North and South

Back from an ass-early departure yesterday for my third trip this season to beautiful Watkins Glen. NASCAR arrives there next weekend for the annual Winston-Nextel-Whatevertheycallitnow Cup race, and already there are many more signs of the imminent pilgrimage from below the Mason-Dixon line into our own Deliverance-like environs.

You know they're crazy about their claim to fame when you see one of those ubiquitous WELCOME RACE FANS signs on the grounds of St. Marys on the Lake Roman Catholic Church. Now, in fairness, I didn't stay long enough to check if it was a sign connected to the parish itself or just some function using the grounds, but if I'd gone inside I would have been looking for one or more of these telltale signs:

- Stations of the Cross re-arranged into a counter-clockwise oval;

- Confessionals marked with yellow caution flags for those confessing only venial sins, and red ones for mortal;

- Rather than denying Jesus, Peter passes Him three times;

- Paul and Philip required to wear restrictor plates while prosletyzing in Asia Minor and at Talledaga;

- John 20:28: upon seeing the evidence of the Lord's crucifixion, Thomas says, "I did not doubt thee, Lord, I was merely drafting!"

- The apocryphal 13th apostle, known cryptically as "the disciple Jesus hated," is depicted as actually being Jeff Gordon;

- Sacramental wine replaced with Busch Light;

- Parishioners still marvel at how Jesus went 40 races without a pit stop;

- Every square inch of priests' vestments covered with advertisements;

and the number one sign of NASCAR's invasion of the Church....

- Most of the congregation secretly admit they're there mainly for the good crucifixions.

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And speaking of Letterman (was I? that had nothing to do with him, did it?), I was right and truly impressed by this quote on officialgaiman, where Neil responded to a recent suggestion by a commentator that he was on the verge of becoming Serious Famous with the upcoming releases of All This Major Motion Picture stuff based on his work:

There's an interview over in Time Out New York today that suggests that I'm about going to move from whatever cult famousness I have to being someone who is recognised in delicatessens. I hope that doesn't happen. I've spent about 15 years turning down things like People Magazine and the David Letterman Show mostly because I didn't want to be famous in that way, remembering Stephen King's comment to me back in 1992 that if he had his life to live over again the main thing that he would change would be the "Do you know me?" American Express TV advert. He wouldn't do it, because somehow his face entered the public domain at that point. I prefer a world in which the people who don't know me or what I do also don't know my name or what I look like...

Sadly, he followed that with one about being recognized coming out of the Simpsons movie, leading to this exchange:

"I could move," I said. "I could head off to the Scottish Highlands. Or Patagonia. I could absolutely go to Patagonia and leave no forwarding address."

"Oh dad," said Holly. And then she pointed out, "You aren't allowed to vanish mysteriously until Maddy's eighteen."

"I could wear a hat," I said, a bit desperately.

"It wouldn't do any good," she said.

Actually, I don't think Maddy would mind a bit. She does an awesome job taking over when the boy is gone.