The car-carrier hauling four sports cars to the tiny airport takes all afternoon. When he finally reaches the top, the driver’s shirt is off, sweat drizzling down his ample belly like a pork shoulder slow roasting at Extra Billy’s Barbecue. Curses spill from his snarl.

As the 300-pound man angrily unloads the cars, a 300-pound black bear roams one end of the runway, watching us warily. Planes landing here often buzz the runway first to scare of deer, bears or coyotes. In the opposite direction, a coyote tests the system, avoiding the bear and us. Deer sneak along the tall grass at the drop off into the valley towards Hot Springs.

We are here to put cars on HD for the Virginia Lottery’s Muscle Car Money. Later we will slice the images into 45-second, 30-second, 15-second and 5-second commercials riding on top of grinding, thumping drums and guitars.

The next morning, a yellow Camaro SS, charcoal Mustang GT, screaming red Challenger RT Hemi and a deep gray Charger RT Hemi line up facing the ceramic blue sky punctuated by clouds shaped like buttermilk drop-biscuits. Cameras aim at an S-curve in front of them.

These cars don’t just look fast. They are fast. Hundreds of horses hide under Detroit steel carved into retro sheet metal bringing back retro memories for anyone who lived in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  The Camaro and Challenger turn heads. The Mustang turns wicked lap times. The Charger sits alone in this bunch, like a pimply boy at an eighth grade dance, it’s sporty pedigree diminished by four doors and a police car reputation. But even as the 4^th wheel at a three-wheel roundup, it growls like an angry colon after bean dip and beer.

Tattooed crew – some wearing headbands, all carrying grip tools – mount high-def Canon 5D cameras with expensive lenses to hot, metal roofs and shiny fenders. One by one, the cars peel across the tarmac toward the runway looking for the perfect shot. Inside, some of the cams point at tachs, some at shifters, some at steering wheels. A large cinema camera called a Red is bolted to the rear of a Ford F-250. In its lens, muscle cars blow past, dropping back, then blow past again, over and over until it is exactly the way the director wants it. This dance goes on for two days.

The Challenger chases the camera truck over a slight arch in the runway that ripples the horizon. Out of sight, we hear tires screaming and gears shifting and V-8’s oiling cams and cylinders. Next the Mustang gets its turn in the barrel followed by the Camaro and Charger. It is a thing to behold.

This is a guy’s shoot. It is car porn, starring wicked RPM’s, sucking every guy’s metal dream into its exhaust-flavored vortex. These cars are designed to touch that reptilian part of a male’s brainstem housing the internal combustion engine. The rest of a guy is not much else but worthless decoration. That little spot between a man’s ears, however, is the driver’s seat. Muscle cars live here, not on the road. And today, our inner reptiles are smiling.

Virginia Lottery Muscle Car Money Behind the Scenes

Some music goes beyond the sound that comes out of your speakers. From time to time, these sounds define a cultural or political movement. In a few cases, they become the soundtrack for a generation.

Neil Young wailing, “four dead in Ohio,” still conjures memories of a black and white photograph of a young girl on one knee, panic stricken, next to the face-down body of a student shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.

“The Pusher,” written by Hoyt Axton, and growled by John Kay over a grinding Steppenwolf beat brings images of Easy Rider and a drug culture that slapped America’s conservatism right between their eyes and the sound machine. This is where my intentions went off the tracks.

I started out to write this piece about Steppenwolf. They cranked out several seminal songs in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (Magic Carpet Ride, Born To Be Wild). “The Pusher” sounds like a Steppenwolf song. No surprise there. But knowing Hoyt Axton wrote those words is an interesting contradiction. At least to me.

Growing up, I saw Hoyt Axton as sort of a folksy character like Glenn Campbell or Mac Davis. Then, when you see that he wrote “The Pusher,” it kind of twists in your head a little. I remember the notorious lyrics (“God damn the pusher man”) and I remember Hoyt Axton. I just can’t put the two memories together. John Kay’s voice, yes. Hoyt? No way.

