Finally, a bit of clear-thinking sanity in this overheated campaign.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
Important soccer stuff
Having now watched many hours of European and British soccer action, I believe that I now have what it takes to be a professional soccer player. Of course, I'm not very fast or strong, and I've never been good at kicking the ball with either power or accuracy. But yes, I've mastered soccer's 3 important expressions.
First, there's the face on both hands, followed immediately by a pleading look skyward. This is what you do when you've missed a wide-open goal from maybe 10 yards out and instead kicked the ball into the upper tier of the stadium. No further explanation needed, right?
Second, there is the two arms stretched out and up in the air along with a confused and exasperated facial expression. Whenever a player from one team makes contact with someone from the other team, everyone within 10 feet or so on both teams is required to immediately take this stance as if to say to the referee, "How could you not call a foul on the other team? Are you blind?"
And finally, there is the pained expression. All players are required to make this expression whenever any opposing player touches them. For maximum impact, it is recommended that you begin making that face a split second before you actually get hit, so that there is no delay in the display of agony. This is usually done along with a headlong dive and grabbing of one leg, which need not be the leg that was hit. If done properly, this virtually guarantees that a yellow card will be given to the player who fouled or appeared as if he might be fouling.
That seems to be it, so I'm ready to go, don't you think?
First, there's the face on both hands, followed immediately by a pleading look skyward. This is what you do when you've missed a wide-open goal from maybe 10 yards out and instead kicked the ball into the upper tier of the stadium. No further explanation needed, right?
Second, there is the two arms stretched out and up in the air along with a confused and exasperated facial expression. Whenever a player from one team makes contact with someone from the other team, everyone within 10 feet or so on both teams is required to immediately take this stance as if to say to the referee, "How could you not call a foul on the other team? Are you blind?"
And finally, there is the pained expression. All players are required to make this expression whenever any opposing player touches them. For maximum impact, it is recommended that you begin making that face a split second before you actually get hit, so that there is no delay in the display of agony. This is usually done along with a headlong dive and grabbing of one leg, which need not be the leg that was hit. If done properly, this virtually guarantees that a yellow card will be given to the player who fouled or appeared as if he might be fouling.
That seems to be it, so I'm ready to go, don't you think?
Weather notes
Probably more than enough written about the hurricane, but considering that I'm situated such that I can simultaneously watch out the window and on TV, I guess it's the main thing going.
It's raining right now. I'm not a fan of rain. I am, however, a fan of living on top of a hill rather than in the lower elevations. I can see water streaming down the street, headed for some neighbors' houses. We get a bit in the basement, but that's about it.
I realized last night that I'd bought this little thing called a power inverter so that we can plug things into a regular outlet in the car. I had one made for airplanes and charging computers, but when that got lost, I bought a more standard one, which apparently is made for camping. Not rustic camping, mind you, but camping where you want to run a refrigerator and a TV. So all I have to do is hook this puppy up to my car and we'll have at least some power so we can watch TV while we eat tuna out of a can.
Part of me is glad this isn't snow but part of me would like to see the 4-8 feet you'd get with this amount of precipitation.
I'd actually like to go out for a walk in this, just to experience it. And I probably would except that I'm afraid of a branch falling on me. We live in a stone house with no trees large enough to even reach the roof around, so I'm thinking we're going to be pretty devoid of drama here. Maybe devoid of electricity as well, but I'll take that trade-off.
What the hell were those 17 people doing out on the (replica) HMS Bounty today? And now, to paraphrase Louis CK, of course the Coast Guard has to go out and save those people, but maybe, just maybe, they deserve what they're getting.
On a related note, we got an email from the school saying that students are writing in and asking what's going to happen with with tests that were scheduled for today. Part of me finds this funny and part of me finds it terribly sad. I'd also like to invite anyone who feels like they really need to take a math test to drop by and I'll make one up for you.
It's raining right now. I'm not a fan of rain. I am, however, a fan of living on top of a hill rather than in the lower elevations. I can see water streaming down the street, headed for some neighbors' houses. We get a bit in the basement, but that's about it.
