Friday stuff

[fflo]

Here's an article from Scientific American for ya:
"Keeping Money in Mind Makes People Less Helpful"

It's the day before the big football game. I may actually watch. As my coworker T commented yesterday, it's hard not to get a little caught up in it.

It's not the same situation in the least, but I think of how my (sorta) home town had gone through years of a kind of cultural shaming in that venue of measuring success (football wins), particularly with respect to the Nebraska Cornhuskers. The Nebraska fans, too, would descend on our little town on that game day & engage in all manner of unpleasant behavior---e.g., prowling around town in drunken packs that had the citizenry locking our doors; parking across yer driveway opening in their big red-"N"-sporting RV, blocking you in; painting the "N" in the cement "MANHATTAN" sign on the side of the hill red; etc. After years of our team stinking it up on the field, the Wildcats, albeit at the hands of a kinda scummy (but effective) coach, started winning. And I actually lived in the Little Apple again when, once this phenomenon had been underway for a while, they beat Nebraska. Notwithstanding my then-gf's notorious (at least then-)antipathy for football and football culture, an attitude with which I have considerable sympathy, it was nigh-on impossible not to get into the spirit, as vjsmom and hubby could likely attest.

The same sort of small-U-city civic avenged-underdog psychology cannot be attributed to this place I live now. Yet I like a local sense of event, and we rarely get that sort of thing in Amurrka any more. The other day an older woman I know vaguely at the gym (that Brenda from the pool, bigfinedaddy) asked me in the locker room whether "we" had won. I happened to know from squirrelykat that it was the day of the Ball State game, to which David Letterman had given a sense of event, with his offer to pay everyone in the stands 5¢ should his underdog alma mater triumph. (I may have also noted it on the window of Beaner's on Liberty, where they've been tracking the run-up to the potential #1-vs.-#2 game in blue and yellow paint.) It gave me some pleasure to know what this woman meant, and to have a modestly informed answer, and an assumed shared desire, just based on our living in the same town.

Sad world, wouldn't you say?, in which college football offers us more of a sense of having something in common than does most else, apart from, say, very dramatic violent weather or a massive power outage that lasts for days.

Comments

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

I believe I have a VHS tape of the aforementioned handing of the can of whoop-ass to the Cornhuskers. I must say that the K-State/Nebraska game weekend in Manhattan was quite something to experience for a person who'd gone to a little liberal arts school that had no football team (and, thank goodness, no fraternities).

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I only wished my little college had football so we coulda had a marching band. (Big dork that I am.)

Alas, however, we did have the frats, and they were a cross to be borne.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

p.s. I think I have an extra copy of that video still. Thought of eBaying it. Wonder if kohkae would want it.

I don't have a VCR any more myself.

[schroederjt.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, as I hail from the city on the other side of the big game, we should enter into some kind of livejournal wager.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

By gum, I am game. I have yet to honor my debt from a similar bit of sportspersonship with aabassplayer as regards the World [Sic] Series, but I am good for it, I swear.

May I suggest the "loser" write, oh, say, a PANTOUM in praise of the game played by the team of the "winner"? I like that poetry might be involved, but am certainly up to other suggestions, including other suggestions involving poetry.

[(Anonymous)]

Go Michigan!

Not sure if you heard the news, but I'm sure you must have: our little K-State giant killers beat Texas last week!

I'm not Anonymous!

[kohkae.livejournal.com]

Didn't realize I wasn't logged in when I posted the above until just as I was already hitting the "Post" button but it was too late to stop myself. Just like a couple weeks ago when I was shutting the door of the truck with the keys on the seat and the dog inside.

Re: I'm not Anonymous!

[fflo.livejournal.com]

So, you want a K-State whups Nebraska video?

Re: I'm not Anonymous!

[fflo.livejournal.com]

(see comments earlier)

[schroederjt.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. It will be worth it, win or lose, to be able to say, "I have a pantoum riding on this game!"

[bigfinedaddy.livejournal.com]

I'm not a die hard Michigan fan, even though that's me alma mater. But somewhere along the way I picked up the Ohio State hating part of being a Michigan fan. It was a red state/blue state thing...and it's all right there to be seen even in the colors of the uniforms. So I'm pretty into the game this weekend, too. Especially since Bo Schembechler just passed away this afternoon, adding quite a tear-jerker Hallmark win-one-for-the-Gipper element to the whole thing.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Alright--- you're on! I venture to bet (as well) (if anyone will take the bet and find a way to determine the winner) that it's the only pantoum riding on this game. So far, anyway. You know, as people may hear we're doing it, and that kind of thing can spread like wildfire.

[schroederjt.livejournal.com]

I agree that it is probably the only pantoum riding on the game. We are high rollers. Others might only be able to afford to bet haikus.

This makes me imagine a poker game or something played entirely with poems. "I match your villanelle and raise you a sonnet."

Well, I reckon I owe you one!

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I have yet to hear of anyone else betting a pantoum.

The poker game vision--- it's actually that kind of things-that-aren't-money bet in a poker game that was the first serious foray into flirtation between me and your former fellow Hiramite. Somehow the people present agreed spontaneously to depart from the chips-only (or was it coins?) betting, and then what we'd put up against what, or be willing to bet to have a chance to get what, became the encoded territory of our expressing our interest in each other. I did bet rather heavily & enthusiastically for the pot that contained her lucky plastic Grover with teeth marks, and for an ugly scarf she called an ugly scarf (and which was indeed ugly, though was not, as I remember it, present at the game for assessment). For her part, H honored my depiction of an item from my kitchen as worth the tremendous value I was angling for it to be taken to have: the last Girl Scout cookie, which I'd been saving. This even though it was one of those peanut butter patties, and she was a Thin Mint gal all the way.

It really was a fun one, that night. That scene that could be well adapted to a film.

I'm being taken out to Thai in a few minutes; guess I'll get after that pantoum thereafter. Is there a pantoum payment deadline?