Are You Shitting Me???

I will not bore you with the physiology of running, but trust me when I say this: there is a definite benefit to getting glucose into your system at the end of an endurance run or marathon. And the simpler the sugar to break down the better. For example, some people buy fancy glucose goo , and others, like me, save money and buy gummy bears or any other gummy candy.

Like Jelly Beans.

Jelly Belly knows this and is now marketing Sports Beans, which its website says, is "a first-of-its-kind jelly bean formulated to energize the body during exercise, [and] is the newest way to keep competitive."

Click here for the link.

I don't think I could shit out more bullshit, even if I was the mascot for the Durham Bulls wearing a Michael Jordan jersey. Jelly Beans' benefit to running is they are mostly pure, simple sugar. That's it. End of story. There's no need to make a special formula for them.

This is as stupid as that performance water, Propel, from Gatorade. But I don't blame these companies for marketing this crap. The consumers only have themselves to blame for buying all these products. More power to Gatorade and Jelly Belly if they can make a profit.

My Impersonation of the Spurs

This weekend I went fishing, just like the Spurs are doing now that they are NBA champs. There's few things I love more than fishing in the summer, and watching the Spurs win a title is one of them. The Spurs' titles from 1999 and 2003 were sweet, but not as sweet as 2005's. This is partly because the Spurs had to face a tough opponent this time around and mostly because it was game seven.

Also, the 1999 and 2003 titles were very lonely experiences for me. I was stuck up here with a bunch a Timberwolves fans who were either apathetic or bitter about the Finals. I watched the games by myself.

Well, this year I learned that misery loves company. A friend from high school was in town for work and had to watch games 6 and 7 with me. Clearly we both wanted to be in south Texas to celebrate the title; we felt trapped in Minneapolis. But we made the best of it, and had our own victory parade through the heart of the Longfellow, Phillips, and Uptown neighborhoods of Minneapolis.

Emily took some pictures of our celebration and posted them on her blog. Once I learn how to use Flickr to post photos, I'll put some pictures of my own up on this site.

It has been an awesome week. I finally have been able to celebrate a Spurs title with a friend who loves the Spurs as much as I do. I have talked to several old friends from high school as a result. And even though life supposedly got back to normal after the playoffs ended, I still had an ultimate escape weekend and went fishing up north.

The weather was perfect yesterday. At the watering hole near the lakes were fishing on, I had beer, fries, and a cheeseburger for lunch and then again for dinner. In between burgers, I caught about 20 fish with a friend (most of which were bass and none of which were keepers--but a northern did snap my line). And we made like an Old Milwaukee commercial in the evening drinking beer and bullshtting over a bonfire.

Maybe reality will kick in tomorrow.

Life Is Beautiful

SPURS RULE!!!!!!!!

So much to say and no time to do so. I was up until 2:30 am last night and didn't fall asleep until 3 a.m. I was so amped. And I probably woke up ten times last night with one word ringing in my head,
"

SPUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURS

"

Eddie Rubber, Meet My Freind Johnny Road

Or, "Eddie Shit Just Hit Johnny Fan!!"

Or, game 7 is tonight.

No need for any platitudes so I'll make a few observations and move on.

1. This is the first time the Spurs have been in a game 7 since 1990 against the Portland Trail Blazes. Most Spurs fnas remember this game for the The Pass. No need to revisit that heartbreaking game again (Spurs lost a nail biter in overtime).

2. I am not feeling good about tonight's game. How can I? My team is the one who lost three of the last four. The one thing that gives me confidence is Manu has shown he is Mr. Clutch time and time again this year, dating back to the Olympics.

3. For the first time ever Tim Duncan is the so called "x-factor" instead of a known entity. He was awesome in 1999 and 2003. Not so much in 2005. Sure he has bad ankles and David Robinson is in row 7 of the crowd and not playing next to him. But that doesn't excuse the missed free-throws. Manu can keep the Spurs close on his own, but he'll need a solid performance from Duncan in every aspect of the game for the Spurs to win. If it wasn't for Robert Horry in game 5, I would have suggested all Spurs fans get a cute little goat costume for Halloween and tell people they were dressed as Tim Duncan.

But no matter what happens tonight,

SPURS RULE!!!

Rock and Roll Lifestyle?

Soul Asylum's bassist, Karl Mueller, died at age 41 this week of throat cancer.

