xtcian

Movement

Ian's little sister Michelle here. I just returned from a night at the pool hall where I, if I may, *smoked* everyone in sight. Such releases are desperately good for my soul... particularly since at the gym today, five meatheads were mean to me, so my revenge is to spank their kind over a green velvet table.

Anyway, tonight's blog is not about my prowess at billiards. Tonight is the first night, since the birth of la Lucy, that Ian and Tessa have been away from her. I hear tell they are skiing somewhere, at a somewhat "corny" resort, and living it up with a lake view and a fireplace. It sounds wonderful, and they most certainly deserve a blessed night off. And thus, kind readers, you are stuck with me.

I've been thinking a lot about how to move people, and what exactly moves people- moves them to change, to take action, of any kind, be it in their own lives or for a specific cause or whatever. What compels us to do something that is even ever so slightly different than what we did the day before? When Ian wrote the blog about the "ten things you can do for the environment", or whatever it was, why exactly did those of you who did buy low-emissions light bulbs? Is it because it's the right thing to do, or is it more because you care about Ian, or are moved by his writing? Or a little of both? If someone who was even half as eloquent with the written word had made such a suggestion, would you have paid attention?

I'm thinking about this because yesterday I attended the California Arts Council statewide conference- which they've not had the funding to host in over four years- and I had the rare opportunity to hear Dana Gioia speak. Gioia is the Chairman of the NEA, and my god, one of the best speakers I've ever seen live. He's a poet, and quite accustomed to the public eye, but his ease, his humor, his brilliance- he could have been, as they say, reading the phone book, and I would have been mesmerized. Instead, he was talking about arts, and arts advocacy, which is the very thing I spend each day doing myself, and I could barely breathe. Annette Benning also spoke, and she was lovely, and numerous other folks as well, but Gioia was something altogether different. So inspiring, and so refreshing, and so moving, and so incredibly sincere, hilarious, and *real* that it was hard to believe he was addressing 450 people.

I know I'm a good public speaker, but he was eons, light years, beyond what I am now, someone who commands respect even while he's totally screwing around. NEVER self-deprecating, NEVER apologetic, because why in the hell should he be?

And it's times like these that I realize how massive social shifts happen. It's hard to imagine how Hitler could have been so successful in his horrid mission; it's hard to comprehend what Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished in such a short lifetime. I know these are opposite spectrum folks, but from what I've learned, both were captivating speakers, and experiencing them was nothing short of infectious.

I think what I'm taking away from this is that change is possible, so clearly possible, even when people insist that it is not. Case in point: 30 years ago, if someone in the Bay Area said they were going to Napa Valley, it meant they were going to the insane asylum that still thrives in the city of Napa. Napa Valley was for "loonies", as they were called. Now, to go to Napa Valley means visiting a world-class wine & food destination. So when people tell me that Napa Valley will never be an arts destination, I'm realizing I should just give them the metaphorical finger- or, at the least, realize that they just don't know. But it is strange that it is not facts & figures, not reports or information, that move people- it's people with an incredible gift of the gab that move people. So those with that gift should think long and hard about what they want to do in this world, because, in my experience, they are the only ones who can really create change.

And so, to a question, since that seems to be the order of the day on Ian's blog: if you had this gift, what would you fight for? I mean, beyond politics- seriously. If you could talk large groups of people into seeing the light as you see it, what would be your issue? What, outside the leadership and direction of our country, would drive you to the soapbox? This can be anything- from advocating for the use of a particular product to massive change in our social strata. What, if you had this gift, would you fight for? Hot dogs and buns being sold in the same numbers? Universal yoga classes? Increased funding & support for all expectant mothers? What?

slide over here and give me a moment

1/30/07

How bizarre - I had my first neti pot experience last night before writing yesterday's entry. I'd seen them in friends' bathrooms before (and destroyed yours on accident, Lee and Suz!) but I didn't know how they worked. I thought you were supposed to put boiling water in them and just breathe the steam or something. I had no idea you actually irrigated your own brain.

Once you get past the feeling of being six and having swimming pool water go up your nose, it was actually quite amazing. I did it like seven times because when you get to my age - one's indeterminate late thirties - there are very few new sensations. I was committed to feeling this one to the fullest.

Which leads to today's CODE WORD... what was the last time you had a Truly New Sensation©? On a huge scale, the birth of Lucy opened up an awareness I truly didn't know humans possessed. On a tiny scale, there's the neti pot. On a different part of the scale, there was my adventures with strep throat in December, which was a kind of sick I recall only vaguely from grade school.

