Recipe for Middle Aged Disaster

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So I joined up to play in an over-40 soccer league.  I’m thinking, "Hey, I’m on the younger end of that spectrum so how bad can it be?"  I played the first couple of games and discovered how truly out of shape I am.  Since I haven’t played competitive soccer in over 23 years and I’ve put on more pounds than I’d like to admit, those 40 yard sprints ain’t to easy to recover from.  So this week when they asked me to play goalie I thought, "Hey, why not?  At least I won’t feel like I’m gonna pass out after five minutes."

Sunday I stepped into goal and little did I know that the team we were facing was a perennial power in the league.  Thus I found myself flopping around like a fish on land as I went after shots, crosses, through balls, etc.  I really enjoyed it, but yesterday when I woke up I felt like someone had beat me with a 2×4. Then on top of that I got hit with a mild case of the flu bug which engendered me not venturing too far from the facilities all day long.  By last night I had the shakes something fierce and all I could do was lie in bed under several blankets with a heating pad on my lower back.

Thankfully a good night’s sleep seems to have cured all that ails me, with the notable exception that I’m still over-40 and wondering why I can’t party like its 1984.

links for 2008-03-14

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    Laura Hendrix writes from Kenya: “It’s very frustrating to know that we have created a culture that expects a handout…We invite the elders of villages to an educational session on how to prev

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    Laura Hendrix’s blog about her work in Kenya for Mentor Initiative. Very interesting stuff from an “on-the-ground” perspective on doing work on flooding, malaria control, etc.

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Headlines

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I’m no grammarian so please keep that in mind as you read the following.  I’ve noticed lately that I have to re-read headlines to make sure I understand what the author is trying to say.  I understand that headline writers are dealing with very limited space, but sometimes I think they need to be edited a little more closely.

Here’s one I found today on WXII’s website: Woman in Court Accused of Killing Daughter.  Uh, is the court accused of killing the daughter or is the woman?  Can a court kill a daughter? Wouldn’t a better headline be Woman Accused of Killing Daughter is in Court? I mean you’re adding two letters and a total of four spaces and it’s a website for goodness sake so space isn’t that precious.

There’s this headline found on the Winston-Salem Journal’s website, although the article originally appeared in the LA Times: Features of New $5 Bill Aim at Thwarting Counterfeiters.  Can features aim?  At a minimum wouldn’t it read better if it was written as "aimed"?  Or how about New Features of $5 Bill Intended to Thwart Counterfeiters.

I understand that the idea is to convey the main thrust of the story in a few words, and I don’t think that you can always do it and be grammatically correct at the same time.  But if the idea is to get the point across quickly then I don’t think it’s a good headline if it causes the readers to say, "huh?" when they read it.  So with that criteria I think the first headline is pretty bad, while the second headline doesn’t really get in the way of understanding what the article is about. 

Maybe I’m just being picky because, you know, these people are supposedly paid to write and edit well.  All I know is it bugs the hell out of me when I read these things.   

Pucker Up

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First there were the deep fried Twinkies and now we have these: Pickle Sickles.  From the story in the Washington Post:

An ice pop made of frozen pickle juice doesn’t sound like something
people would be clamoring for. Then again, in an era when candy
companies compete for bragging rights over whose flavor is the sourest,
perhaps the appeal of a little pucker power makes sense.

Sure enough, Pickle Sickles are selling at the rate of about 20,000 a month, mostly through the Internet. Who knew?

John Howard
knew, but that’s because he created them. Though the degree of
popularity has surprised him, Howard, 43, knew he was on to something
when he began freezing leftover jarred pickle juice at his roller
skating rink and arcade in Seguin, Texas, a year ago.

You could have given me a million years and I never would have thought of Pickle Sickles.  What next, frozen mayonnaise?  I shall never again make fun of the seemingly odd cuisine found in places like China. Puppy on a stick anyone?

links for 2008-03-12

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Annoy-a-tron. Oh, the Fun I Could Have

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Esbee sent me the link to the Annoy-a-tron so you can thank her if your ears are tortured any time in the near future. Here’s the description:

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name)
beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time
‘timing’ the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in
intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically
annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody,
select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight
‘electronic noise’ built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown
Admin wonder where his packets are.

Applications I’m considering for this ingenious device:

  1. Next PTA meeting.
  2. Car dealership show room, sales area.
  3. Forsyth County Commissioners meeting, behind the commissioners’ table.  Set for loudest setting during the sectarian invocation.
  4. Anywhere that teenagers gather en masse; they bug the hell out of me all the time so I think I’m due some payback.
  5. Anywhere that pompous, self-important blowhards congregate en masse; see reasoning in item 5. (Yes I’m aware that this could be considered redundant to item 3).

Yes, yes, yes.  Much fun.

More on the FDIC

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A trusted source, someone who shall remain anonymous lest I kill his business by letting people know he’s connected to me, sent me an email after reading yesterday’s post on banking woes.  His email did not lighten my mood:

A little info on FDIC. They have about $1.28 on reserve for every $100 they
insure. The last time they went broke was in 1992 during the S&L crisis
which was R/E related (mostly commercial). Tax payers bailed out the system.
Banks now pay higher fees into the system (but still not enough) and is a
significant reason for lower CD rates and higher loan rates. Cycles tend to
repeat. R/E’s cycle is about 12 to15 years. Scary isn’t it.

Scary enough that I’m thinking about stuffing my mattress.  It’s kind of lumpy anyway, so what’s the harm?

Lovin’ Backyard Burgers

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My son left his super-duper calculator that he uses for geometry at home today and needed it because his homework was stored on it.  Like I said, it’s a super-duper calculator.  When I was in H.S. in the early 80s we thought it was cool that calculators could work on solar power and sometimes even do more than add, subtract, multiply or divide.  His does all kinds of crap I can’t even understand well enough to describe, and I get insanely jealous every time I think about all the calculations and graphing I had to do by hand when I took geometry. Any way, he needed someone to bring his calculator to school.

Celeste and I ran it over to him at lunch time and then on the way home stopped at Backyard Burgers right off of 421 on Lewisville-Clemmons Road.  If you live anywhere in the Southeast then you simply must hit a Backyard Burgers.  It’s fast food, but the folks at Backyard treat it much better than that.  The burgers are very well made and the sides are always well cooked.  For instance if you opt for a baked potato instead of fries in your combo meal it will cost you about ten cents extra and the potato is invariably fresh, not a shriveled piece of mush that tastes like it was cooked a year ago.  And then there’s dessert.

I indulged myself with a baked raspberry cobbler and created my own a la mode by ordering a scoop of vanilla ice cream that I summarily plopped on the cobbler when it arrived at my table.  Oh, that’s right I forgot to mention that after you order you sit down and they bring your food to you.  Take that Wendy’s!

Combo meals will run you about $6.00 and include a sandwich, fries (or a replacement side) and a soda.  We ate at the height of the lunch hour and even though the place was packed we had our food in about five minutes.  On the way out of the restaurant Celeste noticed a sign on the door that says if it’s raining you can ask a teller to set you up with umbrella service and they’ll have an employee walk you to the car.  I’m telling you, it’s one of the best fast food operations going.