Pay me my money down

Only fate shall deem me a genius or an idiot. But betting season for me is now closed. Here's the line, at standard 11/10 football-style parlay:
SENATE
Ohio
BROWN (D) v. DeWine (- 1.5%d)
TAKE BROWN, 110

New Jersey
KEAN v. Menendez (-2%d)
TAKE MENENDEZ 22

Tennesee
FORD v. Corker (-.5%d)
TAKE CORKER 22


OHIO GOVERNOR
STRICKLAND (D) v. Blackwell (-15%d)
TAKE STRICKLAND 55

CONTROL OF HOUSE
DEMOCRATS v. Republicans (-4 d)
TAKE DEMOCRATS 110
CONTROL OF SENATE
DEMOCRATS v. Republicans (-2 d)
TAKE REPUBLICANS 22
... and that's it for this cycle. I'm unwilling to make economic projections on the MI governor's race, which is a contest between evil and eviler. The only other Senate race with good odds was MN, but I didn't feel comfortable enough with it. I avoid House races like the plague - too much can go wrong in the points.

End of season wrap-up

Last night, I ate my last baked chicken and roast beef dinner of the season. Yes, at an AMVETS post in Napoleon, Ohio, we brought another wedding photography season to a close. We worked three weekends a month from May to October this year, and saw a little bit of everything - pushy moms, bitchy brides, blind-drunk groomsmen, and even a grandmother of a bride who was all slutted up like Charo ("Coochie Coochie Coo!!!").
Through the '06 season, O Tolerant One & I armchair quarterbacked a lot of bridal decisions - but none so much as the food. Here, then, is our awards edition from The Quarterdeck. We honor the best meals - and scourge the worst.

BEST FRATERNAL ORGANIZATION MEAL
Elks Lodge, Maumee, Ohio (June 2006): It has long been my contention that private clubs’ banquet halls should be sued by the Justice Department for antitrust violations. How else can you explain why every Elks, Legion, Amvets, VFW, and Moose serves exactly the same stuff at every wedding?
So it was with some trepidation that I approached the buffet at the Maumee Elks for the first time, especially since I saw that rotten old chestnut, Chicken Cordon Bleu.
But, saints preserve us!, the Maumee Elks got a little sumthin’-sumthin’ goin’ on! First, their Chicken Cordon Bleu actually bears some resemblance to the original dish, with an herb-crusting and real cheese inside – not like the crappy movie theater nacho cheese most places inject into a rubber chicken breast.
The miracles here don’t stop at the chicken station. The Elks have a station of prime rib that’s well beyond the ill-defined “roast beef” tables at most receptions. To top it off, they have a little pasta thing that’s pretty good, plus scalloped potatoes that didn’t come from a box. I would shoot at this place 30 weeks a year if I could eat the food.


BEST INTERNATIONAL MEAL
Las Mananitas, Cuernavaca, Mexico (Sept. 2006): Admittedly, it’s the only international meal we had at a wedding this year. And it technically was the pre-rehearsal dinner. But I have never had Mexican food quite like this before.
Start with a bowl of tortilla soup that breaks the surly bonds of Earth. Who among us could have imagined that pork rinds would be a perfect addition? Then, a few more appetizers lost in the late hour of the meal (which followed a mudslide-induced detour). A few Don Julios. Then the most tender steak I’ve ever eaten, coated with a Mexican spice rub. All of this with a completely non-English speaking Mariachi band doing the unplugged version of the Macarena. Priceless.


BEST HOME-COOKED MEAL
Deshler Fire Department, “suburban” Deshler, Ohio (June 2006) : I had some misgivings about this meal when I walked into the reception site; a trucking company’s garage located on a busy state route between the twin cities of Deshler and Custar.
Ouch, I thought. This’ll be a tough one to swallow. Especially after I saw the campside Thermos coolers lined with aluminum foil.
But Ill be a horse’s hindquarters if this wasn’t one of the top five wedding meals I’ve ever eaten. It was barbeque chicken – and not the barbeque sauce like Open Pit, but the stuff that gets applied with a lawn chemical sprayer. Every guest got a quarter chicken, twice-baked potatoes, and homemade pork and beans with big strips of bacon.
Every wedding should have food like this: Food that represents who the couple actually is – no blandness, no haute cuisine, just good American food for a couple of good kids.


