Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

It’s the Ides of March, but I seem to lack the ambition to assassinate anything but time.  Lousy weather this weekend (after some promising days late last week) kept me off the water; today opened with cotton-candy-like gobs of snow falling eerily to earth, followed later in the day by 20 - 30 mph winds, pelting rain and the occasional sucker-hole of bright sunshine.  We managed a walk to Fremont yesterday to buy groceries at PCC, and I peeled off of the couch to ride down to the gym this afternoon.

I spent a chunk of yesterday and today watching the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament, as Ohio State upset Michigan State yesterday and played (and lost) to Purdue in the championship game today.   One thing that occurred to me, and I’m surprised it hasn’t before, is how much the chorus of squeaking from 20 basketball shoes resembles a tree full of birds during nesting season.  I guess there’s a reason I don’t write for Sports Illustrated.

The NCAA March Madness tournament starts this week.  For a long time, I regarded it in its current 65-team incarnation as a bloated abomination that cheapened the regular season by allowing as many as 8 teams from a conference into the tournament.  But the last couple of years, I’ve started to warm up to it, probably because my expectations of the Buckeyes are pretty low, and I can just enjoy it as a pageant.  This first week, especially, is a riotous bazaar of game, going almost nonstop from Thursday morning to Sunday night, and it’s kind of like going to a music festival where you can walk from venue to venue sampling all manner of entertainments.  OSU plays Siena at 10pm EDT Friday night and if they win, will probably play Louisville, the #1 seed in the entire tournament, on Sunday. That‘ll lower your expectations, fersure.

I’m also sort of Jonesing for a camera, a successor a couple of generations removed to my Canon S3 IS.  It’s the SX10 IS, or its sidekick the SX1 IS.  Each has a 20x optical zoom (the 12x zoom is the thing that most endears me to the S3) and, like the S3, can record video in stereo.  The SX1, however, has a CMOS chip and can record video in HD.  But it’s about $250 more.  I don’t know why I care, since I don’t own any kind of display that will render HD in the house, and I’d probably have to buy a gazillion-gigabyte memory chip.

The natural progression for someone who snaps as much as I do would probably be to move up to a DSLR and invest in some lenses.  However, so much of my photography is done on the run, impromptu, and is only possible because I’m usually carrying my camera.  And I don’t think I’d be as likely to sling a DSLR and a gaggle of lenses onto my shoulder.  Both the SX1 and SX10 are the smaller sub-SLR with the lens built-in.

Have a good week, and beware of leprechauns selling securitized peat-bog mortgages.

So we met at my middle brother’s place near Charleston, SC to roast oysters and watch the Ohio State-Michigan game last weekend.  The weekend sped by, and I could do no more than hold on for the ride. I mean, nominally it was a 4-day weekend spanning Thursday through Sunday, but so much of my time was taken up on airplanes that I only got 2+ days of ground time with my peeps.

I arrived in Charleston on time, but at midnight on Thursday. On Friday, my middle bro, the host of the festivities, and I went shopping at the oyster store and (natch) the liquor store, then stopped at what used to be a rice and indigo plantation adjacent to man-made Lake Moultrie. His employer now owns the grounds, and entree to the place is an employee benefit. It was chilly the whole weekend, and on Friday there was a 20-knot wind. As we strolled, the sun was lowering and the angle of light was making the sea oats and Spanish moss look like it was on fire (click photos to enlarge):

My youngest brother and his entourage arrived Friday evening and, after going out for a gala dinner, we stayed up late drinking his home-brewed beer around a campfire. Saturday, Gameday, arrived all too soon, and I dragged myself out of bed just in time for the noon (Eastern) kickoff.

Even though Michigan has had its struggles this season, I had expected the usual nail-biter. Instead, the Buckeyes finally fulfilled the potential that seemed imminent early in the season, and won the game easily. We usually watch the game outside, back by my brother’s garage, but the chill, and the presence of a new wide-screen TV in the living room, kept us inside for the first half.

