I saw last night on the sports news that NASCAR has suspended Michael Waltrip's crew chief Larry Hyder indefinitely and fined him $100,000 for some kind of chicanery. It was already the fifth incident of cheating detected as the NASCAR season prepares to start. I think it had something to do with jet fuel in the engine manifold or something like that. Rumor has it that Hyder will be fired. Given that Waltrip is driving for Japanese auto maker Toyota, perhaps hara-kiri would be more appropriate. Hai!
The new gold-colored George Washington dollar coin comes out today, the first in a series of presidential dollar coins. There will be four different designs each year, and each President will be honored in the order that they served. My question: Will Grover Cleveland get two different coins, since he was both our 22nd and 24th Presidents? Cleveland was the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms. I think it would be kind of cool to have a "young Grover" coin and an "old Grover" coin, like the proposed "young Elvis" and "old Elvis" postage stamp designs. Only the "young Elvis" was actually used, of course.
UPDATE: YES! There will, indeed, be two Grover Cleveland coins, according to the release schedule from the U.S. Mint's site. Note that the release schedule only goes through Nixon in 2016. I'm guessing that the web page pre-dates Gerald Ford's death in December, and that only deceased Presidents will be honored. So the next question: What happens if Jimmy Carter is still alive in 2016? He'd be pushing 92 when his coin was due to come out. But the Ronald Reagan coin can't come out until after the Carter coin is issued...
Finally, the FBI investigators in Salt Lake City are still stumped about why 18-year-old Bosnian immigrant Sulejman Talovic went on his shooting spree, but they "had no reason to believe he was motivated by religious extremism or an act of terrorism," according to this morning's AP article.
"It's just unexplainable," said FBI agent Patrick Tiernan on Wednesday. "He was just walking around and shooting everyone he saw." 'Just unexplainable.' Right. This article in the Salt Lake Tribune said that Talovic had regularly attended Friday prayers at a mosque in Salt Lake City up until December, when his father had him get a full-time job. One wonders what was preached at this particular mosque. Was it "love thy neighbor as thyself"? As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
When someone considers everyone who doesn't believe what he believes to be an infidel worthy of death or enslavement, the world is a target-rich environment. Occam's Razor, folks. Occam's Razor.
