Seeping Matter

Last Saturday me and my Z went to Roosevelt, Utah, to participate in the annual car show there, because that’s where my family lives, and my dad and my brother and I all thought it would be fun to put our cars in the show together.

It was fun, too, even if none of us won anything.  It was fun just being there with my dad and brother and having people walk by and wonder why I parked my 350Z there.

My 2003 Nissan 350Z, looking her best.

Here’s my car parked in between my brother’s Mustang (background) and my dad’s Econoline (not pictured).  I washed and vacuumed and scrubbed and detailed that car for about three hours before the show, and I must say it looked really fine.  Oddly, right after the show ended, it rained for about 30 seconds, just long enough to get my car dirty again.  Oh well.

My dads 1961 Ford Econoline van

Dad just started working on this 1961 Ford Econoline van. It is pretty sweet. I love the all white paint with the black accents and the very subtle gray pinstripe all around. He’s got a 302 in the doghouse inside the van and plans to redo the interior next.

The story on those wheels is pretty cool. He was looking for those exact wheels by American Racing, Torq Thrust IIs, and looked all over for the sizes he needed (two different sizes, front and rear). The fronts, 14×6s, were nearly impossible to find. Then he called one place who just happened to have two of them left, along with six of the size he needed for the rears. So he took two of each, and the dealer was thrilled to get rid of his two 14×6s and even himself out with four remaining of the other size.

My brothers 2009 Mustang GT, my 350Z, and my dads Econoline

In the foreground is my brother’s 2009 Ford Mustang GT. He’s added a Roush bodykit and Shelby Super Snake wheels and a lowered suspension so far. He wonders if it is weird to have Shelby wheels and a Roush body kit, but I think it is cool to make your own Mustang that has your favorite components from each builder.

Original Roosevelt City Fire Truck

My dad is mayor of Roosevelt, so I went with him to drive this to the show. If you lived more than a half mile from the fire department and had a fire back then, there was really no point in calling the fire department. It’s a neat truck though.

Early 30s Ford Coupe

I want to say this is a ‘32 Ford but I’m really not sure. I do know it belongs to my dad’s friend Mike Mahoney, who has like 30 cars.

Another early 30s Ford Coupe

Another Ford coupe, ‘31 or ‘32 (I really should learn to tell the difference). This one belongs to another of my dad’s friends, Dennis Peterson. Dennis restored this car himself, repairing all the rust and pounding out all the dents and smoothing out the whole body by hand. He is incredibly talented. He also did all the body work on my dad’s Econoline and is currently working on another project which will be pretty awesome when it is done.

Early 70s Dodge Dart

When Dad and I brought the fire truck into the show we followed this ‘70 or ‘71 (again, can’t remember) Dodge Dart. I wondered to myself if it belonged to my cousin Joe Gardner. I was right. As long as I can remember Joe has restored a number of really cool Mopar cars – Chargers, Challengers, Darts, Superbees, etc.

Award-winner for Best of 80s and Newer

This mostly stock gray 2007 Mustang GT beat my brother’s 2009 Mustang GT somehow, which goes to show that the people who judge the shows don’t always know what they are doing. I mean, it’s a nice looking Mustang, but doesn’t have nearly as much done to it as my brother’s does.

White 3DCarbon Mustang GT

If any Mustang there was better than my brother’s, it was this white 3DCarbon Mustang pictured here.

Award-winning 30s Ford Coupe

This blue ‘31 or ‘32 Ford coupe won some award, maybe for best 30’s car? Or most unique? Can’t remember. Take a look at this engine though, for a clue as to why:

Now that

Flathead Offenhauser

The roadster carrying this sweet litttle Offy won Best In-Progress Car. Which seems kinda like a weird award, since pretty much all the cars there would be considered “in-progress.”

Beautiful 50s Chevy

This is a beautiful car. Look carefully and you can see the well-done ghosted flames along the side. It won Best 50s Car and, since the owner drove it all the way from Riverside, California, it also won an award for furthest distance traveled to attend the show.