My SIL was the first to notice it - my bro’s have finally devolved to watching the Buckeyes in rocking chairs, and spending time-outs in barcaloungers.  Eventually, in the second half, we tentatively migrated outside to start the grilling marathon.

The game won, we turn to developing a hot bed of coals for roasting the oysters. The pets don’t escape the madness (the dog is from Columbus, and is named “Beanie Wells”.  Go figure). After eating way too much, we hang out around the fire despite temperatures in the 20s, savoring the win, my brother’s excellent hospitality, and each other’s company.

Three yards and a cloud of dust?  Try 25 yards in the clouds.  Beanie Wells channels Edwin Moses against Illinois last weekend.  The guy’s 235 lbs without the pads.:

As you can perhaps discern from the banner change, it’s officially Michigan Week, the 6 days of ratcheted insanity that precede the Ohio State-Michigan football game. The game this year is in Columbus, with OSU’s record at 9-2 and a trip to a BCS (major) bowl at stake, while Michigan is having a miserable year at 3-8 and going nowhere except Columbus. Most of the time, this game is played for the Big Ten championship, and frequently both teams are in the top 10 nationally. When we’re heavily-favored, as we were in the heartbreaking 1969 game, is generally when we get our asses kicked, and I expect the game to be played with even more than its usual ferocity.

I’ll be flying out on Thursday not to Columbus, but once again to Charleston, SC to meet up with my mom and bro’s, where we’ll roast oysters in my middle brother’s field. I was going to gloat here about the relative temperatures between the two venues, but it looks like it’ll be sunny in both places, with a high of 40 in Columbus and just shy of 60 in Charleston. Game-breaking performance: we’ll have a bonfire and, since they added metal seats in Ohio Stadium, you can’t have one there.

Since football is the theme for the week, and I mentioned Brett Favre in my previous post, I’m posting the following quote from an excellently-written article on Favre by Jeff MacGregor of the NYT:

For 25 years in the N.F.L. — roughly parallel to the rise of the computer — the System has been ascendant. At once a weapon in the coach’s battle against chaos and a holy talisman against chance and the random bounce, the System is intellectual insurance against human confusion and statistical weakness. It offers a coach not just digital predictability but plausible deniability. The System promises to abate risk, to assuage a coach’s nervous uncertainty. And to assure that he’ll have a job next week. The System is what coaches whistle as they walk past the graveyard…This is Favre’s element, and he moves through it as happy and unflappable as the Dalai Lama. But he is also the captain, the leader by example, the ancient Hall of Famer and the prankster king of the well-placed rubber snake and the deftly hidden turkey carcass. And he’s already in command.

The end-of-the-week trip means a hectic 3 days ahead.

Are in the bag:

The fear is that some dyslexic drum major will try to dot the “m”.  “M” should never appear in an OSUMB formation in the first place!

 Hectic and compressed week.  I mean, it’s always a gong show after I’ve been  out of town, but this is a 3-day work week for me, as I depart tomorrow morning on my annual haj to Columbus, there to pray at Mecca on Saturday.  I will again play and march with my Ohio State alumni band, and mingle with my mom and brothers and their wives.

I’m not sure if I actually have a new reader or two since the last iteration, but just in case: I was in the Ohio State marching band while slouching towards my accounting degree, as was my youngest (10 years younger) brother.  The alumni band celebrates a reunion each year, and the athletic department allows us to either cavort or waddle through pregame and halftime shows at an early-season football game.  My family has been using this occasion as a family reunion as well, and we have a fine old time.

Something like 700 of us alumni bandsmen return each year for this event, and that’s about 100 too many to be able to participate in our signature formation, the venerable Script Ohio.  So, they conduct a lottery to see who gets the coveted marching spots for the halftime extravaganza.  I had to sit out last year, but I’m on the field this year.  Here’s a nice video of what we do:

The game itself is a snooze to contemplate - against Youngstown State, ferchrissakes.  It annoys me that teams like Ohio State pack their schedule with cupcakes like this.  And it’s not like you can’t lose one of these (see Michigan vs. Appalachian State last year).  But, whatever, the weather is supposed to be good and it’ll be a fine way to spend an afternoon.

