Trekkychick

Dear Readers, it is most fortunate [for you] that today you are provided the windfall of reading a post that is not written by me. That’s right, today’s guest blogger is a leading sportswriter* for an esteemed sports magazine* and has written dozens of articles about sports* that have been read all over the nation* and also maybe in other nations.*

*Not really, but I wanted to give him a nice introduction.

As published in the New England Journal of Kickball

Kickball is a common enough game. You might see it on any school yard on any given day or even at the occasional municipal playground being played by the neighborhood kids or inebriated adults. But few, if any, of these participants take into account the serious risks posed to them by their participation in this sport. Please consider the following:

THE BALL
Kickball is a game loosely based on the rules of “Kick” – where one person kicks the ball to another and then the recipient returns the kick in a timely fashion, and “Baseball” – where 9 players get together and stand around for a few hours looking intently at each other and occasionally scratching themselves (hopefully the two are unrelated). But in this Kickball adaptation, you must kick a ball as hard as you can that has been hurled at you. I ask, why the violence? Couldn’t the ball simply be placed in front of the kicker? Or to even further prevent any injury, might I suggest that there be no ball at all and that the kicker just yells out loud what his “kick” would have done. “Single to the left center gap,” the kicker would say, and then the fielders would react accordingly. Surely you can see where both kicker and fielders would be at low risk for injury in this situation.

THE LINE CHALK
I bet you have played on many a lined field, but you have to ask yourself just what goes into those lines. On some fields the chalk has been upgraded to a biodegradable paint, but in many kickball stadiums where budgets are tight and generally conserved for beverages, the more traditional chalk is used. This poses both a physical and internal health risk. Physically, the chalk makes a ridge on the base path with which to catch a cleat or stub a toe, thus rendering the base runner useless for his team with torn muscles and broken bones. Internally, everyone is at risk from the “dust.” Yes folks, you never knew it, but much like the DDT of the 50s and the 60s, line chalk is hazardous to your health if inhaled. It is mass produced mostly outside nuclear energy plants, where the condensed dust from the cooling towers is harvested for this precious commodity. So not only is it highly poisonous; it is also mildly nuclear reactive which is why it glows so well in the dark.

Please refer to the chart below that has nothing to do with Kickball, but which makes my report look substantiated and important when in fact I stole borrowed the format from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Total Numbers of Drug Shortages and Shortages Involving Sterile Injectable Drugs in the United States, 2005–2009. Lots of drug shortages in Kickball too. Obviously the drugs are all going to Football and Baseball. That is why there are no big “Home Run” kickers these days.

In conclusion, you are better off doing hours of dubious internet research before partaking in any activity no matter how harmless you think it might be. You can never tell when imminent death will await you around the corner doing exactly what you thought would have been the safe thing to do. Next week… “Tetherball and What the Duty Teacher Didn’t Tell You About it.”

Source Information
Sources? What you think I need to verify this stuff? Are you kidding me… I had a graph!

Dear Readers,

tacky, but free

So as my nearby beloved Hollywood Video recently became another casualty to the new generation of netflixers, it held a final closing sale to part with its cinematic stock. “Everything Must Go!” reported the banner strewn across the front of the store. “Prices marked down 30-50%!”

Now, I’ve never taken a business class, and I presume the definition of a liquid asset to be a really tasty microbrew, but I know the urgency connotated by “must” (Troi on a road trip of more than 10 minutes in duration: “We must stop now and find a rest area!”) and if everything really must go, wouldn’t marking it down by 100% speed up the exit of products from a store?

And it’s not just Hollywood Video’s oversight. In this economy businesses are closing their doors with lightning speed, each closure allegedly necessitating the elimination of all unsold stock, and yet not a single business uses my suggested catch phrase: “Everything must go. So come in and take it. For free.”

You may have heard that everyone’s favorite word is their own name. This is a misnomer. Everyone’s favorite word is actually “free.” Everyone’s favorite short phrase incorporates both their first name and the word “free,” as in, “Hey [insert your name here], did you hear about the free [insert object here]?”

