Congratulations to the Carolina football team on their most improbable win last night against #4 Miami in Kenan Stadium. That was hands-down the best football game I’ve ever been to in my entire life. The whole game I was never quite letting myself buy into even thinking that we could win. When that kick sailed through the uprights it was like having an out of body experience. The whole place went crazy.
After the game, and even still today, I’m absolutely stunned. The scene in Chapel Hill was surreal. We stayed and watched the celebration on the field for a good 15 minutes or so, and then we just kinda walked out into the night, heading aimlessly towards Franklin Street along with thousands of others. It was as if all these people had just experienced some traumatic experience and were just walking because they needed to walk somewhere, talking because they needed someone to talk to about what they had just witnessed. Unbelievable.
I’m not sure what this means for our program or John Bunting or the rest of the season or anything, but none of that really matters right now. Regardless of what happens after this, we will always have that cool fall night under the lights in Kenan Stadium, a night where boys became men and memories will become legend as this story is told and re-told through the years.
You earned it last night, Carolina, and no one can ever take that away from you.
Go Heels.
As most of you know I’ve been league bowling since last summer. I bowl with two guys that I met in a business group here in Greensboro, Joe and Tim. Joe used to be a semi-professional bowler, meaning that he’d travel around to various tournaments as a means of supporting himself and paying the bills. Since Tim and I have known Joe he’s told us that he’d get a 300 for us one night in league. He’s done it 18 times before. Well, last night it happened, and it was awesome.
I think I got a taste last night of what it’s like to be part of a no-hitter in baseball. When someone’s on a 300-pace, you don’t talk about it. It’s like Fight Club. Joe has come close a few other times since we’ve been bowling together but he usually taps in the 7th or 8th frame. Once he got through the 8th last night I knew something was going on.
It was really pretty cool, though I found myself struggling to find things to talk to him about while Tim was up that weren’t about the game. “Uh, so I hear there’s going to be a lunar eclipse tonight and stuff.” Smooth, Jamie.
So the cool thing was about the 9th frame you could hear people around us whispering about it. People started to gather around our lane, but not too obviously. It really is a weird dynamic.
Joe’s 12th and final strike was a bit off mark but it carried and he had his 19th 300. The place went nuts. People were coming by for like the next hour to shake his hand and say congrats. It was pretty cool.
The funny thing about this is that Tim and I both kinda suck. Not just compared to Joe, but compared to most other folks in the league. We were having sub-par games even for us while Joe was bowling his perfect game. We ended up winning our game by 90 pins, which was all Joe since he normally averages a 210. We were excited for Joe but scared for us. We had decided that if Joe bowled a 300 and we still lost that the American Bowling Congress would come to our doors and take our cards away. 
In the end, Tim and I have decided that we are the ugly girls to Joe’s hot chick. Every now and then we’ll string some strikes together and get some high-fives, but in the end it’s all about Joe. That’s who everyone is there to see.
I wouldn’t have it any other way though. I have a blast with those guys each week. Bowling has been a real release for me over the past year. I’ve met some great people, drank some beers, and got to experience special moments like last night. You just can’t beat that.
It seems that Carmelo Anthony of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets was cited for marijuana possession while boarding the team plane last week. In a shocking statement, ‘Melo said that the wacky was left in his backpack by “a friend”. No way.
Now in this particular instance I’m actually inclined to believe him. I’m not sure why, but despite being named ‘Melo, Anthony doesn’t strike me as one to smoke up. What I find amusing about this particular incident is the use of Celebrity Excuse #2 in response to charges of doing something stupid. Celebrity Excuse #1 is of course “I was misquoted.” Celebrity Excuse #2 is “It was my friend’.”
It wasn’t Randy Moss’ weed they found in his car a few years ago. Nooooo. It was his friend’s. It wasn’t Ray Lewis who stabbed that dude at the Super Bowl. It was his friends. Well, okay, in that case it was his friends.
My point is that these athletes sure must go through friends pretty fast. How many people that you know from back in the day can you throw under the bus each time you assault someone or get caught with drugs before your out of friends? I would imagine that given the rate these athletes tend to find themselves in trouble, it gets harder to find friends that uh, well, did it.
That’s why I’ve decided to start a new service. Jamie’s Celebrity Rent-A-Friend. It’s going to be like a recruiting service for celebrities, primarily athletes, to help them find “friends” to take the fall for the stupid stuff that they do. You see, it won’t be hard to find people because everybody likes to hang out with celebs. One of my ads might look like this.