BEST MEAL I NEVER ATE
Schadel Gardens, Elmore, Ohio (May 2006): The setting – a Japanese garden. The family – richer than my wildest dreams. The meal – pasta stations, fresh grilled shrimp and chicken skewers, and blackened whitefin. The verdict…
Man, I HATE people who screw you out of a meal! We worked from morning to sundown, and the mother of the bride casually comments that she “won’t be able to get us a meal.” I get it when poor people are cheap … but they never are. They always take care of you. Rich people who are cheap really, really tick me off. Especially when the food smells so good and you haven’t eaten in seven hours.


ROCK BOTTOM WORST MEAL EVER
Undisclosed location. Genoa, Ohio (May 2006) : I’ve eaten some real crap in my life. Once, I quite literally ate crap – or at least, a part of the intestines through which crap passes. I’ve never, though, had a meal quite as crappy as the one at a nasty little banquet hall in Genoa.
Everything about the place was cheap, from the wall outlets that weren’t screwed in, to the rickety arbor through which the couple passed, to the bar that looked like it was made by a shop class composed entirely of quadriplegics.
None of that could have prepared me for the true horror of the dinner. After you shoot enough weddings, you get used to eating a lot of baked chicken and roast beef with a healthy side of mashed potatoes. But, my Lord, was this awful.
It had all of the same forms, but none of the same function. Yes, there was chicken. But it tasted as if it had been first boiled, and then run through the microwave, and perhaps scalded with a blowtorch just to make it look a little more brown and healthy.
The roast beef seemed familiar to me. Possibly because it had recently served as the bottom of my shoe. The mashed potatoes came from flakes. Correction: The mashed potatoes were flakes, as some of the crystals were still visible since they hadn’t been cooked properly.
This meal was so bad I ate at a McDonald’s afterward to get something good.

Years of therapy

A pal posted a blog about being able to spend one more day with someone you loved who's no longer with us. My Grandma B & Grandpa K came to mind. When I thought about how I'd spend a day with Grandma, I didn't have to think long. If I could have one day with her, it wouldn't be at church, it wouldn't be at their old house in Parma, and it wouldn't be on some Caribbean beach.
It would be at old Cleveland Municipal Stadium. We'd eat dogs with Ballpark Mustard. We'd complain about the Indians ineptitude and rail about the Yankees. Somewhere along the way, I would find a way to ask her about the inner strength she had to manage the family the way she did and have each of her eight children grow into the most amazing people I've ever known - my dad and his brothers and sisters.
So after that, I was psychoanalyzing myself. Why in the heck would I want to go back to the dumpiest stadium in the AL? And I started realizing that I think I know why I fell into Cleveland athletics ass over applecart. What my grandma was to the Tribe, my grandpa was to the Browns - die hard, and always hungry for information. The Indians and Browns replaced my grandparents when they died. Going to games was just like visiting their graves, but more alive. Anytime I sit in the stands for an Indians game, I remember my first game in 1986 (Indians v. Brewers, for those who care) with my grandma at my side wearing her new-ish Indians visor over her gray hair.
I also realized that this is why I cried more when I saw Cleveland Stadium being torn down than I did, say, when my dog died. The Stadium wasn't a dump, it was the place I always associated with my grandma. And this is why I will always despise Modell and the Ravens - not because of the team or what they did for the city, but because of what they replaced in my life.
I suppose this is also why I have zero tolerance for people who just adopt some team out of the clear blue sky, then jump the bandwagon when times get rough. People like Yankee Fan.
Well. That was therapeutic.

