And the Awards for the Rest of Yous

Here's the awards to go out to bloggers who aren't currently typing an award blog at this cul-de-sac of the Internets at this very moment. That's right, you get to see if I think you're worthy of the oxygen that is slowly killing you while sustaining your life temporarily. Most of you are probably perfectly aware of these bloggers and the validity of each as a source for boredom relief, but if you aren't, all of the following actually feature people who were at least professional writers for a couple of years or are at least good enough to write professionally. Keep in mind that they're blogs though and we all suck sometimes.

I also expect you to download the image at right and to display it proudly on your blog. It's your official Bliss and Blisters Award Gold Medal and I made it especially for you.

Best Blog with Frequent Posts about Climbing Things: It's obviously not a blog about climbing, but no one else has written a brilliant narrative about being trapped on a ledge during a climbing trip and spooning with a girl who isn't his significant other, or about climbing tables.

The Blogger We All Wish Wasn't So Damn Inefficient: Chris is perhaps the best writer among us. His posts are intelligent, witty, and laugh-out-loud funny, but in a perfectly dry and subtle way. He just posts on a lunar cycle, about once a month. This is a good place to start if you aren't familiar with my former college newspaper editor.

Best Long-Winded Blogger with a Black, Mean-Spirited Heart: She makes fun of me, celebrities, babies, people who make babies, and then stabs hopeful filmmakers in the heart in their moments of vulnerability of previewing a work they put their sweat equity into. She may look all sweet and caring, and try to fool you with her comments about her husband and dog, but she's really evil.

Blog with the Best Comment Pages: Bacon Soup may have short posts that rely heavily on a gimmick, but they result in some seriously classic comment discussions. Try the ice bear and Bhutto comments for example.

Funniest Blogger I don't Know Personally: I have no idea who Kate is. I do know that she doesn't post enough though. However, despite the slow pace of content addition, her posts are comedy gold. She's got a great way of making the mundane sound hilarious. Kudos. Just read her dining room floor glitter post (the first one on the previous link) or this to see for yourself. She also gets the award for Best Use of Labels.

Blogger Who Makes Best Use of Surveys Taken from Other Blogs: Sure, she actually makes plenty of more original posts and some high quality ones at that (and seems to mention me more than Mickey should be comfortable with if he weren't so busy spooning with female rock climbers and climbing kitchen tables), but she takes the classic cop out blog post and actually makes them worth reading, especially if you're really bored or know her personally, both of which usually apply to me.

Best Poster Who Doesn't Actually Have A Blog of Their Own: There's no link here because Julie doesn't have a blog and apparently doesn't even allow her profile to be shared. In fact, if you don't know who I'm talking about, feel free to imagine that she's simply a figment of my imagination or a sexual predator who thinks I'm ten years old. Julie also qualifies for the Campaigned Hardest for an Individual Honor award.

And I Begin the Award Season


I figure who better to honor than myself to start off the Jacob's Land of Bliss and Blisters Award Season. This post will feature what I consider to be my five best posts of the year. I'll get around to all you other punks and losers later. Going through this I've noticed a trend. First, I really have been posting more regularly, and second, apparently the longer I take this blogging thing seriously, the longer the average post gets.

5. My Favorite Dictators. I don't think this one turned out as funny as I intended it to be, but I think it kind of encapsulates my personality (especially when combined with number 3.)


4. Sleep and toilet phones. Not the most obviously complementing topics are encompassed in this post, but if you really think about it, it's a perfect combination.


3. My ode to my desire to be a career loser. Honestly, I really do feel this way even though I know I'd be miserable doing that too. I like some of my more poetic modifiers in this one.

2. My Christmas Adventure. I'm not experiencing any muscle spasms, or tightness in my jaw, so I'm assuming I didn't end up with tetanus from my pipe-fixing adventure under the house Christmas morning, so I'm unable to finish this story with a dramatic ending, but what are you gonna do?

1. One of Those Moments. Honestly, this one seems to be a bit out of my place on this blog. There's no whining about what I'd rather be doing with my life, or absurdist or sarcastic humor. Still, I like this one.

An honorable mention goes to Of Boredom and Dragonflies. I don't know why I like this one, but I do.

Freedom for the First Time

K and I are heading out to Brunswick to visit some friends there tomorrow. My mom is going to pick up E to take him to church. Since I no longer attend, she wants him to be exposed and takes him every once in a while. Luckily, her religious beliefs don't include E needing to be "saved", so it's not because she's trying to keep him from leading a life that ends with him burning in the eternal bonfires of Hell. That makes me feel a little better about the whole thing. That belief also keeps her from nagging me about not going to church anymore. She'll ask if I want to go with her on occasion, but it never goes beyond that. I'm really glad it doesn't. I'd prefer to not get pushed into a corner and have to explain exactly why I now refuse to go.

The freedom part of my title comes from what happens after my mom picks up E for church. K and I will pack our overnight bag and head out of town without E for the first time since I originally knocked my poor wife up. I'm looking forward to it. K's feeling a bit guilty.

I was a bit worried about asking my mom for overnight babysitting duties. After all, the boy's still getting up at least once (and more often twice) a night to eat. I made sure to remind her of this and she still seemed pretty enthusiastic at the prospect of keeping him overnight.

I'm more or less over the soul-wrenching despair at becoming a father and knowing that my life is hobbled for at least the next 18 years. I'm still aware that my life is seriously constricted, but I'm starting to get over myself a little. Still, I'm really looking forward to going out drinking with friends without having to worry about E during the process. K doesn't see this as quite the opportunity that I do, though. I guess her maternal instincts are a bit stronger than my paternal instincts.

And like I said, I don't entirely resent the poor kid. In fact, I spent the whole day (at least the part after I got up around noon) taking care of the kid and giving K a break. We drove back in from Augusta last night and got home around 2 a.m. When I fall asleep after a day like that, I tend to be in something more akin to a coma than a slumber. K couldn't get me up to take my normal nighttime feeding shift and ended up dealing with both shifts and keeping him occupied when he got up for good around 7. I'd say the fact that I've done all the feeding, changing, and entertaining since noon is more guilt than anything else. We did have fun watching football together, though.

A Really Cool Day

We went with my parents to deliver my sister to Augusta to spend a few days with her beau before heading back to Denver to work her last week before spending a week skiing and moving back to Georgia. I didn't really think that driving two and a half hours from my backwater home would involve such an international experience, but it did.

First, on the way there, K changed my Garmin's voice from an Australian chick to a British dude. Already we're jumping hemispheres if not languages. Second, on the way to Augusta we stopped for a potty break and I was feeling a bit hungry and knew that I still had at least an hour before lunch, so I headed off to the chip aisle and found some Herr's Kettle Cooked Garlic and Parmesan chips. Mmm. Italian. They get a little too salty by the end of the bag (and I'm a salt fiend), but these are pretty good chips, and I don't eat a whole lot of potato chips.

My sister spent a couple of years living in Augusta while attending the Medical College of Georgia, so we deferred to her for lunch spots. My sister is like the cool, less eccentric version of me, so I tend to trust her opinion on these things. She suggested Tako Sushi, a less-than-obvious fusion of cultures and cuisines. Imagine a place where you're faced with a choice of ordering a fish taco, Asian pork dumplings, or a spicy tuna roll. Yep, it's a place that's half Southwest/Tex-Mex and half sushi bar. My sister is a huge sushi fan; she eats it about twice a week, so I'm going to assume that this was good sushi, especially since she's been in Denver for the past two years and would have been exposed to a wider range of choices for the stuff. I do know that none of the fish smelled fishy (always a bad sign) and that despite eating so much sushi, all involving some form of raw fish, that I couldn't finish my second soft taco, I didn't get even slightly sick afterwards. I'm going to assume that means that this was good sushi. I actually enjoyed eating the stuff, so we'll stick to that. I'd never eaten more than two bites of the stuff (and never more than a single bite of raw fish). So, after our adventures with Australian and British navigators and Italian potato chips, we lunched in Albuquerque and Kyoto.

And, even though I've mentioned it before, Courtney's boyfriend is Taiwanese and his friend is Korean, so we ate sushi and tacos with a guy from Taiwan and another from Korea.

