Worldwide Ace

A spoonful of sugar.
Taken from the BBC’s Good Foods Glossary.

The best advice I ever received came from a fictional umbrella-toting nanny.

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” she sang.

The irony is that taking this piece of advice at face value, it’s often wrong. Most liquid medicines are already sweetened these days, so extra sugar makes it sickly sweet. If you’re talking Castor oil as a punishment or Ipecac to induce vomiting, adding sweetener kind of defeats the purpose, though you’ll certainly still vomit. A spoonful of sugar makes it that much harder to swallow a pill, and putting it in your IV is just silly. A spoonful of sugar is a bad idea when the treatment is topical, and while the fetish lover you’re sleeping with may like it in your enema, you probably won’t.

—

I’m going to die.

To a certain extent I already knew that. It’s not a new prognosis, but rather the ultimate endgame to my existence. I don’t know when it’ll happen or how; at least not right now. Yet it is an absolute.

So often I hear about people running for religion when they know they’re going to die. Their proverbial spoonful of sugar is the thought that there’s something more, that their friends and loved ones await them. Heaven, reincarnation, and every variation on the immortal soul are all likely pipe dreams.

Really, though, it’s just a fancy way of saying they seek hope.

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I woke up this morning feeling glum, much like during the waning seconds of the tail end of my final lacrosse game in high school, where I stared from the sidelines as our team lost well aware that it was completely beyond my ability to do anything about it. It wasn’t an oppressive glumness, but a light and malleable one punctuated by a slight distaste for Zoe, who had spent the wee hours of the morn pawing at me as I attempted to hide from the world beneath my comforter. I rolled out of bed, accidentally and haphazardly flinging Zoe off the bed, and I was immediately chill in the cool morning air that had leaked into my room over the course of the night.

My ankle cracked loudly with each step as I traversed our dim stairwell and emerged in our living room. I thought it was just a sprain, but two plus weeks later I can’t help but posit that something worse may have happened, like the time I got clotheslined by the parallel bars and may have broken my nose but went back to play with just a band-aid and a thirst for more tag—I’ll never know if I broke my nose as it’s long since healed.

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It’s been a tradition in my family to make a Jack-O-Bear for Halloween. Though they haven’t done it every year, my parents once again rose to the task this year. I had hoped to help my Dad carve it before I left Boston this week, but it seems to have been completed in excellent fashion despite my lackadaisical efforts.

Happy Halloween!

“Well, yeah. It just makes sense,” I admitted.

“Ok, follow-up question,” warned Matt.

“Shoot.”

“Would you say that’s sexist?”

My immediate inclination was to say no, but even after discussing the topic for nearly an hour, there was still a shred of doubt in the back of my mind. It ate at me, gnawing on my conscience until I started posing the same questions to friends. I didn’t want to be prejudiced, especially given the amount of respect I have for the opposite sex, but no amount of reassurance is enough to completely quell the possibility.

—

The question seemed innocuous at first: you’re in a book store, trying to pick out a self-help book (a scenario that instantly demands the requisite statement of “not that you need one, it’s just hypothetical”). The self-help book you’re looking for should be designed specifically for your sex with their issues in mind. When you get to the shelf, you find two books with this topic in mind. One is written by a man and the other is written by a woman. Which do you expect to be a more useful book?

The question is almost always answered “man” by men and “woman” by women. No one really thinks twice until the question of sexism is raised. This is quickly followed by rationalising, backpeddling, and an intense dislike for the scenario:

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Ann Althouse, now a law professor at the university of Wisconsin,
studying for her final law exam in 1981. Taken from her blog.

When it comes down to it, there’s always one question that needles me until every thread of thought and belief come unwound: Why?

—

The past few months, I’ve been slowly wending my way toward grad school. My exact destination has been unclear, but the path to all points is roughly the same. It’s like navigating by Polaris, the North Star; it probably won’t get you to your destination directly, but it’ll get you close enough that it’s hard to get too lost.

