SPORTS

SPORTS

I have not had a chance to write (lucky you) (and yes I understand you are not the plural you) because I’ve been working hard on the NCAA Tournament. My job is to assemble a whole bunch of information regarding how the network is broadcast into a zillion different regions, and make sure that the people who actually make the switches know what the heck they are doing.

You can say what you want about the NCAA Tournament, mostly because it is your first amendment right. By the way, why is the right to free speech an amendment? How did they forget to put that into the Constitution in the first place? Remember that War for Independence we just fought so that we could speak freely? Didn’t anyone proofread the thing? “Dude we left some stuff out- it might be pretty important…”

Incidentally I have a great idea to reduce the deficit: you know the Bill of Rights? Go ahead and submit a bill. Charge people for the rights they actually use. For instance, I need free speech so I can annoy people. But I don’t need to bear arms. I have arms, but I don’t need to bear them. Charge people extra for brandishing arms, and even more if they menace. I don’t need free religion- I am not religious. I don’t need to do anything unto others- I can’t remember if that is the Bill of Rights or the Ten Commandments? I always get those and Benjamin Franklin confused. “A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned-“ was that Jesus or Ben Franklin? I heard Jesus was kind of a cheapskate.

Anyway, when the NCAA tournament rolls around everyone has to “pick their brackets.” Don’t worry that you know ABSOLUTELY nothing about the teams, just pick them. The early rounds of your bracket are awash with red ink. If you got most of them right that means you are an idiot savant, like a horse who can paint with his tail, and it comes out looking better than some stuff you have seen at the MOMA, or when your cat walks across the piano, and it sounds a little like Liszt. Or when George Clooney is in a movie and for some odd reason it isn’t that bad.

Obama picked some ridiculous school for an upset and was crowing about it for two days. My mother LOVED the NCAA Tournament, because she loved to root for the underdog.
“I love Michigan- they are cute! A little school like that against a big powerhouse and they WON!”
“Mom, Michigan was favored by 25 points- their stadium fits 100,000 people.”

This year these dopey mid-major schools have been beating up on the big guns, and the execs at CBS are getting nervous. A final featuring Murray State versus St. Marys (Cal) was a distinct and distasteful possibility for far too long. Any school that has to list what state it’s from in parentheses because there is another BETTER school somewhere else with the same name does NOT belong this deep in the tournament.

They are thinking of expanding the tournament to 96 teams. This is not good. I went to Syracuse, which is a fine learning institution with a damned good basketball team. I don’t want to see some bogus little college come along and knock my ass out in the second round.

It would actually be 97 teams, because they have that play-in game. Can someone please explain why that play-in game is in my life? Didn’t they play the whole season so that they could either be selected or not selected by the tournament committee like everyone else? The winner (loser, because the winner wins an embarrassing smack-down in the first round by the number one seed of the tournament) this year was Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Does a team with the word “bluff” in it sound like it’s going very far? This year they skipped the game and Duke just took them into a back alley and shot them- it was more humane.

Some dopey schools in the past: I.U.P.U.I. I’m not sure what it stands for but it will keep you from getting pregnant I think. Also: Austin Peay (pronounced Austin Pee), which got a lot of chuckles from dads and eye-rolls from moms with kids named Austin.

And the lower the seed, the weirder the school nickname is. Cornell is known as the Big Red. The Big Red WHAT? I think I know the answer, but I am too much of a lady to say. Speaking of ladies, that’s another thing. After Title IX passed, all the major schools had to fund female basketball programs, but they didn’t give any thought to what they would call them. So they just put the word “lady” in front of the existing nickname. The “Lady Trojans” of USC is a perfect example of inappropriate. Now the nickname for Brigham Young University is the “Cougars,” so I’m not sure what to make of that.


Incidentally, the lowest seed to become the national champion was Villanova in 1985. They did qualify as a “Cinderella” team, because they arrived at the tournament in a large pumpkin, and believe me the inside of it was the pits.

