IF I LIVE IN THE SOUTH FOR TWO YEARS, I might as well - make that I might could - go in full bore. Don’t worry: I’m not putting a confederate flag sticker on the back of the car or eating Fried Snickers Bar for dinner. But I did get hooked up with a ticket for the highlight of the Richmond social calendar. That’s right. NASCAR was in town.

NASCAR comes to Richmond twice a year, and every time they sell out the 112,000 seat track. The “real” NASCAR is the Nextel Cup, and the night before Nextel is the Busch Series race. The up-and-comers do Busch Series, but many of the big names run in both races.

I’ll tell you how you know NASCAR is a Southern activity. First, a priest gives an invocation before the race. I don’t mean one of those airy-fairy liberal multiculti invocations. I mean a good, old-fashioned, let me get an Amen for Jesus invocation. Second, when the announcer tells the crowd to remove their hats for the National Anthem, everyone actually has hats on that need removing. Third, there’s no buying of six dollar cups of beer here; you’re allowed to bring you own cooler of Miller right into the track! I couldn’t believe it when they let my roommate walk in with 24 cans of brew. (Incidentally, we stopped at the ‘hood supermarket to pick up the beer. I’ve mentioned before that there are maybe 5 non-black families in the neighborhood I live in. So, of course, the entire staff of the grocery store was Korean. I told you that there were Koreans and Chinese running the grocery store I stopped at in Lesotho, Africa, right? It’s uncanny.)

Fourth, dudes like the one below are par for the course:

Since you’re getting the full Southern tour, I should give a tour around my room. When you sleep 10 hours a day like me, you need to go full effect on the bed. I built a simple platform bed from a set of 2×10s, and used the money I saved on some 600 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. They are awesome. My walls have a bunch of photos here and there, and three pieces of art that I’ve done since I got here. First is this guy, which is oil on a 30×40 canvas. The pattern is the Fibonacci Sequence, which you likely know from back in elementary school. The sequence shows up a lot in nature and is related to the famous, aesthetically-pleasing “Golden Ratio”. Behind my bed are these 12×12 oil on canvas paintings. The numbers are all famous irrational numbers (meaning that there is no natural number p or q such that p/q equals the number). You know some of these for sure: Pi and e are famous. The others are root 2, root 10, the Golden Ratio and the Plastic Number. (Pi is interesting, by the way; did you know we only knew Pi to 800 or so digits until the invention of the computer? Even in the late 1800s, we’d yet to calculate 100 digits of this ever important constant. Now that we have computers, we’ve computed a billion digits of Pi, which is more than enough for any real-world application. Being alive in the Computer Age puts us in a special place in human history, for sure.) (Subnote: Pi and e are also related in what I think is the single best equation in mathematics. e^pi*i + 1 = 0. This equation, found by Euler, relates the five fundamental constants in mathematics. Really, an amazing, and unexpected, link.) On the far wall is another small math joke. There are a series of numbers called “taxicab numbers”; without getting into what they are, the name comes from a story in early 20th century England. A mathematician named Hardy was visiting an Indian prodigy friend of his at a hospital, and while making small talk, noted that he arrived in taxi number 1729, an eminently boring number. “No, no, no,” replied the Indian, “don’t you know 1729 is the first number which is the sum of two different pairs of cubes?” (In this case, 1^3 + 12^3 and 9^3 + 10^3). Incidentally, if you want to win some fame, find the 6th Taxicab Number, which is still unknown. This is merely a problem of computational power, and not one of the ridiculously simple-sounding yet nigh impossible to prove proofs in number theory (look up the Goldbach Conjecture, for instance.) The photos are all photoshopped versions of New York cabs with the first through fourth taxicab numbers inserted. Check out 1729 - I even put in the reflection of the number on the top of the cab. Now that’s quality.
And lest you think I’ve gone of the poindexter deep end (yes, I know, too late), I do have a set of sculptures and some yuppie magazines that I like (Dwell, Wallpaper, Traveler, Natl. Geographic…) on the coffee table. And check out the view from my bed below. Gotta like that 70″ HD up on the wall, no doubt. Last up: I just dug this up. I’m 17 or 18 in the pic. What do you think of my “smug future tycoon” look?