The silent letter

We have a big stack of table games that we like to play with friends. One that we like is Bananagram.  I often complain because, unlike Scrabble, there are no points for the letters. And without points, how do we determine a winner?

Nancy just unzips the cloth banana and spills out dozens of tiles with different letters. We turn them upside down and pick the proper starting number of them (usually trying to pick tiles from various parts of the pile—as if that makes any difference) and then each person starts his own little word-building.  The end result is a crossword-looking series without any lines and with no clues.  If you have leftover tiles after you spell your first series of words, you say the proper word and everybody draws another tile. The person who runs out of tiles first is the winner.

But there are no points!!!   How do we identify a winner after a night of full-contact Bannanagram if the losers of each game don’t get points?

We also play other word games such as Quiddler and Wordspiel.  And other non-word card games including one with five suits called Five Crowns.  And games that aren’t word games such as Labyrinth,  Dominoes, and Rummikub.

Whether it’s because we play word games at the table or because we make a living out of stringing words into columns or articles or books or speeches, we find the English language pretty fascinating.  Maybe it goes back to one of our first jobs being the proofreader of the National Broom and Broom Corn News, which had an unpleasantly picky and prickly editor, in Arcola, Illinois or because we had some pretty good English teachers along the way.  (The NB&BCN was a contract print job that the Arcola Record-Herald published for the broom corn industry that was big in central Illinois then).

That’s probably why we had to do some hard thinking when we saw an article in Mental Floss by Michele Debczak about the only letter in our alphabet that cannot be silent.

(Let’s pause here for a bit so you can ruminate on this. Come back whenever you’re ready.)

The English language is a really hard language and a lot of us never learn it or never quit learning it.  The other day I admonished a friend for saying something such as, “George and myself are going to the game next Friday.” That sentence construction is fingernails on a blackboard.  Suppose George wasn’t going with you.  Would you say, “Myself is going to the game Friday?”  Think of a sentence that way and you’ll probably say or write it correctly.

Psychosis.   Gnu.  (In Africa a couple of years ago, I took a picture of several Wildebeests standing around.  I called it “Gnus Conference.”)  Mnemonic.  Silent letters.

Some letters have multiple personalities. Hard and soft “c,” or “g.” A great example is “Ghoti,” which is pronounced “fish.”  You know, “gh” as in “enough.”  “O” as in “women,” and “ti” as in “action.”

Ms. Debczak points to some foreign words we have appropriated for our own use that have silent letters.  French gives us the silent “z” as in “Chez.” Spanish gives us a silent “j,” as in “marijuana.”  Come to think of it, the “z” in Debczak probably is silent.

She apparently has read the Merriam-Webster Dictionary because she says the only letter in that entire dictionary that is never, ever silent is (drum roll):

V

If the “v” were silent, we would be saying “I loe you.”  Politicians would proclaim “ictory” after citizens had cast their “otes.”  Poetry would be “erse.”  Olive oil would be extra “irgin olie oil”  We’d have to find another word to describe these political times. “Diisie” would not work.

Get out your dictionary. Look at all the “V” words.

Let us know if you find one with a silent “V.”   And once you’ve done that, find the rhyme for “orange.”

 

Motivational posters

Your correspondent dislikes walking into a room—usually somebody’s office—decorated with motivational posters.  You know them.  Lovely pictures with some syrupy words about success, or greatness, or achievement, or—motivation.

The motivational poster industry probably has been around forever; I think I have read of some motivational sayings painted on the walls at Pompeii.  But they’ve become noticeably popular in the last two decades or so.  We will leave it to various “ologists” to study what has changed about us to warrant such treacle.

There always was this feeling that anybody who really needed one of these saccharine decorations must have been short of self-esteem—or working for bosses who think a treacly poster can be a transformative influence on the employee.

I know several apparently well-adjusted folks who have these things on their offices.  As far as I know they do not spend any time every day meditating on them and pondering the significance of the message. They seem to be perfectly normal people who do their work competently every day.  I’ve known some of them long enough to know that the poster in their office has not changed the high-quality work they have always done anyway.

All of this is why my newsroom work station, for several years, sported a calendar from Despair.com (https://despair.com/collections/demotivators) that countered the hard-hitting soupy sayings on walls elsewhere in the building.  Every couple of months there was a new mini-poster taped under my name thingie.

