Not Just For Pizza Anymore

Ah, pepperoni. Who doesn't love you? Along with bacon, you go with anything.

Everyone is familiar with the classic cheese and pepperoni pizza. But I keep pepperoni around for my sandwiches. A few on a simple ham and cheese or even a plain old bologna sandwich give lunch a neat little kick. And now that I'm exclusively using whole wheat bread, it's healthy too.

Whenever I'm in Hessel in Michigan's glorious Upper Peninsula, I like to eat at an Italian restaurant called Ang-Gio's in nearby Cedarville. They have among other menu offerings one great cheese and pepperoni pizza themselves. But I love their all you can eat soup and salad bar, because it has more than vegetables. Along with black olives, and it's hard to go wrong with black olives, friends, their salad bar always has pepperoni, with which you can pile onto, er, top off your salad. Plus it's salad, so it's healthy, right?

Bacon? Absolutely. Give some thought to pepperoni too. 

Temporary Crowns

Today is the day after, so to speak, and I'm wearing temporary crowns. On my teeth, because, you know, the crown on my head just won't come off. 

They're plastic, these temporaries, and they feel weird. They feel like those lead weights that you put on car wheels to balance them. You know what I mean? The ones that taste like metal?

Oh, for Heaven's sake. These things: Lead weight

It feels exactly like one those things are sitting inside my mouth. I know you know what I mean, that odd taste and feeling.

What's that? How do I know about the taste and feel?

Oh, would you lookit the time? I gotta get to work.

What Today Brings

Yesterday I had dental work done. It was supposed to be this Thursday, tomorrow as it is now, but my dentist had a spot come open at 5:30 Tuesday so I took it. May as well get things over with, right?

Almost immediately upon accepting the change of plans, the dread set in. No one really looks forward to major dental work, do they? Certainly not I. Now instead of living through the mental agony of the wait on Thursday I got to live through it Tuesday. Oh joy, oh rapture.

But that has its advantages. Tomorrow it'll be all behind me, and I'll get to watch baseball Opening Day live. My beloved Detroit Tigers first pitch of the season is set for 3:10 Thursday. I'd likely miss it if bound to the dentist's chair in the dental lair. Believe it or not, I nearly rescheduled my original appointment simply to catch the opener. Honest. Things, then, may be working out well after all.

As to the tooth work done and how I feel, well, that's Thursday's blog now, isn't it? Hopefully I won't be like Dr. Smith. You know, Dr. Smith: "Oh the pain, the pain." The accidental stowaway from Lost in Space? Remember he and the Robot and Will Robinson used to hang out. Do I have to explain everything?

The Other Traffic Extreme

Everyone, well, every one of you leadfoots out there anyway, hate it when people drive less than 120 miles an hour in the fast lane. I get that. The fast lane is for the passers, so you ought to let them pass. But there's an opposite side of that coin too: don't race in the curb, slow, lane.

As I drive a lot for my job I do try to stay out of the fast lane unless passing, and these days I will stomp onto the accelerator when so doing, getting back to the right once beyond the obstructing vehicle. Yet there are those numbskulls who want to ride my tailgate in the right lane.

Look, dude, if I'm already five miles over the posted speeds in the slow lane and you can get around me, and you almost always can, then get the Hell around me. You shouldn't tailgate me anyways, but if you do it in the slow lane my foot is coming off the gas, buddy. I've slowed down as far as 35 in those cases. Even if I'm impeding you, because of course you have somewhere critical to get to I'm sure, then you're going to rear end me at as slow a pace as I can force upon the situation.

So, drivers, you wanna speed? Be in the left lane. If you're in the right lane speeding you're the dangerous driver, not me.

Rant. Over.

In Review

It's nice to be garnering the amount of reviews which my books have been getting lately. It helps that the bulk of them are positive; three tales are averaging above four on Amazon's five star ranking system while the one book below that is still 3.9, so I'm happy. And as with so many other things in life, with the results I'm getting I wish I'd taken more interest in direct promotion much earlier than this. But so it goes, and there's always a degree to which self promotion should be uncomfortable, I think.

Even some of the less stellar reviews are helpful. One person remarked that I use adverbs too often. I don't use them as frequently as she claims (adverbs are nowhere near in every paragraph I write, despite her assertion) but I do overuse them. I'll be careful about that in the future. I will readily, unceasingly, routinely avoid them.

That's an adverb joke. Seriously, though, if you want to have fun with adverbs, look up Tom Swifties. Some of them are hilarious.

The compliments I'm receiving are nice ego builders but are fraught with peril for exactly that reason. They can go to your head. I know me well enough to know that that's dangerous. I suppose the best idea is to take the positives with a grain of salt and the negatives with a reasonably thick skin.

Anyway, I'll stick to the plan and see where it leads. It's been a fun ride so far.

I Just Watch Sportsball

There's a Monty Python skit - bear with me, Ron - where John Cleese plays an oaf a soccer player who can hardly put a sentence together while Eric Idle is an interviewer trying to get into the intricacies of the game. Cleese answers a question, "I kicked the ball, then there it was, in the back of the net." That was in response to Idle asking about the positioning of the opposing players and blah, blah about what deep strategies led to the goal. It's clear that even Cleese doesn't get it. He's just a guy who scored a goal, a deer in the headlights of a self important reporter.

I feel like the Cleese character these days, when watching sports. When did they become so complicated?

Watching golf early this morning, a replay of an earlier event, the broadcasters were describing a shot where so-and-so was taking advantage of such-and-such by using a club with a 52 degree head angle rather than 51.5, which was surprising considering tons of various other factors including that the club shaft was a rare Uruguayan titanium alloy and it had rained six hours ago in northeast Ohio while a local woman delivered twins in the back of a taxi with the help of a well I won't go into that. All the while I'm thinking, about the golfer, "He hit the ball well."

I see it in other games too. A shortstop throws a batter out at first base and the announcers describe the play as though they're writing War and Peace. Meanwhile I'm slapping my son on the shoulder, shouting, "Did you see that throw?"

All right, players are looking for every possible advantage and reporters want to sound like they know what they're taking about. But it doesn't add a thing to the game for me, and I doubt most others. And I can't help wonder if any of it really makes a difference anyway.

Irish Folk Songs, or, A Long Way To Go For A Very Poor Attempt At Humor

Perhaps my favorite Irish folk song is Whiskey on a Sunday. You can listen to The Irish Rovers take on the tune here if you like.

Believe it or not, there's a lot more to Irish folk music than The Unicorn.  Whiskey on a Sunday is one example of that. Still, irreverent Marty can't help but take a swat at the tune. Maybe that's the Irish in him acting up.

Seth Davy is the main figure in the song. The third verse begins, 'And sad to relate that old Seth Davy died, in Nineteen Hundred and Four,'. Yes, we're supposed to feel pathos then, and I generally do. Indeed I have had a tear come to me eye at that point in the song. Yet does that keep me from mockery? No. I sometimes find myself asking, So it would not have been so sad to relate had he died in 1903 or 1905?

I still love the song. Despite me, some days.