{"id":566,"date":"2012-12-01T23:00:26","date_gmt":"2012-12-02T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/?p=566"},"modified":"2012-12-09T00:34:40","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T06:34:40","slug":"saturday-sports-and-such","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/2012\/12\/01\/saturday-sports-and-such\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Sports and Such"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>1. How &#8217;bout those Broncos?<br \/>\n2. Leftovers and cupcakes<br \/>\n3. The badger is a dangerous animal<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>I. How &#8217;bout those Broncos?<\/h3>\n<p>It&#8217;s a weak football weekend; it&#8217;s just &#8216;championship&#8217; games and other season-enders, such as that embarrassing Oregon State affair (it was supposed to be their first game of the season). Our TV doesn&#8217;t really receive (m)any channels, but ESPN lets me catch some games on the computer, though usually the selection stinks.<\/p>\n<p>Today I got lucky and could watch the second half of BSU vs. Nevada down in Reno. Last night my father called and left a message; I heard it and noticed that his voice was nearly gone &#8230; so I suspect he didn&#8217;t make the flight or drive to watch the game. Though I&#8217;m also sure he would have loved to have been there.<\/p>\n<p>For those who do not follow BSU football (and I only do, really, because of the family connection), Nevada has ruined BSU&#8217;s season the past two year running. This year BSU is having an off-year anyway, though still as good or better than most expected or hoped for. And this time they scored early and often against the Wolfpack.<\/p>\n<p>But oh that Nevada quarterback &#8230; fast, dangerous &#8230; able to get away from five men chasing him in the backfield on third down and make a first down out of it. A little stop here, another there, and suddenly BSU can&#8217;t run out the clock and with only 17 seconds remaining Nevada has the ball and, a couple plays later, a last gasp to try to reach the endzone and win it.<\/p>\n<p>This year, though, they fall short, and BSU celebrates &#8230; though not for want of trying to give the game away (where did the defense go in the 4th quarter?).<\/p>\n<p>And so when I do talk with my father &#8212; when his voice is back, when we get around to calling each other &#8212; we&#8217;ll have this game to talk about.<\/p>\n<h3>II. Leftovers and cupcakes<\/h3>\n<p>We only have two episodes of &#8216;Oz&#8217; remaining now. Tobias is back in Emerald City, and Cyril avoided death &#8230; for now. It was touching and very well acted and directed. I&#8217;ll be sad to see this show go; seasons ago I never would have suspected that I&#8217;d care about Cyril. I also never would have suspected the warden of being quite this dense. Ah, Ernie.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in the day we also got in an episode of &#8216;The X-Files&#8217; &#8230; &#8220;Ice,&#8221; the season 1 episode that (1) is basically an &#8216;X-Files&#8217; take on &#8216;The Thing,&#8217; and (b) an introduction of sorts to the black oil we get later. And oh does Xander Berkeley look relatively young here &#8230; I&#8217;d most recently seen him in some episodes of &#8216;Nikita&#8217; before I stopped watching that show. I was trying to place where&#8217;d seen Jeff Kober (the pilot) before &#8230; then I recalled that he&#8217;s in &#8216;Buffy&#8217; for a while. And Felicity Huffman &#8230; the &#8216;guest star&#8217; list for this episode is sort of interesting after-the-fact.<\/p>\n<p>Leftovers. Recycling.<\/p>\n<p>Today I finished the last of the baked penne &amp; cheese. Still delicious. It went well with a side of red beans &#8230; a big batch I made several days ago. And today I opened the bag of mustard greens &#8230; a bit spicier on their own than the turnip greens, but also a bit more tender, taking less time cooking to be soft and such. Simmer them in a bit of vegetable broth, mustard, and cider vinegar, sprinkled with red pepper flakes, and you have a tasty and healthful side dish. Even 4oz fresh will yield only about 28-30 calories.<\/p>\n<p>We also had cupcakes left over from the batch Ms. S. bought and decorated for me (ah, Stargate symbols all over them), and so first I calculated my &#8220;real&#8221; food for the day and then allowed myself to fill in some blanks with cupcake treats.<\/p>\n<p>This evening, though, I feared the girls were going to kill me, take my cupcake, and then devour my corpse. Ms. S. was in the bedroom getting ready for work. I sat on the sofa, cupcake in hand, and was licking the frosting from its top. Suddenly A appeared to my left and stepped on to my thigh, eyeing my cupcake with great feline desire. I was able to palce my arm and body between her and the pastry, but as I peeled back paper and presented its moist chocolate body to my waiting teeth, E sprang up on the back of the sofa and appoached along the sofa&#8217;s arm along my right side, where she then perched herself hawklike. Me or the cupcake &#8230; I was almost ready to give it to them and run away in fear &#8230; but never, ever show fear to a cat.<\/p>\n<p>They only ever paw us or sniff us to see whether we&#8217;re alive. If we&#8217;re close enough to death, or if we show fear &#8230; they&#8217;ll pounce.<\/p>\n<p>So I swallowed that delightful little cake, folded its paper wrapper, stood, and strode from the cats with authority.<\/p>\n<p>Never let them see you sweat.<\/p>\n<h3>III. The badger is a dangerous animal<\/h3>\n<p>And then there are the Cornhuskers &#8230; I suspect all they did today was sweat. And lose.<\/p>\n<p>They were supposed to win this game handily &#8230; they&#8217;d only lost twice, they had a better record, and the Badgers had lost three of their last four, ending up 3rd in their division and 7-5 overall (4-4 in the conference).<\/p>\n<p>And yet when I check in midway through the 3rd quarter the game is 63-17 in favor of Wisconsin.<\/p>\n<p>It was also a game that ESPN was not showing online (or perhaps at all), so all I could do was catch the online, slowly updated play-by-play. And play by play, tick by tick of the clock, the game progressed and to the extent that Nebraska got any closer it was essentially meaningless and in garbage time.<\/p>\n<p>A third straight Rose Bowl for the Badgers. And nobody will be surprised if they get blown out by Stanford. They&#8217;ve already lost once this year to the Pac10 &#8230; er, 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1. How &#8217;bout those Broncos? 2. Leftovers and cupcakes 3. The badger is a dangerous animal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[352,181,127,354,344,345,353],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-various-and-sundry","tag-bsu","tag-food","tag-football","tag-leftovers","tag-television","tag-the-x-files","tag-wisconsin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}