Now, understand that news people have a tendency to be kind of anti-establishment, independent, unruly, and untidy souls who have an inborn pride in being to some degree as manageable as a wheelbarrow full of frogs.  Or cats.  Or Beagle pups. We are only slightly more manageable than a wheelbarrow full of canaries.

But my work area used to be decorated with beautiful pictures such as one showing several hands hoisting a trophy with the big word, “Winning” beneath and the ensuing paragraph: “Because nothing says, ‘You’re a loser’ more than owning a motivational poster about being a winner.”

There are several others—enough that I did not have time to acquire them all.

One that some legislator with a sense of humor might want to hang in the outer office where visitors can see it. If features a lovely early evening sunset-illuminated Nation’s Capitol and its reflection in a mall pool.  It says “Government,” and beneath it are the words, “If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.”

Apparently there is an alternate contemplation: “They may seem inefficient and feckless at times, but your Representatives in Washington just want what’s best for you assuming you’re a major corporation. Otherwise, you’re pretty mush screwed.”

Another poster shows a stack of newspapers with the big word “Media,” followed by, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies right to our faces.”

And there’s one labled “Conspiracy” that says, “Never attribute to stupidity that which can easily be explained by a pathological blood lust for control.”

Or one showing hands raised in high fives and labeled, “Teams,” with the note, “Together we can do the work of one.”

And of course the poster reading “Motivation,” which advises, “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job.  The kind robots will be doing soon.”

I’m waiting for the poster that says “Treacle.”  The accompanying line should be a pip.

The Greatest Accomplishment

We suppose our former governors have, from time to time, been asked about their greatest accomplishments during their terms. Lately, it has become part of the regular business of wrapping up their time in office to publish a glossy, colorful booklet praising themselves.  But apart from the self-serving publications, what do past governors really think is the best thing they did.

About twenty years ago or so, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, published at Southeast Missouri State University, printed a letter from then-former Governor Arthur M. Hyde about “some problem of statewide interest which occurred during my administration.”  The letter was to Dr. Joseph A. Serena, the then-President of then-Southeast Missouri State Teachers College (since 1973 it has been Southeast Missouri State University).

Hyde, a Republican, had been elected in what was seen as one of the great upsets in Missouri elections history in 1920. He immediately cleaned house in then-patronage dominated state government by throwing out Democrats given jobs by previous administrations.

The demand for a modern highway system led to the creation of a State Highway Commission during his term. Public education needs led to the assessment of real estate at its true value, “thereby writing a taxable foundation under the public schools upon which good schools could be built.” He listed the purchase of state parks and putting state charitable institutions under non-partisan control as important accomplishments.

“To my mind, however, the matter of greatest public import was the ‘cleanup’ of the Republican party,” he wrote. What he next wrote about the Republican Party of his time is applicable to either of our major political parties today.

“Á political party justifies its existence only when it offers itself to the people as an instrument or a tool which the people may use to bring about necessary reform, or to accomplish political results.  All political problems are reflected in party action. All matters of governmental action are political matters.  A carpenter cannot use a dull or an “unset” saw to do fine work.  The people cannot use a corrupt or a selfish party to achieve needed political changes. That the realignment within the Republican party was used by the people to accomplish great results is proved by the recitals of the early part of this letter. That realignment is forcing changes within the opposing party.  What a happy day for Missouri when the people have two effective instruments with which to work, when party campaigns are contests as to which party has best served the State, and which offers the most constructive program for the future.”

We offer Hyde’s words less as a commentary on present situations and concerns than as an observation that both of our major political parties are required to do significant soul-searching from time to time if they are to be “effective instruments” to best serve the state or nation and offer “the most constructive program for the future.”

What a happy day it will be, indeed, if we ever reach Hyde’s ideal that the appeal for power must be based on two instruments offering the most constructive service to the people.

(photo credit: 1921 Official Manual of the State of Missouri)

 

The Past, The Present, The Future

(The beginning of a new year is a frequent opportunity to look back, to ponder how the past has led us to where we are, and the degree to which yesterday should shape tomorrow.  Dr. Crane tells us each has its place.)

PRECEDENT

Precedent is solidified experience. In the realm of ideas it is canned goods.

It is very useful when fresh ideas are not to be had.

There are advantages in doing things just because they always have been done. You know what will happen. When you do new things you do not know what will happen.

