Random, random, random thoughts

• Were Rachel and Monica really the hottest I've ever seen them at the beginning of the fifth season of Friends -- perhaps not so much in that picture -- or do I just think that because I'm comparing them to Phoebe, who was then "nine months pregnant"? Seriously, it wasn't long after that Rachel cut her hair short (bad move) and Monica grew hers long (bad move).
• To the people who were forced to stand behind me in line at Qdoba immediately after I ran 5 miles and immediately before I showered, sorry.
• Death Cab's new album is growing on me, Pinetop Seven is not as good as I hoped, I can't get into "K-Hole" on my Silver Jews album, Illinois by Sufjan Stevens is not getting old, but nothing beats finally putting 2Pac's Greatest Hits on my iPod and finding out it came off my scratched CD clean as a whistle. You know, see?
• hwong sure is hwaving fun with medical school, by which I mean it occasionally makes her wish she never had the idea to become a doctor in the first place. She was involved in two childbirths on Sunday. The mothers were grateful, but a little confused when hwong swaddled their children in law-school pamphlets.
• I'll miss wearing pajamas so much once it gets warm. It's the next-best thing to wearing an electric blanket as a toga. Actually, that sounds stupid, so wearing pajamas is the best thing. Hands down. Unless you're wearing a toga. In which case, hands up, and keep that puppy connected. Unless you're Rachel. Or Monica. From Season 5. (Best season, hands down.)
• How's that urge to strangle me working out for you?
• Check out these songs (in most cases, I love the song but could care less about anything else by the artist):
• "Breathe Me", Sia
• "Goodnight Moon", Shivaree
• "Winter", Joshua Radin
• "When I Get You Alone", Thicke
• "Dreaming Of You", The Coral
• "Brothers In Arms", Dire Straits
• "Tuesday's Gone", Lynyrd Skynyrd
• "Feeding The Fire", No Use For A Name
• "Anti-Manifesto", Propagandhi
• "Canned Heat", Jamiroquai
• "Snow", Loreena McKennit
• "Un Giorno Migliore", Luna Pop
• "Tapin' Up My Heart", The Mr. T Experience

Not a finger!

May there be moist turkeys in heaven for Darren McGavin, dead at 83.

Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigaro

Dinner and opera -- "Barber of Seville" -- Friday night. I nodded off in the first act, was wide awake for the second and started to get fidgety near the finale. But it was well done, if you don't count when the supertitle went on the fritz and a Windows prompt showed up!

Fourteen miles to run Saturday, plus I have to cook something for a pot-luck. How about Chex Mix?

I laughed so hard I spat

Not at this picture -- at the name of the band in the picture. Has anybody ever heard of these cats?

I love it

Read this from almost exactly two years ago, then this. I know I'm a little late on this, but it's awesome.

Something I don't remotely understand

Oklahoma State officials have said that even though Eddie Sutton is on a medical leave of absence, any Cowboys victories will go on his record.

Sorry? Is there any precedent for that? Maybe there is, but imagine if Sutton's son Sean, the current coach, wins another five games this season to reach 800 "for Eddie" and Eddie's not on the bench to celebrate it? That'd be an anticlimactic-disingenuous smoothie. Yuck.

The longest shower of my life

That was at least 20 minutes. But it followed the coldest run of my life, in something like 22 degrees. The park is still snowy and icy in some stretches, and it was very weird that the last song my iPod spat out on shuffle before I left was "Running On Ice" by Billy Joel.

I can't take much more winter. It's so hard for me to start my runs slow when it's so, so cold. It's almost as if my body panics. Even today, I did a full stretch in the apartment before heading out, and I still whipped through two sub-7 miles at the start, entirely without meaning to. I slowed down later to finish at a 7:50 pace for 12 miles, but I was whupped at the end. Frustrating.

Anybody have any suggestions, other than to hibernate?

OS X

If you write a limerick rhyming "pirate" and "ran great," stick to computering.

I'm nerding it up myself inside on this 10-degree day, cozily filling in a 25-column spreadsheet for fantasy-baseball purposes.

