The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly – X

The Good

Trading Vacations for Wildfires

A group of Hall County Firefighters are using a week's worth of vacation to battle the raging wildfires in south Georgia.

A half-dozen volunteers left Tuesday morning. They will work seven straight 12-hour days. When they sleep, it will be outdoors, sometimes near the fire so they can go to work at a moment’s notice.

…

They will relieve six Hall County firefighters who have spent the past nine days battling a wildfire that has burned and grown for a month. They have worked in an area of Georgia that is unfamiliar, while battling a fire that is like nothing they’ve ever seen.

Firefighters are awesome. They always step up. Thanks guys!

The Bad

Earnhardt Jr. penalized 100 points; crew chief fined, suspended

Less than a week after officially cutting ties with the team founded by his late father, Dale Earnhardt Jr. on Tuesday was docked 100 driver points by NASCAR as a result of a pre-race inspection this past weekend at Darlington Raceway.

Earnhardt was not the only member of DEI to take a hit, as crew chief Tony Eury Jr. was fined $100,000 and suspended six weeks. The suspension applies to the next seven Nextel Cup Series races, including Saturday's NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge.

The penalties stem from last weekend's Dodge Avenger 500, a race where Earnhardt finished eighth.

But the racing superstar's Chevrolet Impala had illegal rear-wing mounts, an infraction discovered during an inspection Saturday night. It marked the first car-parts penalty involving the "Car of Tomorrow" – or COT – a newly designed, safety-oriented racer.

…

"The car in question was a brand new car for the No. 8 team, and the brackets that were found to be nonconforming were built as test pieces before the final design was established by NASCAR," the statement said. "They should not have been on the car and with Tony Eury Jr. away from the track Thursday during inspection, the error was not caught.

WTF? Accidently using brackets that were "test pieces" before the final design was established amounts to a 100 point fine for Jr, and a six week suspension for Tony Eury, Jr.? Pardon me, but that's bullshit.

I'm all for steeper fines and larger point deductions for cheaters, but come on. Tony Eury, Jr. wasn't even at the track at the time, and he gets suspended? And for six weeks?

Remember the Daytona 500?

Two crew chiefs were suspended for four races and their drivers lost 50 points, and two other crew chiefs were suspended for two races and their drivers lost 25 points. They were all cheating. The first two had improperly ducted air into the car, a blatant violation. The other two had illegal fasteners with holes drilled in them. It's pretty safe to say they also knew they were cheating.

So why the harsh penalty? The spotlight is on Jr, so I guess they want to make an example of him while everyone is watching? It just doesn't make sense. But then again, when was the last time NASCAR officials made sense. Chalk another one up to inconsistency on their part.

The Ugly

Flickr = Censorship

Rebekka is a single mom and art student living in Iceland. She's an artist and a talented one at that. She does amazing things with her camera. Recently she discovered that a gallery Only-Dreemin had been ripping her off. They'd sold thousands of dollars worth of her images and when she caught them and tried to make them give her the money that they stole from her they refused. So Rebekka did what anyone with a following on the internet might do and she posted about her frustration and plight on her flickrstream. And her story resonated loudly with the flickr community. Her story made the front page of digg and by days end she had 100,000 views on this particular photograph with hundreds of supportive comments.

So what's got me pissed today? What's got me pissed today is that according to Rebekka, Flickr has removed her image from their site. That's right. Not only did they remove and kill her image and her *non-violent* words of protest, but they censored each and every one of us who commented on her photograph, who offered support to Rebekka, who shared in her frustration by wiping every single one of our comments off the face of the internet forever.

More bullshit. What the hell is Yahoo! thinking? Do they honestly think that censoring the community is going to strengthen it? No way. In fact, there is no better way to destroy a community than to start telling them what they can and cannot say.