Hoyt Axton wrote a lot of song you have heard for 50 years. He wrote “Joy To The World” (as in Three Dog Night’s “Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”) for god’s sake. He wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis and “Greenback Dollar” for the Kingston Trio. He wrote songs covered by Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt and John Denver. He wrote some pretty pop stuff. And then he wrote, “God damn the pusherman.” That is some first class contradiction with a true Southern bent. Got to like that.

Sabol is 67 now. He became famous by turning football into art (according to Joe Posnanski in Sports Illustrated his week). It is a great story if you haven’t read it in the Scorecard section.

Sabol put cameras at every angle, shot super slo-mo, put microphones on coaches, hired John Facenda to be “the voice of God,” and hired former music school teacher, Sam Spence, to create music that made the sport feel like a noble act of war.

Joe Namath jogging off the field pointing to the sky claiming a championship. Sabol shot it. Dick Butkus’s muddy hands. Sabol shot it. Steam coming from Ray Nitschke’s mouth. Sabol shot it. Franco Harris’s Immaculate Reception. Yep, Sabol.

Every famous moment we remember from the NFL is in our memories because Sabol put them there. ESPN may be in business because Sabol created the genre. So when you watch the Saints and the Colts and the Who on Sunday, think about Steve Sabol and NFL Films.

Then, for just a few moments, remember Tom Brookshire, who died last week at 78 from cancer. The former Philadelphia Eagle All-Pro became even more famous for his insights as he sat in a TV booth for hundreds of games with partner Pat Summerall telling us about this game we have come to treat like royalty. In case you are under 35 years old, John Madden replaced Brookshire in 1981. Some of us remember those days. But it is a game, after all. Sabol and Brookshire just made it seem a hell of a lot more important.

Whoa, dude. Who doesn’t want those side effects? Unusual dreams? It sounds like Woodstock. What is a usual dream? Being chased by snakes on skateboards? Your neighbor parking the space shuttle in your front yard? Going to work naked, but not realizing it until you are there? Flying through walls and hooking up with aliens? Eating a pizza the size of my house? My dog talking to me and sounding like a guy I worked with at Chiat/Day? Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters asking me if I am the key master? Outrunning bad guys wearing black robes and brandishing brass knuckles in the restroom at Grand Central Station? I’ve had all of those dreams, yet I have never taken this medication. Damn.

My dreams are normally so unusual, I wonder what kinds of dreams I would have? What is unusual for me? I can see the dream now. I’m sitting in a chair. The light is on. That’s it. That’s the entire dream. Just sitting in a chair with the light on. For me, that is an unusual dream.

If the Food Network producers had cut her hair and put her in a Florida State shirt, Paula Dean could have coached the Seminoles to victory over West Virginia and no one would have been the wiser. Same with Paula Dean’s cooking show. Put Bowden in a smock with a wig and he could sauté up something tastier than an opposing team – like salt pork surprise with meatloaf pudding balls.

After mentioning my observation to several people, they all agreed that the two were the same person. Have you ever seen Bobby and Paula in the same room? No. And you never will.

I love college football. Always have. But there are parts of it that chew at me. This is one of them:

My first B-52 experience happened in the early 1980’s at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. Before it closed in 1994, Carswell headquartered a lot of the behemoth bombers. They were going day and night, it seemed. I never knew where these things went all day. They took off and roamed the skies of America and then return like massive, metal birds to their nest next to Lake Worth. A B-52 Stratofortress coming in low overhead is not something you forget easily.

A B-52 is hardly subtle. It is a blunt instrument, a club for pounding opponents not into submission, but into little fleshy leftovers. I watched the wings getting wider as the airplane descended like a raptor on a rabbit. I felt very rabbit-ish, indeed, as I watched the eight groaning, double-barreled, turbojet engines pushing toward me. A B-52 would give stretch marks to the largest stadium in the country. Standing at the end of the runway, I thought about just how many people had witnessed this view, followed by pain and torment of a flavor so violent, no one gets a second taste. A B-52 can carry 70,000 pounds of weapons, some nuclear.

