Regan Smith's Long Road To First NASCAR Victory Lane Ends At Darlington

by Jeff Gluck

If trying to find a NASCAR ride is like dating, then Regan Smith has been rejected, kicked to the curb and had his heart broken enough times to say, 'The heck with this – I'm going to become a monk.'

Somehow, though, he persevered. Smith kept knocking on doors and sending love letters to teams, asking for a chance. And, on Saturday night, his first NASCAR Victory Lane date came from an unlikely source: The 'Lady in Black.'

Smith's road to Victory Lane at Darlington Raceway has been frustrating and long, often with little light at the end of the tunnel. That he even got there at all after numerous setbacks is nothing short of incredible. He's had only a tenuous hold on every ride in his career, and more than once had his job yanked out from under him.

They say NASCAR is a sport of highs and lows, but forgive Smith if he was left wondering when exactly he'd stop falling off a cliff after climbing an ant hill.

It all started with his very first Cup opportunity when, in 2007, Smith was Mark Martin's young protegé at Ginn Racing. The veteran Martin and youngster Smith split the No. 01 car (the Army-sponsored ride that almost won the Daytona 500 that year) and when Sterling Marlin was booted from the Waste Management car that June, the team told Smith he would have a full-time ride starting the following week.

This whole moving-up-the-ladder business was easy. Life was good.

But then, before Smith even made his first start in the new "full-time" ride, Ginn suddenly merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc. The points from Smith's car were assigned to Paul Menard, and the DEI bosses put Aric Almirola with Martin –which left Smith out in the cold.

It was a cruel turn of events. Smith had gone from being told he was promoted to a full-time Cup ride to being jobless – all within the span of a week.

A couple months later, though, things began to look up again. DEI signed Smith to a full-time ride for the following season, allowing him to race the 2008 season for Rookie of the Year honors.

But from the mid-point of the season, it was clear Smith's team was doomed. There was no sponsorship for the following year, and Smith was going to be out of a job again.

Suddenly, Smith put forth a great drive at Talladega Superspeedway that October and crossed the finish line in first place. It was perhaps going to be a job-saving move; maybe the team could suddenly get sponsorship after a dramatic win.

NASCAR, though, deemed Smith's last-second pass to be illegal. Not only was the win awarded to Tony Stewart instead, but the penalty dropped Smith to 18th place – denying him of his first career top-10 finish.

Incredibly, Smith never finished in the top 10 "officially" until this season; his first top-five ever was on Saturday night. And, quite frankly, there were no guarantees Smith would someday find redemption and get to Victory Lane for real.

So how did he end up doing burnouts at the track "Too Tough To Tame?"

After Smith's DEI ride went away, he accepted a part-time Sprint Cup job with Furniture Row Racing – a half-season deal in 2009. He hoped the Colorado-based team would return to a full schedule eventually, but that was no sure thing based on the trend of NASCAR teams cutting back their number of race dates.

Fortunately for Smith, he only had to wait a year. The team ran full-time in 2010, and Smith knew he finally had an opportunity to show what he could do.

But the team was without much success; Smith had only four top-15 finishes all season, and he privately wondered whether Furniture Row would fire him.

It didn't. Furniture Row stuck with Smith, and Smith stuck with Furniture Row. The driver showed more potential than ever this season – his qualifying average was the best in NASCAR heading into Darlington – and that potential finally turned into a sweet, euphoric, long-awaited win on Saturday night.

Now, no matter what other setbacks may await Smith in his career – and with his luck, you never know – the 27-year-old's perseverance and determination to succeed in NASCAR has resulted in at least one thing: Smith's face is on the Southern 500 trophy.

Smith takes maiden Cup victory

By Diego Mejia

Sunday, May 8th 2011, 04:08 GMT

NASACAR SPRINT

Regan Smith claimed his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series victory by fending off Carl Edwards in a close green-white-chequered finish at Darlington Raceway.

Smith, the 2008 rookie of the year, had crossed the finish line first at Talladega in October of that year but was deemed to have passed Tony Stewart by driving bellow the double-yellow line which limits where cars can race for position. Officials stripped him of victory back then, but nearly two and a half years later, the 27-year-old finally got to celebrate in victory lane at one of NASCAR's most legendary venues.

The Furniture Row racer grabbed the lead of the race when the caution waved with eight laps remaining after the engine of Jeff Burton's Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet expired. Smith was one of only three drivers who stayed on the track while the leaders pitted for two new tyres for the final sprint.

The green flag waved with five laps to go and Smith was able to remain up front before the caution came out three laps later for the final time following an incident ignited by contact between Joe Gibbs Racing's Kyle Busch and RCR's Kevin Harvick, with Clint Bowyer also getting involved as they fought hard for eighth place.

