Jinxing The Home Team

It's a few hours from the kick-off of Super Bowl XLVI. The New England Patriots and New York Giants are ready for the big rematch of four years ago. And I'm just trying to make sure I don't do anything to lose the game. Yes, little old me feels that something I do could aversely affect the game. Let me explain...

I've written a couple of times about how I can be rather superstitious about certain things. See My Own Personal Superstitions and Friday the 13th Part 2 to read more about them. In both of those blogs I mentioned the fact that I always fear a negative outcome of a sporting event based on what the commentators choose to say (and exactly when they choose to say it). This continues to be a problem, and I will probably end up with calluses on my knuckles from having to knock on wood every time it happens. Just the other night I had the opportunity to go out to the movies by myself. When I got in the car to head home after the film I turned on the radio and the Boston Celtics had a one point lead with only about seven seconds left in a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers. It seemed like a nail-biter, but I didn't realize until one of the many timeouts taken in the last ten seconds of a close NBA game that it shouldn't have been a nail-biter. Not too much earlier the Celtics had a TWENTY-TWO point lead! They had let it slip away almost completely before sweating out a three-point win, 93-90. Luckily I wasn't listening to the whole game (listening on the radio as opposed to watching on TV because we don't have cable). One of the announcers jokingly said something to the effect: "To all the hundreds of people who just tweeted me, there is no such thing as an announcer jinx."  Yeah, right! Does he really believe that? I was happy to hear that I wasn't the only one who believed in the jinx--based on the wave of tweets this particular announcer received for something that I (luckily) didn't hear myself.

From what I've written so far it might seem like I'm only concerned with announcers and commentators jinxing major sporting events. In actuality I feel that anyone can be the cause of something bad happening within a game (wittingly or unwittingly). In fact, the person I'm concerned about most of the time is myself! Obviously I wouldn't purposely do anything to endanger my favorite teams' chance of success, but sometimes it just happens. For a perfect example we only have to go back a few weeks to the last game of the regular season between the New England Patriots and the Buffalo Bills. The Pats were 12-3 and the Bills were 6-9. After starting the season with four straight wins Buffalo had slumped very badly. It seemed like a sure bet that the Patriots would win (even though they had lost to these same Bills early in the season).

I'm not one to wear football jerseys while watching games on TV. It's not that I'm against the idea or don't have any jerseys (I do own a few), it just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable--like I'm guaranteeing a win or something (which of course is not at all what I'm trying to do). For whatever reason it just seems like a bad omen for me to overdo the support for the team in the wardrobe department. But this seemed like a good time to pull one of the jerseys out though. It was the last game of the season. The Patriots had already won 12 games, had won the AFC East, were already in the playoffs, but were still playing for something--if the won they'd have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. The Patriots were playing well and the Bills weren't. I pulled out the jersey of one of my all-time favorite Patriots, Troy Brown, and put it on just before the game.

Now I assure you, I do realize just how ridiculous it sounds to say that I thing that something that I do (especially something as minor as my choice of what to wear for a game) could possibly have any effect on the outcome of a game played hundreds of miles away by professional football players who will never even know who the heck I am. Nonetheless, I DO indeed feel that way. I'm sure there are plenty of other people out there who also feel the same way. I sometimes wonder if a win has more to do with the seemingly random actions of a few hundred fans than what the players on the field actually do. Heck, even some professional sports figures are hyper-superstitious themselves. How often do you hear about a player not changing his underwear or wearing the same shirt every day during a winning streak. Remember Wade Boggs with the Boston Red Sox and his habit of eating chicken before EVERY game? Remember Nomar Garciaparra with those same Red Sox and his little fidgeting ritual he'd go through every time he stepped into the batter's box?