I realized last night that I'd bought this little thing called a power inverter so that we can plug things into a regular outlet in the car. I had one made for airplanes and charging computers, but when that got lost, I bought a more standard one, which apparently is made for camping. Not rustic camping, mind you, but camping where you want to run a refrigerator and a TV. So all I have to do is hook this puppy up to my car and we'll have at least some power so we can watch TV while we eat tuna out of a can.
Part of me is glad this isn't snow but part of me would like to see the 4-8 feet you'd get with this amount of precipitation.
I'd actually like to go out for a walk in this, just to experience it. And I probably would except that I'm afraid of a branch falling on me. We live in a stone house with no trees large enough to even reach the roof around, so I'm thinking we're going to be pretty devoid of drama here. Maybe devoid of electricity as well, but I'll take that trade-off.
What the hell were those 17 people doing out on the (replica) HMS Bounty today? And now, to paraphrase Louis CK, of course the Coast Guard has to go out and save those people, but maybe, just maybe, they deserve what they're getting.
On a related note, we got an email from the school saying that students are writing in and asking what's going to happen with with tests that were scheduled for today. Part of me finds this funny and part of me finds it terribly sad. I'd also like to invite anyone who feels like they really need to take a math test to drop by and I'll make one up for you.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Now I know I've raised my kids up right
My daughter told me that she didn't want to watch the debate, she just wanted to see Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert review it on their shows.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Oh. My. God.
I am scared sh-tless. I have now had, for the first time since, get this, September 9, two relatively pain-free days in a row. And so I am now planning, to the extent I can plan anything at this point, to visit school for a little while tomorrow, and to return to teaching next week.
It's hard to sum up how weird this feels. It's not like at the end of summer, when everyone's returning. This is the 8th week of school and I haven't been there since the first fragmentary piece. Everyone else is already settled in and into a routine. The best way I can express it is to say that I feel like a ghost. Or more trendily, a zombie. Either way, I'm definitely not exactly the same person I was at the end of the summer, when I arrived at school happy, fit and ready to go. Now I'm sluggish and kind of mindless. After this long a period where I couldn't concentrate, my brain has atrophied. Not permanently, mind you, but I'm not going to be on top of my game for a little while.
Hence the visit. I'm just hoping I don't suddenly take a step backward tomorrow. That's happened to me twice before when I was planning a return, so I'm nervous. But this thing is supposed to go away after a while, so I guess I should be at least a little bit more optimistic. It's a big deal for me, so wish me luck!
It's hard to sum up how weird this feels. It's not like at the end of summer, when everyone's returning. This is the 8th week of school and I haven't been there since the first fragmentary piece. Everyone else is already settled in and into a routine. The best way I can express it is to say that I feel like a ghost. Or more trendily, a zombie. Either way, I'm definitely not exactly the same person I was at the end of the summer, when I arrived at school happy, fit and ready to go. Now I'm sluggish and kind of mindless. After this long a period where I couldn't concentrate, my brain has atrophied. Not permanently, mind you, but I'm not going to be on top of my game for a little while.
Hence the visit. I'm just hoping I don't suddenly take a step backward tomorrow. That's happened to me twice before when I was planning a return, so I'm nervous. But this thing is supposed to go away after a while, so I guess I should be at least a little bit more optimistic. It's a big deal for me, so wish me luck!
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
On and on it goes
I'm now missing my 6th week of work. The best thing I can say is that it hasn't gotten noticeably worse. But it hasn't gotten better either. I've actually had to edge the amount of pain medication I'm taking back up because I was too uncomfortable and not sleeping again.
Constant pain is kind of like a Dementor. It just sucks the life right out of you. I'll have moments when I'm motivated to get something done and then a minute later I'm grabbing my side and heading back to the couch.
Sorry to be depressing here, but I think it's one of the jobs of the unhappy to spread their misery around a bit. I continue to spend much of my time watching TV sports and fortunately there's still enough baseball to complement the soccer.