“WANTED. Crew to roll with <insert athlete name here>. Must be funny but not annoying, be able to hold your drank, and prolific in Madden 2004 on X-box or Playstation 2. Great perks.”
That’s it. Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that job. So then the friend hangs out with the celeb for a few months and everything is going good. Then the celeb does something stupid and he’s like, “C’mon, homey. I can’t be going to no jail for driving this tree into this here church. Switch seats with me and say it was you. I’ll get you the best lawyer. When you get out we can go back to playin’ Madden every day.”
It’s just that easy. I think my business will be a smashing success because a.) as I said, people like to hang out with celebrities and b.) celebrities are on the road a lot so it’s probably hard for them to find new friends once they’ve sent all their other friends to the state pen. They’ll be happy to have a service like mine. I’m going to make a mint! 
My friend and blizzog reader E-Fab sent the following e-mail to our crew of friends this morning…
Here’s a list of things I could do this weekend while I’m in Boston…
- attend the national conference on health care and domestic violence (the reason for my trip)…if time allows J
- attend the inaugural gala of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
- attend the Head of the Charles (River) Regatta
- attend the Jets/Patriots game
- attend game 1 of the World Series!!!! (or watch it at the “Cheers” replica bar with Sam and Carla)
- Eat baked beans, cream pie, and chowda
How crazy is this city going to be???
I’m taking my Boston to English dictionary, wish me luck J
I would imagine that the Boston to English Dictionary is quite heavy and will be uncomfortable to lug around. As you know, we here at the blizzog promote a variety of healthy lifestyle choices, one of which is maintaining proper back alignment.
To that end, we here at the blizzog are proud to present E-Fab with The blizzog’s Wicked Abridged Boston to English Dictionary. Feel free to clip this out and carry it with you on your travels. It will be much lighter than the full dictionary and has everything you need.
wicked ahwsum - very good, desirable. As in, “My new Pedro jersey is wicked awhsum.”
wicked pissah - very bad, undesirable. As in, “I had a wicked pissah of a headache this mawhning afta rioting all night.”
Sully, Murph, and Bon-ahh - the names of your fake friends in Boston. It seems everyone from Boston has friends with goofy names like this, so dropping them where appropriate should get you most things that you want. For example, “My boys Sully, Murph, and Bon-ahh tell me you got wicked awhsum chowda hee-ah. Can I get a bee-ah?.”
Hmmm. I think that should about do it. I should note that I’ve only been to Boston twice, and one of those times I was like 5, but I have watched Cheers and Good Will Hunting alot, so I’m pretty sure that this will get you through your trip.
Have fun, E-Fab!
So it’s 11:30 and even though I should be in bed I’m up watching Game 6 of the ALCS between the Red Sox and Yankees. Wow, do I hate the Yankees. I’m not really a Red Sox fan, but them beating the Yankees and moving on to and hopefully winning the World Series will do a grand number of things for me. 1.) I won’t have to watch the Yankees in the World Series AGAIN. Seriously, it’s getting to be like the Grammy’s and the Best Song By Sting award they give out every year. It’s like in the bag from the get-go that the Yanks are going to be in the Fall Classic almost every year. 2.) I won’t have to listen to crybaby Red Sox fans carry on about the curse and how they never win anything and blah-freaking-blah.
(I should note how classy it is of the Yankees fans to be throwing things on the field right now to the point that they are having to clear the field and warn the fans about their behavior. A-Rod cheated. Get over it. You know it’s a game when the police in riot gear show up. Classic.)
So, Go Red Sox! NO-MMMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!……oh wait…uh,…….CABRERAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH….or something. Just doesn’t have that same ring, does it?
Dad’s heart cath didn’t quite work out how we wanted it to today, but the news isn’t all bad. I’ve learned a lot since I made my last post and need to clarify a few things. One, Dad had a stress test a month or so ago that indicated that one part of his heart didn’t have the throughput that it should. The likely candidate was this bypass of the bypass I mentioned the other day from back in 1997. I thought they knew for sure that it was this one. It turns out that they didn’t.
I also thought that Dad was having acutal surgery today, and he didn’t. The original plan was to go in today with the cath and find out which of the arteries was really blocked. Once they found it, they were hoping that they could put a stent in it that would open it back up and let Dad start feeling better almost right away. This is an outpatient procedure and isn’t technically surgery, so sorry for overstating things the other day.
What ended up happening today was that once they got the cath up into Dad’s heart, they realized that it wasn’t the bypass-bypass that was blocked, but that one of his original three bypasses from ‘88 had pretty much broken down. The vein that they used for the bypass is pretty much shot and not really letting much through right now.