So back to the game at hand. Why would I feel like I had any effect on the outcome? Well, let me explain and maybe it won't seem quite so outlandish. The game started and I sat there, feeling just a wee bit uncomfortable in my Troy Brown Jersey. Wouldn't you know that by the end of just the first quarter the Patriots looked horrible and the Bills already had a twenty-one point advantage. Yes, they were up 21-0 in the FIRST quarter! Three possessions, three touchdowns.  Well, needless to say, I was just a bit unhappy with the way things were going. I simply had to take my jersey off--not because I was jumping off the bandwagon like a fair weather fan, but because I felt that I had doomed my team to a terrible loss because of my poor choice of clothing. Pretty funny, huh? ...And maybe just a little insane too? Well, check out what happened after I took the jersey off at the end of the first quarter. The Patriots woke up and scored FORTY-NINE unanswered points over the last three quarters to win the game in a blowout 49-21. Did Bill Belichick walk into the locker room after the game and say "Well, thank God that danged Monster Dad guy took off his stupid jersey"? Probably not, but I certainly felt a whole lot better about things after making that decision anyway.

We're hosting a small Super Bowl party tonight, and it's tempting to put on all my Patriots gear and overdo the house decorating, but I just can't bear to do it. Yes, seeing your team in the Super Bowl is a rare and special occurrence (only two out of the 32 NFL teams get to do it each year), and should be celebrated and commemorated. But like they always say, everyone remembers who won the Super Bowl, but no one remembers the runner-up (even if by virtue of losing the Super Bowl they can claim to be the second best team in the entire league). I am nervous enough about this game. I certainly don't want to take any chances on doing something stupid that might cost the team dearly. And, yes, once again, I do realize that saying that itself sounds pretty stupid.

One last superstitious thing about this Super Bowl and superstitions. Sports Illustrated has had a long-standing and well-known history of jinxing players and teams by featuring them on the cover of the magazine (see Sports Cover Cover Jinx at wikipedia for all the gory details). It's amazing just how often this phenomenon had happened. Last week the latest issue of Sports Illustrated arrived at my house with Tom Brady screaming on the cover.

After a moment of panic I realized that I shouldn't have anything to worry about. After all the next issue would hit newsstands well before the Super Bowl. It was a no-brainer that it would have another Super Bowl-themed cover. Since the Patriots (by way of Tom Brady) were featured on last week's cover, this week's was bound to have the Giants on it. Right? Right? Wrong. This week's cover featured the owner of the Patriots, Robert Kraft.

He was supposedly the first NFL owner to be featured on the cover. That is quite an honor. Having the Patriots featured on the cover two weeks in a row is also quite an honor to be sure. But WHY did it have to be these two weeks in a row leading up to the Super Bowl? I get the feeling that Sports Illustrated knows about--and believes--the whole jinx thing and is secretly (or not so secretly) rooting for the New York Giants.

Well, we'll know the results in a few short hours. One team's fans will be jubilantly celebrating while the others will be crushed. How much of that outcome depends on the play on the field and how much depends on what hundreds of thousands of people around the globe do I can't say. All I know is that I won't be taking any chances.

Resurrecting The Past: January 21, 1983 (Part 1: The Past)

JANUARY 21, 2012

This might seem like a daunting task. In the past we've seen little bits of the past resurrected--like a drive-in speaker, an old rotary telephone and a ColecoVision video game console. But to try to resurrect or recreate an entire day? Well, it's actually only a small part of that day that I'm interested in bringing back. And to make matters a bit easier, I've already done much of the research necessary to accomplish this. Due to the amount of information I need to cover with the topic this will have to be a two-part entry. Part one will explain the significance of the seemingly random date of January 21, 1983 and my reasons for wanting to resurrect it. Part two will cover the actual resurrection process itself.

On the date of January 21, 1983 something occurred that I had never told anyone about for nearly thirty years. For all that time it had been an experience that only I knew about. It might have stayed that way and the memory might have died with me, but last year I decided to share the story with my parents. The funny thing about it was that, for all those years the story sat in my memory, the people I would have least wanted to know about it were my parents. Last year my father was in the final stages of his battle with cancer. I was trying to spend as much quality time with him and my mother as possible before it was too late. I suddenly realized that my "secret" memory which had seemed like something that should remain a secret was actually pretty silly--and in fact even pretty funny.

