Mucous Cream Puff

That would be my sinus cavities right now. Speaking of cavities, yesterday all along the roots of my upper jaw, my teeth were killing me. I of course began imagining the worst. What cruel irnoy. I just went to the dentist last week and got a clean bill of dental health AND I had just re-committed to flossing. But seeing as how I have received nothing but chocolate and fudge from kids at work, I assumed that all the pain I was feeling meant my teeth needed about twenty fillings. See if I ever floss again. What good does it do?

But it turns out I already had too much filling, of the mucosal variety. Thank God it was Sunday so I couldn't call my dentist, because I would have around noon. But by dinner it hit me that I had about three atmospheres of pressure sitting in my sinuses, and that's what was causing all the pain. I took a decongestant and all the pain was gone. This is bittersweet, as it looks like I'll have to keep flossing, as it may do some good afterall.

I relayed this story to a couple of people at work today (needless to say, it was a slow day). Both of them said they had the same problem in the past and actually went to their dentist. Well, $100 later the dentist ending up saying "Your teeth are fine. Blow your nose more and go buy a decongestant. You can pay the receptionist on the way out."

It reminds of a time when I was in grad school and living in fear for my teeth, since annual check-ups and cleanings were luxuries I didn't feel I could afford. But then my teeth were feeling more and more pain with each passing month, or so I imagined. So I forced myself to go the University of Minnesota Dental Clinic, a place I imagined full of whiskey bottles, leeches, and crude pliers. Well, it wasn't as bad as I'd thought, but it wasn't so great either. But it turns out all I had to do was switch toothpastes and the pain subsided.

Given that episode and yesterday's false alarm, I fear my brain will believe my teeth now cry "WOLF!" at the first hint of dental pain. I hope not. Because maybe next time my brain will tell my teeth to quit being such babies next time they feel pain, only to find out, three root canals later, that my teeth were actually right all along, and not just crying "WOLF!" for the hell of it.

Crumpled Dollar Bill In My Back Pocket Reminds Me I Had Twenty

That is an opening line to a Jayhawks song, and it sums up how I feel right now. I don't know how my mom and dad were able to give us a full Christmas tree year after year, because I know we had some pretty lean times growing up.

But last night a guy came to our house collecting money for Sister's Camelot, a charity that helps feeds the homeless and those who can't afford food. And this is a charity that screams my name. All the food they cook and serve to people is from local, organic, CSA (community supported agriculture) farms.

As I mentioned below it was so very cold last night, and this guy was going door-to-door. I gave him the money I had in my wallet (which is never very much). He said they were having a hard time raising money this year, which is hard to believe because how can you not give a donation to a guy freezing his ass off going door to door.

And now I am helping get the word out about this group. Emily said they were the charity of the month at St. Martin's Table. So those of you in the Twin Cities who are looking for a good group to volunteer with or support in any other way may want to ttake a look at Sister's Camelot by clicking here. There are so many charities and people who need help and we all only have so much energy, time, and money it can be overwhelming. But I figured there are still some people like me who could still do a lot more to help the community than giving five bucks here and there to charities and writing occasional letters-to-the-editor that never get published.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

A lot of random Christmas Eve thoughts. I have one of my few days off from work today.

Here's a shocker. I have some last minute Christmas shopping to do. Poncho and I are going to a few stores.

After shopping, I'm planting my ass on the couch to watch the Vikings/Packers game. Emily even bought beer, diet Lemondae, and salty snacks for the game. I think even she knows this is a bigger than usual border battle. Normally I would watch this game guilt-free but I am actively trying to phase pro and college sports out of my life. I am trying to enforce a rule that I will watch football when it's a social event and the Spurs whenever I get a chance. Maybe that will start in 2005.

It's cold. So very cold. I have a hard time letting go of the fact that there are so many homeless people in the Twin Cities freezing right now. It makes me so very grateful to have a warm home, but I have yet to spring to action to help these other people, other than a donation here and there. Maybe that too can change in 2005.