The final restart saw Smith get a nice push from the third-placed Penske Dodge of Brad Keselowski, who helped him stay ahead of a charging Carl Edwards as the penultimate lap of the race started. The Roush Fenway racer quickly moved up to second and placed Smith under pressure ahead of the final lap.

Smith drove right on the edge out of Turn 2 for the last time, getting sideways while trying to get on the power as quickly as possible. With the chequered flag within sight he did enough to keep Edwards behind him out of the last two corners, taking his first victory at NASCAR's top level in his 105th Cup start.

Having qualified better than any of his rivals this season with seven top-10 starts out of a possible 10, Smith was finally able to translate his speed into a top result - which was also the first victory for his squad and team-owner Barney Visser.

"I don't really know how to put it in words right now. It is so surreal," said Smith in disbelief. "We had a good car all night and we had to work for a way back. We kept working on it and these guys kept digging and digging and digging. We got track position. It was good out front with clean air. I hit the wall on the white-flag lap but the chances of me checking up there were about zero.

"My biggest concern on the initial restart, I wasn't as worried. It was the second restart when Carl was on the outside and he had the fresh tyres also or fresher tyres than I did. I spun them real bad on the first one and I just backed it up a bit of a notch on the second restart and went with it.

"It stuck and I held it wide open in [Turns] 1 and 2 on the first lap and tried to hold it wide open in [Turns] 3 and 4 also. The car was good when I got in clean air. That is all I say. I can't be prouder of this team."

Edwards led the race for 57 laps and was up front when he pitted for the last time under the penultimate caution. His second place further strengthens his lead in the standings, although he lamented not being able to wrap up what could have been his second win of the season.

"First of all, congratulations to Regan. He earned that," said Edwards. "On the restart, he spun the tyres a little bit and I thought, 'Alright, I'm not going to beat him to the line because I've got a good enough car with fresh tyres. I can beat him here.' And as soon as I started pedalling, Brad hooked on his rear bumper and they took off. I thought, 'Oh, man. I'm in trouble now.'

"I drove down into turns real hard and Brad did a good job not wrecking underneath me and then we raced hard and he won the race... I'm sure that will feel good tomorrow, but, right now, I wanted to win that race."

Keselowski, who also ventured on staying out when the leaders pitted for the last time, capitalised on his strategy to claim his best result of the season thus far on a day that saw his team-mate Kurt Busch go through yet another tough outing, finishing 27th.

Behind Keselowski, Red Bull's Kasey Kahne seemed poised to take victory as the lap-count faded but despite leading the most laps from pole position, he had to be content with fourth ahead of Stewart-Haas front-row partner Ryan Newman. Hamlin was a solid sixth, while Tony Stewart recovered from being a lap down due to an untimely green-flag stop to finish seventh.

Martin Truex Jr was 10th, recovering from a spin while entering the pits, with Kyle Busch following him in 11th. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver was at the centre of controversy following a late exchange with Harvick which dragged into the post-race as the RCR racer tried to show his displeasure to Busch when they drove into the pits after the race concluded.

A furious Harvick confronted Busch, who tried to avoid physical contact but still pushed his rival's car while driving away from the scene as Harvick attempted punching him with his right arm. The pair met with NASCAR officials in the sanctioning body's hauler after the race. Harvick was classified 17th in the end, having led the event for 47 laps.

Reigning champion Jimmie Johnson was 15th, recovering from contact with Juan Pablo Montoya and then a spin on his own later during the second half of the race.

As usual at Darlington the race was action packed, the caution waving 11 times, seven of them due to incidents.

Results - 370 laps:

