So if you're reading this, you probably already know that we're engaged. We'll have more to say soon, but like good 21st-century nerds, we updated our relationship status on Facebook. This is what Facebook asks you when you tell it you're engaged:
"You are about to add Lisa Todorovich [in my case] as your Fiancee.Romantic, isn't it? Continued ...
"We will then notify Lisa Todorovich, who will have to confirm that you are in a relationship."
As I write this, we're but 12 hours away from tipoff of the first round of the greatest three weeks in sports. As with any event of this scope, the millions of fans tuning in will have just about as many superstitions and rituals and quirks.
F'rinstance, I used to pick one snack food and eat only that one while I watched games, and I still won't put a team through to a later round on my brackets until I've filled in all games from the previous round. You probably have your own things, and that's cool: Let your basketball-jones flag fly.
All that said, I think we can all agree on a few basic rules for maximum tournament pleasure. Really, it's just one rule, with a bunch of exceptions.
That rule is:
Always root for the underdog. Upsets -- your Hampton-Iowa States, your Valpo-Ole Misses -- are what makes the tournament the greatest, and in many ways the most American, of all sporting events. We love to see the little guy stick it to the Man -- the little guy in this case being some school with a direction in its name and a home gym that seats 3,500 and the Man being all the big-money, big-conference Programs who dominate the season.
Go by that rule, and you're pretty much set. There are, however, a number of caveats.
Caveat 1: Personal, familial or geographical ties to a particular school may trump the rule. This allows me to root for Texas to make a deep run; my brother attended grad school there and has settled in Austin.
Caveat 2: When both teams in a first-round game are middle-of-the-pack schools from a big conference -- this year's West Virginia-Arizona matchup, which I'll bear witness to Thursday night, is a good example -- the rule is waived. Cheer for whoever you please, or ignore entirely.
Caveat 2.5: Similarly, when two teams from smaller conferences butt heads, you're free to take whichever side you want, since it's a guarantee that at least one mid-major team will make the next round. There are a few of those games this year, and though some of that is the inevitable result of seeding, I kinda wish the selection committee would stop those pairings. We like David-Goliath matchups, not David-David ones.
Caveat 3: It's always OK to root against the teams you hate, regardless of their seeding.
Caveat 4: By the Elite 8 round, when teams seeded 7th or worse are most likely gone, you are free to root for whomever you please -- although hoping for the best possible games in the Final Four is always appreciated.
Corollary 1: Rooting for teams based solely on how you far you've taken them in your bracket is uncool. Unless you're wagering more than $100, just enjoy the ride.
Corollary 1.5: If you're on the verge of winning more than $100, Corollary 1 may be ignored, provided you don't end up also violating Caveat 1. No one likes a fair-weather fan, money or no money.
May the madness be with you. Enjoy.
I wish I could say the past few weeks had been filled with fabulous and wonderful adventures, and that's why we haven't blogged for a while. I suppose I could say that, but then that would be lying (although we did get to this the other night and had a lot of fun).
Because really, we've kinda been hunkered down with work and general late-winter boringness, and just kind of lazy when it comes to this here.
How lazy? We shared a candy bar with bacon in it more than a week ago, and I'm just now getting around to writing about it.
Background: We went to Richmond two weekends ago to celebrate Lisa's birthday (yay!), where we enjoyed a lovely evening in the Shockoe Slip/Tobacco Row historic areas, eating delicious food and staying in a fancy hotel. On our way home we stopped at the awesome candy store For the Love of Chocolate in Carytown. Words can't do it full justice -- the variety and creativity of sweet stuff on display there is kind of staggering, from Chick-O-Sticks to super-exotic chocolate flavored with chile, rosemary and all manner of other things you wouldn't necessarily think about putting into chocolate.
Which brings me to Mo's Bacon Bar, which, as you may be able to see above, is a combination of "applewood smoked bacon, alder wood smoked salt and 'deep milk chocolate.'" We were both a little trepidatious about trying it, but you know what? Turns out bacon and chocolate is pretty darn good (two great tastes that taste great together, as it were).
The smoky bits of fried pork are a nice compliment to the chocolate, which is darker than your average Hershey bar but not into the realm of the serious dark stuff. But it never gets overwhelming (at least not in the mini-size bar we split). Good crunch too.
