Are my eyes really blue?

So let’s say I gave in to my impulses. Run, hide, get away from it all. Actually do what it takes to go away somewhere. Let’s go with Britain, because it’s the foreign country I’ve been to the most, and I’ve paid enough attention to Absolute Radio and BBC America that maybe I could pull it for a while.

First – how long? The stamp on the passport says “six months without recourse to public services,” which I assume means I might be able to get treated for a sniffle on the NHS but shouldn’t count on help with a job or housing or anything. So you need a place to stay – and a place for two, presumably, because I don’t think the wife will cotton to me running away to Britain without her. If staying longer than a couple of weeks, a job is essential, unless you have a stray house to sell for the cash to sustain you through this little outing. But even if you could sort that – ok, you have a shed to live in somewhere, and somebody will pay you money to blog, and the wife can keep her job and telecommute from the Pret around the block (or the pub down the lane if rural enough) – fine.

Then what?

How long before you come back? Do you ever plan on coming back? You’re cutting your old job adrift, almost certainly. You’re not going to see much of your friends – even with the help of Skype and FaceTime, there’s still the time zone difference, and forget about having people pop over to visit. You might see the Redskins occasionally, if you’re willing to get up at two AM for Monday Night Tuesday Morning Football (although regular start time would be 6 PM, just right to cap off a Sunday evening) but forget about hearing Sonny and Sam on the radio. Actually forget about following college sports altogether, unless you can arrange for some sort of wacky international streaming access (not bloody likely). Different TV might be a novelty for a while, might even be enough to while away the evenings sometimes, but you’re going to have to go out and make an entirely new crop of friends in a foreign culture (don’t forget, two countries separated by a common language).

But if you don’t do it for good – if you wind up only making a year of it or such, and you’ve quit your job and sold your house and abandoned your old life to make it work – what do you have to come back to? At that point, you’re committed. You’re all in. You’ve bet your life on the devil you don’t know.

So as much as it might help to be curled up on the sleeping bags in the shed, with the rain falling outside and the mist on the moors, and the splendid isolation from everything you might want to get away from for a while – you’re probably not going to be able to make it work.

I’m late to the party on this one, but now that Five Guys has landed in Silly Con Valley, it is finally possible to achieve a proper head to head comparison. I say late because others have already hit this up in other blogs, so this will probably be more impressionistic than a one to one breakdown.

First things first: the venue. The key factor for me is that Five Guys has no drive-thru. If you have to park and go in, you’ve given away half the title of “fast food” for better or worse. That among other things will lead to the real comparison later.

The burger itself: both go with a standard two patties and two slices of cheese, but Five Guys offers a much wider array of toppings with things like jalapeños and bacon. In n Out sticks with basically the same offerings they’ve had since the late 1940s. The standard 2×2 In n Out configuration is smaller in aggregate than the Five Guys equivalent, but not wildly so.

One place the Bible is not literally accurate is in the matter of feeding the five thousand. I am convinced that rather than mucking about with loaves and fishes, Our Lord fed the multitudes with one small fry from Five Guys. It is a preposterous serving size and basically unmanageable for a single person. The fries themselves are a thick skin-on cut that basically begs for barbecue sauce and seasoned salt. In n Out’s fries are the more traditional fast food type, and are in fact widely regarded in the Valley as the Achilles heel of the menu – because the potatoes are fresh and not frozen, the frying process results in a different texture and taste that largely depends on whether potatoes are in season. In n Out fries are much more suitable for layering onto one’s burger, though, which is important if you are Mike CASSSSSidy.

Five Guys has no milkshakes, which might be important to some, but their array of fountain beverages includes Coke Zero, which is my current indispensable propellant. In fact, that’s a whole separate post, about how the frack is Zero not a standard Coke offering after four bloody years.

Service was fine both places. In n Out is the diamond encrusted platinum standard for fast food service worldwide, but it’s not like Five Guys was being run by baboons or anything; quite the contrary, they aptly handled a line that was literally out the door on the day we went by.

Oh yes, price: a 2×2 type burger, with regular fries and large Coke, cost a hair under half at In n Out what it costs at Five Guys.

