Reading

There is almost something almost deliciously sinful in today’s hectic and over scheduled climate in spending an entire day curled up on the couch with a good book.

I make a point to do so whenever possible.

Cheating

Cheating: An Inside Look at The Bad Things Good Nextel Cup Racers Do in Pursuit of Speed has been sitting on my book shelf for a while now, but I just got around to actually sitting down and reading it.

I was raised in a family of engineers, do-it-yourselfers and generally mechanically inclined men, so I was raised with a healthy respect of technical ingenuity and my-oh-my do they get ingenious in the Nextel Cup garage.

This book covers the technical aspect of the sport most histories of NASCAR do not. It covers the entire history of NASCAR from it’s first race in 1949 up to the 2004 season from strictly the garage’s point of view. Who did what, how NASCAR reacted and how it affected the rules into later seasons. “Cheating” is a fuzzy term in the garage and Jensen is conscientious about what were deliberate attempts to break the rules, such as the many imaginative hiding places for buckshot used to get a lighter car through the weigh-in process and a million and one places to hide extra fuel, and good mechanics/CC’s pushing the envelope by manipulating the grey areas in the rule books, such as the first experiments shaping the car for aero dynamics, building a car at 7/8th scale for instance. He also attempts to make sure both sides are heard in any debate on NASCAR rulings, through he doesn’t shy away from drawing some conclusions which are obvious to those sitting on the outside.

Cheating not only details the colorful mechanical attempts, and some of them were quite colorful, of CC’s to get more speed out of the car, but also outlines the development of the arcane NASCAR rulebook and NASCAR approach to cheating and how it rules on infractions, which to fans often seems arbitrary and ungoverned. Well, it is often still arbitrary and ungoverned, as witnessed when NASCAR seized one of Tony Stewart’s cars in 2003 and kept it for months, without finding anything but an offset rear window, or when one of Rusty Wallace’s engines was stripped down to the bare block out in the open for everyone in the garage to see, also finding nothing wrong. But the book does give some hints at the thought process and occasionally political concerns the NASCAR has to deal with when handing out fines, points penalities and suspensions for cheating. Whether you agree with those thought processes or not is up to you.

For most fans who know their sway bars from their track bars most of the mechanical discussion is easy enough to follow, through there are a couple parts where more familiarity with automotive mechanics definitely help picture what was done. This book merely a isn’t a delicious tell all of the dark side of NASCAR, but a more complete picture of the sport and the men and companies that shaped it. I believe this book is valuable to the NASCAR fan wanting to take the next step into fandom, to get more out of the sport by learning more about what happens when the car is not on the track. Most NASCAR fans that have come recently to the sport (which is a large number) have never heard names like Smoky Yunick, he and others rate only a passing mention or a footnote in most histories of the sport. Yet it is because of them that stock car racing evolved into what it is today, from cars off the show room floor to the highly engineered machines we watch today.

More Fun Reading

Also arrived yesterday was the latest edition of Archeology Magazine, who’s cover story was titled “The Next 50 Years” by Brian Fagan. Fagan is sort of “The Man” in archaeology right now. Not so much in the fore-front of research, but he has written text books on a wide variety of archaeological subjects, especially dealing in various pre-historical cultures all over the world. I have five of his books already from various courses I have taken. He's sort of archaeology's older statesman. Fagan’s editorial outlines where archeology is now and where it is going. The focus of Archaeology has turned from “proving history” of large flashy finds of tombs and ancient cities to “reconstructing past lifeways”, understanding how humans and cultures developed on this planet. This approach focuses not so much on the artifact one might see in a museum, but on the composition of those artifacts, where they came from, what they were constructed with and what they were used for.

One could say we have moved from “macro-archaeology” to a “micro-archaeology”. The clay from a pot can tell us where the clay was taken from the earth and the pot constructed, where it was found can tell us how far it traveled and any residue found can tell us what it contained, ergo what people considered valuable enough to store or transport. The medical technology now open to archaeologists now allow us to, as Fagan put it, “know more about Ramses II health than he did.”. Diet, illness, periods of famine, where the person grew up and where they lived, how they lived and died. All vital to understanding the movement of man across the world, studying which cultures were the most successful and learn from the mistakes less successful cultures made.

In a world where we have reached a crisis point in how we live, find alternative means of power and the need to strike a balance between nature and mankind, these are important lessons to study to save ourselves from making mistakes others have made before us.

However, Fagan observes there are still large finds being made. The sunken portion of ancient Alexandria for instance, and the Harappan cities uncovered by the Tsunami and along the Saraswati. South East Asia is especially tantalizing in it’s untouched wonders. For all it’s tourist foot-traffic Angkor Watt, for instance, has barely had it's surface scratched.

Between this and the rapid development in the West, this is actually a good time to be jumping into archaeology. Not only does there appear to be job security (always a nice thing), but the scope of research open, both academically and in the private sector, is unprecedented.

I confess I am not entirely sure where exactly I want to go yet. While most Maritime Historians in the U.S. tend to favor the romantic era of sail: Spanish Galleons, Nelson’s Navy and Tall Ships (and there's nothing wrong with that, I have all of O'Brian's books myself), I find myself more and more drawn to ancient ships and trade routes. The transmission of culture of the Silk Road for example, fascinates me. Do you realize that the great greek philosophers, Homer, Zoroaster (who’s monotheistic influenced the major monotheistic religions of the Middle east: Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the great prophets of the Bible, Buddha and Confucius were all alive in roughly the same 600 years? That some of them may have heard of the others as contemporaries? That while the distances involved precluded it, that some of them may have had the opportunity to actually sit down and talk? Well, while they themselves never did, their ideas certainly met up with one another. It's remarkable the explosion of cultural ideas during this period. It’s an epoch far more widespread than the Renaissance. It's on the scale of Industrailism, but it was philosophical and religious ideas spreading, not technology. And the main route of transmission wasn’t conquest, it was trade. The more we learn, the more realize how far reaching trade networks were in ancient times and how much information was transmitted through them. The sea obviously made up some of those trade routes, we're just beginning to suss out how much of them.

Well, as I said, it’s nice to know I have some job security waiting for me. :)

The issue also has some great articles on the recent excavation of the victims of Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, something the government has been reticent about exhuming and identifying until now. Also pictures from the oldest Etruscan tomb recently revealed by a looter trying to plea bargain. The artifacts are gone, but the frescoes are fascinating in their primitive iconography. (Lions for example, as seen above, were drawn by someone who had obviously never seen them from descriptions of someone who had never seen them either. They’re kind of cute in a mini-ferocious, “I’ll nip yer toes off! grr!” kind of way.) Then there is coverage of the conservation of the Egyptian Temple of Mut, a mother goddess, which has turned out to be older than suspected. It turns out it was yet another construction project on Hatshepsut’s list, almost 100 years before than previously assumed. And a blurb on the reopening of the sculpture museum at Copan, one of my favorite Central American sites as well as an interesting article on excavations in pacific North West of the Russians cites that were the centers of the fur trade network reaching as far south as North California in the 19th century.

Among other things, like the Germans have discovered that Mammoth’s had the same sort of gene for color that mice and humans do, meaning there could have been blonde mammoths.

A thought to give one pause when next you view a Natural History Museum diorama.

As Fagan observed, lots of stuff going on. :)