Category: Southern Culture

I Dream of Sausage (and BACON!!)

All day long I dream of sausage (and BACON!!). I just can’t help it.

It started last Friday on the drive from Huntsville to Durham, North Carolina where we witnessed a Man (as in Saban)-made disaster: a towering tsunami sweeping over and flooding the horseshoe-shaped bowl of Wallace Wade Stadium, turning it into a mini-Bryant Denny for a day and coloring it all houndstooth and crimson.

I should have been focusing on the game at hand, but I couldn’t avoid looking ahead after I spied those bronze memorials of a mama pig and her little piglets in the plaza in downtown Asheville.… Read the rest

Crazy and Crimson on 9/11/10

I was finishing up my charting on the last patient of the day last Friday afternoon when DU, a friend from Harding and a longtime blog reader and commenter, left me a message: “Eyeguy, call me when you have a minute. Thanks. RTR!”

DU is a Bama man, born and bred, and I could tell by the excitement in his voice that college football fever was eating up his bones. I’m a relative late-comer to the party, but after reading Warren St. John’s Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, the fundamentalist bible of fanatical Bama fandom, a few years ago, I repented of my childhood allegiances to Virginia Tech and Notre Dame and was washed beneath the Crimson Flood.… Read the rest

BREAKING: God Blesses Bama, Picks Tide to Repeat As BCS National Champs

In a stunning development that will likely leave Lee Corso and “Herbie” Herbstreit looking like tiny ants waving their itsy-bitty antennae in a desperate bid for attention, the Lord God Himself has broken His silence and declared His allegiance to the University of Alabama and picked the Crimson Tide to repeat as 2010 BCS National Champions.

Long suspected of rocking the Houndstooth beneath the dense billows of smoke and pillar of fire which conceal Him wherever He goes, God came out of the cloud yesterday and ended all speculation as to His true colors (Crimson and White) before the season even started.… Read the rest

Temperature Taunting

I’ve noticed a certain online phenomenon which seems to be on the rise along with the afternoon’s triple digit mercury: temperature taunting.

Temperature taunting occurs when friends in more moderate summer climes such as Seattle, New Hampshire, Michigan or Malibu post some ironic and sarcastic taunt on their blogs, Facebook or Twitter pages about how “godawful” their high-70s/low 80s/low humidity weather is and “However are we going to survive this heat wave?” or some such nonsense. If it were football season (and yes, Roll Tide, our boys reported for practice yesterday), these so-called “friends” would be flagged for a 15 yard penalty and loss of down.… Read the rest

“Darn The Oil, Full Speed Ahead!”

They say our stretch of beach was named for the Satsuma oranges that used to grow meekly there until the two consecutive winters of 1927-28 when massive frosts killed them off for good. Now long stretches of the formerly-white sands, which could reflect the sun so brightly they would burn your corneas if you weren’t careful, are marinated in oil. The orange-tinged granules spread like spilled Tang from the entrance of Perdido Bay, ringed off with long lines of floating boom, through Gulf State Park, past Gulf Shores and the stacked rows of new condos and beach homes rebuilt defiantly in the aftermath of Ivan and Katrina’s twin ravagings, and on to Fort Morgan.… Read the rest

“A Stouuury Book Endin’!”

“We were watching the soccer match,” Eyegal explained to the desk clerk at the historic Park View Guest House in the Garden District of New Orleans last Friday morning.

The US v. Slovenia match had ended just a few minutes before the 11:00 AM checkout time, but we had planned ahead and had our bags packed and ready to go. The “good” US National Team had taken the pitch in the 2nd half after the “bad” one, the U-10 squad that had showed up by mistake, had gone down 0-2 in the first.

Yet the 2-2 draw to stay alive in Group C play had left both of us a bit frustrated.… Read the rest

A Tale of Two Schools: A Review of the 2010 Christian Scholars’ Conference

People look at you kind of strange when you tell them that you shelled out good money to attend something called a “Christian Scholars’ Conference” and that you actually enjoyed it. Reactions can range from “What’s a guy like you doing in a place like that?” to “Well, la-de-da!” But believe me, after a long season of Tim James political TV ads and rootin’ tootin’ “Ag Commish” wannabe viral videos, I was ready for a little more “la-de-da” in my life.

You know Eyegal and me–liberal arts geeks to the core. An itch like that doesn’t always get scratched sufficiently in a high tech town like Huntsville, Alabama.… Read the rest

Bama Fans Storm State Capital in Montgomery

In the most stunning political turn since Fort Sumter, University of Alabama football fans have ringed the State Capital Building in Montgomery with a barricade of RVs and double-wide mobile homes in an attempt to seize control of the state government.

