What’s that? You haven’t been able to work all day either? I KNOW. Can’t stop graming those N’s.

by Philo Hagen

When I was a kid we’d escape the Seattle winter gloom and rain and roll down Interstate 5 to California. Descending from the Shasta National Forest into California’s Central Valley, I’d always put down the window and stick my hand gleefully into the warm, rushing air. “It feels like California, mom! It feels like California!” Not long ago but many years later, I found myself traveling that same stretch of highway. Windows down, a hot and dry wind tousled my hair as I reached my hand out into the sun. It sure felt like California alright, and I couldn’t help but notice that this realization had left a very big smile on my face. That’s when I thought: is it self-abusive to spend your whole life in wet, dark, dank cities when you know you feel so much better in the sunshine? Posing this question to friends on Facebook, the response was overwhelming: “absolutely.” A few weeks later I signed a one-year lease on a sunny studio in a tropical fruit-flavored building in Koreatown. I’m now a resident of Los Angeles, the City of Angels. Keeping my eyes open, I’ve spotted numerous angels in my day to day travels, and we’re not just talking about the ones at the top of the tree.

Walking through a Trader Joe’s parking lot to score some Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s, a plump red-haired woman in a red convertible began honking at me incessantly. I stopped to ask her why she was so horn-ey. She laughed, and said, “Because I want to be, that’s why!” After hearing her voice, I wondered, haven’t I seen this broad in numerous bit parts in bad television sitcoms? So it’s true what they say about L.A.: real life begins to blur with what’s referred to as entertainment. Why, this restaurant seems incredibly familiar, even though I know I’ve never been here before. Is that the villain from “48 Hours” in line for the cash machine behind me? Did Andy Dick just bump into me at Art Walk and not say excuse me? Isn’t that Michael C. Hall from “Dexter” sitting alone eating Thai at Toi on Sunset? Gary Myrick and the Figures were right — I do feel like I’m living in a movie.

While I love how much lighter and easier life is when the weather is on my side, I’ve found it surprising just how often I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to go or walk somewhere because of filming, much less that a city hell-bent on driving everywhere wastes so many obviously good parking spaces, or that flip-flop wearing hip-hop-flavored white boys in their twenties insist on tagging anything within reach of their spray paint cans. Still, I feel healthier and I’m eating better, my fruit intake has probably quadrupled and I’ve been spending more time outdoors than I ever have in my life.

Tisha and I happened to be out hooping at Pan Pacific Park during the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new home of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, or the MOTH, if you will. Mayor Villaraigosa and other important-looking types were on hand. I couldn’t help wondering why a monument to remember such an atrocity had to be such a — well, while I was told the design won acclaim for its starkness and also for blending into the surrounding park, it certainly doesn’t make you want to rush in and find out what the hell happened. According to the museum, the building “plays a significant role in how you experience your visit. You will notice the rooms descending and decreasing in light as you progress towards the darkest part of history.” I don’t know that viewing historical artifacts from the Holocaust look any more horrific in the dark than they do in the daylight though. Why couldn’t it be more like San Francisco’s AIDS Memorial — a circle of redwood trees — or how about a crisp, white and inviting airy building on a hill overlooking the city that makes you want to go in and leaves you learning more than you’d ever bargained for? I really think the Jews and the gays should be getting together more on these things. After all, we were there too. And why must financial high rollers always have their names etched onto anything that can be hit with a chisel and acid these days? Whatever happened to giving simply for the sake of doing so? I remember the Holocaust for sure but now I also remember The Martz Family.

Speaking of the gays, what with California’s recent judicial nods to marriage equality for same-sex lovin’ folks (subsequent ongoing legalese and proverbial red tape aside), I’ve found myself thinking a whole lot more about finding myself a husband. When the state starts to take gay and lesbian relationships seriously, apparently the individual is tempted to as well. Who knew? And Los Angeles appears to value romantic partnerships more than anywhere I’ve lived. San Francisco, for example, is a singles town through and through, and while you can certainly play in L.A., I’ve noticed a much higher emphasis here on coupling up. Maybe it’s because it can get lonely in a city of 9.86 million, or maybe Angelenos are simply more ambitious, driven to check off all of the boxes on their proverbial “My life really is a success! No, really!” list. Deciding I should go for the high dive, I soon found myself answering a litany of at times irrelevant questions on Match.com and 70 bucks later, I had a three-month pass to swim laps in the dating pool.

