Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

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...