50 Cent’s new album “Street King Immortal” was set to be released tomorrow after several setbacks in 2012, but it seems that it has been pushed back once again to a tentative release date of “whenever the f*ck it happens”. This is worth mentioning because aside from beefing with Floyd Mayweather Jr. and starring in crappy energy shot commercials with Joan Rivers, I can’t figure out why the hell 50 Cent is being invited to huge events like the Daytona 500, but sure enough he was there yesterday and he was as poignant as ever.

Mr. Cent started his day by Tweeting that he couldn’t find any black people at the race, and everyone laughed because that joke is fresh. But to his credit, he at least set the race as a top priority, and he made that perfectly clear to his biggest fans…

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Now that Danica Patrick has won the pole for the 2013 Daytona 500 this Sunday on Fox, the media can begin this season’s most common pre-race question: “Will Danica Patrick become the first woman to win the Daytona 500?” And then it will be asked at the next race, the race after that and so on, because until she wins a race, it will be the easiest question a NASCAR writer can write. Seriously, I could wake up, write it on a napkin, and sleep four more hours before I even had to be up for brunch at Hooters.

But over the past three months, a few people have been asking a much different and somewhat more intriguing question: “Can a woman hang with a NASCAR pit crew?” For as long as stock car racing’s grandest stage has existed, everything from the steering wheel to the impact wrench has belonged (mostly) to men, and as Patrick looks to change that on Sunday, another woman wants to change pit crews forever as well.

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Divorce is never cause for celebration, unless it involves Olivia Wilde in a year or so – sorry, Jason Sudeikis, we love you but… it’s an Internet thing – and it pains me to bring more light to the recent news that NASCAR’s first lady of turning left, Danica Patrick, and her husband, that guy who she married, are indeed calling quits after seven years. Patrick and Paul Hospenthal, if that is his real name, filed in Arizona, where a couple can get divorced for any reason under the sun, so I hope they go with something cool like, “Refusal to Invest in Shark Fighting League”.

Unfortunately, they went with a boring reason, as the Sporting news reported first:

Danica Patrick filed for divorce on Jan 3. in the Superior Court of Arizona, citing an “irretrievably broken” marriage with her husband, Paul Hospenthal.

Sort of like how my heart was irretrievably broken when Wilde got engaged to Sudeikis. But back to this announcement, someone’s getting taken to the cleaners, right?

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When I first heard about this story, I was mad. The two things that make me maddest are (1) people who are dicks to animals, and (2) finally getting to write a FLORIDA OR OHIO story and finding out it happened in neither.

I can only feel so badly about this one, however, because it is the comedy gift that keeps on givin’. Meet Gary Wayne Ericcson, the 46-year old North Carolina man who mourned the death of his beloved pet snake by shooting it, then went to jail for animal cruelty because he couldn’t reasonably explain why he’d want to shoot up a dead snake. His rationale is almost poetically southern:

But Ericcson says the snake, which he said was named Anonymous, had died before the shooting.

“I couldn’t bury him or the other animals would get him,” Ericcson told NBC Charlotte, the Observer’s news partner. “I had to shoot it to get the gas out of him, then I was going to burn him.”

Ericcson said the snake was his pet for about 17 years. “I’ve had that snake since he was so small he could just wrap around your wrist,” he said. “Me and my wife can’t have kids, so the animals are our kids.” (via Charlotte Observer)

If a man naming his child-pet “Anonymous” (to keep it off the grid, I guess?) and debating whether to shoot it with love or burn it with love to keep other animals from “getting him” doesn’t make you laugh, perhaps this aside from the end of the report will. Ericcson was so mad that after he shot the snake, he turned the gun ON HIS NASCAR MEMORABILIA CABINET. Because America!

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Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick hanging out with Guy Fieri on New Year's is only half the problem.

Politicians are the worst people on this planet, so it shouldn’t have surprised people this morning when news leaked of the sordid inclusions in the fiscal cliff deal, from a heavier rum tax on Puerto Rico to financing Goldman Sachs’ new headquarters. Good, those guys needed a break. But also included is the so-called “NASCAR loophole”, which has a lot of people really pissed off right now.

However, it’s not like the government is just giving a ton of our hard-earned cash to the good ol’ boys who spend their days turning left. It’s much sneakier and more complex than that. Basically, it’s a nice, big tax break for the billionaires behind the International Speedway Corporation, and most notably the France family. So what, then, does this loophole give them?

The so-called NASCAR loophole allows anyone who builds a racetrack to receive a small tax benefit through accelerated depreciation. This tax break cost roughly $43 million the past two years and will get extended for another year. Sounds tawdry, right? And yet, supporters claim the break is necessary so that NASCAR can compete on a level playing field with other theme parks. Looks like they got their wish. (Via Washington Post)

Now I’m no fancy, big city slicker lawyer type with a degree in smartness, but I’ve read enough USA Today pie charts in my day to know that this isn’t much of a surprise. Look, millionaires and billionaires get all the breaks. We’ve just got to learn to live with that. I mean, take Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, for example. He fleeced an entire major city government into funding his ridiculous, giant new stadium, and he did it all on the paper wings of a promise that he was committed to building a contender. Classic rich dude crapping on our dreams scenario.

Instead of Loria, though, it’s just NASCAR and International Speedway executives who get to act out the “We need these tax breaks to build new tracks and fix the old ones so we can create jobs because America!” routine. But this is all unfair speculation and the biased ramblings of a lower class American just trying to get his next meal. Let’s see what the NASCAR fatcats have to say in response…

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Here’s NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski “hooping it up” during halftime at a Charlotte Bobcats game, and I’d make more jokes about how he’s terrible, but he’s not much worse than the Charlotte Bobcats. (via The Nosebleeds)

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