The Critics Respond, Special Ross Rapaport Edition
My regular Avoidable Contact column this week at R&T was entitled Why Diesel Needs To Die. It was primarily a discussion about how the European focus on CO2-as-a-pollutant led them to deliberately overlook the well-known health risks of diesel emissions.
The Internet being what it is, I'm not surprised that at least a couple of people took this as an opportunity to post the usual LOL BARUTH AND HIS KID ALMOST DIED IN A TOWN CAR LOL. I was mildly surprised to see that one of the loudest voices was someone who is, at least nominally speaking, a colleague of mine.
Ross Rapoport is an "editor" for Roadfly.com. I have to confess that I hadn't heard of Roadfly until today, but is it a real website, albeit one with an exceptionally small reader base. Alexa places it much closer to jackbaruth.com than to Jalopnik or TTAC or even the next level of small automotive blogs like TFLCar.com. If all of you clicked on Roadfly today, you'd probably double their traffic.
Nor had I heard of Ross until today. The number of balding, low-bench-press, awkward Aspies who think they can become famous by standing in front of end-of-life press loaners and making videos about them considerably exceeds my absolutely nonexistent ability to sit through said videos. No matter. I'm aware of him now.
I have to admit that this fellow has damaged my calm a bit. It doesn't bother me when people make fun of me or criticize me for mistakes I've made. Certainly I've made enough of them to keep anybody occupied for a long time. Given that I was not the primary victim of this crash, however, I think joking about it smacks of cruelty. To give you an example, I'm aware of several incidents where a relatively prominent journalist went into the trees at high speed during a lead-follow road drive. One of them was the thing with Motor Trend's Scott Evans doing a half-gainer in an ATS. Scott was unhurt and it was all in good fun so I duly took a swing at him. In another incident, a writer's spouse was injured pretty badly. So that one is going to stay under wraps.
The January 2014 crash fractured nine of my favorite bones and also resulted in the trimming-by-laser of my spleen, whom I now call "Mr. Stubbs" as he valiantly but ineffectively attempts to keep me safe from additional bouts of pneumonia. I don't sleep very well any more and I have a fair amount of peripheral neuropathy. I gained forty pounds, only twenty-one of which I've lost. But I was back on a racetrack less than ninety days afterwards and I went on to win the debut AER enduro on August 1st of that year. Since then, I've traveled the world and done everything from jumping a small box at my local skatepark to driving the K-PAX World Challenge McLaren.
On the other hand, it's no secret that my passenger in that January crash has undergone close to a dozen surgeries to address her injuries. I'm happy to report that she's back to work and doing very well. She's healthy enough to ride bicycle trails with me and my son. Having rehabilitated from a few major injuries in the past myself, I remain thoroughly impressed by the dedication and bravery she's displayed over the past twenty months. But it's been a long, hard road.
I have too much to look forward to in the upcoming months, starting with a triple race in my reanimated PTE Neon at Mid-Ohio this weekend, to devote too much more thought to Ross Rapoport. It's probably best to close the topic with this: You can throw as many stones as you want in this world if you are certain your house isn't made of glass. But life has an odd way of turning stone to glass when your back is turned.