Growing up I was (obviously) very interested in watching old horror and science fiction movies on TV. But another type of movie I was interested in was war movies--or more specifically, movies about World War II. The 1960s were a time of many, many movies about WWII. Roughly twenty years had passed since the war ended. It must have been that just the right amount of time had passed that there was a lot of interest in films about the war. I suppose that people who were around during WWII (either in the service or on the home front) were interested in the subject, and younger people wanted to learn more about something they were too young to really remember or comprehend. Whatever the reason there were indeed a lot of great (or at least entertaining and watchable) World War II movies that came out during the decade. I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While the 1980s (and the ensuing decades for that matter) were a time when very few war movies were produced (at least in comparison with the 1960s), it was also a time when a LOT of those great older movies were being aired on local TV. The independent Boston-area stations that I watched (WXNE Channel 25, WSBK TV Channel 38 and WLVI Channel 56) frequently featured war films as their 8:00 movies. I saw many of them during this time.

Back to the topic at hand. The memory that this whole topic is about centers around one of these movies--and the identity of that movie was key in figuring out the date in question (January 21, 1983). It was around this time that I remember first being old enough that my parents felt comfortable with going out and leaving me alone at home. The memory that is at the heart of this blog was from one of the first times they did this.

I remember being excited to know that my parents would be leaving me alone for a few hours on a Friday night. I wasn't excited because I'd be throwing a wild teenage party or doing anything illicit. No, I was psyched because I knew that the movie "Hell is for Heroes" (1962) was going to be on WLVI 56 that night. Yes, my parents were going to leave me alone at home on a Friday night and I was going to...sit around and watch a movie on TV. Wild times! Well, "Hell os for Heroes" was not only a World War II movie, it also just happened to star one of my favorite actors, Steve McQueen. McQueen was one of the stars of my (still) all-time favorite war movie, "The Great Escape" (1963).

Not only was I going to have the house to myself to watch a Steve McQueen war movie, I was also going to make myself some microwave popcorn. While that admittedly sounds pretty mundane, it was rather exciting to me. Up until a short time before this, if we had popcorn in my house it was popped by my father on our stove in one of these old-school popcorn poppers:

But at this time we had just recently gotten our very first microwave oven. That allowed us to experience the uber-moden wonder that was Microwave Popcorn! Here is that very same microwave as it appears now, nearly thirty years later:

Of course a microwave is a pretty standard and unexciting thing to own nowadays, but in the early 1980s they were still a somewhat new and interesting technology. I remember being a little intimidated by our new unit as I slowly learned how to use it and to deal with its strange habit of not heating something evenly all the way through. Well, on this particular night I was going to do something very new and exciting; I was going to make my very first bag of microwave popcorn all by myself!

Put all of these factors together (a Friday night, being left home alone for one of the first times, making my own popcorn in the microwave for the very first time ever and a Steve McQueen movie on TV) and you can start to see why this night was pretty special for me (as lame as it might sound today). Remember, this was a couple years before we got our first VCR. That means it was during that ancient era when you actually had to be around and sitting in front of the TV when something you were interested in seeing was on. You couldn't videotape, TiVo or DVR it. You couldn't pop a tape or DVD of the show or movie in to watch at your leisure. You couldn't go online to watch it. If it was scheduled to be on at a certain time, that was when you were going to have to see it--or risk having to wait a long time until it was broadcast again by one of the handful of VHF and UHF stations that you could pick up with your antenna.

All these little factors were enough to make for a memorable night for me. But one unexpected thing happened (the thing which I kept secret for decades afterward) that made the night truly unforgettable. Like I said, I had never made microwave popcorn before. In fact, we had only had our microwave for a short time, so I hadn't made (or even simply reheated) very much in it at all. It was pretty neat to be able to take a flat paper bag, throw it in the micro for a few minutes and have a generous helping of hot popcorn already seasoned with a butter-like substance and ready to eat.

