The National Football League has set the record for most meaningless records on a single Sunday afternoon.
Previously held by Major League Baseball, the NFL worked hard all season long to capture the record, bringing a fresh crop of Ivy League-trained statisticians off the bench in the fourth quarter of the AFC Wild Card playoff game on Sunday to clinch mark for monumentally meaningless marks.
Continue reading NFL Record for Most Meaningless Records on a Sunday Afternoon
Day 5: We have reverted to a feral state. Unencumbered by internal shame or external judgment, we fart audibly. We sleep in our clothes. We trudge through the detritus of Christmas Day to the refrigerator where we drink straight from the carton.
We haven’t changed the sheets. We sleep with the dogs. It’s a wonder we manage to feed them or ourselves at all. We just plunge our dirty spoons straight into unheated cans of marginal sustenance and slurp up what remains. The clock, languid in its expression of life force, lurches onward to that blissful four-hour interlude when we can down our shots of Mucinex like the fire-breathing tequila of high school spring breaks.
We are on our third (3rd) bottle of this life-giving elixir, and I can say from experience that Theraflu is distilled from the Devil’s urine cup. It could not touch this plague upon our house!
Instead, we fight it with bags upon bags of cough drops – lemon-honey, mixed berry, soothing syrup center! Armed with a warhead of eucalyptus vapor, we blast at its encrusted mucosa with our weapon of mass humidification. It gurgles and burps past the blockage that sits on my chest like an iron pig. Deep inside this maw of honking coughs, we hork up great chunks of lung butter and cast our soiled tissues into this dark landscape of undone dishes and unwashed laundry.
Though Pat initially mocked me when the chills descended on me like a hard freeze and receded into the painful ache of a feverish afternoon, he knows better now (his fever was longer and karmically more intractable). But now, we fight this pox together… in sickness and in health (if we ever get there again).
Let this be a warning to you all: Civilization is flimsy veneer, blasted away by the expulsion of just one uncovered sneeze. You are only a few microbes away from eating crackers in bed.
My dear friend Stacey and I rocked the Las Vegas Rock and Roll Half-Marathon last week, in honor of our 40th birthdays, and we did it in world-record-setting fashion. Our feet are still hurting because we kicked so much ass… asphalt, that is, 13.1 miles of it on the Las Vegas Strip.
Actually our 40-year-old feet are still hurting (as are our knees, hips, shoulders and toes) because they are 40-year-old feet, knees hips, shoulders and toes.
Not only was my 2 hours, 44 minutes, 43 seconds good enough for a mid-pack finish (22,064th of 33,257 half-marathon finishers and 38,000 or so starters) and not only did Stacey triumph at 2:42:42 for 21,443rd place, but the Las Vegas Half-Marathon also set a World Record for the Largest Nighttime Running Event.
Ergo, Stacey and I are now world-record holders.
Complete the following simile:
Stacy Bertinelli and balletic grace go together like …
a) Turds and punch bowls
b) Rama lama lama ke ding a de dinga a dong
c) Sarah Palin and Rachel Maddow
d) A and C but not B
e) A and B but not C
f) All of the above
So when my Team Limoncello partner-in-crime Kellee Stooks suggested we take a Ballet Barre™ exercise class to test our physical fitness and steely resolve… well, stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Ballet Barre™ promises a tough, calorie-blasting workout that lengthens your legs, strengthens your arms and lifts your butt. As I rapidly approach 40, I’m all about lifting my butt, as long as my dignity remains intact.
I can assure you that at Ballet Barre™, it did not.
Climbing the Seventh Tallest Free-Standing Structure in the World, I realized three (3) things:
1) This is a spectacularly boring undertaking. There are no windows until the top and no view beyond the bottom of the person in front of you. It’s basically vertical NASCAR – 10 steps up, turn right, 10 steps up, turn right – two flights per floor. … Lather, rinse, repeat. … Lather, rinse, repeat. Until the 67th floor when you have to step out onto a landing, turn left and ascend a single, thigh-shredding 16-step flight. (YOU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME? 16 STAIRS? SERIOUSLY?) You would curse too if you were two-thirds of the way done, had settled into a plodding, steady, dependable rhythm and had just learned that your quadriceps were going to be run through a 16-step cheese-grater. Yes, the six extra steps made a difference, along with the fact that they decided to add a left turn to our repertoire. Ten steps up, turn left, 10 steps up, turn left – they were only about 16 floors too late to balance us out, but I figured it’d even out… until I arrived at Floor 90, when they decided to run four flights per floor: Six steps, left, six steps, left, six steps, left, six steps, left… I’m getting dizzy here. What floor are we on again?
Continue reading Team Limoncello Scales Tallest Building in Western Hemisphere