Best Of Show 2010 - 1937 Ford Coupe

This 1937 Ford Coupe from Vernal, Utah won Best Of Show and definitely deserved it. Which is much better than the week before, at another car show in Vernal, where this car was beaten for Best Of Show by a bone-stock straight-off-the-showroom-floor 2010 Camaro. This car is a beautiful work of art from every angle and no detail is left undone.

Just check out the beautifully done interior:

1937 Ford Coupe custom interior

1931 Ford Vicky

This beautiful chopped and dropped ‘31 Ford Vicky had to sit next to the ‘37 Ford above, so it had a rough go. It definitely deserved to win something, so I’m glad my dad chose to give it the Mayor’s Choice award.

matt Cars 350z, Hobbies

This weekend — tomorrow, actually — is my 20 year High School class reunion, which means I’m, uh, 29.  Again.

As everyone knows, the purpose for Facebook is to help you connect with old friends, like that girl who wouldn’t go with you to Homecoming, you know, to see if her life is in the crapper and she got what she deserved for snubbing you.  So I’ve been using Facebook for it’s designated purpose, and I’ve found a bunch of the people I went to high school with, who, inexplicably, all seem to have great lives despite the fact that I pretty much never had a date in high school.

Since the reunion is tomorrow, many of them have been asking me whether I’m coming to the reunion.  When I say, “No,” they want to know the reason, and so I tell them, “Because.”  This reasoning seems to work well when I’m explaining to my son why he has to mow the lawn, but it doesn’t seem to be working with the old high school friends.

So, in order to avoid explaining this a hundred times, I decided to just write a simple blog post about it.

I actually alluded to this in another post some time ago, but basically the issue is this:

I’m not a fan of high-school Matt.

I’m a fan of perpetually-29 Matt.  That guy is happy with himself, he’s confident, he makes loud noises on a guitar when he feels like it, drives a pretty cool car, mostly wears T-shirts to work, and has great taste in music and movies.  He’s got a wonderful wife and a great family that are awesome to hang out with.  He’s a pretty darn good software engineer and he doesn’t even feel nerdy about it (well, not TOO nerdy).  He’s so dang funny that it is sinful.  He feels free to be himself pretty much all the time and enjoys his life.

He’s not like high-school Matt at all.  High school Matt was ignored because he wasn’t athletic and ridiculed because he was smart.  High school Matt carried labels given him by other people that worked so well even HE thought that’s what he was like.  He didn’t feel good about himself for who he was and instead kept trying to pretend he was someone he wasn’t and fit in with a crowd of people that he didn’t fit with and date the girls who weren’t interested in dating him.  Even worse, he ignored the crowd he could have fit with and the girls he could have dated instead.  He was a poser and a fake, someone who didn’t value his own abilities and instead kept trying to make himself into something he wasn’t.

Whenever I’m around high school people again, high-school Matt tries to come out.  I don’t like high-school Matt.  He makes me feel ashamed of myself, not only of my past but of who I am now, almost as though who I am today is not good enough even though I’m quite happy with it.  He makes me act like someone I’m not, someone I don’t like, someone like him.  So I try to keep him hidden.

And the best way to keep him hidden is to avoid situations where he insists on coming out.  And if I go to the reunion, he will insist.

I’ve really enjoyed catching up with those friends on Facebook and hearing about their lives today.  I’m not really interested in letting high-school Matt come out to feel like a loser again in person.

So, thanks anyway, but I won’t be going.  Don’t be offended.  Or, take offense, whatever, I don’t care.  High-school Matt is obsessed with what you think of him, but that dude is gone.  The current version wants to be your friend, but only at face value.  Otherwise, nevermind.

matt Rants Introspection

Apparently LeBron James announced the other day that he will leave the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat.  Apparently this is a big deal.

I guess I can understand it.  It’s kind of like a person being a part of one street gang, and then going to join a different street gang.  NBA teams are pretty much the same as street gangs as far as I can tell.  You can think of them as advanced street gangs.  When you are a young man growing up in the inner city, the gangs recruit you this way:  “Sure, for now you will have to wear Oakland Raiders clothing and hold this handgun sideways when you kill people.  But, you know we are like the farm league for the Indiana Pacers.  Someday you could be an NBA star if you just work your way up the ladder.”

