Zombie Ball

I lost interest in sports years ago, especially pro sports. I still enjoy a game if I know someone playing; this generally restricts me to high school and younger teams.

When our kids decided they wanted to play, I got interested in their sports. I went to all their home games and whatever away games I could make. The first year both Esther and Josiah played basketball I decided to give pro ball a chance again as well. I didn't even recognize what I saw. The uniforms were huge and baggy and silly looking, but the biggest problem was the play.

Or lack thereof. Both teams plodded back and forth, individuals taking turns showing off like a bunch of junior high kids who'd all just moved to the neighborhood, wanting attention but not really caring that much about the game or teamwork.

I couldn't tell you what was going on in their heads, but I can tell you what it looked like from my vantage point.

"I have arrived! I am the star. I don't have to break a sweat unless I want to. I'm the coolest dude around, and cool dudes don't have to sweat. All these cats out there paid to see me so I'll mosey around. occasionally make a break, and then show off my trick shot. I don't make as many as I used to, but so what? I'm cool and stuff."

And then, perhaps because he was busy imagining he was admiring himself in a mirror or on a giant screen TV (since the league allowed neither on the court), he'd accidentally commit a foul-- perhaps tripping, kneeing, pantsing, or scuffing an opponent's hair. The latter usually resulted in a full brawl between the teams, although nobody ever got hurt and the coaches' starched shirts and ties never even looked ruffled.

College ball, on the other hand, was very good. Collegiate players showed a passion the high school teams understood but the pros had forgotten. They were, of course, much better than the high school teams. I'm not sure that was the case with most of the pros. I once sat bemused in Mr Gatti's, watching two teams of million dollar babies mope up and down the court for foul shots at least a dozen times in a row without more than a couple of seconds of play between each set of fouls. I really think Josiah's team could have beat either of them. Esther's team, despite a severe height disadvantage, could have beat them.

I haven't watched much in the way of basketball since our kids finished at Hilltop, but the few moments of pro ball I've noticed lately suggests that either someone lit a fire under those guys or those college players graduated and took over the pros. Either way, the recent games looked like pro ball again.

But everything I see on social media about this year's college brackets suggests the college teams have caught whatever disease the pros had a decade ago. I hope someone comes up with a vaccine soon, and offers it to the high schoolers before they catch it. Zombies and basketball just don't mix.

On Ice in Norcross

In January and February of 1985, the Atlanta area experienced an infrequent serious cold spell. One day the official temperature at the airport was -8F. It was -10F in the boonies up north where I lived (outside Marietta) and worked (outside Norcross).

After more than two weeks of temperatures averaging below freezing, the pond by work was frozen to a depth of at least a foot. Kevin and John, both from Ohio, proclaimed it frozen enough to walk on. Kevin was amazed to learn the reason two of us kept asking was that we wanted to go play on the ice. "What's the big deal?" he asked several times.

The big deal, of course. was that we had grown up in the south, and neither of us had ever seen a body of water frozen enough to walk on. And so we did. We walked, we slid, we tried to run, we whooped, we hollered. Kevin and John watched for a minute, then headed back inside, laughing at us.

A couple of guys built like college football linemen wandered to the edge of the pond ten yards away from us. They looked back and forth at the ice and us. Finally one yelled, "Is it safe?"

"Sure. Just take it easy!"

Whereas we stayed within ten feet or so of the shore, they went straight to the middle of the pond, and proceeded to cut up like little kids. One of them fell. "CRRRAAAACCCKKKK!" Said the ice. We heard and watched the crack race away from the fallen man toward the edges, in two directions. Suddenly there were two pieces of ice on the pond, not one. It got very quiet. We all froze, so to speak.

The guy who fell started trying to get up. We were thirty feet away, near shore, and we could feel the ice move. We heard grinding and cracking. "Don't get up!" we yelled. "Just pull him gently and slowly to shore, away from the crack!"

