Tail fins apparently make today’s NASCAR Sprint Cup cars more likely to go airborne in a wreck.

Big crash Sunday in NASCAR race at Atlanta.

This aerodynamic anomaly comes more sharply into focus with the latest display of a driver feud featuring tit-for-tat spinouts, from season to season and even in the same race. In this instance, the aggrieved Carl Edwards got back at Brad Keselowski for bumping him into a crash earlier in Sunday’s Atlanta race.

This seems to be all fine for NASCAR fans and the grudge-nursing drivers, some acting out revenge akin to battling first-graders. I hope NASCAR orders modifications to the cars reducing the likelihood of a spinning racer taking to the air. Before someone on the track or in the grandstands gets killed.

Utah basketball coach Jim Boylen let off some steam in the press conference after the Utes were blown out of the gym Wednesday night by their ancient rival, BYU.

Those were pretty innocuous, pertinent questions that triggered the coach’s snarls. But Boylen must have been fuming in any case. The Cougars embarrassed Utah 71-51 in a laugher worthy of a Utah fan’s worst nightmare.

I would have asked Boylen similar questions. Over the season I’ve become accustomed to seeing the lack of on-court leadership, the lack of effective game management and the absence of discipline on offense that led to the BYU disaster and the probing questions afterward.

When Boylen was hired, I loved what I heard from him. He said things like, “If anyone comes into the lane, they can expect to get hit.” He said he’d take the in-state rivalry seriously. Now I’m wondering when we’ll see it.

This is some fragile ball of mud we’re riding.

NASA scientists say the Chilean earthquake shortened Earth’s day and shifted the globe’s axis.

Not to worry, they add — the effects were measured in microseconds and centimeters. I wasn’t a physics major, but even I know this doesn’t mean the planet is going to spin out of its orbit. So, I’ve been asking myself why I’m so intrigued, if this was an all but meaningless planetary hiccup.

Forget the science lesson. Really, it’s a visceral reminder that nothing is permanent. It’s one of those jolts that momentarily broadens your outlook to a cosmic level, that shows the vulnerability of the world’s existence, including your individual fly-speck part of it. The everyday worries of jobs, the economy, wars, terrorism, crime, disease, and whatever are plenty enough reasons already to keep you feeling mortal. Now comes evidence that even the enduring Earth itself can suffer a kick in the teeth.

Somehow, the unplanned global clock change and axis adjustment is way more real than the distant threat of a comet or asteroid someday doing a corner-pocket pool shot to the planet. This quake-speedbump thing actually happened, like an event in a science fiction script come to life. I almost expect a towering otherworldly presence to boom through the windows, “Insignificant mortals, cower before me.”

I know my days are getting shorter anyway, but this is ridiculous.

Today we’re eerily reminded of Mitt Romney’s confrontation with some Snowbasin event attendees back in the 2002 Olympics. During traffic problems before one of the events, Romney — head of the 2002 Games for Utah — personally took charge of some of the traffic control. Some attendees later accused Romney of cursing at them, a charge he strenuously denied.

Transportation and trouble seem to coincide for Romney, considering the story out today about his tussle with a rap star aboard an airline flight.

Political figures of course are magnets for publicity and controversy, although this makes twice that the likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate has mixed it up with “real people.”

It’s a he-said, he-said tale, once again. It’s also amusing. I laughed out loud when I read that rapper Sky Blu described Romney as having grabbed his shoulder in a “condor grip” or “Vulcan grip.”

The rapper, whose real name is Skyler Gordy, told his side in a video on TMZ. Gordy is a grandson of Motown mogul Berry Gordy.

UPDATE: The science fiction geeks blog weighs in, even posting a nostalgic photo of Mr. Spock using the Vulcan pinch on a hapless victim. Hysterical!

Sex and celebrity wins again.

Chrissy Wallace drove in the NASCAR Nationwide Series race at Daytona on Saturday. No female had started a Nationwide race since the 2008 season. But almost no attention was paid to Wallace, because Danica Patrick also was in the lineup.

Danica, you might know, is dabbling in NASCAR racing after several high-profile years on the Indy car circuit. She gets more attention than anyone else in auto racing. She’s recorded one Indy league win and she’s a decent driver. But if she were male you’d never have heard of her.

Plus, because she’s so photogenic, the news coverage never sleeps. A couple of years ago Danica did a swimsuit photo spread. She’s also starred in a series of racy TV commercials in which other sexy women around her start disrobing before the camera pans away.

A good-looking woman in a fast car sells big in America.