I read the directions, set the microwave for five minutes at full power and returned to the living room to watch a few more minutes of my movie while the micro-magic happened. Not having ever made microwave popcorn before I didn't realize that five minutes was the maximum time and that it might actually take much less time. At this point my wonderful night took a strange turn. Before the microwave finished its cooking cycle I started to notice a burning odor that didn't smell like popcorn. I went out to the kitchen and saw smoke coming out of the oven. Opening the door I was shocked to see the paper bag that contained the popcorn singed and smoking. Not only had the popcorn burned, but the bag itself was burning! Knowing that my parents were going to be home at any time I started to panic. How could I conceal this mini-disaster? I quickly but gingerly grabbed the scorched bag and ran down the back stairs and outside the house. I threw it under our back porch in the snow. then I raced back upstairs to try to deal with the smell of burnt popcorn. Opening windows (and letting cold New England winter air into the house) I tried to coax the smell outside. Naturally I saw my parents' car drive up the street and park in front of the house at that moment. With not much hope of avoiding getting in big trouble I proceeded to attempt to act normal while trying desperately to think of some explanation for my irresponsible actions. Mom and Dad came in the house. I did my best to act like nothing was going on (and feeling like I was failing miserably in my effort), and...they didn't seem to notice anything was amiss! That was pretty much the end of the affair. My fun solo night was tainted, but I got away with my accidental destruction of a bag of popcorn.

It's funny how we can sometimes think something is much worse than it is. I could have simply said something like "Hi Mom and Dad. Guess what, I tried making some microwave popcorn tonight and left it in too long and burned it--and the bag it was in too". It most likely wouldn't have been a big deal, but instead it became one of my deepest and darkest secrets. It kind of festered in my mind and took on a life of its own. It wasn't until last year while sharing memories with my parents that I realized how truly minor of a thing it really was. When I told them the story it ceased to be a dark secret and simply became a funny story about a youthful mistake blown way out of proportion by that youth's over thinking mind.

While I always remembered the details of that fateful night (suppose you could say the memory was seared into my brain), I didn't know until just recently exactly when it happened. I knew it was a Friday and that Channel 56 had "Hell is for Heroes" on that night. I also knew that our microwave was pretty new. That's not really a lot of information to go on.

I had a tape recorder at the time that I used a lot to tape all kinds of stuff from TV and radio. Like I said, this was before we had our first VCR, so this was the best method for me to preserve stuff on TV that I wanted to hear (if not see) again later. Many of those cassette tapes from the time managed to survive the ensuing decades and I was able to recover most of them from my parents' house in the last couple of years. One of these tapes had a lot of interesting things on it (interesting to me at least). In addition to some early 80s pop music there was also the theme from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", bits and pieces of an episode of "CHiPs", a TV broadcast of "Young Frankenstein" (1974), Parts of the movie "Westworld" (1973), audio from "Force Five"--one of my favorite after-school cartoon shows, and many other things. One of those things was a bunch of battle sounds from an old World War II movie. After listening to it a couple times I was pretty sure the movie was "Hell is for Heroes". Unfortunately I had never written any dates or anything else on the tape, so I had no idea when it was from. It was time for some detective work.

The 1983 cassette tape in question

Three of the songs I had taped were from Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" radio countdown show. I knew that these songs were number 4, 3 and 1 that week. Looking up "American Top 40" lists for the early 80s online I was able to determine that there was only one week that those three songs were in that exact order on the countdown. It was the middle of January of 1983. Taking that bit of information I was able to use my TV Guides from that time to figure out the dates and times of nearly everything on the 90-minute tape. This included the fact that the airing of "Hell is for Heroes" that I taped audio from was on Channel 56 on Friday, January 21, 1983. I knew that I had seen the movie at least two or three times as a kid, so that date didn't really mean a whole lot to me until I realized a few other things.

• First, at the beginning of the tape I had recorded the theme to "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". I must have been very annoyed at the time because the recording was interrupted by a couple of things: our kitchen phone ringing at the end of the theme, and a high-pitched beeping noise that I didn't recognize at first. Then I realized it was our microwave oven finishing a cooking cycle out in the kitchen. I was pretty sure that we had gotten our microwave at the very end of 1982 or the very beginning of 1983. This would mean it was still very new at the time of this recording in January of 1983.
• Second, I remembered that when I went outside to throw the scorched bag of popcorn under the back porch there was snow on the ground.
• Third, it would make sense that early 1983 would have been around the time my parents would have felt I was old enough to leave home alone (a trust I felt I would have forever broken if they ever found out about the popcorn incident).
• Fourth, I remembered that "Hell is for Heroes" was on Channel 56. I believe that it was on Channel 56 every time I saw it on TV.