Avoiding the early initial splashes from men who don’t understand why they’re still single — and who then proceed to give some very clear answers to that question — I did receive an email from a guy who was, I admit, rather intriguing. He was a singer and who doesn’t like being serenaded. He was also a tall African-American man with an eye on spirituality and metaphysics. Given my tendency to enjoy those who, y’know, pay attention to the condition of their spirit, we rendezvoused at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, the California-based chain similar to Starbucks that relies heavily on powdered drink mixes. When we ordered our drinks to-go though — something I insisted on to help avoid that whole cafe-date-turned-job-interview scenario, I noticed something a little different about him. His voice had that tone to it that the deaf often have, which is when I noticed the giant hearing aids on each of his ears. Walking down Wilshire Boulevard I couldn’t help wondering how this guy could be a singer if he can’t hear the sound of his own voice? Answer: Open mike nights at a neighborhood piano bar. I envisioned an audience of regulars smiling politely through a couple of selections nightly. After all, when he sang “Misty” for me outside the twenty-four hour Tofu House in Koreatown, I smiled and suffered quietly in silence. None of this would necessarily remove him from my potential future husband list! But a troublesome 20-minute monologue regarding his study and worship of the goddess Inanna who lives in the seventh dimension and can be communicated with directly via meditation? That pretty much did the trick. While I’m far from one to say that his spiritual beliefs couldn’t actually be happening, I am one for saying that I had no interest in hearing anything more about it ever again.

So while my love life in Los Angeles so far has been lukewarm, the days have been hot and the sun feels wonderful. It’s December and I find myself needing to do laundry simply because I’ve run out of short-sleeved shirts. And honest, I really do feel great about living in a place where UFOs fall from the sky, TV chefs hire the homeless to kill their wives and 1,689 dead bodies turn up that were never claimed. After all, it’s Christmas and the freeways are cluttered with Christmas trees and Mariah Carey really is our Mrs. Claus, but only because Grandma was given a stray bullet.

Stopping at the mall to pick up a few holiday items myself, realizing that I hadn’t been in an actual mall in years, as I walked past the Kiehl’s store I spied Mario Lopez doing high kicks with a couple of Rockettes for the cameras. He told onlookers that it was “just like doing leg curls at the gym.” Sure it is, Mario, sure it is.

Driving home with my purchases, I was listening to GAYNGS, courtesy of KCRW, while cruising through the gaudy side of town. Sunroof open, I suddenly felt giddy knowing that my new Southern California life is truly unlike any I have ever had. I took a left on Melrose and reached my hand up high into the bright blue sky and once again savored the feeling of warm wind rushing against my tingling palm.

Philo Hagen is the overlord of Hooping.org and Night Owl Nation.

We’ve all been enjoying the Times’ block-by-block flash map thing of America. But let’s not forget that it’s based on sampling. Here’s a cartoon about that!

It was obvious that Greg Gumbel was not happy. There was a palpable lowering of his voice, a brief decline into the robotic we-are-being-treated-well tones of a hostage video. With everything he had, The Humble Gumbel was signifying that this particular “60 Minutes” promo was being read under protest. “It says here,” he sighed, “that Jerry Jones has got an ego the size of Texas,” before continuing to plug that night’s profile of the Cowboys owner. The CBS cameras cut to Jones, who had left his luxury box and was on the sidelines, his face that familiar taut botox rictus and his arms pumping out oilman handshakes to his players as they left the field.

The timing of it all was, admittedly, fairly awkward, and probably bought some poor switchboard hump at CBS an early evening of speed-dating phone calls with Cowboys fans who had both the cellphone minutes and misplaced priorities necessary to get on the horn and voice their displeasure with that self-evidently correct characterization. While NFL media types are remarkably loath to speak ill of the NFL’s luxury box-bound gentry, it’s not even clear that Gumbel’s coerced promo was anything but an individual example of a broader truth about NFL owners. And anyway, given that Jones’s cultivated grandiosity often seems the result of Gruden-ian marathons of film study in which episodes of “Falcon Crest” and “Dallas” stand in for game tape, the Cowboys owner might even accept it as a compliment. At any rate, the point is this: Jones may indeed be a nightmare of big-talking billionaire entitlement and petro-tackiness, but he makes sense as the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. I’m going to explain how this relates to Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder in a second, I promise.

