A LITTLE HASTY, A LITTLE BETTER

DANCES WITH GATORS

Orson and Stranko over at EDSBS dropped a nice little e-mail on me a couple days ago, wanting my thoughts heading into the The Only Good Thing About Outback Steakhouse Is The Bread, And Even That Isn’t Very Good Bowl, thoughts which I was more than happy to provide in exchange for their answers to my own vaguely-insulting questions about what’s on their minds heading into this game.

For some reason, they wrote back.

INSANE REGIONAL BIGOTRY ROUND

1. Give me your favorite anecdote involving a palmetto bug, a nutria, a real-estate developer, or some other revolting Floridian creature.

Your regional boogeymen are slightly dated, though the Palmetto bug never really goes out of style. They’re roughly the same size as dogs, can fly, and occasionally hold minor offices like alderman, fire commissioner, or governor.

A truly revolting creature in the Florida wilderness is the armadillo, which in addition to being eminently kickable–it was a high school hobby to get loaded and go “dilla-kickin’”–is also the second most common casualty on the roads due to their startlingly low IQ and fondness for the taste of car bumpers. Some roads in Pinellas County seem to be paved with their carcasses, and they pop like bloody eggs when hit. The first most common casualty on Florida roads would be human pedestrians of course, eaten by Lincoln Town Cars legally piloted by retirees who can’t open cans of beans without assistance.

Our favorite revolting Florida creature was our high school resource officer, who used to go to bars with the teachers, get so drunk he couldn’t stand, and then have a slightly less drunk teacher drive him home in the cruiser while he slept in the back. Wildlife comes in a million varieties in the Sunshine State–which means everything you read in a Carl Hiaasen novel is true.

2. Help us Hawkeye fans with proper Southern etiquette: How much should we tip our carjackers?

10-15%, of course. Standard service gratuity, unless they shoot you, which is considered poor form outside of the Miami metropolitan area.

3. Rank these Florida cities in terms of how Northern they actually are: Jacksonville, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Pensacola, Orlando.

The most northern (we should say northeastern) is Tampa, which has long since been overrun by waves of New Yorkers and New Jersey expats.. You’ll get great bagel and schmear, Yankees spring training games sold out to the gills, and a strong New York accent to most public events. (Inevitable chants of an athlete’s name done to the rhythm DUH-duh DUH-duh, clap-clap, clap-clap-clap.)

O-Town is second; Orlando’s the Iowan emigre’s choice, as it is the flattest, least interesting part of the state, and therefore ideal for the restless Midwesterner. Boy bands, lousy traffic…one big Disneyfied Indianapolis at 28.5 degrees north latitude.

Fort Lauderdale is third, but just barely. A strong Broward county redneck contingent balances the northeastern influence.

Jacksonville takes fourth, but only because Pensacola is really part of Lower Alabama. They’ve both got impeccable ‘neck pedigrees–Jax actually is the hometown of Lynyrd Skynyrd, which is all we really need to say here.

ACTUAL FOOTBALL CONTENT

4. How many times this year did you find yourself missing Ingle Martin?

Never–transfers die the instant they step off campus. It’s like being banished in the movie “Judge Dredd;” once they leave, they’re gone forever, destined to fight for their lives with the mutant bandits of the nuclear wastelands.

As for the evolution of the spread, it was agony to watch the coaches pound at the square peg for much of the season. Sanity set in sometime around the Georgia game, but not before we were given the treat of watching Chris Leak running the option like “someone wearing high heels,” as Mark May said. May, as he usually is, was wrong here, too–he neglected to mention the fabulous Bob Mackie gown Leak was wearing at the time.

Whatever the spread option is, we won’t see it until a new qb gets broken in–we’ll run a Northwestern knock-off until then.

5. Apart from beating Mississippi State, what has been the biggest change in Florida football under Urban Meyer?

Honesty. Toughness. Everything was “getting better and better” under Zook, all bluster and no ferocity. For Zook, the fourth quarter was when you won the game. Meyer’s only real M.O. seems to be destroying other teams so badly that when the fourth rolls around, they don’t even want to be there. We went unde! feated at home, which did wonders for the program’s recruiting, and there’s a resurgence of interesting characters in the program. During the Zook era, there was no attempt to say, “This is what a Florida player should be.” Meyer’s first move was to find those players and hold them up as the prototypes, players like five-foot-nuthin’ Vernell Brown and center Mike “Ogre” Degory–tough, disciplined players with exemplary personal stories and charisma. And the team seems to have slowly dropped into that mold over the season, with the FSU game coming as the pinnacle.

