If Monte Carlo is the "face of F1," then Silverstone is the "brain of F1." This is the home race for so many teams, I can't even keep track of 'em. It's certainly one of the better tracks to show off the combination of grace and power that is a F1 car. PLUS, you get turn names like "Becketts," "Copse," and probably my all-time favorite, "Maggots."

AND it's just down the road from Official Overseas Reader Flotsky's home... I'm assuming you're going this year, Flotsky ol' boy? We want an on-site report!

Right. Starting on Friday at 8am, we get live coverage of the 2nd practice session. Wave, Flotsky! Set the VCR or TiVO it, 'cause it ain't bein' replayed!

Saturday brings us the Quals, live from 630a to 8a. SPEED will replay it on...

Sunday, from 2am to 330am.

And that's it. We get CBS coverage of the race on Sunday. Aren't we lucky?

Hopefully we'll have Danny Sullivan on the mic again... he wasn't (crashing!)NEARLY as (crashing!) bad as (crashing!) the (crashing!) other (crashing!) guy is.

I assume that Speed Channel will do the usual replay of the race with the Legendary Announce Team behind the mics a week later.

Warm beer and boiled meat. Enjoy!

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Did you know...

...that Silverstone was named for it's founder, Mr. Andrew Airport?

...that the UN coats used F1 tires in sugar, then transports them to hungry nations? Reportedly, they taste like doughnuts.

...that American Scott Speed's real first name is not "American" as the people at Speed Channel would have you believe, but is instead "Scott."

...that Kimi Raikkonen actually spoke his first coherent sentence in English in the Monaco Grand Prix's post-race press conference?

...that Takuma Sato has yet to take out another car this season?

...that I actually thought this post was a good idea?

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No questions. Just go look (and LISTEN!) to this guy play!

I caught an interview with him on WGN-AM radio out of Chicago back in December, but missed his appearance on Conan O'Brien later. He's stunningly good at what he does.

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If you tried to visit The Pond this weekend, you may have had some difficulty doing so. According to Pixy, all of MuNuVia was under a concerted DoS attack.

Then, if that wasn't enough, one of the two servers that run the .mu.nu extensions coughed a hard-drive onto the carpet.

How's that for a weekend's entertainment?

Now, I've sung Pixy's praises before, but let me take a moment to do so again. He has given me, and many others, free space to roam and blog, in an environment friendly to such things. For all intents and purposes I have essentially unlimited resources to do so on the MuNu servers.

When I first started The Pond here at MuNu, he actually apologized to me for "taking so long" to set up my account; it took him three days to get around to doing it.

I had a need to download something recently. The way it was set up, however, meant that I would have to d/l it from home... taking about 16 hours on my dialup connection. When I mentioned that to Pixy, he allowed me to d/l the thing from him directly, using bandwidth that he pays for, just so I could use a computer at Duck U.

And he does all this for free. He's never asked for a penny. He has no tipjar on his blog.

For all of the above reasons, I hereby proclaim Pixy Misa to be an Honorary Duck, with all the glory that brings unto him.

Thanks, Pixy.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 05:49 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Quack!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 04, 2006 07:28 PM (FRalS)

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It's been a slow week for F1 news. Other than the whole "Michael Parks His Car" fiasco, there's not been much going on of any real substance.

About the only interesting bit that's come out is that the Midland MF1 team might be sold. It appears that Lost Boys, the Dutch company that is one of MF1's sponsors, has made an $125 million offer to Alex Shnaider. That's about four times what he reportedly paid for Jordan in 2004. A nice little profit for him, and a deeper set of pockets for the team.

Shnaider has discovered what other privateers before him knew: it costs a LOT of money just to run a F1 team. To run a competitive team takes a lot MORE money on top of that, and Midland just can't afford to fork it out for no gain. It's not like a steel company would get much in the way of advertising benefit from an F1 sponsorship, yet that's essentially what Midland did when they acquired the team.

Car manufacturers like Renault, Honda, Toyota, BMW and Mercedes, it's obvious what the attraction is, however, which is why we've entered a period of factory teams. A side effect of that is the loss of players like Guido Minardi, Eddie Jordan, and other privateer teams.

Weird to think of a steel company as being a privateer, but there you are.

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...it's time to talk about the Marvel comic book character known as Wolverine. Over at Chizumatic, Steven says:

Wolverine has always struck me as being an odd one to be part of X-men, because he isn't really a mutant -- at least according to the Marvel origins. Canadian scientists operated on him and replaced essentially all his bones with metal replacements, and also installed those wonderful claws of his.

I spent nigh on two years working at a comic book/gaming store back in the early-mid-90s (which, coincidentally, is where I caught the anime bug). While I read a wide variety of comics when I was there, I 'specialized' in the X- series: X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Generation X, Cable, Excalibur, X-Force... and Wolverine.

In the Marvel Universe, Wolverine's bones weren't replaced by metal, but coated with unbreakable adamantium. And indeed, he thought that his claws WERE implanted by the Weapon X program scientists (his life before then was, at the time, completely unknown... he didn't even know if his name, Logan, really WAS his name).

In the classic Fatal Attractions storyline, it's revealed that his claws are actually made of bone covered with adamantium. This was as big a shock to Wolverine as it was to the readers; he assumed they had been implanted. Unfortunately, he found out the truth in a most uncomfortable way: Magneto, in the event that ultimately led to the creation of Onslaught, yanked the adamantium out of his body through his pores.

Ow.

It was his healing factor (which was his one acknowledged mutant power) that kept him alive, though grievously injured, during the end of the Fatal Attractions saga. Apocalypse eventually (2000) stuck the metal back onto Wolvie's skeleton, though if my memory serves, Logan wasn't thrilled about it before it happened (and the process turned him feral for a while).

So that's a somewhat long-winded way of saying "Wolverine's claws are made of bone." Yeesh.

Please understand that any of this information may be out of date. I haven't picked up a comic book probably in five years; knowing Marvel, it's entirely possible that it was discovered that Wolverine's bones are actually made out of cottage cheese or something.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 06:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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