For the football fans among us (you know who you are)...

...here is the list of upcoming college football bowl games, courtesy of ESPN, with additional partial credit to Mr. David “Putz” Barlow of Ephraim, Utah, who once fell out of a car and landed on his head:

1. Eagle Bank Bowl: Wake Forest vs. Navy (Dec. 20)
2. Pioneer Las Vegas Bowl: BYU vs. Arizona (Dec. 20)
3. magicJack St. Petersburg Bowl: Memphis vs. South Florida
4. New Mexico Bowl: Colorado State vx. Fresno State (Dec. 20)
5. R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl: Southern Mississippi vs. Troy State (Dec. 21)
6. San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl: TCU vs. Boise State (Dec. 23)
7. Sheraton Hawaii Bowl: Hawaii vs. Notre Dame (Dec. 24)
8. Motor City Bowl: Florida Atlantic vs. Central Michigan (Dec. 26)
9. Meineke Car Care Bowl: West Virginia vs. North Carolina (Dec. 27)
10. Champs Sports Bowl: Wisconsin vs. Florida State (Dec. 27)
11. Emerald Bowl: Miami (Fla.) vs. California (Dec. 27)
12. Independence Bowl: Northern Illinois vs. Louisiana Tech (Dec. 28)
13. Papajohns.com (Tangerine) Bowl: NC State vs. Rutgers (Dec. 29)
14. Valero Alamo Bowl: Missouri vs. Northwestern (Dec. 29)
15. Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl: Maryland vs. Nevada (Dec. 30)
16. Texas Bowl: Western Michigan vs. Rice (Dec. 30)
17. Pacific Life Holiday Bowl: Oklahoma State vs. Oregon (Dec. 30)
18. Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl: Air Force vs. Houston (Dec. 31)
19. Brut Sun Bowl: Oregon State vs. Pittsburgh (Dec. 31)
20. Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl: Boston College vs. Vanderbilt (Dec. 31)
21. Insight Bowl: Kansas vs. Minnesota (Dec. 31)
22. Chick-fil-A (Peach) Bowl: LSU vs. Georgia Tech (Dec. 31)
23. Outback Bowl: South Carolina vs. Iowa (Jan. 1)
24. Capital One (Citrus) Bowl: Georgia vs. Michigan State (Jan. 1)
25. Konica Minolta Gator Bowl: Nebraska vs. Clemson (Jan. 1)
26. Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi: Penn State vs. USC (Jan. 1)
27. FedEx Orange Bowl: Virgina Tech vs. Cincinnati (Jan. 1)
28. AT&T Cotton Bowl: Ole Miss vs. Texas Tech (Jan. 2)
29. AutoZone Liberty Bowl: Kentucky vs. East Carolina (Jan. 2)
30. Allstate Sugar Bowl: Utah vs. Alabama (Jan. 2)
31. International Bowl: Buffalo vs. Connecticut (Jan. 3)
32. Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: Texas vs. Ohio State (Jan. 5)
33. GMAC Bowl: Ball State vs. Tulsa (Jan. 6)
34. FedEx BCS National Championship Game: Florida vs. Oklahoma (Jan. 8)

I didn’t even mention the Iron Bowl. And that’s just college football. There are also all of those professional football teams trying to defeat one another in playoff games so they can play in the Super Bowl.

When I was a kid, there were just four college football bowl games (Rose, Cotton, Sugar, and Orange) and just three channels on TV (ABC, NBC, and CBS) and gasoline cost only 20 cents per gallon.

In other words, I come from a world that never existed or at least has Gone With The Wind. Here is a photo of someone from my part of the country who went like the wind. Can you name him?

Happy birthday, guess who! Happy birthday, guess who! Happy birthday, my hero! Happy birthday to...

For a good time...

...don’t visit Pudding Towers. Don’t search the Internet for “peicture sex.”

Click here instead.

Or here.

You’ll probably laugh more and the next morning you won’t have a bit of trouble remembering what you did.

A Google search is a fearsome thing...

About a week and a half ago, I published a post called “Get Around, Get Around, I Get Around!” (which, as our friend Putz then pointed out for us, is the title of a song made famous by the Beach Boys). I have updated that post several times in the past week and a half to include flags of more countries that have visited my blog since I installed the Feedjit Live Traffic thingy over there in the left sidebar.