Last Friday, I received my LSAT score. This, along with my instant GRE results, ends the studious portion of the process and plants me firmly at the application stage. I’m still not tremendously pleased with my GRE score–thanks mostly to what appears to be over-performing on the math section and under-performing on the verbal, which place my overall score approximately where I expected despite my annoyance–but I overshot my LSAT target by a couple points, leaving me quite enamored with the outcome.

SIDE NOTE: Graduate exams are interesting. The GRE’s verbal section is infinitely harder than the math section, but given that my lackadaisical nature resulting in less than 4 hours of studying for math combined with my complete and total avoidance of math since high school nearly a decade ago, my 770 out of 800 was a complete surprise. Meanwhile, despite my complete and total infatuation with the English language, I found that much of my linguistic tendencies resulted in a skewed understanding of language in which colloquial definition and dictionary meaning were at odds. The LSAT, meanwhile, played up the strategist in me. It’s a test which I not only found to accentuate my strengths as a gamer, but also to be surprisingly enjoyable. If the LSAT is truly indicative of the type of work required by law school, I fully expect to both enjoy and be challenged by the material presented.

My pleasure was short-lived, however.

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Assorted peppers and fairytale eggplant from Crescent Moon Farm.
Taken from Figs with Bri.

Hearing a Jew take Jesus’s name in vain doesn’t quite have the same gravity as when a Christian does it. There’s the immediate shock factor that the biggest name drop in the Western world just happened, but when I figure out the offending party is a fellow member of the twelve (or thirteen, if you’re superstitious) tribes, the surprise dissipates and I return to my dissection of the argument, assuming there is one.

Today, my good friend Em is getting married. Her wedding, having been slated for October for several months now, was fully into the planning stages by the middle of summer, including getting the gear, picking the guests, and, perhaps most controversial of the tasks, choosing a menu. A few years ago, Em continued her downward spiral into moral righteousness by becoming an ethical vegetarian.

I’ve never been much of one for ethical vegetarianism. I have no problem with vegans, vegetarians, pescetarians, or any other flavor of dietary morass one chooses to affiliate with. In fact, I wholly laud the immense number of vegetarian and vegan restaurants in the Boulder area, something often taken for granted by the residents who live there. My issue with ethical vegetarians is the first word in the compound: ethical. The implication, much like the pro-life camp, is that those of us who choose to remain omnivorous are unethical by definition.

The saving grace of ethical vegetarians is their lack of militant tactics. They remind you of the wholesale slaughter of life with wit and humor, making it hard to be angry that they’re trying to change you. They encourage you to try food without meat and remind you of good implications for one’s health if you choose to participate or even just cut back on meat one meal a week. And, perhaps most importantly, they usually respect your choices even if they disagree with them, an outright friendly tactic. It doesn’t hurt that we, the proud omnivores of the world, outnumber ethical vegetarians by the dozens.

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Ef Rodriguez performs at Ignite Boulder 6. (photo/Andrew Hyde)

“Hipsters generally seem to lack passion,” he explained. “It’s this overriding malaise. They get excited about things, but they just as quickly seem to drop them.”

I thought about it for a second, acknowledging the various hipsters I know and considering my life recently. “I generally seem to lack passion these days,” I finally replied.

“Maybe you’re a hipster, then,” he chided me playfully.

—

For the week prior to Ignite Boulder 6, I pondered whether or not to go. Sure, it would be entertaining and I’d be supporting friends and seeing people I’d hadn’t seen for quite some time, but I still feel pangs of anger and resentment that my previous topic had been shanghaied from Ignite Boulder 5.

On Monday, it dawned on me that it wasn’t Ignite or the people involved I was angry with. I was angry with myself.

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Urethral catheters.

In high school, I had some serious jaw surgery. They removed a sliver of bone from my upper jaw and reattached it, leaving me bloated and recovering for over a month. Because of the invasive nature of the procedure, they used a full anesthetic and installed a catheter.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a catheter is a plastic tube shoved into your urethra so that if you pee, it’s swept directly into a bag. It’s a relatively important piece of equipment, because otherwise you might spray the surgeons or otherwise foul up the operation.