As a child in Montgomery, Alabama, our house was under the flight path of Maxwell Air Force Base. I can’t recall a B-52 at Maxwell among the wickedly fast fighter jets bursting air above us day and night leaving the sound barrier in their wake. That is why I was standing beside the highway in Fort Worth waiting for the black beast to belly down and smoke its tires on the asphalt strip.

The sound assaulted my ears in a way that brought Dr. Strangelove to mind. The sheer magnitude of a thing this big being able to fly is dinosauric. I squinted into the sky at the shape that had defined fear worldwide for 50 years. I understood exactly what this plane could do. Watching it fly over me and land in the distance put a knot in my gut like the feeling after seeing an accident on the highway.

Tex Johnston flew the first B-52 in 1952. Some variation of the workhorse has been in continuous service for the Air Force since 1955. The plane I watched twenty years ago was flying long before I was born. B-52’s dropped hydrogen bombs on the Bikini Atoll in 1956 when Eisenhower was president and Khruschev was running Russia. In Operation Rolling Thunder, B52’s dropped enough metal and explosives on Vietnam to probably build a country twice the size of Vietnam. B-52’s kept the hated Commies at bay during the protracted Cold War. B-52’s dropped bombs on Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991 and they launched missles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The plan is for them to be in service until 2040, eighty-something years after production ended. Few things built by man last that long and none of them can fly. 

There are several versions of B-52’s: B’s, C’s, D’s, F’s, G’s and H’s. The planes have been modified for over fifty years. Today its jets suck alternative synthetic fuel making the monster sort of green in a deadly way. 

My sighting was years ago. There was a time when big, clunky B-52’s, plated with Detroit Steel had their way with entire countries and continents. These behemoths no longer rule battlefields, replaced by faster, more accurate planes, laser-guided weaponry and deadly precision drones. Even so, they are still on those battlefields, lurking over the carnage.

It’s impressive how we can find ways to kill each other.

(flipping channels)

I have seen how everything is made.

(flipping channels)

I have been lost.

(flipping)

I can whisper to dogs and cook like Rachel (not Maddow) and I hope the bachelor drowns in that 24-person hot tub with twelve clawing women.

(flipping)

I know that the catch is not that deadly.

(flipping)

I understand that stars can dance.

(mindless channel flipping one after another)

Who cares if the NFL is reloading millionaires while the rest of the country suffers layoffs? Where is the love for Larry King and Al Roker? Steroids in baseball. The Shawshank Redemption. Andy, Barney, Gomer, Lucy, Gilligan – it is a 500-channel desert at the end of my remote control. Geez there’s Jeopardy. I’ll take April Sucks for $1,000, Alex.

(flip)

Oh, here we go. CNN. Trillions here. Corporate greed there. The little type scrolls across the bottom of the screen: Iraq, stock market, ugh; A, I and G are three letters I hope I never see again. Too big to fail? What is the right size to fail? Is my live savings too big to fail? Nope.

Strangely, humans learn more from losing than winning. Coaches won’t admit that – until they lose. Considering that April is the month that hosts April 15th, losing seems like an appropriate subject.

It is spring. Flowers crank up. Leaves put out. April showers bring May flowers. That tells me, get ready for some quadrupulous rain in April. Hello Mr. Cantore.

Years ago, when we lived in Texas, April was the month when the sky turned greenish purple and the wind did its damndest to hammer our car with baseball-sized hail and blow the shingles off our roof, even when the sun shined. That is April.

This is what April means: Jim Baker married Tammy Faye in April. Marvin Gaye was shot by his father in April. CBS fired Brent Mussburger in April. Iraq started using mustard gas on civilians in April. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe April just really sucks.

I attempted to talk to a woman in a grocery store; get her April wisdom. Here is what she said:

“I have pepper spray.”