My conclusion, which I have repeated elsewhere, is this: for whatever reason, the greater 650/408 area is home to a number of charbroiled burger establishments. Clarke’s in Mountain View is the pinnacle of those, but establishments like Kirk’s and Jeffery’s also have a loyal following, and chains like Burger Joint and The Counter have moved in as well. I is my opinion that Five Guys is a much more direct competitor for places like that rather than for In n Out, in terms of offerings and price point alike. I’m not sure anything will ever pull me off Clarke’s as “this is where God goes for a burger” but I think Five Guys will definitely carve out a niche and light a fire under everybody else, as it may be the first fast food chain since In n Out to achieve the level of national buzz that makes people say “when is it coming here??”

Damn, now I’m hungry. And I didn’t drive, I’ll be damned…

When I first moved out here, people were trying to tell me about the rivalry between Cal and Stanford, both very fine academic institutions which support me in very different ways (but don’t think I don’t have a rooting interest). And I asked “Do you know anyone who’s been shot over Cal-Stanford? Divorced? No? I don’t think you take your football seriously. You see that flag that’s half Cal, half Stanford, and says “A HOUSE DIVIDED” on it? You know what that flag would say in Alabama? POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS.”

I thought about this in the wake of Alabama’s national title, and the hue and cry over Cam Newton, and the unabashed glee from my house at the travails of the athletic department at the Penitentiary University of Tennessee, and then looked a little wider, and had one of those shuddering realizations.

The Southern form of rivalry is one in which it is less important that you succeed than that your rival fail.

I don’t know whether this is something rooted in economic privation, although that would make sense. If you can’t make any headway getting up the hill, you may still wind up higher relative to your rival if they take a tumble and wind up beneath you. Easier to sit there and wish something on the bad guys than to get up there and do better yourself. Either way, this is something that has to be taken into serious consideration when examining the state of Southernization of national politics (which has happened, and don’t let anyone tell you different) – when everything hangs on demonizing the other, how much simpler to cut down the other than to raise yourself…

NB: I was at one point going to do a detailed breakdown of how the GOP nationalized campaign was a one-for-one recapitulation of the standard forms in Alabama from 1914-58, complete with Big Mules and Yankees and the class-for-racial alignment, but it is frankly too goddamn depressing to contemplate.

For my next trick, a test of blogging from the iPad with no other keyboard, from BlogPress, sitting in bed with my knees propped up. I don’t know that i would like to make a habit of this, but it’s totally doable. More on this later on this week, when we discuss how we live in the future.

It’s going to be below 50 degrees, and possibly raining, when I head out the door tomorrow morning. At least it won’t be as dark as it’s been the last two weeks, assuming the clouds aren’t too bad. I’m looking at various websites trying to sort it out and mulling over what I’m wearing tomorrow.

The problem is, I have a crap-ton of jackets. Having gone from Nashville to Washington DC to Silly Con Valley, I have a wide and varied array of coats, most of which are about 80% of the way there. Right now, the problem I’ve had lately is that it’s cold enough for a jacket in the morning but too warm for it by lunchtime, which usually means a softshell that can be wadded up and crammed into the backpack. If it’s raining, though, you have to commit to the coat because you’re not going to want to stuff a wet rainshell in with your laptop. And if the coat’s too thick, you can’t wear the backpack (the leather stuff is right out).

Right now, a rainshell isn’t enough unless you’re layering with something else, but the shell is the only thing with a hood. I have an oilcloth engineer’s coat which is shorter than a typical duster and flannel-lined to boot, which is plenty warm and doesn’t let the water through even if it does get hella wet on its own, but it doesn’t have anything to keep the rain off my head. There’s always my CERT jacket, but even if it was here and not at work, it’s BRIGHT canary yellow and tough to miss. (Although it would have been nice to have for today’s drill.) Hell, I even have a state-of-the-art sportcoat by Saboteur, in dark gray wool. that has taped seams and waterproofing, but you wouldn’t dare wear a backpack over it even if it were roomier, which it’s so not. That’s going-out wear, not a daily driver.

At this point, I don’t quite know what the move is. I know that everyone here repeats the manta “LAYERS LAYERS LAYERS” but I’d rather not have to take off more than one thing. Even if I were going to, I’d need some better layers than what I have. The really annoying thing is that I have a whole lot of jackets that are 3/4 of the way to what I need, and a lot that are wholly impractical but rich in sentimental value. And as always, I’m constantly searching for the one perfect 100% thing so I can unload a bunch of the 75% things.

What is it with me and outerwear?

that Vandy was down 41-0, and the coach of the other team challenged the call that the Vandy ballcarrier was down, claiming he’d actually fumbled, you’d say “wtf, Vandy doesn’t play USC this year.”