Thankfully, I was already under when they installed the tubing, saving me vast pain. I was not, however, anesthetized when they removed it. I have never had a more painful experience than that. My dick hurt when I peed for a couple days after.

—

Police in Lawrenceburg, Indiana are being sued after forcefully instaling a catheter in suspected drunk driver Jamie Lockard. Lockard had already passed a breathalyzer, but for some reason the officers didn’t trust their own equipment. In order to install the catheter for a urine sample and take blood for testing, they handcuffed and strapped him to a gurney.

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Fenway Park during a night game.

When school let out on a game day, there was always a desire to take my allowance for the week and wind my way down to Kenmore Square for a Red Sox game. At only eight dollars, bleacher seats were downright affordable, and those lovable losers, always in the shadow of the Evil Empire, could entice me with promises of witnessing the unimaginable: a victory.

I could see every major league team in the bright hues painted in the foliage whipping by the subway windows. The speed of the train only compounded my excitement as we dove into the inky blackness, a promise of next stop Kenmore rasped over the PA in a thick Boston brogue. The crowd would sway and part as I ducked and dove, swimming to the surface in the midst of the city’s madness, surrounded by a sea of bright reds and deep blues, all flowing toward the massive green container that could bubble over with teeming joy or leak slowly with disappointment.

It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be child, that ever trusting, nubile mind. I would sidle up to the ticket window and part with my money for a stiff piece of paper that granted me viewing rights to a dreamworld. The gate keepers always smiled as I slipped through the turnstiles and traversed the echoing concrete halls. Every time, I would stop at doorway to my section, the bright blue sky glowing brightly through the threshold. Several deep breaths later, I would walk out, my mind reeling so fast that it seemed a slow motion march into the light.

There’s something magical about an open patch of grass and dirt. The smell alone is intoxicating. In the eyes of a child, every possibility plays itself out right there when the field appears, and each possibility is more fantastic and amazing than the last. Every pitch could be a strike out or a home run. Every hit could lead to an amazing defensive play or an exciting race to the bag. Every fly ball could be the greatest souvenir I’d ever gotten. Probability, scandals, drugs, egos; none of these things mattered. All that mattered was scent of fresh grass, the roar of crowd, and the chance to see some baseball.

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Back Row, Left to Right: Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Samuel Alito
Front Row: Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, David Souter (retired)

Recently, ESPN’s Lester Munson published an excellent story on, of all things, constitutional law and corporate personhood. The case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court sometime in the next year, could have serious ramifications for professional leagues across the nation. What’s worse is that it may also set a new standard for the treatment of government allowed monopolies and oligopolies in all fields while taking away much of the bargaining power of unions.

A Quick Summary:
American Needle Inc. is a sports apparel company which made hats bearing logos of NFL teams. In 2001, the NFL signed an exclusive deal making Reebok the sole maker of NFL-branded headware. American Needle, in the role of the jilted ex, sued claiming that the NFL teams were colluding and violating the anti-trust Sherman Act in preventing other companies from soliciting contracts to make apparel. In 2005, American Needle lost its first court case, the courts ruling that the NFL had a right to collectively bargain its licensing and, in the purpose of promoting football through marketing or licensing, was a single entity. In 2008, American Needle’s appeal was also denied on essentially the same grounds. It was no surprise that American Needle appealed again, this time to the Supreme Court, though in previous similar cases the Supreme Court declined to hear them. In a surprise move, the NFL requested that the case be heard, a maneuver which, given the current pro-business judges on the Supreme Court, could change the face of sports more significantly than anything before.

I’m hardly qualified to explain the far-reaching effects this case could have and I don’t think I can do a better job than Lester Munson or any number of legal professionals have already done. I highly recommend taking a look at his article, and if you want a more authoritative look, Marc Edelman of Rutgers School of Law has a pair of articles that provide excellent arguments why the court would be wrong to rule in favor of the NFL.