They are demanding that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James cease and desist from his campaign and that Governor Bob Riley establish a new executive office, Beloved Athletic Ruler (B’AR), which would be co-equal with Governor and occupied by Alabama Head Coach Nick Saban.  Riley, an Alabama alumnus, is reported to be seriously considering the ultimatum.

The movement began suddenly this past week after James, an Auburn grad, allegedly made intemperate and ill-advised remarks regarding Saban in which he questioned the coach’s maternal bloodline and threatened to reduce his salary or even outright “fahr his a**!”… Read the rest

Raising Arizona One Dale Peterson and Two Tim Jameses

Dear AZ,

Nice try, but no cigarro.

We know you’re a little sore because “L” comes before “R” in the alphabet. And you probably felt a little trampled upon when we drove an armada of Crimson, elephant-festooned RVs with horns that blare “Yea, Alabama,” not once, but twice, through your state in early January on our way to the Rose Bowl and back (Roll Tide!).

But did you really think you could captivate the attention of the entire country with your so-called “controversial” new immigration law? You call that “controversial?” You call yourself “conservative?” Do the names “George Wallace” and “Bull Connor” ring a bell with you people?… Read the rest

Alabama Casera Dulce?

I don’t always speak Spanish, but when I do, I prefer having Jose Rafael Rodriguez (aka, my translator “Danny”) somewhere in the immediate vicinity. I am neither the most interesting man in the world, nor the most bilingual.

I tried to memorize enough Spanish eye care phrases to get by on my recent trip to Guatemala, but despite my best efforts and intentions, I found myself leaning hard on Danny. I would usually start out the day doing a passable job-abre sus ojos (“open your eyes”), mira arriba (“look up”) –but as things got hot and busier and I became increasingly fatigued, I started to mangle my rote phrases more and more.… Read the rest

The Devil’s Hour Be Damned

My earliest memory is of waking up around 3:00 AM demanding my bottle. My mother, desperate for sleep, stumbled into my room, leaned over the edge of the crib with half-closed eyes staring down at me, and handed me one.

It was full of Coke, not milk. I grabbed the bottle and eagerly started to suck its sugary teat. Minutes later, I was back to sleep, and so was she.

I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t read about that little trick anywhere in Dr. Spock. She was “winging it,” as they say. What would I want if I awoke crying at 3:00 AM?… Read the rest

Getting a Grip: About Mark Ingram’s Gloves

ou6zpsNumber One Son and I had just been discussing what could possibly be on the palms of Alabama’s new Nike Pro Combat player gloves, and it didn’t take us long to find out.

We knew that the Crimson Tide was among several teams that would be receiving the new gear, which featured a particular avatar representing the “spirit” of each team, but Bama’s was missing from Nike’s preview website.

But when Heisman Trophy-winning tailback Mark Ingram scored his first touchdown in the BCS Title Game against Texas, he flashed the new gloves toward the camera for all the world to see.… Read the rest

All Eyes Are On Alabama, And It Feels So Right

Bama washingtonIf you’re going to stand in line in subfreezing temperatures in order to enter the holy of holies of college basketball, then you’d better know your stuff because every other Cameron Crazie wannabe standing in line with you sure will.

Well, mostly anyway.

When it comes to football, we were a motley crew, united only in our love for Duke basketball. Clemson, LSU, Georgia, Alabama, Penn State and Rutgers were just a few of the schools represented in our little knot of frozen fandom near the front of the line.

Kid Clemson, the guy in the Tiger hoodie in front of me, was a veritable walking encyclopedia of sports statistics.… Read the rest

Too Big For His Britches

TebowGQLast year this time, I was hoping that he would be long gone by now, but the boy just couldn’t take a hint. You know, that boy: Captain America, Jim Thorpe and Billy Graham all rolled into one.

I was hoping that he would be safely tucked away on the sideline of some 2nd tier NFL team, doing whatever it is that former triple option quarterbacks do in the NFL (Hint: think headset and clipboard). Well, hope can do a lot of things, but it’s not going to stop Tim Tebow when he starts churning those Sequoia Tree trunk-sized legs of his for yet another run up the middle, and it’ll make little difference on 3rd and 5 when he flings a laser-guided cruise missile that comes screaming in, low to the ground, just past the outstretched fingertips of a cornerback and into the hands of a diving teammate.… Read the rest

Just Missed Ole Miss

Gentle Fusioneers, allow me to tell you the story of how I just missed becoming an Ole Miss Rebel.

It was February, 1991 and I was nearing completion of my residency in Nashville. Number One Son had just turned two years old, and Eyegal was very pregnant with Number Two. We barely subsisted on my meager resident’s salary, but we were young and dumb and didn’t know what it was like to have money, so we were happy. Number One has early memories of us pushing him in the stroller through Green Hills Mall, looking in the windows and not buying a single thing.… Read the rest