6. Is Meyer doomed if he loses to Spurrier again next year? I don’t mean “will he get fired?” because I doubt Foley is going to pull the trigger twice on winning coaches, but would he ever be able to recover in the public mind from dropping two straight to TOBC?

Sure, because he’s beaten everyone else. We saw him do it in glorious fashion for over a decade. It’s more important for Meyer to beat FSU, Georgia, and Tennessee than the OBC. Most Gator fans are still torn over playing Spurrier anyway, and who couldn’t use a new rival or two? Few conferences have as much tussle and intrigue as the SEC East, and the OBC just adds to the gumbo.

Foley’s also learned his lesson on pulling coaches too early. We’re now of the mind that Meyer gets four years, barring absolute collapse in year two and three.

7. Give us your honest thoughts on Bobby Bowden.

He’s a sanctimonious fake whose nepotism will bury him. Country-fried Tressel. Was a great coach at one point who now just kisses babies and occasionally puts on a headset. Sets a deplorable example by refusing to discipline players who commit actual crimes under his watch. No one really mentions him in the same breath with Joe Pa, and there’s a good reason: integrity. Next.

8. If Vandy was in the Big Ten, would they be a perennial bowl team?

They’re basically Northwestern, so yes, but not because the SEC izz tha RuLaH!!! like many message board types would say. There’s just greater parity across the system in the Big Ten for some reason, while the SEC has a near-permanent underclass of teams. Kind of like the Southeastern United States, actually.

You should definitely go read their site if you don’t already, but who am I trying to kid? If you read this site, you read theirs too. In fact, if you read this site, you will apparently read anything written about college football . . .

A LITTLE HASTY

Alyson Beth Hasty
6 lbs 2 oz
7:56 pm Mon Dec 26, 2005

There’s a longer story here, and I’ll tell it soon enough.

FLAVORFUL WRITING

It’s been a while since I posted a plain old link, but here’s one to a story about Bill Penzey, founder of Penzeys Spices. I always like to see the Penzeys catalog in the mailbox, even though there’s usually only one or two new products in it. It’s beautifully photographed.

I like the spices from Penzeys. Especially the Adobo Seasoning and the Old English Prime Rib Rub, the former of which finds its way into almost everything I cook and the latter of which has amplified my enjoyment of roast beef about 300%.

BREAD AND CIRCUS

I made bread today.

Stunning news, right? “Local fat man enters kitchen, but first, some breaking news: Sun disappears behind western horizon; experts expect it to reappear in the east in approximately fourteen hours.”

Can I help it that I just can’t stomach that putrid supermarket bread/big bag of slightly crumbly air anymore? Especially at $3 a loaf?

This was my third attempt at baking bread in the past year or so. The first, right after Serena was born, yielded two big, succulent loaves of whole-wheat bread which was delicious, but completely unsliceable. The second was a cornmeal-bread recipe which might have been good, except it had cornmeal in it. If I wanted a mouthful of sand, I’d dig around under the big tree in the back yard. It took us three weeks to eat two loaves of the stuff.

Today was simple white bread. I needed exactly as much bread flour as I had left, which was the first and last optimistic sign. I finished kneading the dough and set it on the stove to rise at exactly the same moment Serena decided she needed to crawl on the kitchen floor. Which neither I nor her mother was willing to let her do, of course, since the floor had flour all over it.

So why not sweep and mop the floor right away, you ask? Because the bread still had to be shaped into loaves, a task which requires the application of yet more flour to the kitchen table and thus the application of yet more flour to the floor. Because no matter how careful you are, a flour particle weighs about as much as a hydrogen atom and has the same tendiencies towards ubiquity and chaos. Besides, Serena would have crawled on the floor for about ten seconds, then she would have been bored with the kitchen. So we opted to wait.

This is when the old, Adamic “forbidden fruit” tendency kicked in. Honestly, it amazes there are people out there who refuse to believe in original sin when the evidence in favor of its existence is so overwhelming.

So, for the next ninety minutes, we got to try to keep a cantankerous, curious fourteen-month-old with destructive tendencies out of a kitchen which represented, for her, the promised land, except Moses probably didn’t want to cross the Jordan as badly as Serena wanted to crawl amidst the flour puffs and dough bits on the kitchen floor.