And I was at my friend's last night watching the Spurs destroy the Timberwolves. He has Tevo so we watched the game after it started and skipped all the commercials and halftime. We were done watching in under 100 minutes. It was pretty awesome.

If we had Tevo, then I could justify watching sports because the time-commitment would be halved. BUT, if I just stop watching sports, then the time commitment would be eliminated.

Merry Christmas to Emily, my mom, my dad, sisters, their husbands, and my friends.

Rock Chalk Pioneers!

Crazed basketball fanatcis at my alma mater, Grinnell College, have between now and February to come up with a catchy cheer to chant because Pioneer basketball is going big time, baby!

On February 3, 2005, when ESPN2 will televise, yes nationally televise, a regular-season, Midwest Conference match-up between your Grinnell College Pioneers and the Beloit College Buccaneers.

Click here for the full story.

As I suggested in the title above, we could borrow the University of Kansas' cheer ("Rock Chalk Jayhawk!") Or maybe we should give props to Grinnell's Iowa roots and change the cheer to "Soil Corn Pioneers!"

Okay so neither rolls off the tongue as easily "Rock Chalk Jayhawk."

Maybe our cheer could be "Our mascot makes sense!" as the Beloit Buccaneers hail from land-locked Beloit, Wisconsin.

Anyway, the game is significant for two reasons. First, I don't know of the last time a regular-season division III game was nationally televised. Secondly, Grinnell will be playing in its new gym (still named Darby Gym) for the first time ever.

First Beloit, then bring on the Tar Heels! We could still use the "Our mascot makes sense" cheer against those guys. Hell, bring on the Illini! I don't care if that mascot has a context, we're ready for the big time so we're ready for them.

"Soil Corn Pioneers!!!"

No word yet if ESPN2, hell ESPN8 for that matter, plans to televise the Grinnell College home track meet this April, but I don't see why they wouldn't want to! Midwest Conference Fever... Catch It!!!

Exploit... I mean Use... I mean SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!

If the Bush adminsitration can win an election with nothing but lip service to the troops, why can't a sagging country singer do the same and revitalize her career?

According to The Tennesean either country singer Chely Wright or her fan club relied on an organized effort, built on lies, to boost her song towards the top of the country charts. Specifically, people called in to radio stations and lied about having relatives in Iraq and requested her song be played on the radio. Her song, as you can infer, defends a US Marine sticker on her SUV. The name of the song? The Bumper of My SUV.

Click here to read the article.

So the troops-loving Ms. Wright completely uses the troops and the war to boost her career. And her song takes pride in the fact that she drives a vehicle that makes us even more dependent on oil from the Middle East. I can't think of anything less patriotic.

It's evil genius that's diving the GOP machine right now. Problem is, it's evil genius in a 1984 kind of way, rather than an Austin Powers variety.

Click here to read the Daily Kos summary.

As a footnote, you should read the lyrics at the end of the story. She chastises a "minivan driver" for giving her the middle-finger for having a US Marine sticker on, you guessed it, the bumper of her SUV. Fair enough. But after ripping the minivan driver a new one for being so judgmental, she then mocks the middle-fingered assailant and assumes she's drving the minivan to pick up kids up at a private school (code for liberal elite). Ummm, what happened to not prejudging people?

Hypocrite, in so many ways.

i am a prowd produkt of texas public educashun

People often wonder how I ever managed to even make it out of third grade.

Click here to see how I pulled it off.

This is reason #26098 No Child Left Behind is a bad idea.

Back to the Future

As I type this, Emily is burning the midnight, I mean noon oil at school. She is finishing up the final portion of her prelims for her doctorate program. She has to design an original study and write a pseudo-grant for it.

So, to support her, I have been doing some epidemiological thinking of my own. As you will (hopefully) read, I came up with a pretty good idea. Even if it's too late for her to use this idea for her prelims, she can always use it for her dissertation.

