The Game

You probably thought I was going to have a lapse in my daily posting. And that, I submit, is just a horrible underestimation of my dedication to this thing.

By which I mean you'd have been right. I'm exhausted now and would really like to lie down and sleep, but this is way too early in this experiment to fall behind.

The appetizer situation was solved by a brilliant purchase of bagel chips and spinach dip at the Morse Market.


Saved the night about as much as David Tyree

I'd do a recap of the game, but everyone saw it, those of us who are rational and were cheering for the Giants rejoiced while those of us who have souls blacker than a starless night wept. A team of researchers is trying to determine how the hell Eli avoided that sack. And, this year at least, I was happy to see the Giants pull it off, and I was glad to see them pull it off in such a solid game, where the officials stayed out of it for the most part and didn't make any enormous mistakes. I was going to make reference to some joker who tried to explain that the Patriots actually won if you screw around with how the clock was kept and presume that the Giants wouldn't have changed their strategy if there was no time left, but he's removed it from YouTube, presumably because Fark picked up the link. He seems to be a minority, though. I haven't read too many Pats fans who are doing anything but giving the Giants credit. Incidentally, if you want some entertainment, go read one of the Fark threads on the Super Bowl.

It what is undoubtedly a bigger game, however, Team Rich Ahn (because our captain didn't get the team name to him on time, so they used his name) had a matchup against "Kaibigan". If you'll recall from the video, our last attempt at floor hockey resulted in a 6-1 loss, three broken legs and our head coach's resignation. Tonight, however, things were different, except that I stuck with #19.

Why the hell not.

We were much more coordinated on offense along with absolutely stellar defense (our third period goalie, Meera, had two saves on two shots on goal, as did the goalie for the first two periods Erin.) Their goalie was solid, blocked me four times and had a terrific stop against Steven, but could not sustain the awesome throughout. One goal by Preeti, a goal by Erin (on which I'm claiming an assist) and a sick backhanded goal by Steven tied up a 3-0 shutout.

Because this is the Northwestern Intramural system, there's only one game left in the regular season. Then the playoffs arrive.

This is going to be intense. Come to Murphspot for all your intramural hockey needs. For all your actual hockey needs, you'll want The Pensblog. OT losses that move us into a 3-way tie for first are not kosher by Murphspot, but I'll leave the recapping on that to the people that do it best.

Giants/Patriots/Digestion

I'm about to head over to a friend's house for the Super Bowl, and thought I should get today's post in before that. He's a Giants fan, so I'll be cheering for the Giants in addition to the fact that there was that annoying little stint where the Patriots seemed to knock off the Steelers constantly.

My intention was to make some appetizers, but I don't have a normal sleep schedule, and so it's going to have to be whatever I can find that has the potential for deliciousness at Dominick's. I could, if I decided I hated everyone that's going to be there, swing by White Castle for a 30-count case (which the marquee was advertising, urging the passerby to "stop in for a 30-burger Crave Case today!" I'm not one who whines about how everyone's overweight because I'm not in shape myself, but it seems strange to me that someone would be walking by and think "Oh. You know what I need? Thirty burgers."), which is in my mind because I went for a walk last night. There's one about a mile south of here, and I'm usually struck by the fact that White Castle is only good theoretically, before you eat it. While you're eating it and certainly after, it's sad times.

We'll see how it goes, I guess. Hopefully, I find something to serve as an appetizer that won't give everyone some kind of terrible disease, the Giants will win and the resulting euphoria will help the half of the party that's on that floor hockey team be awesome and win tomorrow's game.

I'll post a recap of that when it happens. And yes. I considered trying to liveblog a game I'll be playing in (which might actually be possible if I rely on my Post-It pad, but that seems really lame).

Another Entry into the Videoblogging Experiment

Yeah, I'll eventually stop doing this and just write a post. But for now, I am tired and so we'll run with it.

I Need Another Vacation

I'm awake at 1am on a Sunday (which is admittedly pretty early for me) and I'm not quite able to go to sleep yet, so I thought I'd write a bit on here whie I wait for water to boil so that I can have some rice. I've not posted on here in a while, but rather than try to catch this up to what's been going on, I'm just going to kind of wing this return.

