Here is the second piece:

Although I prefer warm weather these days, I remember when I wanted nothing more than to be up north in the cold.

It was our second winter in Florida. The novelty of constant warmth from the first winter had faded; in odd defiance of the conditions, I continued to wear sweatshirts as I had in my years in Virginia, often venturing to Tarpon Springs Middle School on 84-degree days with a heavy, navy blue “Carolina Basketball” Champion sweatshirt or an equally thick gray USF sweatshirt. More often than not, I wore polo shirts beneath these and others I possessed. It was a uniform; it was my routine. Only the colors changed from day to day.

I was fine until I boarded the bus to ride back to our neighborhood. The seventh-grade bus ride remains the most dreaded trip of my life, mainly because our driver decided to assign seats, so I was stuck with two hellions I badly misjudged on the first day of school …

(See, when your family sets up shop in a new subdivision and is one of the first to settle there, there’s a ceaseless stream of “new kids” moving into the neighborhood. The bus stop on the first day of seventh grade had more than twice as many kids standing there as it did for the last day of the previous year. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’ll get along with some of these newbies because they’re about to go through the same shit I endured the previous year, being uprooted from the friends I knew, the school I always expected to attend, the basketball team I thought I’d make, the life I never wanted to change.’ Within two weeks, these newcomers with whom I was seated stopped trying to be nice and had figured out that I was a geek, a nerd … whatever pejorative you want to apply. The bus driver was unsympathetic to my plight and seemed annoyed that I even mentioned that these deviants had slammed my head into the window on a daily basis for three weeks before discovering that the best way to tip over my apple cart was by drawing on my book covers or ripping paper on which I’d written notes from classes out of my binder, all the while elbowing me every 15 seconds of a 20-minute journey that seemed to last days. Fuck the Torture Twins. Fuck that bus driver, who was assigned to another bus route the following year and one day said “Hello,” and asked how I was, to which I said nothing and kept walking.)

… Stuck in a seat with these imbeciles, stuck with no air conditioning, stuck in the sweatshirt that I was afraid to remove because I thought it would be tossed out the window, and it’s impossible to get a Carolina basketball sweatshirt in the Tampa Bay area in the winter of 1988-89, because this is a decade before every school sells every stitch of clothing on-line. But I wouldn’t change. I was comfortable in these threads. The other kids dressed differently, but I didn’t notice what they were wearing; I knew what I liked and I wore it. I only eschewed the sweatshirts when the morning temperature was forecast to be at least 70 and the high temperature at least 87.

As you might notice, I’ve always been tuned to the weather, which I found rather boring in our part of Florida, save for the threat of hurricanes. When I was younger, I wanted us to get hit. Not wiped out, but just skirted enough to see some wind, some rain, some chatter on The Weather Channel about our home area, rather than someone else’s. Whether it was snow or storms, I wanted something unusual, something noteworthy.

Thursday here in Denver was noteworthy enough, and on a snowy day like that, I’m sidetracked by the weather, even though this snowfall is as unremarkable as a rainy day back in Charlotte. I know it’s been colder than this on this date before; without researching I knew the temperatures were at record cold levels at this time four years ago during the last Winter Olympics (and indeed this was confirmed; it was 11 below four years earlier). I remember this because I couldn’t find my car in the long-term parking lot at DIA; I mis-read and thus mis-noted the lot in which I was parked before heading to Honolulu for the Pro Bowl. There are few things less comfortable than being lost in a sub-zero parking lot without proper winter attire.

But as I recall and cement the details of this day, I begin clicking to a Web site that has been a regular stop of mine for 14 years now: Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com). Not so much for the forecasts, but its copious records of conditions going back through my lifetime. Thus, I can tell you the weather for our first date (13 degrees with scattered clouds when I arrived; eight degrees when you tried to locate your building), the morning I left Richmond, Va. for the last time before moving to Tampa (71 degrees and light drizzle) or the day I arrived in Seattle from Tampa (68 degrees on Aug. 19, upon which I blurted to no one in particular, “This feels like winter to me”).

I can also tell you that it snowed in Tarpon Springs on the evening of Dec. 23, 1989, but I didn’t need to research that one; I saw the flakes flying outside my window as I watched a Cleveland Browns-Houston Oilers game and went outside at halftime to throw around a football and pretend I was back in what I then dubbed “a more normal climate.”