According to Emily I talked briefly about Segway scooters in my sleep last night. While I don't recall this, I am not surprised that my comments weren't flattering towards Segways. People are already sitting on their asses too much in this country as it is. And the logistical nightmares of a bunch of yahoos trolling around the streets of downtown Minneapolis on Segways would be enough to make me move to a spider hole, or at least I wouldn't work downtown. Some kids at work have those shoes with built-in wheels and those are already annoying enough.

And this brings me to a study design Emily may want to consider for her dissertation:

Why wasn't George Jetson fat? If you ever saw the The Jetsons, I'm sure you remember that:

1. George sat in a chair that moved around the office so he didn't have to walk.
2. Rather than e-mail, George communicated with his co-workers from his desk through telescreens, which requires even LESS effort than typing out a message.
3. People's houses and businesses had people-moving conveyor belts (like at the airport), eliminating the need to walk.
4. Rosie the robot maid did every damn thing that required any physical effort. And yet Rosie was the most portly charachter on the show.

The Jetsons and their peers should have weighed 250 pounds or more, given how little calories they had to burn a day.

Cartoons from the 60s are always thought of as quaint and charming and The Jetsons is no different. It never crossed the minds of the folks at Hanna-Barbera in the early 1960s that obesity and active lifestyles would be an issue.

Or maybe they were visionaries and they constructed The Jetsons' world with subtle features and built-ins that kept people fit and active, despite the fact that they could get all their daily needs met without getting out of their chairs.

The prudent epidemiologist should buy The Jetsons DVD and view each episode closely and look for clues as to how we should design our world so we stay as trim as George Jetson in the future.

And the careful viewer will note there are no Segways in the show.

I think that would make a hell of a dissertation.

Movie Coffee

To me, coffee is not a fine beverage, the way wine, beer, or a milkshake is. So it's not at the top of its beverage class, but it's good enough and I really enjoy drinking it. Emily has reintroduced me green tea and I have been drinking that at least four times a week in place of coffee. But I still have yet to pass up an opportunity to drink coffee when it's in front of me.

There are movies like that for me as well. They're good enough but not always top of their class. But no matter what, if I stumble across that movie on late night TV or pop it in the DVD player I will watch the movie until the end. It doesn't matter at which point I begin watching the movie; there is always a greater than 90% chance I will watch the movie until the credits roll.

I have been mentally making a list and this is what I have so far (in order that I can remember them):

1. The Fugitive
2. Shawshank Redemption
3. North By Northwest (a top-of-the-class movie)
4. Casablanca (same as above)
5. Raising Arizona
5. The Usual Suspects
6. Fletch

I'm sure I'll think of more. If I do, I'll add them to the list.

Pop II

I do have a newfound appreciation for a different kind of pop. Pop music.

As I posted a few days ago I thought the Modest Mouse CD was kind of fun to listen to. For Emily's birthday I bought me, I mean her, the most recent Beastie Boys and Guster CDs.

The Beastie Boys will always have a special place in any 30something's heart. I haven't heard the whole CD yet, but so far it sounds like their standard output, which is always a good thing. I read a preview for the Beastie Boys concert in the Twin Cities a few years back. I believe I was reading the City Pages. The Beastie Boys were touring with Tribe Called Quest. The preview said something to the effect that those two bands represent what mainstream rap music would be like if it hadn't been overtaken by police helicopters and womanizing. I don't know enough about rap to know if this is true or not, but it sounds plausible to me.

The reason I haven't heard much of the Beastie Boys CD is because I've been busy listening to the Guster CD. It reminds me a lot of another Boston trio, called Buffalo Tom, which is still rocking along and going strong. Guster is a lot more mellow and the law of diminishing returns isn't as dramatic for me when I listen to Guster. I go from really liking Buffalo Tom (and wondering why I don't play their CDs more) from being sick of them in about five songs. But I could listen to Guster all day.