They looked at each other. Slowly the guy on the ground raised an arm; his friend carefully (and slowly) hauled him to land. It worked just fine. How did two southern boys (and me a desert rat) know what to do? I don't know. It may be because we were voracious readers, or perhaps just because we were geeks, engineers, problem solvers at heart. But nobody had to be drug, shivering from hypothermia, out of the water, so it was a good day.

After that, we stuck to what we'd been doing before, racing our RC cars on the ice. We stayed on shore. Within a week or two, the ice age was over.

I had to wear a suit at JHK (long since bought by another company); the photo is of me, barefoot, in tie but sans coat, on the ice. Our camera didn't do a lot of zooming. This was as zoomed in as Kevin could get.

(I was thinking about rotating this photo 90 degrees, but was afraid I would fall. It's hard enough staying up on ice barefoot when the ice is horizontal.)

Mamas, Don't Let Your Young Babies Grow Up To Be Dragons

Thanks to Andy Whitman and Cindy Collins for inspiring this!

I met Smaug's parents once just outside Düsseldorf. They were pretty embarrassed about their son. In his Mom's words (recorded on a Grundig reel to reel tape recorder) "We taught that boy better. So destructive, but of course our home was blown up in the war, you know, we barely got all the gold out, and then we had to roast the Nazis because they wanted to take it. About the only thing that dragon got right was his name; he never said 'Smog' even though it was all the rage. And he could make such a nice fire, if only he hadn't run around roasting everyone like some sort of flying volcano. Here, would you like some more Schnapps?"

Of course what she really said was,

"Wir brachten den Jungen besser. So destruktiv, aber natürlich wurde unser Haus in den Krieg geblasen, wissen Sie, wir kaum stand das Gold aus, und dann mussten wir die Nazis zu braten, weil sie wollte, es zu nehmen. Über die einzige, was die Drachen bekam Recht war sein Name, er sagte nie 'Smog', obwohl es der letzte Schrei Und er konnte so ein schönes Feuer zu machen, wenn nur er nicht herumlaufen Rösten jeder wie eine Art fliegende Vulkan.. Hier, möchten Sie noch mehr Schnaps?"

I hope Google translated it into English properly.

With Two You Get Tachycardia

At one point in my software career I was responsible for developing, maintaining, and supporting a certain piece of software[1]. At this point I happened to sit between the marketing and marcomm folks at work. A vendor brought each of those departments (one and two people respectively) a gift basket.

The free coffee at this particular job was pretty bad. Coffee shops were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today. I rode a motorcycle to work so a travel mug wouldn't work. The only thermos I trusted to survive on a bike cost over $100, so most days I made do with the caffeinated nastiness they called coffee. Working 60-70 hours a week and working with youth evenings and weekends, I needed the caffeine.

Remember those gift baskets? Included in each was a quart of chocolate covered espresso beans. Since none of the recipients cared for those, they ended up on my desk. around noon I could have kissed my co-workers; they were speaking my love languages-- chocolate and espresso!

These were really good chocolate covered espresso beans. They were practically magical beans, delicious and potent. I'd munch a couple, work on code or documentation, munch a couple, support a customer, munch a couple...

Matthew, Pam, and Angela began to laugh as I typed faster and talked faster to customers. It got to the point I asked what they were laughing about. "You can't type that fast!"

"Huh!" I thought. "Not before now, anyway."

About two o'clock they all came to my cube. "Dude, what are you doing?"

"I'm working! What are you doing? What are you staring at?" I looked down. My hands were off the keyboard, but my fingers were still going a mile a minute, practically a blur. On the desktop.

"Stop that!" I told my fingers. I don't think they even knew I had spoken. I moved my hands off the desk, but found that as I talked they kept moving. I thought if speed freaks I'd known in college, and said so. I spoke too quickly, with far more words than necessary and plenty of stuttering.

Pam started. "Did you eat two whole cans in two hours???" She picked up an empty chocolate covered espresso bean can.

Matthew picked up the other one. "He ate half this one. I'm going to put it in my desk until tomorrow."

"That's probably a good idea," I said. Or thought, anyway. The way it came out was, "Hey! No! Gimme those!"