So, yes, in my early years in Florida, I did wish I was up north, because most of the time, Florida felt like Hell — and it usually had nothing to do with the temperature.

Here is the first piece, which is in the form of an e-mail:

So tonight and on many other evenings, you ask me, “What’cha looking at?”
 
Variants of this question have been a regular interruption of my time with computers since I was in elementary school.  Dad did this quite often; he’d walk into the home office and in a forceful-yet-genial voice, ask, “What’cha doin’; what’cha doin’; huh, huh, huh?”  He had a way of doing this without knocking, so without fail, I jumped at those words, leading him and Mom to suspect I was doing something forbidden — which I suppose I was, if they had rules against playing video games or e-mailing.
 
As you know, I typically offer a generic response to these questions.  “Stuff,” “Not much,” or something equally trite and non-descript. 

It’s not a lie; it simply isn’t a revealing response.  The truth is that the response would change by the minute.  One moment I’m catching up on the notable deaths of the previous week; the next I’m researching TWA Flight 800 — the one that went down off Long Island in July 1996 — because I flipped past a “Seconds From Disaster” focusing on it earlier in the day but didn’t watch because I find the re-enactments have a visceral effect on me, rendering them excruciating and thus, unwatchable.
 
So what would have been the detailed answer when you inquired tonight?
 
Yes, there’s Twitter.  There’s an application on my iTouch called “Tweetdeck,” which you might have seen noted below a Facebook post or two, since it allows me to post to multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook simultaneously if I wish, or to read entries as they are posted.  The only problem is that Olympic updates are difficult to avoid.   As I wrote in my Twitter space Wednesday evening: “What’s worse than tape delay? Tape-delayed tape delay.”  I was pissed at NBC and remain so.  Fortunately, NBC’s logic — of which I heard a comically illogical defense from an ESPN radio host who can best be described as a corporatist blowhard — is not emulated by CBS and ESPN, who broadcast the NCAA Tournament and World Cup, respectively, and will happily go all out and show everything live during the weekdays.  I know I’m looking forward to the USA-Slovenia game in June, which kicks off at 7:30 a.m. Mountain Time.  I’ll be feeding the dogs their breakfast that day.
 
(But back to the Olympic broadcast before I move forward: No, I will not spoil any results for you when I return to Eastern Standard Time next week.  I might be too narrowly focused and convinced of my own intellectual strengths, but I’m not a jackass — not usually, at least.)
 
I quickly sifted through eight pages of posts on a Tar Heels message board, just to see if the masses’ take on still another desultory performance mirrored my own and my mother’s.  The sentiment was similar, but many emtroes were harsh on a personal level, which is disturbing.  I learn little from a quick perusal of these postings; I glean more from watching the games and, in Tuesday’s case, hearing of Mom’s rarely precedented halftime change of the channel.  (It’s been eight years since she willingly walked away early from a Tar Heels game she was watching.)
 
I look up every Winter Olympics medal table since 1980, not simply to refresh my memory on the final numbers, but to look at how many sports have been added in the last 30 years and remind myself how the Games barely resemble the ones of my youth.  In 1980, there were 38 gold medals available; this year there are 86.  Snowboarding, short track speed skating, freestyle skiing, curling, women’s hockey, women’s bobsled … they accumulate like lake-effect snowfall.  In that same vein, I detoured upon another tangent and researched Lake Placid, the the site of the 1980 Games.  What I knew of the town was its role in the Olympics and its geographic placement — so far upstate in New York that the closest major city is Montreal.  (This I know from a weekend jaunt to Quebec to watch a Braves-Expos series a decade ago.)  Lake Placid’s population is 2,639 — or approximately 219 times smaller than Vancouver’s.  Somehow I doubt they’ll have the Olympics again.
 
Olympic research tangents are where my Internet adventures grow more arcane.  I found myself investigating the Olympic fortunes of noted Olympiad lightweights such as Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and Iraq.  India arose in my mind because I wanted to learn which nation was the least efficient at winning gold medals relative to its population.  India gets the nod over Indonesia, whose fortunes have accelerated because badminton was introduced to the Summer Olympic program in recent decades.  (I quickly conclude that India’s fortunes would be assisted if cricket were ever added, but if baseball can be a part of the Olympics and then extracted, cricket, which is only played in current and former Commonwealth nations, has no shot.)  The check on Indonesia subsequently causes me to research Jakarta, the nation’s capital, which then causes me to follow a link that lists the world’s most populous metropolitan areas.  Jakarta is sixth; New York City is fourth; Tokyo, with over 32 million souls in its region, tops the list.
 