Viva la Revolucion

This post could go a number of ways. It could be a post about how we take our blessings as Americans for granted. It could be a post about how I never understood the depths of poverty until I breezed through the slums of Mexico City. Maybe it could be a post about how bad I feel for Mexico’s poor. Perhaps the turn most appropriate would be about the lack of coverage Mexico’s politics gets in the American press.
Most of that would just be covering up, though. This blog, necessarily, has to be about fear. I spent the weekend in Mexico, and but for the time spent in our "fortified compound," the emotion that came to the surface again, and again, and again, was fear. Fear for our safety. Worry for the horrible fates many of those we saw faced. Concern for what they endured. Fear for what would happen if People Like That finally got upset enough with People Like Us to do something about it.
Some of you have heard the weirdest of the stories already; But though the salacious details give the story a visceral punch, it’s the small things that make Mexico a terrifying lesson in geopolitics, faith, and finding oneself.
A few vignettes:
- It is never easy to go to a place where you don’t speak the local language. But I think, in the wake of NAFTA, we all think of Mexico as “our” linguistic backyard and assume that, like Puerto Rico, everyone will be able to speak English. I brushed up on my Spanish a bit before leaving just so I would have a little language. But even that wasn’t enough to get me through the small things – like how to make a call home.
- Crushing poverty is visible at every turn in Mexico. As we drove past the tent cities off the Rio Churubusco, a fellow traveler and I wondered out loud if there is any answer to this. Will Mexico ever lift itself out of this? I can’t imagine how – it would take the rise of an intellectual class, a domestic manufacturing base, and a shift from looking at workers as an expendable commodity to seeing them as an irreplaceable resource. One thing I know for sure: If I lived there, I would not think twice about getting through the Sonoran desert to the U.S. and relative wealth.
- There is nothing funnier than overweight, elderly Mexicans dancing to the club remix of Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita.” Trust me.
- America is still paying the price for election-rigging throughout the Third World in the 1950s-1980s. Few of the masses in Mexico actually believe that Lopez Obrador lost, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Lies are only powerful if they have a relationship to reality, and since we actually did fix a number of elections in the past (and, who knows, maybe in the present) our credibility is essentially zip among furners.
- America needs more vaguely-Stalinist monuments. We went to this town called Cuautla, and there was a giant statue of Jose Morelos that looked like a big old Stakhanovite statue from Petrograd. Awesome.
- Political protest is a lot different in Mexico than the U.S. It includes things like mobbing the streets, occupying public parks, and graffiti covering the city. What they call “protests” I like to call “riots.” But then, I live near Detroit. So it ain't no thang.

Early returns

It's only one day. Everything could change after the first day.
Without getting into specifics, the first day back at work today was, shall we say, interesting. I fell right into a trap of my own design - since I had been the most successful person in my department at a specific task last year, I was given a more challenging slate of charges this year.
I sort of feel like whoever was Mike Dukakis' campaign manager. Clearly, that person must have been very good at something political beforehand - after all, you don't pick just anyone to run a national campaign. (Unless you're Howard Dean). When the phone rang from Dukakis, that ward-heeler was in a pickle.
Do you complain that the candidate is incompetent? Do you say something about the eyebrows? If you decline the offer, you kiss your career goodbye. If you take it ... well, bubba, you're gonna deal with the fallout.
And that's where I'm at: Managing fallout. That will be my primary task this year. Try not to piss anyone off. Try not to get shot. Try to keep them off-balance. And at the end, hope that somehow, I'm still standing.

There is a rumble

My windows are vibrating. Our house is hermetically sealed like a tomb. And the rumble just keeps coming. We go to the grocery, and drive around a container truck full of ice. Our church was empty. The streets of downtown BG are a strange milieu - pretty college girls and clean-cut fraternity boys walking on one side of the sidewalk, and the dirtiest, biggest, and scrawniest extras from "Deliverance" walking on the other side.
It is, of course, the weekend of the National Tractor Pulling Championship, a mere three blocks from my bedroom window. I am pretty sure that the hole in the ozone layer has moved north from Antarctica to a stationary position over Northwest Ohio, not just from the tractors, which are powered by unmuffled aircraft engines (seriously), but from the ridiculously huge trucks the spectators constantly drive up and down my street.
The tractor pulling fan is a real specimen to behold. They walk up and down the street near us, and we've seen them around downtown and at Kroger, etc. Apparently, though they can afford the $260 tickets, they are so destitute that they cannot afford shirts. Big ones, little ones, medium-sized ones - none of these dudes wear torso-covering apparel.
It will all end tomorrow. And it can't come too soon.

From the mouths of babes...

My adorable, innocent 3 year old is a giving soul. As we were in the basement doing arts & crafts today, she told me she wanted to make a volcano for her brother. I thought this was kind of funny, and cute. I asked if we should have lava comign out of it,
"No," she said. "That's too hot."
"I want to make a volcano of blood!"
I foresee years of therapy.