When I was in high school I was enamored with the Twin Cities' music scene (so maybe it's no coincidence I live here now), and Soul Asylum was at the center of it. They also used to come to play at Grinnell once a year.

Soul Asylum was such a great band in the late 80s and early 90s. They struggled with their bout with fame but Hang Time, Made To Be Broken, and And The Horse They Rode In On were required listening for me on a daily to weekly basis back in college in high school.

Anytime you hear or read that a rock and roller dies young, you figure he was living a crazy Chris Farley life of self-destruction. While throat cancer is usually tied to the self-destructive habit of smoking, what struck me in reading about Mueller's life is how he was pretty much just an average guy.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Another longtime friend and local music maven, LeeAnn Weimar, said: "Karl was an intelligent guy and had a dry, sarcastic, sardonic wit. And he was a damn good cook. He and [his wife] Mary Beth liked to entertain. He was a really good friend."...

...Said Minneapolis singer-songwriter Paul Metsa: "Karl was blue-collar and a barroom buddy in the best sense of the word. He had a tremendous work ethic. I will never forget seeing him on a Friday night on David Letterman and the following Monday working the kitchen at the Loon Bar and Café downtown."

As for Mueller's bass playing, Metsa called it "both deceptively effortless and incredibly powerful."

Said Hart(Grant Hart of Husker Du fame): "It was never a flashy thing, but that was the core of his humility."

Pat Montague, owner of J.D. Hoyt's restaurant and bar, where Mueller's wife used to work, knew him "as a guy who did crossword puzzles at the bar every day. You'd never know he was in the music business. He was a down-to-Earth guy."

Mueller could often be seen walking his two Scottie dogs -- one black, one white -- around his south Minneapolis neighborhood. But he was famous for what he did with Soul Asylum for more than two decades.

Click here for the whole story.

94! 94! 94!

One final post from Emily's ten year reunion. Technically, it was my 11 year reunion, but I was the only representative of 1994 present. Am I the only guy who robbed the Class of 1995 cradle? I must be.

One part of reunion weekend at Grinnell is when they take your class photo. Seeing as how this was the class of 1995's reunion, I didn't have to worry about the photo this time around. But as Emily and I were leaving one party to go to another, we stopped to take the....

THE CLASS OF 1994 GROUP PHOTO

If the picture above could have a dialogue bubble above my head it would say, "The class of '94 will fuck your shit up you class of 93 and 95 sons of bitches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yeah and to all the other classes before and after, eat it you beeeeeeeeaaaatches!! 94 is in the muthafuckinhouseyall!!!!!! 94! 94! 94!"

Bad Influence

Since Emily and I have been married, there has been a disturbance in the force. Not my force, but hers. Specifically, when she goes on trips with or without me she sometimes packs the day she leaves (sometimes even hours before). I have been doing this since I first packed to go to summer camp at age eight. But Emily used to pack like seven months in advance.

But episodes like last-minute packing did little to prepare me for...

THE ROLL OF TOILET PAPER THAT NEVER GOT SECURED IN ITS CUBBY


Behold the empty roll of toilet paper...



This seemingly obscure toilet paper tube is a historic artifact in that it never made it to the cubby of our bathroom. We ran out of toilet paper and I got some more and didn't bother putting it onto to the toilet paper holder. That just seems like too much damn work to me.

Every fifth toilet paper roll or so, I'll notice that Emily has decided she's not going to do it either, and I'll end of doing it myself. But this last time I decided what would happen if I let it go. Would she eventually cave and put the damn roll on its holder herself? She didn't blink either and the result is Emily is the first wife in the history of time, and I am the 3248842309th husband in the history of time to use a roll of toilet paper until its bitter end without ever putting it in its holder.

It's scary how much I'm influencing her, and in all the wrong ways. I am known for my lack of powers of observation. But last night we went out and I showed her the hat I was wearing and she said "cool." The I went and switched hats 30 seconds later. She didn't notice until four hours later. Pretty soon she'll be getting mad at Spurs games and letting the dog lick her face.

Ford vs. Chevy

Matt's vs. 5-8.

One of the cool things about south Minneapolis is it is home of its own culinary phenom: the Jucy Lucy. A few neigborhood joints in St. Paul have gotten on the Jucy Lucy bandwagon, but the source of the Jucy Lucy is deeply rooted in south Minneapolis. Either the 5-8 Bar of Matt's first created the Jucy, depedning on whom you talk to. My gut tells me Matt's is the kind of place that would spawn a Jucy Lucy.

