Football Fun

Here are some excerpts from a chuckle-inducing e-mail (thanks, Jana!) circulating around about the upcoming football season. This first part documents the football differences of Northern and Southern fans.

Stadium Size:
NORTH – College football stadiums hold 20,000 people.
SOUTH – High school football stadiums hold 20,000 people.

Fathers:
NORTH – Expect their daughters to understand Sylvia Plath.
SOUTH – Expect their daughters to understand pass interference.

Campus Decor:
NORTH – Statues of founding fathers.
SOUTH – Statues of Heisman trophy winners (and championship-winning coaches).

Homecoming Queen:
NORTH – Also a physics major.
SOUTH – Also Miss America (as well as a physics major).

Heroes:
NORTH – Rudy Giuliani
SOUTH — Archie and Peyton Manning (as long as you mean “Heroes Who Are Currently Alive.” I think we all know whose name is in the “Heroes Who Are Currently Not Alive” category.) 

Getting Tickets:
NORTH – Five days before the game you walk into the ticket office on campus.
SOUTH – Five months before the game you walk into the ticket office on campus, make a large financial contribution and put name on a waiting list for tickets.

And here’s another part of the e-mail, answering the eternal question “How many SEC students does it take to change a (energy-saving compact fluorescent) light bulb?”:

At GEORGIA: it takes two – one to change the bulb and one to phone an engineer at Georgia Tech for instructions.

At ALABAMA: it takes five – one to change it, three to reminisce about how The Bear would have done it and one to throw the old bulb at an NCAA investigator.

At KENTUCKY: it takes eight – one to screw it in and seven to discuss how much brighter it seems to shine during basketball season.

At TENNESSEE: it takes 10 – two to figure out how to screw it in, two to buy an orange lampshade and six to phone a radio call-in show and talk about how much they hate Alabama.

Anyway, if you want the whole thing, e-mail me and I’ll send it over.

Hip Prep

The print on this pretty silky top caught my eye in the window of Pink Pelican, the Lilly Pulitzer shop in Huntsville, Ala. (next to Fresh Market at the intersection of Whitesburg and Airport). It seemed like the perfect summer-transition-fall piece — and it was! When you think of Lilly Pulitzer, of course you think Palm Beach, pink/green and preppy. I fit none of those descriptions, but I fit into this top beautifully, so it had to come home with me. Besides, isn’t it important to overcome style stereotypes? I’m taking a stand for fashion, expanding my clothing vocabulary. At least, that’s what I’ll tell my husband, although he’ll point out that the only thing I’m expanding is my closet. So I won’t even tell him that also at Pink Pelican I found some of the best jeans I’ve ever put on: a pair of J Brand bootleg slim-fit mid-rise. If you’re like me and have trouble finding well-fitting jeans that look as if they were made in the 21st century, please give J Brand a try. You’ll be amazed. Poorer, but amazed. Visit Pink Pelican online at www.thepinkpelican.com

Hold the Bacon, Please

Huntsville, Ala., is bursting with fun places to eat — it’s really a joy to be hungry in the Rocket City.

A calzone at Moglie's

 So when my older daughter Liz with her almost-five-months son Nolan and a friend of mine and I ate at the Italian pub-bistro Moglie’s in Huntsville today for the first time, I was enthusiastic about trying a new place we’d heard good things about. The verdict? Good cheesy food. Poor service. Here’s what happened: 1) We didn’t get waited on for almost 10 minutes — no water, no menus, no sign anyone knew we were there, no nothing. Luckily, my friend and I were catching up so intently it wasn’t a problem. But still. 2) Our appetizers came after our entree salads and several long minutes after the waiter promised “they’d be right out.” 3) Worst of all, the salad that two different waiters swore had no meat in it whatsoever came with bacon. We sent it back once and asked for a replacement, which also turned out to have bacon. We finally figured out that the bacon was in the dressing, not the salad, but the wait staff should have alerted us, especially since we specifically told our waiter the salad was for a vegetarian. Frustrating. I’m going to give the place the benefit of the doubt (New waiters? Problems in the kitchen?) and try again, but I need to be convinced. Our garlic bread was delicious, however, and the spinach dip was different than any other I’ve had lately: Whole spinach leaves in melted cheese surrounded by pesto — at least that’s what it seemed like to us. Moglie’s is in the shopping center at the Airport/Whitesburg intersection next to the Dollar Tree and is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays.

7.8 Pounds of Fall Fashion

If your mailbox has been groaning in protest lately, maybe it’s suffering from Fall Fashion overload. The combined weight of the September 2008 issues of magazine favorites “Vogue,” “Lucky” and “InStyle” is 7.8 pounds and total width (or is that depth — high-school geometry was so long ago!) is 2-1/2 inches. That’s a lot of fashion, but still, I guarantee you, come October I will stand in my closet and whine and complain that I don’t have a thing to wear. And speaking of, what is that thing Keira Knightley is wearing on the Vogue cover? I know that fashion designers have to be wildly creative and that these magazines are mostly fantasy and dreams (for those of us with TJ Maxx budgets, at least), but shouldn’t those fantasy and dreams at least be pretty and/or flattering? I’m just saying.

Michael, meet Carolyn

We moms, of course, are always on the lookout for Suitable Suitors for our daughters, and I’m wondering now about Michael Phelpsfor my younger daughter Carolyn. I mean, he seems like a nice boy — very polite and he’s nice to his mom. I’m guessing that now he’ll always have some sort of job, right? And Carolyn’s broken a few swim records in her time, too, let me tell you (hello, Athens-McMinn County YMCA), so they’d have a lot in common. But I heard that he eats a huge amount of food at every meal, so that’s a little disturbing. I mean, would Carolyn have to cook for him all the time? Hmmm….

Actually, in our family, “boyfriends” are called “bufferins,” and this is why: A few years ago, my two daughters and I were in somewhere together and Carolyn randomly said, “I need a boyfriend” and somehow I time-traveled back a couple of decades to when “aspirins” were generically called “Bufferins” because that’s all we had, so I heard “I need a Bufferin” and I immediately started searching my purse, saying, “I think I’ve got one in here somewhere,” to which statement my daughters looked at me very strangely. And, really, when was the last time I actually had a Bufferin in my purse? Do they even make Bufferin anymore? (Notice how I’m changing the subject here so you’ll stop thinking about how could I possibly confuse “Bufferin” with “boyfriend.” Did it work?!)

Best Michael Phelps joke I’ve heard (this is from Mo Rocca on National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”): “What will Michael Phelps do now? Go back to his regular job — as mayor of Atlantis.”