If "Hell is for Heroes" was on Channel 56 on January 21, 1983 (which TV Guide attests to), how many other times would it have been on around the time that our microwave was new? It's not like WLVI 56 put it on once a month. It also had to be around the time when I was just old enough to be left home alone and it had to be at a time when there'd be snow on the ground. The cassette tape also had audio from a network's Sunday Night Movie presentation of "Young Frankenstein" the previous Sunday (January 16). I had already thought that this airing of "Young Frankenstein" was from a night before school was cancelled because of snow. Sure enough, right after taping bits from the movie I also taped part of the no-school announcements on the 11:00 news on WCVB Channel 5 in Boston. There was enough snow on the ground to cancel school on Monday, January 17, so it's a safe bet that there was still snow on the ground that Friday (when "Hell is for Heroes" was on).

All of this information and evidence led me to be nearly positive that the night of the scorched and smoking popcorn incident had to have taken place on Friday, January 21, 1983. There was overwhelming evidence indicating this fact. Armed with this new knowledge I knew that I had a mission that I just had to accept. That mission was to resurrect the night of January 21, 1983. Stay tuned for part two to see whether that mission was accomplished, and how I went about trying to make it all happen...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Part Two is now up.  Find out whether the experiment succeeded or not!

Resurrecting The Past: January 21, 1983 (Part 2: The Present)

Separated at Birth 2: Tim Tebow and Bigfoot

Well, after stretching believability a bit recently by suggesting that Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Stiles were separated at birth (see above and refer to Separated at Birth? for more on that audacious claim), I was surprised to randomly find an even more oddball example of this phenomenon. I wasn't looking for another one, but it just unexpectedly presented itself to me. Let me explain...

The Little Monster has pleasantly surprised me lately by showing a keen interest in the subject Bigfoot and Yeti. As a kid I was always fascinated by all the great mysteries that would be covered by the 1970s show "In Search of...". UFOs, ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, spontaneous human combustion and countless other unsolved mysteries would all draw me in. But the greatest one of all for me was Bigfoot and The Abominable Snowman.

I introduced the idea of these Big Hairy Monsters (BHMs) to The Little Monster a while back, but tried to spoon feed her information about them so as not to freak her out and give her too many nightmares. I think an occasional nightmare is a good thing for a kid to have, but I certainly didn't want to purposely terrorize my poor daughter. She is still a bit younger than I was when I first discovered the Bigfoot phenomenon and became both fascinated and frightened by it.

For the past couple of days The Little Monster has come home from school begging to see yeti stuff and learn more about these creatures. I wanted to show her an old "In Search of..." episode on Bigfoot, but wasn't exactly sure where I put my DVDs of the show. Instead I went to my Netflix instant streaming queue and picked one of the more recent Bigfoot/yeti programs I had put in it a while back. The Bigfoot episode of the show "Best Evidence" (Season 1: Episode 2) seemed like a good thing to check out together. I had never seen it myself so it was something we could both experience for the first time.

What does all this have to do with the topic of "Separated at Birth"? Well, early on in the "Best Evidence" episode an eyewitness account was covered.

This man's recollection of his encounter with a strange hairy creature was accompanied by some sketches of the creature he claimed to have seen.

Something about that second drawing seemed uncomfortably familiar to me. Suddenly, two recent events (The Little Monster's growing interest in Bigfoot and the New England Patriots' 45-10 demolition of the Denver Broncos in the AFC Divisional playoff game) collided in a totally unexpected manner.

The combination of those two seemingly-unrelated events was enough to make me suspect that Bigfoot was separated at birth from none other than...the quarterback of the Broncos, Tim Tebow! While the legendary Tebow might not seem to have much in common with the legendary Bigfoot (other than both having "Legendary" status), he has created quite a sensation with both his playing and his habit of going down on one knee to thank the Lord whenever he is blessed with a victory or a touchdown. This signature move has become known as "Tebowing" and is now rivaling "Planking" as the latest useless activity for people who have YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts, cell phone cameras and nothing better to do. Strangely enough, it appears that even the Bigfoot creature itself takes part in the act of Tebowing. Check out a closer look at the sketch above compared with Tim Tebow (and keep in mind that the Bigfoot episode first aired in February of 2007--meaning that it is very unlikely that the sketch artist was subconsciously influenced by images of Tebow doing his thing):