And after all of this world-travelling in east Georgia, we finished the night off with a good splash of Canadian culture. We went to an Augusta Lynx hockey game. Sadly, I was unable to locate an octopus to throw onto the ice after a goal. The Lynx won in overtime, by the way. I've never actually gone to a hockey game that didn't go into overtime. When I went to see the Lynx last year, it was an overtime win, when I went to see the Thrashers this year before Thanksgiving, it was an overtime win, and then there was last night's OT win.

It's just a shame that I couldn't get a Mexican sushi restaurant to work in my little podunk town.

A More Ambitious Project

I succeeded in completing with NaBloPoMo, so when I thought about Blog365, I couldn't resist. I've got a serious feeling that I won't be as successful with this task as I was with the last, but I've managed to put back-to-back months together where I've posted as many posts as there are days in said month, as long as I don't screw up these last few days.

The rules are fairly flexible, so even if I don't fulfill my personal goal of an actual live post every day except Feb. 29, I can still fulfill the purposes of the project. Back posting is allowed, especially if you fulfill the spirit of the project by writing the post offline on computer, typewriter or paper each day with plans to back post later. Anyone up for a return to everyday posting with me? I won't even mock you when you peter out around Feb. 6. Much.

Plans for the Final Week of the Year

I decided against my tour of Floridian breweries and brewpubs in order to save for a trip to Alaska this coming summer. Considering that I hate Florida and love Alaska, I think it's a fair trade, even if it does mean that I don't get to take a major road trip for another six months. Instead of driving, I'll be sitting here for the next week posting on my blog. I promise to try not to get too cliche and generic. If I start to become the literary equivalent of Sam's Choice Cola, let me know.

I was very upset when Mickey posted his year-end awards list. Not only did he post it obscenely early (I mean, their were at least a chance for a dozen or so posts between his "awards" and the actual end of the year. What if I'd produced some amazingly groundbreaking revelation or a post so funny that Mickey burst a colon from the abdominal contractions caused by his uncontrollable laughter?), but he also stole my idea. He may not have realized he stole my idea, but he did. I've been planning this since about a week before his post. I may still do my own twist on the Best of Blogs list or I may do a Best of Blog Posts lists. Hell, I may even do both. I don't go back to work until Jan. 3. I have a bit of free time on my hands.

The rest of this week (and the ensuing weekend and a Monday) that finishes out the this year will be more of the general aimless rambling that makes up the bulk of this blog. Enjoy.

My Christmas Adventure

Inspired by Mickey's post about his mountaineering adventure and the longest night of his life, I thought I'd share my own adventure about the Crappiest Christmas Ever®.

Last night K wakes me up in a mild panic. It had been time to feed E and she had gone into kitchen to fix his bottle when she heard a roar under the floorboards. I rush in, luckily avoiding stubbing any toes (a real danger when navigating darkened hallways and rooms at high rates of speed to realize it's the sound of rushing water. A pipe had burst.

Here's the annoying part: It was only about 40°F outside. Apparently the pipe had just deteriorated or came apart at a connection. I run outside across the yard, barefoot and pajama-clad, to the pump to shut the water off at the source. The grass was wet and my feet were achingly cold by the time I made the trek back into the house.

Then I went back to bed.

I'll admit that I didn't sleep that way. Annoyance and worry made sleeping difficult despite the warm covers and warm K making sleep a physically pleasant option. I even dreamed that the pipe had burst because my sister was practicing a plumbing project under the house in the middle of the night. She had even murdered one of my chickens so it wouldn't crow at her and wake us up. I also had a deck out the back door, which I don't have in reality. I woke up hoping that the original discovery of the broken pipe had been a dream as well. Alas, it had been all too true, my feet still being a little dirty to prove it.

I live in a house that is raised off the ground a few feet and there is a crawl space underneath. I am deathly afraid of crawl spaces. I have an overwhelming phobia of small crawly things that have no chance of actually hurting me like cockroaches, mice, and most spiders. Those kinds of animals really like crawl spaces. I also don't like not being able to even raise myself up into anything more upright than a military crawl. Despite all of this, I sucked up my fear, put on a bit of false bravado and a pair of coveralls and attacked the crawl space with fake gusto.

The coveralls were a bit of an adventure in their own. Supposedly, they were my dad's which should mean that they could possibly be a little tight around my middle (I'm barrel-chested and fat-bellied) but should fit around the shoulders and everywhere else. Instead, even the shoulders are tight an I end up looking a bit like a plump, blue Christmas sausage. It's a great way to start your Christmas morning.

After posing for pictures so that K could laugh at me in the future as well, I poke my head into the crawl space, get about waist-deep into the murkiness under the house, hoping the mouse nest under my head is currently unoccupied, and catch a glimpse of dog butt disappearing behind a post on the other side of the house. Bubba had sneaked through the entrance while I struggled with too-small protective clothing. I roll onto my side to give the stupid mongrel the right of way so he can exit and then I proceed. Just so you know, dragging yourself by your elbows the length of a house, all the while dodging pipes and wires, is neither fun nor comfortable. I finally get to the area where there is a bit of water on the ground and think I've identified the problem pipe. There is a pipe connected to nothing jutting out of the concrete base of the porch and utility room. I yell out for them to turn the water on at the pump to see if that's the problem and wait in the dust and gloom for something to happen.

Something does happen, only not in the place I expected. Instead of the unattached pipe I expected, water started gushing out of another unattached pipe. Apparently the other pipe was supposed to be that way. The one that used to be attached to my kitchen faucet wasn't any longer.

After the test, I wait some more in the now-mud and gloom while my dad drives back home to get the solvent and glue to stick the pipes back together. K and her parents sing me Christmas carols and K takes photos of me through the vent and gets me a mask so I don't have to keep breathing in dust. Of course now, instead of smelling onions (apparently there were some wild ones growing on the other side of the vent, I smell my own morning breath. I'm not sure that no longer having a gritty mouth is a trade up.

After a bit longer lying in the mud, I crawl over to the problem pipe and dry it off. I reach for the solvent to clean it and look back to find the pipe once again wet. I shake the pipes a bit to get the water out, dry it and look back to find it wet again. I do this a few more times before the water finally seems to stop. I finally get the solvent wiped on and the glue on afterward and the pipe fitting stuck back together. Now, I'm just waiting for it to set so I can see if it worked or if I'm going to need to call in a plumber tomorrow.

I crawl my way back the length of the house to the exit and come out, muddy and with sore shoulders and back, but hopeful that the problem is fixed. The really cool thing is that I don't find out until a couple of hours later (yes, I had done all of this by 7:30 this morning) that I had somehow scratched my arm and it was covered in mud. Awesome. Now I'm going to come down with some sort of exotic infection and die.

Christmas sucks.

Just in the Nick of Time

I bought K a new digital camera. Our old one was getting a little old, and while it was nice to have a 10x optical zoom on a point and shoot, it made it a little less than optimal for carrying around when you were travelling light. In addition to that, K's cousins' kids dropped it or something while we were in another room and broke part of the cover to the batteries so sometimes you have to hold it closed to turn it on. I'd also noticed that it seemed like the quality of photos it was taking was diminishing. Perhaps that's a power issue with the less than tight fitting battery cover, and perhaps it's just an increase in my standards.

Anyway, I knew that K really wanted a new camera even if she hadn't asked for one. I went on Amazon and picked her up a Canon Powershot A560. It's nothing special, but it's compact, the lens retracts completely and takes pretty good pictures. Now she'll be more able to lug a camera around for her E-based photography. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that Amazon wouldn't ship it out the next day. K ordered her gift for me the same day and the UPS pulled up Friday evening to deliver it. Mine wasn't delivered until about 4 p.m. today, Christmas Eve. I'd kind of wanted to give it to her today so she could use it to take Christmas pictures. We did our gifts with the Knuchels today and we're doing the stuff with my family tomorrow.

K missed most of the the Christmas Eve photos, but when it pulled up, I ran back to the back of the house and wrapped it up in color advertising pages from the local shopper newspaper and topped it off with a nice, frilly newspaper bow. K and I exchanged our gifts and she was happy about it. In case you were wondering, and I'm sure you were, K got me a Garmin nüvi 350 . I've been wanting a GPS for road trips for a long time now, so I was pretty excited as well. Enough rampant materialism, though. Get back to your own Christmases.