Pam and Angela blocked the way as Matthew carried the rest of the food of the gods off. Relieved and infuriated, I growled a thanks, sat back down, and returned to thrashing my poor keyboard.

I'd calmed down enough by 6PM they let me ride my motorcycle to dinner.

They were gone when I got back from eating. I was proud of my self control; I had no more magical beans that night.

Mainly because Matthew locked his desk.

 

Notes
1. Its name was Co-Xist, which is utterly irrelevant to the story so why are you reading this?

Random Dark Thorness

Or is that Random Thar Dorkness?

Random things from seeing Thor: The Dark World tonight with Sharon.

1. I liked Thor much better in 3D. It was still an excellent movie in 2D, but 3D was a far better experience.
2. That is the first movie this has been true for me. Josiah said he finds Marvel to always be worth the 3D price.
3. We went to Flix Brewhouse. I'm sure their beer is good, but I know their coffee is.
4. The pepperoni / bacon / cheeseburger was really interesting. Not my favorite ever, but I would definitely eat it again. And not just because of BACON.
5. But still... BACON!
6. The current Marvel movies' Loki is the Best. Villain. Ever.
7. At Flix, like Alamo, you order food and eat during the movie. After I finished eating by alternately leaning way forward and by holding my basket under my mouth, I noticed the gal in the seat next to me had pulled the desk/tray all the way to her seat. I didn't realize they did that. I didn't feel too dumb after all the other people saw me play with mine and try theirs.
8. Since I've also been watching Agents of SHIELD, I have to ask why the Asgardian guards (Asguards?) at the palace had such lame weapons that the dark elves pretty much just rolled over them.
9. They borrowed a little too obviously from Star Wars in places. Can't blame them, but it was very blatant.
10. The monochrome plus red comics when the end credits start are brilliant.
11. I had to cheat and google to see who Don Payne (RIP) and Steve Scott were / are.
12. I still have no clue which one was Steve Scott.
13. These are some of my favorite actors, based solely on the Marvel movies.

This is mainly the fault of Jim Kohli and Robert Norris. Well, after Stan Lee, Don Payne, Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Joss Whedon, et al.

Mama Died

I type this listening to songs from It's a Beautiful Day by the band of the same name. I played "White Bird " for Mom and she loved it as much as I did. I don't recall what she thought of the rest, but several of the other songs are strangely apropo as well.

It's been several years since Mom died. To this day, though, for some unfathomable reason, when I say or type "Mom died", I hear the Grateful dead singing Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" as "Mama died, mama died."

We had seen her for the first time in a while at Esther's boot camp graduation. Kathleen said she had finally convinced Mom to go to the doctor about her severe stomach pain (IIRC). We headed home a few days later, not too concerned. But we soon got The Call.

"The doctor says Mom's skin is a big bag full of cancer and she has very little time to live." We were on a plane back east within a week. We watched Mom go downhill over the week, but we had so much fun! We relived all sorts of fun, weird, sand, and scary times. I'd brought my guitar; we sang her a song. We laughed, we cried, we ate...

We had been at Dad's 80th birthday that spring and I had promised Mom we would go to her 80th birthday. Since it was now clear she wouldn't be here for that we celebrated early. We went to her favorite restaurant. She was occasionally confused about the occasion and didn't eat much, but we still had fun. It was wonderful how much she remembered, and how interesting our life with her had been, and her life had been before us.

Somewhere in there Dad asked me if I would ask Mom if he could talk to her (their divorce had been, and had remained, less than amicable). Mom agreed, Dad came over, and the rest of us disappeared for a while. They somehow came to terms with each other, with themselves, with life, and reconciled. I find myself in tears just typing this. Obviously I wasn't happy that Mom was dying, but under the circumstances I don't think any of us could have been happier.

One day Wink (who calls herself Mean Old Stepmom but has been a Godsend for Dad and us), a counselor and hospice director, called the kids together to prepare us for what we would be going through. But we had been through enough to know, and shortly in she lost control of the conversation as we joked about Mom, her funeral, the grave, whatever. Her eyes were pretty big as we laughed til we cried, talking about bronzing Mom as a tombstone. But she realized we were coping in the O'Neal way, and she relaxed.

we flew home and Mom was dead within a week. She went downhill much faster that week; I think she had quit fighting after she got her time with all her kids and grandkids. Reconciling with Dad probably helped as well.