Success implies not only sound reasoning, but also the variable factor of how a thing will work, which is found out only by trying it.

Hence, the surest road to success is to use a mixture of precedent and initiative. Just how much of each you will require is a matter for your judgment.

To go entirely by precedent you become a mossback. You are safe, as a setting hen or a hiving bee is safe. Each succeeding generation acts the same way. There is a level of efficiency, but no progress.

Boards, trustees, and institutions lay great stress upon precedent, as they fear responsibility. To do as our predecessors did shifts the burden of blame a bit from our shoulders.

The precedent is the haven of refuge for them that fear to decide.

Courts of law follow precedent, on the general theory that experience is more just than individual decision.

Precedent, however, tends to carry forward the ignorance and injustice of the past.

Mankind is constantly learning, getting new views of truth, seeing new values in social justice. Precedent clogs this advance. It fixes and perpetuates the wrongs of man as much as the rights of man.

Hence, while the many must trust to precedent, a few must always endeavor to break it, to make way for juster conclusions.

Precedent is the root, independent thinking is the branch of the human tree. Our decisions must conform to the sum of human experience, yet there must be also the fresh green leaf of present intelligence.

We cannot cut the root of the tree and expect it to live, neither can we lop off all the leafage of the tree and expect it to live.

The great jurist, such as Marshall, is one who not only knows what the law is, but what the law ought to be. That is, to his knowledge of precedent he adds his vision of right under present conditions.

Precedent is often the inertia of monstrous iniquity. War, for instance, is due to the evil custom of nations who go on in the habit of war-preparedness. The problem of the twentieth century is to batter down this precedent by the blows of reason, to overturn it by an upheaval of humanity.

Evil precedent also lurks in social conditions, in business, and in all relations of human rights. The past constantly operates to enslave the present.

We must correct the errors of our fathers if we would enable our children to correct ours.

Our reverence for the past must be continually qualified by our reverence for the future…

The momentum of what has been must be supplemented by the steam of original conviction, and guided by the intelligence and courage of the present.

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Humanity’s Control

(We begin a new year next weekend. Many will say, “It’s good to get 2021 behind us.”  But changing the page of a calendar does not wipe out lingering fears and uncertainties. Nor does it erase lingering joy, lingering hope, lingering striving for truth.  Cruelty and inhumanity remain.  But so, says Dr. Frank Crane, remains ideals that can overcome that cruelty and inhumanity. We must, however, constantly be on our guard that our ideals do not become the cruelty and inhumanity they should overcome.)

THE HUMANITIES VERSUS THE IDEALS

The humanities are the ordinary universal feelings, such as family affection, aversion to cruelty, love of justice and of liberty.

The ideals are the so-called big enthusiasms, as religion, patriotism, reform, and the like.

The humanities are sometimes called the red passions; the ideals the white passions.

The great institutions of the race have been formed and kept alive by the white passions. These include churches, political parties, nations, and various societies and associations, secret and public.

The progress of mankind has been made through institutions, embodying ideals, which we may call the centrifugal force. The humanities have always pulled against this, and may be termed the centripetal force.

Thus, although great ideals present themselves to men as beneficial, yet in the carrying out of them men often become cruel, unjust, and tyrannical. So the greatest crimes of earth are committed under the influence of movements designed to do the greatest good.

Under the church we have seen persecution, a ruthless disregard of human feeling, families torn asunder, opinion coerced, bodies tortured.

The humanities in time destroyed the baleful power of the religious ideal, its dreams of dominance and its inhuman fanaticism. Plain pity and sympathy battered down the monstrous structure of iron idealism. The horrors of the medieval inquisition and the dark intolerance of puritanism had to yield to the humanities.

Most of the great tragedies have been the crushing out of human and natural feeling by some ideal which, once helpful, has become monstrous. Such were the Greek tragedies, where men were the victims of the gods.

War is the colossal force of an ideal, patriotism, where the check of the humanities has been entirely cut off.

It is supposed to ennoble men and states. It has always been the preferred occupation of the noble class, kings and courtiers, because the contempt of personal feelings and the merciless sacrifice of the humanities have seemed grand and royal.

But by and by war must yield to the eternal humanities. Sheer human sympathies will abolish it.

The humanities are peculiarly of the common people. Therefore they find expression and come into political effect quickly in democracies. In the United States, for instance, the rule of a religious party or the program of patriotic militarism is impossible. We have too much red passion to permit the ascendency of white passions.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book of red passion, sympathy for the Negro, overthrew the “white” ideals of the slave oligarchy.

