Real Men/Women of Genius #66

Bud Light presents…

REAL MEN OF GENIUS

{Re-al men of geeeeeene-yuss}

Today we salute you, Mr. Super-Popular Limited-Entry Ultramarathon Race Director That Refuses to Go To A Lottery.

{Mis-ter “It’s STILLLLL a fairrrr sys-stem of on-line ennnnnn-try!”}

So, this year your entire field was filled in, what, less than six minutes?
You get an annual permit from the National Forest Service for two-hundred-odd entries, and there are over fifteen thousand trail runners who desperately want to run your race. And just like you innovatively established back in the 1990’s, the only way to enter Your Race is on-line via website, credit card, and personal computer.

{“Whoa! We donnnnn’t e-ven neeeeeeed the ma-il-mannnnnn?”}

And at 12 noon on the appointed day all fifteen thousand are hovering over their keyboards, vaingloriously racing to enter a footrace for which footspeed is not a qualifier. Nope! It’s “keyboarding.” It’s how freaking fast you can type, fill-in all the cyber-blanks, and peck out the numbers of your VISA card–including its expiry and that stupid 3-digit secret code on the other side–all within this “secure, digitally encrypted safe electronic environment” and all within a mere fraction of a minute.

{“But… but… but… my billlllll-ing ad-dress is difffffff-ferrrrrr-ent!”}

Please. Just one plunk of the Backspace key and your entire entry is thrown out of sequence. Peeps are penalized if their account numbers aren’t pre-programmed or memorized. And the only runners to ever fill your field are never the best athletes, just the geekiest of all possible cyber-savvy geeks.

{“Ya meannnnnn, I was sup-posed to learn how to hack-in and reggggg-isss-ter earrrrrr-lyyyy???”}

So if ya don’t know Fortran, Cobol, C++, Assembler, HTML, or how to author macros, you are SOL. You are *not* going to get into this footrace. And, btw? LOL!

{“Thissss race was full beeeee-fore I even GOT to my ad-dressss!!”}

So crack open an ice-cold Bud Light once that convenient cybertronic race-registering process switches from “active” to “full,” O Masterful Cutting-Edge User I.D. and Forgotten Password Guy, because, while every other race director in the cosmos has at least tried to maintain fairness by going to a lottery, you still believe in your heart that computerized registration is the only way to go.

{Mis-ter Suuuu-per-Pop-u-lar Lim-i-ted-Ennnn-try Ul-tra-mar-a-thon Race Di-rec-tor That Re-fuuuuse-es to Go To A Lot-ter-yyyyy!}

Bud Light beer: we don’t care where they brew it; we just dig their commercials.

( O_O )

Yours troubly,
The Troubadour

Yankee Folly of the Day:
The whole trick to not burying yourself in a hole of your own making is to, well, just stop digging the hole.