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WINTER OLYMPICS

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VACATION DESTINATIONS II

VACATION DESTINATIONS II

We finally went to Disney World, and I started to write about it, and wasted my whole blog on ONE stupid ride. After “Mission: Hurl” we literally took a slow boat to China. Across a really tiny Pacific Ocean lies an entire world out there. If you’ve always wanted to see the continents, but don’t have the money to travel to Vegas, this is the place for you.

Japan and China are dangerously close to one another. I heard stories of Japan toilet-papering the pagoda, and China short-sheeting the kimonos. We saw three Japanese girls performing a very entertaining taiko drum routine. Then two Chinese girls came over and said, “ 汉字 / 漢字,” which means “shut up with that racket,” to which the Japanese replied “F you and the sampan you rode in on.”

Canada has a neat movie starring Martin Short. It’s very funny, and the basic theme is that Canada is not just a bunch of snow. It is also a country brimming with cold temperatures and some freezing rain. Also it has half of Niagra Falls. We then cruised by the German pavilion, where you can get a Nazi officer’s hat with mouse ears on it. At the Moroccan village, we bought a very young girl whom we plan to use as a slave, if we can teach her how to mow the lawn. At the French ville they made fun of us for not being able to speak English very well.

They have an American pavilion; someone must have seen all the weird buildings around and forgot that we already ARE in America. They have a movie that celebrates the history of our country in grand panoramic film, mixed with surround sound and of course the animatronics. There is an animatronic for everything, and after a while you start to question your own sanity. “That is an animatronic squirrel!” “No it’s not, but it has animatronic nuts!” I went to the bathroom to escape the insanity briefly, and it seemed to me that even some of my body parts had a life of their own.

While we were waiting for the show to start, this spooky glee-club looking octet of men & women in full period dress starts singing songs in perfect harmony. Not only is there not one stray note in the bunch, but they are smiling fatuously in unison. This is typical Disney at its finest- everything is happy there, but not normal-happy: Stepford Wives-happy. At the end of the trip I was so smiled-out I just wanted to run over a cat or something.

Anyway “The American Adventure” movie was grandly stirring, and I managed not to cry until they showed a picture of George W. Bush, who always makes me weep for the future of humanity for some reason.

Back across the pond, as we say, was Ellen’s Energy Adventure (everything in Disney is either an Adventure or a Journey). You sit in a seat in the theater, and the rows of seats start to move around, going back into time. Animatronic dinosaurs try to spit on you, and there is even an animatronic Ellen DeGeneres, who, if I had control over the robotics, I would make a much better dancer.

The Seas with Nemo & Friends was very cute- you ride around in a clamshell through a series of real fish tanks, with holograms of Nemo and his pals superimposed into the tanks. It is a lot like a snorkeling trip in the Caribbean, only not as well-behaved.

We tried out “Test Track,” which simulates the experience of a test car driver doing a series of quality control exercises, such as heat and cold response, traveling over hazardous road surfaces, blind curves and speed. It’s similar to taking a cab ride in Manhattan. They don’t call them crash test dummies for nothing.

We went to dinner at the Coral Reef Restaurant, a huge, beautiful faux-reef tank surrounded by tables. We were sitting right next to the tank itself, and all of a sudden a group of SCUBA divers swam by right in front of us. At first I thought they might be lost, and there was a large shark in the tank, which I pointed out to them. But one of them pointed at my dinner and made the international symbol for “I ordered that once and it wasn’t that great.” I asked the waiter if they could grab something fresh out of there.

Back at the hotel, we noticed these two Japanese girls. Since Japanese tourists dress so weird, it’s really hard to tell them from the Disney characters that over-populate the parks. They usually have either pink hair or a really long visor, and wear a lot of colorful clothes. A dull-witted-looking American guy was trying to make some time with them. Although women love a guy who can make them laugh, if they laugh while pointing at you it’s generally not a good sign. I’m pretty sure I now know the Japanese word for “beer belly.”


