11.28.2025 – naw, he said, now what

naw, he said, now what
would I want to remember …
a thing like that for?

In 1966, George Plimpton wrote a book titled Paper Lion as an inside view of pro football by going through the pre-season with the Detroit Lions.

He came out with a follow up book in 1973 titled Mad Ducks and Bears that told the story of the years after 1966 through Plimpton’s friendship and interviews with Detroit Lions Alex Karras (The Mad Duck) and John Gordy (The Bear).

In Mad Ducks and Bears, Plimpton writes about what it was like for Karras and Gordy to play with Quarterback Booby Layne who both men acknowledged was a masterful football player but a pretty nasty guy otherwise.

Both men carried long grudges against Layne that lasted through their careers.

Plimpton relates this story told by Alex Karras, writing:

The two of them sat quietly, thinking back on those days. Finally Karras said, “You know something crazy? Bobby Layne was traded away by Detroit to the Pittsburgh Steelers. He ended up his career there. We played them one Sunday, and this play came up where he was chased out of the pocket and ran out of bounds. I was chasing him, really reaching for him, and when we got out of bounds I still went for him. I racked his ass. Back behind the bench somewhere. Knocked a water bucket over, I remember. I don’t know why I did it. It was crazy. We got a big penalty and I was chewed out plenty.”

“What about Layne?” I asked.

“I can remember him looking at me out of that crazy helmet he wore. ‘Hey, what did you do that for?’ he says. “I couldn’t have told him. No way.”

Later in the book, Plimpton recounts how he had the chance to meet Bobby Layne, spend some time with him and interview him.

Plimpton writes:

“Bobby,” I asked, “do you remember a game when you were playing for Pittsburgh in which you were run out of bounds, and Alex Karras came out of nowhere and really belted you one? They damn near threw him out of the game for it? A water bucket went over. It was way out of bounds. Do you remember that?”

Layne was silent for such a long time that I thought he had his mind on something else and had not heard the question.

“Naw,” he said finally. He reached for the door handle of the jeep.

“Naw, now what would I want to remember a thing like that for?”

Folks, the next time someone suggests that the Lions’ wear throwback uniforms, throwback to those great Lions’ teams, throwback to those great Lions’ games, throwback to those great Lions’ memories that we all say:

“Naw, now what would I want to remember a thing like that for?”

11.27.2025 – stuff in the kitchen

stuff in The kitchen …
My kitchen, where treasure is …
heart will be also

Got up this morning to make a pie and I got to thinking.

I was using my rolling pin that I have had for years and I posted a photo it on facebook with the question, “Name something in my kitchen that hasn’t been washed in 35 years.”

What did I mean actually by saying ‘my kitchen’?

Did anyone in literature every write a better sentence on kitchen’s than EB White did in Charlotte’s Web when he wrote, “The kitchen table was set for breakfast, and the room smelled of coffee, bacon, damp plaster, and wood smoke from the stove.”

And I thought about kitchen’s in time past for myself.

My Mom lived in the same house in Grand Rapids, Michigan for over 50 years.

I can still say the phone number that started 363 (or if you are really old, EM3 when the city used ‘exchanges’).

There was a kitchen that was the heart and soul of a family.

As there were 11 kids in our family, the kitchen was huge.

Had a island with a 4 electric burners AND a metal surfaced prep counter that by itself was a big as most kitchen islands today.

They was a butcher block ‘sandwich’ counter at one end of this vast wrap around counter that turned into a breakfast area with kitchen stools on one side and then the dining room table that you could land a plane on.

Mom’s kitchen was quirky.

Mom had wooden bread box and the side that opened had a hair trigger.

If it slipped when you opened it, or sometimes all on its on, that side would fall fast and smack the counter with a band like a gun shot and made everyone jump.

The oven, somehow, gave off a AM Radio signal.

If you were in the car and someone was listening to a ball game on the radio, when you pulled into the garage, the radio would start giving off this low buzz buzz buzz and you know something was in the overn.

In her later years when she got a little forgetful, I would often drive over to see her and hear that sound and know that I should go in to turn the oven off for her.

Not hard to visualize Mom on an almost daily basis (Wednesday was prayer meeting so to give my a break that was night we went to McDonalds. Back then we ate in the car and two of the older boys would walk to the window to place the order. They would come back with a tray of drinks and hand to Mom who would then take a sip and say Coke Coke Root beer and pass them out. My brother Pete and I got out this by ordering the Orange Drink.)

