Here's a good travel tip. When you have a morning flight, and wake up early to get ready to go, it's a good idea to get on-line and check your flight status. I did that, about two hours ago, and was greeted with the information that my Delta flight to Cincinnati had been cancelled. Perfect!  Loving this whole Delta takeover more and more, everyday.

At least I didn't have to talk to any cranky humans on the phone, since I could rebook my itinerary on their balky website (why does the Delta site forget who I am and what flights I have booked, every time I go back there, while the Northwest site always has all my info front-and-center each time I log on?). So now, instead of leaving at 10:30 to connect in Cincy, I'm leaving at 1:20 and flying to everyone's favorite airport, Atlanta, where I'll have less than an hour to connect to another Delta flight up to Harrisburg (which is overbooked and I don't have a seat yet). Instead of landing in Harrisburg around 4:00, which would've gotten me to Reading just after 5:00, I am now scheduled to land at 8:00 (if I don't get bumped off that flight from ATL). This is GREAT!!!

The only good thing to come out of this is the fact I'm at my own desk typing this blog. If things had gone smoothly, I wouldn't have had time today... Oh geez, just remembered I'll need to change my Hertz reservation, or they'll figure I no-showed for my car. Remind me to do that when I'm done with this.

First things first, in terms of blogging... Got a funny note from my boy Jeff Arend the other day, after I showed my new NHRA FC license plates on the blog. He sent me a pic of his California tags on his GTO, which also read NHRA FC, and asked if my choice was simply a matter of me being unoriginal, or do I just want to be like him? I, of course, wrote back and told him I always want to be just like him. :-)

Let's see, how do I connect Jeff Arend to Brett Favre? Well, Jeff is originally from Toronto, where the Toronto Argonauts have long been members of the Canadian Football League, and just to the south of the CFL is a little league called the NFL. One of the best players to ever suit up in the NFL is Brett Favre. You might have heard that No. 4 arrived in the Twin Cities the other day. It was in the news, I think...

Hoo boy, let me tell you. It was like The Beatles landing in New York for the first time, and then a little like O.J. and his car chase. The Favre drama seemed to end here three weeks ago, when he told the Vikings he was going to stay retired. Then, in a matter of just a couple of hours on Tuesday, a rumor on ESPN turned into an actual private plane with a Vikings logo on the tail landing in Hattiesburg, Miss., where it picked up the aforementioned "former" QB and brought him to St. Paul.

By the time the jet got here, TV news choppers were hovering overhead to catch every moment of it, even as Favre came out of the plane to get in a black Escalade driven by the Vikes head coach, Brad Childress. Every TV station broke into their regular programming to follow this deal, and the choppers stayed on the Escalade's tail all the way from St. Paul to Winter Park, where the Vikings complex is. By the time they got there, word had spread and hundreds of people were running down the street, trying to get close enough to get a glimpse when the SUV arrived. It was insane!!!

Anyway, there's no telling how effective the old dude is going to be on the field, but the Vikings sold 3,000 new season tickets within 36 hours of his arrival, and Reebok is running the presses 24/7 to make purple No. 4 jerseys... It's nuts around here, I tell ya... The Pioneer-Press didn't just run a huge pic of Favre on the front of the Sports section... No sir, they ran it on the front page of the paper!

So... That's been our sports drama over the last couple of days.

Then, yesterday, we had more drama on TV, where once again all the stations broke into regular programming for about an hour. This time, it was weather-related, though, not Favre-related. There were showers in the forecast, and we had been having some nice soaking rains throughout most of the day, but there was little reason to think we'd have any violent weather. Imagine my surprise, then, around 2:30 in the afternoon, when the storm sirens all went off. I turned on the TV to see what was going on, and sure enough there was a tornado touching down just south of downtown Minneapolis!  That one was no danger to us, but then another cell popped up directly south of us, in Cottage Grove (where Shorty has his car bar) and it was tracking due north...

When the announcers start dropping the word "Woodbury" into their excited delivery, once per sentence, you sit up and take notice. Da Boyce were agitated as it was, because the sirens had gone off five or six times by then and they knew something weird was going on. I needed to get them to the lower level, and I figured they'd run away and try to hide under the bed upstairs, but I guess they were smart enough to realize I was there to help, because they acted like they were running away, but they let me grab them within a step...