1) Thanksgiving: We actually did it. Jenna and I actually, successfully, cooked and ate Thanksgiving dinner. I'd like to start by noting that I had no idea how much food is required to cook a proper Thanksgiving dinner, or how much spices cost. Admittedly, we bought these things at the Big Apple Supermarket twenty feet from the back door of my building which tends to be more "small-market"-ish and thus a bit more expensive than, say, Dominick's, but we offset this by buying the cheapest spices available (I'm sure the fine people at McCormick would argue that theirs is just as good, and I'd be inclined to agree because disagreeing costs me double). Still, I ended up paying, evidently, $3.99 for bay leaves (3g), which I'm not even sure what they do, $4.99 for ground ginger which I think may have gone into the pie, but in any case I've still got like ninety percent of the 22g bottle, $5.79 for sage (14g), which was just sort of sprinkled on the squash we cooked anyway and I think we probably could have gotten by without, and cloves (17g) which were supposed to be ground but evidently no one in Chicago sells ground cloves so they're whole and Jenna ground them in a food processor. Suddenly, I feel like I should probably have ground ginger on everything I eat. Especially, say, fish sticks.

Still, the whole thing worked out well, there were no "family movie/sitcom" situations in which we burned the turkey and were forced to eat at the diner (which, incidentally, was offering a pretty good deal at $10.49 for whatever the hell the "complete dinner" consisted of), and I even took some pictures, though because my digital camera is somewhere at home at the moment, I'll only be able to get up once I have them developed and scan them. We've got a good amount of food left over, though did have to eat out over the weekend because turkey's really boring and Jenna went all super-cook today and made soup from turkey bits and celery or something. I don't know. I was playing Katamari Damacy and sacking Ben Roethlisberger.

2) Things I've been reading lately: I just finished World War Z, which is Max Brooks followup to the Zombie Survival Guide which was occasionally humorous and pretty interesting. World War Z is his crack at, I guess, historical fiction, though that term makes me think that Washington and Lincoln should be involved somehow. It's essentially, in the first half or so, an amalgam of the last two bits of the Survival Guide, being the description of a world in which zombies not only exist but have taken over and little "personal accounts". It was a fun and interesting read, and as I've got a 40 minute commute as penance for living in a neighborhood that accepts "Pocket Puppies" as a valid store, it helped stave off long hours of staring out the window and being talked to by, well, anyone. From there, it appears I'll be proceeding with a book I picked up while buying presents, Bertrand Russell's Sceptical Essays. I'll let you know more about that as I actually get into it.

3) Music: Tower Records, if you haven't heard, is being liquidated. As it happens, I live about 200 yards (some ridiculous standard measurement) from one, and so have really cheap music and videos really closeby. Today's purchases: In the Mood for Ska: The Moonska Years- The Skatalites and Ace of Spades- Motörhead. It's odd. I actually like Motörhead quite a lot apparently based on the first few listens, and Ace of Spades seems like a good album to start with when it's $8, their first album isn't actually still in stock and I know the song Ace of Spades from a video game (which is the lamest reason to buy a CD). The Skatalites are, as I expected, fantastic on the two disc set that has them playing with Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken and some stuff from Tommy McCook apart from the general output.

4) The Steelers' O-line makes me weep.

5) Al Jazeera has begun broadcasting in English though no cable companies have agreed to air it actually in the US and if you want to see it in the States you have to pay $6 a month to stream it from their website. It's being carried in the UK on Sky Digital, which, as a bit of trivia, is owned by NewsCorporation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. From reviews I've read, Al Jazeera is actually pretty good at providing an alternate perspective, which is really the only reason that any cable company should agree to carry it, as it's not as though we need another 24-hour news channel. It's a channel broadcasting from and centered on the Middle East, and should, I think, if well done, provide an interesting view from inside that allows us to get an alternate viewpoint, which is good. There are, of course, those that claim that we shouldn't be allowed to elect to watch it, as it would be a mouthpiece for anti-Americanism, something that I have no clue about. It might be, but I haven't actually seen it to make a judgement, and I suspect that most people that already have very strong opinions about it probably haven't either. Then again, none of that really effects me as I don't subscribe to cable and get my news from listing to NPR all day with wicked huge wireless headphones because I don't have to pay for it and it tends to be somewhat neutral, but it's an interesting topic, I think.

