Speaking of Racing

Today I became a race car driver. I took my car to an autocross! You can find pictures of the event here, though I'm afraid they don't do justice to the driving part.

There are a couple of things you should take with you when next you take your own car racing. First you need to understand that the People Who Take Their Cars Racing, like any powerful and secretive organization, have monopolistic tendencies. The more they can take their own cars racing, the better for them, so of course they won't let just anyone join the club. So they freely invite you to join (this avoids any kind of antitrust litigation), and then try to sabotage your effort by not telling you to bring important things.

Important thing #1: sunscreen. You figure, "I am going to race my car" and therefore you will be in your car where the nasty sunshine cannot reach you. Imagine your surprise when you find out you will be spending most of your time standing on an abandoned runway getting heatstroke! Ha, ha - you just went up against the Man - and lost.

Important thing #2: fluids. It turns out even as the Sun is grilling you to a crispy husk, it is simultaneously leaching the very fluids from your body itself! To make matters worse, recent research suggests that the removal of all fluids from the body may increase the risk of pulmonary failure, complicate pregnancy and more importantly, impair your ability to operate a vehicle! So again, I trust you are seeing the long arm of the auto-solar conspiracy in motion behind the scenes here.

Important thing #3: numbers. Now as a computer scientist, I use numbers all the time. I'm not one of these effete snobs who thinks life was better when all we had was geometry and ratios. But you need, in order to fully comprehend my complex situation here, to also understand that today is Sunday, which is part of the weekend. I'm around numbers all day so the last thing I want to do when I come home at night and relax with some ketchup and a tasty bottle of Rolling Rock or a Magic Hat are a bunch of numbers. What I guess I'm getting at here is that you shouldn't be surprised when I momentarily inform you that I arrived at this racing event, completely sans-numeric, as the Japanese say. So the numbers you may see on my automobile were borrowed, as was the tape I used to construct the various additional nomenclature and vocabulary you see liberally sprinkled around the chassis. Obviously you can tell by the state of our school system that the deprivation of numbers is another tactic used by the Bush-Jeff Gordon-Helios axis that we all loathe yet, at another level, respect.