No matter the quality, the incontrovertible fact of getting older means any Truly New Sensation must get more rare. When was your last?

bass in your face

1/29/07

Okay, time to swap out some parts for new ones. If I can replace the oil filter on the car and renovate our farm's heating system, I see no reason why I can't ask for the following:

1. I would like a new set of sinuses. These old ones get infected all the time, and because of a stupid accident with a trashcan in 1999, the septum on the right side is slightly deviated. This means I have to sleep on my left side all night, which is KILLING THE LEFT SIDE OF MY BACK after all these years. I want a brand new silicone sinus replacement with a WARRANTY.

2. I would like wireless electricity. Really, that says it all. How come we have wireless everything else, but not electricity? Yes, smartass, I know "the Sun" counts, but I mean powering your shit without cords. There should be an electricity transmitter built into the wall that transmits power to your TV and laptop THROUGH THE MAGICAL AIR.

3. I would like the hour from 9pm to 10pm to last longer than an hour. Because when you have a toddler who goes to bed at 7:30-8pm, that's the hour when you feel like you can do all sorts of stuff. But then 10pm comes around, with its double-digits and feeling of "night" and it seems impossible to start anything without the spectre of the early morning. Can we agree to stretch it out, please?

4. I would like to create a Rock N Roll Noise Reduction Agreement. Seriously, I still rock. And I have gone to shows in the recent past. And yes, I have not told many people this yet, but I am the bassist in a new band. But here's the thing: everyone at a rock show wears earplugs. The band wears earplugs. When we practice, we wear earplugs. The sound guy wears earplugs and the bartender at the Cradle wears earplugs. Can't we all just agree to turn it down twenty decibels? That way, none of us, both artists and consumers, will have to wear those goddamn things. It just takes someone with the balls to go first. I volunteer; I am turning my bass amp down to NINE.

we're missing all the good stuff

1/28/07

Barnaby and Mom last week; Lucy and Mom in May 2005:

Barnaby now; Lucy in July 2005:

Sean's hairy chest now; my slightly-less hairy chest May 2005:

answer me these questions three

1/26/07

Okay, late post, but if anyone sees this today or over the weekend... three questions if you please.

1. We are going to be in Chapel Hill from Feb. 26 to March 7, and I'm beyond psyched. Can't wait to eat some Pepper's, waste time/write at Davis Library and see us dismantle Dook. However, we're hitting a snag on housing. There's four of us, and in a perfect world, we'd like to rent a two bedroom place within very quick walking distance of uptown. We have a place we can get, but it's not ideal and doesn't seem like it offers much "outside time" for Lucybeans. Any suggestions? Besides craigslist?

2. One of my oldest, bestest friends is putting together a party in Manhattan that promises to be a fun celebration of southern culture for tourism purposes. He's looking for a band that would be a good match: something somewhat hip, alternative bluegrass, fun... any ideas, or people to call?

3. Speaking of bands, a reader emailed with a specific, nagging question. I'll let him say it in his own words:

I saw the Beastie Boys at the Raleigh Civic Center on Nov. 10th of '92, and the opening acts are the source of my inquiry. I am almost positive they were Rollins Band & Da Lench Mob. The most credible Beastie Boys site out there, BeastieMania.com, has Rollins Band and Cypress Hill listed as openers in their gigography section. Do you know how I can pose the question and maybe get a response from someone who also saw the show (I am trying to target a Raleigh area group of readers)?

I have these occasional bits of my past band-seeing experiences that stick in my craw as well, and know the feeling of not being able to solve my minutiae. Anyone see the show in question?

As always, have a wonderful weekend!

have cane, am able

1/24/07

News stories like this absolutely make me shudder with rage. In it, we meet a father of seven in Washington state who managed to stop the seventh grade in the local middle school from watching "An Inconvenient Truth". The man is named Frosty Hardiman, a moniker which, given the subject matter, is so staggeringly ironic that it beggars belief. To quote the article:

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardiman wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

As of now, there is a moratorium on the film, and the school board said "An Inconvenient Truth" can only be shown with the written permission of a principal, and a presentation of "alternate views" that were approved by the superintendent of schools. The science teacher who originally wanted to show the movie has been looking for alternative "authoritative articles," but the only thing she could find from a reputable non-partisan source was an article from Newsweek written in 1975.

