nobody asked…

The morning after it still turns my stomach. Within the safe confines of a Holiday Inn in Knoxville, TN, the legions of orange clad fans are quiet, exchanging knowing and mutually sympathetic glances. Last night at Neyland Stadium we had endured together, witnessing the final undoing of what has been a football dynasty of sorts. Our beloved Vols do not lose to South Carolina. Last night we did. They do not have losing seasons. This year we do. Since Phillip Fulmer assumed the top coaching position some 13 or so years ago, we’ve been on a rip - a National Championship, multiple SEC Championships, bowl games every year. And now it ends. This does not feel right. It does not feel good.

Suffering through the 4th quarter of a game we should have been able to win, there was little to cheer for. Cold wind blowing, teeth chattering, body shivering, my mind wandered to why? Why am I spending all this money and time to be abused this way. Studying the faces around me, listening to the deafening roar of silence from 107,715 of my closest friends - my family, I knew I was not alone. They were thinking the same thing. Back at the lounge of the Holiday Inn, the quiet conversations around me confirmed those thoughts. Verbatim. The Rolling Rock and Bud Light and Jack Daniels would not wash away the sorrows of the Vol faithful. Not this time.

A restless night’s sleep did not help much either. Up too early - why did the time change have to happen on top of this? So I write about it, hoping for some cleansing catharsis. But it’s not happening yet. No one wants to read all the words and pages it might take for the sick feeling to subside. And I do not want to write them. I am sad…not angry, not even a little pissed. Just so very sad…

TRANSITIONS This year we went from hot summer one day to cold weather the next. No fall, no colorful leaves…just green then brown. I miss autumn.

FOOTBALL UNIFORMS I thought the ugliest football uniforms on the planet were those gawd-awful green and yellow things the Oregon Ducks wear. But last night I changed my mind…it’s the maroon and orange (yuck!) uniforms of Virginia Tech. What’s with the one orange sleeve on a maroon jersey?

Update: 10/30/05 - Yesterday Florida wore their normal blue jerseys in the game with Georgia. Normal except they had one orange sleeve! Not as horrid as maroon and orange, but still ugly. Manufacturer must have had an overrun of orange left sleeves they were moving out cheap and thought no one would notice.

BRING IN THE CLONES All girls age 18 and under look, dress, talk, act, smell and feel like Britney Spears. OK, I made up the part about feel. Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?

FAMILY FEATURES The more I see of Bush on TV these days, the more I realize he really does have facial features and expressions akin to a chimpanzee. Oh how I hate to insult a chimp like that!

CHANGE IS GOOD I am not a baseball fan…never was, never will be. Yet for some reason not understood, I was so happy that the World Series of MLB was not the Yankees and Red Sox again.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH I miss John Denver.

GASTRONOMY There are no better restauranteurs on the planet than the Regas family of Knoxville, TN. Their latest addition, Parkside Grille, is to die for. Wish they would open something in Nashville.

SPEAK NO EVIL It seems impossible for anyone in the media eye, especially in the world of sports, to even acknowledge that there are different races or skin colors without being roasted as politically incorrect and run out of town on the next bus.

FOREVER = 4 WEEKS One month ago we were told that gasoline prices would probably never fall below $3.00 per gallon. Today I saw several stations with posted prices of $2.27. Of course that was 30 miles up the road from where I had just filled up for $2.41.

FUNNIEST ONE LINER My wife ran away with my best friend, and I sure do miss him.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. — James Branch Cabell

Reading Jessica Mitford’s classic The American Way of Death back in the late 60s solidified my previously held notion into a conviction: When I croak I want to be cremated.

The major natural disasters of the past few weeks have resulted in countless thousands of our fellow humans being whisked out of this life. In the cases of typhoons, hurricanes, tidal waves and landslides, many of the dead are not to be found, buried naturally by the forces that took them. For many thousands more, the bodies are found, identified, and buried or otherwise disposed of in accord with local cultural customs. Most are buried after the customary preparation. This got me thinking about land use, particularly in high-density population areas. The normal annual death toll in a place like New York City must consume many acres of valuable land-space. Where do they put them? Imagine the additional burden that would be imposed by a major disaster, natural or not… What self-respecting New Yorker wants to get planted in Jersey?

Before I found the statistics or finished my research on that (maybe another day), something else jumped off the screen and found me. Ecological Funerals…

Having never heard the term, it teased my curiosity and pulled me in. With a bit of help from Wikipedia I learned that in 1999 a Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak invented and patented the process of promession, which is promoted as the Ecological Funeral. Her company, Promessa Organic AB, is continuing the development and promotion of the process.

Promession is a method for allowing the body of the deceased to decompose in an environmentally and ethically acceptable way. The first facility for Ecological Funerals, known as a promatorium, should be ready by late 2005 in Jönköping, Sweden. More can be read on this innovative concept at the Wikipedia article or at Promessa’s website.

As interesting and in some ways appealing as it is, I think I’ll stick with my desire for cremation. Having thin Southern blood, I am much more adaptable to hot than to cold…of course who would know anyway. But there is one thing I will know…I have given instructions/last wishes that my ashes be scattered by dumping into the Tennessee River where it passes by UT’s Neyland Stadium. Believe me, I will come back to haunt anyone who violates that wish!

