Of al the dopey sports that I don’t get, car racing tops the list (or takes the cake, if you prefer). Cars zooming around a track at dangerous speeds. Is this really any fun? Not unless somebody crashes. And then you feel like a heel for enjoying the disaster, for the ‘them not me’ of it all. (After all, when we stop on the highway to slowly take in a nasty accident aren’t we really thinking that?) With that little preamble done with, lets proceed to a very peculiar newsreel from 1947 featuring the death of a sports car driver named Shorty Cantion at the Indy 500.I had to watch this one minute of film twice to figure out where the fatal crash happened. That’s because it wasn’t a major flameout like you might expect to happen nowadays. Instead, in those pre-roll bar and seatbelts days, he died from the side impact, his neck breaking as his head swings to the right and left. The most disturbing thing here isn’t the crash itself–it’s the narrators delivery, which is chirpily unemotional to say the least. It’s as if dying during a race were merely an unfortunate by-product of the job. Did this have something to do with the war having just ended, with a general numbness to mortality having set in? The final insult is the absurdity of the cars themselves, the lack of any aerodynamic design and the goofy tinker-toy vibe they give off. I rank car-racing as the silliest sport next to tractor-pulls, and only a notch above golf as the most boring. Then there’s the bull fights, a sport so dreadful that I hate to dignify it by including it in a list of ‘sporting’ events. Although the Three Stooges ‘What’s The Matador’ manages to inject a modicum of humor into the hideous ritual. With that, I sign off. It’s lunchtime and I’m not sure what I’m having yet…