Cruise Control

We are closing in on that time of year when we reflect on the struggles and hardships that befell our Puritan ancestors on their tumultuous voyage to the New World. After sixty-six days at sea, many poor souls had succumbed to disease, and two in their company had died. Initially all of them were to make the trip in two ships, but when the Speedwell was found to be less than seaworthy, everyone was crowded onto the larger Mayflower, and off they went. Inclement weather kept them from arriving at their destination until winter had come to Cape Cod, where the waters became even more treacherous. This was no pleasure cruise.
Three hundred and ninety years later, the brave souls who set sail from Long Beach on the Carnival Splendor experienced many of the same travails as our forefathers. A fire in the engine room broke out one day into their journey down the coast of Mexico, and the forty-five hundred souls aboard were left without lights or hot water for days as the Coast Guard worked to rescue them from their floating nightmare. One passenger described her torment, saying that she wanted nothing to do with the cold sandwiches and salads that were offered up by the crew, and that she had been subsisting mainly on Pop Tarts. Another lamented the four days he had survived without a hot cup of coffee. No shuffleboard on the Lido Deck. No frozen daiquiris poolside, served by Isaac your bartender. None of this was in the brochure. As the survivors of the S.S. Minnow once opined, "No phones, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury."
One thing is certain: Those who disembarked in San Diego will have stories to tell their grandchildren. Unless they were forced to eat them.

The Hawk And Me

"I am the hawk and there's blood on my feathers." When John Denver wrote those lyrics way back in the seventies, I don't expect that he imagined that the blood would be the hawk's own. I am referring to Dan "The Hawk" Hawkins, the now former coach of the University of Colorado football team. Hired five seasons ago as a refreshing change of pace from the scurrilous Gary Barnett, The Hawk brought a new optimism to a beleaguered program. Fifty-eight games later, he had won only nineteen of them. The optimism that was once mile-high reached sea-level this year, and last week, it went underwater.
The Hawk had his team up 45 to 17 in the fourth quarter against perennial also-ran Kansas, and the Golden Buffaloes ended up losing 45 to 52. They gave up thirty-five points in less than fifteen minutes. It was the biggest collapse in the one hundred and twenty-one years of college football at the university. My university. My alma mater. The one I attended and the place I have watched more football games with the possible exception of my living room. After this debacle, the athletic director decided to pull the lever, cut the string, and otherwise end the suffering of Buff fans across the globe.
All that being said, I can't argue the specifics of that decision. Even a losing program would be a nice change from a program that encouraged ugly behavior from both players and coaches. But college football is a business, and nothing succeeds like success. They had to let the Hawk fly. Now they're going to pay him two million dollars not to coach. This comes on top of the three million dollars they paid Gary Barnett not to coach. That is what contracts are for. It protects the coach from the university, and in this case it protects the university from having the money to hire a new coach. I mention this because I continue to send the University of Colorado a pittance now and then to keep their college of arts and sciences in paper and pencils. I won't be receiving a plaque or a mention in the program for any arts performance. I send them money because I appreciate that they gave me a degree, way back when.
I failed miserably as a student, for a while. When I failed a Basic Drawing class, mostly because I stopped going and neglected to drop it, the powers that be put me on academic probation. I am grateful for this opportunity to square myself away as a student and get my life back on track before they simply cut me adrift. However, at no point was there any discussion of giving me a couple year's tuition and sending me on my way. I had failed, and I was given a chance to put together a transcript that would allow me to graduate just a few years later with a modicum of respect. No cash settlement, but I did get to keep the tassel. I paid for that. Maybe next time, I should read my contract more closely.