I have been in a music-listening rut lately. I unconciously found myself listening to Texas musicians only for the past 12 months. Now I'm on this pop music kick. It's kind of refreshing, in ways that soda pop are not.

Pop

As a kid, soda pop our house was the nectar of the gods and more precious than oil. Water and milk were our only choices. It was a magical beverage. Not anymore.

My dentist has a 20 ounce bottle of pop at the receptionist's desk. And instead of pop, it is 20% full of sugar. It turns out that is how much sugar is in a 20 oz Coke. Yuck.

So I just went to the dentist earlier this week, (one night after having two glasses of Coke at a restaurant) and needed a refresher of how nasty that stuff is. The dental hygienist continues to beg me to floss everyday instead of when I remember or feel I have the time. But that lesson is lost on me, even if I appreciate the logic and importance of flossing. However, each time I go to my dentist that pop bottle and all its sugar is etched in my mind for a solid four months and pop loses all its appeal.

Now if they could only do the same visual for the sugar in mini Reese's peanut butter cups. Or if they showed me all the disgusting bacteria in my unflossed gums vs. flossed, then I would probably floss eight times a day.

But you know what? Writing that last sentence was gross enough. I think I've just gone from being a semi-regular flosser to a full-time flosser. I wonder how well that job pays.

Oh well. Must go floss. Be back in a few minutes.

Need a little more motivation to quit drinking pop?

Click here, here, or here.


Of course, there's at least two sides of every story. According to the Coca-Cola website, soft drinks are a "wholesome beverage" and

The amount of sugar in soft drinks is similar to the amount in fruit jucies and fruit flavored drinks. Individuals as a rule can use this sugar as source of carbohydrates that produce energy.

Click here for the link.

So all that sugar is good for you; it gives you energy! Creepy. It is eerily familiar to the propoganda spit out by the tobacco lobby and cigarette companies over the past 50 years.

Jackassalope Reviews in 3-2-1

Allow me to briefly review three CDs, two movies, and one book.

3 CDs

Emily bought the new U2 and Modest Mouse CDs. I really like the two Modest Mouse songs they play on the radio. The album is a bit more ecclectic and bitchy than their two singles. Modest Mouse to me is like a mix between Everclear and The Cure. Like Everclear, many of their songs piss and moan quite a bit about, well, nothing besides that it sucks to be a grown-up with a little baggage. And I don't think this is a bad thing. It's something we can all idetify with. And I imagine Modest Mouse is what of The Cure would sound like if The Cure didn't take itself so damn seriously. And again, this is no knock on either band. The Cure has a very special place in my heart. I think they're a great band. But it probably wouldn't kill them to loosen up a bit.

U2's How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is a solid very buyable album. It feels more sterile than their last album, but you have to give them credit for staying relevant through three decades. I have written before that REM is the band I hold closest to my heart, but U2 is a pretty ubiquitous part of anyone from my generation, whose pop culture awareness began about 25 years ago. Pretty amazing.

But the best album I have bought lately is Steve Earle's The Revolution Starts Now. It is already a dated album in some regards since he wrote it with 2004 Election consuming his frontal lobes. So it may be depressing to some to see such energy gone to waste. But I am inspired that there are musicians and writers out there who can express some of my views more succinctly and with more eloquence and melody than I can.

Two Movies

We rejoined Netflix, which is a good thing since our local $2 movie theater is now a $4 movie theater. This means that whatever movies I see will be very, very dated.

We watched Shrek 2 last night, which should, not very cleverly, be called Shit 2. It reminded me of Back to the Future 2 quite a bit. A lot of clever one-liners and gimmicks, but absolutely no attention to storyline. I was hoping Shrek would lose his moral compass and would chase after fame, fortune, and looks. He'd lose his way until almost losing Fiona and his loyal donkey friend. This would be the epiphany he needs to re-discover that beauty is indeed skin deep. That would have made for a much more believable movie and it wouldn't hurt to give Shrek a little complexity. But instead we were subjected to Dreamworks patting itself on the back for how clever it could be for 100 minutes.