The cry of a starving mother, the protest of wronged workmen, can defeat the apparently resistless power of massed capital.

One drop of blood outweighs the most splendid scheme of the theorist.

The history of the world is the unceasing struggle of the humanities against great ideals which, crystallized into institutions, have become inhuman.

Racing: Emotional numbers at Kansas: 5, 17, 20

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)  Kyle Larson’s ninth win of the NASCAR Cup season was far more than just another trophy in his growing collection as he hurtles into the final three races of the year, the favorite to win the championship. It was a tribute win.

Before the race, car owner Rick Hendrick telephoned Larson to mention that the race was being run on the 17th anniversary of the death of his son, Ricky Hendrick IV, in a plane crash on the way to a race. Ricky had a brief career in the truck series, where he won his first race at the Kansas Speedway twenty years ago this year, and in the then-Busch Series—NASCAR’s second-tier series.

 

Larson’s number and the design of his car’s paint job (seen here at Indianapolis in August) has been a tribute to Ricky Hendrick for most of the season.  He started from the pole at Kansas, led 130 of the 267 laps in the race, and finished 3.6 seconds ahead of teammate Chase Elliott.  It’s his third straight win and the second time this year he has won three in a row. Two three-race winning streaks in a single season has not happened in NASCAR since Dale Earnhardt, Sr., did it 34 years ago.

The race was a struggle for the eight driver in this semi-final round, leaving the determination of who will be the final four running for the Cup to be decided at the shortest track on the schedule. Martinsville is a .526-mile track, the only track still used by NASCAR since its beginning in 1948.  It’s the only track with a concrete surface on the turns (banked at only twelve degrees) and asphalt on the straights.

Five of the eight drivers had issues that juggled the points and point to a possible wild scramble at Martinsville.

The most costly mishap was Austin Dillon’s collision with Ryan Blaney that sent Blaney into the wall with 44 laps left.  Blaney had been a solid second in the point standings going into the race. But the crash ended his day and he goes to Martinsville fifth, one point below the cutline.

He is one point behind Kyle Busch who hit the wall twice and blowing a tire late. He was still running at the end, six laps down, but picked up enough stage points to hold fourth place, one up on Blaney.

Brad Keselowski and Martin Truex, Jr., went into Kansas 7th and 6th, respectively in the points but got together and both had to pit with flat tires shortly after.  The two have swapped position in the points with Truex three points out of fourth and Keselowski six points back.

Joey Logano wen to Kansas 40 points below the cutline, managed to keep the fenders on the car and gained 14 points. But he still needs to win at Martinsville to make the final four.

Larson, Elliott, and Denny Hamlin go to Martinsville with solid margins above the cutline. But the “paper clip,” as the track is called leads to a lot of bumping and rubbing seven drivers trying to fill the last three slots for the season finale.

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Our adopted Missourian, Clint Bowyer, will be climbing back into his fire suit and helmet later today to run some test laps in NASCAR’s Next Gen car.  He and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., will test the car at the quarter-mile Bowman Gray Stadium in Salem, North Carolina.

The track is the same length as the special asphalt track that will be laid down around the football field inside the Los Angeles Coliseum—where the Rose Bowl is played and where the 1984 Summer Olympic Games were held. NASCAR plans to run its pre-season Clash there on February 6, the first time the event will have been held away from the Daytona International Speedway since NASCAR created the race in 1979. The event will be the first competitive event for the Next Gen car.

Bowyer, a native of Emporia, Kansas who often raced on Missouri tracks as he built the career that put him at NASCAR’s top level for sixteen years, is part of the FOX broadcasting team that will do the first half of the 2022 season and Earnhardt is part of the NBC broadcasting team that will cover the second half of the season.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton went into the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas just three points apart and the season dwindling down.  They leave with Verstappen up by a dozen.

Hamilton, starting from pole, edged Verstappen going into the first turn but gave up the lead in the first round of pit stops and came out nine seconds back. He closed to within a second of Verstappen but could get no closer and finished 1.3-seconds back.

Verstappen’s eighth win of the year ends a five-race win streak for Hamilton at the Circuit of the Americas and makes his run to a record eighth F1 title an uphill fight in the five remaining races of 2021.