Did I mention that my wife is due to give birth in the next seven days? Take it from me–don’t make bread in the same house as a pregnant woman who’s beyond the thirty-eighth week. In fact, don’t make noise in the same house as a pregnant woman who’s beyond the thirty-eighth week. Either way, it can only end badly.

The bread rose too much, because I couldn’t put it into the oven until the floor dried. It’s got a dense, doughy texture and a lightly sour flavor. In other words, it was worth it. Every last whine from the (currently) shortest person in the house, every rushed attempt to corral said short person, every moment of recrimination from a wife who certainly today wished that her husband had a more normal hobby.

That isn’t just my opinion. Serena couldn’t get the stuff into her mouth fast enough. I wonder if she, too, thought the bread worth the sacrifice.

Regardless, I think I’ll try making bread in the basement next time the urge strikes.

CTRL-ALT-DELETE

Stay tuned . . .

LISTEN, SNOW IS FALLING

It’s a snowy winter here in Wisconsin. I feel confident in saying that even though winter doesn’t even start for another week yet. It’s snowed about once every 48 hours for the last couple weeks. That can get disconcerting, especially when your lot in life is to be the designated Tender of the Driveway.

So tonight I waited for the city plows to come through. I live on a semi-thoroughfare (transportation geeks would probably classify it as a ‘collector street’), so we get plowed right in the middle of the snow removal. If you don’t get out quickly after the plows come through, the plowed-up snow congeals and freezes into something nearly as difficult to remove as a sitting appeals-court judge.

Tonight I got lucky and actually heard the plows coming down the street, so I rushed right out to shovel the end of the driveway while the snow was still soft. It wasn’t too bad. In about eight minutes, I had the driveway reopened.

I was just about to go inside when I glanced at the streetlight across the street and noticed the falling snow reflected in that circus-peanut-colored glow. The flakes were small, really more shards than flakes, but they were falling so gently, it seemed like they would stop in mid-air if somebody just said “Hold on a minute!”

Then a little tuft of wind swirled up from the ground and blew the snow back up into the air. You never really get to see the wind, but I saw it tonight, different currents going in different directions right next to one another.

I stood on the front porch for a good ten minutes, listening to . . . well, listening to nothing. Maybe the distant rumble of snowplows clearing parking lots, and snowblowers unclogging someone else’s driveway, but that was it. It’s never quiet where we live . . . but it is tonight.

A truck came down the street. Usually you can hear tire roar inside the house, but tonight, it’s like the truck was on tiptoe. The snow kept dancing in the light while all around me was the blissful sound of nothingness. If I had any cares before I went out to shovel, they’re long gone. Sometimes it’s nice to stand on your porch, alone with the city, watching little crystals of ice trying their hardest to resist the call of the earth.

TBP SALUTES NSU

Second in an irregular series

Today, since we are snowed in the house and stuck in the basement, we here at TBP turn our attention to another of America’s oft-overlooked institutions of higher learning. Travel with us now to the pleasant, pretty prairie town of Aberdeen, South Dakota, home of Northern State University. Founded in . . . OK, I can’t find out when it was founded. Either 1889 or 1901. Anyway, NSU is a smallish public university with an enrollment of approximately 3000 students. While its roots are in teacher training, NSU now offers degrees in 38 different fields.

We can personally vouch for Dr. LaFave, the dean of the School of Fine Arts, having taken a history of jazz course from him back in the day. Dude knows his stuff, and he knows how to teach.

The NSU Wolves compete at the NCAA Division II level as members of the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference.

NSU, we at TBP salute you!

OH, FORGET IT!

There’s nothing like trying to write something witty and insightful about twenty-eight different bowl games to make a person hate college football and everything and everybody associated with it. ‘Tain’t worth it. Life’s too short to spend a bunch of time worrying about the Pioneer PureVision Las Vegas Bowl.

I’ll pick the Big Ten games, eventually. Shoulda learned from the last time I tried to do this.

CLARIFICATION

Please note that in the post below, when I said installment #1 of the Bowl Blog Blowout was coming “Friday,” I didn’t necessarily mean last Friday. Though, at the rate I’m proceeding, I’ll be lucky if I ever finish it at all.

By the way, the new VW Passat commercial with the model rocket was one of the funniest things I’ve seen recently.