On the way, I’ll be finishing A Heartbreaking of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  I’ve had the book around for a year or two, but it only made the traveling team because it was on top of a pile, and I grabbed it as I ran out the door to the airport a couple weeks ago.  It’s a strange book, a rambling memoir that details a young person’s launch into adult life in the 90s.  What would have been a fairly unremarkable journey of a suburban Chicago kid graduating from college and dipping his toe into the world is complicated immeasurably by the unlikely deaths of both of his parents from cancer within a month of each other, and the consequent need to care for his middle-school brother.  Not the usual path to becoming a single parent.  I’ll say more about it when I finish.

That was pretty ugly. Some have been saying that, yeah, but it wasn’t as bad as last year. To them I say, what’s the difference if you’re on a plane that crashes and you’re burned alive and your skin melts into the seatcover, whether there were 100 or 300 people on the plane?

Anyway, there were a few moments of fun before all 4 engines failed:

At least, the crew was kind enough to keep serving drinks as the fuselage headed toward dead vertical.

The rain held off, so I had a nice walk home, going up over Queen Anne hill and down through Fremont. When I arrived home, I told Mrs. Perils, “we won’t speak of this again.”

The video above is hosted at a place called vsocial.com. A kayaker that takes lots of video told me about it at the New Year’s Eve party we attended. Advantage: the quality of the video seems to be a lot better. Youtube seems to be pretty random about the quality of its replays, and it doesn’t seem to matter what the quality of your upload is. Lemme know what you think.

In more redeeming news, I seem to have started reading again. Books. Bound books, dead-tree-books. I posted earlier that I finished Middlemarch a couple of weeks ago, and I just finished Ian McEwan’s Atonement over the weekend. And, believe it or not, I carried The Brothers Karamazov with me on the bus to the sports bar last night, and even read a few pages. It’s for a book group discussion due in a couple of weeks. Man, that thing is huge, and dense, like a lead ingot of erudition. It’s my first Dostoevsky. No way I’ll be able to finish it in time to say anything intelligent about it.

I enjoyed Atonement quite a bit. McEwan has a rich prose style, but it’s still clean and translucent. He lingers lovingly on his set-pieces, to the point where I found myself staring around me, trying to see how I could get 3 pages out of mundane street scenes in front of me. And the best part about finishing Atonement is that now I get to see the upcoming film with Keira Knightley. Arrrrgghhhh!! Avast!

Here’s a nice bit about the writing process:

It seemed so obvious…a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page,she was able to sent thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it…You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade.

You’ll go away from here, and after a while you’ll forget that I quoted McEwan - you’ll just remember what good writing there is at Perils of Caffeine.

Another case of Titleus Interruptus. In August, none of us who foolishly preoccupy ourselves with the Buckeyes’ football fortunes thought that a team rebuilding from losing 8 players to the 2007 NFL draft would be sitting at 10-0 on November 9th. Once we were, however, we saw no reason that we wouldn’t be 12-0 on November 18th. We simply got outplayed, at the Horseshoe, by a team that inexplicably wanted it more than we did.

This period of mourning will last about 4 more hours. Then it’s time to start thinking about Saturday and the possibility of heaping more disappointment on this benighted household.  The Rose Bowl’s a pretty good consolation prize to play for.

Light posting lately as I’ve been touring coast-to-coast performing as my doppelganger, the enormously popular middle-aged white rapper known as Travis T. Or not. More likely, I’ve been feeling that sort of lackluster that I get when I’m inundated with projects and phone-stalked by clients with justifiable grievances. And since a couple-three of them venture here sometimes, I feel funny about taking time to post when their projects are going begging. Not that I’m at all out of the woods right now, but I’m claiming the hours between 2am and 4am as my own, dammit!

