Random Notes from a Crank

I volunteered to conduct a couple of mock interviews with graduating seniors in our department. The one I did last week was with a young lady who is intending to enroll in a graduate program at the University of Alberta. 

My first question to her was why that university, and I asked a joking question of "Are you a big fan of the Edmonton Oilers or something?"

Her reply was that part of the reason was the "political situation" in the U.S. 

I suspect Canadian universities are going to see an uptick in applications from U.S. students over the next few years. I know my daughter is probably looking at some grad programs in Canada along with universities in blue states. 

I saw this chart of sorts on Facebook. 

I'm no vegan, but looking at this chart and based on my tastes, here are more go-tos for protein:

• Almonds
• Pistachios
• Tofu
• Hazelnuts
• Walnuts
• Pecans
• Lentils
• Garbanzos
• Lima beans
• Spinach

Now that it's warming up, I need to get to making some tofu fried rice on my Blackstone griddle. Tofu is so cheap compared to meat. I wish I would have known how to cook it back in college. 

I'm worried about Ange's future at Tottenham if he doesn't move forward in the Europa League. Thursday's match looms large. 

I see the Vikings moved on from Sam Darnold, and they resigned Aaron Jones. And then they signed Ryan Kelly for the interior line. Good moves all around. 

I also saw that Najee Harris signed with he Chargers for a one-year contract in a run-first offense. I will be targeting that guy in my fantasy football draft. Harbaugh loves running the football. 

As we expected, RFK Jr. is claiming all kinds of nonsense in a recent interview. 

Random Notes from a Crank

As someone who cares about words and how we use them, I'm troubled by the trend of people making words shorter for no other reason than using a different term. 

For example, in certain business circles or certain people use the word, "vacay," to stand for "vacation." First off, the former bastardization sounds goofy. Just think of someone saying to someone else that they're "going on vacay." Does shortening the word by one stinking syllable really help people? I think not. 

The other one I've seen in sports media that I don't like is the term "presser" for "press conference." The two-syllable term doesn't really approximate the two-word term. I guess "er" is in the word "conference," but "er" is nowhere near anyone with a right mind would abbreviate the full word of "conference." If anything, it should be "presscon" if there really is a need for shortening the language, which there isn't. 

At the hotel we stayed at this weekend, the brand name of the toilet paper was "Comfort Bay," which is ironic. There's nothing comforting about those sandpaper-like sheets as you try to wipe your butt. 

We are in Galesburg, Illinois and had lots of time to kill, so we checked out the campus of Knox College. Since we're baseball people, we looked at the college baseball field, which has some serious dimensions with short corners and 400 feet to straight center. 

The dimensions reminded me of what I've read about Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, the home of the Cardinals and the Browns at one time. Its dimensions were quite unique with all kinds of distance markers. For example, the left field line was at 351 feet and right field line at 310. True left center was 379 with deep left center at 400. Deep left center field corner was 426 with true center at 422.

Those dimensions are nowhere as bizarre as what was going at the Polo Grounds: left-field line at 279, left-center at 450, center at 483, right-center at 449, and right-field line at 258.  

Random Notes from a Crank

For whatever reason, when the holidays come around, I get a thirst for ginger ale. So I bought some. I don't know why I mentally connect ginger ale with Xmas. Maybe because of gingerbread? 

This propensity reminds me of one of my posts from a good while back about people drinking tomato juice on airplanes: "Airplanes and Tomato Juice." 

Today Mrs. Nasty made some lil' smokies for her office's food day, and she used Heinz chili sauce to create the sauce the smokies were immersed in. Buying that stuff made me realize I've never used chili sauce before, which makes me think about some of kind of dips I could make with it and cream cheese. Stay posted...

One of my students, an international student from South Korea, gave me a gift at the end of the semester. It's a pretty awesome leather key chain that has my name on it in English and Korean. I need to teach more international students. 

I wonder what my dog thinks when I stop to pick up his crap after he's dropped a deuce on one of our walks. He's gotta be questioning me, "Dude, why are you picking up my scat? That's weird." 

People can make and enforce laws about dog crap, but we can't take action on real issues like global warming, gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, and growing US businesses. 

Ridiculous.