The MWC staff is back home from our first trip back to North Carolina since our frantic, middle-of-the-night escape last fall. I knew I was really back in the South the first Sunday morning I was there. As I walked to my class on the Raleigh campus of North Carolina State University, none of the five separate strangers who said "Hello" (pronounced "Haah") to me robbed me. So that was a nice change. NCSU is an interesting place, and I'd like to tell you a little about it. To all the State grads who might see this, I apologize for what I'm going to say. You know, for using so many words with more than one syllable.

The very first time I ever stepped on the State campus, there was (this is absolutely true) livestock all over the place, which confirmed pretty much everything I ever suspected about the university. I saw cows, pigs, and a llama. I knew that since State was founded as a land-grant college, it has a fairly extensive agricultural program, but I didn't know it was so fully integrated into campus life. I was somewhat disappointed this time to discover that there were no large animals to be seen. (Obvious but offensive jokes about NCSU coeds will not be seen in a family publication such as this. Besides, I own a scale and I'm not about to throw stones near these glass walls.)

Also disappointing was the second of the two classes I was there to take. The class was supposed to be a relatively advanced course in statistical genetics, but we spent the first morning of the three-day class flipping coins and learning about the binomial distribution. I realize that not all of you are statisticians, so it may not be entirely clear what that means. If statistical genetics were like basketball (and I'm not saying it's not), the binomial distribution would be like the part in basketball where you learn the high-skill task of how to tie your shoelaces.

If you know a little about NCSU, it's not hard to see where this comes from. State has a tradition (dating back to the early 1980s) of enrolling basketball players who, judging solely by their SAT scores, couldn't find shoelaces if you dropped them off at 2 a.m. in the middle of a Foot Locker store. [Q: Fair or Unfair? A: Unfair - It was FSU whose players were involved in the Foot Locker incident.] Although they seemed to have little trouble finding illegal drugs. [ Q: Fair or Unfair? A: Fair - c.f. Chris Washburn.] These teams were coached by the happy-go-lucky Jimmy "Jim Valvano" V, who was able to avoid a scandalous legacy of crime and corruption only by the bold public relations act of opening China to the West. Oh wait, that was Nixon. Jimmy V saved his reputation by the bold public relations act of dying of cancer.

I have a Jimmy V story. I met him once. He was working a Vanderbilt basketball game for ABC, and alert reader Greg "Cotton Johnson" Freeman and I went over to meet him. "You're Jimmy V," we explained, and then we just stood there, dumber than rocks. "Hey, didn't you guys used to play for me?" he said.

So in a key part of Sunday's newspaper, namely the Carson Pirie Scott flyer, I saw that there now exists the Jimmy Valvano Neckwear Collection, "designed by your favorite professional athletes and sports figures." By this, they mean Brett Favre, Dick Vitale, Jimmy Valvano, and Lesley Visser. This, of course, is no one's collection of favorite professional athletes and sports figures. Except Lesley Visser, whom we love.

Our Lesley Visser story begins in Tucson, Arizona, where Cotton Johnson and I met her during the 1991 NCAA tournament. This was also the site of our Jud Heathcote story, our Alonzo Mourning story, and our Larry Johnson story, each of which ends with sadness for Cotton and me and smug laughter for the title character. Cotton and I walked over to meet Lesley. "You're Lesley Visser," we explained. "We love you," we told her, as she ran to hide behind Greg Gumbel's hair. The Lesley Visser story goes on for several months and ends in an unfortunate series of court-mandated restraining orders, although I did get a card from her when I invited her to the wedding. You know, maybe that explai---well, never mind.

Coming back to North Carolina for the first time after eight months away really helped me clarify the major difference between the South and the North. Namely, auto racing, which has long been popular in the South. I opened the Sunday paper when I was there to find the headlines "Hornaday penalty gives Ruttman truck win" and "Pit stops crucial at Dover." Here's what you need to know about the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit:

Seventeen-year-old Jeff Gordon, in the Number 24 car and played by Tom Cruise in the movie, wins every race. Other drivers include men named (I am not making these up) Lake Speed and Dick Trickle, and each week the field is filled out by 26 drivers named Dale. In a Winston Cup race, the drivers are all in Ford or Chevy stock cars, which are called stock cars because they contain no parts actually manufactured by Ford or Chevy. Collisions resulting in life-threatening injuries occur at the rate of two major accidents every three races, as specified in the contract with ESPN.

After a smash-up, it is not considered polite to invoke Darwin's theory of natural selection. It's especially impolite to direct it at the people in the room who are doing all the (and these are the technical terms) whoopin' and hollerin'. Crashes are usually caused by "rubs," as in "Rusty gave the Intimidator's Number 3 car a rub and sent it flying into the grandstand, whereupon the crowd whooped and hollered."

This week's conspiracy theory is that NASCAR is the means by which the South will have its revenge on the North. NASCAR, which stands for "Northern Aggression ends, South Can Again Rise," enjoyed modest popularity over its first 40 years or so. Since the beginning of this decade, attendance has increased five-fold to over 6 million per year with 150,000 to 300,000 fans in attendance at each Sunday's Winston Cup event.

Where is this growth coming from? Tracks are being built all over the country outside the South, but there are only a certain number of dates on the calendar, so small-town tracks in the South are paying the price, losing their races to places like Texas and Las Vegas. Note that Texas is not technically part of the South (despite the fact that being a person of color there is punishable by being dragged behind a pickup truck until dead), because they put a ketchup-like substance on beef and call it barbecue.

[Alert readers will note my contrast of the historically strained race relations below the Mason-Dixon line with the Coca-Cola-commercial-like harmony of life in non-Southern cities such as Benton Harbor, NY, and South Central Los Angeles.]

So my point is, it's 11:30 at night and I haven't put one of these out in about a month, so I have to come up with some ending, no matter how lame, even if it means making a combination Shakespeare/NASCAR reference. No wait, my point is, everybody loses. The South loses the NASCAR they've always known and loved, and the North gets, well, NASCAR.

Aye, there's the rub.