A price reduction of 100%, rendering an item entirely without cost, is irresistible to the average American. Consider this: Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shoppe. People stand in line for hours salivating at the anticipation of a miniature confection that will take 1/100th the time to consume. And in Portland, our Ben & Jerry’s is downtown. The only way to get there is to take public transportation, which costs $4.75 for an all-day pass (which, face it, you’ll need if you’re waiting in line for that free cone), or to drive, which requires the price of public parking at $1.60/hour. It would be cheaper to walk to the nearest Fred Meyer and buy a half-gallon of Tillamook ice cream, which, if you were wondering, is bigger than a free cone at Ben & Jerry’s. But you don’t hear anybody saying, “Hey, it’s free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s! Let’s go to Fred Meyer and buy a half-gallon of Tillamook ice cream!” Instead, you hear them saying, “Hey, it’s free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s! Let’s drive down there, pay our life savings in parking fees to the city of Portland, spend three hours waiting in line in the Portland rain, and receive a single spoonful of ice cream in return for our troubles, because it’s free.”

And it’s not just Free Cone Day that sucks us in. Upon moving out, my roommate recently attempted to unload his surplus of worthless belongings onto my already sizable collection of worthless belongings.

“Look what a great pencil-holder this tacky ceramic teacup makes!” he suggested hopefully after carefully arranging my stray pencils in an awkward arrangement in the teacup.

“No way,” I answered firmly. “I don’t want your stuff. Get rid of it.”

“But…..it’s free,” he continued. “You don’t have to pay a thing for it!”

“FREE??” I exclaimed excitedly. “I’ll take two tacky ceramic teacups, then!”

Dangle the word “free” in front of us, and suddenly our whole outlook on consumerism changes. The words “Buy one get one free” add a whole new lure to the purchase of previously undesirable products. I recently bought mascara on a “buy one get one free” sale at Fred Meyer. I don’t even wear mascara. Certainly, it would have made more financial sense to buy no mascara for free than to buy two tubes of mascara at some cost to me. But the only word I saw was “free,” and now I’m trying to sell mascara on eBay.

“Free” is indeed a magical word. So Hollywood Video would do well to take my financial advice and mark down their movies by 100%. Because if “everything must go,” that should do it.

–Troi out

Comment now on Troi’s newest post for a chance to win a FREE* year’s subscription to her bestselling blog!

*All sales final. No exchanges or returns, no matter how unpleasant the reading experience.

So as I drove home from work today, I listened to OPB to catch up on the latest news from around the world; the BP oil spill, Sarah Palin’s newest book (I’m Roguer Than You Are, or something), and the most recent threat to mankind: Grasshoppers.

Wait…..what?

Yes, Readers, grasshoppers are the latest terrorists in a slew of enemies threatening to bring down the northwestern region of this great nation. According to OPB, a severe grasshopper invasion has been headed straight for the Northwest, predicted to be the most formidable grasshopper infestation since the Great Grasshopper Hostilities of 1933 when grasshoppers became privy to the fact that humans were covering them in chocolate and eating them. Legend has it that during the GGH, Grasshoppers became so tyrannical that they stopped hopping and began jumping from place to place, and some even went so far as to begin hopping in non-grassy terrain, like on soil and sidewalks. (They also apparently munched on a few crops, obliterating farmers’ harvests, or something, whatever.)

As frightening as our green adversaries sound, there is hope on the horizon. OPB reports that the northwest’s rainy late-May weather, which differs from previous years’ rainy late-May weather in no way whatsoever but apparently bears mention anyway, is well-timed as it provides a cold and damp climate that is ideal for breeding diseases and fungi that could knock baby grasshoppers right out of the grassy field. If these late-May weather patterns remain consistent, grasshoppers’ numbers should be dropping over the next few years, which is OPB’s nice way of saying frogs won’t be the only things croaking in the near future.

