Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

So here's my account of what happened. It's been 10+ years so who knows how much if this has been embellished but it's a good story, I reserve the right to embellish, subject to corrections of fact, of course...anyway... 2007 VIR 13, we're running Pablo Deuce. We're pretty amped after the 24 Hours Nelson Ledges win, I'd won the ARRC the year before, the team was rocking. Team Boss (Knestis) was battling the flu so I was doing 2.5-3 hour stints and running a good pace all day. Think I did something like 6-7 hours of the 13 that year... We'd worked up a multi-lap lead by the end of the night. As I was closing the event I came up on some clod in a Pontiac Solstice that just was out there with no clue. I'd come rolling up on him in the night in the corners like I was beamed down by the Starship Enterprise and pass him, but then he'd "assimilate" my speeds (and headlights) and rocket in front of me on the straights (after all, I had - what?...

I will (shamefully) admit that the news three days ago of the suicide of Kate Spade had no affect on me. While I will lament any suicide, I had never heard of Kate Spade, so it simply became part of the regular churning news cycle. Generally, I don't wax eloquent about celebrity anything, even their deaths. But today is different. I don't fully understand why this one is different, but it is. Anthony Bourdain was not one of those faceless celebrity names, one we can put aside. Anthony Bourdain was a regular houseguest in my home, a vicarious friend, maybe even a mentor. He was more than a travel show, more than mindless entertainment. In point of fact, while certainly entertaining, Anthony leveraged our short entertainment attention span to actually teach us something about the rest of the world. Rather than just being bland shows about interesting (or at times shocking) foods, Bourdain's adventures leveraged our entertainment and pseudo-food interests to broaden our ...

October 2017 So Ed and I are drinking beer at NJMP and he mentions he wants to drive COTA (Circuit of the Americas) and NOLA (New Orleans Louisiana) race tracks. I noted I'd certainly like to check off those boxes myself someday. And then he points out that the 2018 SCCA races at COTA and NOLA were only a month apart down there. And then the VIR SCCA Super Tour is only a month after that. He'd clearly been thinkin' about this. I try to ignore him, but he hands me another beer. December 2017 The official race schedules come out and Ed has some Small House wine shipped to me. I still try to ignore him (it's good wine, though). But then he points out that, well, you know that he has to repair that transmission that I fragged at NJMP and it was going to be around a grand just in parts - and no tellin' what labor's gonna be, hoo-boy that could get into some serious coin...but then "well, maybe we could work out a deal...?" I couldn't refuse. After...