I did want to get back to the business of sports watching, so I'll touch on baseball here. The baseball has been, for the most part, reasonably compelling. The biggest problem with consuming the broadcasts is the disparity in the quality of the announcers from game to game. When there were 4 series at once, the talent was spread dangerously thin. On one hand, the Yankees games have been handled by Ernie Johnson and John Smoltz, who are both excellent, ably assisted by either Cal Ripken or Ron Darling.
Tigers-A's, on the other hand, was done by someone I don't know, but it doesn't matter, because far too much of the talking was done by Buck Martinez, who has admirable hair but simply does not know when to shut up. He is also perhaps the worst interviewer currently working on national TV, with a penchant for asking questions that are so leading and so long that there is rarely anything left to the interviewee to say. There should be a word for that, asking a question in such a way that the question includes the answer.
The other problem is the commercials. I understand that there are a limited number of advertisers willing to spend heavily on baseball, but can't we do something to force them to have more than one commercial? Sometimes I wish they'd just play the ad 25 times in a row and be done with it. I will never eat anything containing avocado ever again and people usually destroy their cars in far less entertaining ways than in the insurance commercial I've seen probably 100 times in the last 10 days.
And I've now seen so many Viagra and Cialis commercials that anytime I see a reasonably mature man and woman (as opposed to the men and women in beer commercials) in a commercial I immediately think he has erectile disfunction but thanks to modern medicine he's still going to have sex soon. This is disconcerting when I then see a Lowe's commercial where a couple is making s'mores with two young children and I'm assuming they're about to leave the kids by the fire to go do the nasty.
At this moment, Fox has decided that a test pattern, occasionally interrupted by commercials, is the appropriate thing to show to pass the time during a rain delay.
So this is my life right now. I am ready to move on to a new phase.
Constant pain is kind of like a Dementor. It just sucks the life right out of you. I'll have moments when I'm motivated to get something done and then a minute later I'm grabbing my side and heading back to the couch.
Sorry to be depressing here, but I think it's one of the jobs of the unhappy to spread their misery around a bit. I continue to spend much of my time watching TV sports and fortunately there's still enough baseball to complement the soccer.
I did want to get back to the business of sports watching, so I'll touch on baseball here. The baseball has been, for the most part, reasonably compelling. The biggest problem with consuming the broadcasts is the disparity in the quality of the announcers from game to game. When there were 4 series at once, the talent was spread dangerously thin. On one hand, the Yankees games have been handled by Ernie Johnson and John Smoltz, who are both excellent, ably assisted by either Cal Ripken or Ron Darling.
Tigers-A's, on the other hand, was done by someone I don't know, but it doesn't matter, because far too much of the talking was done by Buck Martinez, who has admirable hair but simply does not know when to shut up. He is also perhaps the worst interviewer currently working on national TV, with a penchant for asking questions that are so leading and so long that there is rarely anything left to the interviewee to say. There should be a word for that, asking a question in such a way that the question includes the answer.
The other problem is the commercials. I understand that there are a limited number of advertisers willing to spend heavily on baseball, but can't we do something to force them to have more than one commercial? Sometimes I wish they'd just play the ad 25 times in a row and be done with it. I will never eat anything containing avocado ever again and people usually destroy their cars in far less entertaining ways than in the insurance commercial I've seen probably 100 times in the last 10 days.
And I've now seen so many Viagra and Cialis commercials that anytime I see a reasonably mature man and woman (as opposed to the men and women in beer commercials) in a commercial I immediately think he has erectile disfunction but thanks to modern medicine he's still going to have sex soon. This is disconcerting when I then see a Lowe's commercial where a couple is making s'mores with two young children and I'm assuming they're about to leave the kids by the fire to go do the nasty.
At this moment, Fox has decided that a test pattern, occasionally interrupted by commercials, is the appropriate thing to show to pass the time during a rain delay.
So this is my life right now. I am ready to move on to a new phase.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Emerging from the cave
So yesterday I awoke and became aware of having something that seemed distant but familiar. It was a thought. My brain had a thought. Yes, I seem to have reduced my medication enough that my brain suddenly switched itself back on.
