I stopped at three places on the way home this afternoon, looking for a pumpkin to put on the front steps in honor of Halloween. There must be a pumpkin shortage, for I could not find one. Of course I noticed some homes with 4-6 pumpkins on the front porches. I’ll try to remember to not procrastinate and be left pumpkinless next year.
Candy-wise, we delayed buying any until Monday. No sense having all that temptation in house. (I’d noticed Halloween displays in stores not too long after Independence Day.) But that didn’t work too well, as a large amount was consumed Monday night. So yesterday I picked up a carton of ice cream — something to keep us away from the candy.
I used to buy a ridiculous amount of candy; one year we gave out fifteen or twenty pounds of the stuff. We only have about six pounds this year. (Maybe five now, given all the Tootsie Rolls and Reeses peanut butter cups we ate on Monday.) I like giving away lots of candy. Kids love it. To me, Halloween is still about kids. Somewhere along the line (maybe ten years ago?) it started to become something for adults as well. Which is OK, although it’s more like just another marketing ploy to sell greeting cards and costumes, and to get people to go out and spend money on parties.
My favorite Halloween treat ever was received when I was six or seven. Dad walked us to a house in the neighborhood. (Mom always stayed home to hand out treats.) We made the long trek from the sidewalk to the front door. Someone knocked or rang the doorbell and we all shouted “Trick or treat!” when the door opened. The woman who answered the door gave each of us a little waxed paper bag. In each bag were two homemade chocolate chip cookies. Still warm! The grandest of treasures! Mom was a great cook, but she didn’t do desserts, so homemade cookies were heavenly.
Handing out homemade treats these days would likely get you a visit from the police, sad to say.
I read over the weekend that Rick Reilly’s annual salary at ESPN is rumored to be $2 million. That’s pretty wild. I wouldn’t have thought a sports writer could make that much.
I also read last weekend that Arthur Kornberg died. I didn’t know him, but as a science major in college I learned about the research he performed. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1959. He was a superstar in biochemistry, kind of like the Ted Williams of the lab.
After reading the Kornberg obituary I wondered how the Nobel Prize stacked up, money-wise, to what Reilly is reported to earn at ESPN. The 2007 Nobel Prizes were awarded a little while back and I went through the news stories in the New York Times to see what each winner got:
Economics - $1.56 million, split three ways
Peace - $1.5, split 2 ways
Literature - $1.6 million
Physics - $1.5 million, split two ways
Medicine - $1.54 million, split three ways
Chemistry - $1.5 million
Not bad, even when you have to share the money. Still, for a lifetime of work that benefits mankind in one way or another, it’s kind of slim.
And then there’s Alex Rodriguez, who is turning down approximately $25 million a year from the Yankees and entering the free agent market where it’s been speculated that he will get around $30 million annually. (The Cot’s site still has A-Rod listed with the Yankees; I expect he’ll be moved over to the free agent list soon.)
So for one year of playing baseball Alex Rodriguez will be worth about 20 Nobel Prizes. Or 15 Rick Reilly’s.
… Thanks for your concern about my safety. We are all fine as is all our stuff. I missed the DP show all week - the local sports station knocked it off the air for fire news so I couldn’t even get it on the car radio - but that was the sum total of my losses thankfully.
Glad to hear you survived the crisis with a minimum of inconvenience. We have some stuff in the basement (water, a battery-operated radio, flashlights, some candles and the like) but it’s not like we’re really prepared for an emergency. Evacuation would be interesting, given that we have several pets and one of the cats gets very frightened on the 15-minute drive to the vet.
We’ve made it through another severe weather season here, but a good-sized winter storm could always knock out the power. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check our emergency supplies and make some additions to the cache. I think there is some canned food down there, but don’t remember. I feel like the Mike Brown of emergency planners ….
I guess the most compelling thing about the World Series so far is that Red Sox rookie centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury stole a base last night. This means Taco Bell is going to give away a free crunchy seasoned beef taco to everyone who goes to a participating store between 2 and 5pm on 30 October 2007. (That’s next week Tuesday, for those of you scoring at home.)
I like Taco Bell, although I haven’t gone to one in a long time. I feel kind of guilty eating at Taco Bell. I like the food, but I know it’s bad for me. I used to go to McDonald’s a lot (I have the complete collection of plastic cups from their Jurassic Park promo and religiously played their Monopoly game a few years ago — the game that was ultimately found to have been fixed), but haven’t gone to one in years. Again, it’s the guilt thing. One taco or one bag of fries isn’t going to kill me, but I’m concerned that just one taste will give me a craving for the food and once I pass that tipping point it’ll be nothing but Nachos Bell Grandes and Super Sized Big Mac meals. And then heart disease:
Cross section of a coronary artery shows plaque buildup, possibly indicating coronary artery disease.