And, maybe it's just me, but I do think that I can see just a hint of similarity between Tim Tebow and Bigfoot. The Wife only saw Tebow for the first time just before the Patriots/Broncos game during the pre-game show. She wanted to confirm the fact that Tebow was worthy of being the latest NFL heartthrob. Once she spotted him she declared him to be "cuter than Tom Brady". Regardless of his hunkiness, the simple fact that Tim Tebow doesn't seem to be able, or willing, to give himself a clean shave has also exposed another disturbing similarity to the legendary Bigfoot:

For more evidence, check out the similarity between another sketch featured in the "Best Evidence" Bigfoot episode and another photo of Tebow:

And now for the final (and most compelling) bit of proof. Below is a frame from Roger Patterson's famous 1967 film footage of Bigfoot taken at Bluff Creek, California. This frame is probably the best known image ever of the creature. I was able to find no less than 11 examples of Tim Tebow aping (no pun intended) Bigfoot's gait in both his college and NFL careers. About the only thing missing is a football in Bigfoot's left hand.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I feel that all this evidence put together makes for a strong case that Tim Tebow is somehow related to Bigfoot in some way. They may not have been separated at birth--since the Patterson film was taken in 1967 and Tebow wasn't even born until twenty years later in 1987--yet I just can't help but think that there is something strange going on here...

JOHN 3:16

Friday the 13th Part 2

No, this isn't a review of the movie "Friday the 13th Part 2" (and I'm sorry if you ended up here expecting to find one). Today is once again Friday the 13th and I figured it was a good time to relate a couple more of my own "Favorite" superstitions that I left out of the previous entry on the topic, My Own Personal Superstitions. While that blog gave plenty of examples there were a couple things I should have mentioned but didn't. And here they are...

Knock On Wood

This might not qualify as a true "superstition", but I always try to find a bit of wood to rap on with my knuckles a couple times whenever someone says something that I believe will lead to something bad. I went into detail in the other superstition blog about how I was afraid of jinxes, and knocking on wood has always been my preferred way of trying to avoid a jinx situation. Whenever I'm watching or listening to a football, baseball or basketball game I always cringe when the commentators mention a stat at just the wrong moment. For instance, they might point out that the pitcher who is currently pitching to a batter hasn't given up a home run in 34 innings. More likely than not--if that pitcher is playing for "my" team at least--that batter will crush the next pitch for a home run. I know this sounds crazy, but it boggles my mind how many times I've seen/heard it happen. My only defense in such instances is to knock on a piece of wood. If I'm sitting down in a chair with wooden arm rests then it's pretty easy. Sometimes I have to walk over to a wooden doorway or something like that. I've been meaning to find a wooden nickel that I can carry in my pocket everywhere I go so I can have something to knock on when no wood is easily available in my current surroundings. Of course wooden nickels are also supposed to be tokens of good luck. While that's not the main reason I'd be carrying it I'll certainly take any additional good luck that I can get along with that which comes from heads-up pennies that I find lying on the ground!

The Wife has given me plenty of opportunities to knock on wood too. She's more of a glass-is-half-full person and I'm more of a glass-is-half-empty type. Because of this I tend to try not to jinx something that could still go wrong by commenting on it too soon. The Wife on the other hand is more than happy to throw caution to the wind (without even realizing it of course) by saying something that could come back to haunt her (or more specifically, ME). If we're on a long drive and the weather is of the rainy variety she'll say "Well at least the rain has stopped" as soon as there is a break in the precipitation. I always cringe at something like that because it seems that Mother Nature also hears it and starts the rain back up in short order. I also never want to admit that an activity we are taking part in is successful or going well until it's safe to do so (like when it's over). I always feel that saying "this hike is going great" is a sure way to invite a sprained ankle or a sudden cloudburst. I don't see anything wrong with just enjoying an activity and then talking about it later rather than take a chance on messing it up by saying how wonderfully it is going. What can I say?