Anyway, one of the leaders of the Cleveland gang had his feelings really and truly hurt by all of this so he wrote a letter to make himself feel better.  Now everyone is making fun of his letter because it uses the Comic Sans font.  I never use Comic Sans, but I guess I missed the memo that says, “Do not use this font.  Ever.”

So I’m not going to make fun of that dude for using Comic Sans.  I’m also not going to make fun of him for an entire letter comprised of paragraphs which almost without exception have only a single sentence in them.  I’m also not going to make fun of him for not knowing how to use capitalization or punctuation or quotation marks.  No sir.  I am not that kind of person.  Instead, I’m going to make fun of him for a completely different reason.

Here is a direct quote from his letter.  Note that, since this is one of the places he (ab)used quotation marks, I also have to quote the quotation marks, so this will seem a little weird.

““I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE”“

Hmm.  Interesting.  And also, how exactly does he plan to do this?  I mean, since he doesn’t actually play the games.  And also, he says he personally guarantees it; or what?  What happens if a team LeBron plays for actually wins a championship before Cleveland?  Usually, a guarantee comes with an “or” clause, e.g. “or your money back,” “or I will eat my hat”, “or I will write another letter in Comic Sans with poor punctuation and post it on the internet.”

I also don’t understand the “self-titled former ‘king’” phrasing.  Is he saying that LeBron himself refers to his own self as “the former king”?  Because otherwise, doesn’t it seem weird to claim that LeBron gave himself the “king” title, and yet this guy is going to claim that he doesn’t have that title anymore?  Or maybe he doesn’t understand what “self-titled” means.

Of course, if you read further in the letter, you will see this:

Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.

Sorry, but that’s simply not how it works.

I fail to see what this has to do with anything.  But it definitely discredits the entire letter.  As everyone knows, Moses was taken directly into heaven without dying first.  So apparently, sometimes it actually does work that way.

matt Sports Humor

It takes about one year for my big toenail to grow back.

I’ve verified this on two separate occasions.  The first was in college, when we were having a killer waterfight with the girls who lived across the parking lot, and we were just about to enter complete domination phase when I smashed my big toe into one of those scallop-topped concrete edging stones and broke my big toenail right off.  It looked like normal a year later.  Then, last year when we hiked Maple Mountain, I broke my big toenail halfway off at the root and have been sort of managing that situation ever since.  It almost looks like normal now, and it’s been almost a year.

I’m sure, like me, you will not be surprised to know that I’m not the first to notice this fantastic phenomenon.

A quick search revealed that the ancient Yrgyuilf tribe also noticed this phenomenon.  Located deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle near the equator, the story goes that this simple tribe had a problem:  They could not tell time, because they had no seasons, being near the equator, and they had not noticed the sun yet.  They also owned everything they had.

One day the tribe elder had a revelation.  He called a tribe council.  ”I’ve figured out our problem!” he announced.  ”We’re all depressed and unhappy!”  A murmur ran through the tribe.  Yes! they thought.  I hadn’t realized it until now, but yes! I am depressed!  And  unhappy!

“Probably the reason we are so depressed and unhappy is because we own everything we have, and we don’t have a bunch of crap we don’t really need!” the crowd exclaimed.

“What will we do about it?”

“We need a reason to spend money that we don’t have, and go into debt, on a regular basis!” someone suggested.

“Hey yeah!  That’ll work!”

“But … but, when should we do this?”

“Wait — isn’t that what Christmas is for?” someone asked.

The elder took control of the situation.  ”Excellent, everyone.  We’ve figured out what is wrong with us:  we are depressed and unhappy, and we didn’t even know it until now.  The reason we are depressed and unhappy is because we don’t have any debt or crap we don’t really need.  Celebrating Christmas will solve our problem, as it provides the opportunity to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need.  Only problem is, we need to know when to celebrate.”

