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With gasoline prices soaring higher, will Mario Kart Wii, which launched Tuesday, be the future of auto racing?
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THIS WEEK, we try to pry the Wii Wheel out of our wee 4-year-old's hands, ponder the fate of suburbia (that means you, Fredericksburg-area readers) at the end of the automotive age, and ask for your badmouthing assistance in choosing a new cell phone and wireless carrier.
Answer: You, Dale Jr. and
Question: What's the future of NASCAR when you'll no longer be able to afford to drive to the racetrack?
With gas prices on a never-ending climb up Mount Bankrupt, this could be the future of NASCAR:
You racing Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a Mario Kart Wii Tournament on the Internet.
Think about it.
It's interactive. How cool is that? Instead of sitting in the stands watching Dale, waiting for him to wreck, you're actually racing Dale, trying to make him wreck.
At the rate gas prices are increasing, it'd save you the cost of burning what could well soon be $7 a gallon driving to the racetrack.
It'd save Dale's sponsor the cost of burning gas driving around the racetrack.
Anyway, Nintendo's new Mario Kart game for Wii is almost cool enough to ease the pain you'll soon be feeling as you pedal a bike to work instead of revving that big, gas-guzzling SUV that now costs nearly $100 to fill up.
Since it launched Tuesday, I've had a hard time prying the Wii Wheel away from my two young sons to play it. Believe me, it's fun.
And every few weeks, Nintendo has already begun worldwide racing tournaments on the Mario Kart Channel, an online feature that allows players to compete in tournaments and exchange taunts and race data with friends.
Your best time is recorded and added to the worldwide rankings.
See ya there, Dale. Wouldn't wanna be ya.
We got trouble, trouble, trouble right here in suburbia
At the end of last month, BusinessWeek featured an interesting article titled "Good-bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia?"
In it, author James Kunstler says "the Automotive Age is almost history" and that means that you're going to have to sell your "McMansion" for, oh, about a buck fifty, and move to D.C. to survive.
Kunstler is probably correct in suggesting that the era of commuting 100 miles
However, that doesn't mean that suburbs will become ghost towns.
It more likely means that something that should have happened a decade ago will finally come to pass--general acceptance of telecommuting.
If there's a silver lining to the fact that we've snored through the need to find alternative fuels for the last 30 years, it could be that those who now have to commute to Washington will be able to snooze longer in the morning.
The waste involved in climbing in a car at 5 a.m. and sitting in gridlock has never seemed more insane than it does now.
Which carrier should I avoid like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?
Which hot phone should
Call it the statute of liberty from bad cell phones and wireless carriers:
Give me your tired fingers, your cell phone bills making you poor,
Your huddled smart phone keyboards yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refusal of your wireless carriers to help on your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed handsets to me.
I lift my lamp beside the less-than-golden door.
Um, yeah. Anyway, my wireless contract with AT&T is up and I'm shopping around for a new personal cell phone.
At the same time, I'm choosing a new business mobile phone.
My advice will come later. First, I'm asking for yours. I'm not looking for recommendations, but warnings.
We learn best from getting burned. But maybe if those of you in the burn unit at Wireless General Hospital dish, I can stay out of cell phone intensive care and help others do the same.
Perhaps your pain won't be in vain.
"If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody," Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth famously said, "come sit next to me."
If you haven't got anything good to say about AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint or T-Mobile, I say, hunker down in my inbox.
Michael Zitz: 540/846-5163
Email: mikez@freelancestar.com