The good news was that he had started to build “helper” vessels around the blockage on his own, but they are pretty small and not big enough to get the job done. To help them get bigger, the cardiologist is recommending that Dad try a relatively new therapy regimen called Enhanced External Counterpulsation (or EECP, for short).
EECP is kind of a weird concept, but it goes like this. An hour a day, five days a week, for seven weeks, you come into the doctor’s office and lay on the table. They hook these long cuffs up to your legs that are very much like the cuffs used to take blood pressure. They also hook you up to a computer that monitors your heart beat. The cuffs then expand and contract in time with your heartbeat such that higher than normal amounts of blood are “milked” back into your coronary arteries.
The benefits appear to be two-fold. One, it helps these helper vessels grow bigger and stronger. Two, it helps the overall strength of the heart. The effects of the treatment after the initial seven weeks are supposed to last for about 5 years. My Dad’s cardiologist said that about 70% of people respond very well to this and are able to resume normal activity in short order. I found a good article about EECP on About.com and it seems pretty cool.
So, while we’re all bummed that they couldn’t put the stent in to provide some immediate relief, we are happy that we at least have this promising option still available to us. Dad’s still at the hospital right now but we get to go bring him home at 2 today.
So, that’s the latest from here. Thanks to all of you for your kind words of support over the past few days. We all really appreciate it.
For those of you that don’t know already, I’m hopping a plane home to Ohio later today so I can be there when my dad undergoes heart surgery Friday morning. Dad suffered a heart attack in 1988 that required triple bypass surgery. In 1997 one of those three bypasses became blocked so they bypassed that one again. Well, that pesky 3rd bypass of the bypass is clogging up again, so they are going to put a stint in it to help keep it open for the long haul. They are going to try to do this all via a leg cath which they will snake up to his heart to install the stint. Should that not work they are going to have to open him up which is obviously more serious.
Everyone expects that the leg thing should be just fine and we’re all expecting the best. I know that my family would certainly appreciate it if you kept Dad in your thoughts and prayers over the next few days. I know that I’m certainly pulling for him and that you all will be too.
More later from home as this unfolds.
It was on this date 8 years ago that AG and I had our very first date. It was at Ham’s in Chapel Hill. We had a quick lunch before running back to band practice before the Maryland game. We had only been formally introduced a week earlier at a party at Jigga’s house by a common friend.
I had the Three Cheese Burger and of course did all of the talking. I don’t remember what AG - then AD - had to eat, but I do remember that she barely said a word the whole time. I’d like to tell you that it was love at first sight and that I knew right then we’d be together forever, but that would be a lie. The truth is that I didn’t think that our date went that well at all because she barely spoke. I thought she didn’t like me. It turns out that she was just Silent Bob.
Obviously we moved on past that first encounter and have had many more dates at many more fine establishments like Ham’s since then. And AG shed her Silent Bob persona around me and started talking. A lot.Â
So while other people celebrate Columbus’ discovery of the New World today, I’ll be celebrating my discovery of a new world with my Not-So-Silent Bob.Â
I got sick of waiting for the next version of .Text to come out so I broke down and implemented my own “preview” feature on the home page. Now for posts that are longer than 75 words, you’ll see a little [More] link. Just click that to get uh, well, more. It doesn’t show up for stuff that is less than 75 words. Hopefully this will make the site a bit easier to read and give the more recent posts a chance to catch your attention.
You’ll also notice that my grill is back on the home page. AG hates it but I think it’s kinda funny. I also think it embodies what I want the blizzog to be, which is me but unkempt, goofy, and not always in the best light. I’ll try to find a better one but that one stays for now. Werd.
Although it got off to a bit of a shaky start, I think I’m going to like the new combination of Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler hosting SNL’s “Weekend Update”. I’m pretty sure this marks the first time in the history of the show that two women have shared anchoring duties. Given the extremely deep cast of talented female players on the show, it seems that there couldn’t be a better time for this new twist. Poehler didn’t seem very comfortable in the format on the season premiere, but I think it’s something she’ll grow into over time. I also liked Rachel Dratch’s “Debbie Downer” character, though the skit they did with her this past week was not nearly as funny as the one they did when Lindsay Lohan hosted towards the end of last season.
Here’s hoping that SNL finds its legs this season with this latest edition of the cast. This past week’s premiere didn’t exactly blow me away, so I hope they get it together. If not, I guess Tivo will just have to start recording “Cheaters” instead.