A wise old man stepped forward.  ”Once,” he said, “I stubbed the crap out of my big toe and my toenail broke right off.  It took a long time to grow back.  We could call that time period, uh, a ‘year’.”

“We will celebrate Christmas every year by spending money we don’t have on stuff we don’t need,” said the tribe elder.  ”I feel happier already!”

As the council continued, they decided that each year, they would select a young virgin and smash her big toenail until it fell off.  When it had completely grown back, it would be time to celebrate!

It wasn’t long until they realized they could use similar logic for other measurements of time:

• How long after I sprain my ankle until it doesn’t hurt anymore?  One month.
• How long after I pull a tooth out of my head until it doesn’t hurt anymore?  One week.
• How long after I shave until my whiskers grow back?  One day.
• How long after I bean you in the head with this rock until your headache goes away?  One hour.
• How long after I prick my finger until the bleeding stops?  One minute.

Figuring out a measurement for one day took some time, as the young virgins in town didn’t seem to be growing their whiskers back.  After some deliberation, they figured that a male virgin could work.  It took a while, but they eventually found a male virgin that actually could grow whiskers back, and they celebrated because now they could measure days.

This worked quite well for the Yrgyuilf tribe for a while.  It created jobs as some people were in charge of rounding up the young virgins for timekeeping purposes, and others would regularly prick their fingers or bean them in the head with rocks in order to know things like whether it was time for lunch.

After a while, they started having trouble finding young virgins and also had to simultaneously deal with a significant teenage pregnancy epidemic, so they decided that perhaps any old person could be used for measuring time.  Surprisingly, experimentation showed that it worked about the same.

Eventually someone asked the question, “How long is forever?”  They had a hard time deciding how to measure this, so they eventually settled on three different options:

• If you bash someone’s skull in with a rock, forever is how long it takes for them to wake up.
• If you sever someone’s legs at the hips with a chainsaw, forever is how long it takes for them to grow back.
• If you impale someone through the heart on a sharpened post, forever is how long it takes for their heart to start beating again.

Since it was so essential to get this experiment right, they searched and searched and eventually found three young virgins to help them complete this experiment.  Unfortunately, it was about this time that the tribe pretty much disbanded.  Three of the original Yrgyuilf tribe members are still there, spraining each other’s ankles and pricking each other’s fingers and smashing each other’s toenails off and beaning each other in the head with rocks in order to measure time while they are waiting to see how long forever is.  They’ve stopped measuring weeks because they are all out of teeth and don’t know how to do it anymore.

The rest of the tribe members moved to the city and became dentists.

matt Science Humor, Interesting

This is a very painful and sad post, so by definition it should be hilarious.

It looks like my 1998 Kawasaki KX 250 will belong to someone else tomorrow.  I bought that bike, worn and beaten, six years ago.  I brought it into my garage, took it apart, cleaned it, painted it, put new graphics and a new seat cover on it, gave it a new rear race tire, had the forks rebuilt by Pro-Action, and gave it a new Renthal rear sprocket.

This, my friends, is how you show your motorcycle just how much you love it.

I’ve loved every minute I’ve ridden it.  I love that rush of adrenaline I feel when you kick the engine to life and you feel the motor revving beneath you.  I love the awesome power as you launch off the line and the pull you feel in your arms as you climb through the gears and that amazing 250cc two-stroke powerband.  I love that feeling of soaring high above the ground (where “high” means “a multitude of inches”).  I even forgive my bike for that time I was trying to learn to double-jump and instead I broke my collarbone.

If any girls read my blog they probably think this is so dumb.  And to that, I say this:  I had a fair number of girlfriends when I was single, but when I found one that I felt this strongly about, I married her.  And if that doesn’t show you up, well, I don’t even know what I meant by that.

Seriously, I really wish I could keep it.  Maybe someday, when my career doesn’t require every spare minute of my time and investments of large sums of money in laptops, maybe then I can have another one.

Until then, there’s a part of me that will be dead.  There’s a part of me that will ache every time I watch motocross or supercross racing live or on TV.  There’s a part of me that will feel like I sold my soul in order to try to move my career forward, and that part will let me know how disappointed it is with me for the rest of my life, especially if I fail.

