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Showing posts from 2011
"Sandwiches That Can Kill You" for a thousand, Alex.
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The Legend of Bucky: A Malvern Boy's Rite of Passage
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It was called the rest home by most in town, but it certainly wasn't the type of place that the elderly go to shuffle up & down hallway corridors aimlessly, or lay in bed waiting out their last days on earth. The group home was in a century-old hotel, just east of Main on 3rd St. For me, it was across the street from Granny's house, across from the Leader Office and directly behind Randy's Tastee Sweet. It was named Nishna Cottage, and it was home for a collection of ex-junkies, the mentally disabled, and other various adults with mental and physical disabilities that, to an impressionable youth, appeared to have been forgotten about by family, if they had any left that would still claim them. The structure itself had served as a hotel in the late 19th early 20th century. It was on the payroll as a state institution, loosely affiliated wit the Glenwood State Hospital & School, a fifteen minute drive west of town. The residents, from what I could tell, were free t
Road Tripping, Bad Baseball in a Great Setting, and Losing Friends Through Snoring
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It's one thing to get a (not so) gentle nudge around 11:15 PM from my wife, who's encouraging me to roll over onto my side and not sleep on my back due to the inevitable louder-than-normal one-man chorus of snoring. It's quite another to hear the soft click of a hotel door at 1:15 AM, when your buddy decides that the best option is to gather his things and leave the room, leaving behind the echoing growls of a slightly overweight human bear, heavily sedated from an 11-hour slow-to-medium beer consumption pace in Wrigleyville after a day-night double-header, and attempt to get his own room with peace and tranquility at $150-a-night, only to be up & on the road by 5:30 AM. Gotta tell you. It was an attention-getter. I wonder how many more HYPHEN -riddled sentences I can jam into this post. I know I've been an above-average snore producer for quite a while now. I would assume that it's from a combination of genetics (my parents are Steve & Edie of snoring
Tuscaloosa: An Incredible Tornado Event
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A very rare combination of all of the essential ingredients needed for incredibly explosive, tornadic storms came together for one afternoon yesterday across the deep south, triggering what will be considered one of, if not THE worst tornado outbreak in recorded history. While not confirmed yet, one particular storm sustained a mesocyclone/circulation/tornado continuously for almost 200 miles, from eastern Mississippi, across the state of Alabama, into northern Georgia, before the storm dissipated entirely, finally, southern North Carolina. This was the fateful storm/tornado that ravaged Tuscaloosa, AL, and went on another 50+ miles, tearing through the north side of Birmingham. It would go on to do more damage as it crossed northeast Alabama, and into northwest Georgia. The majority of the known fatalities from yesterday’s outbreak are from this one supercell thunderstorm. Truly amazing I don’t think this video was taken by a trained spotter or storm chaser, but needless to say
Queens of the Stone Age - Monsters in Your Parasol (2002)
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Wrestlemania 27: Live Stream-of-Consciousness Notes
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A note up front: For at least what is looking like the first hour or two, due to an extremely hyper-needy 14-month old, this isn't going to go real smooth. He's found his voice....and it sounds like a loud, inaudible 14-month old. This will be the post that will update every 5-10 minutes or so. So, what have you done with your entire day to quell the overwhelming anticipation?? T-Minus 5 minutes till the Grandest Stage of Them All begins once again. Dating back to a young, impressionable 7 year-old, Wrestlemania was always the larger-than-life event to me, where my boyhood heroes became legend. SO what's my excuse now? Well... Um.... I guess I keep thinking that it will be as entertaining to me as it was in the mid to late 90's, during the peak of the "Monday Night Wars". Wrestling certainly wasn't what it was in my childhood anymore. Raunchy, bloody, extreme, immature....entertaining. It appears that this Wrestlemania is trying to tap into that
My Recent Unhealthy Hockey Fixation
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There's a window of time in the late winter, the time when football season is over, and baseball season is a still a couple months away. From the time between the Daytona 500 and the beginning of March Madness, there was never much for me to latch on to, from a sports standpoint. Sure, back in my formative years I would watch the NBA with a fair amount of passion. Even college basketball would satisfy me. it was my favorite sport to play, and it was fun to keep tabs on a team or two. But as I've gotten older, my playing days long since pased, basketball simply doesn't hold my attention like it used to. Enter the game of ice hockey. The grand game embraced as Canada's National Pastime, played by a bunch of tough, toothless Northerners, preferably on a frozen pond with sub-zero temperatures. For a long time, I had a hard time looking at hockey players in the same sense of any other professional athlete. They looked like guys you'd see at your local bar, never