Herr Necklace

You know that land bridge that is to have existed in the past, connecting Alaska to Russia, whereby people and animales traveled back and forth and ventured into new lands? That's what I am reminded of every time I look at that area under my ears. Normally, there shouldn't be any hair there, trying to connect the hair of the head from the beard, but lately, once every ice age, or at least a fortnight, I must shave that area to avoid looking like a Cro-Magnon man.

Not only that, but when trimming my facial hair weekly, I also have to remember to get the insides of the ears, ear lobes, and inside of the nose. I get stray dark hairs all the way up to my cheekbones. I think the hair factory in my body is working overtime, but lacking production in one vital area, that is the widow's peaks that seem to be getting more and more severe each time I cut my hair.

In the CD booklet for Phish's live album Slip, Stitch, and Pass, there is a picture of Trey Anastasio, but his name is listed as Herr Necklace. He sports a black tee-shirt with a stretched-out neck, which hangs down to show his massive amounts of black chest hair. A patch of it clearly stands out, looking like he has on a necklace made of hair. I think if I wanted to, I could sport a nice hair necklace. A necklace of hair in the front, with the chain going up over the shoulders and around the back.

Isn't it a very cruel trick that nature plays on a man, giving him a full head of hair in youth, then slowly taking it away and adding it and then some to the rest of the body? I'm not really going bald yet, but it seems like if my head was a major metropolis, that too much of the hairs are moving to the suburbs of the ears, neck, and nose, with more living in the smaller cities of the shoulders, and some prefering the lonely flatlands of the back.

The only places on my body now that seem to be hairless are the bicep area, most of my hands, the bottoms of my feet, and the forehead. I can't really speak for my back because I don't spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, at least not looking at my back. I guess I would rather not know. I suppose I can consider myself lucky that I have not yet had to worry about growing a unibrow. Maybe that is next...

Kale recipe

Today during work I had an unrelenting urge to eat some kale, which is strange because to the best of my knowledge, I've never eaten kale before. After work, I headed over to the grocery store and bought a head, or a bunch, or a unit of kale, whatever the correct nomenclature happens to be. Having no idea what to do with it at that point, I used some different cookbooks as a reference for preparing the kale and formulated a gameplan.

Kale recipe:

Ingredients: Kale, bacon, garlic, Thai peanut sauce, sunflower seeds, water, serrano pepper

Prepare bacon as normal. Set aside cooked bacon, but save grease. Add garlic and a generous spoonful of Thai peanut sauce to the hot grease. Add chopped kale and serrano pepper to the grease mixture and stir, coating kale leaves before adding half a cup of water. Cover and cook at medium-high heat for 5 minutes. Uncover and cook at medium-high heat until water has evaporated. Cook until kale reaches desired tenderness. Stir in another generous spoonful of Thai peanut sauce, add a handful of sunflower seeds, and crumble bacon over kale. Mix together and serve, or like me, eat an entire plateful by yourself.

It was delicious. It was spicy because of the pepper, flavorful from the peanut sauce and bacon grease, and slightly cruncy from the sunflower seeds. I look forward to trying different things with kale in the future.

What was that again?

There have been a few phrases, words, or sentences I've heard or read recently that made me think twice. They will be presented and discussed.



"Market Value"

I was reading about Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel wanting to get "market value" from the Patriots, which means that he wanted to get paid more than others who produce less than him. In most situations, I would agree that this is a good salary rule: If you produce more than somebody else, you should get paid more than that person. In professional sports, where salaries are ballooning, it makes for some interesting contracts. Take Barry Zito's 7-year deal for $126 million, which has not paid off for the Giants. Now, pitchers who produce more than Zito, or even have the potential to produce like him, will get deals that approach or surpass those numbers. I guess my point is this: Is there that big of a difference between getting paid maybe 6 million a year and wanting 8 million a year? Yes, I suppose it is 2 million dollars, a large sum of money, but 6 million is still far more than some 99% of the US population makes in a year. I can see a person arguing that they produce more than a coworker and deserve a raise from $12/hr to $15/hr, but the numbers these professional athletes argue over have six zeroes behind them!