It’s the same thing with tennis players and golfers. Maria Sharapova is far from a star for the ages in professional tennis, but she’s broken world records for the number of photo appearances on the sports pages.

I’m a regular but casual NASCAR fan. I watch most of the Nationwide races and never miss a season opener, so there I was Saturday, expecting plenty of coverage of Danica. But even as weary as I am of saturation coverage of celebrities, I underestimated this one. The ESPN crew rattled on about Danica and put up special graphic boxes focusing on her race status. The sports news crawler across the bottom of the screen brayed, “Danica Patrick is the first female to start a Nationwide race since 2008.” Resigned to the over-coverage of Danica, I settled in, trying to follow the race itself — including the leaders, imagine that.

A crash at the back of the pack on the first lap interrupted Danica Day. The driver got out of the wrecked car, not hurt. “That’s Chrissy Wallace,” the TV announcer said.

What? Who’s Chrissy Wallace? And, hey, that’s a woman’s name!

I’d never heard of Chrissy, through no fault of hers. Her last name rang a big bell; there were three other drivers named Wallace in the race, all veterans. One of them is her dad, Mike. Rusty Wallace, now a TV commentator, was a NASCAR star years ago. What a story, I thought. Here’s a young woman from a legendary NASCAR family, starting a race with her dad, cousin and uncle. Tell me more.

The usual quick, perfunctory pit garage interview with the crashed driver followed. Chrissy got in one run-on sentence, blaming her spin-out on the driver behind her. Instantly, it was back to the announcer’s booth and the Danica coverage. Later, Patrick crashed at the race’s midpoint, and much of the following broadcast and print coverage centered on the Danica circus. Tony Stewart, one of NASCAR’s best drivers, won the race, but seemingly no one cared.

Pathetically, ESPN later during the race edited the inaccurate crawler to give credit to Chrissy along with Danica for being the first woman starters since 2008.

Sex sells, people. Numberless starlets, singers and other sexy women in the public eye can’t avoid the camera lens, and seemingly most don’t want to. I’m sure it’s also why Danica has become the publicity and marketing black hole of auto racing, sucking the atmosphere out of any location when she’s on site.

Chrissy Wallace doesn’t have a centerfold aura. The way our celebrity-dominated culture works, that’s too bad for her. She’ll have to gain her greater fame by driving well. Hopefully, she doesn’t care. Maybe racing hot rods with her dad will do.

A representative of the Utah Bankers Association stopped by the Standard-Examiner on Monday to lecture the editorial board on proper reporting of bank troubles. He said media coverage of the death rattles of Barnes Bank made the collapse worse than it would have been if reporters had swallowed their pens.

Howard Headlee also argued that Barnes and other community banks that have encountered trouble since the national housing market collapse got there because they had been working hard to serve a booming housing development market. He complained about lax home loan policies, nothing to do with the business loans of community banks, that fueled the boom and collapse.

OK, did I undertand this correctly? So bank failures are more the fault of nosy reporters and greedy mortgage lenders? Wait a moment. How about the bad banking? I mean, Barnes and a lot of banks smelled big profits in the housing boom and plunged most of their business into the bubble. And when it blew up in their faces, that’s someone else’s fault?

Upon questioning, Headlee acknowledged that Barnes’ ultimate fate was of its own making. Yet the bankers group feels the need to go on tour scolding news organizations for alerting the public to capitalization problems at certain community banks. The message: Trust us. We and the FDIC can systematically resolve banking boo-boos during sensitive periods; no need for depositor panics spawned by news stories.

In the case of Barnes Bank, it had been under scrutiny by FDIC for months, and in its latter days, its shareholders were arguing among themselves. In an open society, that’s information that citizens in a community ought to be alerted to, so depositors and others can go about making their own decisions, backed by knowledge not available from the self-interested banks.

The Bankers Association understandably must feel burned by the loss of the more than 100-year-old Barnes Bank. But pointing fingers in all other directions seems excessively petulant. Before he left, Headlee also complained that credit unions are not subjected to the same levels of public disclosure and scrutiny that banks must shoulder.

The SUV spins out on an icy road. The guardrail does no guarding, and the rig flies down a Yellowstone Park embankment and rolls, jamming into a tree-choked snowbank. It could have been a multiple-fatality accident. But the four ski vacationers crawled out of the totaled vehicle with nothing more than a few bruises and a sprained thumb.

Amanda Coleman, one of the backseat passengers, says the safety slogan we’ve all heard and read a million times is true: Seat belts save lives. All four were buckled up.