So, a little summing up. Of course, I spent a lot of Saturday watching football. It was like Pickett’s Charge, half of the top 15 teams disemboweled and gasping on the greensward. The most stunning of which was Stanford’s regicide of USC. That game gave Jim Harbaugh, Stanford’s first-year coach and former Michigan quarterback, instant street cred and deflected some of the attention he’d gotten when he made these peculiar remarks about his alma mater. (An aside of astounding relevance: I delivered the Toledo Blade to Harbaugh’s house when his dad coached at my high school).

The Buckeyes’ game with Purdue was shown to 85% of the country, but here we got the unsightly spectacle of UCLA allowing Notre Dame to once again breathe air in the same time slot, so I sucked it up and bought the game PPV from Comcast. You’d think they’d make it easy for a strung-out junkie to buy a hit of ESPN crack, but nooooo. You can order all manner of depravity from the cable company with just a couple of flicks of your (unoccupied) wrist and the remote, but you can’t order ESPN Gameplan - you have to call Comcast. Which is what I did a half-hour before kickoff. It was a rude awakening to apprehend that they were woefully understaffed, and my only option was to accept a call-back in 40 - 45 minutes. I fumed, cursed, and did exactly what they asked me to do and paid them everything they asked me to pay.

I only missed about 4 minutes of the first quarter. When I watch a game at home, Mrs. Perils takes the cat and disappears to a safe room somewhere where the paint won’t peel when I scream. My companion for these events, oddly, is my 90-year-old mother-in-law. She spent a lot of Saturdays watching football with her husband, and I think it has a familiar feel for her. She’s got some cognitive issues, and it doesn’t help when I flick from game to game during time-outs. She follows it for the most part, though, and every now & then has a moment of clarity, like when I do a drive-by of a Penn State game, and she exclaims, “Is Joe Paterno still coaching?”

Then there was this priceless moment a couple of weeks ago. Mrs. Perils had alighted briefly among us, and I was saying something to her about a player. She said, “what year is he?” And my MIL grinned and said, “he’s a fifth-year freshman!” We looked at each other with a “where’d that come from” look, but it’s not that far-fetched. She (my MIL) has been pondering all the various increments of academic/athletic status like “red-shirting” and, one of her favorites, “true freshman”. She was a school-teacher and a parent of two valedictorians, and her view of academic progress is decidedly less malleable than that of a college athletic department.

Folks on my Ohio State newsgroups are aghast at this revelation yesterday that our 3rd string quarterback, who had all but ascended to the 2-deep and had gotten most of the backup playing time in our nailbiter against Northwestern Saturday, was arrested after offering an undercover officer $20 for sex.

It’s not that they’re surprised that a teenager might evince a sex drive - they’re dumbfounded, and I think their pride’s a little hurt, that a Buckeye quarterback feels a need to pay for sex. The archivists are bloodying their nails searching for a precedent. I remember once when I was a student at OSU and experiencing some of that special loneliness characterized by animal head ornamentation, two really hot women walked into the lobby of my dorm, picked up the house phone^* and cold-called the 2nd-string quarterback, Ron Maciejowski. (the kid got to start once a year when Rex Kern would take the Wisconsin game off.) Completely ignoring yours truly, who was no doubt picturesquely pretending to study. Dagger to the heart, that.

Another surprise for me is the apparent Seattle/Columbus exchange rate. Around here, $50 is a cheap dinner for two, and I wouldn’t bet on the chances of a cheap dinner getting you laid.  Some on my OSU list were wondering if the deep discount might have been an NCAA violation if consummated.

The best reportage I’ve seen of the incident comes from the always-hilarious EDSBS (Every Day Should Be Saturday). They hit us where we live with the caption “I-O! H-O!”

* - The more perceptive of you will notice the absence of the terms “cell phone” or “texting” in this anecdote