If we don’t change the direction we’re going, we’re likely to end up where we are headed.
— Chinese Proverb

URGENT: White House desperately in need of compass, new or used. Preferable in working order, but doesn’t really matter since we are hopelessly lost anyway. Please send overnight express to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. Payment of $1 million in US dollars will be paid for each compass delivered to the White House; payments will be made immediately after all other debts of the US Government have been satisfied. Questions or comments to W_is_lost@whitehouse.adrift

OK, so I’m slow. Nolo contendere. This just showed up in my email this morning (thank you Sally, wherever you are) and I thought it was a real side-splitter. Before doing anything with it, seemed like a good idea to track down the original source, since the email I got it from was silent on its parentage. In two shakes of a Google tail I discovered the piece was originally posted back in early September at BS News. Like I said, I am slow on the uptake sometimes. While checking out BS News browse through some of the other great material they have — all true of course! Here’s just a sampling of this one to whet your appetite and make you click over for more.

BUSH SELLS LOUISIANA BACK TO THE FRENCH

BATON ROUGE, LA. – The White House announced today that President Bush has successfully sold the state of Louisiana back to the French at more than double its original selling price of $11,250,000.

Read the rest of this hilarious piece of fiction. It is fiction, isn’t it?

We already knew that our country had been hijacked by the ultra-conservative, bible-thumping, extreme right-wing, Protestant Republican party. Unfortunately, those folks have no idea, do not understand and do not care about Constitutional tenets, how those have been interpreted by the courts over the last couple of centuries, or what our founding fathers said or intended. They think that separation of church and state means that as long as they are two separate words everything is OK. Beyond that, they only know two things: 1. they are in charge and have a lackey at the helm doing their front-end dirty work, and 2. they can do no wrong because God is on their side. You don’t believe it, just ask one of them. Never could I have imagined that our country would or could spawn such extreme terrorists as these who are destroying America from within. Yes, this ship of fools led by captain Bush has taken our beloved country aground. An act of Congress or even an act of their God cannot save us now. Yes, we already knew all of that…

Then comes one of the scariest uses of the internet I have ever seen. Whether or not Bush, his administration, or the Protestant Republican party openly endorse or underwrite the Presidential Prayer Team website is not the issue. The appearance of doing so is written all over it. The United States of America is now officially in moral, ethical, and legal bankruptcy.

What’s next — baptismal pools and fonts at polling places?

During the original conception and design of nobodyasked, one of the basic ideas was to have not one, but two listings of other blogs and sites this author enjoys reading. The first listing called Got2Read (isn’t that cute?) is the roll for daily reading, which in a sense would seem to indicate my favorites. And that is certainly what that list started as — and remains. Knowing that time for reading and browsing would be limited at times, the list started with ten entries, which felt like about all I could reasonably handle on a daily basis. Recently I added one that I felt myself drawn to daily, but could not find one I wanted to move off the “A list”, so the list grew to eleven. Yes, Rand’s Law, Corollary 7, states that “Having made these stupid rules, Winston has the right to break his own rules at any time for any reason whatever, or for no reason at all.”

The second listing, Places2Go/People2Read, is for all the other blogs that I find interesting, useful, informative, entertaining, or notable for easy finding again. There may even be a couple of them that I go to only when feeling the need for punishment. You may entertain yourselves for hours trying to figure out which ones those are. This listing has been somewhat dynamic, having frequent additions, occasional deletions, and once-in-a-while changes of name, URL, popup descriptive notation, etc. I do try to get through this list at least once a week, though my work schedule the past few weeks has made a complete sweep impossible.

From time-to-time I discover a site that speaks to me and begs to be added to the favorites list. It is becoming more and more difficult to say “No, you have to serve apprenticeship on the ‘B’ list for a while.” Read more

Obviously crime pays, or there’d be no crime.
— G. Gordon Liddy

The following is quoted from Patricia Keefe’s column in InformationWeek Daily Newsletter, Friday, Oct. 7, 2005, issue. There are potentially significant implications for all bloggers as such cases and rulings unfold across the States.

The Delaware Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a group of anonymous bloggers in a defamation suit, saying in essence that free speech trumps defamation. (If that’s true, there’s no point to the concept of defamation.)
Read more

Whether or not your dog’s testicles — or lack thereof — concerns you, this one will give you a good chuckle! Maybe even a pause for reflection on just where the hell our focus and priorities are as a nation. Read on…

I’m not a fan of Jim Rome or his syndicated sports talk radio show. The smooth style and voice of Dan Patrick on ESPN Radio is more to my liking, though there are times I would like to punch Dan out for so obviously trying to make a story where there is none. In the course of a normal work week I do listen to a lot of sports talk radio as I spend time in the car driving between customers. A couple of years ago it was political talk radio - ugh! - and before that it was wall-to-wall public radio. Next year it may be oldies or jazz or whatever. But this year my no-sleep remedy while driving is sports radio.

So last Friday I was cruising up I-40 from Nashville to Knoxville and hit one of those areas where I could not find anything worth listening to. This happens every trip and I started kicking myself for leaving my CDs at home. Soon the Scan button landed me on some little 500 watt station out here in the middle of nowhere that was airing The Jim Rome Show. Almost ready to give up and turn it off, I realized that good old abrupt, abrasive Jim was not talking sports - he was talking about dog testicles.

More precisely, he was talking about a new product on the market called Neuticles. It turns out these are synthetic orbs sized and shaped for your dog, implanted when he is neutered to give him a natural look and feel. There was also something about giving him the confidence to carry on a normal life free of the ridicule of his un-neutered peers. I promise, I am not making this up! You’ve just got to see more of this for yourself at the manufacturer’s site or at this third party site.

What with my annual pilgrimages to Knoxville and Neyland Stadium this time of year, the time-crunch of some new network and server installations, and the normal excitement, drama, and ho-hum of the daily grind, it has been difficult to put the finishing touches on some posts that remain works-in-progress. Ergo, there have been/will be more offerings from my collection of meaningful, humorous, or inane one-liners to mark the passage of time. Glad to share those with you, my dear readers. Come on back again; Winston and nobody asked will get back to some level of normal soon…

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
— Elizabeth Taylor

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead