From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Perhaps the most enduring and memorable TV commercial in the 1980s and 90s was for monster truck rallies. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! See the monster truck rally at Mile High! … Kids tickets are still just five bucks! … You'll pay for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge! As a kid, the clips of big trucks jumping off ramps and driving over a row of big Detroit sedans looked really cool. I never asked my parents to go, though, so it mostly remained a highly-quotable bit of shared culture: "When is your birthday party? SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!"

A couple weeks ago, my sister in law asked my wife if we wanted to see the MonsterJam in Denver. My first question was whether it would be on SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY; our original plan was to go on SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY, but we ended up switching to the proper monster truck day. The event was at the Ball Arena (also used for basketball, hockey, lacrosse, and rock concerts) rather than Mile High (a proper football stadium), so I was curious how they were going to fit big trucks jumping all over the place. A central hill with various slopes and drops stood in the middle of the floor, with passages on two sides a little wider than a monster truck and with enough space on the other two sides to do donuts. The event featured seven monster trucks, each named and with a thematic fiberglass exterior like Megalodon (a shark), Jurassic Attack (a triceratops), and Scooby Doo! (a, well, cartoon dog). In the Burning Man world we would call these "art cars." Perennial fan favorite Grave Digger has been through three dozen incarnations and has several trucks and drivers active so that pretty much every Monster Jam can feature one.

The competition featured four events: a timed lap, two-wheel tricks, doing donuts, and a minute-long freestyle. The scoring for the final three were determined by members of the crowd voting on a mobile web site, so victory was mostly determined by looking cool. The winner, EarthShaker did some impressive handstands, a back flip, and ended up on its back after not quite sticking the final trick. The Grave Digger driver added some flare by removing the steering wheel from the column and holding it out the window while doing donuts. A few pieces of the truck shells got knocked off and flung around; I would've been disappointed if there wasn't any metal carnage.

Instead of a marching band, the halftime show featured four dirtbikers doing big-air jumps off a ramp well above the monster truck hill. Also during halftime dirt was moved back onto the hill by a front loader, or as I like to call it a "dirt zamboni."

Masks were not widespread in the stands, but a lot of kids were wearing big helicopter-style ear protection, so safety wasn't completely ignored. Kids were clearly having a fantastic time, screaming randomly, jumping up and down, and eating cotton candy. Watching the event as adults was interesting too; my brother-in-law is an airplane mechanic and pointed out several technical features of the truck and we could notice things like hydraulic fluid leaking while Grave Digger was doing a handstand on the hill. Apparently monster trucks these days use alcohol-based fuels for high performance, so even though the event was indoors it didn't smell too bad.

Since it's the 2020s instead of the 1980s, I captured a whole pile of photos of trucks doing handstands and flying through the air.

Whoa. Barrel Man died this weekend. Tim McKernan received more TV time at Denver Broncos games than many Denver players. A rotund half-naked working class guy wearing an orange barrel in frigid temperatures is an enduring image for anyone who watched Broncos football in the last three decades. Even though your first thought on seeing a barrel-chested naked guy in the snow is "He's probably drunk," apparently he was completely sober for the last 25 years.

Barrel Man started his fan antics in the late 1970s, in a different era of public events. Rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Kiss played rock and roll to tens of thousands in sports stadia. Like tailgating at a football game, the atmosphere outside the concert was almost as important to the experience as the show itself. The Grateful Dead had a legendary caravan of hippies on their trail, and political protests still had a feel of the mass street protests of the Vietnam era.

These days, there are more people, more events, and more media, but the venues are the same sizes. Since McKernan first donned the barrel, Colorado's population has increased by nearly two million (~80% growth), but the $364 million new stadium didn't add any more seats. A smaller percentage of fans can fit in the stadium, and more of the tickets are bought by corporations and rich folks who are unlikely to practice fan antics like face paint, outlandish costumes, and foregoing a shirt in freezing temperatures. Televised football is now a huge business, with enough AV technology that at home you can often get a richer experience of the game, though not of the crazy fans. Musicians still make a big percentage of their money touring, but with digital music players in everyone's pocket and prodigious mp3 collections, it's easy to spend all day focused on a band without spending eight bucks in ticket convenience fees. Concerts are still a good place to meet like-minded folks, but no better than social networking sites. Maybe with the Internet's millions of ways to express your craziness, being crazy in highly public places has lost its charm.

At least monster truck rallies (coming Sunday Sunday Sunday!) still have cheap tickets and working class fans, though their crowds may have shrunk too: apparently they're held in basketball arenas now. I would not want to experience that noise and fume spew indoors.

Who'd have thought that the second ever playoff game at Coors Field would end 2-1, giving the Rockies a sweep?

I of course had the fortune to attend the one game they've lost in the last three weeks. Hopefully that can extend to six.

Sports Center shows all of the day's exciting sports moments in an easy-to-swallow form. This is sort of like a video that compiles orgasm shots from two dozen porno films and shows them back-to-back without much context.

While orgasms and home runs are both very exciting, the game is often more enjoyable if it's full of squeeze bunts, double steals, and head first slides.