It’s Monday. Had some decent weather over the weekend for the Route 66 NHRA Nationals in Joliet, Illinois. My favorite former NASCAR driver Tony Stewart claimed his second-career NHRA Top Fuel win yesterday, running 329.10 MPH to take down a 15-time winner Justin Ashley. Even better, Stewart now has the points lead in the division. If he wins the championship, it would put him in a category of his own.
NASCAR was in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for the annual All-Star race. This is always a fun race to watch because it’s about one thing and one thing only—the one million dollars! There are no points, it’s only about winning a cool million and that’s exactly what Christopher Bell did.
Next Sunday is the high holy day of racing. The day starts with the 109th running of the Great American Race, the Indianapolis 500. After that is NASCAR’s longest race, the Coca-Cola 600 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina. That’s a lot of racing action for one day, but I’m already prepared with extra beer and munchies.
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Light My Fire
It’s Tuesday. Holy shit! Stolen from Jim Morrison’s grave in 1988, the long-lost bust of The Doors lead singer, Jim Morrison, has been found after 37 years!
Mladen Mikulin’s bust of American singer Jim Morrison accrued seven years of graffiti and lost its nose before it disappeared from Père-Lachaise cemetery.
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Jim Morrison’s long-lost graveside bust turns up during French police search
Police make chance find of sculpture that adorned Doors singer’s Paris grave until its 1988 disappearance
Carved out of white marble and covered in graffiti, the hefty bust disappeared in 1988. Now, 37 years later, the doe-eyed sculpture that once adorned the grave of the American singer Jim Morrison has been found, in what Paris prosecutors described as a “chance discovery”.
Police in France said they had been carrying out a search related to a fraud case when they happened to stumble upon the bust of the frontman of the Doors. The announcement, made on social media on Monday, was accompanied by a photo showing the graying sculpture still covered in graffiti and missing a chunk of its nose, reportedly sliced off by souvenir hunters before its disappearance.
Conceived as a tribute to Morrison, the sculpture was carved after his death by the Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin. It was placed at his grave at Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery in 1981, 10 years after the singer died in the French capital at the age of 27.
While the exact circumstances of Morrison’s death remain shrouded in mystery, most early accounts say the singer died of cardiac arrest in his bathtub.
From its perch on top of Morrison’s headstone, the statue welcomed the throngs of visitors who came to snap photos, lay flowers and – before the hiring of a guard to watch the site – smoke pot and party with one of Père-Lachaise’s most famous residents.
Seven years after the bust was placed at the site, it disappeared. Rumours swirled over what might have happened: some spoke of two fans who had managed to cart off the bust, reportedly weighing 128kg, on a moped in the middle of the night; others repeated the seemingly baseless claim that authorities had hidden the sculpture in order to protect it.
In 1994, after years had gone by without any sign of the sculpture, two Americans were arrested for attempting to erect their own bronze version of the bust at Morrison’s grave site.
Todd Mitchell, who said he had travelled from Utah and spent thousands of dollars of his own retirement fund to resurrect the bust, said the security guard was initially confused when he came across him and his nephew scrambling to bolt the bust to Morrison’s headstone in the dark. “He just looked dumbfounded … Most people are destroying stuff in that cemetery,” Mitchell told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1994.
On Monday, as fans of Morrison celebrated what police described on social media as an “unusual discovery”, there was little news on whether the bust would be returned to the singer’s tomb. Benoît Gallot, the curator of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, told Le Figaro: “The police haven’t contacted us, so I don’t know whether the bust will be returned to us.”