The Maggot Mistake

You learn something every day if you're careful enough to pay attention, and sometimes even if you're not the blunt force of an experience is enough to learn you anyway. In any case, the following is a bit of a long form apology to my sister-in-law, who suffered grave embarassment due to an act of goodwill on my part gone wrong.

Jill (The Special Lady) and I were until recently living with our in-laws waiting to close on the house, and during that time, after a decade or more calling my own shots, I slowly learned how to be a gracious long-term houseguest. It's small things that make a difference, chipping in for groceries, closing doors and turning out lights, putting stuff away, doing dishes, not pumping the AC out at 69 degrees.

Around a house with 3 children the ambient entropy creates a consistent list of chores and so it's nice to tackle a thing or two that slips through the cracks without expectation of praise or remuneration.

So, one Monday back in August we were really feeling generous and decided a civil thing would be to barbecue the five pounds of chicken Jill's sister had bought and hadn't gotten around to yet. We got home after work and opened the fridge to discover a full-blown funk odyssey underway. Raw chicken doesn't keep forever. No matter, I wrapped it in a plastic bag and took it out to the trash and we went out and bought more chicken.

Now, coming from San Francisco, where high taxes pay for niceties like twice-weekly trash pick-up and mild weather slows the decaying forces of archaea and insects, you can toss out 5 pounds of spoiled chicken and not think twice. In the Philly burbs, during the hottest week of August with once-weekly trash detail on Friday, this was a bad idea.

By Wednesday a new evil was in the air and accompanying that stink was a writhing maggot orgy that was even scaring off the supernaturally-ravenous Bala Cynwyd squirrel population (who had previously eaten squirrel-sized holes in the plastic lids of the garbage cans in their lust for human trash). At the same time as it was revolting, it was also kind of spectacular how life could respond with such abundance. I'm not officially-licensed in this kind of math, but if I had to guess I'd say there were 100,000 maggots in that trash can, easy, each one furiously wiggling like a grain of soft-cooked white rice on ecstacy.

The thought of a spray-bottle of bleach crossed my mind, as did gasoline and flame, but recalling how gross problems can unexpectedly snowball, I decided against introducing toxic chemicals or comustible fuel into the situation. Which made things a test of endurance to see how bad things could get before Friday.

Finally, on Friday, my poor sister-in-law had a run-in with the garbage men. She happened to be out on the drive way when they came, and had no option but to take their cold, judging stares as they removed our low-rent, little problem.

My excuse is that I was just trying to make a nice, home-cooked meal and take out the trash. But it was my mistake and that should have been me facing down those garbage men. Jo-Anne if you're reading, I apologize.

The Most Wondeful Time of the Year

Geeze, I looked down for a smoke and a pancake and when I started paying attention again it was September. Here's an incomplete, annotated bullet-point list documenting my reasons for being really thrilled about this Fall:

-the end of East Coast-muggy hot weather

-Indian Summer

-looking good in my liberty-red capertons during the pending and glorious Fightin' Phils post-season run

-College Football in general

-Boise State Football, in particular, kicking off tonight against Oregon at 10:15 PM EST on ESPN, which means a lot of things, I'll be up late tonight, and I could be devastated or elated tomorrow morning based on the outcome, essentially being a single-game rite of passage for BSU's BCS aspirations.

-NFL Football in general

-Fantasty Football, in particular, my team 'Dickhead Banana' of the GFL led by Drew Brees.

-foliage

-the return of my faithful sweater collection

-boots!

-forgetting the compulsion to put lime wedges in my beers.

-chicken wings on the reg.

-Pearl Jam at the Spectrum on Halloween

-birthday parties: mine, my brother's, my nephew's, my niece's

-4.1

-b-school lite at Wharton

-Thanksgiving Tropicalia in the DR

ABC & ESPN College Football TV Schedule & Coverage Map 2009

Updated: September 16, 2009

The Elusive and Inconsistent ABC/ESPN Coverage Map seems to live here for now:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?page=coveragemaps2009

Without updating in Week 2 (the page automagically updated today from Week 1 to Week 3), here's hoping things stay more up to date from here on out.

The TV Schedule lives here:

http://espn.go.com/college-football/schedule?addata=2009_cfbat_xxx_xxx_xxx_xxx

Damn this page has been elusive.

Amid their raging torrent of web traffic, the world wide leader probably doesn't notice that the above linked-to page has some serious SEO issues. For college football fans it holds some of the most precious and relevant information for planning your Saturdays throughout the fall, yet it is buried obscurely within the architecture of ESPN.com.

Furthermore, it is very hard to find using routine Google searches such as: 'abc college football map,' which currently yields archived copies from November 26, 2008 and some weird ass page from 2002 as the top two results.

Methinks this preventable situation is largely due to the the terrible URL structure of the genuine site, versus the two currently showing in its place in the rankings.

So this is my little experiment to see if I can index and drive some traffic on that frequently sought information. As well, there's dim hope this might work its way up to the ESPN.com brass who should generally make this information more readily available by better SEO and more prominent guidance on the website.

In the meantime, I'm pointing users to the correct clearing house for this information.

From Housewarming to Hospital Visit in 30 Seconds

Friday we closed on the new place and before moving in and cluttering it up with our junk, we decided to throw a little housewarming party for the new friends and family we have in Philadelphia.

At 6pm, just as guest were starting to arrive Jill showed up in the pouring rain with all of the food and drinks for the party. Since our young newphews were attending, some fun drinks of the non-alcoholic variety were also procured - notably a carbonated pink lemonade that comes in a carafe resembling a wine bottle.

On her way out of Whole Foods it started raining and before Jill could get all of the groceries into the car, she and the bags were soaked.