Incidentally, Walt Disney had planned for EPCOT to be the model for an integrated community. Laid out in a circle, the small city would consist of businesses in the center, schools and parks in the middle, surrounded by residences for 20,000 people and connected by monorails and people movers. Unfortunately, Walt Disney died before the EPCOT property started development, and the Disney Corporation wanted no part of it.

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VACATION DESTINATIONS I

VACATION DESTINATIONS I

We finally went to Disney World- we had been scared off all these years because of the crowds and the possible bombardment of Americana. The crowds have been managed a little better over the years with the adoption of “Fast Pass,” which allows you to in essence book a time to return for the ride, so you don’t feel foolish waiting in line two hours for an 8-minute ride. It’s a great thing, and I started thinking that they could “Fast Pass” every facet of your life and things would go smoother. I asked my wife- why not “Fast Pass” the restaurants? She said it’s called “reservations,” and we have one for 5 minutes before the park closes, so shut up and get in this line. We started at EPCOT Center, which Walt Disney named himself and means: Experimental Private Coordinated Outhouse Transmutation. I actually forget exactly what it stands for but trust me it’s something like that.

Even on a low-attendance day the crowds are large. If you are not careful you can get caught in a crowd riptide that propels you onto the nearest ride, possibly against your wishes. We were ushered onto one ride that looked like it seated three people, so we climbed aboard with another girl, who had an gi-normous ass. Each of us stood up twice and sat down once, like a game of whack-a-mole, hoping that we could find the right combination of asses to fit into the seat, but it was not to be, so we waited for the next car. The ride was a strict two-seater, and the girl and her ass counted as two.

Next we went to “Mission: Space,” which I hereby refer to as “Mission:Hurl.” It offered a “wuss-friendly” option- you could join the “Green Team” on a very important simulated space mission where you might possibly save the world. Imagine if you will, a pilot, navigator, commander and engineer, all as afraid of heights and motion as you are. We took our places inside the capsule along with two members of another family. Our pilot was a three year-old baby, so we figured we were on the right flight.

The rocket takes off at a zillion G-forces or whatever and I am just trying to keep it together, vomit-wise. I had to look away to avoid barfing on the $20 million controls developed by Hewlett Packard. The pilot-baby was laughing idiotically all through this serious situation. So I figure I'll do what I usually do when I’m driving and open the window, but in space for some reason that's a big no-no. So I try to count license plates, and that of course is another big zero.

Although I heard in the news over the fall that scientists sent a thing the size of an SUV crashing into the moon to see if water would come out of it. By it I assume they meant the moon, since there probably already IS water in the SUV's radiator. It would be just my luck driving along on 684, following the SUV, not paying any attention, and all of a sudden the SUV starts taking off for the moon, and there I am in the middle of a sneezing fit, or trying to get the Yankee score or something, and I end up right behind it crashing into the moon to see if there's any water.

Meanwhile the baby fires the retro-rockets at the wrong time and sends us hurtling into a meteor storm, which sends the simulator into a sickness-inducing frenzy and narrowly misses an asteroid. I yell, "You stupid Baby- what the hell did you do that for! Are you trying to get us all killed?" And the father goes, "Don't call my baby stupid, you greenish-tinted lummox!" I later apologized to the dad, but said in all fairness the baby might be slightly retarded and that he should keep an eye on things.

So we go back out into the sub-freezing temperature of Florida. Seriously, whoever had the dumb idea of moving south for the warm weather is living in a magic kingdom. My sister in Virginia got 2 feet of snow this weekend, while we got ZERO inches. If I have to go to Virginia next weekend to find snow on our ski trip I will be pissed. All the oranges in Florida froze a month ago so orange juice supplies are down, although all the frozen concentrate weathered the chill just fine. I thought I could see a slow-moving glacier coming our way from over near Splash Mountain. I thought we should get the hell out of there, because I didn't want to be captured inside a glacier and discovered thousands of years from now with a sickly look on my face from being on the GREEN team.

