An Uncharacteristic Sports Post

I haven't blogged in over a month. There are lots and lots of things about which I want to blog, but I don't have the energy. On most days, when I come home from work I'm exhausted, and I fall asleep, and then I wake up, think Ugggh, and just watch TV.

I am using the occasion of the Super Bowl to force myself to write a blog entry. I don't follow sports, and I have no partisan feelings on who should have won the game (but if i had been forced to choose a team I probably would have gone with the Steelers because I would not have been required to wear cheese on my head).

My question is, what's the deal with Green Bay? Does it really exist? All my life the only times that I've ever heard about the city of Green Bay are in conjunction with its football team. But how could a city get a football team if no one had ever heard of the city? It's almost like a fake city that was made up for a soap opera, along the lines of Bay City or Port Charles.

(This is only a random comment, not meant in a spirit of malice or hostility. If you are a Packers fan, please don't get mad and throw your cheese at me.)

A Photograph for New Year's Day

(The full-sized original is here.)

I took this picture a year ago, on January 1, 2010, about half an hour after the picture that I posted on Christmas. It feels as if I took the picture yesterday. It shows the parking lot of the swimming pool at Cameron Run Regional Park in Eisenhower Valley. Before I took the picture I walked around the edge of the pool complex. It was closed for the winter, locked up and abandoned. I went back there in the summer and the pool was open and bustling with people. Now it is locked up and abandoned again. And soon it will be open and bustling with people. One is spurred to consider how fast time passes.

Don't Want to Be Your Monkey Wrench

For years I have been hearing the Foo Fighters song Monkey Wrench on the radio. All this time I thought that Dave Grohl was yelling 2010! 2010! The year 2010 is ending, and I was planning to write a post about it. I got the idea to use a reference to Monkey Wrench as the introduction to the post, because, after all, the song contains repeatedly mentions the year 2010.

But, in researching the lyrics, I found that it actually says one in ten, not 2010. All these years I'd been hearing it wrong. And so my planned blog post was undone.

A Photograph for Christmas

(The full-sized original is here.)

This is a picture that I took in Eisenhower Valley in the late afternoon on January 1, 2010. For some reason it is one my favorites out of the thousands of photos that I've taken over the years. You really should take a look at the full-sized original.

Some might find this to be a melancholy scene. But to me it is almost comforting. It seems to say: It's a winter day, maybe it's been a bad day, but it's over now, and you can go home. And that's what makes it a fitting picture for Christmas, one of the few days when almost everyone can go home and rest.

Top Five Songs Played on the Radio at Christmas That Have Nothing to Do with Christmas

1. Jingle Bells

2. Sleigh Ride

3. Baby, It's Cold Outside

4. Let It Snow

5. Winter Wonderland

The Sparrow Has Landed

(The full-sized original is here.)

I have put in a lot of work trying to get photos on my flickr page linked to the blog. I eventually got it to work, but I could only get the photos to show up in two sizes, Too Big and Too Small. In order to get things Just Right, I had to adopt an awkward approach in which I made a smaller version of the picture on my computer and uploaded the small version to the blog, with a link posted to the full-sized version on flickr.

So anyway, here is the picture of the dead immature House Sparrow that I promised in earlier posts.

Anole Embarrassment

At the beginning of October I went to Florida for a few days. (The trip will be blogged in more detail when I get the photographs on the internet and finish all the species identifications.) For me perhaps the biggest attraction in south Florida is the large number of lizards, mostly introduced, which can be found there.

The most diverse of these lizards are the anoles, a group of iguanians common in the American tropics. I have been interested in anoles for most of my life. I even owned one when I was younger. And all that time I have pronounced the word as "anoel" (to rhyme with goal). But when I got back from Florida, I was talking to someone who had grown up there, and he pronounced the word as "anoe-lee" (to rhyme with goalie).

It turns out that "anoe-lee" is the correct pronunciation, even though to me "anoe-lee" sounds like some kind of Italian dessert. (If you are doubtful, you can hear the word being spoken by someone who sounds like Michael Caine.)

The really embarrassing part is not just that I've been mispronouncing a word for decades, but that everyone else whom I know has mispronounced it the same way—which makes me worry that the reason that they pronounced it as they did is because of the way that I pronounced it, because I was the one who was supposed to be the reptile expert.

This anole understands my embarrassment.