The time for this tomfoolery is at an end.

There are three issues, for me, that bear specific importance to the survival of my family: drastically reducing our carbon output, jumpstarting research on stem cells, and securing ALL loose nuclear materials in the world. If we make headway on those things in my lifetime, I will consider this era to be largely successful.

Yet all three have ticking clocks. It is only a matter of time before some very bad people get their hands on weapons-grade nuclear material. We only have a decade - at most - to stop a potential environmental holocaust. And I would like to unlock the stem cell secrets before any one of us, currently healthy reading this blog, starts to get Alzheimers, Parkinsons, or has a spinal injury.

That's three clocks. One ticks down to an American city flattened into glass, one ticks down to you not remembering your own children, and one ticks down to billions dead because of a little change in the weather. I'm not being histrionic or even cavalier. It took me a lot of Celexa, therapy and a healthy dose of nihilism to come to grips with it. They all loom, but all come with a saving grace: THEY ALL CAN BE PREVENTED IF WE ACT IN TIME.

Let's leave aside the nuclear material problem, because that's my own little bête noire. The other two issues, however, are being roadblocked, again and again, by American religious fundamentalists. If we don't stop them, they will actually end up killing us. I'm not being histrionic. Their efforts to suppress the news of global warming and their stalwart opposition to stem cells will, if nothing else does, eventually end your (or your kids') life before its time.

I was listening to this story about two brothers who are trying to bridge their cultural divide: both are Christian, but one is a pro-war Republican who believed the Earth was created in seven actual days by God, and the other, well, votes for Democrats. They discuss how they've decided to get together more often and see where they have common ground.

The evangelical brother's biggest problem with... I dunno, people that don't agree with him, I suppose... is their perceived superiority. He doesn't like the disdain, and he's enraged by conversations where he's perceived as an idiot.

For me, it's summed up in a metaphor. Suppose there is a car that is supposed to drive us into the future. A lot of people with a lot of skill made the car, and it was almost done and ready to go, when another group of people come along and say "nice car, but it needs square wheels."
"Square wheels?" the craftsmen say, "You're... you're joking, right?"
"No," the group says, very loudly, "And I'll thank you not to act so smug."
"But round wheels work infinitely better than square wheels."
"We don't care. We firmly believe, to the depths of our hearts, that square wheels are the way to go."
"We're not putting square wheels on the car! That's totally fucking stupid!"
"HOW DARE YOU CALL US STUPID! WE'RE GOING TO LIE IN FRONT OF THE CAR UNTIL YOU PUT OUR SQUARE WHEELS ON IT!!!"
"We're sorry, we're sorry," say the craftsmen, "Maybe we can compromise... um, maybe octagons? Um..."

That argument? That's where America is right now. The future is coming on incredibly fast, the clocks are ticking. We're dying to go, excited about a future that could be so much better for ourselves and our families. We could be so far along on the journey, and yet we're stuck retrofitting our vehicle with bling from the Dark Ages.

That time has expired. We have work to do. For the love of your God, please get your Hell out of the way.

pellinore

1/22/07

My opinion of George W. Bush has been a frequent topic on these pages, and I have to say, in defense of consistency, my feelings have not wavered one way or the other in the 6+ years we've been with him. As he gears up for the State of the Union speech tonight, I would like to know: what do you, personally, really think of him? It may sound reductivist and easy, but a snapshot of your collective feelings would be immensely interesting.

Anyone, including lurkers, are invited to answer - you can stay anonymous. Give your exact impression and don't be afraid to be explicit one way or the other!

UPDATE: Awesome debate in the comments. Can anyone who watched the State of the Union address give their impressions to those of us who didn't?

open mouth, remove doubt

1/21/07

This is Set-The-Record-Straight Monday®, and I'd like to begin with the grotesquely botched case against the Dook lacrosse players. Now, if some of you don't know, I have not always been a fan of that school in Durham. I admit a long, lengthy bias, probably due to deep-set psychological wounds from childhood, then crystallizing in my experiences with the school from 1985 onwards.

There is also a certain genre of lacrosse players from the northern climes of the United States who take a certain meathead solace in their racism, their sexism, and their skill at beating the shit out of each other with a stick. Mixing Dook and lacrosse together was like Pop Rocks and Coke, as far as I was concerned. If that mixture didn't kill Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials, my feeling is that a drunk-driving lacrosse player from Bernardsville, NJ probably would.

