combination of easy to make naughty pictures and fast internet sharing leads to these images getting sent around. It’s almost faster than you can think, and the deal is done. Once done, you cannot take it back.

Sexting, the sending of text messages on a phone with photo attachments is another avenue for this sort of thing. There have been a number of cases discussing underage nude images being shared this way, as willing girls send naughty pictures of themselves to their boyfriends, who sometimes share them around. One of the problems is that this sort thing is actually child porn, and legally unacceptable.

Sexting is also big in colleges and universitys. The scary part about that is that we have perhaps an entire generation of women who have traded naughty pictures with guys, who perhaps have archived them for later display. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when they are running for political office, an old boyfriend will pull out an image of them naked or engaged in a sex act, and run them out of politics. It has taken much less to cause a fuss in these oddly politically correct times.

My advice? Don’t take pictures of yourself naked, and don’t send them to people. Certainly don’t do it if you are a politician, married, and so on. Duh Weiner, you did it to yourself. I hope your few minutes of sexual pleasure makes up for all that you will lose. Maybe you can get a talk show on CNN.

A while back, I wrote a piece about Wikileaks and how just being able to do something didn’t make it right. There are so many things that have happened around Wikileaks in the last little while that raise all sorts of red flags about the true intent of the organization, and it’s true goals.

The latest piece of stupidity is a report on Wired that says that Wikileaks leader Julian Assange is making employees sign non-disclosure agreements, effectively trying to stop leaks from an organization that is about leaks. Yeah, I know, it’s a head shaker for sure. However, when you think about it, it is just another piece of the puzzle that reveals the true intentions of Wikileaks.

This sort of move shows that Wikileaks isn’t about putting information out there, but rather about putting information out there if and when it is useful for the Wikileaks organization or the causes / political parties / political concepts they support. Right now, Wikileaks continues to sit on massive amounts of information from the Manning leaks, which they have not released. Instead, those documents are in an AES256 Password encrypted file, not viewable by the general public until Assange feels the need. Why would an organization about leaks not make the information public?

You have to look at the connections that exist between the Pirate Party, The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, and various “rogue” politicians that support the cause. Releases of information appear to be done not so much to inform the public, as much as to embarrass officials or to cause the most harm possible. More than once, Julian Assange has threatened companies or governments with disclosure of information, more often then not with an indirect reference to stopping some action or allowing something to happen as a key to stopping the release of information. That seems to be getting very close to blackmail, at least on the surface.

The latest “stop the leaks at Wikileaks” document shows that Assange isn’t about getting the information to the public, but rather to getting control of information and being able to use it to further his agenda. For supporters of transparency and information flow, it seems that Assange has hijacked the entire process to his own ends. The question now is how long Wikileaks remains relevant before people start working around this blockage.

What a weird world we live in. Since President Obama became the candidate for President of the US a few years ago, there has been a group of people who think he that he wasn’t born in the US. These so called birthers are the mouth breathers of US politics, a group that makes Sarah Palin supporters look bright. They ragged on about the birth thing, called Obama a Kenyan, pointed out his middle name is Hussein (trying to paint him as a hated Muslim, which he is not), and so on. They were a persistent, annoying circus, egged on by the Republican leaders and conservative media types who would sidestep the issue and by their silence, encouraged the wingnuts to keep up their crusade. Donald Trump, seeing this as a chance to ride the wave, took the concept very public, and attacked Obama about his failure to release a birth certificate.

Of course, all of that changed a couple of weeks back when Obama’s Birth Certificate was released. Suddenly, the birthers were left out in the cold, Trump was busy eating his words, and the nut jobs didn’t have anything to rag on about anymore. The more extreme went into the last defensive position that it took 2 years for them to fake the birth certificate, and in the end, the release of Obama’s birth certificate pretty much shut up the birther movement and made them useless.

Skip ahead a few days, and Osama Bin Laden gets taken out by US forces. Now it’s a double down time for Obama, not only did he shut up the birthers, but he accomplished the very mission that Bush and the Republican’s could not do, taking out the biggest terrorist target in the world. What does that get us?