Celebration and Nothingness

Before I get started, I'd like to announce that this is my 100th post this year. I've never even gotten 10 in a year before this point, so I'm pretty stoked. I bet you are too.

We began the Christmas celebrations today. Actually we started last week, but that was mostly with old people who are related to me on my mom's side but who I don't actually know. They all know me, though, and I'm extremely uncomfortable in situations where many people know me and I know none of them. I feel guilty, but not enough to start learning who those people are. I may take pride in family history, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to know those people personally. Today was the first one with people I actually know and like. This is my dad's side of the family. I grew up around them and feel much more comfortable with them than with the other side.

I got to thinking how amazingly diverse the gathering was despite it being a gathering of small town Southerners. My sister brought her boyfriend, who is Taiwanese. They also brought his friend, who's Korean. My cousin's girlfriend is either Ecuadorean or Honduran by birth. The funny part of this is that all of these people are as white as I am. Sam (my likely future brother-in-law knows Taiwanese and Mandarin, but speaks English without an accent and comes across like he would have been comfortable in my group of friends given his techie/computer gamer interests. Their friend was born here and doesn't seem to know all that much Korean even. Sam even referred to him as being white on the inside. The cousin's girlfriend may have been born in Latin America, but she has no memory of it. She was adopted by a couple in my hometown when she was an infant. She grew up as if she were just a rural white Southerner with a really awesome tan.

I've really got nothing important to say today, I just thought I'd share that and my 100th post. I'm actually on track to do another month's worth of posts this month despite missing a few days in a row a week or so back, so I figured I'd try to meet that goal again this month.

Annoying Dreams

I keep having these dreams where Bella shows up. The setting and storyline surrounding the discovery is always different but the rest of what happens is always the same. I'm always approached by this little black and white dog and it always takes me a second to realize, "Holy crap, it's Bella." Then I always wake up in a good mood and it takes me a while to realize that it was all just a dream and Bella is still no longer with us.

Bella went missing just shy of a year ago. I let her out one night like we always did. When I got ready to go to bed, I called for her to come in and she wouldn't come. It was late, I was tired, and she had done this before, so I just went to bed and let her stay outside. She was always waiting at the front door the next morning. We live nearly a mile from the nearest paved road with anything resembling traffic, so it wasn't really a big deal. But this time, she was nowhere to be found when we got up to get ready for work. We posted classified ads, drove all the dirt roads that crisscross the woods and fields near our house calling for her and she never turned up. We'd occasionally get calls from people who'd read the ad and thought they found her but the dog was never even close to being Bella. After a few months of this we gave up. What's worse is that this all happened only a couple of weeks before the contractor who was working on some of our home renovations finished putting up the fence in our back yard. Bubba made the transition from free-wandering stray to backyard pet safely, but Bella disappeared too soon.

It may sound weird to those who've never had a close relationship with a pet, but K got Bella on a whim as a wedding present just a few months before we got married. Bella had kept K company during her first year of teaching when she lived alone in an apartment in a town where she didn't know anyone and when I worked nights at the newspaper, I'd come home every night with Bella waiting at the door to welcome me home. While I wound down with a beer and a book, Bella would curl up next to me on the couch. When I woke up in the morning, she'd be waiting at the foot of the bed or tucked behind the bend of my knee waiting for me to roll onto my back, her signal that I was awake and it was time to pounce on me for a good wrestle before heading outside to relieve herself.

Having a dog outside just isn't the same. Right now, if Bella were here, she'd either be on the couch with me or on the rug near my feet. As it is, Bubba is outside wishing he could come in but stuck outside because K doesn't want a dog that large in the house. His 60 or so pounds is a bit more than Bella's 20 pounds, but he's actually less energetic than Bella, so I don't think it's really a big deal. Still, I'd miss Bella even if Bubba were curled up next to me with his head on my lap right now.

Life Begins (Temporarily)

In case you didn’t notice yesterday, I have a bit more time on my hands than I normally do. I actually put up two lengthy posts on widely disparate topics. The reason for my newfound productivity is that the students were set free for Christmas break around lunch on Wednesday. I posted my grades that afternoon and straightened up my desk while I waited for my personal freedom at 3:30. I still had to come back for a planning day on Thursday, but you don’t realize how easy life is for a teacher when there are no students around. I verified my grades, finished some last minute straightening up and then had the other six hours of my day to do nothing. I read the news, listened to last.fm (artists like Iron & Wine, a channel Chris would really dig, I think), ate lunch at the Christmas luncheon, researched salmon and tuna on Wikipedia, and then watched part of the ending to Julius Caesar (which was kind of even preparation for school since I teach Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but it’s too enjoyable to count as work.) I left a little early, having a 30 minute pass for perfect attendance last month, picked up E (K was with a friend shopping so I didn’t have to pick her up like usual) and headed home. I had E set up on the floor with some toys and surrounded by pillows (we have no carpeting in the house and he’s not perfected the art of balance yet) and was washing dishes from my baking session the night before by 3:15. E went down for a nap a little while later and I got a chance to format the open letter to Hollywood that I wrote during my free time at work. After a trip to see the drama club’s Christmas play, I came back home, watched the first period of the Thrashers game and formatted the second post, and then switched over to the Poinsettia Bowl to watch Navy and Utah kick off the Bowl Season. I stayed up intentionally late on a Thursday night, knowing that I could sleep in on a Friday. So freaking sweet!

I actually fell asleep on the couch. It’s not a big deal. Our couch is probably the best sleeping couch I’ve ever felt. I woke up fairly rested this morning. K had turned the TV off for me when she got up to feed E around 1 a.m. This morning is a Friday and I’m having my second cup of coffee (I usually go without during school because I lack the time to make any and until recently have tried to avoid regular caffeine consumption) and watching the part of the Navy game that I slept through last night. E is sitting next to me, splitting his attention between watching me typing and the football game (he loves football and bands. He’ll sit quietly through football games, marching bands, and band concerts.) Until about 30 seconds ago he was actually sitting on the floor watching the game, with the occasional glance back at me to give me a grin. It’s one of those moments that actually keep you from sincerely regretting parenthood (and it takes a surprisingly small number of these moments to keep you going, but E gives us these on a regular basis, fortunately). K’s out shopping again.

Tomorrow is more of the same, with probably a little housecleaning to get the place ready for K’s parents and brother and sister-in-law coming in on Sunday and Monday. I have basically two weeks to decompress, sleep and do nothing. Of course all of this comes to a screeching halt during the week after New Year’s Day, but I’m OK with that. It’s surprising how much more work teaching is than any other job I’ve ever had. In my other jobs requiring an education I’ve been able to take a break pretty much whenever I wanted to (except the last two hours each night on the copy desk) and spending time on activities with no relation to work never kept me from getting all of my work done on time. It doesn’t work that way at school. If I take a break during my planning block I start getting really behind on grading and planning. The rest of the day I’m with students, during which time taking a break isn’t an option. I even have to train my body to only go to the bathroom during planning and lunch during the day. This probably sounds like whining, but it’s not intended that way. I actually had a good semester, and while I’m still working on trying to find a new career path, work isn’t causing major depression this year like it has in the past. I’m just mentioning it to help explain why I look forward so much to breaks like these where I can get in all the laziness I need that I just don’t get during the school year.

The History of Football

Being a football fan and not sharing similar feelings for baseball, I sometimes find myself a bit envious of fans of the sport-formerly-known-as-America's-pastime. While their sport is waning with slumps in popularity and PR crises involving performance enhancing drugs, you cannot deny the historical importance of baseball in American culture. Sure football is far ahead of any other sport in the US in terms of general popularity, TV viewership and revenue, it just doesn't bring with it the same tone of reverence when discussions of its past arise.

Quick, try to name ten all-time great baseball players. Follow that up with ten all-time great football players. You can fill the list easily for both sports (probably even for the non-sports fans among us). The difference comes in the historical composition of your list. If you're like me, your list for baseball included as many players who died before you were born as players still alive or even playing now. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Honus Wagner (as much for his megabucks card as for anything else), Jackie Robinson, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Hank Aaron all seem so much more important than any of the superstars from my lifetime. I'm pretty sure Hammerin' Hank is the only one of those fellows still alive and most died long before my birth. The football list, on the other hand has a much more contemporary slant to it. I'd be surprised if you named any players who weren't active in the 60s or later. Sure you've got players like Johnny Unitas, Jim Brown, and Dick Butkus, and even a great coach in Halas who was there in the beginning of what became the NFL. The only player I can think of from the leather helmet era is Jim Thorpe (greatest American athlete of all time). There's just no hallowed history from the early decades of the sports like there is for baseball.

