Stupid is as stupid duhs…part three
Posted by Steve | Filed under Football, Newsworthy, Sports
So Cinncinnati Bengal teammates Odell Thurman (UGA), Reggie McNeal (A&M), and Chris Henry (WV) are out on the town at 3AM on a Sunday night (monday morning?). They’re knocking a few back celebrating a win over Pittsburgh. It comes time to go home and even though it’s Henry’s car he is apparently a bit knackered after catching 5 passes in the game. Thurman and McNeal are fresh as daisies because they didn’t do a damn thing all game. Odell is sitting out a 4-game suspension for missing a drug test and Reggie…..well, he’s just Reggie. In their infinite wisdom these rocket scientists collectively decide Odell should be the designated driver.
Lo and behold, Cincy’s finest pull them over only to find Odell has done enough 12oz curls to register a 0.18 BAC level…oh yeah, Einstein was coming off suspension next week. Now he’s staring at a minimum one-year suspension from the NFL.
How stupid do you have to be, people?
Family Matters
Posted by Steve | Filed under General
Well I guess I’m overdue for an update. I’ve had a few entries bouncing around in my head for a long while. I just haven’t been in the mood to put hands to keyboard lately.
I’ve been on the East coast attending Granny’s funeral and visiting relatives. Family get-togethers can be a trying time for me. Both of my parents come from huge families so memorizing names is like cramming for the bar exam. It’s really frustrating for me because I don’t have a great memory to begin with. When I’m in a situation where I suddenly have to get reacquainted with people I haven’t seen in some cases 15 years. My mom is one of thirteen children and dad is one of ten children. That number does NOT include another boy that died at birth AND three girls that Granddaddy W adopted. They were children of a friend of his that he agreed to take care should anything happen to the friend. One day something did and Granddaddy W kept his word, although they weren’t legally adopted until they were grown. Both my parents also grew up on farms in rural South Carolina so that was called “free labor” back then. I’m talking about a town so small I’ve even talked to people from South Carolina that have never heard of it.
Great Granddaddy W died when Granddaddy W was just a boy. A friend of Great Granddaddy W agreed to take care of him before his death and he did so……barely. Granddaddy W was not allowed to stay with the new family so at age 13 he built (BY HIMSELF) the house that my father and 12 brothers and sisters would later be born AND raised in. He would sleep in the house alone and go to the the other family’s house to eat meals. The real shitter was the friend was a mean man. He would let his boys eat first and whatever meat they didn’t want he’d let Granddaddy W have. I didn’t find this out until Granddaddy W’s funeral service and it still irks me some seventeen years later. Everytime I think of that I have to remind myself of something funny to calm down. Granddaddy W married Grandma W on the front porch of the house he built. They were standing on the steps to the porch and they caved in during the ceremony! 
Thankfully nobody was hurt. Grandma W was half Native American Indian and she gave birth to all but one child at home.
Anyway, growing up in Atlanta I was always closer to my dad’s side because they were geographically closer. My mom’s side moved to Philly in the late 50′s so I only saw them once every 10 years or so whereas I saw my dad’s side almost every summer, if only for a weekend.
I was often a little uncomfortable visiting Philly because Grandma Z lived in “the hood”. I mean blocks and blocks of row houses no more than 15 feet wide. You have to understand something. While you may call me DT, I am actually Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I grew up on an upper middle-class street that had three houses in the space of a football field. Grandma’s neighborhood had 20 houses in the same distance. No grass nor white people for miles. The kind of neighborhood where if you were out after dark you were probably up to no good. The backyard was roughly a 10×10 foot area…from her backdoor to the backdoor of the house behind her is about 25 feet. The dudes around here were what my friend Harold would call “hard brothas”. Poverty, drugs, alcohol were rampant.
Grandma Z had one of those freestanding tubs with the lil feet like you see on tv…only not nearly as nice. I was always afraid something would come running out from under it and grab my leg while I was getting out. Man, I hated that tub. I was one chickensh*t lil fugga though. I woulda gone the whole summer without taking a bath if I could have. The truth is Grandma Z did not have rats or mice and I can’t recall ever seeing anything under that tub. Nevertheless, I was convinced the Loch Ness Tub Monster did indeed exist.