Now that’s just mean. Grasshoppers aren’t my favorite insect, either, and certainly, I wouldn’t keep one as a pet, anymore, but to report on their demise as a celebratory story (“But enough about the unstoppable oil gushing through the Gulf for the next five years, here’s Bob with a heartwearming tale of death to grasshoppers”) simply doesn’t seem fair to the little green guys. I mean, it’s not like the grasshoppers are hurting anybody (except organic and sustainable farmers’ crops, farmers’ livelihoods, and the food supply).

I think there’s an easy alternative to all of this grasshopposition that simply hasn’t been considered due to the strained relations that have endured since the Great Grasshopper Hostilities of 1933. Why not offer grasshoppers an incentive not to chew on crops meant for human consumption? (Hear me out on this one. My ideas are highly underrated—-to date, nobody has actually used one of them. I’m flummoxed.) We all know that grasshoppers are vegetarian. And we all know that nobody actually eats brussels sprouts. Yet brussels sprouts continue to be grown, to sit on grocery store shelves under the pretenses that somebody, somewhere, will actually buy them, and they continue to rot, unbought. Why not just place brussels sprouts in areas of high grasshopper traffic, with a sign that says, “Grasshopper Food.” Grasshoppers will surely see the sign and forgo their usual diet of farmers’ crops in favor of a nutritious brussels sprout. Crops will flourish, humans and grasshoppers will co-exist peacefully, and my family will stop trying to serve brussels sprouts during Christmas dinner.

–Troi out

*If you click the links, this post doubles as your daily Bible study

Fred was here

I’m pretty cool, and I like to show it by driving my car with the top down. Except that my Ford Escort has no top, so I drive with the windows rolled down, which I tell myself is practically the same thing. The open window invites winged passersby into my car despite my clearly-marked “No insects allowed” bumper sticker taped to the rear window (I guess bugs flying in through the front windows don’t see it, or can’t read it because they suffer motion-sickness when reading at high speeds, or can’t read it because they’re bugs). One such passerby—-I called him Fred but you don’t have to, because he’s dead now, so in deference to his passing please refer to him as Dead Fred if his name comes up in conversation—-was a feathery white speck about the size of a pencil point, who nonetheless endangered my life every time he flew in front of my face to say hello as I drove. I would roll down the window and calmly explain his options (“You can leave peacefully now, or I will park this car and forcibly remove you from the premises”) but Fred never listened and I never followed through on my threats, because besides the near-death experiences he wasn’t really causing me any harm. Plus I figured that, being a bug, his lifespan couldn’t be terribly long, and he’d probably pass on naturally, and I’d pass guiltless into Heaven one day letting God know I had valued the antennae on the bug as much as He values the hairs on a sparrow and we’d have a good friendly laugh about the whole thing.

That was the plan but Fred persisted and grew larger than life—-he was almost the size of two pencil points at the time of his death (R.I.P., Fred, R.I.P.). I was flummoxed by both his rapid growth toward bug obesity and his longevity. Doesn’t a bug in carptivity (get it??) die more quickly than a bug who breathes in fresh, polluted air?

It was only through thorough investigation of Fred’s living situation—aka my car—-that I spotted the culprit: My penchant for eating on the go. In my haste, I tend to accrue a few plastic coffee cups, candy bar wrappers, bags that once contained pastries from Sweet Pea bakery, and the like, in the receptacle that doubles as my car. I am fastidious about removing the waste, just as soon as one of the containers actually starts to stink. It turns out the remnants from the coffee cups and the nano-morsels inside the bags, adding up to no more than a few moldy calories for the average human, was enough to feed an army of Freds for several decades to come. I had been inadvertently intentionally sustaining Fred just as Jesus sustained the 5000 hungry people with five loaves of bread and two fish.

So the way to rid my car of Fred the everlasting bug was to rid my car of its everlasting trash. I cleaned and polished every compartment, and Fred watched, and I really felt good about my decision to purify my car’s environment while eliminating Fred’s will to live through slow starvation.

But Fred was not to be so easily deterred, as he told me as he flew at me the next morning on my way to work. As had become our ritual, I pushed the button that automatically rolls down the window, and I suggested he exit the automobile. I think he was trying when the button stuck, and the window began to automatically return to its closed state, catching poor Fred in the crossfire. I mourned Fred’s passing for a few…..wait, what was I talking about?