For example, in the early years of the NFL (it began in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and changed to NFL in 1922) there was a team called the Pottsville Maroons. This team from the coal mining region of Pennsylvania was one of the greatest teams to ever take the field at that point in history (they were even able to beat college teams, which was a huge surprise back then). The team was stripped of its NFL championship in 1925 after a miscommunication between teams and league president led the team to play a game against Notre Dame in the territory of another club against league rules. The Cardinals (then in Chicago)
ended up with the championship and their owner blocked the trophy being rightly awarded to the Maroons leading to the "curse" that the Cardinals (now in Arizona) have suffered through ever since.

Great story, huh? Yeah, but you've probably never heard it before unless you know way too much about NFL history or spend too much time perusing the depths of ESPN.com (one of their authors is pimping his book about the team). But I will guarantee you know all about Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 in which players were paid to fix the World Series unless you really are just entirely clueless about sports. Sure, fixing the World Series is a little bit more sensational than a team being stripped of the championship for playing an unsanctioned game, but both involve the championship of a premier league. One story you know by heart. Another you just learned of for the first time.

I think part of the problem is the facelessness of football. Baseball is a really an individual sport played on teams. A single batter faces a single pitcher and a great player looks just as incredible on a crappy team as he does a great team. A-Rod wouldn't suck just because he played on the
Royals. Edgerrin James did start sucking when he left the Colts for the Cardinals. If your offensive lines stinks, the QB and running backs are going to look bad too. But the fact of the matter is that football didn't mean anything back then. The sport isn't much younger than baseball, although baseball was mostly recognizable in the late 1800s whereas football looked more like rugby until the early 1900s. There was something civilized about baseball and it appealed to the senses of time. There was order. Everything was in it's place and it was a very proper looking sport. Football, especially in the early days, was mostly a mass of confusion. Large numbers of players slammed into each other with no apparent order or plan. It was violent, bloody, and dangerous, a sport for the poor, a sport that was nearly banned in several states because of deaths it caused. It gradually was pared down, organized and safety was improved and its popularity increased at colleges, but for some reason while the pro baseball players were idolized, pro players in football were often reviled as mercenaries and often weren't as good as their collegiate counterparts. Those Maroon teams of the 1920s were some of the first to prove that pros could be as good or better than their amateur counterparts.

Basically football in the 1920s was to sports then what hockey is today; a niche sport not understood or followed by most, but with a cult-like following that kept it alive. It didn't become a big enough deal to bring with it the awe-inspiring quality that baseball had already possessed for decades until the '60s, really and I don't think it even peaked until recently.

There is a flip-side to this, however. While I may not get to revel in the historic and cultural importance of my favorite sport's past, I will get to have a unique perspective on it in the future. I was alive for much of the classic history of my sport. Many of the all-time greats who will be on the list in 50 years will be players from my childhood or only a little before. I'll be able to regale my grandkids with tales of watching Joe Montana, Tom Brady, Emmitt Smith, John Elway on TV. How I sat in the stands and saw Calvin Johnson come down with impossible receptions just yards from where I sat. How I saw Peyton Manning get made to look like a fool during the first half against the Falcons when I attended my first NFL game and then promptly engineer the inevitable comeback in the second half. How I watched the Patriots dominate their way through a modern-day dynasty despite the salary cap rules that were created to keep that from happening. How I watched upstart Boise State upset collegiate dynasty Oklahoma in one of the greatest games of all time.

Baseball fans don't have that to look forward to. Their heroes will remain in the past and the only stories they'll have to tell are the asterisk-branded baseball honoring Barry Bond's record-breaking home run and memories of declining ticket sales and TV shares.

An Open Letter to Hollywood

Dear Hollywood,

While I know that your first purpose is to make enough cash to fund your lavish, overly manicured, and sordid live, I'm sure you understand that I am your most important customer and that my pleasure comes entirely before that of your own. So, with that understood, I've noticed a few things recently that have disturbed me, and I'd like to offer you a few critiques and suggestions to help you produce better content and be more successful in the future.

1. Stop with the live-action versions of classic cartoons. You do an acceptable job taking comic books and translating them to the screen, probably because of the more realistic style of artwork predominate in that art form, but you've done a largely dismal job with cartoons. While movies like X-Men were passable and Sin City was quite good (with the exception of casting Rory Gilmore as a whore), movies like the Chipmunk movie and Underdog are offensive to the sense of sight for every good child of the 80s and 90s. Cartoons are heavily stylized in their art and rarely come anywhere near realism. Despite this, most cartoons turned into live action seem to aim more for realism and in this ruin the entire movie. People fall in love with cartoons as much for the way the drawings look as for the stories. Probably more so at times. Could you imagine the Simpsons in live action? I don't care how great the script was, the magic is ruined by the real actors. Even if you painted the actors yellow, you're just making them look like they're suffering from liver failure. In the two current examples of this genre, Underdog and Alvin and the Chipmunks, realism is attempted and in both they fail miserably. Underdog doesn't even stand on two legs and instead of being a shoeshine boy is apparently an actual family pet. Lame. The Chipmunks look nothing like the child-sized, tan things of the original and instead look more like large rats. It's more creepy than realistic. They could literally stand on Dave's breakfast plate. Also lame.

It's true that there has been occasional success in this genre. I think the live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas was very true to the original Dr. Seuss vision, but I am just talking about the visual aspects. I've never seen more than a few minutes of the film, but K says they ruined the feel of the story with some of the added gags, but the characters themselves actually look like Dr. Seuss designed them. Hollywood, until you can stay true to the original design as well as the as you did with the Grinch on a regular basis, please stop ruining my childhood.

And Mr. Lee, I love your work with Kevin Smith and in My Name is Earl, but please stop aking crap. It hurts to see you debase yourself this way.

2. The next suggestion isn't so much a complaint as a comment on an obvious missed chance for publicity. Horror movies are huge these days. They're often relatively cheap to produce and bring in reliable box office sales. I don't watch horror movies. My sense of empathy is too well developed to handle anything more gruesome than Silence of the Lambs. I can dig a good psychological thriller, but the gore fest does nothing for me. However, I'm perfectly fine with horror movies being made and being successful. I'm perfectly aware that not everyone shares my taste for mainland Chinese cinema, movies about birthday party clowns being raped, and films about East German rock star emigrants who suffered from botched sex changes. In fact, I like that not everyone shares my taste because it gives me an avenue to feel superior to the average person. I need that. I think everyone does.

The problem here is that the movie industry isn't taking advantage of real life horror stories to promote their product. Serial killers are real. Why aren't studios sponsoring the actual serial killers. Sure, it's bad publicity, but do you think that would actually stop anyone from going to a movie about the slow torture and eventual murder of innocent teens? I don't think so. Instead the media would really blow this thing up and you wouldn't even have to run television ads for this. It'd be featured news daily. Now, I know that serial killers aren't all that easy to find. For one, they really aren't all that common. For another, they typically don't want to be found. I understand that, so I've got a backup plan for when a good serial killer just can't be found to leave cryptic notes taunting the police with ads for your film featured prominently throughout. They do tend to get caught, just like that pig farmer in Canada. Why don't you sponsor the defense for guys like that? Pay them and their lawyers to namedrop the film during press conferences, maybe even get them to wear clothing promoting the film in court if the judge isn't some prude who takes the justice system seriously, anyway. I think you as an industry are really missing out on this one.

3. Finally, I think it's time that Hollywood clears its bad reputation as a liberal hotbed. The truth is, there just aren't that many liberal politicians who once made their living as actors or directors, but there are plenty who ended up in the Republican fold. Ronald Reagan, before he slept through meetings and threw up on foreign dignitaries as the leader of our country, was an actor who once co-starred with a chimpanzee. Arnold Schwarzenegger may not be the prototypical republican, but he does have the membership card in his wallet as he leads Caleeforneeyah. Charlton Heston, before being the leading lobbyist for the right to bear arms used to pretend to be a block of wood in a variety of films. Current Republican candidate Fred Thompson starred in some TV show no one has ever heard of.