666 - The Number of the Beast

The number 666 is frequently associated with satanism, black magic and that sort of thing. I don't know if it's generally thought of in terms of superstitions, but in my case it is. And it's appearance is only an issue for me in one specific instance--when I'm driving. I don't have any problem hearing the number uttered in a movie or on the radio. It's okay for me to look down at the page number of a book I'm reading and to discover that I'm on page 666 (if I'm ever reading a book with that many pages). The problem arises when I'm driving and just happen to look down at the odometer or trip odometer in my car and see that the last three digits of the current mileage reading are 666. And it's amazing how often this happens. Of course it can only happen once every thousand miles (or twice if we're counting the trip odometer), but it always seems to be there whenever my eyes wander down. And it's not like I check the odometer on a regular basis either. It's something that I'll just sneak a little peek at when things are pretty quiet and there's nothing much else to look at (besides the road of course).

The funny thing about the number 666 is that it generally tends to bother me more than the number 13. Other than Friday the 13th I'm not really all that concerned with the number 13. It can give me pause from time to time, but in general is a pretty innocuous number--even when I see it on my odometer.

The Number 143

It may seem that everything I believe in terms of superstitions is negative, but there's at least one thing that I consider to be good rather than bad luck. The number 143 has been a favorite of mine since high school. There's a long and possibly uninteresting story behind this which I won't go into detail about here. Suffice to say that whenever the number 143 randomly appears in my everyday life I've decided to consider it a sign or omen of good luck. While driving I'm always pleased to see the digits 143 in a license plate of a car in front of me. Along the lines of the number 666 above, I also enjoy (instead of dread) seeing that the last three digits of the odometer reading are 1-4-3. It's also nice to see things priced $1.43 in a store.

I suppose a lot of the reason that the numbers 143 and 666 seem to come up so often in my daily life is simply because I look for them (even if subconsciously sometimes). It would probably be the same case with any random number that I decided to fixate upon. Either way, it always seems strange how such a seemingly random number as 143 should show up in bunches in many different places at certain times.

That's about it for this installment of my own personal superstitions. Please have a safe and luck-filled Friday the 13th!

He Who Spelt It Dealt It

Over a year ago I wrote in Night of the Living Bread about The Wife's proclivity toward healthy foods and how it collides with my history of less-than-healthy eating. While we've had some pretty heated debates over this subject I certainly do have to appreciate the fact that she is making an effort to reform me so that I will actually live a little longer. As I age I'm starting to see the effects of decades of eating pretty much whatever I wanted. All that saturated fat and cholesterol is starting to catch up with me.

I've recently written about both sugary cereals (Return of the Monster (Cereals)) and Spam (My First Taste of Spam!)--even though the spam I was talking about was the electronic type rather than the sodium heavy canned meat product. In light of these recent posts it seemed like a good time to revisit the topic of scary-sounding healthy food products in my household.

We still have fruit smoothies made with tofu for breakfast. We still have tofu and spinach lasagna on occasion. We still have cous cous, quinoa and wheat barley for sides instead of the evil that is white rice. And we still have multi-grain (at least a dozen minimum), all natural wheat bread instead of white bread most of the time (this includes the infamous Ezekiel 4:9 "bread" detailed in the earlier blog). A few weeks ago I was wondering what we were going to be eating for dinner on a Friday night. Seeing as how it was a Friday I was kind of angling for something tasty. The Wife surprised me by announcing that we were going to be having burgers and fries for dinner! Needless to say this isn't a regular meal in our house. I had seen a package of ground beef in the refrigerator and knew that we had a few frozen french fries in the freezer (another thing not frequently found in our home). I got pretty excited by the prospect of a "normal" meal of burgers and fries and almost fell for the ruse. Then The Wife asked me if I could put the burgers in the oven for her. BURGERS IN THE OVEN?!? What was going on? I looked at these "burgers" and realized that I had been had. They almost looked like hamburger patties, except they had a bunch of green stuff sticking out of them. I believe it was spinach. Not only that, but one of the main ingredients along with the ground beef was... Bulgur Wheat! Not just any bulgur wheat would do either. This bulgur wheat was "all natural" and contained soy for good measure. Yum!

While it probably seems obvious that nothing much has changed since the last time I wrote about this subject, I still thought it would be fun (interesting? scary?) to take another look at a few of the products that have found their way into our house lately along with this wonderful bulgur wheat. And I still have no idea what bulgur wheat even is.