Fuck Urban Meyer. Fuck them Gators.

The first time I can remember it was my senior year of undergrad. My phone (and its integrated answering machine) was on the main line at the Honors House because my roommate was the RA, and as such he had system voicemail which I couldn’t check. So my phone was downstairs, ringer cranked to the stars. It was impossible to miss.

And nothing good ever came of that phone ringing. The only person who ever called me was my new girlfriend, the one who replaced She Whose Name We Do Not Speak. And she had already gone off the rails. I should have had the sense to pack it in, but I didn’t, and one thing led to another and she was still my girlfriend even after I went off to grad school.

Grad school was electronic. Email off the VAX was our principal means of contact. So the ringing phone could only mean somebody I didn’t particularly want to talk to. And then grad school wasn’t there anymore, and in those first trying years out of school, the phone meant family I didn’t want to talk to, or bill collectors, or worse.

And over the course of these past nine years, everybody I want to talk to has long since figured out that the text message is the best way to reach me. And I’ve done the same. I don’t know if this is a product of the aversion or just feeds it, but there it is. Because I hate it. That’s half the reason I have one wacky ringtone after another, especially tailored to certain numbers so I’ll know whether it’s somebody I want to talk to. The regular ring of a phone is like an icepick down my spine, a shock of dismay and foreboding that I can’t abide having to deal with. And the more tense, or uneasy, or depressed, or anxious I am, the worse it gets.

Maybe that’s the price of having embraced the modern era. Email, SMS, picture messages, Twitter, Facebook, FaceTime, all manner of ways to reach the people I want reaching me. And so only the bad things come over the phone now.

No, seriously. I’m disengaging from football as much as I can at this point, because quite frankly this year has done nothing but add to my general store of angst and despair. Consider:

* Cal is circling the drain and now has lost the starting QB for good thanks to a shredded ligament. Kevin Riley’s career with the Golden Bears is done.

* Vandy’s best player, running back Warren Norman, broke a wrist and is out for the season, with Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wake yet to play.

* As it stands right now, the Furd is in a position to potentially make the Rose Bowl.

* Auburn is on the inside track to a national championship appearance, despite the new Cam Newton scandal flowering in Alabama.

* The Redskins are in utter disarray, thanks to their highly overrated coach whose only accomplishments have been inheriting John Elway, putting guys behind the dirtiest line in football, and being a golden child of the NFL re: officiating. Now he’s benched his QB for reasons that defy logic (and which have changed with every press conference) and the city is in an uproar, and rightly so.

Basketball starts in a week or two, and I will be off to that like a shot. Meanwhile, the postmortem:

Vandy has a first-year coach and is, well, Vandy, so this is about as good as you could expect. I think Tennessee and Wake might still be doable, for all the good it does us. Bama will be fine; even if they don’t beat Auburn they may still luckbox into the Sugar Bowl if Auburn makes the BCS simply because they will be the second-best team in the SEC (the SEC East is beneath pathetic this year). As for Cal, this is the beginning of the dark age. It will last through 2012 unless Tedford can do something amazing in AT&T Park, and at a minimum he needs a new offensive line coach. If they can’t pass-protect any better, it won’t matter which of half a dozen candidates goes under center next year. I don’t really want to go to any more Cal games this year, just because the losing is going to be miserable in every particular. Maybe the UW game because it’s the last game in Old Memorial, and the only reasonable possibility for a home win left on the schedule. And the Redskins? Well, I’ll probably want a trip or three to Dan Browns, and I’ll want to listen to Sonny and Sam on the ridearound because you never know how much longer they’ll keep the team together (and I’ve been fortunate to have them out here for 4+ seasons I never expected to get).

But it’s time for cold weather and hot gyms and my Commodores doin’ work. Break out the rugby and strike up the band.

Invocation: St Willie Mays, pray for us.

I can’t claim to have been the greatest Giants fan over the last decade. I saw Pac Bell Park on the same trip where I met my now-wife in person for the first time, and a couple of years later we took the park tour (a very worthwhile trip when in SF, even if you’re not a big baseball fan) and a little old lady in the gift shop said the batting practice hat made me look like Rich Aurillia, and I decided that the Giants would be my baseball allegiance after some post-Braves years of casting about among Royals, Mariners, or Red Sox. It was National League time again.