There were a lot of exhibits called Imagineerovations, or Engimagineerances, or Edumatioventions, stuff like that. We went into one, and spent about half an hour working a robotic ball-peen hammer trying to break a TV set, which never broke. A stupid premise had I thought about it in advance- why not just release a cat into the area, who will push it off the table the old fashioned way?

Anyway, I have wasted my whole blog on ONE ride, so I will have to finish the Disney trip later…


Incidentally, and this is not apropos of the whole Disney trip, but I thought I should mention my favorite lyric today on Jonathan Schwartz' Sinatra Saturday. Sinatra does this swinging version of My Fair Lady's "Get Me to the Church on Time." At the end he sings, "Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong.... Goddamn bells."

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ANIMAL HUSBANDRY

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY

My friend Chris is an angler. He has acute angle for just about everything, since he used to be in sales. He and his girlfriend Caryn angle sometimes from a rowboat on a lake in upstate New York. Recently instead of a fish they angled a snail. This in itself is interesting, because snails are not very fast, and they are usually attached to a rock. A snail cannot go and chase your line with its bait on it. You pretty much have to catch a snail on its own terms, as he sits there on the rock. Which leads me to believe that Chris catches mostly rocks when he goes fishing.

I teased him and asked if he used a special line to catch the snail and he said, yes: “Do you come here often??”

So they get the snail home and foolishly put it in a tank with water. If it was me I would have done what I always did when I was a kid: put it in a shoebox with some grass and lettuce, and poke a couple holes in the top. Three hours later you have a shoebox with some grass, lettuce and a dead snail. But NO. It turns out snails are asexual, which means they dress well, get manicures and pedicures, spend a lot of time grooming fine lines into their facial hair, and vehemently refuse to discuss their sexual orientation. Unless I’m thinking of metrosexuals?

A snail doesn’t need a partner to have sex. It needs only a warm, comfortable environment and internet access. It saunters along the ground by the wall of the tank, in which it can see its own reflection, and goes, “Damn! I gotta hit dat.”

With my luck I would walk in on the snail having sex with itself, and we’d both be embarrassed, and I would have to explain that it’s perfectly normal, perfectly natural, all snails do it, blah, blah, blah. I dread having that talk.

So six days later there were 17 snails in the tank. They are smart enough to keep a quorum with an odd number so they can break any voting ties, unlike the New York legislature.

Two days after that, Chris asked me what he was going to do with 21 snails? Well, you could make a deal with a French restaurant. French people have a way of selling you for 37 dollars a plate of something you would normally pay $150 to have an exterminator get rid of. Come to think of it I wish he would go fishing in our pantry because I think we have a mouse.

Or he could sell them to a pet store. Someone told me that they sell snails there, but I don’t know if the snail is the pet or something you feed to another pet. I’m afraid to ask, because they know me at the pet store as someone who says weird things. I once burst into the pet store and yelled, “I want a TURTLE- and make it SNAPPY!”

Or he can use them to clean his car windshield. After 10 or 12 snails play touch football on your window, you can bet there will be not one speck of algae on it, although you might not be able to see through the dried slime.

Snails come with problems. Yes, they own their own homes, but like so many these days, they are underwater. And trying to run away from home presents a logistical nightmare.

Snails leave a trail. So you can ask, who took the last Dove Bar? And the snail will turn red and go, Not me, brother. But of course the oozy evidence leads right to the freezer….

Plus they move incredibly slowly. If you get into a checkout line at Home Depot that is not moving no way, no how, there is a snail working the register, guaranteed. And then it becomes tempting to finally learn how to use that Self-Checkout island where two people who could have been running registers tell you how to use it.

On the plus side they multiply really fast- I started taking one with me to the restaurant to calculate the tip. I look like a friggin’ genius now.


Incidentally, the snail’s antennae are not used for bringing in ESPN, as previously thought. The two large antennae are it’s eye stalks (it doesn’t see very well, even though its eyes get there a few minutes earlier than the rest of it), and the smaller ones are for feeling and smell. So if you punch a snail in the big antenna it will only be able to see half of you leave, but if you punch it in the small antenna, you will hurt its feelings.