Despite this, Hollywood keeps pretending to be liberal and producing films like The Cider House Rules promoting the butchering of unborn babies and movies teaching young girls to give up the happiness brought by being wives and mothers to take up lives of sin and sodomy. And God forbid we have to watch another movie about the plight of poor people. Poor people suck. Sure, we see all these hip stars out protesting for liberal causes, be we never see their ballot, now do we? I say the movie industry give up the pretension of being liberal and start making pro-gun, anti-abortion, and anti-poor people cinema. I can just see a great based-on-a-true-story film about the heroic Minutemen guarding our borders from illegal immigrants. It could be an uplifting story about a young mother choosing not to abort her unwanted child. Her thinly veiled resentment of the child leads him to join the Minutemen and he ends up retiring with the top kill tally of Mexicans since the Mexican-American War. It almost brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

On Fascism and Christmas

K's putting up our Christmas tree right now. I'm sitting on the couch, laptop on my lap top vaguely hoping that the radiation or something from it will kill the fecundity of my testicles, and I've noticed that our collection of ornaments has a very large snowflake to everything else ratio. This may sound all innocent and crap unless you're a Christian fundamentalist who's offended by the non-religious aspect of snowflakes and snowmen on a Christmas tree, but it's not. It's really a sinister attend by northerners to co-opt a holiday that should be universal (at least in Christian majority nations) and make the rest of us feel inferior because our Christmases are really more brown or green.

I never once saw snow on Christmas until after I got out of college and got married and visited K's grandparents in Cleveland. It snowed 3 feet over night (and rained in the middle so it was really 2 feet of snow and a crust of ice topped by another foot or so of snow. The next white Christmas I had was in Denver when again we watched 3+ feet of snow fall from the sky, stranding my sister at work downtown while the rest of us were stuck in her apartment in the 'burbs. I never even saw snow last past lunch until college.

Don't get me wrong; I love the snow. I'm warm-blooded by nature and would much prefer to shovel snow than mow my yard. But it is entirely unnatural for me to associate Christmas with snow. For me, snow is something foreign, something to wish for but I have to travel to enjoy. Instead of singing "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas", I should be singing "I'm dreaming of a brown Christmas," although for some reason there are a ton of little green plants in the fields around my house. Hell, most of my Christmases involved T-shirt and jeans and walking down the road to my aunt's house for lunch and gifts.

So I propose those of us in snow-challenged areas fight to take back Christmas from our snow-Nazi northern neighbors. When you hear Bing Crosby singing about his white Christmases, call the radio station and complain that snow makes baby Jesus cry and you demand they replace all instances of said song with "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer."

If a band of carollers assails you with harmonized calls of "dashing through the snow" or "let it snow, let it snow, let it snow" punch them in the face. You'll probably even be able to get a good shot in on all of them. They'll probably be so shocked that they're being attacked that they won't have a good reaction time. You don't really have to draw blood, just let them know that you're tired of being treated like a second-class person just because you're snow challenged.

Now, taking up the cause of taking back Christmas for the rest of us make make you look a little bit like a Scrooge, but it'll be worth it in the end when you're finally able to represent your own reality on your tree with tufts of dry grass, collard greens, and flowers. And I promise, in the end, taking pride in your own heritage and throwing off the yoke of the culture of another region will bring your inner peace and happiness.

Cool Discovery

I found out this weekend that I’m the great great grandson of Lyman Hall, the second president of Georgia Tech. He’s on the side of my maternal grandmother (and apparently on her mom’s side given that she was a Bales and not a Hall. Of course that side of the family is known for their intelligence. My great uncle is an actual rocket scientist for NASA (or some contractor for NASA). Just another reason I justify my irrational love of Georgia Tech.

There was actually another Lyman Hall who signed the Declaration of Independence and was a governor of Georgia, but that’s not him. They’re both from Georgia, though, so I may be his descendant as well. That would be really cool.

Playing on the Tracks

I mentioned yesterday that I grew up in a house near the railroad tracks. It features prominently in my family history. My great grandfather made more money from his cattle off of the train company than he did at market. Apparently, if the train hit one of your cattle, the owners had to pay fair market price for the animal. That is, as long as you weren't around at the time of the impact. I'm guessing that little caveat was intended to prevent guys from driving their herd onto the tracks whenever the train came around. My grandfather was actually trained to duck into the woods whenever he heard the train coming so he wouldn't be seen if the train hit one of the cows. I don't think he was supposed to drive them onto the tracks. Granddaddy couldn't bring himself to put down a bull that broke its leg once and actually spent the time and money on cattle rehab for the brute. I just can't see the man who put his bull in a sling and cried at the deaths of his dogs actually driving the cattle onto the tracks to be hit.

That being said, he didn't try to drive them off either.

I'm sure there were practical reasons for this. Cattle aren't known for their quick response time and if he'd gotten caught up in a stampede of cattle spooked by the locomotive, it wouldn't have been pretty, but after the stories of my great-grandfather, I'm not so sure that he wasn't happy not to have to take his bovines anywhere to get his money.

Of course those tracks were still there when I was a child and still only about 200 yards from our front door. I remember distinctly my father leading my sister and I down the tracks for excursions into different parts of the woods that surrounded our home and teaching us safety about walking on the tracks. I even remember him snatching up my little sister as we ran down the tracks once when we were at a stretch of the tracks surrounded by swamp on either side when a train came into view. I think he was over cautious with that because we made it back to the house even before the train crossed our driveway, but I could see why. It may have been difficult to explain to my mom why he left my 6-year-old sister behind to defend herself against the oncoming train.

Knowing my sister, she very well may have won that fight. More on that later.

Our father having led us down the tracks on more than one occasion and having never issued any direct order not to play on the tracks by ourself (or at least not any that we remembered), we spent tons of our free time on the tracks. It made for an easy path to more interesting parts of our world and we lived miles from the nearest children our age. We were both of above average intelligence and knew which parts were safe to lollygag on and which should only be used as a route to another place. We also knew that when you heard the rumble to get off the tracks and into the woods or out far enough in the field that things couldn't get thrown off the tacks and hit you.

I'm not really sure my parents ever realized just how far down the tracks we went. There was a stream about a quarter mile down the tracks that we used to go down and play around. I knew my parents had to know something was going on from our growing collection of rusted railroad spikes and antique glass power line insulators. You only found those around the tracks.

We also used to spend a lot of times wandering the woods. We'd follow game trails and pop out a mile away from our house on the dirt road that passed behind our property. We'd done this for years before my parents started becoming protective and warned us (with me already being in middle school) not to wander so far that we could hear our mom calling for us. My aunts used to dread watching my sister and me because we'd become so accustomed to wandering that we'd take off at the first turned back and dissapear into the woods and fields with nothing more than our dog and maybe the wagon. We never understood what the big deal was when we inevitably wandered back to the house. Mama and Daddy never cared, why should they.

For some reason, I'm not sure that K, or my parents even, are going to be keen on E taking up the same childhood hobbies.

Another Lame Post about My Heritage

I've already spent a post on my grandfather, who I knew very well. Now I'm going to waste your time with a post about my great-grandfather, who I knew not at all. I'll start at the end, which his death, which kind of serves as a good metaphor for his life. He died in his 60s or 70s after his truck either broke down or he ran off the road into a ditch. He was likely drunk and was struck and killed by another car while he was walking home.

My grandfather was originally from a town in north Georgia near Canton. He moved down with his father back when the area where I currently live was just being homesteaded and land was pennies an acre. My great-great grandfather didn't dig his new digs and moved back north, but Great Granddaddy persevered in the swamps and gradually moved up from a two-room shack to a fairly respectable farm house by local standards. It's actually the same house I grew up in, although my parents continued the process of gradual additions that would, in stop motion animation, make the house look like some sort of organic life form growing new limbs during its embryonic stage. This isn't wasn't what made him all that interesting. What made him interesting were his seemingly never-ending eccentricities.

First, my grandmother often described him as "the only person I ever knew who could earn a living by sitting on his ass." Now, I'm not exactly sure what she meant by that. He was a farmer (He ran cattle back before there were fences and grew the typical Southern cash crops of his era.) Farmers aren't typically known for being that successful by being lazy, but his family did pretty well and Granddaddy didn't really have any sob stories about the Depression. I'm not really sure it affected people who were pretty much self-sufficient with plenty of land and not in the part of the world suffering from the Dust Bowl as much as those in the Midwest and city folk.

