HossC

We had the prospect of a great finale with the two title contenders starting first and second. As a bonus, the race was also live on free-to-air TV. I'm still annoyed by the ending, which is why I didn't post the result myself. What a complete mess it turned out to be after such a great season. If it had been a straight wheel-to-wheel fight I'd have been fine with the outcome, but the race stewards seemed to decide which rules to follow as they went along. Normally they either resume racing in the order they stack up behind the safety car, or they let lapped cars overtake to unlap themselves, but yesterday they just let the five cars between Lewis and Max go through and almost immediately restarted the race. Mercedes still plan to appeal the result, so this still may not be the end of it. At this point I'm not even sure if I'll be watching next year!

I'm sure Roger would have liked my afternoon - a charity tractor run went through town. I think each vehicle had to pay €20 to join the convoy, and there were plenty of people shaking buckets along the route. As well as tractors, there were also a good few trucks, and I nearly went deaf as they all sounded their horns as they went by. The majority were decorated with Santas and Christmas lights. I lost count of the number of vehicles, but they took almost half an hour to pass. I'd say there must've been around 200 altogether.

Thanks for the link, Hobie. It's quite fun, and there's a good few Dukes references in there. I just struggled slightly with the line "In that car all painted o'nge". Virtually nothing rhymes with orange (Blorenge (a mountain in Wales) and sporange (a technical word for a sac where spores are made) don't fit the theme), so maybe he should have put it in the middle of line. Other than that, good stuff.

The line was spoken by Lori in 'Southern Comfurts'. She was played by Lori Lethin, who seems to have stopped acting (at least on TV and in movies) in 1999.

Did you check the basement for silver thieves?

Yes, I'm supposed to be on a low fat diet. I was definitely nervous because they have to go through the worst case scenarios. I've still been sore today, but the painkillers seem to do the trick. I'm just hoping for a good night's sleep. I'm glad that covid hasn't affected your family too much, Roger. We've got tighter guidelines starting again this week. Let's hope that we don't have to go back to lockdown again before Christmas.

We had a very strange F1 race in Saudi Arabia today. It was the first race at a brand new street-style circuit, and it came with its fair share of incidents and controversy. There were a couple of crashes with red flags, several virtual safety cars for debris, and some "interesting" on-track moves. In the end, Lewis Hamilton won the race, with title rival Max Verstappen in second. They now go into next week's finale level on points.

Thanks, Hobie. I've just ventured out to get some groceries, and while I was walking it felt vaguely like I'd been punched in the stomach, but not too hard. Hopefully things will get even better tomorrow.

Another new experience for me yesterday - I had my first general anesthetic so that I could have my gallbladder removed. I'm still tired from the operation, and the incision points are a bit sore, but other than a bit of pain when I cough, I don't think I came out of it too badly.

It's from 'Share and Share Alike' in season 4.

Thanks for the review, Philip. It scores a reasonable 7.6 on IMDb, and gets three 10/10s, two 9/10s, a 4/10 and 3/10 in the reviews. I doubt that I'll get to see it anytime soon, so I'll have to make do with John Schneider in 'The Great Santa Claus Chase', 'A Dickens of a Christmas' (from the Dukes animated series) and of course 'Christmas Comes to Willow Creek'.

Sad news for F1 fans - Sir Frank Williams, founder and former team principal of the Williams Racing Formula 1 team, has died aged 79. He has been in a wheelchair since a car crash in France in 1986, but that didn't stop him having many successes in the sport. He and daughter Claire sold the Williams team to US investors just last year. Despite the change of ownership, the team still bears the Williams name. You can read more here.

They'll have to stop at Omega. It's lucky that there are only 24 letters in the Greek alphabet!

Skipper, which bit of this aren't you getting. ONLY REPLY TO THE PREVIOUS POST! If you carry on replying to old posts, I will start deleting your replies because they make no sense.

I've haven't had time to look into this yet, but how did the new variant get called Omicron? The last one I was aware of was Delta, so what happened to variants Epsilon through Xi?

Thanks, Hobie. I didn't have any beer for my birthday, but I did have some Irish cream liqueur and some French cognac (yes, together!).

Thanks, Roger. HazzardNet is very much a team effort by all the Hazzardites. I hope everyone's enjoying their turkey. I probably won't get any until nearer Christmas when turkey and ham starts to appear on menus. One of the local sandwich shops usually does a turkey, ham, stuffing and cranberry mayonnaise special which I'm looking forward to.

Thanks, Spike. It's been a while since the two have coincided, not that we celebrate Thanksgiving over here. As mentioned above, we do now have Black Friday. So far I've just had a quiet day at home. Hopefully I'll get to see a few friends over the weekend.

Thanks everyone. You guys in the US have really gone to a lot of trouble for my birthday this year.

You're obviously talking about the Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina, but it reminded me that I hadn't heard anything about the Rockingham Motor Speedway in the UK for a while. Sadly, it turns out that it closed three years ago, the stands have been demolished, and earlier this year it was being used to store up to 50,000 used cars. It only opened a couple of years before I moved to Ireland, so I never got a chance to visit, but it hosted several rounds of the British Touring Car Championship and appeared on many car-related TV shows. I think that now leaves EuroSpeedway Lausitz in Germany as the only speedway track in Europe. Although the track was sold to the vehicle inspection company Dekra in 2017, it still hosts DTM (German Touring Car Championship) races.

That's getting closer to the current F1 qualifying format, although F1 is planning more of the sprint races on a Saturday next year. That means that qualifying takes place on Friday to determine the grid for the sprint race on the Saturday, and the sprint race result determines the grid for the main race on the Sunday. There are also championship points available in in the sprint race: 3 for first, 2 for second and 1 for third.

Love (Remember the B-52s?)

gentlemen

When the video first went viral, most of the comments were making fun of how the reporter had misheard the chant. It only seems to be later that people suggested that she was covering up the real words.

I did briefly mention the '"Let's Go Brandon" memes over in the NASCAR thread on October 5th, but didn't go into details of its origin because, as you'll remember, this is a non-political forum! From what I read at the time, NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast was interviewing Brandon Brown after his victory in the NASCAR Xfinity Series Sparks 300 race at Talladega on October 2nd. It's not clear whether she was trying to cover up the crowd chant, or if she genuinely misheard it.