When the story came out, I wrote a li'l blog in which I said "I've held off talking about the Duke Lacrosse Scandal for a while, because blogs are always the 'zero draft' of history, and you can look pretty foolish if you blather and end up being wrong." Well, it turns out we have most likely been utterly wrong on this one.

Don't get me wrong: I believe worse things than this happen in elite sports programs every day, and judging from my friends who currently live across the street from a Dook fraternity, a lot of these guys need a month of sensitivity training and a primer on civil rights. But this was a big fuck-up, and I can mea some culpa and say that I was truly predisposed to believe the worst. And there's a word for that kind of behavior.

Speaking of fuck-ups, many of you have forwarded to me the retraction of the Consumer Reports study on the safety of infant car seats. So it looks like my impassioned, overwritten, hyper-emotional screed from last week was also a waste of your time. For this, I must mea more culpa.

Turns out the tests were done not at speeds of 30-40mph as reported, but more like 74mph. I'd still like an infant car seat that doesn't throw your kid 30 feet even at 90 miles per hour, but pending a retest, I'd say we can all go about our business. Apparently Consumer Reports outsourced the test to some other company. Lesson to learn: do everything yourself, because other people are totally incompetent.

Here at xtcian.com we've prided ourselves in rants and self-righteous diatribes about a myriad of subjects before the facts were in. We're proud of our spotty batting average, and hope you keep returning for more vaguely-misinformed sermons on subjects theoretical. See you soon for more histrionic geysers of unmitigated crap!*

* except for global warming, which really is happening

on the importance of nomenclature

1/18/07

I'm gathering my thoughts on the year 2006 for next week, but in the meantime, this odd slice of Lucy and Barnaby says more than I can:

very, very, very, very, very, very

1/16/07

We all spent months of our lives fiddling with the typewriter margins - and later, the margins in AppleWorks and Microsoft Word - to make our term papers look longer. Some of the margins were so pathetically large that teachers would actually dock points for believing them to be fools.

And now, in Hollywood, everyone's script is always too long. The first thing a manager/agent/writing partner will tell you is "this thing needs to lose ten pages." And so there you are again, this time in Final Draft, messing with the margins in a desperate attempt to make the piece appear smaller.

What is the poetry here? We spend our youth extending that which is small, and our adulthood truncating that which is too large. What lesson am I to take away from this?

fairly goshparents

1/15/07

Neva asked a good question about godparents, and specifically how we see Lucy's godparents given that we don't adhere to any specific religion (and my own relationship with any Church is, to be mild, somewhat fraught). I suppose the answer lies in the same reason we go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve; we like to pick and choose what part of the ritual and canon we have for our own lives.

For me, I just like the sound of "godfather" and "godmother," especially since I didn't have either. I liked the idea of being a teenager and getting to steal a weekend away with "my cool godmother," so we set about to make sure Lucy had those options in spades.

Being magnanimous completists, that meant we wanted about 40 godparents for Lucy. If you think you might have been one of them, I guarantee you were. We managed to whittle it down to four, from all vastly different walks of life. Straight man, straight woman, gay man, gay woman, all with distinctly different philosophies. None of them had kids of their own when Lucy was born (although, that has suddenly changed, excitedly!) and we've known them all for a combined fifty years.

I've never said who they were (and still won't, although I gave one away already) because I felt it might be taken as a slight to other old friends. The truth is, Lucy is a big character and will probably make you her godparent eventually anyway. Her extended family of uncles and aunts is formidable - besides, we've been tossing around the idea of perhaps one day having more kids, and obviously we'll need more godparents.

But as for the role specifically, we just wanted someone who could show them the world reflected in a slightly different prism. This I know: one godparent is married to a priest and will give her the best birthday presents for fifty years. Another will take her on her first whirlwind jaunt through the East Village. Another, with her lovely wife, will teach her how to surf - and the fourth will send her postcards from the Seychelles, the Maldives, and Madison, New Jersey. If that isn't spiritual guidance, then I don't know what is.

the humphreys proxy

1/11/07

Today, I'd like to further salute my wonderful friend (and one of Lucy's godparents) Annie by showing her new found skillz in hooping:

so frickin' cool!

heaven or las vegas

1/10/07

Yesterday, Jody brought up a great example of something I love: The Accidental Cheap Solution that is Infinitely Better than the Popular, Expensive Solution. His example was the ZR motorcycle helmets that retail around $99 and perform better than all the other stylish helmets five times as expensive.