Perhaps he supplemented his inefficient farming with moonshining. There is a shed just across and down the railroad tracks from my childhood home that was an active still back during Prohibition (and likely a bit afterward). The mason jars and rusted remnants of some of the equipment is still there. I used to go inside as a kid and imagine there were skulls inside under the collapsed shelves. And yes, I played on the railroad tracks as a kid. I think my parents may have even been aware of this fact. I've got a great story about that I can share at a later date. My family isn't exactly sure he financially benefited from the still in any way. It's not actually on our land, but we do know he would have been a major customer if he wasn't a partner in the business. Granny actually said he was a bit of a con who could get other people to do most of his work for him, so maybe that's how he managed to be a successful farmer without the hard labor one expects from his profession.

He was also apparently quite intelligent. He was known for being able to add up the serial numbers on the sides of the boxcars as the train passed his house. I'm rather impressed by this as I was able to easily master geometry and trigonometry and managed to pull an A in calculus despite not really mastering anything but I was never able to add that well. Multiplication and division were a bit tough to get consistently correct too. You ask me for the square root of 25, I'm as likely to tell you 6 or 4 as I am 5. It's not that I don't know any better. It's just that the right answer didn't come out first.

One thing I'm particularly proud of in my ancestor is the fact that he took the smoke house, which originally was intended for the curing of meat (hence the name) into a dark room in the early 1900s. My parents and my oldest aunt still have boxes of his old photography, both the glass daguerreotypes and the early paper prints. The smoke house is still in existence, and still referred to as the smoke house, although it serves as a humble storage shed now instead of serving either of it's early functions. That's kind of sad somehow.

He's also the first of the family that I know of to possess the intense obsession with fruit that the males members of my family all seem to share. I obsess over the perfect peach. My dad will buy gallons of fresh strawberries from a local farm every year and stock a year's worth of sliced berries in the fridge. He literally has more fruit in his cereal each morning than cereal between the bananas, strawberries and blueberries when those are in season. My grandfather was also obsessive about peaches. My great grandfather focused his food obsession on bananas. He'd not buy them by the hand (bunch for you losers), but by the the stalk, which contain dozens of the individual fruits. He'd buy them straight off the train and eat them all before the first one got even close to being overripe.

Of course there was the whole alcoholism thing. My oldest aunt remembers having to pick him up and drop him off at rehab in Atlanta back when they lived in the metro area when she was a kid. She doesn't have the fond memories of him that she does of her grandmother, which is understandable. She was actually afraid of him as a kid. My dad doesn't remember him that much, so basically can just enjoy the stories about him like I do.

Mickey said that my tale of my grandfather seemed to explain me. I really think I share more of the more outright bizarre personality traits of his dad than I do with him.

(Hopefully) Heading Home Again

I don't mean where I live now or where I grew up. Those are pretty much the same place if you're not picky about GPS coordinates and the like. I mean heading back to the place I actually get homesick for: Alaska.

It does seem weird that a kid who's spent his entire life in Georgia would consider Alaska his home, but I do. I got obsessed with it as a kid when I was looking through an atlas trying to find which state had the fewest people per square mile. I found Montana and thought the six people per square mile was kind of cool, but then I saw Alaska's one person per square mile. (I tend to flip through books and magazines from back to front unless I'm seriously reading. Deal with it). I even talked K into going to Alaska for our honeymoon. I think even she'll admit it was a cool trip. We went back a couple of years ago with my parents and rented an RV and wandered from north of Fairbanks to the Kenai Peninsula, and quite frankly, I've never seen a prettier place in my life.

The facts are: I love mountains. I hate warm weather. I love being in the middle of nowhere (as long as I am within a day trip of somewhere that most definitely isn't the middle of nowhere. I've actually enjoyed being in blizzards the two times I've experienced that in Cleveland (over 3 feet in 24 hours) and Colorado (right at 3 feet in 12 hours).

Now, where I currently live the average summer temperatures are in the 90s with extremely high humidity and the fire ants are still on the move this late in December. It was in the high 70s yesterday. A cold front came through today, but it's still warm enough that I don't need a jacket. There are no mountains within 100 miles of my house. There's not even a hill within 60 miles unless you count rolling terrain as hilly and then it's 15 miles or so. It just doesn't snow this far south.

So why am I still here? Because I grew up here and I didn't find a way out before I got out of college and got married. K (understandably) doesn't share my enthusiasm for moving to a place that would require a $1,000 to visit her parents and you have to install a block heater to plug your car up so the engine won't freeze up on you in the winter.

Instead of moving there, I've taken the methadone of visiting as often as I can. It still leaves me with a broken heart the other 99% of my existence, but for those weeks I've spent there, I've been happy. The next visit I'm hoping for is this summer. Some beer geek friends and I are talking about possibly flying up there (or to the coast of British Columbia, which is far enough north and beautiful enough to sake my longing) and having a week of salmon fishing and beer geekery. Alaska has a seriously disproportionate number of good craft breweries for their small size (they have about the same number of breweries and brewpubs as Georgia, but only about a quarter of the population of Metro Atlanta.) Besides, salmon is just tasty. I couldn't imagine a better week than sitting around a camp fire with a slab of salmon freshly caught that day washed down with something nice from Midnight Sun, Sleeping Lady or Moose's Tooth.

The good news is that K doesn't seem to be too upset with the idea of me heading out for this. The bad news is that I now have to save up for a trip that's going to run between $500 and $600 just to get there and back by jet. That and the fact, K and I are camping up the coast to Maine this coming summer and I have to make sure that we can afford both my camping trip and the Maine trip. I'm not about to make K sacrifice her vacation just so I can go gallivanting off to satisfy my need for wandering. I have decided to give up my planned beer tour of Florida during the week after Christmas and earmark the funds I would have used for that for the Alaska trip. Still, I was going to get paid in part of the Florida trip from articles that would come from it for Southern Brew News, so that's less money than it sounds like. Maybe I should just get a second job to pay for regular visits up that way.

The Peg Leg Guru

This is one of the more unique tales of thievery that I've ever seen. Apparently, two robbers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh stole the holy leg of a holy man there. What makes this truly a story of the weird isn't that it's in India or that it involves a holy man (events set in India and holy men are both common in that country), but that the elderly man was still using the leg when they stole it. That's right, it was some statue or relic from long ago that the man kept with him as a talisman. Instead it was the lower limb he sprouted back in his days as an embryo.

Apparently the guy claimed to have healing powers in his leg (faith healing is pretty common with the Hindus as well as Christians who watch too much religious TV) and a little problem with drinking. The two robbers consulted with the man over a supposed health issue and came back two days later under the pretense of thanking him. They got him drunk, he passed out and he woke up with the new nickname Pegleg Yonadi. He's currently recovering in a hospital.

Still, what shocked me was that an octogenarian can survive having his leg stolen in an amateur amputation in a second-tier city in a second world country while a young, healthy professional football player can't survive getting shot in the thigh by thieves in a major city in a decidedly first-world country. Maybe our health care system ain't so hot after all.

Or maybe it really was a magical leg.

God's Promise

I'm going to win the lottery tomorrow. I'm sure God told me this while I was sitting in the dark with my door closed hoping that no one would come make me cover a class during my precious planning period. I just know that no one else was in the room at the time and I didn't hear any voices.

At least no corporal voices.

So it must have been God. Or maybe it was the baby Jesus before he got eaten by the ice bears in The Golden Compass.

But anyway, after I got through with this conversation with my Lord and Savior that I don't actually remember having (although I'm passionately convinced that it happened) I started thinking about what I'd do when I won. It's currently over $100 million and even after the deduction for taking the cash up front and the taxes, I'd make out with enough that with a little smidgen of common sense and a financial advisor I could die a very wealthy and well entertained man in my late 80s. I think about this a lot, actually, so I've got it planned out pretty much. Maybe that's why God is winning the lottery for me.