YUCK!
Coronary blockage denoted by red arrow.
I saw angiograms of my father’s heart before his bypass surgery.
I’m not sure if this is the exact item that Taco Bell will be giving away, but I assume it’s close: Calories in Crunchy Taco. 171 calories doesn’t seem bad, although 90 calories (52.9%) of it are from fat. And from one 78g taco, you get 8g of protein but 10g of fat. That certainly is not healthy.
I have enough bad habits as it is and don’t need to add Fast Food Junkie to the list. My main guilty pleasure food-wise is ice cream. And chocolate. Ice cream with chocolate is the best. (My all-time favorites: Breyers mint chocolate chip, Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, Starbuck’s Java Chip). I’ll allow myself this indulgence, but keep the reigns short when it comes to fast foods.
I hope my willpower will hold out next Tuesday when I drive by a Taco Bell between 2 and 5pm. Maybe if I start obsessing over the Mets again I’ll just forget about the promotion ….
this I understand. for the true lovers of the game, I do hope the zipless pleasure lasts seven games and long, long extra innings.
and here’s something for the seventh inning stretch. get up and dance, damn it!
Thanks for the supportive words and the Blast-from-the-Past video. (Stunning hair. Better than Manny’s.) Obviously the Rockies didn’t get the memo for game one. We’re hoping for a better game tonight.
Here’s a sexy video (visually nice, but a complete lack of narrative), although given the baseball theme of this post you would have expected the umpires to have called the game and the grounds crew to have rolled out the tarp.
I discovered this video on a WordPress blog a week or two ago; I neglected to bookmark the blog, so I can’t give it props for steering me towards interesting material. I googled around and found the Fat Rant blog and the video on YouTube. (I also found that I am out-of-the-loop: the video has been out for seven months and has been viewed over a million times.) It sends a great message.
I feel sorry for people who allow external elements to define “happiness” for them.
I hear people complain about Christmas — how commercialized it has become — and many will say “I hate Christmas.” Well, the holiday has become very commercialized, but I still love Christmas and I always will. I’m not letting ad agencies and department stores and the consumerist mindset determine what Christmas is for me.
Similarly, I’ve always been a bit befuddled over women and men who obsess over their appearance and feel bad or guilty about not meeting a specific notion of what “attractive” is supposed to mean. And our society puts more pressure on women to look a certain way, so it’s not surprising that a lot of women are self-conscious about their looks. I guess this comes from the days when a woman was looked upon as being an adornment to a man — the beautiful girlfriend, the lovely wife, an object of desire — and not seen as being a valid, productive, and intelligent individual in her own right.
As regards beauty, weight has become quite the issue.
I’m lucky. I’ve never obsessed over my appearance. I’m obsessive about a lot of things, but they way I look is not one of them. I was self-conscious when I was a teenager, but no more than the average kid. I’m not sure how I turned out the way I did. I suppose our parents raised us kids in such a way that we realized that there were more important things in life to worry about than the way we looked.
Of course, that was back in practically the pre-historic era — the 1960s and 1970s. The concept of fashion wasn’t like it is today. Back when I was a kid boys didn’t really care about clothing and hairstyle. If anything, young people back then tended to dress down as an anti-Establishment statement. It’s completely different now. I read an article a little while back (I can’t find the reference so you’re just going to have to believe me on this) about shopping for the new school year; a mother told the reporter that her 6-year-old daughter was “into fashion” so getting the right school clothes was very important. How can a 6-year-old be “into fashion?” I don’t remember a lot from when I was six (except for my first grade teacher admonishing me with “You never finish anything you start!”), but fashion was likely not even on my radar.
We got the classic “Clean your plate” mantra from the parents at dinner. They grew up during the Depression and it affected how they raised us. Wasting food — wasting anything — was and is a cardinal sin. Additionally, growing up poor made our parents determined to give us the things they never had. We had steak for dinner fairly often and there was always soda and ice cream in the house. Mom was a great cook (Dad, too), so it wasn’t like they had to beg us to eat. (Except that one time Mom made liver …. Gads, just the word “liver” makes my skin crawl.)
It also helped that we were active kids. In the day before cable tv and video games, what did kids do for entertainment? We went outside to play. Weekends were spent going to the beach, picnicking with the family, running around with the multitude of cousins. So even with the bounty of food that Mom and Dad put on the table, we were able to burn off a lot of the calories.
