COMING SOON: New Name, Same Great Work

Well, as we prepare to say farewell to this year, I think it's time to make a few changes around here as well. First of all, the blog ISN'T going away. Far from it, I may sometimes take a couple weeks off from it and do nothing but play my damn online wweb games. or go hang out in Second Life, something I actually haven't done for a while, to be honest, but I'm more focused than ever to be working on this, since it looks like this is going to be how I make my money.

So starting the first weekend of the New Year, Sometime between New Year's Day and January 4th, the Blog name will be changing. Since I'm no longer affiliated with the University Times, I don't see the need to keep them in the title. No offense to all my friends there, but I'm moving on, or should I say back, to my own stomping grounds.

Since the start of the fall, two major events occured, one of which I talked about here. First was the passing of my mentor, Michael Hollander, in late September. the second event occured a week later when I joined the sports staff at the Mid-Valley News, a small weekly newsaper based out of El Monte. 

I spent the rest of the High School Football season covering the Almost and Del Rio Leagues in the Southeat Division of the CIF. But more importantly, I was a regular guest on their weekly Football Roundup show, The Mid Valley Sports Central show. So after a season which saw me spending five straight weeks at one stadium, Whittier District Field, home to Cal, La Serna and Whittier High Schools, I prepared to move on to the Basketball season, but things got interesting at that point.

After one show, my boss, Sports Editor Joe Torosian, asks me if I might be interested in doing a weekly racing column, since I had been hinting at the idea of expanding the paper's online coverage to the Toyota Speedway at Irwindale, my old beat with the LA Times. Seeing a good opportunity to exand the readership, as well as reminding him that there was already an MMA column written by another member of the staff, I got my green light.

So, getting back to the original intent of this post, namely announcing the change of name for the blog, We're going to change the blog's title to...

Backstretch Burnouts with Tony Solorzano

We're still going to cover most of the venues in Southern California, from the track at Irwindale to the Winternationals at Pomona, the Sprint Cup Weekends, the Long Beach Grand Prix, the AMA Supercross races in Anaheim and the Superbikes at the Auto Club Speedway. We're also going to be posting some more audio and video content to the website, maybe as soon as I can get an MP3 player with voice recording capabilities. 

This weekend, I will be previewing the new blog with some video from last month's Red Bull World Drifting Championships in Long Beach. I will post the trophy presentations, as well as the interviews with the top three drivers.

So enjoy your holidays and get ready for change in 2009.