Okay, so while civic pride no doubt factors into the equation to different degrees for different owners, it seems safe to say that no one buys a NFL team because they intend to make it a living, concussion-generating gift to a particular metropolitan area. Unlike most NBA owners and many Major League Baseball owners, the NFL’s proprietor class actually turns a profit, and will continue to do so in something like perpetuity thanks to the twin assurances of a progressive and generous revenue-sharing system and a regressive, owner-friendly collective bargaining agreement which ensures that most player salaries feature nearly no guaranteed money. While the NFL won’t open its books due to a looming labor confrontation, pigskin oligarchs have barely bothered with the usual we’re-going-broke-for-love-of-the-fans softshoe that usually accompanies this sort of sports-y labor showdown — while some are more so than others, every NFL team is profitable, and pretty much everyone knows it. Some NFL owners are more civic-minded than others — and some, like Pittsburgh’s Rooney family, really are Pillar of the Community types — but it’s mostly true that NFL owners reflect their geographic region’s distinctive plutocratic folkways more than they serve those regions in any particular fashion.

This is how we get the Ford family’s generous and totally inevitable totaling of the Detroit Lions organization, or jumped-up trans-fat millionaire Jerry Richardson overseeing the distinctly Sun Belt-ian collapse of the Carolina Panthers, or the booming, blistering Texas crassness of Jones and his Cowboys. In Snyder, who has owned the Redskins since 1999, Washington has received both an owner whose excesses reflect that of the nation’s capital and something more prosaic — a defective, self-important try-hard with a lobbyist’s sense of moderation, the accountability of a multi-term Congressman representing a comfortably gerrymandered district, and the thermonuclear entitlement of the most feckless legacy Senator. That the Redskins have had just three winning seasons during Snyder’s tenure in the owner’s box matters less than how they’ve lost during that period, and how they continue to lose — that is, in an increasingly expensive, consistently sour fashion characterized by desperate reactivity from above and logy, enervated decay on the ground.

Which is sort of a grandiose way of saying that the Redskins stink, I know. But while Snyder’s predecessor in Washington was no peach, either — that would be Jack Kent Cooke, a Canadian squillionaire who spent his golden years extricating himself from three-month marriages and trying to find ways to avoid paying taxes — there’s something especially, heartrendingly appropriate and familiar about the way in which Snyder has failed Washington’s fans. The Redskins’ front office is bafflingly opaque and unaccountable, prone to throwing large sums of money at faulty weapons systems — disagreeable battleship-sized nose tackle Albert Haynesworth is the most recent and egregious in a long string of Pentagonian personnel missteps — and strangely, sadly willing to get behind any strongman with a solid PowerPoint and a multi-point plan.

And so it was that unblinking orange martinet Mike Shanahan — whose first move as Redskins coach was to install his son Kyle as offensive coordinator, and whose second was to systematically alienate Haynesworth in the most public way possible — came to power. That Shanahan changed the defensive scheme to exclude Haynesworth (the team’s best-paid defensive player) and spent much of the season undermining quarterback Donovan McNabb (the best-paid offensive player) wasn’t so much a surprise, given Shanahan’s track record. That Snyder has signed off on it is even less so. On Sunday, the Redskins will start Rex Grossman — a human punchline of a backup prone to unmotivated demonstrations of arm strength in no particular direction — over McNabb at quarterback, thereby announcing… well, not so much a capitulation to their opponent as the same thing that the team has continued to announce during Snyder’s term in office. In short, that authority will be exercised. Arbitrarily, expensively, and in unaccountable panic and with implacable unreason and a desperate dedication to faulty ritual, but exercised all the same. This particular bit of nonsense makes almost too much sense.

