Cabin Weekend and Stoooopid Bowl Sunday!

I am now "watching" Super Bowl XL. I can't actually claim to be paying full attention to the game as my computer is positioned in such a way as to force me to have my back to the TV screen while I'm typing. But that's cool; I don't watch football and I understand absolutely nothing about it. I am just watching this thing because, well, I guess you sort of have to. I mean, what else would I have on the boob tube at this point? If not the Super Bowl, then what?

I'm not even sure who is playing in this thing. I only know 4 things about football:

1. I have a square in the work Super Bowl pool. I know that my numbers are 0 and 8, but I am not quite sure which numbers go to which teams. I didn't bring the copy of the grid home. I thought I had it, but when I went to open my paper up, I realized I brought some worthless curriculum document home instead of the football sheet. Whatever. Now I can study curriculum standards for the evening. Yeah, right!

2. The second thing I know for sure about football is that there is no rhyme or reason to the timeclock of the game. Whenever I try to watch football, I struggle to get my head around the reality that when the players seem to be in full action (running, throwing the ball, jumping into pig piles, tackling each other, etc.,), the clock is frozen in place. However, whenever they are just standing around, shooting the shit about the demise of the Soviet Union or the price of tea in China, the clock is running down. Has anybody else noticed this?

3. The third thing I know about football is that the players stand around, on the playing field, talking on cell phones, eating nachos and balancing their freakin checkbooks. I swear, there is any class of non-football activity taking place on the football field at any given point in the game. And none of the announcers even seem to say anything about this. I swear, last year, some Patriots guy was out there with a tray of nachos (with the creamy Velveeta cheese sauce) ON THE PLAYING FIELD. What is that about? Jesus, even if he was just on the sidelines and not playing (but I guarantee you, he was playing), just the appearance of him eating the gooey nachos is completely unprofessional. I don't even drink coffee in my classroom because I think it seems unprofessional. Yet, these guys can have the freakin' Dominoes delivery guy deliver a stuffed-crust meat-lovers pizza right onto the field while the game is going on full throttle. Can somebody please explain this to me? Enlighten me, PLEASE!!


4. The final thing I know about football is that football time defies all laws of physics and the universe. A "football minute" and a "minute" are two entirely different things. I know this is hardly a revelation to folks, but please. Get the show on the road!! A one hour game turns into a week-long odyssey.

Anyway, enough commentary on something about which I understand absolutely nothing. I will graciously leave the rest of the commentary to John Madden or one of those other old white guys with the massive heads and cotton candy machine inspired hair-dos.





As I mentioned in my last blog, and again in the title today, I was at the cabin in NH this weekend. It was fun and somewhat relaxing. I managed to finish my book, "The Time Traveler's Wife." I highly recommend it. I had some misgivings about it before starting to read it. By now I should know that my mother has a knack for picking out great books for me for Christmas. Every year she gives me two or three great reads. "The Time Traveler's Wife" was no exception. I highly recommend it. I HATE science fiction, and obviously the theme of time travel would suggest a science fiction based book. Not at all. It is just a really riveting story that I'm sure you'd like.

We went into Littleton (pictured above) to stroll around for a couple of hours on Saturday. Littleton is cute. There is a very unique mixture of yuppie-types and native small-town folk. The businesses are also very varied in this regard. There are little shops and businesses ranging from the small diner with the thick brown coffee mugs so typical of that sort of place, to the trendy little gift boutique that sells designer Provencal soaps and tea-light lanterns. We always enjoy walking around there.

The cabin always provides the backdrop to some great debauchery. Beer and sausages are the dietary staples. (Although, for me, sausages are pushed aside to make way for grilled chicken. As my hero Samuel L. Jackson says in "Pulp Fiction", "I don't dig on swine!")

We bring lots of movies, cook out on the back grill, and nestle up into our sleeping bags at night. It was a nice, relaxing time, but we did blow out of there pretty early today. I was home by around 3:00.

I worked out. Much needed. Even though I worked out Friday and really only missed Saturday's workout, the beer consumption and extensive lying around make me salivate at the mere thought of being able to exercise!




So, what does Enron have to do with all this?

Oddly enough, on the drive up to NH, Stephen and I were talking about the newly begun trial of Enron CEO, Ken Lay and other top executives. We both agreed that what happened to Enron employees (loss of employment, retirement and stocks) was horrible, and we were both pretty sure that it happened deliberately at the hands of Enron execs, but we were both not really terribly sure of exactly what happened or how it went down.

I say it was "odd" because on Saturday night, our friend busted out his newly received "Net Flix" film called, "Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room." It was a documentary about the downfall of Enron. I was pretty excited to watch it. So, we put it in and prepared ourselves to get some Enron education.

I have absolutely no background in investing. I have never worked in a corporate environment and I am really out of touch with this stuff. I didn't understand a lot of the intricacies of what exactly they did, but I am convinced that those executive bastards are completely at fault for the downfall of that company. They screwed their employees over by forcing them to invest in Enron, even as they knew that Enron was failing. They established phony companies to "invest" money in Enron, which made it look as if Enron was clearning profits, but really, they were just taking it out of one place in Enron to put it into another. Really crooked.

They were even responsible for the rolling black outs in CA, even though there was no need to have such blackouts. They were just telling the people of CA that there was no power, so that when they turned it back on, the people would be under the impression that they were getting their hands on a "hard-to-get" commodity, and would therefore be willing to pay more.

What a total fuck-up!

Let me just say that now, having seen this documentary, I hope Lay and all his other goons go down with the ship!

There was one poor bastard, just some utility man, who, prior to the downfall of Enron, had almost 400,000 dollars in his Enron Portfolio. When the stocks started to enter into free fall, the executives froze all the "little guys" out even as they themselves were selling like crazy. When the stocks opened back up, this particular utility man dumped the Enron stock he had (initially worth almost 400,000) for just 1,200 dollars!

That's just sooooo wrong!

Down with Ken Lay!