Oh, and there’s the YouTube clicks.  The focus of my distracted mind for 20 minutes after I returned from the dentist’s chair was gold-medal winning short and long programs; I watched John Curry’s in 1976, Robin Cousins’s in 1980 and Brian Boitano’s in 1988 (thus answering the question, “What would Brian Boitano do?”) and muttered, “They wouldn’t even make their national teams today.” 
 
Some reasons for my research tangents are quickly forgotten.  Why, for instance, was I Googling “myocardial infarction” today?  I mean, I know why I was reading about “dental fillings,”  since as of now, a new one sits in a lower tooth.

So as you can see, what I’m looking at is not much.  It’s just stuff.

In honor of Casey Kasem’s last countdown, which aired this weekend.

To reference another Kasem outtake, here’s hoping you got Don on the phone, and that you receive all the pictures you could ever want.

Not according to Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern, who blames our “greater national moral crisis,” including promotion of same-sex marriage and divorce, among other circumstances, for the state of the economy.

Blaming the recesssion on “debauchery”

When I lived in Seattle and anything went wrong, we just blamed it on people from Eugene. (GoDucks.com photo)

Just stop.  Please.  For the love of God.

Four different helmets?  None of them are yellow — which is merely one of the school’s two officially listed colors, but evidently in Eugene, that’s neither here nor there.  One helmet is black, and another is “carbon,” which I thought was an element, not a color.  Speaking of carbon, the person who designed these atrocities ought to be encased in carbonite.

“All told, Oregon will have 80 different combinations (jersey/pant/helmet) at their disposal.”

So we’re stuck looking at these abominations for seven seasons while they cycle through every possible combination.

If I were dictator of sports, this garbage wouldn’t happen.

.. Skipped the workout tonight. I allow myself one day off every week, and it almost always ends up being Wednesday. Overload of banana daiquiris and one of my favorite meals to prepare in the kitchen — beef-and-chorizo enchiladas — offers a handy excuse.  Well worth the 90 minutes I spent putting it all together …

… Well-prepared chorizo is the sustenance of the gods. Banana daiquiris are their nectar …

… Bobby Cox won a Sports Illustrated poll asking MLB players which manager they would most like to play for. If they feel that strongly, maybe some of them would be willing to take a little less to play in Atlanta in future years? Oh, wait … it doesn’t work that way. Damn.

For all the Cox haters on Braves blogdom, know this … our team will never have a better manager. But I still wish he’d reconsider the wisdom of sending out two guys with sub-.660 OPS and sub-.300 OBP every … single … day … instead of giving them more chances to watch, learn settle down and improve …

The little guy is learning bladder control.

… On the positive side, Rupert walked outside of his own volition and relieved himself.  But he also dropped off a few friends near the front door.  Hard to stay rankled, though, when he licks your face from hairline to neckline …

… I think I’ve posted enough for one day.  Starting to feel the writing mojo coming back a smidgen.  I reckon the blog is serving its purpose … to give me an excuse to ponder and express whatever stumbles into my mind.  Then training camp will come, and for blog purposes, I’ll be pulling a Mark Sanford, — albeit sans the other woman …

And speaking of Sanford …

"Irwin, professional journalism time now. Go back to the beach and finish the damn story!"

 

Some are radical bloggers; some are CPACers railing against what they perceive as liberal media (see video at 3:24); some are simply unaware of their surroundings.  But what they share is a belief that our culture would be better served without newspapers and journalists who can devote their entire working lives to news gathering and analysis.  From time to time, I’ll show why they’re wrong.

Reason No. 1 why America needs professional journalism:

Who else would have shown up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta to greet South Carolina governor Mark Sanford to begin untangling a slipknot of lies?

Bravo to The State in Columbia, S.C. for its role in bringing the truth to light.

View the front page of Thursday’s edition here.