(INDYCAR)—Another European driver on track to move up to Formula 1 will race, instead, in INDYCAR.  Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan Tacing has signed Danish driver Christian Lundgaard to a multi-year contract.  Lundgaard is the FIA Formula 2 champion. He was impressive in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course in his first INDYCAR start in August.  He qualified fourth with limited experience on the course and finished twelfth despite dealing with a bout of food poisoning. He will run both road and oval races.

He’s 20 and has come up through a Renault program designed to train young drivers to compete in Formula One. He’ll join Graham Rahal and Jack Harvey on the three-car team.

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Arrow McLaren SP is considering adding a third car to its lineup for 2022 and has given another European driver a little seat time.  Nico Hulkenberg, who has 179 F1 starts and a LeMans overall victory to his credit, was scheduled to turn laps yesterday at the Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.  Hulkenberg, who is 34, says he has no “current plans” to move to INDYCAR but he was “pleased to try out an Indy car and see what it’s all about.”

AMSP says it’s focusing on its two car setup for now with Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist but it will continue evaluating adding a third car in the future.

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(Photo credits: Racing Reference.com; Bob Priddy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Racing: History at Talladega

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—William Darrell Wallace, known to friends and fans as “Bubba,” has been declared the winner of the rain-shortened race at Talladega, a historic win at a track with great historic significance to the first African-American driver to win a race in NASCAR’s highest division in 57 years.

Wallace, the only black driver in NASCAR Cup competition, drives for a new team owned by basketball star Michael Jordan and fellow driver Denny Hamlin.  The race, postponed from Sunday because of rain, was called after 117 of the scheduled 188 laps Monday because of more rain.  Wallace, who had started 19th, drove his way to the front five laps from the end, passing Kurt Busch to become the 19th driver to lead the race on the track that traditionally features nose-to-tail racing and at least one big crash.  A wreck on the 116th lap, just before the rains came, froze the field with Wallace at the head of the pack.

Restrictor plate races at the big high-banked tracks of Daytona and Talladega are traditionally mad and unpredictable scrambles but Wallace has shown flashes of strength in those races.  He has finished second twice at Daytona although his best previous finish at Talladega was 14th.

He finished ahead of two Ford teammates, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano.  Bush was squeezed back to fourth, just ahead of Christopher Bell.

The next race, on the Charlotte Roval, will be a cut-down race in which four drivers are eliminated from the chase for the championship.  Kevin Harvick, who led more laps in the Talladega race than any other driver, was shuffled back to eighth when the red flag came out, short-circuiting his hopes of climbing into the top eight in the points chase. He’s nine points out of the playoff field heading to Charlotte.  Christopher Bell’s fifth-place run still leaves him 28 points back.  William Byron, who tangled with two other cars just before the rains hit, is in a must-win situation if he is to advance, as is Alex Bowman, whose chances for a good finished vanished when his car was badly damaged in an early-race wreck with three other competitors.

The victory in the playoff race will not propel Wallace into the next three-race runoff round because he was not among the top sixteen drivers in the points when the regular season ended.

(THE BACKSTORY)—Wallace’s victory was a popular one among his colleagues who showed their support of him by pushing his car to the front of the starting field at Talladega in June, last year, after a noose was reported on the pull-down rope of the door of his garage at the track.  The FBI investigated and determined that the noose had been there since the previous October, at a time when it could not have been predicted Wallace’s team would later use the garage.  Wallace supported the finding.

Wallace was born almost three years after the death of the only other black driver to win a top-level NASCAR race.  His victory comes a little more than 100 years after the birth of Wendell Scott, who passed Richard Petty with 25 laps to go on the half-mile dirt track at Jacksonville Florida in 1964 and went on to win. He was not announced as the winner, however—some say it was because of the racist culture of the time—and the win originally went to Buck Baker, who was two laps behind. NASCAR discovered two hours after the race that Scott had won but he was not officially awarded the win for two more years.  He never received a trophy.  NASCAR presented his family with the trophy he had earned in 2010, seven years before Bubba Wallace ran his first NASCAR Cup race.

Scott ran his last NASCAR race in 1973 but it was injuries he suffered in a crash at Talladega earlier in the year that forced him to retire.  He died in 1990. He never had a sponsor.  His low-budget owner-driver operation nonetheless saw him finish in the top ten in the points standings four times in a thirteen-year, 495-race career.  He finished in the top ten at the end of 147 races.