If you are unfamiliar with what a Jucy Lucy is, click here for a nice historical overview.

Emily and I have been to Matt's at least a dozen times. I love their fries and on occasion have had two Jucy Lucys in one sitting. We've also been to the 5-8 many times, but last night I had their Jucy Lucy for the first time.

It's a tough call deciding which is better, but Matt's is probably the winner based on overall dining experience. Both places have lousy service, but it's easier to forgive Matt's since they typically staff only one server and cook to run the whole place. I liked the 5-8 Jucy Lucy because it was a little bigger, so you got more hamburger flavor, but this wasn't enough to overcome the superior fries you can get at Matt's.

Then there is ambience. Now that Matt's is smoke free, you actually get the fun of being in a dive bar without all the smokey side effects. The 5-8 feels like you are in any other sports bar. Like a smaller Champps. But either way, you can't go wrong.

Now the question is, do I go check out the Jucy Lucy imitators? There's Adrian's (we used to live 50 feet from the place, literally), Williams (not likely, I think you have be under 23 to hang out there), and the Cardinal (the closest Jucy Lucy to where we live now). Or do I leave it to this guy?

My arteries and heart would probably prefer the latter.

Blog to the Rock

Last weekend Emily and I went back to Grinnell for Emily's ten year reunion.

On Saturday night we went to a party at the Harris Center and it felt like we were back in 1993. As we were leaving a few members of the current cross country team were breezing through. One of the guys recognized me. We shot the shit for awhile and I was able to talk one of the guys into going for a run with me the next morning.

This was a very good way for me to feel old in a hurry. As we were running and I was struggling like hell to keep up, he said it was "kick ass" to see a guy my age still running, which I guess was supposed to be a compliment. Then he asked me what it was like in Grinnell 20 years ago.

"I don't know. I was 13 and lived in Texas," I said.

That ended that conversation.

At some point during our run he told me to check out The $lum. The $lum has been an off-campus house that members of the cross country team have lived in for the past 20 years. And to be honest, the place is a shit hole and the $108 monthly rent we paid (per person) back in 1994 was a rip-off. Anyway, he said to check it out because "it's been all fixed up."

Emily and I did check it out and it looked exactly the same. Debris from a party nights before. Drywall dust mingling with sofa lint. Empties of Busch Light strewn with empty Gatorade bottles. Bikes on the lawn. Shitty DVD boxes (well back then we had VHS), enjoyed all in the name if irony, sitting on the Goodwill sofas. And a few skinny runners slowly getting their synapses up to speed, after handicapping them by partying well past a 33 year-old has-been husband's bedtime. I guess The $lum never changes. Even the Talk to the Rock picture was still on the wall (unfortunately, that is indeed me in the picture below).





Click here for a larger picture.

This is the original document, from which about 474784389 copies were made and pasted to every available window, bulletin board, phone poll, tree, outhouse, henhouse... on the Grinnell campus.

It all started one day when I mailed a week-old tray of nachos to my friend via intracampus mail.

These nachos were controversial as another housemate had made them for all of us during the World Series. But none of us ate them. In his mind since he cooked the nachos, he didn't have to clean them up. In our collective mind we figured, "we didn't eat your shitty nachos or even ask that you make them, so you clean them up, Mr. Nacho Chef."

In an Olympic passive-aggressive battle of four wills against one, those nachos sat there gathering $lum bacteria and dust for a week, until I grabbed them and stuffed them in an envelope meant for mailing newspapers. My grandma had just mailed me a months' worth of sports pages so I could keep up with the south Texas sports scene, especially the San Antonio Spurs. So I emptied out the sports pages and put the bacteria culture of nachos in the envelope.

I was about to take passive-aggressiveness to a Hall of Fame level and mail the nachos to Mr. Nacho Chef when the Nacho Chef himself came walking up the steps, back from a class.

"What are you doing?" asked Emeril of the Nacho Kingdom.

"Ummm mailing these nachos to...." and then I rattled off the name of another housemate, who I had absolutely no beef with whatsoever, although I found his obsession with Rush to be quaint.

In retrospect, direct confrontation would have been the best way to solve Nachogate. But I didn't have retrospection back then. Hell I didn't even have introspection. All I had was a fear of confrontation that was only matched by my alpha male stubborness.