In order to find your particular Accidental Cheap Solution (ACS), you need a few things: the internet, obsessive chat forums, and eBay. Once you have those things in place, you will find that there is a four-dollar part that will make your $35,000 car run more smoothly. You will discover the guy who can make your TiVo hold 250 more hours of television. There is a woman who sells an ointment for $6.99 that is better than Crème de la Mer.

My personal favorite has to do with the iPod. I have become better read than ever thanks to Audible.com and fallen in love with new music again, all because of long road trips accompanied by naught but the iPod and sour gummi worms. The problem is this: if you don't have a tape player in your car (or a specific MP3 audio jack) you are reliant on some pretty ancient goddamn technology. I refer to, of course, the FM transmitter.

Take a look at this page and you'll see the cottage industry that has built up around these things. You're basically creating your own tiny little radio station in your car, and hoping the signal is strong enough to go through the window and hit your own car's antenna. If you think about it, it's pretty ridiculous.

But the worst thing of all, is none of these bastards work in big cities. There's simply too much interference from all the other radio stations to get a clear sound, and if you're listening to books on tape, forget it. All of these products, the DLO TransDock, the Belkin TuneFM, the Griffin RoadTrip, costing almost a hundred dollars, become useless pieces of plastic in a place like, say, Brooklyn.

Enter the Accidental Cheap Solution. Thanks to hours of DIY sleuthing on the part of folks at iLounge, a small, disturbed following of aficionados discovered a tiny, white FM transmitter that blows all of them out of the water. It's called the Scosche FM Transmitter and it was languishing on dusty bottom shelves at Walmart. You could get it on eBay for five bucks.

This motherscratcher has got to be illegal: it not only overpowers local broadcasts on the same channel, it'll transmit your iPod to cars around you. Tessa and I tried it in the countryside one afternoon with two cars and it was like having IanFMRadio. Which meant lots of Smiths, XTC and the Cocteau Twins for my wife and Lulubeans in the other car! HA HA!

Anyway, someone must have figured out it was breaking FCC regulations, because they've come out with a new one in black: I can't vouch for it. Oh, and don't get the white one made specifically for the iPod - it doesn't work for shit. You want the one that is specifically in the link above, that plugs into your headphone jack.

And so I ask, what is your favorite Accidental Cheap Solution? It can be anything from any walk of life - enlighten us!

tied to me tight tie me up again

1/9/07

Those without kids avert your eyes; this is the kind of talk that'll make you think that the act of childbirth turns us all into blubbering, precious, drama queens. BUT... I'm sure most of you parents have read Consumer Reports' test of baby car seats: ten of the top twelve sellers failed catastrophically at speeds over 30 mph. Crash test dummies were violently thrashed, and one flew thirty feet through the window. These seats include, no doubt, yours, and certainly the one we used, the every-yuppie-has-one Peg Perego Primo Viaggio.

Remember, these are crashes at less than 40 mph, far slower than many you've seen on the freeway. One of the main culprits was the LATCH system that comes standard on almost all new cars. It's those little metal closed hooks that are buried in the fold of the back seat (along with four french fries, a packet of used ketchup and eleven cents in loose change). I was so psyched to snap in li'l baby Peanut Lucy into her LATCH, thinking that crappy car seats were a thing of the past. Instead, the LATCH system - and all of these baby seats - became an industry-wide fuckup that is Corvair or lawn darts or tobacco in scale.

Except that only four people ever died playing Jarts, and they were drinking. This is the kind of corporate suck-my-dick move that means someone in Accounting did the math and calculated the cost of your child's life in litigation fees, and projected it against future profit. Worse, you've got government agencies like the apparently useless NHTSA barely bothering to tell us that "LATCH is confusing" and exhorting us not to worry about it.

Well, actually, I am going to worry about it. Look, I am not some ninny parent who keeps their kid in a hyperbaric chamber and feeds them nothing but organic flax. We lead pretty big lives and we schlep the Buglet from one continent to the other, despite the fact she won't remember any of it.

But I spent my early years in Cedar Rapids, IA during the 1970s, when it seemed like nary a season would pass without some family being visited by some motorcrash horror or another. Simple trips to the Hy-Vee would become gruesome accidents with memorial services; kids would have their faces disfigured; innocuous jaunts to Shakey's Pizza would become cautionary tales for generations. There were seven of us in that household and I'm still blessedly thankful we all made it out intact.

