My idea of a good time

a) Surf-casting for undetonated WWII ordnance
b) Blind date with La Vache Qui Rit
c) Being Deborah Winger in charades
d) Reading Kierkegaard while sipping absinthe

*

My favorite mode of transportation is

a) Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine
b) Weinermobile
c) Silly Walk
d) Reading Kierkegaard while tripping on Dimethyltriptamine

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My favorite era of Anarcho-Syndicalism

a) They were all good

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Time

a) Is on my side
b) Is not on my side
c) Will not outlast Mad
d) Is not necessary for String Theory to be correct

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If I could play a sport with an artist

a) I’d play handball with the Foo Fighters
b) I’d peel tomatillos with Francis Bacon
c) I’d stage a duel with Billy Joel, and cheat
d) I’d play “telephone” with Kierkegaard, Derrida and Lacan

* My Favorite Aircraft Carrier

a) I don’t have one
b) me, neither

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My favorite recombinant-DNA food product

a) Cool-Ranch Flavor feed corn
b) Spicy Tuna soybeans
c) Twizzler potatoes
d) Sunflower-seed-after-the-pitcher-has-spit-out the shells sunflowers

*

My favorite childhood memory

a) The first time in front of a judge
b) The first time in front of Captain Kangaroo
c) The first time my babysitter used dishwasher liquid in my bath
d) The first time I read Kierkegaard in graphic-novel form

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I want Ted Nugent to

a) Be on my side in a hand-to-hand battle in a dystopian universe
b) Teach me to play the lead on “Cat Scratch Fever”
c) Lead the Armed Forces
d) Take Dimethyltryptamine with Kierkegaard

*

One

a) Is the loneliest number that you’ll ever see

b) should be pronounced “own”

c) Is, technically, a prime number, but since this is obvious, prime-number-theory mathematicians do not seem to bother with it in the field of Prime Number Distribution when they’re doing things like trying to prove or disprove, say, Opperman’s Conjecture (“There exists a prime number between N-squared and N-squared+N, where N is an integer.”) Explain. Provide citations.

You got: “The corrugated metal that county highway departments make cheap Quonset huts to store road salt in.”

You are rigid, and nothing but a quick fix when it comes to siding. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Yes, it was short, but wasn’t it the coolest NHL season in recent history? These six outdoor games? Officially (as in, “marketingly”), four of them were called “The 2014 Stadium Series.” They complemented “The Winter Classic” and “The Heritage Classic.” Unofficially, they gave us a six-pack of insanely great hockey.

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/68607688/nhl-outdoor-games-are-the-best-hockey

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/67759040/derek-jeter-is-forcing-another-yankee-farewell-tour-on-us

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/67837448/tj-oshie-and-vladimir-tarasenko-prove-olympic-spirit-still-exists

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/67974352/team-usas-real-miracle-on-ice-occurred-in-1960-in-squaw-valley

You think you know what it’s like to be pulled over by a Georgia State Trooper? With New York plates? You have no idea.

We had crossed the Georgia border about four minutes earlier. The flashing lights in my rearview were so aggressively redblue-redblue-redblue-redblue that they would have prompted an epileptic fit if I were given to seizures. Which I was about to. Seize, I mean.

I pulled our new, bright red Kia Soul to the side of Interstate 95, and looked into the rearview. This time I noticed more than the lights. I saw a large car with ominous bars in front of a chillingly grinning grill. I saw the metallic face of an automotive carnivore, ready to devour a New Yorker’s life.

Had I been speeding? Impossible. It had been a decade and a half since my wife and I had bought a new car. I generally drive a ‘97 Volvo that shudders from side to side when it goes over 58 miles per hour; I hadn’t figured that a Kia shaped like a toaster could actually go 75.

Apparently it could.

I looked in the rearview to see the archetypal central-casting Southern trooper. Big, wide-brimmed hat, and protuberant belly., beneath which were a belt with all sorts of ordnance: the Swiss Army knife of trooper belts.

I was surprisingly cool, since I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten a ticket — at least a decade — so, what the hell. Pulled out the license, rolled down the window, looked up, and, i swear, flashed on James Dickey playing the suspicious trooper in Deliverance.

“Awful far from New York, arentcha?”

“I guess we are,” I said, humbly, meekly. I tried to look as little as possible like someone who was Jewish because while I myself am not Jewish, although I’ve always wished I were, I am frequently told that I look Jewish, and I had this idea that people in Georgia, who generally aren’t Jewish, judging by the number of churches which seem to outweigh the number of actual homes in the state by 2-to-1, are not particularly fond of having Jewish people in the rural areas of the Peach State.