It will definitely be a bittersweet memory.  Like the CRX, I’ll love it forever.  And I don’t care if you think that is stupid.

So, for posterity’s sake, here’s some pictures to remember my baby by:

Catching tons of air at Bunker Hill Raceway in Delta, 2004-ish.

I love this picture.

matt Hobbies, Sports Career, CRX, Hobbies, Motocross

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very very much, like my wife and I, sometimes they have a life-changing event which starts with a very simple conversation, like, “Honey, do you think we should get a new MacBook Pro?”

At least, that’s what happened in our family.

One night, we were just laying there together in bed.  All the kids were asleep.  I turned toward my wife and softly said, “What would you think if we got a new MacBook Pro?”

She got a bit of a twinkle in her eye as she turned and snuggled in toward me.  ”Why do you want one?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking, pretty much it is time for me to get a decent laptop.  Even though I don’t want to spend the money, and even though we are trying to do the Dave Ramsey Dance, I think it is holding my career back.  I don’t think it is wise to continue without one.  I think it is an investment that we need to make in my career,” I said in the most romantic way possible.

She kind of bit her lower lip, then said, “Well, why are you thinking of a MacBook Pro?”

“Their laptops are simply the best hardware available,” I explained seductively.  ”I would dual-boot it with Boot Camp so it ran Snow Leopard in one partition and Windows 7 Ultimate in the other partition.  Then I could create a domain-joined account in the Windows 7 partition with a separate virtual drive that holds all of the company data that I can protect with BitLocker.  That way I can use my laptop to work remotely and also have excellent Mac hardware.  I’m getting excited just thinking about it.”

“Oooooh, baby, I love it when you talk to me like that.  Let’s do it!” she said.  So with that, we turned off the lights and went to sleep.

Some time later, the long-awaited day came.  I was at work when my wife called.  ”Honey, it is time,” she said.  ”The MacBook Pro is here.”

I rushed home to this:

They are prettier after they are born.

I must admit it didn’t look like much. But I know that true beauty lies within. Within the box, I mean.

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long before the laptop started making its way out.

It's crowning!

When they first come out they have this weird whitish covering on them.

Now THAT'S a good looking laptop! He (she) is so handsome (pretty)!

It's a boy (I guess)!

We decided to name him Steve, for obvious reasons.

matt Technology Career, Humor, Mac

I don’t know if you guys knew this, but I’m dang funny.

I’m not kidding around here.  Well, actually, I sort of am.  But really, I’m hilarious.

I mean it.

In fact, I’ve been told that I’m too funny.  I tell too many jokes.  People don’t appreciate that.  I totally get it, too.  It hurts to laugh too much, plus you start to cry and you blow snot all over yourself.

In Heinlein’s book “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the story of the human Michael Smith who was born and raised on Mars and brought back to earth to learn how to behave like a human, one of the hardest things for him to learn was to have a sense of humor.  As the book goes, Martians had no concept of humor and the humans had a hard time teaching Michael about humor and why people laugh.

Initially Michael was told that people laugh when something is funny, which means it is something happy or something that makes him happy.  Yet Michael knew that people also felt happiness through love, and friendship, and achievement, and yet those sorts of things didn’t make people laugh.  It wasn’t until some time later that Michael came to the realization that things are funny not because they are happy, but because they are painful.  People laugh to deal with the pain, the irony, the frustration, the sadness.  Not because they are happy.

Jerry Seinfeld says, “What’s the deal with airline food?”  We laugh because we are thinking, “Yeah, no kidding.  Airline food is lame!”  Brian Regan says, “I before E, except after C, and when sounding like ‘A’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’, and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May, and you’ll always be wrong no matter what you say!”  We laugh because we think, “For sure.  I can never figure out how that rule is supposed to work!”  I say, “People hate to laugh because they blow snot all over themselves.”  You laugh because you think, “I know, that is so embarrassing, and now I have to wash these clothes.”

We don’t laugh at jokes about airline food because we love it so much.  We laugh because it is so annoying.  Michael Smith (or Heinlein, technically) was right — we laugh because it hurts, not because it is happy.