She would take a break from the never ending laundry and walk into the kitchen and start frying up pans and pans of pork chops or stir and giant kettle of spaghetti sauce or peel the 10lbs of potatoes she would need for the evening meal.

In one corner of the kitchen was a tall under the counter cabinet.

It was in there that Mom kept the 10 different kinds of cereal we demanded.

Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Sugar Crisp and Cap’n Crunch.

The Cap’n Crunch was for Dad who liked to sprinkle a handful on his vanilla ice cream.

Then over under the butcher block counter top was a giant two drawer cabinet known as the ‘cookie drawer’ where every kind of cracker, cookie and snack anyone ever heard of was kept.

As we were Dutch, there was always a box of Rusk.

An old friend of mine named Gordon Olson once said he never doubted the business acumen of the Dutch as there were able to sell boxes of stale bread by calling it rusk.

Almost more than the contents of the cookie drawer, what I remember was how the Grand kids eyes would go big whenever they discover Grandma’s Cookies.

They would stand there and almost cry as it was so hard to make a choice of ‘just one’.

Come Thanksgiving Day, Mom and the kitchen when into high gear and enough food to last Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in their little house in the big woods through the entire winter.

Pots and pans and baking sheets piled up.

Food piled up.

Plates and glasses piled up.

That, folks, was a kitchen!

I realized that there is a big difference between ‘the kitchen’ where you live and ‘my kitchen’ which means more, ‘What’ not ‘Where’.

In the short story, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name”, Jim Harrison writes that the man in question had “In the trunk there was one suitcase, one box of books, and one box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with in his urge to travel light.”

One box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with.

That, for me, up what I mean when I say, My Kitchen.

I am happy to say that my box of cooking equipment includes utensils from my Mom’s kitchen.

We have lived in a dozen different homes since getting married and the The Kitchen always changes.

But in that kitchen, I will spread out the one box of assorted cooking equipment I could not bear to part with and once again, I am in my kitchen.

I am reminded of the Bible verse at Matthew 6:21, that says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

For me, where my rolling pin in, there MY kitchen will be also.

11.26.2025 – but beating the team

but beating the team
that you hate the most? That lasts
the rest of your life

It’s also college football in a nutshell, and it’s worth keeping in mind as we enter Rivalry Week: In the end, what makes this sport so deliriously wonderful is this sort of irrational emotion, this primal and eternal bile. We have become accustomed, already, just in the second year of the 12-team Playoff, to gauging every week’s results by how they affect the ever-shifting CFP bracket picture, and we’re fully primed to do that again this week. 

But the thing about those games is that, in the long term, what they mean for Playoff positioning will be the least interesting thing about them. What matters is beating those other guys’ brains in. What matters is getting to talk trash all year.

This would seem like an obvious thing to say — college football is about tradition and rivalries — but it is one that, because of college football’s wild changes over the past few years, needs to be repeated and, perhaps more than anything else, cherished.

But beating the team you hate the most? That lasts the rest of your life.

From the New York Time article, College Football Playoff bids are great. Making your rival miserable is still better by Will Leitch.

Of last year, Mr. Leitch wrote:

Maybe Ohio State beat Tennessee, Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame to win the national title last year. But it didn’t beat Michigan, which means a huge chunk of its glorious season was a complete and total failure. That is hilarious. It is also kind of wonderful — and one of the best reasons to love this deranged sport.

I was born and raised in a Michigan family.

My first big sports hero I remember was Michigan basketball start, Cazzie Russel.

And the first big sports memory was that Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1969 when Michigan beat an Ohio State team that hadn’t lost in 2 years.

I like to say that when I was a kid I was told that Woody Hayes was under my bed if I got out, he would grab me and take me off to Ohio.

Reading biographies as a kid I had to wrestle with the fact that General Grant, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and James Thurber all were born in Ohio.

It didn’t make any sense.

Until I figured it out that none of them achieved much success until they LEFT Ohio.

Mr. Leitch quotes William Hazlitt called “On the Pleasure of Hating.”

Mr. Hazlitt once wrote, back in 1826:

Nature seems made of antipathies.

Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit.

Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits.

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust:

Hatred alone is immortal.