COIN! I know that I do not really care about or understand individual football games that much, but that does not mean that I am happy to have slipped behind an item of foreign tender in the picks. It also does not mean I can really do that much about it — this week’s games make a little more sense than last week’s, and hopefully my habitual overthinkage will be a bit more useful this week than last. Last week, seven of Sunday’s 13 games were decided by three or more scores. Do you know who would predict something like that? Not a human, I’ll tell you that. Currency would predict that, and it did quite well doing so. At the very least, regardless of what happens going forward, I hold an inarguable advantage when it comes to emdash-usage. No coin, from any country, can take that away from me. But jeez, come on. (Once again, Thursday’s result has been incorporated into the overall standings)

Week 14 (and overall): David Roth: 6–9 (103–99–9); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 11–4 (104–97–9)

Sunday, December 19
• Washington at Dallas (-6), 1:00 pm — DR: Dallas; ATTLCTDC: Dallas
• Buffalo at Miami (-5.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Miami; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• New Orleans at Baltimore (-1), 1:00 pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: Baltimore
• Arizona at Carolina (-2.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Arizona; ATTLCTDC: Carolina
• Jacksonville at Indianapolis (-5), 1:00 pm — DR: Jacksonville; ATTLCTDC: Indianapolis
• Cleveland at Cincinnati (-1.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Cleveland; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Houston at Tennessee (-1.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Houston; ATTLCTDC: Tennessee
• Detroit at Tampa Bay (NO LINE), 1:00 pm — DR: Tampa Bay; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• Philadelphia at New York Giants (-3), 1:00 pm — DR: New Jersey G; ATTLCTDC: Philadelphia
• Kansas City at St. Louis (NO LINE), 1:00 pm — DR: St. Louis; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Atlanta (-6.5) at Seattle, 4:05 pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• Denver at Oakland (-6.5), 4:15 pm — DR: Oakland; ATTLCTDC: Denver
• New York Jets at Pittsburgh (-6), 4:15 pm — DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J
• Green Bay at New England (NO LINE), 8:20 pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: New England

Monday, December 20
• Chicago at Minnesota (NO LINE), 8:30 pm — DR: Chicago; ATTLCTDC: Chicago

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Photo by Brian J. McDermott, from Flickr.

Back when Christmas was a season of joy rather than an extended period of coping and anxiety, i.e. when I was a child, we would spend the holiday at my grandparents’ in south Jersey. My folks would stay for dinner and we slept over. Every year the kids would argue that we should open our presents after the meal rather than the next morning. My father always insisted that we should wait for Christmas Day, but he was consistently overruled by my grandmother, a remarkable woman who spoiled her grandkids rotten. It’s hard to even imagine now, given how emotions harden and become more transactional and transitory as you age, but I’m pretty sure I loved my grandmother as much as any little boy has ever loved his grandmother. And there was never a question that she loved me back.

One of the main ways she expressed these emotions, as is the case with all Italian grandmothers, was through food. She was a terrific cook, and barely a minute went by between meals without her foisting cake or pudding or snacks or something else she had just whipped up on us. (My somewhat robust physique these days may owe a debt to those childhood binges.) My favorite thing of all was something she only made once a year: tardelle. (The spelling on this is from the instructions she wrote out for my mother, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy; she pronounced it “TAR-deel.” It is also known as struffoli.)

Italians are not famous for their desserts, but I could never get enough of this. It was one more thing that made Christmas seem special. Here’s her recipe.

Ingredients
1 cup honey
Grated orange peel
Confectionery sprinkles [the small, round ones]
2 3/4 cups of flour
3 eggs
Pinch of salt
Oil for frying [I would go with something like peanut oil]

Place salted flour in bowl. Make a well. Beat eggs and pour into flour. Mix and then knead until it’s like noodle dough. [Here she writes, “I’m sure you know noodle dough.” You may not, so just work it until it’s somewhat smooth and elastic.]

Roll a piece of dough into a long strip onto a floured board, round like a pencil, and cut into small pieces.

Fry a few pieces in hot oil ’til golden. Repeat with remaining pieces. Drain on toweling. [I love that she used the word “toweling.”]