Jozy Altidore celebrates his first-half goal against Spain. (Soccernet.com)

It is a purely American trait to parallel soccer outcomes to historic results from other sports.  Perhaps it is because the futbol afficionado can be condescending to the non-believer, yet at the same time wants to help him or her understand.

So here I go.

First of all, let’s stop the hyperbole.

This wasn’t like USA-USSR ice hockey in the 1980 Winter Olympics, which I reckon is the gold standard for American teams in international sport.  These were all pros out there in Bloemfontein, and this was the Confederations Cup, not the World Cup.  Not the biggest event on the schedule.  It’s a poor parallel even in terms of the teams’ quality.  Spain had more players who will be in the Champions or Europa Leagues this fall than the U.S. (22 to four), but Spain has the advantage of being, y’know, in Europe. 

(To further specify: Let’s be conservative and say that MLS is on a par with, say, the Norwegian Premier League, which according to the telltale UEFA coefficient is the 19th-best first division in Europe.   The league manages to send three of its teams to the Champions or Europa Leagues, and the country sends four clubs overall since one slot goes to the Norwegian Cup winners.  So that little discrepancy is both revealing and misleading. 

But that being said, the U.S. doesn’t have anyone of Fernando Torres‘ ilk.  Now back to the blog.)

Competitively speaking, this wasn’t like Appalachian State over Michigan or Chaminade over Virginia.  Whatever you think of the FIFA rankings — which have the Yanks 14th — the U.S. is decidedly among the world’s top 25 sides over the last decade.  They’ve been to the last two World Cup Finals in that span (and five in succession dating back to 1990); they’re on track to make another Finals next year; they’ve dominated their chief rival, Mexico, which possesses some international cachet.

(However … Mexico is overrated by observers because it is terra de futbol and the U.S. is lamentably indifferent to the sport, save for pockets of fervor like mine, leading to the perception that we can’t be competitive because multitudes don’t care … even though there’s enough who do to ensure that our national team has more supporters than most sides in Europe and South America.)

If you’re looking for a parallel, it lies in the 1983 national championship between N.C. State and Houston.

Three reasons:

1. State, like the U.S., came in with some credibility, having been a perennial 20-win team for over a decade prior to the upset.  They’d won some big games over the years and even that year (defeating Virginia and North Carolina) while also displaying some head-scratching performances.

2. State and the U.S. had to execute risky strategies to perfection.  State focused upon hitting outside shots, setting a deliberate pace and intentionally fouling down the stretch.  It worked; Dereck Whittenburg and Terry Gannon drained jumpers and the harried Cougars launched bricks from the foul line.  The U.S. laid back and let the Spaniards control midfield; its efforts revolved around being able to get in front of every shot and safely steer it away, while maximizing its relatively rare counterattacks.  Thanks to a defensive effort led by Jay DeMerit — he’s never played a better game before, and likely never will again — and Tim Howard’s resilience after being fairly shredded in the first two games of the Confederations Cup, this plan worked.  The Spaniards outshot the U.S. 11-4, but almost every shot was contested.  The U.S., meanwhile, had the clearer looks on its chances, and scored. 

3. Houston, like Spain, would have been favored over everyone else in the field.  Spain’s 35-match undefeated streak was the longest in international soccer history; its 15-game winning streak is virtually unfathomable given the competition it regularly faces in Europe.  The Cougars seemed unstoppable going into the game.

(In one way, the correct parallel might be Duke over UNLV in the 1991 semifinals.  But the U.S.’ international soccer accomplishments don’t measure to Duke’s in college basketball before that win, when they’d been to the previous three Final Fours in succession.  None of the State players in 1983 had ever been out of the round of 32 prior to that season.  Decent, capable of commendable results, but nothing special.)

Comparisons aside, there now exists the faith that the U.S. might be able to go to the second round of next year’s World Cup and “give ‘em all a nice big shitburger to eat” (“Shitburgers?”) if they can successfully navigate the choppy CONCACAF waters to qualification. 

And as for the casual American observers of the sport … their national side gave them ample to not only believe, but give a happy hot damn about its chances next year.

That might be their biggest victory of all.

(Bet you thought I meant “changing teams” as defined by Seinfeld!)

Rush Limbaugh might be the face of the Republican Party, but it’s Fox News who determines who belongs in it.   A Freudian slip to follow an action that was somewhat of a Freudian slip in and of itself.