It was a little overwhelming at first, and strange to realize that I'd spent the last month basically not thinking. I mean, I remembered to walk the dog and go to the bathroom and such, but beyond any moment's necessity? Nothing. It's odd to contemplate what this is like, even from the very near outside. I think I did my taxes, because I have completed returns sitting here, but I don't really remember doing it.
It was sort of like I was in suspended animation. I think the brain goes into some kind of shock to try to mitigate the kind of incessant, intense pain that I lived with for several weeks, just as the body goes into shock when it sustains a catastrophic injury. The body is an amazingly adaptive piece of work.
So I wish I could say that the sensation upon returning to consciousness was, "Hey, I'm back! Yay! Let's party!" But to say that would be something between exaggeration and outright falsehood. Yes, it's exhilarating, but it's truly overwhelming as well. On one hand I'm able to go out and do things, like drive for the first time in 5 weeks. On the other hand, I return feeling shaky and slightly ill.
I'm sure this is a consequence of my extreme inactivity (as in around 22-23 out of 24 hours spent lying down for 5 weeks, except for those nights when I had to pace for several hours to distract myself from the pain). Not helping the situation, I'm guessing, is that one (or both or the combination) of the medications depresses may appetite, causing me to lose another 5 pounds on top of the 13 I'd lost intentionally.
I'm by no means underweight, but I've entered the range of medically acceptable rates for people my age and height, which given my build I should do no more than enter. (As an aside, next to the "ideal weight" number on the calculator I used was this note:Women tend to imagine their ideal weight is unrealistically low, so they diet unnecessarily. Men tend to allow their ideal weight to be higher than medically recommended. Men and Women should learn from each other.)These last 5 pounds have disappeared in the past 10 days, which is simply too fast for the body to adjust. I have not weighed this little in about 30 years and my face looks different.
The good thing is that I was in, for me anyway, great shape when I got sick. The bad thing is, well, I've been sick and my body is weakened anyway.
The other thing is that the pain, though now more manageable, is by no means gone, and I'm having mixed success in matching my medication to the pain level. So I'm having extended periods (6 hours or more) of pretty serious discomfort.
All told, this makes a decision on returning to work difficult at best. My current plan is to return very part time, to teach 1 out of 4 classes and attend some meetings. I'm not 100% positive that will be workable. If I had to go back today I couldn't. Maybe Monday will be better.
It was a little overwhelming at first, and strange to realize that I'd spent the last month basically not thinking. I mean, I remembered to walk the dog and go to the bathroom and such, but beyond any moment's necessity? Nothing. It's odd to contemplate what this is like, even from the very near outside. I think I did my taxes, because I have completed returns sitting here, but I don't really remember doing it.
It was sort of like I was in suspended animation. I think the brain goes into some kind of shock to try to mitigate the kind of incessant, intense pain that I lived with for several weeks, just as the body goes into shock when it sustains a catastrophic injury. The body is an amazingly adaptive piece of work.
So I wish I could say that the sensation upon returning to consciousness was, "Hey, I'm back! Yay! Let's party!" But to say that would be something between exaggeration and outright falsehood. Yes, it's exhilarating, but it's truly overwhelming as well. On one hand I'm able to go out and do things, like drive for the first time in 5 weeks. On the other hand, I return feeling shaky and slightly ill.
I'm sure this is a consequence of my extreme inactivity (as in around 22-23 out of 24 hours spent lying down for 5 weeks, except for those nights when I had to pace for several hours to distract myself from the pain). Not helping the situation, I'm guessing, is that one (or both or the combination) of the medications depresses may appetite, causing me to lose another 5 pounds on top of the 13 I'd lost intentionally.
I'm by no means underweight, but I've entered the range of medically acceptable rates for people my age and height, which given my build I should do no more than enter. (As an aside, next to the "ideal weight" number on the calculator I used was this note:Women tend to imagine their ideal weight is unrealistically low, so they diet unnecessarily. Men tend to allow their ideal weight to be higher than medically recommended. Men and Women should learn from each other.)These last 5 pounds have disappeared in the past 10 days, which is simply too fast for the body to adjust. I have not weighed this little in about 30 years and my face looks different.