I’m not thin. I don’t think I was ever a thin person; my birthweight was normal but I‘ve always been kind of chubby. The Fat Rant video said that the only way to be thin is to have two thin parents. Dad’s kind of average: 5’11”, I think his weight has varied from 155-170 pounds over his adult life. Mom was thin; she was a very active person, plus the cigarettes she smoked gave her that extra metabolic boost. (Those cigarettes also caused her to die at too early an age. It pains me to see people smoke.) She was around 5’5” and gosh I don’t think she ever weighed more than 125 pounds. Me, I’m 5’5” and probably between 135 and 140 pounds. This is normal for me. We have a scale but the dial was sticking so someone took it apart to fix it and now it’s sitting in a box, its innards exposed for all the world to see. We’ve thought about buying a new scale, but it’s not high on our list of Things We Need, plus it feels like we’re taking a stand against the national obsession with weight if we don’t have one. Weight-wise I’m OK, but I don’t feel like I’m in condition — like I don’t think I could run a mile in 10 minutes. I think being in good physical condition is more important than weighing a certain amount or being able to fit into a certain size of clothes.
I watch what I eat, not so much concerned about my weight but because I want to stay healthy. Here again, I am lucky. I have low cholesterol, low blood pressure, and am in good health so I don’t have to police my diet as some do. It would be a challenge if I were diabetic or hypertensive or had heart problems and had to monitor my diet closely. But I’d adjust. I would like to have a good, long life. Someone has to stay alive to pay the mortgage so that the cats have someplace to sleep.
I guess it’s trite to say that the worth of a person comes from what’s inside — his or her personality, intelligence, sense of humor, etc. — but I truly believe this. What’s on the outside is just packaging.
I heard the third hour of yesterday’s show live and before DP interviewed Mark Cuban “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire played him in from the commercial break. This struck me as odd because on the old show this piece was his Friday Here-Comes-The-Weekend song:
Well, whatever. He no longer has Phil the Showkiller laying down his soundtrack.
At any rate, I downloaded the show and listened to part of it last night (the Rockies-Red Sox game was a yawner) and was disappointed to hear …
nothing.
No music. The first couple of segments sounded pretty quiet, and for certain that Arcade Fire clip is gone.
DP mentioned broadcasting from WTEM in D.C. for the next couple days. (I guess Lou will have to take the kids to Hooters.) I saw this a couple of days ago in the Washington Post, Short Run Deserved More Air Time.
Feldman and Maloney had just been steamrolled by the media juggernaut known as Dan Patrick, the former ESPN SportsCenter anchor who recently left the so-called Worldwide Leader to strike out on his own. In addition to signing up last week to associate himself with all things Sports Illustrated, Patrick also is now in the third week of his new syndicated radio show, and apparently WTEM just had to have him.
I’m sure this is happening with other radio shows across the country. I like the DP Show, but I hope that local sports radio will survive.
I suggested elsewhere that DP could invite female sports journalists on his show to provide a different perspective and mentioned Selena Roberts of the New York Times as an example. So I was a bit dismayed to read this in Slate, Manny Ramirez, as Himself:
That means you, too, Selena Roberts, who said on ESPN’s Sports Reporters on the very morning of the seventh game of the American League Championship Series that the problem with the whole Manny-being-Manny thing is that it lacks “accountability.”
So Roberts is in ESPN’s pocket, too. Gosh, who the heck isn’t on their payroll?
The World Series starts tonight. I’ll watch it; I always do. But since the Mets never made it, the post-season has been pretty darn unfulfilling for me. Following the Indians was nice, but their run ended. And rooting for the Tribe wasn’t the same as cheering on the Mets. Without the emotional investment it just didn’t feel right.
At any rate, I hope the series goes seven games. I don’t have a rooting interest at this point. Yeah, the Rockies are a good story, but I’ve enjoyed Red Sox skipper Terry Francona’s interviews on the DP Show and it’s hard to cheer against him.
Seven good games. I want baseball season to last as long as possible.
I am listening to the downloads from yesterday’s show and am shocked — shocked! — to hear music playing Dan into and out of commercial breaks. When the music first came on in the background as he ended the first segment of the first hour I did a double-take.
“Hey. What’s that? Music? Music!”
Neat-o. Including music bumps the show up to a whole new level. And one item from my Dan Patrick Show Manifesto has been corrected.
Two, maybe. All three segments of today’s show were up on the KLAC podcasting site fairly early this afternoon. Cool! Quality control is kicking in.
Not that she writes for this blog, but Hawaii contributes interesting and insightful comments here. Additionally there are her stellar efforts at Blogging Olbermann and Palaver.
Hope you and yours are safe while the fires burn in and around San Diego. Thoughts and prayers to all those affected. We have friends in the Los Angeles area; they’re OK for now, but you never know how things like this will go.
As Stuart Scott might put it, give us a holla to let us know how you are doing.
I stopped at three places on the way home this afternoon, looking for a pumpkin to put on the front steps in honor of Halloween. There must be a pumpkin shortage, for I could not find one. Of course I noticed some homes with 4-6 pumpkins on the front porches. I’ll try to remember to not procrastinate and be left pumpkinless next year.
