Tag Archives: sports

Just Call Me ‘For Dinner’

If you had read this post earlier, you could have surmised from the book on the lower portion of the bottom half of my page (that is not there anymore so don’t bother looking), that I had just finished reading Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, about a legendary mountain man of the Old American West.  What struck me most about this book is the extreme coolness of mountain man nicknames: Bear Claw, White-eye, Arkansas Pete, Hatchet Jack, Mad Mose, and of course the main character, Crow Killer, otherwise known as Liver-Eating Johnson.

This got me conTIMplating nicknames, where they come from, and perhaps most importantly, why I don’t have one.  Continue reading →

Doping Ice Fishermen Is Snow Joke

So I’m cleaning out my birdcage the other day and I ran across an article in the New York Times regarding an event here in my neck of the woods that got me conTIMplating why it’s called ‘neck’ of the woods and not ‘hip’ of the woods or ‘spleen’ of the woods and why it’s even in the woods in the first place.  Said event was the World Ice Fishing Championships held last week on the Big Eau Pleine Reservoir (French for ‘large, old, nondescript body of water’) located in the greater Wausau, Wisconsin Metropolitan Area.

Fishermen from eleven countries (counting newcomers Japan and Mongolia) paid their own considerable fares to get to Northern Central Wisconsin, known as “The Northern Central Wisconsin Capitol of the World” because at no other location can one find so much of Northern Central Wisconsin. Continue reading →

Poor Sports

So I’m sitting in front of the TV the other day watching The Hobbit — I mean, The Muppet Show — I mean, the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, and I couldn’t help but think that perhaps Salome had squandered her wish on John the Baptist when she could have saved us all some horrendous agony by asking for Matt Lauer’s tongue on a platter. Continue reading →