Vintage Hot Rods at the Winternationals Festival

Click and Clack won’t take my calls on their Car Talk radio show. They think my lack of mechanical know-how has to be an act. Nobody knows that little about cars.

When I was growing up, my Dad introduced me to two of his passions:  sports and engines. Guess which one stuck.

Of course there’s always been an intersection of the two, and motor sports have been wildly popular ever since the first guy said to his buddy, “I’ll bet my Model T can get to the end of that road faster than yours.” But until the advent of the “It’s Game Time Somewhere” Tour, I had never really ventured outside of the stick and ball world to check it out.
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I spent the other evening rooting like hell for a temperature of 10 degrees.

The alert reader may wonder why, given that when the thermometer displays 10 degrees, the description of the weather is never just “cold” – there’s always an adjective in front of it.

My motivation was simple:  At the time it was 0 degrees, and I was going to be spending the bulk of the next day outdoors at the Winter Dew Tour’s Killington, Vermont stop. By comparison, 10 degrees would be a huge improvement. At 10, we’d be talking “excruciatingly painful” as opposed to the “potentially rushed to the hospital” I normally associate with 0.

I really needn’t have worried though. I had the Ski Diva on my side.

The Ski Diva started out as a self-professed Ski Chick, but her years of working in the ski business have undoubtedly earned her a promotion. And for her efforts on my behalf she’s now up for Ski Sainthood (assuming there is such a designation).

In preparation for the “It’s Game Time Somewhere” Winter Swing, she had given me a checklist of clothing articles that I needed to think seriously about bringing along. None of which I actually owned, of course.
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…Continued from the previous post.

The PBR World Championship Trophy

It’s fortunate that I don’t wear a pacemaker, and that my heart is more or less sturdy. Because if I did, or if it wasn’t…well, The Bird would be on The Concorde to Paris right now, with the generous proceeds of my life insurance policy tucked under her wing.

And she’d have the Professional Bull Riders Tour to thank for the windfall.

See, I was recently sitting in the upper balcony of Las Vegas’s Thomas & Mack Center, just looking around and minding my own business when the time arrived to introduce the cowboys about to compete in the PBR World Finals.

It was not subtle.

But once I climbed out of the lap of the woman seated next to me and apologized for having landed there, I had to admit it was quite a spectacle to behold. Well, to visually behold, anyway.
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So there I was in Las Vegas – just off The Strip. All around me, nothing but neon, concrete, glass and steel. And cowboys.

If this blog was entitled “It’s Sesame Street Somewhere”, we’d be going into the “One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others” segment of the show right about now. And if you selected “cowboys” from the list above, you would receive…well OK, I don’t exactly know what the purse is for the average Sesame Street episode, but that’s beside the point.

I was surrounded by cowboys because the Professional Bull Riders Tour was in town, conducting their season-ending World Finals at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center. And bulls and cowboys go together like…well, like bulls and cowboys.
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I was born tragically devoid of the “cool” gene.

Seriously, it takes between six and ten iterations of the latest trend in popular culture to play out before I become vaguely aware of it. My friends will back me up on this – in the full bloom of youth, at my pinnacle of trend and fashion awareness, on my absolute best day…I was not cool.

I’m OK with this. I’ve made the necessary adjustments. I call my buddy Kels for updates and tutorials as needed.

But last week I had to face this deficiency head-on, for the “It’s Game Time Somewhere” Tour was headed to Costa Mesa for the 3rd annual Maloof Money Cup – one of the premiere events on the pro skateboarding circuit. If skateboarders actually acquiesced to having an organized “circuit”.
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