"Tide of Iron"
Tide of Iron is a board game I purchased recently. It is a scenario-based World War II game, that I supposed could be described as Risk on steriods. Risk would be somewhat skinny, rookie year, 1987 bash-brother Mark McGuire, whereas Tide of Iron would be 1998, bulging arm vien, gum-chewing, muscleman Mark McGuire. I believe Tide of Iron is a great name for the game, as from the shore, the D-Day invasions must have turned the beaches into a tide of iron, but then the game itself has no scenarios that involve those battles. It deals with events that happen after D-Day, some almost a year after the operation. So, it's a great game, but the name doesn't exactly fit the game.

"We play everything"
That is the station motto for 100.3, The BUS, based out of Des Moines. They claim to play everything, but they don't. What you can hear on the BUS consists of most of the songs you can hear on any oldies station (93.3 here in Iowa), classic rock station (95), or 80s/90s pop station (102.5). They have some self-righteous DJ recordings that they play before songs and frequently talk about how their songs are played at random, even though there are a few heard daily. Well, they don't play everything, a wide variety of songs for sure, but nothing that approaches the all-encompasing "everything". They play no jazz, few blues songs, no country, no opera, no classical (Roll Over Beethoven doesn't count), no rap, no hip-hop, nothing you regularly hear on college radio stations, no Christian, no bluegrass, and no metal. Surely, many other genres are excluded. Well, I'd still prefer to listen to the BUS at work over any other radio station, but their self-proclaiming radio shorts really annoy me.

"All projects equal"
I went to my brother's senior art exhibition, where a woman served as a judge to give out awards. You know how you have to let people who didn't win feel good about their work? She tried to do that, but ended up not making sense. She said that all projects were equally good, but a few stood out from the rest. Seven pieces won awards, one first, one second, one third, four honorable mention, but they were all equally good... I wish I could take a math course that she taught where she would show how 1=2=3=4=4=4=4=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5=5... I'm not on an angry guy grammar or semantics rant here, I just thought what she said was humorous, then came up with the math parts in my head.

I'm sure I've come across more of these, but they were the few that I remembered to write about.

Clutch Maker to the Nation

Wow, I didn't realize it had almost been a month since I last posted. I want to thank those who posted previously, especially those who have never posted before. It is always good to know that your audience is larger than you think, which I believe now stands to be roughly 27 people.

My feelings towards work have changed a little, or maybe now I'm just too tired to exhausted to think about it at the end of the day. I remembered a Green Day song the other day at work, the one entitled "Welcome to Paradise", it kind of sums up my feelings towards work at this point, especially if you substitute the word "home" with "job" in the excerpt, which I will do for you.

It makes me wonder why I'm still here
For some strange reason it's now
Feeling like my "job"
And I'm never gonna go
Pay attention to the cracked streets and the broken homes
Some call them slums some call it nice
I want to take you through a wasteland I like to call my "job"
Welcome to Paradise

In the song, the protagonist moves to a new city, which is not his ideal place to live. At first he is nervous and unsure of his decision to have left home, but through a period of time, he comes to accept the new city as home, even though others, and maybe even himself, have such a negative view of the place.


I removed some old boxes of junk from my parent's house about two or three weeks ago. In the boxes were old baseball cards, stuffed animals, souvenirs, knick-knacks, and what seemed like all of the notes, tests, quizzes, worksheets, and handouts for every class I took dating back to my sophomore year in high school. I sorted through each individual sheet to look over things I had written in papers and on tests, pictures I had drawn in the margins of notes, and things I had learned about over a period of nine years. I came across a poem from my 11th grade American Literary Studies class, Chicago by Carl Sandburg. It inspired me to keep going and working hard at my current job. The excerpt, which shows the last third of the poem, applies to me, especially if you substitute the phrase "clutch maker" for "freight handler".

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating proud to be Hog Butcher, Toolmaker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and "clutch maker" to the Nation

That's about it for today. I have some topics to write about, but maybe not the motivation to sit down and write them.