I used to think I'd work out my contract for the school year and not leave the school high and dry. At least I started thinking that after I stopped working at the alternative school where I despised the administration as much as the kids instead of like now where I just despise the kids. I'm not so sure that now the time has come that would be the decision I'd make. I might work out the semester to give them a few weeks to find my replacement. I might even agree to come back as a long term sub as long as they agreed to my time limit of no more than one month of work before I quit subbing too. Then again, I might just walk out the doors after checking my winning numbers and go home and go to bed. I wouldn't even taunt the kids on my way out. They'd probably come to my house after school and shoot me for my ticket, and unlike Ryan, I'm only capable of firing off one round at a time in self defense.

What would I do after that? I think I'd start up my comedy career. I'd tell farmer jokes and long humorous stories involving the inherent humor in the information breakdown among the multitude of tribes in Papua New Guinea, and the people, they would love me. They would shout for more and I would tell them a traditional joke from the Khoisan and follow it up with what goes for a knock-knock joke in Tibet. They would try to crown my ass three times and I would push the crown away each time and they would roar in laughter because they would think that allusions to Shakespeare and out-of-work NFL coaches are freaking hilarious.

And I wouldn't even have to give any of my money back to the big guy in the sky because Jesus was gobbled up by those ursus iceus. Sorry, I couldn't find the Latin word for ice. Maybe they don't have one. They're the linguistic foil to the Inuit.

The Forgotten Genocide

On this day in 1909, Chief Red Cloud, the chief of the Oglala Lakota, died on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Red Cloud, whose Lakota name was Makhpiya Luta, spent much of his adult life leading the fight to defend his people's rights. We know from history that his fight was doomed to failure, but I admire those who stand up against giants regardless of the odds. Red Cloud is even known as one of the few (possibly only) American Indian chiefs to win a war against the United States. During "Red Cloud's War", the leader and his people forced the U.S. Army to abandon several forts that had encroached on their territory ended with a complete victory and return of lands to the Oglala. Of course in the end, the Oglala got screwed like every other American Indian tribe and were shipped off to reservations, but for that one shining moment the big guy got kicked in the nuts. Hard.

Makhpiya Luta spent his life on the reservation still fighting (although this time through peaceful means) the U.S. government to ensure that the rights of his people were respected.

And no, I didn't know all of this off the top of my head. I actually read the first tidbits during my reading class today and then came home and researched the rest. I do, however, take more interest in this sort of thing than most because of my own Indian heritage. It's a very small portion of my genetic heritage, but then my Scottish heritage is probably pretty watered down and I was raised to honor that part of myself. Still, the American dealings with the previous inhabitants is one of the greatest overlooked genocides. It wasn't always an active, intentional genocide, but it shared more elements with the Nazi persecution of Jews than we as Americans should be comfortable with. The fact that we're still cool with an NFL team going by the racial slur Redskins as their moniker just goes to show that we still haven't gone as far with civil rights with the Indian population that we have with other minority groups.

This isn't even saying that the Indians were the perfect people before the arrival of Europeans. They fought, enslaved, and tried to exterminate each other just like every other group of people ever to come into contact with each other throughout the history of the Earth. It still doesn't justify the acts of supposedly enlightened people later on. I personally don't want to think that racism, slavery, and ethnic violence against me and my family is justified because of what my ancestors did and thought in the not-so-distant past.

Help Me Stay Literate

I've just gotten myself back in the habit of reading on a regular basis. E kind of screwed that up for me, but I can't really blame him. I'd gotten out of the habit when I moved to the same schedule as K and didn't have the alone time I had back on my old 4 p.m.-midnight schedule. I've got a couple of bookshelves worth of books that I've got in my backlog (just because I stopped reading regularly didn't really slow my purchases and receipt of gifts), but I'm looking to diversify my reading material. Since childhood most of my reading has been fiction and either science fiction or fantasy. There are some truly great authors in those genres like Charles de Lint, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Orson Scott Card, but there's a lot of crap too.

Starting last year before E came along, I spent a brief period of regular reading (I bought K a pair of wireless headphones so she could watch TV while I read since she couldn't handle me reading in another room) I got into more nonfiction. I read (and loved) Guns, Germs, and Steel, and A Long Way Gone, but honestly, I got lucky with both books. Both are inherently interesting. One is written about an interesting take on the success and failure of human cultures (basically why Western Europeans ended up technologically and financially superior to the American Indians and Pacific Island peoples) and the other told a first-hand account of what it was like to be a child soldier and to find redemption after the psychological damage that caused. I actually use A Long Way Gone in my classroom now.

I'm still not well versed in nonfiction, though. I know a lot of it is dry and boring, or just crappy biographies that don't really serve any purpose other than informing fans about their favorite pop culture or historical figure and pop politics. I'm interested in neither. I want something that shows a unique spin on the world or shines a light on more obscure aspects of our lives and culture. I'm hoping to get a few suggestions from my (usually) literate friends to make up a reading list. If you've got any really interesting fiction suggestions, I'm game for those too.

Don't Be an Idiot

I just overheard a conversation at the bar that made me laugh. An older gentleman came in and ordered an IPA. He seemed to get a little confused when the bartender asked, "Which one?" I thought that was a little weird. Usually people who drink IPAs know better than to just order a style of beer, especially since the bar we're in provides you a beer menu that organizes their beer selection by style. What really sets me to giggling is when he corrects the bartender by saying, "It's really not a beer. It's an ale."

Now, I'm fully aware that bartenders are often idiots, but seriously, if you're going to correct the guy, at least know what you're talking about. I know that most of my readers may not even know what and IPA is or even what the acronym stands for, but you're not going to be trying to correct anyone about it either, then, are you? I'm cool with that. Ignorance is fine as long as you don't try to pretend you know what you're talking about.

I'm not going to go correct a brewer on on some of the finer details of brewing science. I'm perfectly aware that I don't have mastery of that knowledge set, especially on a professional scale. I'm also not going to second guess a farmer just because I grew up on a working farm. My parents and grandparents weren't farmers either, so my knowledge is limited. I do know some tidbits, especially about environmentally sound farming practices, but I'm aware I don't know enough to go around correcting guys whose livelihoods depend on them knowing how to farm. I'm what Doctors of Education would refer to as "conscious unskilled," which means that you know enough to know you don't know enough. That's better than unconcious unskilled, which means you don't even know enough to know that there's something you don't know. There's also conscious skilled, which means you know what you need to know, but have to think about it, and unconscious skilled, which means you've gotten to the point that the knowledge is recalled and put into use automatically.

Obviously, this guy had gotten a very small slice of beer knowledge, but remained at the unconscious unskilled level, but thought he was at one of the skilled levels instead.

And to keep the less geeky of you in the know, ales are beers. It's kind of like squares and rectangles. All ales are beer but not all beer is an ale just like all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Beer is the name for all fermented beverages that are made with malt and hops (or really just made with malt, hops are almost universally used, but there are a few historical remnants that use other bittering agents). Ales are produced using ale yeast (which ferments at a warmer temperature and more quickly with a fruitier aroma and flavor) and lagers are produced with a lager yeast (which ferments cooler and with a more neutral aroma and flavor.) Budweiser and all of the typical BudMillerCoors crap are lagers as are Heineken, Stella Artois, Celebrator and almost anything called a bock or pilsner. Some of these are even good beers. Pretty much anything else, especially if it's made by a brewery you've never heard of, is an ale. Porters, stouts, IPAs, pale ales, ESBs, golden or blonde ales, and brown ales are all ales. They're all still beer. The only difference is the yeast and how it works.

IPA stands for India Pale Ale. The style originated early in the British colonization of India. Hops, in addition to serving as a flavoring agent, serve as a natural preservative. Hoppier beers just last longer. Alcohol also serves as a natural preservative. India is a long way from Great Britain and the fastest mode of transportation was still a ship propelled by wind. The normally mild and weak English beer just spoiled before getting to India after the weeks it spent in the hot holds of the ships. English brewers, not wanting to move to India, just dumped in more hops and added a bit more malt to produce more alcohol a couple of points, and the result was India Pale Ale, a pale ale destined for India. By the time the beer actually reach India, the time and heat had mellowed the hops to the point that the beer tasted about the same as it would have if it had brewed normally. How the beer got to be popular fresh is unclear. All of the stuff was originally sent straight to the British stationed in India. One legend says that one of the ships wrecked off the coast of England and the barrels floated to shore and the locals became the first ever "hop heads". More likely, one of the local brewers started serving his IPA locally to see if there was a market for it, or the British troops returning home started asking for that stronger beer they'd fallen in love with overseas.