The good thing is that I was in, for me anyway, great shape when I got sick. The bad thing is, well, I've been sick and my body is weakened anyway.
The other thing is that the pain, though now more manageable, is by no means gone, and I'm having mixed success in matching my medication to the pain level. So I'm having extended periods (6 hours or more) of pretty serious discomfort.
All told, this makes a decision on returning to work difficult at best. My current plan is to return very part time, to teach 1 out of 4 classes and attend some meetings. I'm not 100% positive that will be workable. If I had to go back today I couldn't. Maybe Monday will be better.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Living on shingles time
I've now been cooped up in the house for a month, which would have seemed unthinkable a month and a day ago. But it's hard to expect the Spanish Inquisition that is shingles until you have experienced it. And I apparently had a particularly nasty case.
So I haven't written much because I haven't done anything, plus my mind's been clouded by medication, so I haven't thought about much either. What I have done, aside from sleep, is watch sports on TV.
At this point in the year, baseball is getting down to the finish and until a few days ago there were multiple games of interest on every day. Now we're in the playoffs at the point where there are 4 series going so there are still at least 2 games on ever day. This weekend will spell the end of that.
I really don't like football very much. Yes, it's entertaining in spots and it looks great on TV, but it's got two serious problems for me. First, there's only one game a week. I understand that teams need a week to heal after each game, but there's nothing about that that has to be true. If football was played every day like baseball, people would play it differently than they do now. So that means 3 hours of entertainment per week. Not very much for someone who has 18 hours a day, 7 days a week to fill up.
The second, more serious problem, is that football is dumb and kind of sucks as a sport. I know this isn't the commonly held belief, but it's true. Football is a simplistic game that totally lacks subtlety, played by people encased in so much body armor that they barely look like people. The only way we know there are actually people in there (aside from the current inadequacies of robotics) is that the players get hurt and if it were robots out there they would get broken instead. And the basic rules are very simple: See that line I drew down there? You've got 4 chances to get your team there with this ball while we try to stop you. You can either run there or throw the ball to a teammate who runs there. And we try to stop you by...well, stopping you.
That's it. Everything else is embellishment. I'm not saying the players aren't great athletes who make some very entertaining plays sometimes, but at its core it's boring and brutish.
Anyway, this wasn't intended to be a knock on football beyond its general lack of availability to me while I've been sick. What has been available is European soccer.
As is my norm, I have done exactly zero research to determine if what I'm saying contains even a grain of truth. But I promise you I will say it as if I am absolutely certain of it, this being a skill I acquired in the advertising business.
European soccer on American TV consists primarily of the English Premier League and the EUFA Champions League, one of which is based in England and the other somewhere in the EU (see, that wasn't so hard). I believe that they are separate leagues, but there are teams that are in both and teams in both leagues have players from multiple nationalities. This is puzzling, and if I really cared I could figure out how it works, but remember that I am on painkillers.
The Premier League is more confusing because you have to know both London and Great Britain geography to have a clue where any of these places are. How am I supposed to know where Tottenham is in reference to Chelsea or West Ham or Wigan? And there do seem to be a certain number of English players on all of the teams. Many of the foreign players do seem to have a strong attachment to their English teams, but that attachment seems to me of the financial sort.
The way the whole thing works is that there a Premier League and then a Secondary League and then a Tertiary League and on down until they run out of soccer players. Your team can move up by finishing in the top 2 in your league or down by finishing in the bottom 2. All the national leagues throughout the world are like this except the United States, which is too small to have multiple leagues. There's a playoff at the end of the season which has a prize of a trophy for the team and the right of that team's hooligan fans to riot in the other team's town.
The UEFA Champions League is clearly a misnomer as all 30-odd teams in it could not be champions unless there were a pretty substantial set of ties or if they mean the league has a champion each year. You might say, that would be silly, all leagues have champions, but this is Europe we're talking about and maybe they think that their championship is the only "real" championship.