If this LATCH system is actually worse than just hooking the seat belt through the car seat base, then it's a massive failure of initiative and imagination, an unconscionable breach of trust, and an unnatural rewinding of the technological clock. We should treat car seat makers Evenflo and Britax - as well as government oar-draggers like the NHTSA - with the same respect we give Halliburton and Philip Morris.

In the meantime, I guess the only solution for newborns is to ditch the expensive seat you got at the baby shower for the only two seats CR could recommend. We should also demand two more belts: one attaching to the floor in front of the baby seat, and another that stretches behind, like the toddler seats we use now.

Oh, and duct-tape mattresses around your car, fill your back seat with styrofoam peanuts, and don't drive over 15 mph. That oughta do it.

the one about the one that's about itself

1/8/07

Oh, one more thing. Taking this long break from blogging made me crystallize a few thoughts : first, I really needed the long break for personal reasons. Second, when you have laryngitis, you literally lose your voice, but for me, I actually temporarily lost the desire to speak in the written word as well. It felt equally frustrating.

Thirdly, I'd like to do two things with this space from now on. For starters, I am going to post when I really feel like it, rather than spewing something useless. On the days when you get nothing from me, that's your cue to start a conversation on anything you want. We get a few thousand hits a day here, so your thoughts might just make a difference. Or just ignore me and go back to YouTube (where I hear they have several captivating clips of recent Dook highlights).

The other thing is that I might start asking regular guest contributors to the blog. They promise to be smarter and sillier than I am.

Oh, and one last more another thing: I'm not going to talk about the blog itself in the blog. Nor am I going to talk about talking about it. I'm just going to do it, or, occasionally, not do it.

And now I'm going to California, and will see you all there!

LUCY'S THIRD FRENCH FRY!!!

earl grey's finest bag

1/7/07

Is there anybody in a leadership position in America that can be as much of a jerk as Koach K, day in and day out? Okay, obviously the entire Bush administration, and every manager of a Home Depot, but the Dook Koach always manages to cap off every win - or in this case, a loss - with a statement that makes you want to throw bricks of gouda at his rat face.

Consider this one, after their awesome loss (at home) to Virginia Tech (who had lost to Marshall):

In this decade we have won about 85 percent of our games, a lot more than anybody. [This team] is not those teams.

In essence, he is saying that HE is the mark of constant quality, and any besmirching of his record is the fault of the piece of shit team he currently has. You rarely hear people so deftly throw their entire bunch of kids under the bus for the sake of their own ego, but if you're looking for a modern-day Narcissus, gaze no further.

Don't get me wrong; I'd gladly metaphorically throw any Dook player under any bus you've got coming. That Jon Scheyer kid makes my pantapoons itch, and Greg Paulus - another in a seemingly interminable line of annoying white Dookies - definitely deserved to be teabagged.

What's that? You didn't see the Va Tech guy gently graze his nut hairs over Paulus' forehead en route to a layup? You weren't reminded of Vince Carter jumping over that French guy in the Olympics, only pausing to dip his écrous dans sa bouche? Well, by all means watch it here!

I'll go into more detail about this later, but 2006 and 2007 seem to be years when the truth comes out from hiding, when the unjust get what they deserve, and when the tower of lies comes tumbling down. I will really enjoy watching this happen to Dook, who have benefited from the unwarranted (and, in my opinion, slightly racist) largesse of sportscaster punditry. Koach K only has one set of vertebrae, and he already used them to get out of one season; I doubt it's an option again.

And the true glory? My beloved Heels are as fun to watch this year as last. Young, crazy, talented, humble and exciting. It's the gift those awful years gave us - the ability to truly love each win, no matter how lopsided. I used to have a undercurrent of dread for each Dook game, and now I salivate like a lion who has just spotted the zebra. They might get away, who knows, but the chase makes life worth living.

my winter vacation

1/4/07

Disease:
strep throat
Time period:
December 21 to December 28
Keywords:
unmitigated misery, like gargling with lit gasoline

Disease:
pneumonia
Time period:
December 27 to December 31
Keywords:
chronic, impacted, spirit-draining

Disease:
conjunctivitis (pink eye)
Time period:
January 1-2
Keywords:
crusty, annoying, demoralizing

Disease:
laryngitis
Time period:
December 30 to present
Keywords:
fist-through-window frustration, horse-noises, surrender