The birthers were reborn, this time as deathers. Yup, now that Osama Bin Hiding is now Osama Bin Killed, the wingnuts are on the warpath, alternately claiming that Bin Laden isn’t dead, was killed for no reason, was killed illegally, or was in fact killed years ago and that Obama is just trying to get a boost by killing his ghost.

Some people will never be satisfied.

2011 started on an up note for the NASCAR nation (or is that Napcar Nation?). Daytona was a weird race with two car drafts and all sorts of off stuff, and a surprise, nay, shocking win for the part time Wood Brothers team and their rookie drive Trevor Bayne, who isn’t even running for points. That was a nice pickup, the TV ratings were good, and important for NASCAR, Dale Jr did pretty good too. Plus with the NFL Superbowl and all being out of the way and the Pro-bowl nowhere to be seen, NASCAR was running without any competition. Full throttle!

On to Pheonix. Good move for NASCAR to take California out of the 2nd race of the season spot. The TV ratings were good, attendance was good, and overall, a reasonably interesting race. Vegas was pretty much the same thing, pretty darn good crowds, uptick in ratings, and things were actually looking pretty good.

However, it looks like someone forgot to tighten a few lugnuts on the last pit stop, because when the circus came to Bristol this past weekend, few people seemed to care.

Yes, it’s March madness. Yes, the economy is hurting. Yes, it’s spring in an area that sometimes still gets snow this time of the year. But Bristol was the home of 55 consecutive sellouts, filling it’s 160,000 seats with a 20,000 name waiting list for tickets. It was the big deal. It was possibly the poster child for NASCAR success, a modern gladiator arena, with rough and tumble action, hard driving, chrome horns, and more than a few frayed nerves. It was poetry with a sledge hammer, ballet with a baseball bat. It was about surviving the event, being aggressive and being contained, not blowing your top as you get sent for a spin. Not anymore, it seems.

In 2007, SMI decided it was time to redo the track (it needed it, the rebar in the old concrete was showing through). In an absolute bout of stupidity, they decided to add “variable banking”. The idea is to give the track a second groove. They succeed, but in doing so they removed much of what the fans came looking for. Since that time, attendance has been on a steady decline, and a race that so many people looked forward to has sort of slipped away.

The results? Well, backed with a weekend off (never a good thing so early in the season), Bristol has probably it’s lowest attendance since SMI bought the facility in 1996 (they had 86,000 seats for the summer race). While some suggested 120,000 or even 130,000 this weekend, it was painfully obvious even the casual observer that the place wasn’t much more than half full. That would put the number in that 80,000-90,000 range. While it is still a large crowd, it is a disappointing result at a facility that had a waiting list just 4 short years ago.

More importantly, TV ratings also dropped, another 9% off of last year’s disappointing results, and somewhere near 40% off the viewership in 2008.

Plenty of people make the standard economy, costs, and what have you excuses, but that would only hold water if people were not attending but still watching. NASCAR started the season well and pulled some viewers back from their down season last year. But Bristol shows that the fans just aren’t liking the changes. The drivers say the racing is better, but in a world where it is about putting on a good show, it is clear that the fans no longer think Bristol is a good show.

The real challenge for NASCAR comes this week: California’s Auto Club Speedway. This is the only NASCAR event there this year, they lost one race, and have moved this remaining event later into the season (from race 2 to race 5), and chopped 100 miles off a race that is often considered a snoozer. Things aren’t looking that good, a quick check on their website shows plenty of prime “top rows of grandstands near pit entrance” and “pit exit” are available without issue. They have had horrible attendance problems, and TV ratings that mostly seemed to live in the runoff from Daytona, as the fall race (during the chase even) last year pulled a stunning 2.5 rating, which is nearing test pattern range.

With staggeringly bad attendance and TV ratings from Bristol, California may be another case of “do or die” for NASCAR, as we find out if things are on and upswing, or if the start of the 2011 season was just a dead cat bounce.

