Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Chick-Tac-Dough

While I was walking the dogs this morning, I saw a sign on one of the advertising kiosks that are scattered around. I guess that the kiosks aren't really for advertising because informational "You-Are-Here" maps of the various districts in Cleveland are posted, but the poster-sized ads pay the bills.

The poster was green -- like the color of money -- and urging me to come to Detroit to the New Greektown Casino, where I could "BEAT THE CHICKEN."

Until June 8th, I could "Play Tic-Tac-Toe against a live chicken."

And on June 9th, I "could win $20,000 in our final Chicken Challenge Drawing."

Tic-tac-toe against a chicken, a live chicken, at that.

There is no mention of tic-tac-toe against a live chicken on the New Greektown Casino website -- no mention at all. I did discover, when checking out the website, searching for the chicken, that Ryan Bufalini is the Director of Player Development. What does a director of player development do? Does he train the chicken? No mention of that, but I assume that he has worked many, many hours training the chicken.

Here's the thing about playing tic-tac-toe against a live chicken, as opposed to a dead chicken -- what if you lose? What if you're sitting across from the chicken, and you hit the touch screen on the tic-tac-toe machine -- I am only imagining this scene with the human on one side of the table with the flat screen embedded into it and the chicken sitting on a stool on the other side of the table -- after the chicken has beaked the touch screen, grabbing the middle square with its "X" and after you've put your "O" in place and after the chicken beaks the screen again, and you, all of a sudden, realize that you have underestimated the chicken sitting across from you.

The chicken clucks, as chickens are wont to do, and you wonder what the chicken is thinking. And you hope to hell that the fucking fowl does not notice that a well-placed "X" will win the game. In fact, you make the sign of the cross and say a little prayer that the chicken doesn't notice that you have made what could be a fatal error in your tic-tac-toe strategy.

You say a prayer because people are crowded around watching you play tic-tac-toe against a live chicken. And you will be the laughing stock of the gambling world if you are defeated by a stupid, stupid chicken.

You look across the table at your opponent. Is the chicken smiling? You swear that the chicken is smiling at you. And definitely winked at you. Knows, yes, the chicken knows. And the chicken is taking its time, making you sweat. And here's the deal -- all those people crowded around the glass booth, they are all smiling and laughing. They are smiling and laughing at you because they all know that whether or not the chicken decides to give you a break this time, you have been beaten by a chicken. You have lost a tic-tac-toe game to a chicken. Even if the chicken makes a mistake and you salvage a tie, they know you lost.

That is why they are laughing at you, the person in the glass booth sitting across from a live chicken playing tic-tac-toe.

And as you are sitting there, realizing that your fate is in the claws of a chicken sitting across from you, you wish that you had spent the extra money to get the Gold Club or Silver Club membership. A VIP "can even enjoy the privacy of a separate High Limit Cage."

The privacy of the separate high limit cage. That sounds very nice right now, as you sit across from the gloating live chicken.

WOOHOO!

Thank you, Cavs, for a freaking AWESOME season! looking forward to next year!

oh. and new york? sucks to be you.

5 EASY STEPS TO INSANITY

by now, you know i'm a cavs' fanatic. and lebron. duh. so the past 10 days have me questioning the very meaning of life. why?

in spite of the fact that our loyal readers (all 2 of them) know for a certainty that that guy over there to your right thinks in a verrrry different way from most of us/you, you might -- or might not -- be surprised to learn that my thinking process can zoom wayyy out of control. i struggle (mightily) to be normal or some acceptable approximation thereof (one of us HAS TO) and to control the not-so-much demons as umm, well, i guess maybe thought monkeys?

so, i start thinking "cavs game tonight!"

then, "please, PLEEEEEEASE win!"

then "orlando doesn't need this! Cleveland does! they have freaking DISNEY WORLD!"*

then, "please, PLEEEEEASE, god!"

then, "wait. if there IS, indeed a god, then he surely is letting cleveland take care of itself."

then, "is there a god/gods? do i believe in god?"

arghhhhhhhh. i don't want to THINK about this right now. maybe never.

then, "what should we eat during the game? are we out of potato chips? should we even HAVE potato chips in the house?"

ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!

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*sometimes THIS step spirals off into the "if-cleveland-loses-will-lebron-want-to-leave place. it's a dark. dark place where i don't want to go. ever.