More excitement to come -- we're going to the first and second rounds of the greatest sporting event ever in D.C. this weekend, and I plan at least one update from there. I have taken days off in the past to watch the first two rounds, and am doing so again this year, only this time I get to see games in person. This Salon piece from 2001 pretty much captures my feelings about the tournament, and I can't wait to experience it in person for the first time in more than 15 years.
Happy bacon, happy bracketing, and remember to pick at least one 12-vs.-5 upset.
We shed our proud-townie status for a couple hours last Friday and headed over to campus -- pardon me, "Grounds" -- to hear Daily Show correspondent and real-live British person John Oliver deliver a fine set of stand-up (happily, we were not the oldest people in the room; a fair number of other grownups attended too).
Now, writing about a comedy performance and trying to impart just how funny the guy was is probably an exercise in futility. Even if I had perfect recall or had surreptitiously taped the show, transcribing his bit about how he updated the Wikipedia entries for several political figures ("Sen. Richard Lugar could have been the greatest swimmer in Olympic history but for the fact that he's soluble in water") wouldn't come across quite as funny on the screen.
Nor could I do justice to his story about the moment that he realized he would be a comic, and not an athlete (it involved a 400-meter race, a cool breeze and a flap on the front of his shorts) . Because you still couldn't have seen the look on his face as he recounted the horrible tale, coming off like Harry Potter's hangdog older brother.
And I really don't know how to describe his partner-in-comedy Andy Zaltzman, with whom he hosts a podcast for The Times of London and did a show for BBC Radio called The Department.
What I can tell you, though, that if John Oliver comes to your town, you should go see him. Dude was really, really funny.
It's been six months and a couple of days since I was last in Los Angeles. That's not that long, really, but in that time I've managed to forget just how freakin' big this place is. I'm on the plane, maybe a half-hour away from landing, and I look out the window. Hmm, I wonder if that's Big Bear down there.
Turns out it was -- and then I just kind of sat there for the rest of the flight and marveled at the unbroken spring of urban/suburban/industrial development that stretched from Lake Arrowhead all the way to the coast. Living in L.A., you sort of tend to stay in your bubble, and while you bitch about the traffic and know sort of implicitly that all those people live somewhere, it's easy to forget how the Southland stretches on and on and on.
So, yeah, it's nice to be back. And also a little odd.
Not in a bad way, though. More in this kind of way: Driving in from LAX, I take note of the old hotel on Lincoln that's been boutiqued and see that Playa Vista looks even more monolithic and out of place than when I last drove by. A couple new facades on the little shops near the office, a new shmancy blonde-wood door on the entrance to our suite.
As I leave, I remind myself that I'm driving to my hotel in Marina del Rey and not my old apartment. I've already sussed out a back way to avoid the traffic on Lincoln; it works. Pavilions still has the sandwich I like, so that's dinner. I sit and watch Super Tuesday returns in the state where I no longer vote; my primary is next week, and it looks like it'll still count, which is cool.
Nothing is all that different, but still it feels a degree or two off. Maybe it's a location thing -- I'm in a perfectly nice but nondescript hotel in Marina del Rey for the next six days, eating at places I haven't visited since I was fighting monsters. It's going to be great seeing my friends here again (already has been, with regard to my co-workers). And this will be my home again soon enough. Right now, though? Just passin' through.
Sometimes it's just about hangin' out.
Today's recipe:
Not off to a blazing start in 2008, but any year that starts with kissing your awesome girlfriend at midnight, staying in bed till about 11, said girlfriend making delicious waffles and then watching football all day has potential, I think.
But since I still have a full year's worth of days (thanks, leap year!) to get stuff done, I figure a lazy opening can't hurt anything. And there is stuff I plan to do this year (I mean, how can one not be inspired by the likes of the image above? Seriously). Like:
More reading. Made significant progress on one of the great political novels of the 20th century, The Gay Place, over Christmas. On tap: Some Ross MacDonald (why this guy, one of the really great crime novelists, is not easier to find in bookstores baffles me), The Night Gardener (my first foray with George Pelecanos), Charlie Wilson's War (saw the movie, now want to read the full story).
Lisa and I have also talked about starting a two-person book club, where we each introduce the other to books we love. I'm thinking maybe The Drowning Pool (there's that man again), possibly some T.C. Boyle. Not sure yet.
Some travel. Nothing huge, probably, but it's nice to get away every now and then. Maybe somewhere in here, possibly here, very probably here for at least a couple days.