I took them to the lower level, put them in the bathroom down there, and went back to the TV. Fortunately, the Cottage Grove storm weakened by the time it got to our neighborhood, and all we got were some strong winds for a few minutes. After it passed over us, it got stronger again to the north, but I don't think it did any major damage. Way too much drama, though...  And it was funny how Boofus and Buster knew something strange was going on. They must have sensed a weather shift in the air, because their fur was standing straight up, their tails were all fat, and they were meowing like they were scared. Scaredy cats...

Hey, here's something new... I was cruising thru the iPhone "App Store" at iTunes late yesterday, figuring I'd download a few new games to pass the time on planes, when I stumbled onto an official NHRA application! Cool!!! We'll see how it works at the races, but it looks like it provides "live" timing and scoring, and it's got a ton of information on it. I suspect it's brand new, and probably still a work in progress, but if this app delivers what I hope it will provide, life is going to get a lot better at the track.

This ties in with a bone most of us PR types have been picking for years, and in this day and age it's almost impossible to believe this issue still exists. After each qualifying session or round of eliminations, the timing department issues "the sheet" which is just a list of the qualifying order after that session or an updated ladder after a round. On the back of the sheet are the incremental times for each driver in that session. At the last two races, in Brainerd and Sonoma, we've been dealing with the worst-case scenario when it comes to getting our hands on the sheets (and most of us aren't simply waiting for them just for our own purposes, but are also charged with the responsibility of getting those incremental times back to our crew chiefs and drivers). In both places, it went like this: At some point after the session, the sheet was printed out in the timing room. From there, a human needed to run it from that room in that tower, over to the Media Room in another tower, where it would be run on the copier so that each of us could have a few copies...

How long did that take? Oh, anywhere from 30 minutes to almost an hour! That's ridiculous in an age when information is instantaneous and everything is wireless. We sat there waiting (and in the case of Elon Werner, who does PR for JFR, it was Austin Coil who was also waiting, wondering where in the world Elon was with the sheet he needed) while who-knows-what was going on with the rest of the links in the delivery chain... It's one thing when the people involved simply show no urgency to deliver the sheets from point A to point B in any sort of timely fashion, but it's also a little hard to believe we still even rely on someone to print a sheet, walk it a hundred yards, hand it to someone else who might be busy, then copy that 50 times so that everyone in the Media Center can have one of their very own.

If this iPhone app shows promise, we might be able to have all that information right in our hands, as soon as the session ends. Hope marches on...!!!

Finally, a little fun with geography (and then I have to change that Hertz reservation and finally go to the airport)... I was trading emails with good friend and long-time blog reader, Kim Campbell from Vancouver, yesterday, and the subject was Lake Mille Lacs. Since Mille Lacs actually translates into "thousand lakes" the name is pretty redundant, and while we were e-mailing about that I mentioned to Kim that we have an even odder bit of geography here in Minnesota.

Are any of you aware that a piece of Minnesota actually lies completely within Canada? It's ever so true. I'll show two satellite pics of Minnesota in the gallery, in the wider shot you can see there's an odd little "notch" on the northern border between Minnesota and Canada. That notch is mostly over water, as Lake of the Woods is up there. But, at the top of the notch there is a bit of land that falls within Minnesota, but you can't get there on land without going through Canada...

Kim wrote me back and explained that they have the exact same situation out there, in British Columbia. Rather than a notch, their border situation was created by a straight line, because when the US/Canadian border was drawn, the southern tip of a Canadian peninsula was bisected by the line, and the lowest edge of that land area ended up below the border. So, the people who live there are Americans, but to get to the rest of the USA they have to cross the border into Canada, then drive toward Seattle and cross the border back into the USA. Seemed to us that some people with a little more common sense probably could've worked that out a little better, in both cases...

Okay, time to go. Thanks for reminding me about the Hertz thing. Hopefully I'll get to Reading at some point tonight...

Wilber, out!