With that in mind, I am thankful this Thanksgiving for something so worthy of my hate.

I live in a seaside resort community that oddly enough has a large Ohio contingent.

Up the coast a bit in Charleston, SC, then even have a MEME of GBTO or Go Back to Ohio.

Its kind of goofy but when the concept arose back in the late 1970’s that timeshare vacations were invented, the fellers in charge took a map and estimated the furthest a father might drive their family and their research led them to focus their marketing efforts on the state of Ohio.

And it worked!

But as one local blogger put it … Tourism is the bread and butter of the lcoal economy, but Ohio’s arrival seems like adding five extra sticks of butter. Sure, we’re richer for it, but at what cost?

Anyway, what this means it that this is a great place to wear an M coaches cap.

And when I say coaches cap, I mean what is now called the ‘SKINNY M’ coaches cap.

It is great fun to walk the beaches and parks and hear from all sides folks yell out GO BLUE.

Especially … ESPECIALLY when there some of those OH IO people around.

You know them.

The group that needs two people to spell O H I O.

BTW, having worked in the world on Online News for 20 years, I was always happy to report that any story on Ohio State Football had twice as many reads as any other sports story.

There was the Ohio State Fan … and the person who read the story to them.

But I digress.

And down here.

They see me.

They see my cap.

My T shirt.

My sweat shirt.

My swim trunks.

They see the M.

And I see them.

And all I have to do is smile.

And they know it.

11.25.2025 – was good night and day

was good night and day,
winter, summer, spring and fall,
dull days and bright days

Adapted from the passage:

Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.

Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days.

It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

From the book, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (Harper and Row: New York, 1952).

Thinking of the seasons and wondering if this line of words may be the best ever at described what happens and the earth spins around the sun every 365 days.

Night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days.

The best place to be.

The glory of everything.

PS: See more Thurber at For Muggs and Rex.

11.24.2025 – I’ve got the best seat

I’ve got the best seat
put my hands up when he was
seven yards down field

Jahmyr Gibbs rescues Lions with long TD run in OT for 34-27 win over Giants by Larry Lage
DETROIT (AP) — Jahmyr Gibbs to the rescue.
Gibbs ran for a 69-yard touchdown on the first snap of overtime and had a career-high 264 yards from scrimmage along with three scores, lifting the Detroit Lions to a much-needed 34-27 win over the New York Giants on Sunday.
“He bailed us out in a big way,” Detroit coach Dan Campbell
Detroit took advantage. With 28 seconds left, Jake Bates kicked a career-long 59-yard field goal that matched a franchise record, giving Jared Goff another opportunity to put the ball in Gibbs’ hands.
In overtime, Goff handed the ball to Gibbs for a run up the middle, Detroit’s much-maligned offensive line opened a huge hole, and one of the NFL’s fastest players took it from there.
“I’ve got the best seat in the field,” Goff said. “I put my hands up when he was about seven yards down the field.”

Detroit Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs (0) runs past New York Giants safety Dane Belton (24) for a touchdown in overtime of an NFL football game in Detroit, Sunday, Nov. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Rey Del Rio)

Kind of like wanting to see an overtime basketball game where one team comes out of nowhere and scores 20 points, I love it when you see something unexpected in OT.

Like a 70 yard run from scrimmage on the 1st play.

Especially when its my team.

I think I saw Goff with his hands up calling touchdown a few seconds after the handoff.

That was fun.

Back in 1996, Brian Griese took over after halftime of the Ohio State game down 0 to 9 and on the 2nd play of the 2nd half, from the Michigan 20, Griese threw an in route to Tai Streets at about the 30 yard line.

The OSU defender fell down and Streets took two more steps and calling the game for ABC Sports, Keith Jackson said, simply, “he’s wide open and gone for a touchdown.”

At that point, Streets was at the 50 yard line but Jackson had seen enough football in his life that unless there was an earthquake and some 200 foot ravine suddenly opened up, Streets was going to score.

50 yards of watching your team, knowing its a touchdown.

Jackson, unlike most sportscasters, shut up and let everyone live in that moment as Streets ran down the middle of the field to the endzone.

And for some reason, no one said, AND NO FLAGS.

Maybe back then, just because they had flags those guys didn’t think they needed to call a penalty on every play.

That was fun …

Who knows this weekend …