I'll be in our Top 10 rumble -- er, I mean meeting – today as I and my fellow National DRAGSTER staffers match wits, expertise, and debating skills lobbying for our individual Top 10 favorites for the upcoming special issue of ND. We go in at 9 a.m. and come out whenever we're done. We may have to send out for pizza. If it goes after hours, we may have to add something a little stronger.

Anyway, in anticipation of being locked up all day, I went sifting through my e-mail Folder of Interesting Stuff (eFIST, patent pending) looking for some entertaining material for today's entry. Man, I collect some weird stuff in there. So, for your reading enjoyment and amusement, here's a little show-and-tell.

And away we go ...

NHRA's IT guru, Jared Robison, forwarded me any interesting link to a story headlined "World's Smallest Hot Rod Made Using Nanotechnology." How could I pass that one up? I mean, there are Jr. Dragsters and then there are Jr. Dragsters, but nano dragsters?

For those of you without a college degree – or those like me who also had to look it up -- nanotechnology is a manufacturing process that controls matter at the nanoscale, usually considered between 1 and 100 nanometers. A human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide. Apparently it's the next great gateway to technical advancements. Hey, just look at the iPod nano.

Anyway, I got all excited thinking that there was going to be some great photo of a super-small car that maybe a flea could drive but instead got the photo below, helpfully positioned by the Photoshop whizzes of the American Chemical Society next to a photo of Joe Hartley's Top Fueler to show the similarities.

Uh … OK. This is a dragster?

"It has smaller front wheels on a shorter axle and bigger back wheels on a longer axle," explained James Tour, a Rice University chemist, who was involved in the research. I think he was serious.

Researchers say that this new "nanodragster" improves on prior nanocar designs (I certainly hope so) and could speed up efforts to craft molecular machines, and learning how to drive nanovehicles could pave the way for small but technologically useful structures, such as electronics, that could be built atom by atom.

The minuscule vehicle, whose chassis is a pair of aligned hydrocarbon molecules, is about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. According to the article, spherical molecules called buckyballs, made of 60 carbon atoms each, serve as the rear wheels. For the front wheels, the scientists opted for a less sticky compound called p-carborane. The "dragster" is pushed along a "dragstrip" made of a superfine layer of gold (and you thought all-concrete tracks were expensive!) by heat or an electric field, where it can reach speeds of up to 9 nanomiles, or 0.014 millimeters (.0005-inch), per hour (which they tell me is pretty fast), and, hey, it also can do tricks.

"Because the front wheels don't stick to the surface as strongly, they're more prone to lift up, so [the nanodragster] does seem to pop a wheelie at times," Tour said.

I bet Bill Doner would book 'em.

On a slightly larger but still small-scale note comes this photo from Randy Bruette at ATI, who has recently finished restoring the ATI Black Magic Funny Car. No, I'm not talking about the Al Segrini/R.C. Sherman/D.A. Santucci-driven flopper, but rather this fine little piece, a minicar built by ATI honcho Jim Beattie for his kids in the mid-1970s when the real car was first storming around the country and up and down the East Coast.

The minicar had languished in a barn for 25 to 30 years before Bruette found it and began bringing it back to life. Built on a Rupp go-kart chassis and powered by a 3-horsepower Clinton engine, it's cloaked in a Vega replica body made of high-impact plastic rather than fiberglass. The body was painted by the late, great flopper painter Tom Stratton in California, who also painted the original Black Magic Funny Car body from a Kenny Youngblood scheme.

Bruette says he's planning to make a Back in the Day Tour in 2010, going to as many tracks as possible in the Mid-Atlantic area for nostalgia events.

The minicar is functional, and a couple tracks have given him the OK to have his 10-year-old daughter, Emmy, make a couple laps.

I also received these and other images like them from several folks, showing amazing art fashioned from old tires. It just goes to show you the inventiveness and creativity of the human spirit. I was about to comment that these were pretty slick pieces of art, then I noticed that these are made from treaded tires. I wouldn’t want to anger the artist, especially if any of them were women. I'd hate to rubber the wrong way, you know? I'd rather inflate her ego. Wheel-y I would. "Rim" shot, eh? Man, suddenly I'm very tired.
 

Is Ford's reemergence in drag racing showing up in its TV commercials? One can't help but wonder. Old pal Jason Oldfield clued me in to a Ford ad for the new Taurus boasting about the quiet ride and showing it off by placing it and a competitor alongside a jet dragster going through its flame show.

Talented wheelman Tanner Foust, he of drifting fame and the Speed Channel show Supercars Exposed, is in all of the new commercials, which can be found here.

Well, it's winter elsewhere in the country, which means it's the time when everyone shows off cool new snow machines. I really like this T-bucket snowmobile with supercharged Chevy power to help conquer those nasty snowdrifts, but how about the bottom photo, where some guy, obviously tired of his anemic-performing snowblower, got all radical with a big-block Chevrolet powerplant so that he could really start tossing aside the white stuff?

Kai Grundt's V-8 snowblower has electric start, an electric block heater, antifreeze heater, and eight wonderful cylinders that churn out 412 horsepower and 430 foot-pounds of torque and can throw snow 50 feet at just 3,500 rpm.

The custom 42-inch, two-stage auger has a Chevy 10 bolt truck differential with spool and a centrifugal auger clutch with shear pin protection, further adding to the image of this automotive-themed blower. Crazy Kai will build you one to suit your automotive leanings (Chevy, Dodge Hemi, or Ford) or will even give you a V-10 or a diesel engine if you’re so inclined.

He also offers hop-up kits consisting of Lunati camshaft, Milodon gear drive, and Holley and Edelbrock components as well as a fuel-injection option.
 
Sure, it weighs more than 900 pounds, but he has ingeniously routed engine coolant through the handle bars to keep the operator's hands nice and warm.

OK, folks, that's it for today. I gotta pack my notes and my boxing gloves and head into the meeting.