If Severo doesn't find something to ridicule in this post, he's just not even trying.

Learning Something New

This is my first post from a place that is not a private residence. Right now, I'm holed up at a Taco Mac near Kennessaw State University. This post isn't about how I learned that I loved wi-fi hotspots. I knew that a long time ago. Instead it's about something I learned about what I really need to be a good teacher. After a week full of lost planning periods due to meetings and other assorted reasons, I decided to bring my quickly growing stack of papers to grade with me up to Atlanta this weekend and instead of sitting around the in-laws house like I usually do, I'd get my car serviced and head out to the bar to get some grading done.

Grading is the second worst part of the job (after the kids) and I usually put it off until it's too late and I just have to throw their work in the trash and make up grades for them*. It turns out that if there were only a decent beer bar in my hometown that I'd be the most with it teacher in the school. So far during the time it took me to drink a Red Brick Winter Ale, I've finished an entire stack of drama tests. I'm taking a short break now for a snack and to type this post before plowing back into another beer and another stack of crap to be graded.

I'm just glad I don't have any essays to grade. I could just imagine the comments I'd start leaving after the fifth or sixth beer of the evening. It takes me a long time to grade essays.

* I don't actually do this, although I have been really tempted in the past. I do occassionally no grade something I've assigned (all teachers do that), but I've never made up grades. It'd make my job easier if I did, though.

Annoying Falsities

Now, I know I'm already preaching to the choir for the most part, or at least preaching to the not-retarded, but I went to pick up some barbecue for dinner last night and saw something that has annoyed me all day today. Posted on the door to the dining area was a flyer, with a big "Read This!" hand scrawled at the bottom. It was a picture of the democratic presidential candidates all standing with their hand over their heart except for Barack Obama. The picture isn't doctored, of course, but the caption and warning is. I'd heard the story about Obama refusing to say the pledge of allegiance to the flag or even put his hand over his heart from my dad, but I was suspicious about the veracity of the claim. I wasn't compelled to do the research to see if it was true or not at the time. However, seeing this photo posted in a public place with that same claim as fact did get me on my butt and typing queries into a search engine.

It turns out that my suspicions were right. The photo is real, but the caption is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. (Don't you like the way I paired up the very forceful blatant with the neutral misrepresentation there? Writing is a craft, people.) There was no pledge being said during the time this photo was being taken and Obama never refused to say the pledge. In fact, he's been on C-Span leading the other senators in the recitation of the pledge to start the senate proceedings. Check out this other blog post for more details along with videos of the actual event the photo was taken from and Obama leading the pledge at his day job. Even Fox News, the virtual mouthpiece of the Republican party, published this article about the event. Even Hannity and Colmes acknowledged it was during the anthem in their discussion of it. Oh, and the whole thing with the flag pin? Bush doesn't always wear his either.

That's not the only stupid e-mail forward making the round, just the one that has an effect on anything important. Another one is in regard to the new movie The Golden Compass, based on a book in a fantasy series by Philip Pullman. While it is true the original author was highly critical of organized religion and the story could easily be interpreted as an allegory for the evil religion brings into the world, but the shocking e-mails I keep getting from relatives and hearing from others keeps saying that it's a kid's movie where they murder Jesus. First off, people, it's fantasy. There's going to be an evil, extremely powerful bad guy that needs killing. Second, the book isn't set in the real world, but a fictional one where Polar Bears talk and people have a living animal representation of their true spirit that follows them around. Third, there are no direct references to the Christian religion or deities. The story is basically that an being has taken control and through his advanced powers and a priestly organization has convinced the world that he is God even though all he does is torture all the souls of the dead regardless of their virtue in life. In the end, the heroine (whose friends have been kidnapped by the sinister organization) frees souls from a hell-like place and storms the home of the evil being and kills it. Now, how you associate an evil being pretending to be god with Jesus is beyond me. The stories always painted the Jewish hippy carpenter as a pretty cool dude.

The best way to take these stories is as an attack of people who would take the religion and twist it to the use of evil like wars, supporting unjust governments, and intertwining religious beliefs and law. After all, the being that is killed at the end is in no way a god, just a powerful being pretending to be so. Plus, the movie avoids the religious overtones of the novels and turns the organization from a religious sect into a mysterious group of evil doers.

I mean, is it that hard to fact check these things? I mean, if it's not on the news and seems like huge and important information, there may be a reason for it. I'm not saying important news isn't often neglected, but if you're taking forwarded e-mails for face value, then you probably don't care about the type of stories not making the front page or TV broadcast anyway.

Sunday Morning Music

Before you start reading, fire up this link in another window or tab and start playing my current playlist.

K finally remembered to bring home her electric kettle so I could take it to school and make tea for myself during my planning period at school. Everyone who knows me very well is aware of my obsession with craft beer, but one of my lesser obsessions is tea. I don’t take it to the heights that I do with beer. I don’t know the intricacies and subtleties of the plant and the drink derived from it, but I do know my white from my green and my oolong from my pu-ehr. The puh-er kind of taste like what it sounds like. I wouldn’t bother with it, if I were you. I haven’t actually consumed tea that came from a bag in years with the exception of the occasional glass of sweet tea at a restaurant when I get a wild hair and don’t just order water with my meal. I’ve got air-tight tins and oxygen blocking bags of different types of teas (my favorites are a silver needle and tie-guan-yin oolong) along with a few varieties of honey. I pretty much only use the honey for tea. In case you’re wondering, my favorite honey for tea is Sourwood. Tupelo is an excellent backup and I’ve got a huckleberry honey right now that’s a nice, fruitier alternate.

But this post isn’t about tea. This post is about music. As I was drinking my warm tea with a spoonful of honey, I logged in to Last.fm and set the station to bands like Iron and Wine. Sam Beam (who more or less is Iron and Wine) is a wonderful musician and I got into him at a perfect time when I was just starting to give more relaxing tunes their due. I have to give Ryan all the credit for this, however, like I have to with a lot of my post-high school music taste development. Ryan was planning on going to an Iron and Wine concert in Atlanta and was looking for someone to keep him company, and, like I have on multiple occasions until I left the Rome area, I gladly took him up on the offer. I’d never heard of the band until this point and Ryan played a couple of tracks while we were driving around one day. I dug it. It wasn’t my usual cup o’ tea, but it was really interestingly composed and the lyrics were sublime at times. We went to the show and despite technical difficulties with some of the instruments, we were both bowled over. I’ve been a huge fan ever since.

Giving Iron and Wine a chance really broadened my spectrum. Until then, my mildest love was Built to Spill, which is pretty much classic alternative rock. Not exactly stuff to make out to. That was fine being as I was never the romancing type (the first time I cooked for K early in our relationship in college, I used the Schindler’s List soundtrack for the background music because it was the prettiest music I had at the time). But gradually I’ve kind of drifted more and more to the mellower end of the spectrum. I still don’t take to the maudlin and cheese of top 40 or adult contemporary, but I really go for the more interesting artists on the fringes that combine a unique sound with mellow mood.

I call this Sunday Morning Music. I admit I stole it from someone else who was suggesting a cd that is now a staple of my mellow moods, but it fits. It doesn’t just happen on Sundays, of course, butit’s music that seems to encapsulate that feeling of sitting around on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee or hot tea when you have nothing to do or are at least cool with not getting around to your list any time soon. The TV’s off. The stereo is on and you’re temporarily happy with life. I used to call this mood the joyful melancholy when I was in high school. I liked the poetic feel of the phrase and seeming oxymoron it created, but it really is an apt descriptor. Happy seems to hollow. Calm leaves out the joy of the moment, and joy is too hyper too effectively describe the mood. The melancholy comes in to mellow out the joy and helps communicate the proximity this mood has to depression. Not, that wailing and gnashing of teeth type of depression, but the just feeling a bit blue variety. They’ve got a lot in common in the behavior and even the feel of the mood. It’s just the topic of thought that changes, really.

It’s music like Iron and Wine and the other bands performing in a similar vein that seems to resonate best with the vibrations of the brain and soul in these moments and the music can take you further into that beautiful melancholy of a Sunday morning.