Another marathon. Been stuck on four for a couple years now, and it's time to climb back on that wagon. This one's on my birthday. Do I want to spend four or five hours running the day I turn 37? I dunno. But it's a thought.
And now, it's time to bookend this day by eating some chili cheese dogs and tater tots. Like I said: This year's got potential.
Instead of being a productive human being during the days between Christmas and New Year’s, I've been hanging out logging much pajama time, taking a break from non-fiction with Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia Project and catching up on the many episodes I've missed of Mad Men. I can’t even say the loafing has been all that creative, but boy has it been fun.
Mostly I've been so preoccupied lately that I've missed a lot of the presidential candidate debates (Can we call them that? Ten people on a stage raising their hands in response to a question is not a debate – it's a dumbed-down version of Miss America. I mean really. Post-9/11, when Pakistan is literally exploding, our image is crap in a huge part of the world and people in New Orleans are still living in freakin' trailers, not to mention having no health insurance and knowing their kids probably aren't learning what they need to know in school, don't we deserve something better that that?
Yes, I'm on my high horse, but sometimes it's just absolutely astonishing what we accept as normal in this country. But who am I to talk? I'm not teaching kids to read in Appalachia or something, and the money I give to UNICEF isn't exactly going to fix Darfur, so I should shut up, for heaven's sakes.). I don't know the specifics of Hillary Clinton's health care plan and I don't know what Barack Obama's response is to Joe Biden's idea that Iraq should be split into thirds.
I am an embarrassment of a former political reporter. For a long time I worried that I'd be climbing the walls if I weren't freezing half to death in Iowa and New Hampshire, or if I'd be worth anything if I couldn't get Mitt Romney's media guy to return my phone calls. Now I know. Admittedly, I miss watching the stump speeches and that cold fresh-air high that's oddly a little like altitude sickness mixed with excitement while watching the process. But I've ended up with something better than I could've hoped for – a life.
Not the one I thought I'd have, and not certainly one that needs some work (Chase, I swear some day that balance will be zero – just not yet.). But it's a step -- and something that other people have always seemed to be able to figure out far better than I. And hackneyed as I am, I'm grateful for every second – not least of which for Rick's giant leap of faith, which totally changed everything this year. And our friends rock.
Now I need to take a walk, catch another episode of Mad Men, and get back to everyone else's 2007 Top Ten lists.
Happy New Year.
We've been taking in the usual assortment of Christmas goodies the past couple weeks -- a shipment of candy from Lisa's mom in Milwaukee (including the mysterious substance known as fairy food) here, a loaf of bread from my sister-in-law there.
We also have a couple dozen of our own cookies still lying around. But we -- and by "we" I mean mostly Lisa -- have been keeping up our end of the supply chain up as well. I spent much of last weekend in awe of the sheer number of cookies that came out of our kitchen -- enough baked goods to make Mrs. Field go, "Damn, that's a lot of cookies."
After the jump, a rundown.
These numbers are approximate, but suffice to say that we completely covered the dining room table with plates and boxes of cookies and nuts. To wit:
7 dozen chocolate mint cookies
7 dozen pepperming sugar cookies
6 dozen oatmeal-white chocolate-cranberry
6 dozen oatmeal-pistachio-cranberry-apricot
5 (or maybe 6) dozen peanut butter Kiss cookies
4 pounds or so Union Square spiced nuts
And, oh yeah, 3 pounds or so of sugared pecans.
I really wish I'd taken a picture of the dining room table. Bad blogger. But to those of you who got them, hope you like them. I think they're pretty darn good.
The other day at Target, I bought a snow scraper/brush combo for my car. Good timing -- see above.
OK, so I'm stretching a little there. The snow that fell on my car this morning was gone by midafternoon, and the snow that fell on it tonight will be gone too -- hell, it's gonna be 60 by Saturday.
But damn if I wasn't happy to see the first snow of the season -- and my first personal snow since, oh, 1997.
Before today, it had been a little more than a decade since there had been a chance of snow falling in the place where I lived. I could see it on the mountains around Los Angeles some winters there, but it was three cross-country moves ago that I last had to have a scraper in my trunk.
So this morning I went out and took pictures of it snowing, and I caught a couple of flakes on my tongue and I generally behaved like a little kid. I'll probably re-acquire my distaste for snow over the next few months, but for now it's very exciting. Can't wait to fire my first snowball.
