A Shoe on the Freeway

A blade, a blade, my Christmas celebration for a blade!

Or … maybe, I’ll just have myself a watery little Christmas. My little corner (“two icy roads converged …”) of the world is under about 6 inches of freaking water and ice. We have been working three days now to dislodge the biggest chunks near the curb, the logic being we’d prefer not to lose any seasonal revelers headed to our house. Yeah, Grandma can float, but what if she is packing a couple fruitcakes and a case of sugar cookies. And, this being the holidays, the neighborhood Newfoundlands, bred for water rescue, are noshing kibble in some warm kennel downstream.

The intersections in my neighborhood have been particularly gruesome, ridges sharp and deep enough to do some damage to an unsuspecting vehicle and traction about as common as reason in Congress. Crossing one of these crevices, you never know if you will succeed or just be found in the spring, prostrate in a dip, waiting for a thaw, a polysyllabic curse frozen on your blue lips.

But we soldier on, spade and pick in hand, rubber and Gore-Tex on our feet, while the temperature soars in the afternoon and falls maddeningly after sunset, undoing our work. I fall asleep these nights with visions of one big blade in my head, one big scraping, pushing and all-powerful blade solving my watery, icy conundrum …

… Until it snows again. Hey, MWC and HIH. Be careful out there. Boats and skates required.

A blade, a blade …

Posted by George Ayoub at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This Sunday Christmas schedule has me out of sorts, not in the Pepto-Bismol way but in the holiday rhythm sort of way.
Granted you (and my son who meticulously counts these things) get two for the price of one trip to church. Saturday also gives many of us a non-working day to get prepared for relatives about to visit: dusting, making food, hiding the sterling.
But if a holiday on a weekend isn’t quite like kissing your sister, but you can see it from there. Sure, we can party longer and the government has allowed us to call Monday Christmas too.
But Sunday is already … well … Sunday.
For my money (the last of which I just spent by the way), the rhythmic upheaval a mid-week Christmas causes is pure delight.
Combine that with the potential day or two buffer zones on either side, bookended weekends and you have yourself a Christmas week plus four.
Follow that with New Year’s (the second stanza of Happy Holidays) the next week, and you might run the table with 15-20 days of Yulish and Auld Lang Syne cheer.
That’s why I love Christmas — especially on a Wednesday. Now that’s a holiday.

Posted by George Ayoub at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Associated Press has released its “Little All American Team.” The news service needs to call its publicist — or consult a thesaurus.

This “Little” team comprises the best football players in NCAA, Division 2, schools that include our own UNK and UNO. The Lopers’ Richie Ross was second team wide receiver. You will find neither Heisman Trophy winners nor Rose Bowl foes in the bunch. Shoe deals go begging on these campuses.

But little?

Let’s go to the numbers: The first team offensive line of the“Little’s” averaged 318 pounds compared to their “Big” counterparts, who weighed in at 313 a man mountain. The entire Little offensive team averaged 271 pounds a man including the kicker, whose weight is actually a non-issue in the game of football.

The Bigs, including Vince Young and Reggie Bush, were bigger — by a whooping 2.5 pounds a guy. Must have been the 210-pound kicker.

On defense the Littles were absolutely tiny, too, their 235 pounds “dwarfed” by the Bigs’ 249. Oh, yeah, and the Bigs looked down on their D2 brethren from their lofty perches — a full inch higher.

D1s are larger schools than D2s, with thousands of students, hundreds of press clippings and millions in their football banks. But to be big about it — honest and right-sized — skip the “Little” in the D2 All-American Team.

Posted by George Ayoub at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What’s up with the reaction to Tom Osborne’s notion that one term as governor may be enough for him? I’ve stayed out of this discussion to date, mostly because my wife is a cousin or two removed from Dave Nabity, who is also on the ballot. Disclosure and family tie explanations bore me and take up column inches in print.
Anyway, why, in a state that approved term limits by nearly three to one, would we be upset with a governor who suggests limiting his term before he runs? I have no idea which way I’m voting — even at the risk of eating in the garage at the next reunion — but I find the response to Osborne curious.

Posted by George Ayoub at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went Christmas shopping Saturday and did not witness one fist fight. We’ve improved since the day after Thanksgiving.
I barely got a sneer or a glare, although I did contribute a couple holiday daggers through my windshield in a couple parking lots.
What is so difficult about one-way arrows? Here’s a hint, free of charge: When all the vehicles are parked in one direction, chances are good that is the direction of traffic. Sure, I understand a goof every once in a while, but I was in a wrong-way warp late Saturday afternoon.
I survived without a scratch or fingered salute — mine or theirs, although neither would have been out of the question. Overcome with the spirit of the season, I moved on, in an orderly manner, with the flow of traffic. Yes, smugness is an unnatural greeting for the season.
I do have issues: While recognizing that I could be disrespecting an entire gender, I have to admit I completed my appointed rounds and now consider myself finished shopping 12 days before Christmas Eve. Sorry, fellas, I’ll do better next year.
My journey was not without effort, however, including 20 minutes in a checkout line where clerks struggled with extraordinary requests from customers who thought they were shopping online when in fact that was where the rest of us waited, on line (two words); computers with a chippy attitude; and, apparently, new gigs for a couple new employees. I wanted to ask if two Saturdays before Christmas Eve was the best time to break someone in, but extending my stay on line would have been cruel and unusual punishment.
Still, I was surprised at the civility of it all — myself included. After 10 minutes of waiting, I thought about what might have happened in Los Angeles, where I shopped for 10 Christmases. My theory goes like this: The larger the city, the less patience with things like 20 minutes on line to buy a gift certificate. Even in laid-back L.A., I might have witnessed that fist fight or, at a minimum, heard plenty of shouting. A trip to the post office or bank in my old neighborhood in any season was always worth a meltdown or two. The trick was to make sure it wasn’t you doing the melting.
Still, we have our moments here. A few years ago, while ringing the bell for the Salvation Army in front of a big box with a parking lot the size of North Dakota, I saw two guys nearly throw down over a parking space close to the door.
As one of them made his way toward the building, I thought about asking him the appropriate question, given what I had just seen: “Know anywhere I can score Laker tickets?”

