    |
Spring Now Please Thank You
It was warm today. There was baseball - high def baseball - on my television. It didn’t snow. For once. The Cardinals won. I went outside. In short-sleeves. Without a jacket. This is nice.
 |
  |
Outside
It snowed today in Effingham - again - making going out of doors rather trecherous. Well, that and The Decatur Smell.
Decatur, home to ADM and its many industrial plans, always smells horrid. Like a concentrated ball of rotten McDonald’s french fries, and so strong you can almost taste it. It’s a horrible hanging scent that makes you gag, especially while traveling US 36 through the central and eastern parts of the city. Usually the smell is confined to the Decatur city limits, but the Cloud occasionally rides the wind to other communities. One evening back in December I first caught a whiff of The Decatur Smell in the parking lot of Effingham’s Martin’s IGA, over sixty miles by air from ADM’s headquarters. I’d been to Decatur that day and fought the scent head-on, so I figured it to be a residual phantom smell until Emily also noticed the hanging ill and we promptly decided I had inadvertently shown The Smell a new community to haunt. After that The Smell remained absent from our quaint town for all of 2008…until I went out for lunch today and got a potent dosage right in the face. Nice to know - at least this time - I’m not responsible for the foul odor. (To be honest, that last line sums up my life quite well.)
|
|
I Want My Baseball
Baseball! Spring training games start tomorrow - thanks to my XM Radio subscription there are three games I can listen to starting at noon Wednesday and say “I wish I was listening to the Cardinals instead. Or even the Cubs.” As useless as exhibition broadcasts featuring teams you care little about seem to be, at this point it’s BASEBALL and quite frankly I’ll take anything I can get. ESPN has the Braves and Dodgers - in HD - Friday at noon. Victory!
|
  |
Closed?
Today Emily and I drove three hours through fog and rain just to eat good pizza…and the place was closed. Connie’s in Anna isn’t just another pizza place. We discovered the tiny diner tucked into the corner of Anna’s downtown stretch thanks to the Vienna Beef sign hanging proudly in the window, and as tentative as I usually am to sample new cuisine I jumped at the chance to CHOMP a Chicago Dog this deep in Southern Illinois. We weren’t disappointed, not by the quality of the hot dogs or the rest of the offbeat, diverse menu featuring lots of food really bad for you but damn, damn good. Nor by the unique ambiance, as the proprieter had dressed her restaurant by quickly redressing the old downtown store with a multitude of old food signs, maps and other appropriate oddities, not to mention the small board games throughout the restaurant to help make our wait for eats a little less tedious. After a few months she added pizza to the menu (once passing out samples - and by that I mean entire pieces) and we were addicted. Then we had to get married and move away. Silly us. Today we returned for the first time since May and the lights were off, denying us our treats. Admittedly, I use the word “just” to lie to you: the pizza was only part of the equation. Emily wanted to tour more of the region of Illinois she’s been assigned to survey as part of her new job, and while we were heading to the south we planned to swing by Carbondale so she could pick up some needed materials to work on her grad school research. After that it would only be a half-hour trip south to Anna and the delicacies we missed so much, and since Sunday is the day Connie’s was usually closed we pushed back our planned Sunday trip to a Monday in order to be able to kill a bunch of red-tailed hawks with one 65 MPH stone. Instead we had to settle for O’Charley’s in Marion, a fine meal but hardly the same. And it’s one we get in Champaign or Springfield any day of the week. Still, the trip to Carbondale had some rewards:
|
  |
Peter’s Oscar Picks: 2008
Usually my call for Best Picture comes the same day as the nominations are announced, mostly because of my Big Old Oscar Theory, such named because I thought of it one day and never tried to conjure up something better. Over ten years I only missed once - picking Babel last year over The Departed - nailing such underdogs along the way as Crash and Shakespeare in Love before the mainstream media started picking up on their potential as an underdog spoiler. Yeah, I’m good. It’s last minute, but for this year go with No Country For Old Men edging out There Will be Blood. Juno’s a longshot, and I’ll be rooting for it, but don’t count on it. My skills never crossed over to lesser categories, but I’ll make picks anyway:
|
The website is back. Color even me surprised. |
NFL Picks - Super Bowl XLII
|
|