Bubba Wallace’s team has had full sponsorship all year.  Next year, 23XII Racing (23 was Jordan’s jersey number and XII refers to Hamlin’s car number, 11) will expand to a second car with former NASCAR champion Kurt Busch as driver.

(INDYCAR)—Wheels already are turning for the 2022 INDYCAR season.  The Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Rookie Orientation Program tomorrow will feature two drivers who focused on road courses this year, Jimmie Johnson and Romain Grosjean.

Johnson, who raced on the track’s road course this year, is not unfamiliar with the big oval. He ran eighteen Brickyard 400s in his NASCAR days and won four times.  But this will be his first time on the oval in an open-wheel car.  He has tested an Indycar on an oval however, running some test laps at the Texas Speedway. He has expressed an interest in running the Indianapolis 500 in May but has not committed to the other ovals on the schedule at Texas, Iowa, and Gateway.

Joining him in getting the feel of the big track is Romain Grosjean, the former Formula 1 driver who built a big following in the series this year.  He got a taste of oval racing late in the season at Gateway’s Worldwide Technology Raceway in August.  It will be his first run for his new team-owner, Michael Andretti.  He’s moving over from Dale Coyne racing.

Before drivers are allowed to run on the Indianapolis oval, they have to prove they can handle it.  The program requires them to run ten laps at 205-210 mph, fifteen more at 210=215, and then 15 laps at more than 215.

The big test will come in May.  In this year’s 33-car starting field, Simona DeSilvestro had the slowest four-lap qualifying run at 228.353. Will Power had the slowest qualifying lap at 227,535.

Scott Dixon sat on the pole at 231.685 with a fast lap of 232.757.

The last NASCAR driver to run the 500 was Kurt Busch, who was the rookie of the year with his sixth place finish in 2014. “The Indianapolis 500 will blow you away,” he said after the race. Johnson could become the nineteenth driver to drive in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, which was first run in 1994.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 was off last weekend. It resumes racing in Istanbul with the Turkish Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton is clinging to a two-point lead over Max Verstappen. \

(Photo credits:  Bob Priddy; Wendell Scott—NASCAR Hall of Fame)

 

Racing: Palou’s first, Hamlin’s second, Hamilton’s hundredth

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor.

Two landmark achievements in big-time car racing during the weekend and one big step forward.

(INDYCAR)—Chip Ganassi Racing, which is shutting down its NASCAR operation at the end of the year after 22 years without a championship, has racked up its 14th INDYCAR championship with a driver in only his second year in the series.

24-year old Alex Palou (he pronounced it pal-LOE) is the first Spanish driver to win a championship in the history of American open-wheel racing. He did it in only his second year in the series, posting three wins and finishes in the top three positions in half of the series’ sixteen 2021 races.  He was leading the Indianapolis 500 with one lap left when he was passed by Helio Castroneves and trailed Castroneves across the finish line by less than one-half second.

Palou had served notice in the first INDYCAR race of the year when he won the season opener at Barber Motorsports Park. He picked up other wins at Elkhart Lake and at Portland.  All he had to do in the final race at Long Beach was stay out of trouble.  He finished fourth behind race-winner Colton Herta (who closed out the year with two straight victories), Josef Newgarden, and defending champion and teammate Scott Dixon.

His closest competitor going into the final race, Pato O’Ward, dropped out with a broken drive shaft and finished next to last. O’Ward was trying to become the first Mexican INDYCAR champion.

Palou, O’Ward, and Herta lead a vanguard of young drivers likely to dominate INDYCAR for the next decade or more.  O’Ward is 22 and Herta, a three-time winner this year, is 21.

(NASCAR)—Denny Hamlin, winless in the first 26 races this year, already has won twice in the first four races of the 10-race championship runoff.  His win at Las Vegas locks him into the round of eight that will go on for the title after two more races.

Victory is a relief for Hamlin, who said afterward, “I’m so happy to not have to worry about the next two weeks.”  Next weekend’s race is at Talladega, where high-speed drafting and anticipated major crashes are considered inevitable, making unpredictability one of the hallmarks of the race.  The last race in this playoff segment will be on the Charlotte road course.

Hamlin dominated the race at Las Vegas, leading more than half of the laps including the last 39. He withstood a charge by last year’s NASCAR champion, Chase Elliott, beating him to the line by about four-tenths of a second. Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr., and Ryan Blaney competed the top five.