After forgetting Fred, I drove for 40 days and 40 nights in peace. But apparently Fred wanted to leave a little piece of him behind, besides that piece that remains on the window. Fred bred when he was in my car. And now I’m raising his children.

–Troi out

Portland Peeps,

“I’m better than you are”

I love the food at Sweet Pea Bakery. As our resident Portland vegan* bakery, it tempts me with offerings of cheesecake, creme-filled donuts, decadent cupcakes, scones, and the like. And I can savor them all, reasurred that the bavarian creme in my creme-filled donut didn’t come from a mad cow injected with Monsanto rBGH (bovine growth hormone). They even offer a few gluten-free options to boot.

While their treats are tasty, their employees intimidate me. I can’t pinpoint why, except that in place of a friendly customer service smile is a scowl, which may be less a deliberate act and more a product of the employees’ mouths being physically drawn downwards by no less than a dozen piercings between their philtrim and chin. I envision the craigslist post advertising a job at Sweet Pea to look something like this:

Position opening at Sweet Pea. Must have at least a dozen piercings, and at least one fully-tattooed appendage. Preference will be given to applicants whose entire bodies are covered by tattoos. Must have air of superiority and be able to sniff out Portlanders who frequent Sweet Pea but are not strict vegans.

And I’m pretty sure they’ve sniffed me out, being, as my dear friend Scott calls me, a vegan fraud. That is, I am by no means a member of the Portland vegan culture, but I nonetheless accrue frequent flyer miles to Sweet Pea because I subscribe to the philosophy of eating delicious food with ingredients I can pronounce. At Sweet Pea, I also don’t have to worry about my body’s slight intolerance to eggs (too many and I have more hives than a beekeeper), which are a staple in most baked goods.

My daily occasional jaunts to Sweet Pea are not the first time I’ve been revealed as a vegan fraud. I have volunteered the past four years for the local vegetarian festival, at which every local vegan vendor sets up shop and samples their selection of vegan masterpieces disguised as something the average individual would actually want to consume. There are deli meats made without meat, coffee creamer made without cream, and cheese spreads made without cheese. (And they call me a fraud.) I volunteer in the children’s section, where we give children stickers with pearls of wisdom like “This fish was sad when you ate his dad”** and “This cow was happy because you ate an apple instead of his pappy.”** I wasn’t ashamed of my meat-eating practices prior to attending the vegfests, but it’s incredible just how much peer pressure one feels when trapped in a conference hall that holds every vegan in the greater Portland area (for those mathmatically-inclined folk, this breaks down to 4.3 vegans per square inch).

“Are you a vegetarian?” a fellow volunteer asked me at a vegfest a few years back as I strung vegan fruit loops on a piece of vegan string to make a vegan necklace for a five-year old vegan child.

I answered honestly, “No,” which felt like the right answer until her eyes narrowed and I felt the judgment of the entire vegan community in her disapproving glower.

So I cracked under pressure and added hastily, “Sometimes I eat fish.” Which was true, but with the intentional omission that I also sometimes eat chicken, turkey, and pork. And by sometimes I mean every single day. In fact, that moment found me already salivating in anticipation of a giant turkey burger from Burgerville at the culmination of my meatless volunteer shift.

At any rate, there’s a hardcore vegan community in Portland, and eating a few vegan brownies makes me no more a member of it than riding my bike once back in 2000 makes me a member of the bicycling community here. But one of the things that makes this community uniquely Portland is its variety of options for food minorities like vegans and gluten-freegans. And as a Portlander, I will continue to embrace these vegan delights, even if I’m not delightedly embraced by the vegans.

–Troi out

*Vegan: Contains no animal products or animal byproducts. No meat, fish, eggs, dairy, gelatin, etc. Different from vegetarianism, which exlcudes meat and fish but allows eggs and dairy products.

**Poems courtesy of Troi. For rights to reproduce these poems for use with your own children, please subscribe immediately to Troi’s blog. Yes, this is a shameless ploy to increase readership.