Such A Thing

Dear Santa,
It has been a long time since I have written, but I noticed the other night that my son had started his letter to you, and it seemed like now might be the right time. Even though there are still plenty of workshop or shopping days left until the big day, I think my little boy may be on to something. First of all, he's not that little anymore. He has been touring high schools to prepare for his freshman year, and he has more than a passing interest in girls these days.
Still, he continues to make the time to sit down and compose a rather detailed list of things he wants, as well as an equally comprehensive accounting of his behavior over the past year. He knows that you know who has been naughty and who has been nice, but he still feels compelled to share it with you. Maybe this is because we lack a certain amount of organized religion in our home. We don't have a ritual confession on a regular basis, so maybe this is the best way to get that kind of catharsis. He could be praying to Yaweh or Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but he picked you.
Flattered? I imagine you probably don't have the time, but I hope in those quiet days after the twenty-fifth of December, you can take time to reflect on your elevated status, at least around our house. It is a beautiful thing that a teenager feels the trust and faith in anything like my son feels for you. That's a gift. Better than a plate of cookies and a cup of egg nog. I don't know if it makes you more inclined to fill his list or put a little extra something in his stocking. It know it works for me.
And speaking of me, I don't have much of a list myself this year. I suppose all I really want is one more year of letters to Santa Claus.
Yours Truly,
Dad

It's Five O'Clock Somewhere - Sometime

Archaeologist Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University in Canada would like us to acknowledge the role that beer has played in the Rise of Civilization. As an avid fan of Civilization, and a vocal advocate of beer for many years, I can back his assertion with a number of easily verifiable anecdotes.
2630 B.C.: Egyptian teenagers, having consumed more than a case of beer, make the creative leap of stacking their cans in an orderly, geometric fashion. This "beeramid" became the model for the architectural triumphs that were to become the Great Pyramids. Without the scale model offered up by these ancient adolescents, we might never have achieved one of the great wonders and tourist destinations history.
1509 A.D.: Michelangelo discovers that, while maintaining a pretty solid beer buzz for three straight years, he could paint the ceiling of a church while laying on his back. A shocked Pope Julius II wandered into the Sistine Chapel just about the time Mike had finished up his drunken vandalism, and decided to call it "a work of art." Why he didn't start on the walls or the floor, we may never know.
December, 1773: A bunch of drunks, dressed like Pocahontas, hop aboard a ship in Boston Harbor, hoping to find beer. Finding none, they do the only thing that right-thinking inebriated patriots could do: they started history's first environmental disaster by tossing a bunch of English Breakfast into the ocean, paving the way for future drunken idiots.
Today is Veterans Day, originally the celebration of the signing of the peace treaty ending World War I. Why not celebrate by recreating the event that lead to the beginning of that conflict, when a couple of Bosnian Serbs tossed back a few Hungarian brews and decided to pull a prank on the Archduke's motorcade.

Brother, Can You Spare A Rib?

It's back. That creepy, indistinguishable slab of protein that McDonald's likes to promote as the "McRib" has found its way back onto the menu. No one asked me, but the appearance of the "rib" portion has always put me in mind of the space slugs that Khan shoves in Chekhov's ear while exhibiting some of his now infamous wrath. I'm not sure what sort of dare might get me to put something like that in my mouth, but as my legend precedes me, I don't think that I would turn down the chance to make a little money off the exchange.
Really? In a word: yes. In a few more words: I have, on more than one occasion, consumed a Big Mac in one bite. The pride that I might take away from this accomplishment is minimized by my age and the relative health consequences that could still appear years after my last performance. I didn't start off by shoving two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun into my face. I began with a simple cheeseburger. Using atomic theory that suggests that most matter are mostly empty space, I surmised that most fast food is made of air. Compression is key. Once all the meat, bread and condiments are condensed into a more compact form, the rest of the process is pretty simple. Ugly, but simple.
Which brings us back to the McRib. It is not, as the name suggests, a bone-related product. It is a ground pork patty. There is nothing on which to gnaw. I suspect that your average denture wearer, using extra-strength Poligrip, could chew their way through this bad boy. Not that they might want to, but the marketing genius that is McDonald's would certainly love every AARP member to line up at the counter for this limited-time offer. And every pre-schooler. And every mother of three. And anyone who has a neck. Just don't expect to get a toy with your Mcground pork Mcpatty.