That is April.

May can’t get here fast enough.

The concept of food is simple: find it, prep it, cook and eat it. Tonight’s Iron Chef, like every episode, added yards to the process. One chef was painting with balsamic vinegar. One chef made little veggie sculptures with goop from a food processor. An engineering contraption was churning out dough or perhaps it was something else, I’m not sure. I lost track while Alton Brown tongue-wrestled sentences pontificating about kosher salt.

How do all of those chefs in Kitchen Stadium just rip into the secret ingredient so perfectly? How do they know what they’re about to be making instantly if it was, indeed, a secret just 18 seconds ago? The Bruce Lee fellow passionately unveils the star ingredient as if he is about to attack Jackie Chan and immediately, every person wearing a white uniform is playing their part like the same symphony went off in their heads simultaneously. I’m sorry but I think they’re not showing us the part where the head chef sits down with a pencil and paper and scratches his head and looks out the window and tries to figure out what the hell he’s going to whip up with that big, smoking table filled with supposedly secret whatever. It is just too damned perfect.

Tonight’s secret ingredient was basil. Basil. Are you kidding me? You can put basil in anything. One chef made ice cream out of the stuff. Are the producers of the Food Network running out of ingredients? Basil? How about salt? Perhaps pepper or water will be next. No matter, I’m a sucker. I watched it like it was North Carolina and Duke tied with a minute to play and the Tar Heels are about to nail the winning tre.

I didn’t even recognize the guy playing the Iron Chef. No Bobby Flay, no Cat Cora, no Mario B. Who was this guy? Maybe I have missed too many episodes lately. I’m loosing my Iron Chefishness. I feel like the first time I watched Deadliest Catch and said, “So?” I mean every week they are out on that boat in rough water, right? Crabs maybe? Maybe not? Some guy gets his fingers smashed. Another guy gets pissed off. There is bad weather. Forgive me but that’s not unlike making a show about some Nebraska farm guys plowing every week.

“Hey, Hubert, watch your hand or that combine will –“ Squish. “Oh damn. That’s gonna leave a mark. Grab that thing. Dust it off. If we get to the ER fast enough they can probably sew it back on.”

Next week, Hubert is up on the combine again, hand all bandaged up, couple of fingers lost to the gears. A storm is whipping the plains like Hulk Hogan after two pots of coffee. There is yelling and grimacing. Deep voiced announcer: “Next on Combine.” Cut to a big old boy standing on the combine. “Watch your foot, Hank!” Crunch. Damn, another one.

These shows have a pattern. Every week on “How It’s Made” they make something. You see what I mean? Every week on MTV, some beautiful twentysomethings pile up in a house together and we watch them bitch and moan and smite each other with insults, and after a few episodes, someone wins something and ends up in People magazine or on a website, wearing no underwear. That’s the pattern.

I want to see Iron Chef  pit two guys from Assback, Alabama in Bryant-Denny Stadium with 92,000 people and a Weber Grill. The ingredient will be a greased pig. One of them has to catch it. What happens next is not scripted.

Before you get upset about the cruelty of this heinous premise, there is a twist. If you have ever tried to catch a greased pig, you already know that the advantage goes to the pig, big time. So sans the escaped porker, the two contestants must square off in a best two-out-of-three wrestling match. The loser must grill and eat a football.

The frilly, little dishes served tonight on Iron Chef were no less preposterous. A dab of this, a sprig of that, a dollop of some green, syrupy plant matter squeezed from a Glad bag with a tiny hole in the corner.

Where’s the hubcap-sized slab of chicken fried steak as crusty as a scab on an elephant’s knee? Where’s a chunk of country-cured ham, salty enough to kill all three judges and Alton Brown just for looking at it? Where’s a mess of turnips and yams both hot and sweet enough to get you elected governor in Mississippi?

I’m waiting for the day when they uncover that table on Iron Chef and there sits nothing but a deep fryer. Who cares what they fry up in it? Pass the Lisinopril.