Four of the present twelve title contenders will be eliminated from the chase after Talladega and Charlotte. On the outside looking in after Las Vegas are William Byron, Kevin Harvick, Alex Bowman and Christopher Bell.

(FORMULA 1)—Lewis Hamilton has become the first driver in Formula 1 history to win 100 grand prix races.  His win puts him back atop the leader board in the points standings by two points over Max Verstappen.  Hamilton finished almost a minute ahead of Vertappen, his closest challenger in his effort to win a record eighth championship. The two will fight for the title in the remaining seven races.

Sir Lewis Hamilton, it is, broke Michael Schumacher’s once-untouchable record of 91 F1 victories last year.  The superiority of the two drivers is reflected in the fact that Ayrton Senna is third on the win list with “only” 51.  Hamilton has run 281 F1 races, winning 100 and finishing in the top three 176 times.

(Photo credits:  Bob Priddy and Formula 1)

 

 

Sedimental Value

(My mother-in-law, Yuba Hanson, used to refer to things that we didn’t need to keep, but did keep, as items of “sedimental value,” things that just accumulate, like sediment in a corner.  As one advances in years, the word “downsizing” grows in importance. And that provokes thoughts of why and how we accumulated so much stuff to begin with. Dr. Frank Crane thought about that, too, and wrote about—–)

THINGS

Miss Mathilda Tommet of Milwaukee left a will the other day eight and one-half feet long, written in her own hand on sheets of paper pasted together. In it she bequeathed to one relative “my best bedspread and one-half of my best towels;” to another a high-backed-chair, admonishing her executors to “be sure to take the one standing on the north side of the sideboard;” to another her chickens and feed; while vegetables, fruit, pickles, a pail of lard, and “father’s old clock” go to another, and to her dearest enemy a pair of old shoestrings.

Then there was Thoreau, who in his house by Walden Pond would have no furniture; he found a stone once which he fancied, and kept awhile, but soon threw it away, as    he found it had to be dusted.

One of the greatest tyrannies of life is THINGS.

The most common form of insanity is the mania to Own.

One of the first acts of a person who comes into money is to load himself down with a pile of rubbish that makes his life a fret and his death bed terrible.

The very rich collect. They get together spoons, canes, pictures, vases, pitchers, books, or marbles.  When there is no more room for them in the house they build a wing and pack it full.

I knew a man who had $ 20,000 worth of old postage stamps locked up in a safety deposit vault.

I knew an old woman who never traveled, although she longed to travel and had plenty of means, because she was afraid her parlor carpet and her blue china dishes would not properly be taken care of.

The stores are heaped up with THINGS. The most skillful men are employed to persuade people to buy THINGS for which they have no earthly use.

Every home contains sets of books that were bought at a high rate, and that have stood for years without a soul looking into them.

American living rooms are as cluttered as Westminster Abbey. Every  mantel is loaded with junk. The walls are covered with pictures, most of them bad. The floors are so thick with chairs and superfluous stands and tables that few can wind their way through them by day and none by night.

Things, things, things! Bedrooms are full of them, closets heaped with  them, the attic is choked with them, the woodshed and barn are running over.

When we go away on vacations we take trunks full of things. When we go to Europe also we find that baggage is the plague of our life.

It is a relief to turn to the books of the Hindus and read :

“Even if they have longer remained with us, the objects of sense are  sure to vanish. Why, then, not forsake them ourselves? If they pass away by themselves they cause  the greatest pain to the mind, but if we forsake them ourselves they cause endless happiness and peace.”

And in another Oriental book we find this searching word:

“For a man ‘ s life consisteth not in the abundance of THINGS which he possesseth.”

 

Curbing enthusiasm at Indianapolis

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(INDYCAR/NASCAR)—A good start, a couple of dream endings, and a closing controversy for the tripleheader at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway last weekend.

An INDYCAR race on the track’s 14-turn, 2.439-mile road course, immediately followed by a race by NASCAR’s second-tier drivers (the Xfinity series) and then less than 24 hours later, another race on the same circuit by NASCAR’s Cup competitors.

Will Power picked up his first win of the season, holding off the field in two late-race re-starts to finish 1.1 seconds ahead of Romain Grosjean, who was the runnerup in the May race on the Indianapolis road course. Power’s victory was the 40th of his career, putting him in a tie for fifth-most INDYCAR wins. Thirty-eight of those wins have come for Team Penske.