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NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Every year at around this time the inevitable happens: a New Year. Everyone gets excited, their expectations high, their mood buoyant. Then as the hour nears and reality sets in, they realize that there is no way they can face the New Year without more alcohol. Luckily there is plenty of champagne-related beverage available. It flows as fast as the staff can pour it into a plastic two-piece champagne-related-beverage-holding devices. And as with breasts, the saying also holds true for champagne: more than a champagne glass-ful is wasted.

Every one is dressed to the nines, the judges rarely awarding a perfect ten. They have had their nails done, even their toenails, although with a single-digit wind chill factor, no one is likely to see them. A brave few are willing to show that the toenail color matches the fingernail color, and even braver if they show that it matches the color of their panties. They have had their hair done. Someone with a one-word fake French name where you’re not sure if it’s their fake first name or fake last name charged $150 to color it, highlight it, curl it then straighten it. They use lots of product, but will not say which product they used. And that is just for the guys.

The girls look resplendent in an 800 dollar dress, with a .04 cent paper hat. Even less if it is the wrong year.

There is a lot of glitter. There will be glitter for weeks on end coming out of places that really could use a little sprucing up anyway.

But first there will be dinner. Shall we go Chinese? NO! Not upscale enough. What about Italian? NO! Too family-oriented. Mexican? Please. French! Ooh-la-la that’s perfect! We will finally go to that place that sounds like a poodle. We will take out another mortgage on our home, even though it is underwater. Soon we will be elbowing hermit crabs out of the way to live in a seashell. But it is New Years! Live a little for god’s sake. “Tonight we have Prixe fixie menu monsieur! Everything is included, even the mortgage application!” That sounds deLIGHTful, even though we will never finish it. A leaking doggie bag is the perfect accessory to an 800 dollar dress.

“Honey,” she muses, “what is your New Year’s Resolution?” Usually I try to have something ready for my New Year’s Resolution that will be meaningful and point me toward the future. Like getting involved with an illegal substance that will require me to resolve to get into rehab NEXT New Years. This year I said to myself (since everyone else has stopped listening to me), “Why should the New Year’s Resolution always be about me? Why shouldn’t it be about others?” And so this year My New Year’s Resolution is for others to be nicer to me.

And then we have to watch the Australians crow about how they are the very first to celebrate the New Year. Did they happen to go, “Check us out Down Under! The Real Estate bubble burst HERE FIRST!” They did not.

This year they let Dick Clark do the countdown, and I won’t make any jokes about the stroke of midnight, or anything like that, no matter how clever it would be. Suffice it to say that the last time I did a countdown like that, immediately afterward a doctor stuck a camera up my ass. And the time before that when I did a countdown like that, immediately afterward I was arrested for DWI. So obviously no good can come of it.

New Year’s Day, I am busy ringing in the New Year. Then I realize that the ringing is in my ear, and goes with a ballbuster of a hangover. When I go to the gym, there are about 40 fat people that I have never seen before. They wander around in an officious manner, with clipboards and pens, wearing brand new jogging outfits. After two or three weeks, the clipboards are gone, the jogging outfits are gone, and even the people are gone. I assume the fat is the one thing that remains. This could be due to hastily conceived New Year’s Resolutions that are lacking fine print. Peoples’ expectations are once again too high. Start low like this: “My New Year’s Resolution is to cut 50% of the fat out of my husband’s diet.” Stuff like that….


Incidentally, every New Year’s Eve a ball drops in Times Square signifying the passage of another year. The same thing also happens to me. The first ball dropped in 1907, but that was probably by accident. This year the ball is made of Waterford Crystal, and thanks to Dick Clark’s countdown, almost broke into a zillion pieces.

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MODERN MEDICINE

MODERN MEDICINE

I had my annual physical last week, which has over the years been reduced to a yearly platform for cheap comedy. Less cheap than it used to be, since my co-payment keeps going up.

