Warning: Lewdness ahead.

Perchance to Dream
Last night, I dreamt I was a spy, & inside the dream I knew it was the sequel to a dream I had several weeks hence. The dream took place inside a wood-paneled public house, a warm, inviting place. I ordered a pint, but instead of a Guinness was served something colorful & fruity that the barkeep insisted was a pint of bitter. Next thing, without any segue, I was defending a distressed damsel from I-know-not-what. This cut away to the damsel performing fellatio on me, though not quite me, since the knob she was gobbling was grotesque & preposterously enormous, like something out of pornography. I, the me who was watching the dream, squirmed uncomfortably 'til the action returned to the public house, where I was defending the damsel (now revealed as more of a trollop) with a gas-gun that shot a variety of liquid chemicals. If the waking world influences our dreams, I suspect this is the influence of recently re-reading the adventures of Metamorpho, the Element Man. There was no resolution to the dream, but as I hit the snooze button & drifted in & out of sleep I composed the blog post about the dream, though in my half-awake state that post seemed much more elegant than the above lines. Of course, it's not as if my half-awake self had the presence of mind to write down his supposedly brilliant account; so, he can take a hike, the pervert.

All clear! Lewdness concluded. All clear!

This week in Motorsport
Rally Monkey
World Rally Championship
Round 11
Rallye de France Alsace
Friday-Sunday, 5-7 October 2012

On Sunday, eight-time World Champion Sébastien Loeb ('04, '05, '06, '07, '08, '09, '10, '11; or, '04-'11) of the Citroën factory team prevailed in the French round of the W.R.C., which included a stage run through Loeb's hometown of Haguenau, Alsace, to win his & co-driver Daniel Elena's ninth consecutive World Championship. It was Loeb's eighth victory out of this season's eleven rallies, & the seventy-fifth win of his storied career. With Loeb's victory & a third-place finish for teammate Mikko Hirvonen, the Citroën World Rally Team secured their eighth Constructors' Championship. Loeb's driving is a thing of beauty, & to see a rally progress is to glimpse why he has been so dominant. His speed is in a class all its own. Hirvonen, himself three-time runner-up to Loeb in the W.R.C., has identical equipment, but cannot consistently match Loeb's blistering pace. The factory Fords, piloted by '03 World Champion Petter Solberg & "Flying Finn" Jari-Matti Latvala, the only man besides Loeb to have won a rally so far in 2012 (three wins, actually), count themselves in contention if they steal a few stage wins away from Loeb, even as he retains the overall lead of a rally. Prior to the Rallye de France Alsace, Loeb announced that he & Elena will drive only a partial W.R.C. schedule, anywhere from as few as two to as many as five out of thirteen rallies; so, a new champion, or at least a champion other than Loeb, will be crowned. Loeb will drive a partial season in the World Touring Car Championship, before a potential full-season campaign in 2014, & he may also return to Le Mans, where he has a career-best finish of second in the '06 24 Heures du Mans, driving for Henri Pescarolo's intensely Gallic squad. There is speculation over whom will be Citroën's second full-season driver, alongside the returning Hirvonen, but nothing is yet decided.

As to the rally itself, if you saw footage over the weekend of a race car plunging out of control through a French vineyard, careening into a utility pole that then fell atop the wee race car, yeah, that was from the Rallye de France Alsace, an unscheduled off-road excursion by Solberg & co-driver Chris Patterson. An old axiom states that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I suspect that's a load of dingo's kidneys. The next round of the W.R.C. is the Rally d'Italia, ahead of the season-ending Rally de España in November.