This is why I’m finding it odd that some people don’t like me making such funny jokes because my humor is too cynical and sarcastic.  According to Heinlein, it wouldn’t be so darn funny if it wasn’t a little painful.  And we know that Heinlein could not be wrong.  After all, he wrote Starship Troopers, which was a great story before Paul Verhoeven ruined it.

In other words, it isn’t the cynicism or sarcasm that is inappropriate.  It is the humor that is inappropriate.  It’s like I’m trying to tell you, I’m literally too funny.  I can’t help myself.  I start out trying to have a serious blog post and the next thing you know you are scrubbing snot off your monitor.

Sorry.

matt Humor Humor

I attended LaunchUp, a monthly meet-up for people interested in tech startups, last Thursday.  My friend Josh Coates, Mozy founder, spoke first, where among other things he described the two types of people at the event:  people who have done, are doing, or are planning to do a startup, and people who like to talk about it but are too chicken to do it.

I’m definitely in the second category.

Of course, Josh’s talk was the most interesting, in case he reads my blog.  But the second talk, DJ Waldow’s talk on community management, was interesting too, particularly to me as someone who’s tried (and failed) to start an effective online business.  It wasn’t so much that there was any one particular point that Waldow made that really stood out to me; rather, the more he spoke, the more I realized how important what he was saying really is:  In order to compete today, businesses have to be active in managing their online reputation and in creating awareness of themselves among their customer base.  The ultimate?  When your presence in the community and the industry is so prevalent that when they think of your business area, they think of your business.

Since I don’t have my own business, I am my own business.  So this made me wonder, how well am I doing?  How synonymous is my  name with the software engineering industry, or other things?

Since I know how incredibly interested you are, here’s a detailed table of my findings.  For each term, I conducted a search on both Google and Bing.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan”: Searching for just my name is pretty disheartening.  No results relating to me in the first twenty pages on either site.  It doesn’t help when you have the same name as a pro football player and a musician.  I don’t even show up on Wikipedia’s Matthew Ryan disambiguation page.  Hrrmm.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan blog”: Not much better.  No results for me in the first ten pages on either site.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan homepage”: Finally, a result.  Google gave me a result for www.mvryan.org, my homepage, on page 9 result 9; Bing, oddly, gave their first result for me for my user profile page on Novell’s developer website, from back in my days working for Novell’s developer services team.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan software”: Now we’re honing in.  Google’s fifth result on their first page was for my developer.novell.com profile page; Bing gave two results for me on their first page; the third for my LinkedIn profile, the eighth result on that page for my user profile on SourceForge.net.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan software engineer”: Google showed me love twice on page one, results three and seven, but Bing really showered down their devotion by giving me five results on the first page.  I got top billing with the first result on the first page, along with results four, six, seven, and ten.

Bing really seems to be favoring me more than Google, but surely that’s not because I work for Microsoft; it must just be a coincidence.  Anyway, it seems I’m fairly well associated with my profession, but there’s definitely still some work to be done.

Some other searches:

“Matt Ryan Microsoft”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 2

“Matt Ryan Mozy”: Google, page 1 results 2-6 (oddly, the first result is for a Matt Ryan on the mozy.com blog but that isn’t me, even though I worked for Mozy for a year); Bing, page 1 results 1,2,3,5,6,9

“Matt Ryan Novell”: Google, page 1 results 1-6, 8-10; Bing, page 1 results 1,2,4,5,8-10

“Matt Ryan Eclipse”: Google, page 1 results 1,3,5,7; Bing, page 1 results 1,4,6,8,9

“Matt Ryan IBM”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 results 1,10

“Matt Ryan Spillman”: Google, page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 result 1

“Matt Ryan utah”: Google, page 2 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 1

“Matt Ryan 350z”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 3

“Matt Ryan world superbike”: Google, page 1 result 1 (and 2, and 3); Bing, page 1 result 5

“Matt Ryan supercross”: Google page 1 result 9; Bing, page 1 result 9

“Seeping Matter”: Google page 1 results 1-4,6,8; Bing, page 1 results 1-4

“Coding Frogs”: Google page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 results 1,2

matt Technology Career, Software Development

World Superbike USA weekend is nearly here and I can hardly wait.  (Since I can barely concentrate I figure I may as well blog about it.)  Derrick and I will be in attendance.  This year we’re sitting in the Paddock Grandstand at Miller Motorsports Park, which should be a very interesting and awesome change from where we have always been up to this year, down by the Tooele turn.