First come the delicate negotiations with the nurse. She tells me to put on one of those ridiculous gowns where everything but your fat ass is covered. Those seem silly and degrading, and even if I am undergoing surgery I try to wake up in the middle and remove it. So I of course refuse, and opt for my underwear instead. She measures my height, and she starts to write down 6-foot-two, but I keep her there as I lean in every direction until it comes out 6-foot-two and a quarter. I almost fell over, which caused her to write a few things that she would not show me. My weight isn’t bad, especially when I tell her that my watch weighs 5 lbs. She again made a couple notations that did not look like subtraction. She takes my blood pressure, which is exemplary, and I keep her there, threatening to walk out in my underwear unless she agrees with me. In the interest of decorum, she does, but I can see HER blood pressure might be rising dangerously. Then, inexplicably, even though I have been technically alive for the past 10 minutes, she takes my pulse. I figure I must be exhibiting dangerous vital signs, but even so I can’t resist shouting out indiscriminate numbers to try and throw her off. She looks at her watch for an entire minute, but I am still alive.

Then the doctor finally shows up, we shake hands, and he gives me a cold as usual. He says, “Time to check your ear,” and I bend over the table, misunderstanding him. He sticks in that cold ear-checking device which is shaped like a Pez dispenser. Sticks it in my ear I mean. He tells me something that I can’t hear because there is a Pez dispenser in my ear, but I bend over again just in case. He puts the ear thing away and tells me to open wide. My mouth he means. I say “Ah,” and not in a good way, as he puts that popsicle stick in my mouth, which my tongue finds depressing. I picture him eating a big fat popsicle before he sees each patient. Then he puts the freezing stethoscope on various parts of my body as if I am a lumpy checkerboard. He tells me to cough, which I have already been doing since he gave me the cold. He doesn’t ask me to sneeze but I do anyway just in case.

He tells me to sit down, and whacks my knee cap with a little hammer as if I didn’t pay back a teensy weensy loan, and so I kick him in the nuts with my other foot and he stops. Then he says it’s time to check my prostate. I bend over again, and this time he reads me my rights ands slaps a set of handcuffs on me.

Then he sends me down to the lab where they tell me they are going to do a couple tests, draw my blood, and that I have to pee into a cup. First they hook my nipples up to a machine. I assumed that there was a similar machine hooked up to a chimpanzee’s nipples, and that after they treated me with this machine, my nipples would then take on the characteristics of the chimpanzee’s nipples, and vice versa, since I saw a similar thing on Gilligan’s Island once. But it turned out to be just an EKG. By the way, wouldn’t EKG stand for Electro- Kardiogram? Seems sort of Krispy Kreme-y kutesy to me. Anyway, it measures your heart function. I asked the tech a question: What if I have a heart transplant- wouldn’t I then be likely to fall in love with the former owner’s widow? The lab tech said not to move, especially my lips.

Then she hands me a little plastic cup and tells me to pee into it. I tell her I misunderstood what she said earlier, and that she better wash her coffee cup. The one they give me is like a little plastic shot glass- it takes me forever, since I suffer from anxiety that it is going to overflow. Then it’s time to draw blood. I tell her I’m afraid of needles- I don’t even like pine trees, and can’t she get the blood another way? She says she has to do it this way so I tell her that her rubber gloves make her look fat. She punches me in the nose and we don’t need the needle after all.

She sends me back up to the doctor’s office. He asks me if I smoke, and I reply only if I’m close to bursting into flames. He asks me if I do drugs, and I say why do you have anything? He asks me if I drink and I say I do get shit-faced but only in moderation. Then we discuss my medical history, which means didn’t I use some of these same jokes last year?



Incidentally, It is also recommended that you give your pet a thorough going over at least once a year, or every seven years, depending on your point of view. For instance, if you notice an unsightly discharge coming from the mouth area, that’s pretty much normal. Also, if you detect a foul odor coming from the coat, that means your dog probably sat on it.

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