The SUV was totaled, the ski day was ruined. But having walked away from a spectacular car wreck, life was sweet at that instant. Amanda was back at work at the Standard-Examiner on Wednesday, still giddy from surviving her brush with death. She said she was thrilled to be tackling projects that just last week may have been viewed as mundane.

She was even chewing out co-workers known to disdain seat belts. “Wear your seat belt or I’m going to punch you,” she told one miscreant.

Look at these scary crash photos. Think about your life. Wear your seat belts. They really do save lives.

Photos courtesy of Amanda Coleman

Here’s another military subcontractor problem that doesn’t involve the usual price gouging or mercenary abuses. This one, rather, makes a mockery of the Bible. The manufacturer of gun sights for combat rifles used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan stamped biblical verse references on the weaponry.

Bible thumping has a new meaning here, as our people fighting Islamic militants and terrorists take aim and fire with the visible stamped blessing of Christianity. Military commanders properly are embarrassed by the subcontractor’s practice. There’s nothing holy about a gun to begin with, and the sight-stamping needlessly fuels our side of the already perceived holy war between Islamic militants and the Christian West.

To make our mark in Afghanistan, anything branding it as a religious crusade is the dumbest strategy. So, file down the gun sights. If we must, go about the killing with all the secular fury the allied forces can muster. But please leave Christ out of it.

Quite a contrast. State Senate Majority Leader Sheldon Killpack’s official portrait and his Salt Lake County jail booking mug. Killpack was arrested on suspicion of DUI early Friday.

Are you finished with the U.S. Congress for its pork-barrel ways? Have you had more than enough of presidential administrations blowing through untold billions? Yes, you may be justified in your disgust. But why focus on the feds? You’re missing plenty of outrageous misuses of your tax dollars right here in the Top of Utah. And your odds of being heard are much higher on the local level.

Just in the past week, there are three local news stories that should boil the hard-working blood of the typical taxpayer:

– The New Kaysville mayor, Steve Hiatt, ran on a platform of fiscal conservatism. That means, don’t be wasteful with public money. Hiatt’s first moves were to redecorate his office and throw a big party for his inauguration. So much for being tight with your wallet. Campaign promises of fiscal conservatism these days seem to carry as much weight as a drunk’s pledge that he’ll quit drinking after one more happy hour.

– Auditors reported that Layton High School had a $38,000 slush fund. This dough was hidden from the school district and supposedly was kept around in case school administrators needed quick cash for things not included in the school budget. Graduation ticket sales proceeds of $4,000 were not deposited into school accounts but instead were used for awards to secretaries and others. Auditors called the slush fund a “serious violation of regulatory requirements” but longtime principal Paul Smith retains his job, although he plans to retire Jan. 31.

– Logan City officials spent $12,000 on holiday season meals for city staff. Logan is suffering amid the economic downturn as are most cities, but officials decided on the food cornucopia to help employee morale.

Meanwhile, many Utah legislators are bathed in righteous umbrage as they fight back hard against a citizen initiative on ethics in state government. The voter drive seeks to prohibit lawmakers from accepting gifts, using leftover campaign cash for other purposes, and a list of other Capitol practices that have fallen ever deeper into ethical disrepute. Legislators brand the initiative as a vile, unnecessary attack on their credibility that will saddle them with continual defenses of their personal reputations.

Predictably, people close to the subjects of these stories rise to the defense of the officeholders and officials, offering rationalizations that the spending was not that much, the old stuff was getting old, the governor was attending so a deluxe fete was called for, public employees need a boost, all involved are honest, etc. Letters to the editor are flowing in defending Layton High’s Smith as a good guy, and so on.

Perpetrators and enablers of all these practices exhibit at least three common traits:

– They hold a sense of entitlement that blinds them. They’re on the inside. They know best. They belong. They deserve the best.

– They develop arrogance. I’m an elected official, so I’m important. They voted for me so I’m due. I AM this school, or this city, so I know best, and me and my people deserve this. These Jazz tickets cannot corrupt me; how dare anyone accuse me.

– Worst by far, they violate the trust of the people who put them where they are. They’re spending taxpayers’ money for dubious purposes and, when exposed, can’t even own up to it. Instead, they dribble out insulting excuses.

There’s nothing new here. Government agencies have been wasting money forever, and they don’t even let up when the economy crashes and unemployment soars. That’s why it’s so important for the citizenry to pay attention, be involved, ask questions and challenge wastefulness. The cases cited above are maddening because few obvious corrective consequences seem to be pending or even available (translation: they’re getting away with it).

You might feel powerless to hold the federal government accountable in a large way, but on the local, county and state level, your cries may reach officialdom’s stubborn ears and at least make spendthrifts uncomfortable.