Needless to say, Cookie Crisp definitely isn't something The Wife would bring into the house. I was guilty of this a while back, but just had to throw this one in here. The funny thing is that even sugary-sweet breakfast cereals have attempted to get into the whole healthy eating thing. I'm well aware that this stuff isn't healthy in any way, but find it hilarious that General Mills touts the fact that Cookie Crisp is a "Whole Grain" cereal. In fact, apparently General Mills cereals are "America's #1 Source of Whole Grain at Breakfast", according to this box. It makes it a bit hard to know what is actually good for you when it seems like everything is telling is about its healthy and all natural ingredients these days.

I'm all for having noodles with a meal. We used to have regular pasta pretty frequently, but that has been replaced by whole wheat pasta. Doesn't seem like a giant difference, but there definitely is a difference. Now the product pictured here isn't pasta of course. These are Soba Noodles. And these are special because they go beyond the common "whole wheat" designation and are in fact made of 100% Organic Buckwheat! Yet another item to add to our ever expanding vocabulary of healthy foods.

The beloved (by some at least) cous cous. This has become a popular rice alternative in our house.

Here's Pearled Barley--another rice alternative for a healthy side dish. In our house it also finds its way into delicious soup loaded with vegetables...and noticeably void of meat.

Whole Ground Flaxseed Meal--a wonderful addition to almost any food. Now if this stuff doesn't get your juices flowing, nothing will! I know about the benefits of fiber and Omega-3 fats in a diet, but have to admit that I've never heard of Lignans before and don't have any idea what the heck they do for you. Strengthen your ligaments?

I'm used to berries being a fruit that you can get either fresh or frozen. I'm familiar with blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries. But Wheat Berries were a new one to me when they made their first appearance in our home. How's this for an appetizing description: These whole grain wheat berries are made from "High Protein Number 1 Dark Northern Hard Red Spring Wheat". I can remember a more innocent time not that long ago when simply calling something "whole wheat" was enough of a designation to get people excited about the health benefits of your product. We've come a long way since then baby!

And for breakfast we can forget about such old favorites as the Monster Cereals and Cookie Crisp seen above. In fact we can even forget about such previously thought to be healthy cereals as the much dreaded Cheerios and Wheaties. Instead we can now chow down on the sublime taste of Musli #3! I think it goes without saying that this cereal is all natural. Check out the ingredients too. The first three listed are Whole Grain Spelt, Whole Grain Oats and Barley Flakes. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

And, finally, here are a couple more bread choices to go along with our frozen supply of Ezekiel 4:9. Both of these loaves come from Jessica's Brick Oven:

Tuscan Pane Whole Wheat bread. Not to be confused with run-of-the-mill wheat bread, this one is made using Stone Ground Whole Wheat. I have to admit that I can't really figure out what exactly makes bread so much healthier and more appealing when the wheat in it was ground on stones rather than metal (or however they grind all that pedestrian wheat found in more common breads).

Surprisingly enough, the people at Jessica's Brick Oven don't even mention the fact that this is an "Artisan" bread. You have to look at the label on the back to discover that comforting bit of information (as well as the fact that this bread is "Rustic"--and I'm not sure exactly what "Rustic" entails or what makes rustic bread better than more "urban" types of bread). "Artisan" is another popular term in foods that I don't like. I picture an "artist" painstakingly crafting individual loaves of bread one at a time--when I know that no matter how healthy a bakery is they are still churning loaves out in some mechanical manner. Remember a few years back when Wendy's was promoting their now-discontinued deli sandwiches that were served on "artisanal" bread? What a joke!

Last but not least is Jessica's "Ancient Grain" bread. This echoes the biblical grains touted in Ezekiel 4:9 bread. And of course it also contains our old friend spelt! You'll also note that this bread contains the hallmark of all the healthiest and earthy-crunchiest breads out there: a generous portion of nuts and seeds on the OUTSIDE of the bread. It seems like healthy eaters are suspicious of a bread's true all-naturalness unless they can actually see all the grains and such on their loaves. Couldn't these nuts and seeds provide just as much of a health benefit if they were in the bread dough instead of being on the crust? In general I'm not a big fan of old and stale bread (who is?). For whatever reason, calling this bread "Ancient Grain" just doesn't sound appetizing to me. I'd prefer the grains in my bread to be the newest and freshest ones available. I suppose that's just me though...