There was one thing I did enjoy though. Well two actually. Every once in a while my cousin Tracey and I would get money to go to the store a few blocks away. We’d come back with a soda and a Tastycake and all was right in the world. The other good thing was “city swimming”. What’s that, you say? Well there wasn’t a swimming pool for miles but when it got really hot the fire dept would come around and open one of the fire hydrants for an hour or so. All the kids would splash around like it was the first time we’d ever seen water until they cut it off.
I could go on for a while but frankly, it’s late and I’m getting tired. Another reason I had a hard time memorizing names in my family is because so many of them go by nicknames. Once a cousin from Virginia came to stay with us in Atlanta for the summer. Everybody in the family calls him “Handsome”. I think I went the entire summer not knowing what his real name was (true story). I saw him in Philly and he was in the hotel room next to me and dad. Once again I had to ask Mom what the heck his name was….it’s Leroy, Jr.
Anyway, I’m going to wrap this blog up with a shout out to all my relatives that have a nickname. So “big ups” to Noot, Crunchy, Tiny, Roshaun, Handsome, Fat, Buddy, Snookie, T-mont and the 425 others I can’t remember.
Well that sucked…
Posted by Steve | Filed under Cycling
Saturday morning I found out my grandma died the night before so I went for a long bike ride to clear my head. It was way too hot to be out that long, but I chatted with a pretty nice guy for the last part of the ride.
Saturday morning the power went out in the apt for an hour or so. Sunday it was out all day. We checked all the circuit breakers and that wasn’t it. Roomie is having a conniption because no power means no cable internet. She’s addicted to the Big Brother reality show. She has subscribed to the live internet feed so she watches it about 16 hours a day; and she used to bag on me for watching webcams…irony. Just to shut her up I remind her that her laptop has wireless and she could probably steal a signal from the neighbors. This worked like a charm.
I determined there were 3-4 outlets in the whole place that work and some of the lights worked also. I had one working jack in one outlet in my bedroom so I daisy-chained all my computer stuff to that but it still left me with no television. Normally I couldn’t care less about television but FSU was set to whup some Miami ass at 5PM so this was unacceptable.
We had to run an extension cord to plug the frig in somewhere else so our stash of Mountain Dew and Ben & Jerry’s didn’t go bad. Of course the office was closed for the holiday. We paged the emergency maintainance number and true to form Skippy the maintenance dipshit, who is very hard of hearing, responds.
Skippy the maintenance dipshit: allo? you call?
us: yes, the power is out in our apt
Skippy the maintenance dipshit: hot water?
us: no, electricity
Skippy the maintenance dipshit: no hot water? you call back. I fix
us: wha? call back for what? and it’s electricity, you border crossing numbnut.
Of course we call back again but does he return the call? Noooo so it was all day with spotty electricity. In the south coming between a man and his football is a capital offense, one that is punishable by death. We did manage to find a working jack for the bigscreen tv so Skippy should consider himself lucky.
Monday was also roommate’s birthday and she spent the majority of it bemoaning the fact that nobody (literally nobody) has called to wish her a happy birthday. I gave her a card the day before and her dad sent one early. Nevermind the fact that she has no friends because she chooses not to make any. She tells me I am her only friend. Trust me when I say that if I am your only friend you are in a world of hurt. Hell, her sister is 45 minutes away and didn’t call. Of course this could have been because roomie is always ripping Sis a new one for spoiling her two kids and trying to impose her ideals on how Sis should teach ‘em some respect.
I’m flying to Philly for the funeral on friday then back to Los Angeles Monday. I was initially going to fly to Atlanta Monday and stay there til Saturday. After already getting approval from work to take all of the following week off I’ve decided I can’t afford to detour to Atlanta because a multi-city flight is double the cost. I’ve got a few other large expenses coming up so something had to give. I think I’ll still take it off and just stay home. I was going to take a few days off before I found out about the funeral anyway.
R.I.P. Grandma Zimmerman
Posted by Steve | Filed under General
My last living grandparent has passed away last night. We love you still. 
1919-2006