The low on Saturday is gonna be 12

So yeah, I think I'll switch my 13-miler with my off-day, and go out there Sunday instead. Why risk reacting to unprecedented cold (unprecedented for me to run in) with an injury?

I'm a pretty bad blogger now, I realize. Sort of a binge blogger, on weekends. But writing every day for a living has taken some of the urgency out of blogging. However, I still intend to bring you the salient events of my life; I just can't promise to do it cleverly at all.

It's getting to be late February, and I'm giddy about fantasy baseball and the NCAA tournament. But I'm peeved that Sawyer is becoming cartoonishly evil on Lost. He'll have to grow his mustache a little bit so he can twirl it and chortle.

Here's what else I think about Lost: It's getting lazy. At the beginning, when everybody crashed and met each other (and when the show was new and unproven to viewers), J.J. Abrams was obligated to develop many characters in a short period of time.

But now they've met. And we've met them. And the show is a massive hit and will continue to be so. And I just feel that characters whose flashback it isn't that week are just saying their lines. I'm not feeling the conflict, I'm not feeling as compelled.

But of course, it's still very good. It's just not great, and it hasn't been, this year. That's inevitable; most shows lose steam. I just hope Abrams doesn't think his is immune to that phenomenon, and that he'll inject some more humor to offset the direness (other than Hurley saying "Dude" and patting his perm).

This is America... guys get shot in the face all the time!

"I would shoot with Dick Cheney everywhere, anywhere, and not think twice about it," she said. But she said, "The nature of quail shooting ensures that this will happen. It goes with the turf."

Really? Then would it be fair to say that the turf is a stupid place to be?

What I'm doing

Listening to:

• Tanglewood Numbers, Silver Jews
• Illinois, Sufjan Stevens
• Plans, Death Cab for Cutie
• Songs for Silverman, Ben Folds
• End of Love, Clem Snide
• Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, Pinetop Seven
• From a Basement on the Hill, Elliott Smith
• To expunge it from my head after hearing it in so many commercials -- "Daydream Believer", The Monkees
• Ditto -- "Livin' Thing", ELO
• Audio version of the Appalachian-Trail memoir A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

Reading:

• The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
• AV Club interview with Dan Savage

Watching:

• Lost
• Grey's Anatomy
• Scrubs
• The Daily Show
• The Colbert Report
• Reruns of Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond
• Jeopardy
  

I smell

I ran my 12 miles -- 7:26 pace -- and since my gyros place is closed Sundays, I stopped in O'Sheas for a Dark Side of the Moon (half-pint Guinness poured over half-pint Blue Moon) and bacon cheeseburger. My waitress Clarissa remarked that "you smell the way I smelled when I used to run."

I said, "Thanks." Later, she must have felt badly about it, because when "Run for Life" by Melissa Etheridge came on the radio, she sat down at my booth and talked about how the song's given her goosebumps ever since she had a tumor eight months ago. Benign, luckily. But that was two consecutive conversations in which I had no idea what to say.

And, of course, it was only a matter of time before Dick Cheney shot an old man. A campaign contributor, no less! How quickly they forget...

"I am the Jesus Christ of politics."

It doesn't seem so long ago that I lived in Rome a few miles from this guy. What a lunatic.

Off to run an 11-miler in the park. We got zero inches of snow, and I've never been more excited by a snowfall amount. Sorry, Delaware Valley, for the 18 inches you got.

Presidents in love

An nauseating excerpt from this:

Another no-nonsense woman, Barbara Bush, got a treacly note from her husband, George, asking her to show more affection for the television cameras in the 1988 campaign, like their opponents, the Dukakises.

"Sweetsie," he began. "Please look at how Mike and Kitty do it. Try to be closer in more -- well er romantic -- on camera. I am practicing the loving look, and the creeping hand. Yours for better TV and more demonstrable affection. Your sweetie pie coo coo.

"Love 'ya GB."

WHEW

I had a computer scare tonight. I thoughtlessly clicked on Windows Updates, installed XP Service Pack 2, and discovered that it sucked and was very slow. I discovered this a year ago and somehow forgot.