Posted by George Ayoub at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s a couple of useless words: conservative and liberal. I’m about done with them. Their value is next to nil. Too big, too inaccurate. Too easy.
Still, we hear them all the time, accepting them as precise from the radio or the television or the printed page.
They are worthless labels.
Unless they are all you have. My mission is always to have more.
We have run them into the ground. They have little meaning except perhaps to pigeonhole somebody when we take a cerebral nap, when our brains cramp from inactivity.
Conservative and liberal have been Reasonerized. Harry Reasoner once said he hated labels because they tend to lump you with people with whom you have only one thing in common.
And in a world where a bunch of self-proclaimed conservatives are running up deficits and out-loud and proud liberals voted for welfare reform, well, who you gonna call?
The answer to “Who the hell is Harry Reasoner?” in a minute. The guy had a point, though.
In a world where information reproduces like bunnies on steroids and cheap Chardonnay, we often depend on labels rather than thought — let alone research, facts or even simply looking it up. We’re label makers. We lump. We’ve traded thinking for Post-it notes. Just stick it on, and you’re good to go.
We find it easier to explain away a behavior or a thought or a statement with something like “so much conservative nonsense” or “just another flaming liberal” than to have the chops to discuss or debate or rebut.
Or find out.
My high school English teacher pounded me incessantly about lazy thinking, about assuming and shorthand and missing the point badly. He was talking, among other things, about labeling.
My mom said it was simply name-calling.
Harry Reasoner was an anchorman for CBS, when CBS reported the news, unlike in the Rather era, when it too often was the news.
Of course, if you want to slap a label on Harry — or anybody else — go ahead.
Problem is, eventually, the sticky side dries up.

Posted by George Ayoub at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Lennon was gunned downed in front of the Dakota apartment building in New York City 25 years ago today.
That was one day and 39 years after Pearl Harbor, shorthand for the devastation and death that yanked us into World War II.
I have read accounts of the Day of Infamy in my history classes. I have interviewed Pearl Harbor survivors and written their stories. I have realized that, for my parents’ generation, Pearl Harbor was, in some ways, the most momentous day of their lives.
Lennon’s murder does not carry that for me, but he and the Beatles were the accompaniment for my generation. They provided the background music for us when we grew our hair and howled at the moon, when we questioned authority, when we decided (if we have) to grow up. And we were irritated, yet somehow pleased by the familiar and personal, the first time we heard “Strawberry Fields” or “Lady Madonna” in an elevator or grocery store on the Muzak.
I was living in Los Angeles when we got the Lennon call from a friend in New York. We thought it was a story or a joke or something, anything other than the death of a part of our lives.
Young people may wonder why we 50-somethings living on Good Old Days Street in the middle of Geezerville even care.
Simple: It was the music.

Posted by George Ayoub at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, yes. The Alamo Bowl.
Remember?
No, not “Remember the Alamo,” although that has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Remember the Alamo Bowl.
We have history there. Two chapters in the ongoing drama and occasionally sob story known as Husker football have taken place in San Antonio.
In the 1999 Alamo Bowl, we opened up a serious can on Northwestern, beating the Wildcats 66-17 and setting the stage for a gallop through the 2000 schedule … until the debacle in Boulder.
Since then, we have won only a few more than we have lost.
But remember the Alamo. Remember how we waxed Northwestern like cheap linoleum and how it launched us into a No. 2 ranking before the world blew up in Colorado.
In the middle of that plummet, our boys beat Michigan State in the 2003 Alamo Bowl. That was a month after the sacking of Frank Solich, who lately has been looking for a dependable designated driver but then was clearing out his desk.
Assistant Bo Pelini, everybody’s favorite head coach who never was, steered the Huskers to a 17-3 victory. Pelini punctuated his audition with a Category 4 tantrum after begging to differ with the officials over a disputed fumble call.
Poor guy never got a call back from Steve Pederson. The rest is part Husker Nation apoplexy, part petty plotting to launch Pederson back to Pitt and part digging in our heels as push came to a long downhill slide.
I’m counting on the recent funfest in Boulder to move us to the next chapter, something with “rebirth” in the title and a forward by Bill Callahan.
Either way, we’re writing Husker history again in San Antonio, in the spectral shadows of Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, neither of whom knew a cover two from zone blocking.
But that’s OK. All we need to do is remember.

Posted by George Ayoub at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)