This is a bad combination, because then you end up in situations like this one: you're mailing Rubella Nachos to Grinnell's biggest Rush fan. Nevermind that Rush Fan is not only your ally in Nachogate, but one of your closest friends.

But the prank was too good to pass up. So I ended up mailing the nachos to Rush Fan knowing he would have a sense of humor about it (although I knew he'd get me back somehow).

The whole mail room stunk the next day because of my prank. I can see very clearly why college kids are sometimes despised by the rest of the public. I am very sorry to the mailroom man and the HazMat team who had to deal with the Bird Flu Nachos and the stench they rode in on. For those of you who regularly read Emily's blog, you now can get a whiff of why she thought I was obnoxious when we were in college.

So it was nasty and gross and the guy who worked the mailroom knew he'd never catch the perpatrator. So to vent he gave Rush Fan a good talking to. Revenge did come to me. In the form of Talk to the Rock. Rush Fan grabbed the most white trash looking picture of mine he could find (there were a lot to choose from) and made the poster you saw above.

So one fall morning as I was walking to class I was very shocked to pass 28434 pictures of me and that I was running a group therapy session three nights a week.

Professors would make jokes about it in class. One history professor suggested all questions during his lecture be directed to me, or the "talk the rock guy in the back row" as he called me. Funny stuff.

Some people were put off, thinking it was serious, wondering where I got off trying to solve the campus' problems with masturbation, sexuality, stress, and alchohol in no particular order.

Emily thinks I should mail an 8X10 frame to the $lum so they can preserve the historic document behind glass.

Well I guess the moral of the story is: don't mail rotting nachos to your friends as a prank, especially when your friends are funnier and smarter than you. Or maybe the moral has something to do with directly facing conflict and striving for compromise (can the Minnesota and national legislators learn from this?). Nah, fuck that deep shit. The moral is that it's not cool to mail Staff Infection Nachos and SPURS RULE.

Spurs Rule

From the way Hubie Brown was calling game 1 tonight you'd think:

a) The Pistons were up by 30 at halftime

and

b) The Pistons were the only team on the court.

But then Manu went to work and suddenly the Spurs did indeed exist.

Game 2 will be much more intense and stressful. If Rasheed Wallace is a bigger factor, or any factor at all in game 2, the Spurs will have their hands full.

Damn. I was disappointed the Heat lost. I wanted Shaq the Villian in the Finals. But this is just as stressful to watch. So intense. So physical.

GO SPURS GO!!!

The People Have, I Mean, A Person Has Spoken, er Typed

An e-mail from a crazed Spurs fan in south Texas:

You better get on the stick with your blog, Bub. I finally found it and you refuse to update it. Come on, they won the Western Conference Finals, doesn’t that deserve some kind of entry? The coverage here has been great. Academy Sports ran out of their Spurs paraphernalia the first day (they sold a million dollars in Spurs gear). The caps look pretty nice. People have gone Spurs nuts, but as usual, they express this as emphatic waving, smiling and cheering. Got to love San Antonio.

Spurs fans are as great and compassionate as any group of fans I know, although I may be slightly biased.

And I do have a lame excuse for not blogging, even as the Spurs blazed past Phoenix. The computer was in a bag for over a week as I sanded off all the joint compound in the office. There is still a lot of work to be done in this room (Bob Vila I ain't), but at least there is a place to hook-up our laptop again. And then I was in Chicago and was at Grinnell's Ten Year Reunion weekend for Emily's class (she graduated in 1995, so it was technically my 11 year reunion, although I was the sole visitor from 1994).

I have a few things worth posting from the reunion weekend, as does Emily, I'm sure. Eventually I'll get around to that.

But that is neither here nor there. The point of this post is to say I hope to start posting with some regularity and

SPURS RULE!!!!!

Where's Shaq? Where's Kobe? Bring on the Pistons!!!!!!

This should be a great Finals. I don't know if I can take the stress. When the Spurs were in the 1999 and 2003 Finals it was foregone conclusion they'd beat the inferior Eastern Conference opponent. Not so this time. Detroit is tough, battle-tested, and there defense is a good as any north of the Alamo.

Ironically, the Pistons/Spurs series will feature two of the greatest defensive teams in recent memory. The irony being they both share nicknames of things that make things go.

To hell with irony. To hell with the Pistons.

GO SPURS GO!!!!!