Gheorghasbord: From Wieners to Cocks

Hope your respective weekends were good. Just a few tidbits to keep the good gheorghies tuning in and the postcount up.

Tubesteaks have dominated the discussion here for a while. Frankfurters, I mean. Question(s)for you...

1. Do the meats in the video below count as hot dogs?
2. Any interest among the gheorghies?
3. Is there some shortage of wiener buns?

On a related note, 6 years ago this article muddied the waters on an ongoing debate of whether a hot dog is a sandwich: National Hot Dog and Sausage Council Announces Official Policy On ‘Hot Dog as Sandwich’ Controversy.  The long and short of it was that they claim that hot dogs are in their own category and therefore not lumped into the sandwich category. But check out the USDA Regulatory Definitions of a Sandwich in that link.  Thoughts?

30 years ago a few of our guys went through a parallel debate of whether a BLT is a sandwich, with the non-obvious argument throwing its eggs into the "bacon is a topping not a primary meat" basket. This one wasn't and isn't much of a debate, but I certainly enjoyed the ridiculous banter that it offered a while back.

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It was once written, "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League." New York is the epicenter of everywhere anywhere (just as a New Yorker; they'll tell ya). First in business, first in fashion, last in the American League. Meanwhile, rob's Red Sox are in first place, even as he sandbagged our annual case o' beer bet and has the Sox +10 wins versus the modestly Amazin' Mets. Conventional wisdom says those spots will be reversed by Memorial Day, but one never knows...

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QB Alex Smith retired today. Much will be said about him, and hyperbole will abound, as is de rigueur, but what he did to come back from a gruesome injury and subsequent infections cannot be overstated. He faced amputation and played a couple years later in meaningful NFL contests. His acquisition set the WFT back a costly bit, as it turned out, but the team's fans are Alex Smith fans all the way.

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Speaking of football, I have twice as much incentive to get to an SEC game this summer. My younger daughter came to the end of her miserable run during the college admission process. It's been a rough road for her and for her peers because of a few factors:

• Would-be rising sophomores from last year who took a gap year and are coming back. According to at least one admission office, one-quarter of their freshman slots were taken by this population, so this year's crop of kids were starting off short-handed.
• The SAT wasn't a requirement this year. My daughter did well (highest in the extended family), so this would have helped her. Instead, it saturated the candidate pool.
• With the effect the pandemic has had on the economy, large state schools (the relative bargains) have been flooded with applications. My girl applied nearly exclusively to large state schools.
• Among other things working against her, some recent grads from her high school were embroiled in a cheating scandal at UVa; that and a progressive push from colleges for DEI and a new era of wokeness did not help the students at this decidedly unwoke preparatory school. Sounds like there's a shake-up a-brewing at Norfolk Academy, though enough of the Board of Trustees all have MAGA stickers on their Bentleys and Range Rovers that it's not a given. I do know that when a high school is more expensive than a number of the colleges for which it offers tutelage and trajectory into, its numero uno metric is college acceptance, and when that ebbs mightily, look the fuck out.
• At least in these parts, it's just been a crappy year to try to get into colleges... and to be a senior. All the fun stuff and privileges have been cancelled, virtual learning sucked, in-person learning was definitely not the same, and now the process of moving forward has been disappointing at best. A friend who's a UPenn alum sits on interview panels for local applicants. He said that they usually have an acceptance rate of 9% to 14% of the kids they see. This year they interviewed 98 applicants. 1 got in. 

So... bad luck for my daughter and her peeps. All that said, she's going to college! That's more than many people across many years could say! She came to a decision late last week, and we're happy for her.

Maddie will be joining her sister in Columbia as a Gamecock for the University of South Carolina. 

I'm happy for a variety of reasons. She's done and moving on with the next chapter in her life. The first place she thought she might want to go when this process began was USC. She only had reservations because the cat left the bag and a lot of her schoolmates loudly announced how much they wanted to go there, when she wanted an element of getting away from much of what (and who) she'd known before for a new adventure. 