The morning of the funeral Bill got a call that we couldn't put Mom in the remaining family plot. Despite the lack of a gravestone, despite the cemetery records saying the space was empty, a relative who shall remain Nameless insisted there was a baby buried there, and that she (Aunt Nameless, not the Dead Baby) would go to court if necessary to prevent Mom being buried with her family. Bill, normally very calm, was nearly apoplectic.

I was pretty skeptical. Even if there was a baby buried there, why was it a big deal to Aunt Nameless who had never bothered to put any sort of marker up, and couldn't really explain who the baby was? (I have since wondered if this wasn't a baby born out of wedlock or out of a "shameful union" and best forgotten from times when such things were scandalous at best.)

Eventually the cemetery found something indicating there was, after all, a baby buried there. They found an alternate location and dug it up. Fast. May I suggest that a cemetery should perhaps be more careful and have accessible records? But we appreciated their speed once they found the mistake.

The funeral occurred, as they are wont to do. Mom was interred. We all went to eat, caught up with cousins, aunts and uncles (Aunt Nameless was absent), nieces and nephews, and assorted relations. We all went home.

Mom's tombstone was delayed as well. Given the cemetery fiasco, it surprised no one. It eventually showed up.

The following Valentine's Day I heard a commercial for PajamaGram. I was inspired. I decided to order a negligee and have it delivered to the cemetery, where it would be draped over the tombstone with a note, "I miss you, Mom! Your loving son." Mom would have loved it, but this was Selma, AL, and I figured the next time one of my siblings showed up at the grave they might get arrested, so I didn't do it.

Yet.

I keep thinking how hysterical Mom would find that.

The Great Coffee Disaster

That should be disasters. Plural.

OK, full disclosure. I haven't been involved in any monumental coffee disasters, at least of the magnitude that requires the EPA or WHO to get involved. But on a personal, need to wake up level... well, that's when most coffee disasters happen, when you need to make coffee but can't function because you need to make coffee. Classic Catch 22 writ small.

I think I have made almost every mistake you can make with a Mr Coffee style drip coffee maker:

• No grounds- great for making hot water, which is great of your name is Eb and you want Hot Water Soup for breakfast.
• No filter, no grounds- ibid
• Using beans you forgot to grind- great if you want soggy coffee beans to eat. Except that they happen to be revolting.
• No basket, no pot- great if you need an excuse to clean the counter and floor before you are awake enough to do that, either.
• No filter- great if you like the grounds in your coffee a la wild west coffee at a campfire.
• No water- the only disaster here is the wait while you wonder where your coffee is and then finally add water.
• No pot- a lovely coffee waterfall, only a disaster if you don't get your mouth under it, or don't like your coffee scalding and black with counter crud.
• Double grounds- hardly a disaster, but it does waste some for the coffee ability of the grounds, which is a terrible tragedy.
• Double water- ugh. Weak coffee is disgusting!
• Pouring water into the grounds- makes a mess, costs time, wastes coffee and water (in a drought you think about these things).

Eons ago we used a stove top percolator. We still have it for emergencies. We made nearly all the mistakes you can with that as well; there are less possible. At least we never melted the pot leaving it empty over a flame too long.

Sadly we never had a stove top espresso or single cup maker. Apparently you can launch boiling grounds 8 feet if you leave the strainer out. Or at least that's what I gather from author Sally Hanan's Facebook page.

The worst was the day I was making a full pot (12 "cups" (who uses a 6 oz coffee cup?)) extra strength and dumped the grounds in without a basket or pot, putting most of the grounds on the floor... in front of everyone I was making coffee for. And it was half of what I had left. Two grinders full later, after sweeping and cleaning the counter, we started a pot of coffee. Thankfully the next morning I found my emergency cache of Starbucks Double Shots.