I’ll let you know right up front that this will probably be the most disjointed column you’ve ever read with about half of it having anything to do with cars, trucks, tractors, or anything else motorized. The other half? We’ll you’ll have to stick around to get that far. With Christmas about to go down in mere days, it is about time to purge the mental blotter and get ready for a jolly day filled with kids, food, presents, and a couple gallons of spiked egg nog. Buckle up!

So one of my favorite things about Christmas is the time I get to spend with my grandparents, particularly my grandfather Warren Lohnes. Grandpa is always good for a couple stories from back in the day and in his old school New Englander way, he’s a great story teller. One of the topics that gets brought up a lot regards his diet when he was a kid. Apparently my great grandmother prepared whatever food he wanted, whenever he wanted it. Being that he shares the same…uhhh…robust (yeah, that’s it!) build as me, his food choices were interesting. Fried pork chops were a favorite breakfast staple of his. Mostly everyone else who hears this story is horrified, while I sit back thinking,”MMMMMMM…fried pork chops.”

Recently there has been a lot of grumbling and anger amongst the nostalgia nitro flopper set due to some regulations imposed by the NHRA for the 2011 season. The most significant of which is the implementation of carbon fiber brakes on the cars which will be mandatory starting with the 2011 March Meet. The quoted expense for the upgrade is somewhere between $6,000-$8,000. While it certainly sucks that teams have to outlay that type of cash, they had to know something was coming when the flops started regularly breaching 250mph in the quarter mile. Drag racers are drag racers, look at the NHRA big show. The Top Fuel cars are now running the same mph in 1,000ft as they were in 1320ft a few years ago. No one lets up, no one slows down, this is the engine behind the evolution of the sport. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle unfortunately, and any time an ET and MPH nuclear arms race breaks out, things are going to get expensive quick. 

Is it possible I actually feel bad for Brett Farve now? When he got taco’d into the frozen turf in Minnesota Monday night, he looked like he was dead on the ground and none of his own teammates even lent him a hand up. He’s certainly done some dumb stuff tis year and seems like an incredible ego maniac, but at this point he is a pretty sympathetic figure. The guy seems to really “need” the lime light. I bet life after the game won’t be easy for him.

We’ve all had the run in with the “know it all” parts guy at the local chain auto parts store and probably bitched about it on the internet. Here’s something positive. I have to give full props to the staff at the Abington, Ma Advance Auto Parts as they’ve been my go-to location for parts and pieces with my Goliath project since I started. Sure, I’ve always told them the truck was a C30, but anything they didn’t have on the shelf they got the next day and have been great to deal with. Now that the truck project is entering the final phases, I’ll not be seeing them every weekend with the two boys. Hell, they know us so well, one of the counter guys gave each of my sons a little die cast John Force car a while back. Got to highlight the good if we’re going to scream about the bad.

I have a blown Hemi Christmas ornament on my tree. I also have a Peter Griffin ornament. They are on opposite sides because that much awesome would clearly cause the tree to combust if they were too close together.

Unless someone can convince me differently, I’ll go to my grave believing that Egg nog is simply melted vanilla ice cream.

My neighbors always look at me funny when I am driving up and down my street with a video camera stuck to the outside of Goliath or when I am standing in front of the truck talking to said camera. Louise, an elderly woman across the street wandered over this summer and asked if I was, “EVER going to finish that truck?” When an 80 year old woman breaks your balls about the speed of your project completion, you’ve got problems. 

I’ve been forthright about my love of tractors since the inception of BangShift.com. My affection for these machines has apparently traveled the circles as today I got e-mails from two auto-writer types pointing me toward neato tractors for sale on eBay. I think they’re just closeted with their love of farm equipment. Ain’t no shame in it, boys!

I’ve been thicker than hell (mentally, and I guess physically, too) my whole life. I don’t remember the year, but my sister and I begged my parents for an Apple IIGS computer. That was the hot ticket back in the day. We had no idea how expensive it was and were only vaguely familiar with the operation of a computer, but man, that Apple IIGS seemed to have boundless powers. Oregon Trail, California Games, and Silent Service were awesome games. Anyway, my hard working parents laid out God knows how much money for this thing in the late 1980s. I come hauling ass down stairs on Christmas morning and open a container of floppy discs. My response was not to look around for a computer, but (and I remember this clear as day) rather to say, “These will be great when we get a computer!” My dad almost had to fire off a flare gun to get us to notice the brandy new Apple IIGS sitting in the next room. I then freaked out for hours.

If you’ve hung on this long, you deserve compensation.

We’ll be cranking content through the end of the week just like we always do, so stick with us as we careen toward another chance encounter with St. Nick. Thanks for hanging out with Chad and I here at BangShift, I probably don’t say that enough, but man do I ever mean it. We really put our hearts and souls into this thing and we try to deliver for you every day with good stuff. I think we hit more than we miss and judging by the ever growing number of people who are “tuning-in” every day, you think so too. 

We’re working on some very cool stuff to unveil in the new year that’ll blow your socks off…and by the smell of some of you, that’s a damned good thing. 

Merry Christmas everyone,

Lohnes