Well, today this blog received its first visitor from the oil-rich Middle East, from a place called Ar Riyad in Riyadh province, Saudi Arabia, to be exact. And just to be consistent, here’s the Saudi Arabian flag:



I think this visit deserves its own post. Not because it’s the first one from the oil-rich Middle East, though, but because of how our visitor found us and where our visitor landed. It’s really quite bizarre, and it’s also a tribute to the incredible search facilities of the engine known as Google.

According to the Feedjit description, our new reader from Saudi Arabia arrived here via google.com.sa (the Saudi Arabian Google) after searching on the words “peicture sex.” He or she landed on a post I wrote back in October entitled “But enough about me.” Curious as to why a search on “peicture sex” would lead someone to any post of mine, I went back to “But enough about me” myself to investigate.

The word “sex” does appear one time in the post. I was wondering aloud what to write about, and after rejecting autumn, politics, and literature, I wrote, “Sex? Not even on a dare.” I went on to write about my dog, Jethro. The post did, in fact, include a peicture and it was a peicture of Jethro’s cute little cuddly, canine self.

So I suppose I can see how someone in Saudi Arabia (whether male, female, Muslim, Christian, Arab, or American, I do not know) searching for “peicture sex” could wind up reading about my little dog, Jethro, but you wanna know something?

It boggles the mind.

You wanna know something else?

I have no idea whether this revelation makes you want to sell any Google stock you may own or rush out to buy some.

You wanna know a third thing? I don’t care how people find my blog, I’m just very glad they keep finding it. Jethro is glad, too.

’Old Onto Your ’Ats, Blokes

Mr. Yorkshire Pudding of Pudding Towers, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England -- I have yet to learn his real moniker -- has finally lost his mind and created a brand new reason to get up every morning, the Laughing Horse Awards. For 2008, the inaugural year of the awards, he has named 17 recipients in 13 categories.

Oddly, yours truly has been selected, along with two other American bloggers, to share the 2008 Laughing Horse American Blog Award from Mr. Pudding. You can see a list of all the categories and all the recipients at www.beefgravy.blogspot.com/, his blog. [WARNING! WARNING! If you visit YP’s blog, the post entitled “Awards” is rated G, but the post entitled “Hangover” is rated R. Both posts are adorned with a picture of the Laughing Horse. Don’t say you weren’t warned. --RWP]

Here is the acceptance speech I left on his “Awards” post:

“It is a pleasure and an honour [note British spelling. --RWP] to stand here in Pudding Towers tonight, even though it is alarmingly close to the Blackburn Meadows Sewage Treatment Plant.

I accept this awesome, though shared, Laughing Horse American Blog award in the name of all bloggers everywhere who toil daily over their hot keyboards without hope of achieving anything other than emptying their brains of all the accumulated debris and making the ugly voices in their heads go away. Thanks to Mr. Yorkshire Pudding himself, my brain will now be filled for some time with this image of a laughing horse.

I can only hope it is laughing with me and not at me.

God save the Queen, or at least Prince William.”

(end of acceptance speech)

Now that I have had a little time to reflect on things, I feel that I don’t deserve to be in the company of the other recipients. No, really. I don’t deserve to be in the company of the other recipients.

Thoughts after winter rain

Our rain gauge indicates that we have received about 3-3/4 inches of rain. For a while on Thursday morning, the Mississippi River appeared to be passing through our back yard. The water was running about a foot deep. Fortunately, we live on a little hill. Things are returning to normal, though. In the early afternoon, the clouds parted to let the sun shine on us. Atlanta’s chief source of water, Lake Lanier, is reported to have risen almost a foot, but the drought around here is a long way from being over.

On Thursday, it reached sixty degrees. This morning it was twenty-seven. The phrase “global warming” seems to be falling out of favor and people now speak of “climate change” instead. Maybe they have a point. The climate does seem to be changing. This week it snowed in Houston, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana.


