Couch potatoes, unite! Some of the greatest television programming available all year is about to start its legendary six day run. Yes, it is time for the Barrett-Jackson Auto Auction on SpeedChannel (that is channel 112 on our system). Ladies, please excuse your husband while he sits transfixed on the television for the next several nights. If you could come around fairly often and wipe the drool off his face, that would be mighty nice as well.

The Barrett-Jackson Auction takes place in Scottsdale, Arizona every year at this time and, for those of us infected with an unhealthy interest in all things automotive, it is simply a little bit of heaven right here on our television screens. For more information about the times, please click on our “What’s On” site and check it out. This is a nifty little feature of the Glasgow website that many folks on the EPB team contribute to each week. This website is where we try to help you sort through the tons of programming available each day by giving you a “heads up” on the stuff we think is worth watching (in other words, this is what we will be wrestling the remote away from others in our house so that we can watch). If you’ve never paid any attention to the “What’s On EPB’s Cable” link right in the middle of the Glasgow home page, this is what you have been missing. You can find the programming coming up on Cable6 as well as some of our personal favorites to help you with your viewing decisions. Give it a look!

Anyway, back to the Barrett-Jackson Auction, this event features the most unique, most collectible, most unaffordable-for-the-common-man vehicles on the planet. They strut them across the stage like the models in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show and the male of the species is similarly hypnotized. As they roll up the ramp (the cars not the models) many older guys start frothing at the mouth and bidding at the billfold and, within a couple of minutes, the gavel comes down and one person’s fantasy is transferred to another. It is pure poetry and a lucid dream which you simply must experience. Gasoline is too expensive to waste it in civilian modes of transport, but these cars are worthy of $100 per barrel oil!

It is great fun to develop opinions about just how the bidders got lucky enough to be able to pay stratosphere-puncturing prices for these dream machines. I guess some of them might have bought a winning lottery ticket. Others, perhaps, just married very well. Still others probably are in the process of spending the inheritance left them by some dear departed parent who really never dreamed their son would be blowing the money on a 1969 Z28 Camaro or a Ferrari 250 GTO. Finally, there are those that I figure really can’t afford the car at all. They just got a ticket to the event and somehow got caught up in the bidding frenzy, lost sight of the solid boundary between desire and reality, and wound up in the Barrett-Jackson cutting room with nothing but an over-extended credit card and amnesia about the bidding process. I assume those guys wind up missing in action after the Barrett-Jackson security forces get through with them. I wonder if they get to hear the Ferrari at full howl for a few seconds before they disappear. If so, it might have been worth it.