KING JAMES

"oh. my. god. we were there. i'm framing the tickets."

i wrote that last night and posted it to my facebook. if you don't know what i'm talking about, well, um... ok, i got nothin.

when i first started hearing all the media frenzy (all over the country!) about this high-school basketball player phenom from akron, lebron james, it was all i could do to not throw up in my mouth. wtf? he's in freaking HIGH SCHOOL! let the kid grow up and learn to be a freaking MAN before you start teaching him he's GOD! made me sick. and he signed with the cavs right out of high school -- ok yippee, big whoop, pffft. i couldn't sit through a cavs game to save my life. well, maybe that's a bit of hyperbole -- i never tried.

then we moved downtown. the building had this cool cable company that threw in almost every single cavs and indians game for free. and you just can feel the excitement in the air living down here on days of sporting events. the city comes alive. ALIVE, I TELL YA!

so i sit down to watch a cavs game with my throw-up bowl handy. bill's happy that we have a cavs game on in the living room. he says, "you'll love this kid." we'll see. 5 minutes later, i'm hooked. i cannot believe that this 20-year old has such poise, plays so generously, and is magic (real magic, not the orlando kind of magic) on the court.

i know you're thinking "did i go to the right blog? where's stacey?" sorry. it IS me. i have turned into a cavs/lebron james MANIAC. we bought 2 season tickets for next year (and then 2 more -- 2 + 2 = 4 seasons tickets. stay with me people) and purchased the package of 4 seats to guarantee seats to all playoff games. we picked our seats because we had sat in them on one of our regular season game days (before we ordered season tickets for next year). they are hard to get to (for me), but great seats (when you get there)! honest to god (would i lie to you?), they are the absolute last row of the Q, right at center court (bill sits on one side of the center-court line, i sit on the other side). dead center court on the players' bench side. but like a quarter mile high.

i'm a freaking screaming idiot at the games. bill looks at me at least once a game and says "who ARE you?" i don't honestly know -- i'm just having a ball.

last night i wasn't having such a good time when time out was called with one second (do you know how short a time ONE SECOND is???) left in the game. orlando 95, cleveland 93. bill's calm as can be. lebron's gonna hit a 3." well, duh, i knew he was gonna TRY. oh me of little faith. i had my head down, hands over my face. i first hear bill SCREAM "HE MADE IT!" and then the eruption hits. oh. my. god. i have NEVER heard such noise in my life. every single person in the Q is SCREAMING. CRYING. JUMPING. HUGGING. oh. my. god.

and the entire crowd stayed in their seats celebrating until lebron finished his on-the-court interview with espn or whoever it was (you tell ME who it was -- i was AT the game!) waved to the crowd and hugged his mom. ANOTHER LONG OVATION AND CELEBRATION.

sometimes, only "it was freaking awesome!" describes the moment.

oh -- and new york? sucks to be you.

Cavaliers Play-Off Tickets

I understand that Room 12 is raffling off 2 tickets to the Cleveland Cavaliers -- Orlando Magic game, which is scheduled for Thursday, May 28, 2009, at 8:30 p.m., at Quicken Loans Arena, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Raffle tickets are $25 each and a maximum of 200 are being sold, with the winning ticket being picked on Tuesday, May 26, Wednesday, May 27, at 7 p.m. Winner need not be present.

You can buy raffle tickets by e-mailing Room 12 at the website.

Runners' World

I once made a bet with a friend that I would beat him to the finish line in the next Cleveland Marathon. About two weeks before the race, in a mutual decision, we canceled the bet. That was in the days of pure amateurism in sports; and, officially, we did not want to jeopardize our amateur standing - extreme lack of training was the other reason.

The Cleveland Marathon was run this past weekend. I don't know who the named sponsor is. It was called the Revco Cleveland Marathon for many years, then Revco was sold to another company. I happened to be walking the dogs Sunday morning at about the start time and watched a large stream of people running down West 6th Street, spectators screaming encouragement from the sidewalks, interrupting my usual Sunday morning walk in solitude. The line of people at Starbucks, where I usually stopped, after tying up the dogs in front of the Nauti Mermaid Restaurant next door, for a latte, stretched out the door onto the sidewalk.

Marathon running as a spectator sport can't be as exciting as the cheering people on the sidewalks make it out to be. It exceeds golf as the most boring spectator sport. At least, the spectator of a golf match can walk along and see the entire match and doesn't have to run along for 26.2 miles. What is the attraction? There are very few crashes, as in auto racing, the fans of which lust for conflagrations on the track. But the fans were out there, many yelling, generically, as it were, "Go, runners!" What kind of cheer is that? At least, they could be more personal, "Go, Runner Five Thousand Six Hundred and Thirty-Seven, Go!" or "Run your ass off, Steve!" There must be at least one runner named Steve in the group.

So, I didn't stop for my customary Sunday morning dog-walking latte; but it was cool that all these people with their kids and their dogs were enjoying themselves in the early morning chill.

Later, I took the dogs out at about 10:30 in the morning. Runners were still crossing St. Clair Avenue, but up the road a piece -- stragglers, I guess. Weird thing, though. Clothes were strewn all over the street, on the sidewalks, and in bushes along West 6th Street, where the torrent of runners had rushed south hours earlier -- a cornucopia of clothing. Shirts, jackets, hats, gloves -- running can get expensive if they're throwing clothes around all over town.

So, not being familiar with this running thing, like some of you, I have questions: Do they come back and pick up their clothes? Or can anyone pick up these abandoned articles of clothing? Are unclaimed clothes collected by race organizers and donated to shelters? If the runners want their clothes back, do they run the race course again just to pick up the clothes they have discarded? How do they remember where they discarded their clothes?

