An Introduction (of Sorts) and a Farewell (of Sorts)

Hi, everybody. Speedgeek here. Some of you might be familiar with my work, but a lot of you may not, so I feel compelled to drop a few words up here to let you know who I am and what exactly it is that I think I'm doing here.

As you might figure from my name, I'm a racing fan. I'm also a sports fan in general, and so I very much enjoy reading the non-racing stuff that Wedge, Ron and Deuce write here, but my main forte and what you'll read the most from me is racing stuff. IndyCar and Formula 1 are the two main series that I follow and dedicate my time to, but I also follow the American Le Mans Series pretty thoroughly and I also stay pretty well up to date with GrandAm (hey, the Daytona 24 Hours and Blogathon 2011, are just around the corner, right?), the three top NASCAR series, the European Le Mans Series and Le Mans Intercontinental Cup, and lots of the junior formula and undercard series (including but certainly not limited to Indy Lights, Star Mazda, USF2000, SCCA World Challenge, GP2, Australian V8 Supercars, German DTM, and on and on). I'm also a bit of a gearhead, and enjoy talking about street cars and nuts and bolts stuff, but I'll probably leave that stuff to other sites, if I ever do get around to writing about it. This is a sports site, right?

OK, as far as what I'm doing here, I was invited by the staff of Grab Bag Sports to join up with them a few months ago. In my usual timeline of getting around to things, here I am about five months later getting to my first post. Hooray for me! Anyway, my sincerest thanks to the guys here for taking me on board and thanks to all their regular readers for reading (assuming you're still reading this far down in a post that is probably only interesting to me) whatever it is that I might come up with.

Oh, and as Ron started out when this site relaunched as Grab Bag Sports, I also have a grab bag tale of my own to share. Growing up, my brother and I went to A LOT of baseball card shows. He was, being the older of the two of us, far more invested in baseball cards, both monetarily and intellectually, and so he spent most of his time at shows wheeling and dealing and looking for his next investment that was a sure thing to increase in value by 300-800% (by the way, I wonder if he still has that stack of 100 Dave Martinez rookie cards that he bought for like $0.06 a piece?). I spent most of my time wandering around looking for Ryne Sandberg cards, caches of Donruss, so that I could work on scratching a few more cards off of my sometimes-shortening checklist of cards that I needed from the '85 to '88 sets (damn that Barry Bonds rookie card that I still need to this day to finish off the '87 set), and getting sucked in by various tables of "grab bags". I was a total sucker (as my brother told me vociferously and repeatedly), and so I probably spent $150 of my hard earned allowance over the years on what probably turned out to be about $21 worth of assorted commons and Rated Rookies that never panned out. I guess that all that taught me a valuable lesson: don't play the lottery. Also: never trust greasy looking card dealers because there really is only one Bo Jackson and one Orel Hershiser in that entire table worth of bags.


With all of that out of the way, I also have a farewell to make today. As many of GBS's faithful readers might be aware, the esteemed Roy Hobbson of The Silent Pagoda has hung up his spurs and The Pagoda is being deposited in a mini-storage somewhere west of Plainfield. There have been a couple of hints dropped on Twitter that we may not have seen the last of Roy, but at the very least, he's on a good long break for a while. Um, 6 to 8 years with time off for good behavior, to be exact, I think. Anyway, Roy's a solid fella (that stuff that happened in the Coke Lot after Carb Day this year notwithstanding), and a heck of a writer, so I sincerely hope that he finds his way back to The Internets sometime soon. Thanks for all the entertainment you've provided over the last two years, Roy. We'll keep the closet well stocked with Febreeze (for external and internal use, to be sure) until you get back.