Pos  Driver              Team/Car                         Time/Gap
 1.  Regan Smith         Furniture Row Chevrolet      3h53m51.000s
 2.  Carl Edwards        Roush Fenway Ford                + 0.196s
 3.  Brad Keselowski     Penske Dodge                     + 0.861s
 4.  Kasey Kahne         Red Bull Toyota                  + 1.100s
 5.  Ryan Newman         Stewart Haas Chevrolet           + 1.406s
 6.  Denny Hamlin        Gibbs Toyota                     + 1.682s
 7.  Tony Stewart        Stewart Haas Chevrolet           + 1.796s
 8.  Greg Biffle         Roush Fenway Ford                + 2.594s
 9.  Jamie McMurray      Earnhardt Ganassi Chevrolet      + 2.635s
10.  Martin Truex Jr     Waltrip Toyota                   + 2.827s
11.  Kyle Busch          Gibbs Toyota                     + 3.419s
12.  Jeff Gordon         Hendrick Chevrolet               + 3.682s
13.  Marcos Ambrose      Petty Ford                       + 4.392s
14.  Dale Earnhardt Jr   Hendrick Chevrolet               + 4.430s
15.  Jimmie Johnson      Hendrick Chevrolet               + 4.874s
16.  David Reutimann     Waltrip Toyota                   + 8.646s
17.  Kevin Harvick       Childress Chevrolet              + 9.729s
18.  Bobby Labonte       JTG Daugherty Toyota            + 27.111s
19.  Mark Martin         Hendrick Chevrolet                + 1 lap
20.  AJ Allmendinger     Petty Ford                        + 1 lap
21.  David Ragan         Roush Fenway Ford                 + 1 lap
22.  Paul Menard         Childress Chevrolet               + 1 lap
23.  Juan Pablo Montoya  Earnhardt Ganassi Chevrolet      + 2 laps
24.  Dave Blaney         Baldwin Chevrolet                + 3 laps
25.  Matt Kenseth        Roush Fenway Ford                + 4 laps
26.  Travis Kvapil       Front Row Ford                   + 5 laps
27.  Kurt Busch          Penske Dodge                     + 6 laps
28.  Ken Schrader        FAS Lane Ford                    + 6 laps
29.  Landon Cassill      Phoenix Chevrolet                + 6 laps
30.  Casey Mears         Germain Toyota                   + 6 laps
31.  Clint Bowyer        Childress Chevrolet              + 7 laps
32.  David Gilliland     Front Row Ford                   + 8 laps

Retirements:

     Jeff Burton         Childress Chevrolet              358 laps
     Brian Vickers       Red Bull Toyota                  332 laps*
     Joey Logano         Gibbs Toyota                     318 laps*
     Tony Raines         Front Row Ford                   172 laps
     Robby Gordon        Gordon Dodge                      87 laps
     TJ Bell             LTD Toyota                        67 laps
     JJ Yeley            Whitney Chevrolet                 34 laps
     Mike Skinner        Germain Toyota                    29 laps
     David Stremme       Inception Chevrolet               27 laps
     Joe Nemechek        NEMCO Toyota                      22 laps
     Michael McDowell    HP Toyota                          7 laps

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PBS kids games show goes interactive

BY COLLEEN DISKIN

The Record

STAFF WRITER

THE ELECTRIC COMPANY

5 p.m. weekdays, WNET/Channel 13

Note: After each episode, log onto PBSKIDSGO.org/ electriccompany

PBS kids games

For years, the classic children's show, "The Electric Company" opened with the signature line, "Hey you Guuuuuys!"

That was the verbal cue for school-age kids to gather around the television for some sketch comedy built around developing reading skills.

Now in the reinvented version of the much-heralded PBS show, that famous call is being used to lure kids to another screen — one in which they can create a digital version of themselves and become a character in the program they used to just passively watch.

The folks at Sesame Workshop — the non-profit educational organization that produces "The Electric Company" and its venerable forerunner "Sesame Street" — are calling this new marriage of television and Web a "transmedia experience."

"We are really letting the children be in the driver seat," said Erica Branch-Ridley, supervising producer of online content for "The Electric Company."

"The Electric Company," which aired for six seasons in the 1970s with a cast that included big-name stars Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno, was revamped in 2009 with a new cast and a similar mission of building reading and math skills in kids age 6 to 9.

This third season of the new "Electric Company" begins airing today with episodes that will end with a two-minute animated segment. In the 12 mini-episodes, two animated versions of characters in the cast will battle a villain who is using a "wordsuckeruppernator" to steal all the words on Earth. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger, with the characters shouting the show's famous catch phrase and a narrator telling kids to log onto PBSKIDSGO.org/electriccompany, to join the adventure.

Kids who decide to follow the story from the little screen to the littler screen are asked to design an avatar that looks like them — even choosing their own skin color. Producers say the interactive games are designed to build kids' math literacy by reinforcing the meaning of words like "graph," "measure" "scale" and "prove."

While PBS Kids has long had a website featuring games and activities connected to its programs — as do Disney, Nickelodeon and other children's networks — this is the first time the public broadcaster has attempted to create a virtual world that puts kids in the middle of the storyline. Such virtual worlds are now common in kids' play, having been popularized by Web-game sites such as Webkinz and Club Penguin.

Karen Fowler, the show's executive producer, calls the jump from television program to virtual Web game a "natural progression" for Sesame Workshop to make in trying to create educational programs for a generation of "digital natives."

"Kids are growing up in a media world that is incredibly available and fluid," Fowler said.

There are some, however, who question whether this new cross-platform strategy of trying to bring kids from the TV to the computer and back again is the proper role for PBS, long considered by parents as a trusted source of educational programming.

"This is really playing with dynamite," said Robert Kesten, president of the Screen-Time Institute of AFTAB, formerly known as America's Future Through Academic Progress.

Kesten is one of the promoters of Screen-Free Week, an annual event every April aimed at convincing families to unplug TVs and other media for a full week so they rediscover the joys of non-electronic entertainment.