Spanishly Speaking

I was in the local office of a federal agency today. I sat down to wait and noticed that the desks of the employees were labeled with signs. The sign directly in my line of sight was yellow, an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of yellow paper, with a huge "8" centered on the sign with the word "WINDOW" above the "8." Maybe the signs were throwbacks to the old days when the employees sat on stools behind a long counter, separated from the taxpayers people by panes of glass with little slots in them. Today, the revenuers customer service representatives sat at desks with the appearance of being friendly, personable, and approachable.

Below the black "8" on the yellow sheet of paper was the word "ocho," which, I believe, is "eight" in Spanish. I had German classes for three years in high school, then took German 101 in college -- I figured I'd coast to an easy "A." That was not to be -- I was tricked into revealing my ability to speak and understand German fluently by the German Professor of German and was put into the fourth-year German class with the only senior German major in the entire school and a junior, who was a princess from Lichtenstein, coasting to an easy "A," where, if he graded on a curve, I was going to be totally fucked.

I do recognize, even though I never studied Spanish, that "ocho" means "eight." It does not mean "8," however. I checked the universal translator on Dictionary.com just to be reasonably sure. Although I'm not 100% positive, I am almost certain that "8," in Spanish, is "8." I can't be too sure, but if I spoke only Spanish and came into this office for assistance, I might be thrown off by the word "WINDOW" on the sign because there are no windows, but desks. And the universal translator is of no help.

WHY WE'RE BUSY

well, duh, yeah, the cavs! but this, too:

go here.

The Bridge

It was three weeks ago, a Sunday morning, when I drove over the lift bridge on Carter Road over the Cuyahoga River. And yes, that is the river in Cleveland that was set ablaze-- one of 13 times in recorded history -- 40 years ago. And none since that time. By the way, the Cuyahoga River was the western boundary of the United States of America for a time, established by the Treaty of Greenville, a treaty with the Native American tribes in the area to end one of the many Indian Wars.

The lift bridge road surface is a steel grate and looks like this from above:

On that Sunday morning three weeks ago, as I started across the bridge, I saw something sticking straight up from the bridge deck, a bird wing. The bird -- a gull -- had gotten its head stuck. I drove around the bird. It was flopping around a little, and its head was definitely stuck in the grate. I'm not that good of a draw-er to draw what it looked like, but you can imagine, if you close your eyes -- the head sticking in the bridge grate and the body laying there with one wing straight in the air, kind of flopping around. There -- you got it.

It was one of those circumstances where a better person -- perhaps, a bird-loving person -- would have stopped and pulled the fucking bird's head out of the grate and like, you know, nudged it a little, encouraging it to take wing and fly away. Because that's what bird-loving people do -- kind of like maybe if the nudge doesn't work, pick up the bird, in the "You're in good hands with Allstate" kind of way, and give it a little toss in the air so that the bird flies away. But then there's the danger that the fucking bird won't take wing and will plunge headfirst into the ground -- well, the bridge -- and maybe the fucking bird will be stuck by the head in that traumatic situation again. See, that's why it would take a better person -- perhaps, a bird-loving person -- to rescue the fucking bird from its uncertain future, given the propensity of some motorists to swerve to hit the fucking bird, in which case -- Did you know that Vince, the guy who sells the Slap Chop! was arrested after he got beat to hell by a prostitute? I digress, but, for some strange reason, I was reminded of that chopper.

If you have read this blog, all of this blog, you know I'm not that kind of person; I'm not one of the minions of evil who would swerve and hit that poor fucking bird with its head sticking in the grate because they got the fucking bird right where they want it. Like I said, I drove around the bird, believing that a better person -- a bird-loving person -- would chance by, stop, and pull the fucking bird's head out of the grate, and help the bird, maybe even save the fucking bird. [This reminds me -- why, I don't know. There's this guy who plays basketball for the Boston Celtics, major sissy, actually, because he bumped his knee, and why play when he, Kevin Garnett, can collect his 22 mill a year salary by sitting on the sideline, saying "Mother fucker!" on national TV every time the camera pans his way. Just wondering, that's all.]

On this bridge, an operator is inside a control room 24 hours a day to antagonize motorists by making the bridge go up and down ... real ... real ... real ... slow, holding up traffic for what-seems-like-hours, allowing boats and ships to pass. The parking area for the operators is on the south side of the river. To reach the control room, the operator must walk north to the ladder that leads to the control room in the middle of the bridge. Between the parking area and the ladder was the bird with its head stuck in the grate.

That was three weeks ago when I first noticed the fresh fucking bird. And I've driven around that bird nearly every day since -- except for yesterday. The whole bird was gone. Part of the bird was still there. I don't know which part, though -- I didn't get out to inspect it. It was laying motionless, except for the feathers, which were moving with the breeze, off to the side of the roadway.