As a long time racing fan, you sort of get use to the ebb and flow of racing series. They have good years, and they have bad years. The people running various racing series either make really great decisions, and advance their sport, or they make incredibly stupid decisions that leave their sport in tatters. Just ask the brains that split CART into the IRL and Champ Car, or the brains that ran Trans Am into the ground.

NASCAR faces a significant cross roads. They find themselves on the back side of their meteoric rise from little southern sport to national (and even worldwide) events. They went from running on local TV channels, TBS, and as short clips on ABC’s Wide World of Sports into a property that has 3 major networks tripping over each other to toss money at the door. But the last few years have been painful for NASCAR, with attendance down, sponsorships drying up, field quality suffering, and all that against hugely increased costs to actually run in the series.

2010 was a year where the squeezing turned into pinching, and the pinching turned into pain. Tracks that have historically sold out every race (places like Bristol) now have huge sections of grandstands covered over. California didn’t attract enough unique fans over their two events in 2010, to the point that they will have only one event in 2011, and it will be a shorter race. The 2010 Rookie of the Year didn’t even run all the races, and when he did, and he did only because of a nonsensical top 35 rule that allowed his car owner to cash the checks and let him run around sometimes 10 MPH slower per lap than the rest of the field. Not surprisingly, Raybestos, one of the real long term players in NASCAR, cancelled their commitment to the ROTY program. In 2011, there are apparently no rookies lined up to drive the full season.

The grim news for NASCAR continued on the viewership side of things too, with races often down 10 – 20% in viewership, some even more. Changes to rules, restarts, going from wings back to spoilers, and pretty much every other trick NASCAR could think of didn’t change the trend. Having the same Champion 5 years in a row can be painful for any sport, and having one as incredibly dull and lifeless and Jimmie Johnson doesn’t help. Outside of the NASCAR races, there isn’t anyone in the media lining up to interview this guy, to include him in anything. He has the media profile of an also-ran, while at the same time dominating the series through a rich owner and a crew chief who isn’t scared to push the rules. JJ in the 48 has turned into the sleeping aid so many people need to get a good afternoon nap on a Sunday.

So 2011 comes around, and it’s starting to look like do or die for NASCAR. The last TV deal was signed in 2005, which covered 2007-2014. Basically, the deal was signed at the very top of NASCAR’s game. Now with attendance down, viewership down, and fan interest sinking, NASCAR needs a great 2011 in order to be able to renegotiate in 2012 to continue the TV deals. That deal is 600 or so million per year (4.8 billion for 8 years). If NASCAR isn’t improving in the ratings, continues to show a decline, and continues to show a loss of fan interest, it is likely they will end up on the downside of the marketplace during the next negotiations. That could lead NASCAR back to being a cable only series, as network may be less interested to carry programming.

The costs to the networks are significant. Fox / SPEED have pretty much had to turn their cable channel into a full time NASCAR channel to try to recoup their expenses, and now you see superbowl length pre-game shows for every race event, something I personally think leads to even more fan fatigue. Every practice, every qualifying, every everything is covered, almost all live. Every attempt is made to squeeze every penny out of this, because right now, the networks are probably hurting running NASCAR. If the Networks come back and say “Starting 2015, we will only give you 300 million per year”, NASCAR could find itself no longer to live in the Champagne style they have grown accustom to. It’s only a matter of time before someone has to pay the piper.

NASCAR is trying, at least a bit. Apparently drivers will have to commit to a single series for championship points for the season, hopefully killing the old “busch whacker” mentality that has lead almost all of the champions in the last decade for what is currently the Nationwide series being cup regulars. It doesn’t help that they have won more than half of the Nationwide races in that time frame, and an even higher percentage in the last couple of years (only 1 or 2 races in 2010). The noses of the cup cars have been “improved” again this year, getting rid of the support braces. There is even rumors that fuel injection might replace the ancient carbs that still run on these cars. Some race distances have been cut, and races moved to other tracks. Most fans on chat boards seem to be less than impressed. 2011 will tell the tale, by this time next year, NASCAR could have had it’s palace coup.