We Be Jammin'...

"The first line of the blog entry will be, Tonight, I became an American," I told Jen as we left the parking lot in the frigid cold last night. "No," she corrected gently, "The first line should be, Tonight, I became Homer Simpson."

Yes, our first visit to the famed Fargodome was to see "Monster Jam," a monster-truck rally that had been advertised on the radio incessantly all week long. What caught my attention was that the kids' tickets were $5. Eager to maximize our investment in high culture, we showed up early for the pre-game show, where you could walk up to the trucks and get the drivers' signatures. We didn't particularly desire anyone's signature, but we liked looking at the trucks. This one is Grave Digger, a legend on the monster-truck circuit (I'll admit that even I had heard of it):

People who walked up to the box office yesterday were sold pretty good seats, but if you bought them online, they gave you nosebleed seats:

...which was fine, because it appeared that the closer-in seats were earbleed seats. The guy next to me theorized that they sold them online from the back row forward. The Fargodome's not really that big; the view was perfectly okay:

Here's Grave Digger in action... click on the triangle to start playing it....:



It was kind of a funny event. It was certainly loud – I bought some earplugs at a concession stand, and we used them. But honestly, it wasn't all that.... exciting.

The Friday night show was "freestyle," which sounded like more fun than what we ended up seeing: "racing." It involved the trucks going one or two at a time around the circuit, jumping a few crushed cars. It was okay the first few times, but when they insisted on holding quarterfinals, etc., until a winner was picked, it actually got a little boring.

Which I totally didn't expect: I thought, okay, maybe this is going to be really lowbrow, but it's gotta be entertaining. Two trucks overturned in the early going, which actually seemed to shock the race organizers. Truck-body pieces flew off, and one truck had to sit out a few rounds. I thought it would be a lot more busting stuff up.

They had motocross bikes in the middle of the show, where guys jumped their bikes from a metal ramp onto that big dirt hill in the middle. Each rider made his jump; he was scored based on the difficulty of the contortion he threw himself into while his bike was in the air. This is scored just like figure skating! I thought.

The big finish was a demolition derby, but they restricted the fleet of beater pickups to the right-hand side of the field, so no one could really get a good head of speed up. For both me and Jen, it did bring back happy childhood TV memories of Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero trying to avoid the infamous "Mallachi Crunch."

Still: Let the record show that we have seen the monster trucks. If you hear my kids complaining in later years that we never took them to see anything, please refer them back to this post.