The competition was intense throughout the race with 269 on-track passes (changes of position during pit stops not counted), 190 of them for position.  The 269 on-track passes set a new record for the road course and the 190 passes for position tied a record set on the IMS road course three years ago.

Points leader Alex Palou, who started sixth, had a disastrous end of his day with an engine failure than left him 27th in the 28-car field.  Pole-sitter Pato O’Ward led the first 15 laps and finished fifth.  Scott Dixon, who went into the race third in points struggled from a poor starting position and could do no better than 17th.

Nonetheless, Palou’s lead over O’Ward and Dixon has shrunk to just 21 over O’Ward and 34 over Dixon with four races left in the schedule.

INDYCAR runs its last race on an oval next Saturday, the last chance Midwesterners will have to see the cars and drivers this year.  The evening race at Gateway Motorsports Park across the river from St. Louis precedes two weeks off before INDYCAR wraps up its season with three races on the west coast.

INDYCAR President Jay Frye told your correspondent Monday morning that the tight schedule between the open-wheel race and the Xfinity race gave the Speedway little time to clear all the INDYCAR gear out of the pits and to get the Xfinity pit boxes installed.  The goal was thirty minutes, he said. It took 33.  Frye says the track will work on eliminating that three-minute delay.

Speedway and INDYCAR series owner Roger Penske wound up with a two-fer for the day when Austin Cindric drove a Penske car to victory in the 150-mile race on the road course. Cindric is the son of the President of Team Penske. It’s his fifth win of the year, 13th of his career. But this win was at Indianapolis, an event he called, “amazing,” continuing, “I can’t even put into words what this means.”

Pole-sitter A. J. Almendinger was second for the second straight road-course race.  But his Cinderella moment would come a day later.

The Sunday Cup race was the first Indianapolis road course race for the Cup cars and it came within six laps of being hotly-contested leading up to a breakthrough win for one of NASCAR’s top drivers who is still grasping for his first win of the year.

Eleven drivers led at least one lap with Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin combining for 55 of the scheduled 82 laps.  But six laps from the end, a disintegrating trackside curb led to crashes, caution flags and two red-flag race stoppages that consumed an hour and 24 minutes in all.  Hamlin took the lead from Larson with seven laps left and held him off through two re-starts before being spun out of the competition by Chase Briscoe.

A. J. Almendinger was the beneficiary of the crashes and carnage, avoiding all the trouble to hold off Ryan Blaney for the 94th and 95th laps.

The crashes triggered by the deteriorating curb in turn number six drew quick criticism from some drivers, although the same curbs had survived the Xfinity race last year, the INDYCAR races, and Saturday’s Xfinity race, as well as practice and qualification laps.  The troublesome curb was finally removed from the course for the last few laps.

NASCAR’s competition vice-president Scott Miller said after the race that the curbing had been installed at the request of several drivers before last year’s Xfiniity race “because that section (of the track) was way too fast.”

Miller said the curbing was the same style of curbing that has been used since the road-course was re-arranged seven years ago.  “We looked at that curb between every session; we looked at it at night and in the morning and there was no indication…that there was really anything wrong with that curbing.”  He called the delamination of it “a little bit of a surprise for us.”

Almendinger is a full-time Xfinity driver for Kaulig Racing, which fields a Cup car for a limited number of races. His win came in his fourth Cup race of the year.  It does not qualify him for one of the sixteen playoff spots for the championship because he’s not a full-time driver in NASCAR’s premier series. The win is the first Cup win for Kaulig.

The win at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was particularly emotional for Almendinger, who drove for Penske in the 2013 Indianapolis 500.

He had the lead with seventy laps left when a seatbelt clasp came loose and he had to make a pit stop to get it fixed. He finished seventh, about four seconds behind Tony Kanaan, who set a speed record for the 500 that stood until this year..

Hamlin, who won seven times last year, remains winless this year. He wound up 23rd in the race but has enough points to be in the playoffs. However, his end-of-race disaster coupled with Kyle Larson’s third-place finish leaves Hamlin 22 points behind Larson for the regular season points championship and the bonus playoff points that go with it.

NASCAR has two races left before the 16-driver shootout field is set.

(Photo Credits: Rick Gevers, Bob Priddy)