So I removed SP2 but then my computer wouldn't start Windows! It asked me for a password, which it hadn't done ever, and it wouldn't take anything I gave it, even no password. So I put in the Windows recovery disk, fully prepared to have to format the drive or something, but after 40 minutes it managed to fix whatever the hell was wrong and get me back to exactly where I was.

Anyway, it doesn't sound as daunting as it was. There's something about computer trouble that makes me irrationally upset, way more upset than I get at anything else. Maybe it's because I couldn't hack it as a compsci major and I switched to polisci, so I'm bitter.

All's well that ends with me being able to rank fantasy baseball free agents.

Nope

No running diary for the Super Bowl. I've got to prepare for my fantasy baseball free agent draft. One form of nerdiness supplants another.

And please, please, please vote for Barry.

Hurray for me

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Barry's getting robbed!

Puppy Bowl II is on, and it is the latest idea that I wish I had.

The premise: Animal Planet draws non-football fans by putting 14 puppies in a fake football arena and giving them a bunch of toys and a water bowl and letting them do whatever they want. They nap and eat during commercial breaks. At "halftime", kittens frolic.

Two disturbing trends so far:
1) You can vote for Most Valuable Puppy, and Barry -- who is far and away the feistiest, spurring much of the action by fighting bigger dogs and sprinting laps around the little field -- is getting drubbed. I think voters are picking the Cutest Puppy, but that is not in the spirit of the world. I'll admit Barry isn't much to look at, but he gets the job done. Vote for Barry.
2) Every time one of the puppies has an accident, he is penalized! A creepy guy in a referee uniform stomps onto the field, throws a flag, and announces "intentional grounding" or some other pseudo-entendre that would normally make you chuckle. But as I said before, the guy is creepy, and he has an earring. No self-respecting referee would wear an earring on the field, but since this guy is, in fact, refereeing a game involving puppies, I'm guessing his self-respect may be less than it normally is. Plus, he has to clean up the "intentional groundings," so no wonder he looks pissed.

Anyway, it's on four times today: 3-6, 6-9, 9-midnight, midnight-3.

Quite the busy Saturday

On my way to have Firestone perform a minor repair on my car, I was on the short end of a hit and run. Luckily, I wasn't hurt and the guy hit me square on from behind and it was only 10 mph or so, but I pulled over so we could exchange information and he took off.

An open letter to people.

Dear People,
You suck.

Cordially,
E.S.C.

So then I drew upon my wrath to bust out a 39:36 6-miler, probably the quickest pace for that far since cross-country training in high school. 6:36 pace per mile. Then hwong14 and I had a lunch date with other med school couples, meant to introduce med students' significant others to each other. So it looks like I'll one day soon be getting pedicures alongside a half dozen wives of future doctors.

Then I watched National Treasure -- quite a shallow movie, but good enough for Netflix -- and then we had a dinner party where everyone made their own pork dumplings and stuck forks in the same fish. And then we watched Grizzly Man, the documentary about a documentary being made about bears by a guy who eventually was eaten by a bear.

Sunday is a much more lightly planned day: Wake up around noon and watch the Super Bowl. Go Stullers.

Ummmm...

Well, here are the "celebrities" whose faces mine "resembles."

Zayed Khan (yes, that Zayed Khan). 71% match.

Timothy Leary. 65% match.

Hugh Grant. 64% match.

Eric Idle. 60% match.

John Cusack. 59% match.

Things of the week

Song of the week: "Angel Band" by the Stanley Brothers ... actually, the version by the Wharvey Gals and the railroad soothsayer from the end of O Brother, Where Art Thou? It haunts me.

Other song of the week: "Goin' Back to Cali" by Biggie ... funny how it seems slower if you listen to it while running.

Strange keyboard affliction of the week: My "e" key keeps giving me two e's or zero e's when I type it once. You don't want that.

Sad realization of the week: I don't read books anymore.

Oh yeah, old photo of the week: Me at Halloween 2004 in Philly.

I miss not having a job.

Only because time seemed to go slower then. Although it went so slowly, I went nuts. Could time kindly go faster than that and slower than it is now?