The Magnificent Moustache Malarkey
Day 8: The deadline deadline has worked its magic ahead of schedule, the deadline for the end of the Malarkey has been set for 27 June, Day 54 of the M.M.M., six months from the beginning of the Banzai Beard Bonanza II: Bonsai's Revenge. Go big or go home.

Magnificent!

Even those of you who despise "This Week in Motorsport" posts might wish to read the first paragraph, which is a stiflingly elaborate joke in somewhat poor taste. The real discussion of F1 doesn't begin until the second.

This Week in Motorsport
The former President of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (F.I.A.), Formula One's governing body, was Max Mosley, son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the years preceding the Second World War. I have strong personal motivations for arguing that a man should not, must not, be judged by the life and career of his father, not least because this is a fact of life over which a man has no control, but it is no small thing to be the son of a man who spent all of the Second World War either interned or under house arrest for sympathizing with bloody Nazi Germany. Max Mosley's successor as head of the F.I.A. is a chap named Jean Todt. Unfair though this most certainly is, given Mosley's family background and Todt's surname, should we now call the F.I.A. "Organisation Todt"? Poor tastelink.

I was in *shudder* Ohio last weekend visiting Where's Teddy? during the running of the Gran Premio de Espana. I've been catching up on all the excitement via the wonders of videotape and have so far watched the second Friday practice and Saturday's all-important qualifying, plus Speed's race-in-review program F1 Debrief recounting the last round of the World Championship, the frustrating and unsatisfactory Chinese Grand Prix, but have not yet watched the grand prix itself. The burr under my saddle is that this weekend is the Grand Prix de Monaco—eternal Monaco, the mere thought of it makes my heart soar—the very next weekend after Spain, following a three-week break since China. I love Formula One, but grands prix on consecutive weekends are a pain in the neck, all the more aggravating in light of August's four-week break between the Magyar Nagydij (Hungarian Grand Prix) and the Belgian Grand Prix*. I have so far managed to avoid learning the results of the race in perfidious Spain, but this has unfortunately necessitated a self-imposed blackout of all F1 news, taking some of the fun out of my usual online routine. I'm obligated to perform a bothersome favor for my verdammt vater tomorrow evening; so, in all likelihood I shan't have the chance to watch last Sunday's race before Friday morning's broadcast of practice from Monaco.

Project MERCATOR
And I've a birthday party to attend on Friday night, sure-to-be-fun socializing that will seriously cut into my sitting-alone-like-a-loser-in-front-of-the-television time. Crumbs! Plus, I should mow the lawn post haste before this week's rains make doing so a misery. I don't know if I'll be able to get caught up before the Grand Prix de Monaco on Sunday. Schieße!

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
The Offspring, "Hand Grenades" from Short Music for Short People (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: The only song in my library to have the element manganese as a lyric.

*Why are some grands prix rendered in English and others in a variety of differing languages? I'm following the stylings (minus titular sponsorships) used by Formula One itself. English is the lingua franca of F1, and most grands prix are known as the Country X Grand Prix, with some place names rendered as adjectives (the British Grand Prix, the Belgian Grand Prix) and others as nouns (the Singapore Grand Prix, the Bahrain Grand Prix). I like to let the foreign stylings stand on their own whenever possible, and I think that most of us can figure out that the Gran Premio de Espana means the Grand Prix of Spain (or Spanish Grand Prix), but in the case of the Hungarian Grand Prix, the Magyar Nagydij, I felt some parenthetical explanation was appropriate. Magyar? Okay, a lot of us know that the Hungarians call themselves the Magyars, fair enough, but Nagydij? Oy.

Interesting, is it not, that the Monaco Grand Prix is the Grand Prix de Monaco while the restored Canadian Grand Prix is the Grand Prix du Canada? De versus du. Is this due to some difference between the words Monaco and Canada? For example, in French is Canada feminine and Monaco masculine? Or does the difference lie in the archaic French spoken in Quebec versus the contemporary French used in the Principality of Monaco? Or is Grand Prix de Monaco not French at all, but rather Monégasque, a local dialect of Italian? Not interesting enough to quest after an answer, not for more than a few minutes before giving up and accepting my continued ignorance, but interesting nonetheless.