Heat honey [in a separate pan] with grated orange peel. Stack the tardelle in a pyramid on a large plate. Drizzle warm honey over tardelle. (Work quickly.) Add sprinkles. [Alternately, you can coat the tardelle in the saucepan you use to warm the honey, but my grandmother always though it made them harder to stack later, and the presentation is important.]

And that’s it. This is slightly inexact, but if you’ve ever fried anything before you shouldn’t have too many problems with it. The recipe is going to make more tardelle than anyone can eat in one sitting, but that’s okay. They’re best when they’re fresh, but they’re still great over the next couple of days, even when they start going a little stale. They will taste like unconditional love.

“According to a new Nielsen study examining teenage mobile-phone usage around the world, American teens text more than six times an hour while they are awake.”

Does alcohol keep you warm? “When we drink alcohol, our blood vessels widen, causing increased blood flow, and bringing more heat to the skin. ‘If you’re sitting at home in a sweater and having dinner, the heat in the skin is kept in the skin, which is fine,’ [says Dr. Sam Zakhari of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism]. But if you’re outside in the cold and you drink, the heat on your skin dissipates into the atmosphere. ‘You’ll lose heat, and feel a lot colder,’ says Zakhari. Unless, he adds, you’re dressed very warmly, or doing something physical, like skiing.” Dress appropriately, kids!

Subports is a retail mechanism disguised as fun. They provides vendors with a text “shortcode” — you know, like the way they vote on reality TV shows — that customers who have enrolled their credit cards can use to purchase products via text message. But instead of rolling out in support of big box retail, Subports chose to work with artists, designers and record stores, and build stores (both virtual and pop-up) as sales points. We spoke to Subports honcho Will Robison.

Q. Are there some retail experiments you have in mind but can’t yet pull off?

A. I have a list of ideas the size of my leg. We have played with and discussed other fun under-utilized technologies like self-tinting glass for window displays, RFID readers, retinal and fingerprint scanners and bone conduction to enhance the retail experience. We do have some amazing experiments coming up in the new year. Real soon we will be giving away keys to an apartment in Williamsburg to all of our members. The apartment will act like a store and all items inside would be text-to-buy. Customers could also just use it to take a nap or watch TV or grab a rare Finnish cider from the fridge. Another one is retrofitting old vending machines that will be able to be used using text messages. These vending machines would dispense unique items such as jewelry, art, design and fashion accessories. We are building one for an undisclosed fashion designer for their store in the Hamptons and one to sell T-shirts at Roberta’s, the most amazing pizzeria in Bushwick. READ THE REST. (Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case American Express Open Forum; advertisers do not produce the content.)

“In just nine months time, my skilled colleagues will be jockeying to outdo one another on 10th anniversary coverage [of the 9/11 attacks.] The sad thing will be that the wall to wall coverage will be little more than window dressing with little true consequence. They’ll make us feel patriotic and tearfully grateful as they sidebar a piece or two on the plight of the rescue workers who still seem to be dying broke, ill, and in need of basic benefits.”
 — Former “Good Morning America” producer Eric Ortner, himself a first responder after the attacks, is upset by the lack of media coverage surrounding Republican efforts to block the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Mpemba Effect

In a world
Where a ragtag band
Of misfits and raw recruits
Can go up against the forces of empire

The question remains:
Will cold water or hot freeze faster?

Everything you know is wrong,
Everything you think a tagline:
Fear the sky

Everywhere the eye falls,
Four plasma screens tumble
The message table of someone
The state recognizes as a person,

And underneath it all, the truth — 
The worst bitch ever.

As for me, I like liking.
I like living, too — but
Liking!

There you have it. I’m a liker.

Otters

So much of poetry
Is filled with stuff
That fills poetry. Also,
This stuff is so often
Arranged in a way
Stuff is arranged
In poetry. We ought
To get together
And steal time
From our jobs
To put stuff
In poetry
That wasn’t
There before,
And arrange it
In a way stuff
Isn’t usually arranged.

Click here to watch
A video of otters
Floating, holding hands.

Jordan Davis’s poems have appeared in Poetry and Ploughshares, and he writes about poetry for The Nation and the Constant Critic.

For more poetry, visit The Poetry Section’s vast archive! You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.