By the way, there is still time for you to get here, if you hurry.

Anyway, the last couple of years Derrick hasn’t been up for autograph hunting.  But since we’re going multiple days this year maybe I can talk him into it.  Here’s some of the autographs I’d like to collect:

• Sterilgarda Yamaha’s James Toseland, two-time World Superbike Champion
• Alitalia Aprilia’s Max Biaggi, former 250cc World Champion
• BMW Motorrad Motorsport’s Troy Corser, former Australian and AMA Superbike Champion
• Xerox Ducati’s Michel Fabrizio
• Alstare Suzuki’s Leon Haslam

As long as I’m dreaming, we might as well throw in Troy Bayliss (three-time World Superbike Champion), Nicky Hayden (former AMA Superbike and MotoGP Champion), and Ben Spies (three-time AMA Superbike and current World Superbike Champion).  Maybe they’ll be there, you know, to visit, and meet me and all that.

Forecast is for rain on Saturday, which should make practice a bit difficult, but it looks like Sunday and Monday will be great days.  Can’t think of anything more awesome to do on Memorial Day than watch World Superbike racing, and also think of my grandma who passed away a few years ago, and hates racing.

matt Sports AMA Superbike, Racing, World Superbike

So last night was the big finale of “Lost,” the TV show sensation that proved you don’t actually need to have a workable plot to make uber-gazillions of dollars selling flashing pictures to people.

I haven’t actually watched the finale yet.  I may or may not, but the murmur I’ve seen on the interwebs about it today indicates that the finale is probably pretty much what I thought it would be.

A month or so ago I read about this in my issue of “Wired.”  I like Wired, but admittedly the authors are guilty of a bit of fanboyism with some things.  Like Google.  And Apple.  And, apparently, Lost.  They did a big write-up where, among other things, they discussed with the writers of “Lost” many of the unsolved questions in Lost up to that point, and asked the writers if all the questions would be answered.  The writers pontificated, talked in circles, praised themselves and their genius, and in many other ways answered, to paraphrase:  No, not really.

I was going to post a link to the Wired article, but I changed my mind because they used a potty word.  But you can get pretty much the gist of it here.

Anyway, I figure I better chip in here, to help people understand the finale of “Lost.”  I think I owe it to the global economy to just cut to the chase here and end the debate.

Episode 1: A bunch of people miraculously survive a jet airliner crash-landing on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, only to find they are deserted there.

Episodes 2-(Finale-1): The writers attract a devoted following as they create more questions than answers by throwing everything into the show they can think of.  Lifelike inanimate objects.  Unexplained wild animals.  Intricate past and future lives.  A mysterious sequence of numbers.  Others.  Dharma Initiatives.  Moving islands.  Magnets.  Time travel.  Alternate universes.  Nuclear weapons that don’t kill people.  Dead people who are not dead.  An island that needs protecting.  As best I can explain it, the writers would get together on Monday, do drugs all week long, and on Friday they’d take whatever they happened to write down or remember from the week and make that into a show.

Finale: Panic sets in as the writers realize that people want an ending.  Then they remember:  We’re artists!  We’re elite!  We don’t have to explain ourselves!  If the audience can’t understand our art, that makes them uncultured swine!  And we can even tell them this and they will worship us all the more!  We don’t have to explain anything!

Somewhere in here, in an incredible act of hubris, they actually tell people in magazine interviews that they are doing this.  And even more incredibly, most people hear this and say, “Oh, yes!  We ARE uncultured swine!  Thank you for not answering any of our questions!”

Anyway, I hope this clarifies things for you.

matt Humor Humor, Rants