"Madness! Madness!" and Other Holiday Musings

Ganaway runs wild.  Major Clifton would have been at home that night.

Made it through the "Holiday Season" which was once known as the "Christmas Season" prior to the onset of the reign of "No Hurt Feelings and Soccer Trophies for Everyone" in what passes for our national psyche.  Made it, in the sense that we had only one screaming, hair pulling, semi-wrestling match between Daughter No. 1 and Daughter No. 2 this festive time of year, over--a pair of jeans.  It was touch and go for a while, but neither employed the dreaded "Iron Claw" or scissors kick and it ended in a disqualification and a return to their neutral corners which fortunately reside on opposite ends of the house.  Yours truly was the hapless referee without a bow tie, treading lightly on a bum knee and a keen eye for getting caught in the scrum and a return to Dr. Happy Scapel and his band of mule skinners at Texas Orthopedic Group ( I had been scoped and lightly gutted only days before).

I was alone for New Year's Eve as Mrs. Bulba and Daugher No. 1 were visiting her family in the Valley and Daughter No. 2 was at a friend's ranch along with fellow collegiates, happy to be away from law enforcement personnel and close to all of the Budweiser contraband they could smuggle.  It's never a good thing when I'm on my own as I rapidly descend into a state much akin to a family dog left alone in the house--pretty soon, there's trash strewn about and I've eaten something poisonous and the couch is stained and torn.  This time, due to said crippled knee I had ample time to view three seasons of "Mad Men," some random stuff about Germans and firearms on The Military Channel, and a couple of episodes of the "Game of Thrones" series on HBO which is as far as I can tell is designed to appeal to the mastubatory needs of the science fiction/fantasy game community at large.  Mad Men is pretty good stuff--really, it's a 60's version of "Deadwood" set on Madison Avenue instead of the Dakotas Gold Rush.  For me, it's a little easier to be sympathetic with the flawed characters of Deadwood since they at least had the excuse of living on the edge and close to a bullet or stab to the gullett.  Don Draper in Mad Men does a lot of stabbing, himself but with a different kind of sword.  Though well played, I don't care for the Peggy Olson character played by Elisabeth Moss.  She has all of the joy of someone late for a civil rights meeting or a kale and radish soup recipe exchange.  Entertaining, though and worth watching.  I did so in the spirit of the proceedings, killling a bottle of Laphroig (neat) in the process.  No Lucky Stikes, though.

Attended the Alamo Bowl in SA last week, capping off an epic season of viewing collegiate football in person and living to tell about it--if you are or were a Baylor graduate or student or unfortunately married to one like the long suffering Mrs. Bulba, you witnessed more excitement and on field drama than watching the combined editorial and "reporting" staff of the New York Times figuring out how to pour piss out of a boot.  An opening game of aerial bombardment with TCU, a nail biter with Missouri, a miraculous victory over Oklahoma, a decisive win over their overlords of Mighty Texas all culminating in a spectacle of something resembling football but which was really a descent into madness, MADNESS in The House that Henry Cisneros Built in San Antonio last Thursday night (this guy captures it in all of its insane glory:http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2011/12/30/2669863/and-in-san-antonio-we-were-all-departed-for-four-hours).  Essentially, two weapon enhanced high octane offenses came into contact with a like number of "defenses" bereft of talent and/or still hungover and the result was a frenzy of scoring and blood letting not known or seen before outside of a Cormac McCarthy novel.  Record number of points, yards, dead cornerbacks, flattened linebackers, pancaked defensive tackles, and cardiac arrests--the lady sitting behind died a couple of times along the way.  If you're a defensive asthetic and concerned with the bad taste of excitement in a game, you were surely disappointed.  If you were there that fateful night, you did your best to simply hang on and live as the roller coaster plunged downward and off the tracks only to be hurled upward into the sky, and to be rinsed and repeated over and over until the thing ended with gnashed teeth and garbled wailing and finally balloons descending from the roof and everyone on both sides staggering out into the night, doing their best not to wonder too hard about what they witnessed--one somehow lived through the shelling and turned their thoughts to a quite meadow and a brook (or, a cactus flat and an arroyo seco if you're from Texas) and maybe watching "Antiques Roadshow" or vomiting or something.  Never saw anything like it.  Not sure I ever want to again.  But, damn, it was something.

Didn't get any golf shit for Christmas and I'm thankful for that.