Besides having qualms about a program that encourages kids to go from one sedentary activity — watching TV — to another — sitting in front of a computer, Kesten said he's disturbed by the creation of a virtual "Electric Company" that he fears kids could become too immersed in.

"The thing we really don't know is what the long-term impact is," Kesten said. "For a child it's much more difficult to distinguish programs from commercials and to draw lines between what's real and what isn't real."

Kesten criticizes the move as a means for the network to hold onto its share of the child audience in the face of growing competition.

The non-profit foundation was not primarily motivated by the desire to hold onto viewers and certainly supports the goal of making sure kids don't spend too much of their days on the couch, Fowler said. But its research has found that these new technologies can serve as a "new portal for education" — one that is more interactive than passively watching TV, she said.

Others who study the cultural impact of digital media are crediting PBS for recognizing that it needed to update its educational programming to fit the times.

A 2009 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children between 8 and 18 were using entertainment media an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes per day — a total that sounded a lot of alarm bells, particularly in light of the nation's obesity crisis. But one of the co-authors of the study — Professor Donald Roberts, professor emeritus in the department of communication at Stanford University — said it makes more sense to focus on improving content and on coaching parents to set limits than it does to hope that kids' appetite for new types of entertainment media will somehow decrease.

"I have to applaud 'Electric Company' for saying, 'OK, the technology is here. How do I put it to good use?' "

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Free eCards are a Popular Mother’s Day Alternative

 By
Janet Grdinich
– May 7, 2011

With Mother’s day on the horizon, time is running out to find that perfect Mother’s Day Card. Like many things digital, Mother’s day cards and other greeting cards for holidays and special occasions are being purchased online more and more. The numbers are growing for internet sales both for printable ecards as well as fully digital ecards, which are nothing more than an email sent to someone on your behalf. 

eCards Mothers Day

 

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barca vs manch

barca vs manch 2/0

Watch the UEFA Champions League Final LIVE Online - Manchester United vs Barcelona - Wednesday, May 27th 2009

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cute things falling asleep

Cute Things Falling Asleep

February 21, 2009 by suisy

Yes, I did steal the title, but maybe it’s OK if I link to the cute things site. Anyway, could there be a better title for this photo? I thought not.

This picture was taken some 12 years ago. The cute thing on the right will be a teenager, Sunday at 2:37 p.m. To celebrate, we are taking her on a special vacation. To that place down South where giant mice run the place and people deliberately seek out experiences that elicit terror. (What in the name of all that’s sane are we thinking?) It will be her first time there, and her first time on an airplane.

I hope to fully participate in this extravaganza, but just in case my illness doesn’t permit, I believe our accommodations will be pleasant enough that I can just hang out and read and still have enjoyment aplenty. I owe a huge thank you to charlote, who is a most excellent consultant on all matters related to the happiest place on earth. The planning would have done me in, had I not had the benefit of her considerable knowledge and experience.

I’ll be back in about a week. I’d surely appreciate your prayers for safe travel, a body that cooperates with the program, kind strangers and the like.

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three star recording studios

three star recording studios

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Center Stage announces '09-'10 lineup

Theater to feature some of audience's favorite actors in its newly structured season

By Mary Carole McCauley | mary.mccauley@baltsun.com

April 19, 2009

E. Faye Butler is the title character in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." (Courtesy of Richard Anderson / December 7, 2008)

There will be no shortage of star power at Center Stage next season. The troupe's major offerings for the 2009-2010 season were designed specifically to showcase the talents of some of the audience's favorite actors, including Larry O'Dwyer, Robert Dorfman and E. Faye Butler.

O'Dwyer's comic talents will be tapped in the cross-dressing role of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Dorfman will take time away from his busy film/television/theater career to perform David Sedaris' offbeat holiday monologue, The Santaland Diaries. And Butler will get an opportunity she has been craving - the chance to explore a serious role in a nonmusical - when she depicts the title character in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

"We wanted to build the season around several of our associate artists who are loved by our audience," says Irene Lewis, Center Stage's artistic director. The 2009-2010 season is scheduled to be officially announced Monday.

Organization officials announced in March that they are trying out a new structure for the troupe's 48th season. Instead of mounting six evening-length plays, as Center Stage has done in the past, this year that number will be reduced to four, which will be mounted in the 541-seat Pearlstone Theatre.

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top hat auto wash

Long Description:
Not sure how long this car wash has been around, but it's neon sign wasn't installed yesterday. Top Hat Auto Wash was recently one of the locations Hollywood used to shoot scenes for "Semi-Pro" starring Will Ferrel and Woody Harrelson. It's about a basketball team in Flint named the "Tropics". Due out in 2008. We'll see what hits the cutting room floor.

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