Sure enough, a pennant and a World Series appearance followed immediately, only to be short-hopped by a failing bullpen in Game 6. But not before I went to the ballpark and hung out at the back of McCovey Cove and ate at MoMo’s with the huge TVs wheeled into the dining room and soaked up the whole experience. And then, for about five years, the Giants consisted mainly of Barry Bonds’ personal batting practice.

I’ve written about that at length elsewhere, about how Bonds was God’s personal vengeance on baseball, how Bud Selig and an army of sportswriters attempted to make him the scapegoat for the steroid era and how he refused to play along. Well, the Giants refused to play along as well. They kept Bonds around until the record was broken, and even after not signing him in 2008, the fans and the franchise never turned on him. When they reached the playoffs, there he was, cheering from the stands, getting roar after roar from the crowd. And the fans who had not broken faith were rewarded for their fidelity.

This team was a mixed bag. The best young pitching in 20 years, with a catcher who wasn’t called up for good until May, coupled with a ragbag of position players who were charitably described as journeymen at best – hell, some of them weren’t even in the organization on Opening Day. At least one was plucked off his couch in the summer. Nowhere did it look like a team that would be able to knock off the Philadelphia Phillies, the best team in baseball down the stretch and the two-time defending NL champs.

And yet.

The best part isn’t the endless Journey montage, or the plethora of merchandise (“Fear the Beard!” “Let Timmy Smoke”) or even that a team from a city that George W. Bush wouldn’t set foot in for eight years went down into Texas and took a huge shit on the thing he loves most. No, the best part is that everyone – EVERYONE – was in black and orange, EVERYONE was packing the trains and milling around the stadium with no need of a ticket, and EVERYONE outside of San Francisco was reminded that this is the best baseball town west of St Louis and that San Francisco is the most American of cities and WE FREAKIN’ WON THE WORLD SERIES FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN SAN FRANCISCO.

If there’s any team that can claim its hometown band’s “Don’t Stop Believing”…

* I think history will bear out that I was pretty much right about everything. Check back in two years.

* Nancy Pelosi was the most effective legislative leader for the Democrats in ages, and her house was lost. Harry Reid was the least, and he was preserved alive. No freakin’ justice. At the very least, Reid should lose his gig to somebody else (as I said something like six or more years ago, Dick Durbin should be the guy).

* Keeping the Senate is critical because that’s where treaties and appointments are ratified. Not that it’ll do a whole lot of good, but if the Dem leadership is willing to gut the filibuster rules, it might be easier to fill some of those bazillion vacancies that are still there two years on. (And for those balking at gutting it – you can do it now, or you can wait, not take advantage of it, and then watch as the GOP does it next time they’re in charge. I’m done with the unilateral-disarmament crowd.)

* Once you lose the House, it doesn’t matter if it’s by five or fifty, so that ship pretty much sailed long ago.

* Clinton got re-elected by running against Newt Gingrich. Obama now has a half-dozen Newts to run against at a minimum. Will be interesting to see whether the White House dials in, focuses, and starts punching.

* Alabama basically went GOP across the board, including both houses of the Legislature for the first time since 1874. The only question is why it took so long, given that the state hasn’t gone for a Democrat in a national election since Carter or elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992 (and that one switched parties as soon as the GOP took control).

* 1994 was worse, because I don’t think anyone expected it to be that bad. 2000 was worse, because of the prolonged torture and the fear that a Republican in the White House meant the safety was off for a Confederate-ist Congress. 2004 was worse, because the whole gang was reelected despite the fact that Bush’s approval rating immediately sank below 50% and never recovered. This is only bad for one reason: a party where the politics is divorced from governance is capable of serious negative action. Things like government shutdowns, or worse yet a failure to lift the debt limit – stuff with actual circumstances. There’s also the potential for highly annoying things like endless hearings on ACORN or the like, and I still believe an actual impeachment vote is an above-average possibility before 2012, even though there’s no way it could actually go through in the Senate – but there’s going to be no Republican program put through (largely because they haven’t got one) and there’s going to be no Democratic program put through (because the GOP House won’t allow it), so get ready for two years in neutral.

* There’s no point in considering moving somewhere. Hell, I moved to California, and they chased me here. At some point, you turn around and you stand and you fucking fight. Besides, if I were in London, how on Earth would I follow college basketball? (You notice I don’t say football. That is not a misprint.)