So instead of Shit 2, go rent Supersize Me. You'll be glad you did in a Fast Food Nation, I'm-Never-Going-to-McDonald's-Again sort of way.

And now for a book review. I just finished The Fourth Hand, by John Irving, so you don't have to start it. I had to remind myself easily 50 times that this was indeed a John Irving novel. How could this be the same guy who wrote Owen Meany, Garp and Hotel New Hampshire? He developed a storyline about a hand surgeon a good 60 pages and then he just dropped the guy altogether halfway through the book. It's like he forgot all about him. This book is remarkabke in that it is the biggest gap between an author I admire and a book that I disliked. And it is a tribute to John Irving that he wrote this thing well enough to keep me reading it to the end, when I didn't give a rat's ass about any of the charachters and nothing thought-provoking happened to any of them. The one charachter I did like was dead before the story even really got started.

So there.

Too Abstract To Fit

Okay, here I go with another story that revolves around me walking the dog.

The cold part of winter has finally arrived in Minnesota, but the snow hasn't. So I had to go through the closet to find a warmer jacket to wear when I took Poncho for his nightly jaunt past all the Christmas lights I want to see,

But the fact is, the weather right now feels more like an Iowa winter to me. There is even a form of precipitation that I call it "Iowa" (I used to call it "God Pissing"). Basically, "Iowa" is any mixture of snow, sleet, and rain with a lot of wind. It's this nebulous, gloomy form of precipitation that was a part of Iowa winter and spring and has been migrating north more and more with each winter I pass here in Minnesota.

So it was Iowaing again tonight. As I was fumbling through the closet I stumbled across my old Grinnell letter jacket, which I am pretty sure I have not worn since the last cold spring day of 1994. But I figured "What the hell, I might as well wear it. It is Iowaing outside, afterall.

I was surprised that I still had the jacket. I don't when I last thought its fate, much less if I should try it on. So I tried it on tonight, figuring it would bring back memories of college, since I wore it on every cold day in college (it was my only winter jacket). But whatever memories are attached to that jacket are as accessible as my college 5k and 8k times. They are simply to remote and abstract to even conceptualize.

The only thought I had was, "How the hell was this my winter coat for four years? It's too light!" So I thought I'd try it out for Poncho's walk and see if the jacket was now too cold for me, which would be a sign I'm getting soft in my old age. I wore this jacket at a time in my life when I believed scarves, gloves, and knit hats were pretentious accessories for blue-blooded pretty boys. I have since come to realize using these accessories make winter here almost pleasant.

But I'm shitting you negative, that jacket kept me adequately warm during tonight's walk. I forgot one thing about the jacket though. The sleeves have a vinyl shell and in really cold weather they stiffen up big time. This always makes feel like I'm a robot which makes me happy, even if it does feel like it's four degrees outside.

I'm finding it harder and harder to find things to spark my memory from things between two and fifteen years ago. The weird thing is I can stumble across all sorts of smells, sounds, and sights from my childhood in Texas and I involuntarily feel like suddenly I'm seven or 17 years-old. But I can't figure out why it's so hard to unearth being 27. Time just seems to be speeding up more and the last decade just seems to be blur while my first 18 years of life seem like a still-life.

Spurs Rule

I know I haven't been blogging much. I will try to get back in the swing of things.

The Spurs lost to Seattle last night. But the Sonics seem a lot like the Timberwolves from a few years back. They live and die by the jump shot and that makes for a pretty regular season, but they should fold early in the playoffs.

Anyway, there is a lot wrong with pro and college sports right now. The only reason I still follow the NBA is because the Spurs are easy to like.

Click here to see why Marty Burns agrees with me.