Regardless, I did rise to the editorship before embarking on a freelance career in the late '60's.

I realize this is blasphemy, but a few weeks ago I tried to watch a NASCAR race being run at Talladega. I lasted about five minutes before terminal boredom overtook me. It appeared to be nothing more than a high-speed freeway commute--a mob of luridly painted, identical lumps of metal loping at 180 mph around the banking, fender to fender, nose to tail. Knowing the scenario would surely devolve into a multicar demolition derby that would thrill the goobers in the grandstands, I turned off the set to later learn that this time it was Jimmie Johnson who triggered the eight-car melee.

While greenies and their media flunkies continue to savage the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and rhapsodize about hybrids, hydrogen, electrics, natural gas, propane, nuclear, and God-knows-what-other panaceas, perhaps including bovine urine, there are no realistic, economically viable alternatives. None. Zero. Like it or not, as long as we remain dependent on the private automobile for transportation (roughly 80 percent of all movement in the nation is by car), we are harnessed to the IC gas engine.

Regardless, I did rise to the editorship before embarking on a freelance career in the late '60's.

A written regulation in NASCAR is about as reliable as an Egyptian immigration law.

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

The early 1970s was a time when illegal acts were in style. Everybody was going nuts with causes, most of them against the law.