That photo is not Houston or New Orleans. My blogger friend Jeannelle of Iowa (not to be confused with Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of Richard the Lion-hearted) was the photographer and she gave me permission to post it here. Jeannelle and her husband live on a dairy farm a few miles from the little town of Readlyn, Iowa, home of “857 friendly people and one old grump,” according to the sign at the edge of town. That isn’t Readlyn in the photo either. According to Jeannelle, “Between our farm and Readlyn is a teeny-weeny town called Klinger. A general store is there, surrounded by a cluster of eight houses and assorted sheds, and a very smelly hog barn.” Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Klinger, Iowa, population about 12.

I’ll bet the “very smelly hog barn” in Klinger can’t hold a candle to where I lived fifty years ago. After my Dad and I moved away from the town I grew up in, he married my stepmother and we lived on Denton Tap Road in the northwest corner of Dallas County, Texas, between the village of Coppell, population 600, and the town of Lewisville, which was not much bigger. Across what was then just a two-lane, country road, like the one in the photo, there was a farm with several hundred hogs owned by a medical doctor who was on the Dallas County Board of Health. He was not held in high regard locally. All the money he spent building concrete wallows for his hogs and paying people to hose them down daily didn’t help at all. That farm stunk up the entire neighborhood. In fact, every morning when my stepbrother Eddie opened his eyes and smelled the stench, he promptly threw up.

But even that hog farm paled in comparison to what is absolutely the worst smell my nose has ever encountered, a turkey farm between Coppell and the small town of Grapevine. Passing that turkey farm every weekend on my drive home from college really opened up the old nostrils. Today the entire area is covered with affluent suburbanites in their mansions. Living over turkey and hog poop. If they only knew.

I really don’t know why my thoughts should go from rain to snow to the smells of yesteryear to urban sprawl, but I have a theory. Daily assaults on one’s olfactory system during one’s youth can permanently damage one’s brain. So be careful, little nose, what you smell.

I do not have a photo of Coppell to show you, but here’s another one of Klinger:

Sing Lullaby

If yesterday’s music was on the Thanksgivvy side, today’s should put you in more of a Christmas-y mood. Here is a three-minute video of the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, England -- the soprano and alto parts are performed by boys whose voices have not yet changed -- singing the Basque carol “The Infant King” (also known as “Sing Lullaby”).

The choir’s “veddy upper-clahss” pronunciation, combined with the echoing acoustics inside the exquisitely beautiful chapel, can make the words of this haunting carol a bit difficult to understand, so I have reproduced the lyrics for you:

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now reclining,
sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the infant King.
Angels are watching, stars are shining
over the place where He is lying:
sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now a-sleeping,
sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the infant King.
Soon will come sorrow with the morning,
soon will come bitter grief and weeping:
sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now a-dozing,
sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the infant King.
Soon comes the cross, the nails, the piercing,
then in the grave at last reposing;
sing lullaby!

Sing lullaby!
Lullaby! is the babe awaking?
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not stir the infant King.
Dreaming of Easter, gladsome morning.
conquering death, its bondage breaking:
sing lullaby!

You may just want to go back and listen to the choir again. The world-famous choir is a bit of a local tourist attraction. In the photo below, the choirboys, wearing top hats, can be seen making their way to daily rehearsals at the chapel in the background. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why they seem to be going in the opposite direction.


If you enjoyed hearing their music, I recommend that you turn your radio on to Public Radio on December 24th, Christmas Eve, at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (that's 9:00 a.m. Central, 7:00 a.m. Pacific) and listen to the BBC’s live, worldwide 90-minute broadcast of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of Kings College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, featuring this world-famous choir. Some years the program has also been videotaped for delayed broadcast on television, so check your TV listings for “Carols from King’s” as well. The program always begins with a boy soprano singing “Once In Royal David’s City ” a capella to start the processional and ends ninety minutes later with a resoundingly satisfying rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” with full pipe-organ accompaniment. In between will be some of the most beautiful choral music pieces and virtuoso organ playing you will ever hear, interspersed with readings of Scripture having to do with the birth of Christ. Each speaker ends his segment with the words, “Thanks be to God.” To an Anglophile like me, it is always magnificent and never fails to inspire.

And if you’re still out shopping on the morning of December 24th, I can tell you from experience that listening to this choir in one’s automobile on the way to the mall will work wonders in helping one cope with the stress of traffic and finding a parking place.

Mark it on your calendar now!