Random Sports Thoughts:
• The IWK 250, one of the most celebrated stock car races in Atlantic Canada, will attract thousands of race fans to James River this weekend, where they will camp out at Riverside Speedway, tailgate and take in the races, trying to shut out the rest of the world for a couple of days.
It will be the place to be in Nova Scotia, if you care at all about auto racing.
I’d be one of those people who does everything but watch the races (the whiny engines are hard on the nerves and, there are no guarantees we’d get to see a fiery wreck). We don’t want to see anyone get hurt of course – we’re not psychotic – but the screeching tires, the crunching sound of cars smashing into a wall, and the smoking rubble are things that you don’t want to see happen, but yet you can’t look away when they are happening.
Ok, maybe we are psychotic (but only a little bit).
While everyone else is in the grandstand, choking on exhaust and passing out from the heat, I’d be having a late-afternoon snooze in the back of my 70s-era Ford van before I lit the evening campfire, waiting for everyone to stagger back once the races are over. I actually don’t have a 70s-era van, but someday, maybe I will.
Probably not, though.
• If Canadian tennis player Milos Raonic made it through his quarterfinal match at Wimbledon on Wednesday afternoon (editor’s note: he lost), he would then have the honour of losing his semifinal matchup against Roger Federer, the greatest player in history (editor’s note: Federer also lost Wednesday, but still is the greatest). This is not to say that Raonic would have absolutely no chance against Federer (editor’s note: we’ll never know now, will we?), but it’d be one in a hundred, perhaps even one in a thousand.
A couple of years ago, people were talking as if Federer was getting close to the end, that his time as a great champion was running out. Now, he’s playing as well as he ever has (editor’s note: except for Wednesday).
• Local basketball expert Anse MacDonald, a proud native Cape Bretoner of Scottish descent, left me a phone message last week after he read about the upcoming Kilted golf tournament, where I took my annual lighthearted jabs at all those Scottish wannabes in their fabulous dresses.
“You like to live dangerously,” MacDonald said in a low, ominous voice, a tone that was blacker than the old coal mines that sustained Cape Breton workers for generations.
“Don’t go walking the streets after dark.”
Scary.
Non-Sports Thoughts of the Week:
• Seriously, get my order right and don’t forget that I’m sitting out in the parking lot doing a slow burn, waiting for like, 20 minutes. Don’t turn my fast-food experience into a slow-food experience. It’s hard to be nice when you don’t feel like it, so don’t make things any harder than they already are.
• There was a story on the Internet this week titled “Airplane etiquette: How to behave before and when you fly in the sky”.
You’d think you wouldn’t have to tell an adult such things, but without even reading it, here’s what you do (or in many cases, here’s what you don’t do): be polite and cooperative, don’t get drunk and start demanding to be bumped to first class, don’t be rude to the other passengers, don’t give the stewardess a hard time and don’t make jokes about having a bomb strapped to your back. They don’t like it when you do any of those things.
Happy flying.
Kevin Adshade is a reporter with The News. His column appears each week.