I'm especially happy because my two daughters really are great friends as much as sisters, and they want the experience of going to college together. I definitely don't take that for granted. Plus, now I can see them twice as often on my college visits. And it's a bargain.  Oh, and football.

As football comes back in earnest for attending fans, I am looking to join the fray. November is a fun month at Williams-Brice Stadium; Clemson finishes off the regular season there. Before that, Auburn comes in looking for revenge. And before that, the Gators hit town on Nov. 6. Already starting to make plans.

Go Cocks.

Corona Files: One Text You Don't Want

There's powerful writing, as our Outer Banks Ombudsman can demonstrate, and then there's the sheer brute force of a 7-word text, one that spares all preparatory run-up or foreshadowing.  And then there's the idiotic blurt of a reply.

My baby girl got the coronavirus.

She's 19. She's otherwise healthy. She should be just fine. And, spoiler alert, she's now through the woods and already out of quarantine. But it still jolted and jarred me to get that news and consider what it might mean.

In the world in which we live, there is an endless supply of Monday Morning Armchair Quarterbacks (most of whom are of the Ryan Leaf variety) who tell us what they would have done, or what we should do, or neither of those but simply tell us that people are doing it wrong... and how dare they?  Where the pandemic is concerned, way, way too many people apparently have some or all of this mess all figured out. Totally pegged. And the more sure someone is about any element of COVID-19, the more quickly I dismiss them as a foolhardy gasbag.

But I'm here to say that the comfort level that the University of South Carolina, its administration, and its seemingly unflappable president amply provided me leading up to and during my daughter's illness reduced my 385-miles-away angst significantly.  While UNC, ECU, JMU and other schools have punted (for their own reasons) and sent kids contaminated and otherwise back to their homes and hometowns, USC said in not so many words, "We have a plan. And we feel good about where we are with it."

To wit, and to an almost alarming degree, there is a USC COVID Dashboard that began at Alert Level: New Normal and has risen no higher than Alert Level 1: Low -- even as the active cases among the student/faculty/staff population topped 1,700.  There have been fleeting moments where even I wondered if the USC Prez was Kevin Bacon in the Homecoming Parade.

And then two things happened.  One, that number quickly dropped to 640 as hundreds of people are graduating from quarantine with clean bills of health. (We presume; what the virus does to the body can have horrible, lasting effects, but unless you want this father to freak the fuck out, let's move on.)

Second, my daughter got better. She was sick for several days (exhausted like never before, achy all over, mild fever), felt slightly better, waited for a scheduled COVID test while self-quarantining, tested positive, moved into the quarantine dorm (in this case, a hotel room), kept at her classes online all the while, waited for the 10-days-from-first-symptoms paroling -- which meant only three days in formal lockdown, and moved back into her dorm room yesterday.  Where she rejoined her roommate and suitemates, who have now all had the virus.

She's back to being a college kid, still in a strange time, but with a mildly augmented sense of calm. She was a total trooper throughout, talking me off ledges here and there and going full Freaky Friday on me by being the composed teenager to the uneasy parent.

Are there potential holes in this university's plan? Almost definitely. Is its success somewhat contingent on the good sense of 34,000 people who are at the age of pre-frontal-lobe-full-development? As in the age when Dave ate a cicada on a dare, when Rob won the projectile vomit contest, and when I got an embarrassing and not quite right tattoo of a girl's name on my groin?  Yes, yes, it is reliant on those kinds of people. Yikes.  But I still like this plan better than a number of the alternatives I've seen.

That's the news for now, and I hope that's all the news of its ilk for a long, long while.  Good luck to each of you and yours out there, and may your own run-ins with this beast of a virus be like mine.  You know, like a ride on a timeworn, rickety roller coaster. It scares the crap out of you, makes you curse and swear and feel ill and you just can't wait for it to be over... but then it is, and you sigh, and you still think you might puke but you're so happy to be descending the stairs that you don't even consider the organs that may have gotten damaged along the way.

And that's just the dad of the patient. Godspeed.