The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was the genius.

I am going to win this contest. I know I've said it in the past, but this time I mean it. This contest was designed for me to win.
A particular automotive parts manufacturer, whose identity I can't disclose lest you also enter the contest and diminish my chances, is giving the winner (me) $25,000 to spend on a car at the auctions in Monterey, CA the middle of August. Mecum, RM, and Russo-Steele will all conduct auctions during that week.
But wait! There's more!!
The winner will have the help of Wayne Carini in making his (my) choice and during the bidding process.

If you don't know who Wayne Carini is you need to watch Chasing Classic Cars on the Velocity channel (cable). It is the best car show on TV. Pam enjoys it, too. A very briskly paced 30-minute show during which Wayne hunts down classic cars of all types. He has a very successful small dealership in Connecticut that specializes in rare and classic cars. For this show he finds cars through his connections in the business or some other means, negotiates to purchase them, does necessary restoration work, and then sells them, usually at one of the major auctions. The typical show follows two or three cars, but there are variations. Sometimes he's buying at auction, sometimes he buys and keeps, and sometimes he acts as the agent for a buyer or seller. That's what he's going to do for ME as the buyer when I win this contest.

If you haven't seen Chasing Classic Cars you need to. It has been around for several seasons and they run older shows often. (Think NCIS about cars.) If you don't have it on your channel listing make the switch to DirectTV so you do. Trust me on this one. Besides, there's a good chance I will be featured on one of the shows when he helps me choose and buy my next car.

The "Fast and Furious" issue in D.C., which today included the President invoking executive privilege, is especially big news here. It started with an ATF sting operation that allowed illegal guns from the U.S. to be trafiked from southern AZ into Mexico so they could trace them and catch the bad guys. In the end over 1,000 firearms including assault rifles were sold illegally to buyers who then took them south of the border. The problem: ATF couldn't manage their own program and lost track of the weapons... until two of them showed up just north of the AZ/Mexico border where they were used to kill a U.S. immigration officer. That's when the thing hit the fan and Congress got involved. Understandably, the President's use of executive privilege on this isn't getting a real favorable response here. I expect to see the agent's family on TV again tonight.

A final score of 14 to 10 sounds like a football game. But in this case it's the D'backs over the Mariners. The fans got their money's worth this time!

I've heard that in the entire state of Arizona there is one - count 'em - one natural lake, Stoneman Lake.
This is the place where I mention how many lakes we have in Arizona but that seems to be a hard number to come by, in part because some of them dry up during the summer. That makes it tough to distinguish between a lake and a puddle.
About 15 miles north of our house is Lake Pleasant, with 10,000 surface acres of water created by the Waddell Dam. It's the major water recreation site for the Phoenix metro area. So this time of year, especially on weekends, the major streets and grocery store parking lots (read: beer retailers) near us are filled with huge pickup trucks pulling ridiculously big boats that look like they're going 100 mph just sitting on the 3-axle trailer.
I have no idea what a truck or a boat like that costs. I also don't understand its purpose (or raison d'être per last Sunday's sermon at Pathway). Yes, I'm ADD, but going real fast on the water to travel from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular, just to turn around and reverse the route seems to me to have very limited entertainment value. It's not like the terrain and scenery change. It's water!
How someone else chooses to spend their disposable income (or accumulate debt) is their business. But every time I see those two monsters joined butt-to-nose I wonder about the people who find that fun the third or fourth time.
Just sayin'.