How Is MLB like NPR?

I'm a fan of Keith Olbermann much in the same way that I'm a fan of Woody Allen. The younger, funny one was the best. Then came all the trouble. Some might argue that taking up with the adopted daughter of your wife is less objectionable than making contributions to political candidates. Neither did Keith, but he did have a clause about conflict of interest. Woody's interest was conflicted, but not contractual.
I used to love Olbermann's sports bluster. It was the perfect oversized rush of opinion that makes otherwise meaningless sporting events take on amusingly mythic proportions. There was always a certain amount of wink-and-grin in what he did that let us all know that it was a game, after all, and he was getting paid for talking about a game. All that bombast was really just stuff and nonsense, but we were all in on the joke.
When Keith landed on MSNBC, it seemed like an interesting stretch, but he made it work. Take it from a guy who spent four years referring to the leader of the free world as "Pinhead," I appreciated the fact that there was another cynic out there jabbing his finger in the collective chest of an administration. He rode that horse hard into the election of a new president. He was unafraid to shine a light on "the worst person in the world." Across the cable system, another jester suggested that maybe pointed vitriol of either stripe might be simply feeding the fire that is burning under our feet. The hypocrisy ball was lobbed back and forth, and then suddenly there was this: Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely without pay for making contributions to the campaigns of several Democratic candidates. The same ones he was reporting about on election night a week ago. It wasn't exactly a Rick Sanchez or Juan Williams moment, but that's the world we're living in now. Sportscasters "tell it like it is," even when they come off sounding a little partial to the hometown team. That's a sweet sound. Maybe Keith Olbermann just needs to get sent down to the minors. I wonder if MSNBC has a farm team.

What's That Sound?

I used to love getting new stereo equipment. I was all about upgrading: speakers, receiver, tape deck, turntable. When I had two speakers, I upgraded to four. When I had one tape deck, I upgraded to two. Keep in mind that this was a sound system that was responsible for filling my bedroom, not an entire house. Eventually I even ran speaker wire into my bathroom to make sure that I didn't miss a tweet or a woof. My favorite part about all this expansion of sound was hooking up the new components. Cables and parts spread out in front of me, I had to match inputs with outputs, test connections and make sure that my ever-expanding stereo could support the stress I was putting on it.
Later, when I moved into my dorm room, I packed and unpacked all those pieces and put them back together again in a space designed to accommodate two college freshman. When my roommate arrived, from Trumbull, Connecticut, there was simply no room for any stereo equipment he might have wished to unload into our shared lebensraum. My sound system was preeminent. There was no need to mess with perfection.
Not until I moved into my friend's house over the summer. He too had a monster set of speakers and even higher quality components. We spent the first two days mapping out where all the parts would be stacked and hung. Eventually, we assembled a six speaker wall of sound that, when the doors were left open, filled not just the house but the mountain valleys below. When we blew one of the speakers in the midst of a party, we celebrated the fact that it had stood up to most of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" before the cone of the woofer ripped in two. It gave its life for our guests' exquisite torment.
Over the years I have slowed down the process of upgrading the way that music comes into my life. I had to buy a compact disc player, but kept my turntable for years after to allow the vinyl that I dragged around in crates to be heard. Bits and pieces have been replaced. Now I have surround sound in my living room, which comes in very handy when thrashing my medium mad Guitar Hero skills. I even have the cassette deck, the one that created so many mix tape masterpieces back in college, sitting on a shelf awaiting the next opportunity to play ninety minutes of music with auto-reverse. Every so often I see black or chrome boxes in the local electronics store that make me think that it must be time to renegotiate the aural landscape of my life. Then I remember how the sound that comes out of those little speakers attached to my computer is every bit as triumphant as the thunder I once made with big wooden boxes eight times the size. I know that this is my son's time. He's attaching ever-increasing speaker sizes to his iPod. He wants to make a bigger noise. And I know now that it has become my job to yell, "Turn it down!"