The league uses the accursed "Group" system that you would see if you watched the World Cup which you probably didn't. The teams are divided into groups of 4 and each team plays each other and the 2 teams who do the best move on to the next round. This setup allows the organizers to "randomly" stuff their team's biggest rivals into one group and see them try to kill each other off. That is why this kind of group is called the "group of death." In reality, the players rarely die during soccer game. Rowdy fans die much more frequently.
This is running long so I'll pick it up in another post.
So I haven't written much because I haven't done anything, plus my mind's been clouded by medication, so I haven't thought about much either. What I have done, aside from sleep, is watch sports on TV.
At this point in the year, baseball is getting down to the finish and until a few days ago there were multiple games of interest on every day. Now we're in the playoffs at the point where there are 4 series going so there are still at least 2 games on ever day. This weekend will spell the end of that.
I really don't like football very much. Yes, it's entertaining in spots and it looks great on TV, but it's got two serious problems for me. First, there's only one game a week. I understand that teams need a week to heal after each game, but there's nothing about that that has to be true. If football was played every day like baseball, people would play it differently than they do now. So that means 3 hours of entertainment per week. Not very much for someone who has 18 hours a day, 7 days a week to fill up.
The second, more serious problem, is that football is dumb and kind of sucks as a sport. I know this isn't the commonly held belief, but it's true. Football is a simplistic game that totally lacks subtlety, played by people encased in so much body armor that they barely look like people. The only way we know there are actually people in there (aside from the current inadequacies of robotics) is that the players get hurt and if it were robots out there they would get broken instead. And the basic rules are very simple: See that line I drew down there? You've got 4 chances to get your team there with this ball while we try to stop you. You can either run there or throw the ball to a teammate who runs there. And we try to stop you by...well, stopping you.
That's it. Everything else is embellishment. I'm not saying the players aren't great athletes who make some very entertaining plays sometimes, but at its core it's boring and brutish.
Anyway, this wasn't intended to be a knock on football beyond its general lack of availability to me while I've been sick. What has been available is European soccer.
As is my norm, I have done exactly zero research to determine if what I'm saying contains even a grain of truth. But I promise you I will say it as if I am absolutely certain of it, this being a skill I acquired in the advertising business.
European soccer on American TV consists primarily of the English Premier League and the EUFA Champions League, one of which is based in England and the other somewhere in the EU (see, that wasn't so hard). I believe that they are separate leagues, but there are teams that are in both and teams in both leagues have players from multiple nationalities. This is puzzling, and if I really cared I could figure out how it works, but remember that I am on painkillers.
The Premier League is more confusing because you have to know both London and Great Britain geography to have a clue where any of these places are. How am I supposed to know where Tottenham is in reference to Chelsea or West Ham or Wigan? And there do seem to be a certain number of English players on all of the teams. Many of the foreign players do seem to have a strong attachment to their English teams, but that attachment seems to me of the financial sort.
The way the whole thing works is that there a Premier League and then a Secondary League and then a Tertiary League and on down until they run out of soccer players. Your team can move up by finishing in the top 2 in your league or down by finishing in the bottom 2. All the national leagues throughout the world are like this except the United States, which is too small to have multiple leagues. There's a playoff at the end of the season which has a prize of a trophy for the team and the right of that team's hooligan fans to riot in the other team's town.
The UEFA Champions League is clearly a misnomer as all 30-odd teams in it could not be champions unless there were a pretty substantial set of ties or if they mean the league has a champion each year. You might say, that would be silly, all leagues have champions, but this is Europe we're talking about and maybe they think that their championship is the only "real" championship.
The league uses the accursed "Group" system that you would see if you watched the World Cup which you probably didn't. The teams are divided into groups of 4 and each team plays each other and the 2 teams who do the best move on to the next round. This setup allows the organizers to "randomly" stuff their team's biggest rivals into one group and see them try to kill each other off. That is why this kind of group is called the "group of death." In reality, the players rarely die during soccer game. Rowdy fans die much more frequently.
This is running long so I'll pick it up in another post.
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