“What’s yer destination?”
I mentioned an old fishing village down on the southern coast of Georgia, where we’d rented a cottage for Christmas week. Charming, unknown little town with a nice coffee shop, a nice wine store and marshland full of birds.

“I know Darien, he said. “Great place. Where you from in New York?”

“Dutchess County,” I said. “North of the city.”

“I know where it is,” he said.

“How?” I said. By now he’d lightened up, and we were just having a conversation, which I was intent on extending before we got to the heavy stuff.

“I was a marine,” he said. “Spent a lot of time in New York.”

“My dad was a marine,” I said.

“Yeah?” He was looking at my license now. “You know you were goin ‘75?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “We just got this car, and it kind of drives itself.”

Now he actually smiled. “I think it probably needed some help from your foot on that pedal.”

I have no idea why I had to stretch the boundaries here, but he seemed to be encouraging me. “No,” I said. “You haven’t heard about these new cars? They actually do drive themselves.”

At this he looked at me and laughed. “Now, that’s one I haven’t heard.”

I was about to ask my wife to get the registration and insurance card, but he cut me off, and handed me back my license. “Have a good time in Darien,” he said, “and slow down.” Then he walked back to his car and drove away.

We’ve decided to return to Georgia next Christmas.

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/66241194/

Phish meets the NFL?
Dogs and cats, living together.
The end of the world as I know it. And I don’t feel fine. How could I? What if you had two overriding passions that eclipsed everything else in your life, including your family (as they’d surely attest), and each passion (or, to be frank, religion) represented the two totally opposite sides of your bipolar psyche, and somehow balanced it into sanity…and, surreally, they then decided to collaborate?

On an Unhappy Matrimony for the amazing site Bronx Banter.

http://www.bronxbanterblog.com/2013/12/18/an-unholy-matrimony/

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/64330342/

I have no idea how old the rake is. Judging from the chips and wear and roughness of the wood on the handle, and the rust and weight of the 15-tined iron head, I’m going to guess forty or more years. My rake is like a weathered, grizzled old guy who seems to get tougher with age. If my rake were alive it’d smoke unfiltered Camels.
The hoe seems to be a little newer…maybe 30? Weathered wooden handle, nicely dinged, heavy blade. Maybe thirty years? There’s no way of knowing, short of carbon dating; they were both in the shed when we bought the house almost twenty years ago and the previous owners had passed away,
Once a year, when it’s time to plant the garlic — always the middle of October — I carry them into the vegetable garden and put them to work. Well, they put me to work. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the garlic-planting ceremony is always one of the highlights of my year.
Is it because the tools are so old and heavy and good at their job? And that I’m getting blisters exactly the way backyard farmers have gotten for a century? Absolutely. Do the heads of garlic keep getting bigger every year because of my age-old methodology? I;’ like to think so. No, I do think so.

The toughest part of the afternoon is the first act: attacking the jungle of weeds that have sprouted since the harvest last July. They’re thick and they mock: While you weren’t looking, after you took out your previous crop, we took over your space. You got a problem with that? Well, yes. And so the teeth of the tines wade through the invaders with carnivorous delight: rending, shredding, yanking, tugging. Again and again and again, the heavy iron sweeps, until all that’s left are the couple of dozen plants that refuse to give in — the couple of dozen of stalwarts with ridiculously deep roots for organisms that have only been round for three months.
That’s where the hoe comes in. No plant can stand up to the brutal, insistent, crazily satisfying chop of the hoe — the flat edge of the blade, the deep prick of the sharp corner. And before long, I’m facing nothing but a perfect, rich plane of dark, dark fragrant soil.
The rest of the job belongs to the trowel: only four or five years old, but with a thick steel scoop, of course. I punch about ten holes per row, seven rows, each seeded with the fattest cloves of the July harvest, then covered by the soil, and ready for the long winter sleep.
I’m not saying it won’t be nearly as cool next July when I harvest my six dozen heads — effortlessly, with one deep scoop of a pretty old shovel — and dry them on the porch, andthen bag them in the basement, where they’ll give us a winter’s worth of the fresh stuff.
I’m just saying that their flavor in all those dishes over the winter — in stir-fries; embedded in butterflied lamb; in souffles — will feel as if it’s rooted in a cycle for the ages. The planting with timeless tools will prove — in those explosions of flavor — the inarguable agricultural dictum: you reap what you sow.