In our driveway she went around to the back of the car to get out the groceries. As she yanked out the first bag, the heavy bottle of lemonade tore through the soggy paper bottom of the bag and exploded on the cobblestones at her feet like an IED.

I was watching from the porch, with the gaseous burst of noise and broken glass ringing in my ears, as a thin dark ribbon of blood cut horizontally across Jill's right calf, then made an abrupt downward turn, gushing down her ankle. I told her she was bleeding a lot and ran down to help her into our apartment.

A trail of blood and mud and rain water followed us in to the couch, where I sat Jill down and told her to hold a washcloth against the wound, which was deep and yawning like an imp's mouth. She clearly needed stitches, but it wasn't emergency mode just yet and I was thinking, we'll still get to party, maybe.

Then I noticed Jill had dropped the washcloth and her hand was hanging limp at her side. I watched as her eyes went glassy, crossed and unfocused and the color drained her skin. She was lifeless, waxy, my zombie bride, as she slumped lower into the couch and unconsciousness.

Now I really freaked out and punched 911 into my cellphone. Then I was alternating between barking at the poor lady on the 911 dispatch line, and helping our friend Shelley as she tried to wake Jill, while our nephews burst into tears thinking (and justifiably, given what we'd just witnessed) that she had died. Because that is what it looked like, though I knew better from her short breathing - it was damned scary all the same. Peter, at 6 years old, got so upset that he ran out of the house and sat in the car in the human approximation of an ostrich's head-in-the-sand response. Thomas, not even 4, still thinks he witnessed a miracle, recounting the story that Jill died, but came back to us.

About 30 seconds in she started snoring, then began some light convulsing as she came around and her systems came back online. She appeared confused and asked us what had happened. Seeing her back in the land of the living, I haven't felt so much relief ever.

We got immediate returns on the dread Philadelphia Title Transfer Tax we'd just paid earlier that day as the paramedics arrived within 5 minutes of my call and dressed the wound, before advising that it made no difference whether they or I took Jill to the ER.

So I scooped her up and put her gingerly in shotgun and drover her down to the ER at Penn Hospital. There, we were treated to the excellent experience afforded by our premium health insurance which included a surly intake employee, a threat of a $200 parking fine for leaving my car in the ER driveway for 5 minutes, and a 3.5 hour wait to see the resident.

We got to watch 2 episodes of the Simpsons, 1 episode of Seinfeld and half of the Dallas Cowboys/Tennessee Titans pre-season game before the resident arrived to clean the wound, re-dress it and order X-rays to ensure no glass was still inside my wife.

But an hour later, after the x-rays came back negative, we were treated to the real highlight of the visit when the resident felt compelled to demonstrate the surprising depth of the wound by sinking his finger up to the first knuckle in Jill's leg and asking, 'hey, wanna see something cool?'

It was 11pm when I helped Jill hobble out and we retreated to our empty apartment and ordered a pizza. Our party ruined by the freakiest of freak accidents, we reflected on the dangers of carbonated beverages in glass containers and the sequence of odd events that led up to the injury by gas-propelled glass shrapnel. Don't underestimate that stuff.

Wawa Coffee

Slate recently did an unscientific review of the mass-market cups of coffee and missed the mark by crowning Dunkin' Donuts their champion. I realize they were going for a broad, nationally appealing contest, but Dunkin's kind of a regional player compared to McDonalds and Starbucks, so why not consider Wawa too? They're not so small-time, selling 195 million cups of coffee each year. Perhaps Slate is too highbrow for gas station coffee?

Which is sad, because Wawa is doing something so right with gas station coffe at the in-store coffee hot-pot kiosk they refer to as Coffeetopia. Coming from the West Coast I had little previous experience with Wawa, but was first drawn in by the no-fee ATMs they sport, which are also really awesome considering my bank's ATMs don't line the freeways of the Mid-Atlantic region.

Like any naive, recent arrival on the East Coast, I was on a dangerous Dunkin' Donuts bender which bore the mark of nacent, longterm addiction as the daily injection of blistering-hot, coffee-scented syrup yielded quickly diminishing returns. A little used to do it, as they say, plus there was the growing donut side-effect. I needed an intervention of variety without the expense of Starbucks.

So I gave Wawa a shot and have been pleased by this discovery of the true nexus of cost, quality and variety in coffee. Just this morning, I enjoyed a cup of 100% Colombian Supremo with a splash of Irish Cream non-dairy creamer and was instantly transported to misty, old Dublin. Who knows where this adventure will lead next?

Wikipedia's Random Article Link

It was pointed out to me by the great Ben Felix that this would be a cool way to find your band's name. And even if that's not your particular use case, you can enjoy by clicking repeatedly for one of the Web's most illuminating, non sequitur experiences which yesterday took me on a journey from Norway's tallest structures to the Five Pure Lights followed by a brisk dip in the cosmic flow of the Mindstream.

To blow your own mind wide open:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Imeem's Shot in the Dark Advertising

When I logged into Imeem this morning to add music to my 'Relaxin' Vibrations' mix and pulled up the lite '70s classic 'Sweet City Woman' from Canadian rock trio the Stampeders (currently playing for the dual purposes of your enjoyment and illustrating the irony of this juxtaposition), I was a little surprised at the agro advertising that interrupted my early-morning mellow not only with its image, but a recorded vocal track saying something to the effect of hey man, you into goth?

I'm not sure if this is what GothScene signed on for exactly, because it sure seems like a shot in the dark and Imeem could probably do better to psychographically target the ads they serve based on the music. This ad might be a little more appropriate along side a Mars Volta track, for example.

Sweet City Woman - The Stampeders