Still working on the second half of the previous entry, but for now I’ll send out my holiday wish for everyone reading this to have a pleasant day tomorrow. Hope you enjoy the company of family and friends, and, in the words of Beldar Conehead, consume mass quanitities. Hey, we’re Americans; it’s what we do.
Oh, one more thing: if your bird goes missing, check in the living room. They’re masters of concealment…
I know the election is ancient history at this point, and that all the Democratic griping and navel-gazing has gotten tedious in the weeks since. Nevertheless, I have some things I want to say about the way things turned out, and given that blogs are essentially an exercise in self-absorption — uh, self-expression, I mean — I’m going to ask that you bear with me. Or don’t. I can’t make you stick around if you don’t feel like reading anymore on this subject. It’s not like I have a remote-controlled rifle pointed at you. If you’re absolutely sick of politics or don’t have time to read a long post, I invite you to come back in a day or two.
I’m not much of a sports fan. In fact, I am so not a sports fan that once when someone asked me what I thought about the Jazz — referring, of course, to the Utah Jazz, our local NBA team — I replied that I was more of a rock and blues kind of guy. I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass. I simply failed to understand his question. And that is perhaps the best symbol of my relationship to the athletic competitions that consume the attention of so many people in our society. It’s not that I dislike sports. I am merely oblivious to them.
Tonight, however, a sporting event of sufficient magnitude occurred that even I cannot ignore it: the football team from my alma mater, the University of Utah, finished off a perfect winning season by pasting the arch-rival BYU Cougars 52-21. Undefeated in eleven games, the Running Utes will now head on to the Fiesta Bowl, the first non-BCS team to become eligible to play in a BCS Bowl game. Whatever that means. That kind of talk has the same effect on me that “technobabble” does on people who don’t watch Star Trek. Just as they wouldn’t know a warp drive from a Klingon disrupter, the terminology is meaningless to me. I just know that it’s something very rare and cool, and that deserves some praise.
So congratulations, Utes.
I won’t be watching the Fiesta Bowl — I probably won’t even realize when it’s on — but it is pleasing to know that my old school has earned such an impressive honor.
It’s a cool, foggy morning here in the suburban south end of the Salt Lake Valley. Under normal conditions, the Wasatch Mountains loom only a couple of miles from my office window, close enough for me to see individual trees sprouting from the knife-edged crags. Today, the mountains are invisible behind a smooth gray curtain that reminds me of smoke inside a soap bubble. Just the kind of day you want to start off with a nice hot beverage, preferably one with caffeine.
Neil Gaiman, a British comic book writer and novelist who lives in California and is generally a witty fellow, has an interesting idea on how to reform the whole political system:
I think that some country or other ought to try jury duty as a way of picking its politicians: if your name gets picked, and you can’t come up with a good enough excuse, you’ll have to give up four or five years of your life to helping run the country, which avoids the main problem of politics as I see it, which is that the kind of people you have to choose between and vote for are the kind of people who actually think that they ought to be running things.
What do you have to do to get people interested in seriously studying a proposal like this?
It’s one of those days when there’s so much stupidity floating around that I don’t know what I should be outraged at first.
Just a reminder that the Best Reality Show on Television, the Emmy Award-winning Amazing Race, kicks off its sixth run tonight at 8 PM, MST. As I’ve mentioned before, I generally despise reality TV, but The Amazing Race is different. Instead of wallowing in the worst of human nature and finding ever-more disgusting ways to break people’s spirits (Fear Factor, I am talking to you), this show is a celebration of all the cool stuff the world has to offer as well as a generally positive portrayal of how people can overcome their own limitations.
This new Race cycle promises to be especially interesting for my fellow Utahns, as it includes a pair of sisters from the next county south of mine. Tune in tonight and show a little hometown spirit!
I’m sure everyone has received those chain-letter quiz thingies that float around the e-mail channels. I’m talking about those long lists of questions that function like the literary equivalent of cocktail-party smalltalk by letting your fellow correspondents learn some trivia about you. (Just to show you how far down the road to grumpy old coot-dom I am, I can remember when these things were written on actual paper with actual pen-and-ink and passed around classrooms. I imagine school kids today probably send them over their cellphones.)
I usually delete these things from my inbox on sight — I figure I’ve already got plenty of distractions with which to waste my time — but as the last couple of posts have demonstrated, I’m in a fairly trivial mood today, so when I received one such quiz this morning, I went ahead and filled it out. I’ve decided to share my responses with you fine folks out there in Internet-Land. Enjoy the bitter knowledge of my inner workings that you never really wanted to possess! Bwa ha ha!
There’s a great quotation today on Vagablogging, a travel-themed blog I like to follow:
“Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”
–Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There (1992)
Travel is a major interest of mine, even though I haven’t gotten around to discussing it much here on Simple Tricks, and I’ve got some pretty definite ideas about what constitutes a good travel experience. One of these days I hope to get into some of those thoughts, but in the meantime Bryson has perfectly crystallized many of my favorite travel-related memories into that one paragraph. Those memories are inevitably of moments that occurred as dusk fell, moments when I no longer felt far from home and I realized that I had shed all the worry that dogs me on any ordinary day and was left with only possibility. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that sensation in two European countries and a number of distant American cities. It’s a feeling I don’t feel nearly often enough…
So have you heard about the lastest taste innovations from the Jones Soda Company?
For those who don’t keep up on such things, Jones is kind of a second-tier contender in the Great Soft Drink Wars. Personally, I find their products way too sugary for my tastes, but I’ve long admired the company’s cool photographic labels. The standard product line consists of traditional soda varieties — root beer, vanilla cream, black cherry — as well as some exotic but not too-far-out flavors such as watermelon, chocolate fudge, and blue bubblegum. Now, however, the mad scientists at Jones have outdone themselves by creating limited-edition seasonal flavors that include turkey and gravy, mashed potato and butter, greenbean casserole, cranberry sauce, and fruitcake. Sound nauseating? You have no idea.
Personally, I suspect these holiday sodas were never intended for actual consumption. You’re just supposed to put them on the coffee table as a way of provoking laughter and remarks of good-natured disgust from your Christmas visitors, kind of like setting out a big tray of lutefisk. At least, I hope that’s what the intention is. If someone out there really thinks a greenbean-flavored beverage sounds good, then I’m afraid there’s nothing more modern medicine can do to help you…
