TVSquad

It's that time of the year again. Car collectors from around the world have descended on Scottsdale, Arizona, for the annual Barrett-Jackson auction. A mind numbing array of hot-rods, resto-mods, classics, and other automotive oddities have been selected for the catalog and everything must go.

If you have any interest at all in cars, this is great TV. An endless parade of amazing cars will roll across the auction block all weekend, including Alice Cooper's 1939 Lincoln Zephyr Custom (pictured). The Speed channel is in the middle of fourty hours of coverage of the auction with eight hours coming today, ten tomorrow, and seven more on Sunday.

It's the kind of programming that can suck all the time right out of your day. You pause to see what that Yenko Camaro will go for. But after that is a Shelby Mustang. And then there is a convertible GTO. Before you know it, it's getting dark. The whole day is shot and you didn't get anything done, but at least you now know how much the option to upgrade to the big block motor on a 1968 Corvette was, which is something.

Have you been sitting there on your couch thinking, "Good grief, it's January 7th already, when is NASCAR going to start?" Well, if you have, you need to find a couple more hobbies, but the good news is that the Speed channel is kicking off its NASCAR season this week with NASCAR Preseason Thunder. The season just gets longer and longer.

They will be covering Nextel Cup testing at Daytona. You can get a schedule of the shows on the Speed website. The actual race isn't until February 18th, but Speed knows where their bread is buttered. NASCAR is to them like the football team is to Notre Dame. It pays for everything else.

My early season predictions are for Jimmy Johnson and Tony Stewart to come out strong. Denny Hamlin will prove that last season wasn't a fluke. Kurt Busch will be back in the hunt now that the #2 team has had a season to gel. The #24 team will remain inconsistent, possibly leading Jeff Gordon to fire his crew chief. Robbie Gordon will crash some people, but it won't be his fault. And Michael Waltrip will continue to get all kinds of camera time despite never even getting a whiff of being competitive.

I admire NASCAR fans. It's not because I'm a fan myself, though I have always enjoyed watching my little brother race stock cars, but because it takes a lot of devotion and dedication to try and remember just when the hell all the races are being aired. I would think that having races spread out over three different networks (ESPN/ABC, TNT, and FOX) would test the patience of even the most diehard NASCAR viewer. This begins in 2007, and did I forget to mention the SPEED Channel? Yeah, they're in on it, too. Here's to you, NASCAR watcher, and the numerous mental breakdowns you've no doubt had trying to keep track of all this.