Disjointed Thoughts

Brought to you courtesy of Michelin Sport and seven F-1 teams which gave the finger to their North American fans, and especially the 200,000 folks who bought tickets thinking there was going to be an auto race. It's bad enough to find your lover is duplicitous. When said lover is vaguely French and less than popular with everyone else in the first place your thought processes get a little scrambled. Plus we had to travel 100 miles roundtrip to pay homage to our respective fathers by eating meals which must be described as forgettable, since it's bad form to criticize one's family or a free buffet, while enduring ritual chit chat and a third-party blow-by-blow account of one brother-in-law's third divorce.

• Tony George, the president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, has taken a lot of grief for fracturing open-wheel racing in this country, but he was entirely blameless in this one. He paid a reported $15 M for the right to stage today's farce, and the culprits got out of town as fast as they could go, with the money. This city's taxpayers have, in the last thirty years, built two basketball stadiums, a minor league baseball park, and a domed arena for football which they will shortly be replacing with another. The Hulman family, owners of the Track, have never asked for a penny in public funds, yet they improve the place yearly, enrich hundreds of thousands of locals, and bring untold millions into the economy.

• The incredible arrogance of Governor Emperor Mitch Daniels and his crew is having a palpable reaction that looks like it could become permanent. The latest flap is over his director of the BMV, who tried to close a couple dozen license branches--with a couple dozen more on standby--by fiat just after the legislative session ended, then relented on two, including one in the home district of the Republican Speaker of the House. The BMV chief is the former president of Galyan's sporting goods, which under his leadership was busy expanding regionally just as an out-of-state competitor moved in, built mega-stores within blocks of all the Galyan's, and took them over within six months. These are the folks bringing a business-like efficiency to state government.

• And speaking of business, Lil' Mitch, who made it a big campaign issue that the Democrats were doing business with out-of-state suppliers has announced criteria which would make, among others, Wal-Mart an Indiana business.

• The downstairs toilet, with which I've had a running battle for the last five weeks over a tiny but persistant leak, was the source of a sudden Zen insight on Saturday. I realized, in a pure blue flash, that the flapper valve construction I'd been subjecting to repeated applications of plumber's epoxy was, in fact, the wrong friggin' valve someone had jury rigged God knows how many years ago. And the correct parts are still readily available. The battle has now shifted to a single rusty bolt which must be removed without cracking the porcelain. Metaphysical connection to plumbing fixtures will, I hope, end there.

• Preliminary test results: I tried out some of that paint for plastics on some crappy pots this spring and so far it works a charm. I hope the next major technical innovation will be plastic paint in something other than glaring primary colors.

• My wife's friend was in town from Arizona over the weekend, regaling us with her tale of the nest of Africanized bees on her property and the exterminator she called who said, "Bees? Oh no, I hate bees." After two incompetent attempts by this guy she wound up calling another exterminator who was five times as expensive but expert at the work: he told them he had been on a Discovery Channel program about the subject. I went inside to fix a sandwich--they had a girls' night out planned--and grabbed the teevee listings for some consolation companionship. The killer bee program was on in two minutes. Though the following one, about killer ants, was more entertaining.