Today’s Rave: 24 Hours of LeMons

I ran across something terribly amusing the other day while looking at some Paris Auto Show pictures in the New York Times. And something more amusing than the French electric car concepts, some of the most unabashedly ugly cars I’ve seen a while; by the way, they’re not “so ugly they’re cute.” They’re just ugly.

No, what I refer to is a race that is a parody of the famous LeMans 24-hours endurance race called the 24 Hours of LeMons. Lemons, get it? Like terrible cars? Allow me to elaborate.

The car you enter into the race has to cost (aside from safety equipment, tires, and breaks) $500. That’s it. I’m sure with some imagination you can conjure up a few $300-400 jalopies in your mind. Then a hundred bucks or so to replace the fan belts and a few other minor repairs, and then if you have any money left over, you can weld a Bible to the hood because only God could prevent your car from exploding on Lap 5.

That was a joke. Any religious icon will work equally well at not accomplishing anything whatsoever.

The trick, in this race, is not to get first place. No one has ever “finished” this race. You simply have to win in one of three possible categories. If your heap-on-wheels manages to complete the biggest number of laps without breaking down, you win the distance prize. If people love your car, your attitude, or the way you’ve done your hair, you win the People’s Choice award. And if you manage to keep together an especially horrible, pathetic looking and underperforming car that is more or less guaranteed to break down (old Maseratis or British cars) for even half the race, you win the Index of Effluency award.
I think the description at their FAQ says it best:

Yeah, it’s, like, real racing, but it’s not like you’ll be going particularly fast. You’ll be lucky to break 70 mph as rule. It’s kinda like a loud, hot, noisy version of driving to work. For a really, really long time. Without actually getting anywhere. And it’s a lot harder to drink coffee through the helmet. Oh, and, you know, it’s more dangerous.

This is the anti-race. I couldn’t be happier with this concept. It’s people just trying to race junkers, and believe me, a few pictures of these hoopty cars chugging along with smoke pouring from their hoods and makeshift crap fastened all over it is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Check out some of the pics at the website: you will not be disappointed.

http://www.24hoursoflemons.com/

Today’s Rave: Baseball, Part 2

I’ve been behind on posts this week because I haven’t had much time to myself at work. However, I’ll make that up today with a post about baseball. After realizing that I may have had a secret liking for baseball, I decided to see once and for all whether this was the case. I read a bunch of articles on it on Wikipedia, bought a baseball strategy book, and played a couple of baseball video games. I was led to one inevitable conclusion.

I like baseball.

I used to think it was fairly boring, but now that I actually have a grasp of baseball strategy I can see a whole new layer of interesting stuff going on that was previously unknown to me. When I played baseball in middle school, there obviously wasn’t that much strategy being used because none of us were all that great. I just figured it was like a fancy version of kickball, you just swing away, run as fast as you can, and you take turns until someone wins. I didn’t see anything else to the game.

However, in real baseball, the process of, for example, choosing a batting lineup is a monstrous ordeal that can seriously affect your number of wins. Baseball, due to its semi-predictable nature, has a monstrous set of statistics (a branch of statistics known as sabermetrics) that actually work for strategy because the stats have a sort of feedback relationship. The more you know about anyone from their statistics, the better you can plan for them.

For example, after careful study of some team’s ace pitcher, you’ve learned that during certain counts, such as 0-2, or 2-2, or 3-1, or whatever, he is extremely likely to choose a certain pitch. If your batters know that, they have a much better chance of hitting in general. Also, if you know that in tough situations the pitcher leans on his best pitch, for example, a nasty slider, you have your batters work on hitting sliders before that game. By the same token, if their designated hitter has walloped balls more in a particular area of the strike zone, you’d drill your pitchers to pitch to avoid that area, although I suppose you might try to throw a change-up right through it to fake him out. Virtually all strategy in baseball is player-based. Studying the opposing team is half the battle, and I’m tempted to say even more important in baseball than in virtually any other game because it is much more predictable.

This actually seems like a pretty obvious thing in retrospect, but that’s probably why I never got into watching sports much as a kid. It would have been a lot more obvious if I’d played more of them, particularly in high school.

So now I’m watching the Cubs slowly claw their way past a .500 win ratio and actually enjoying it. There would be a nice narrative arc if I got into the Cubs just as they broke their century-long world series drought. Here’s hoping.

Speed Screed: Baseball

I have a confession: I wish I liked baseball more than I do. This had never much occurred to me before I moved to Chicago, but with the good old Cubs coming up on a century without a single World Series win, I suddenly find myself entranced by the fans’ endless devotion to these lovable losers. How could such a innocuous sport engender such fanatical loyalty? A hard question. I read about them every day in the newspaper. I find myself eagerly awaiting the next news about their recent miraculous game, only to see that it started so well….and yet again ended in abject failure. It brings a smile to my face. What other baseball team can really deliver that kind of macabre consistency?

So I started wondering if I’m a closet baseball fan. If I had to pick a sport that I liked generally, I would say football because the strategic elements are much more accessible to me, and the parallels to an actual physical battle (something I CAN understand) are much more obvious. It’s just an exciting game. Basketball bores me to no end, just people racing back and forth on a tiny court tossing a ball into a basket. But baseball….that always makes me stop and think.

Nevermind all that stuff about the national pastime. True or not, it’s not a good enough reason to watch it by itself. But I read these articles in the Sun-Times and start picking up little snippets of strategy that are not obvious to me. Perhaps the brutal irony of the Cubs’ performance is enough of a narrative excuse to get me into baseball when idle wondering was not enough to make me spend time on it.

Also, my friend Carl (who has posted comments a number of times) is (or at least was in college) a Red Sox fan and he has often remarked that one of the virtues of baseball is it doesn’t necessarily consume your whole attention like other sports. It’s paced so that you could be doing something else while watching it, like having a conversation or playing a game, and not really miss anything. I will admit that this is an intriguing advantage.

I think I may have to give baseball a try, and I think it might have to be with the Cubs. Just another great reason why moving to Chicago is going to change my life again.