6) In addition to my weekly subscription to the New Yorker, I've been occasionally picking up the libertarian magazine Reason now and again. The experience of violently switching between either agreeing completely with what it's saying and denouncing it as unreasonable is kind of fun (I tend to agree heavily on social issues but am a bit of a centrist with regards to the economy, which is actually a change from a few years ago). The issue I picked up most recently does have a moderately interesting interview with the creators of South Park and a bit of a long article in which different individuals are interviewed to try to discern whether someone who is in complete agreement with the magazine on every issue (which is how I presume they define "libertarian") should vote for in the elections that happened a few weeks ago. It's an older issue. Not surpringly, Grover Norquist wants you to vote for Republicans on the "less taxes" issue (which is juxtaposed wiht an article immediately after this one which tries to discern why the Republican party, which campaigns on being fiscally responsible, isn't even close), the guy that runs Daily Kos and Terry Michael, former spokesman for the DNC say the libertarians should vote D on social grounds, and Markos Moulitsas throws in a bit about perhaps the solution to neither party going wacky lies in perpetually divided government, and a guy who was running for representative in Arizona as a Republican says, essentially "please don't vote me out of power, we're still better than those damned Democrats." He won his seat... over the Libertarian candidate, who the last person interviewed in the article, the President of the Libertarian Party, would have preferred. More updates as I continue reading.

7) I think I might be the only person who's disappointed that O.J. isn't releasing his book, tentatively titled "If I Did It", in which he posits that if he puts things in the subjunctive, everyone will be so stupid that they don't realize that the book is basically a confession. Slate had a bit of stuff a while ago about potential legal troubles for O.J. as they related to the book/TV deal. Conclusion: Not really all that much. I don't think I'd read it, but in a world where they're doing things about the Jon-Benet Ramsey case as recently as this year, I can't believe that there's actually no interest in what this particular scumbag has to say. In that, I agree with Timothy Noah. It's news.

I'm going to bed.

The Helmet Thing

So here's the thing.

When you're a professional athlete, you're going to be at least somewhat of a role model. You don't have to like that, but it's going to happen no matter what you do. Which is why people treat it as such a big deal when someone's caught for putting some alkaloid or another up their nose. Less so if the person is a washed-up "ballplayer" that looks really pathetic and that no one actually has any good memories of. I think you know who I'm talking about here. Kids see you and think that if they act like you, they'll be cool like you. It's not a new phenomenon.

Arguably, Ben Roethlisberger isn't a good role model anyway for seven year olds. But sweet mother, if this guy can't wear a motorcycle helmet. I was one of those that thought that nothing would ever happen to actually necessitate a helmet, because, I think, Ben Roethlisberger is already such a huge part of Pittsburgh lore and because that's not something you tend to think about coming off of a Super Bowl win. Of course, it has come to something, which resulted in the condition that the Chicago Tribune led yesterday with a report on Fatah violence, the NYTimes led with a preview of Bush's visit to Iraq today, and the Post-Gazette led with Roethlisberger in font about triple the size of the other two sites.

I get the impression that, in addition to the disregard for his own safety for the feeling of freedom on the road (and here's where I admit that I'm officially feeling old, as I thought "those damn kids" when I typed that, and felt very wary about the possibility that they might be on my lawn), he doesn't quite get how important it is to the City of Pittsburgh to stay healthy. Economic downturns over the past several years, controversy over the rapidly shrinking youth population, division as is requisite with being one of three centers in Pennsylvania that vote to the left of center (and do so strongly enough that Pennsylvania has gone to the Democratic nominee in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004) and the one thing that people are going to be able to come together over is sports, hatred of Cleveland being a corrolary. Sure, some are strictly Bucs fans, some are strictly Steelers fans and some are strictly Pens fans. And sure, I laughed aloud typing the last three words of that last sentence, but the Steelers have done what hasn't happened in Pittsburgh since, well, 1992, effectively relaying to a whole new generation of fans what it feels like to be champions.

When the quarterback of the damn team goes around jeopardizing that despite pleads from the team and Terry Bradshaw, incidentally, I don't think his decision to appear nude in Failure to Launch should affect the fact that he's right on this, though it does affect my ability to look at Terry Bradshaw without feeling ill, you shouldn't, probably, continue to do that.

Also, he had no license. Good job. Criticism is permitted, I think, as a result of the fact that he's got a few broken teeth, a jaw that's not having a good time, and as none of the injuries were life threatening. So yes. Of course, everyone's happy that he's going to be ok, and that he's probably going to be able to play next year, but what happened, even if the actual accident wasn't at fault, is not something to be excused lightly.