Alabama visited Auburn for a three game series, starting tonight. Things did not go well for the Tigers.
Ryan Tella was 1-of-5 with three strike outs:
Garrett Cooper had one hit in four at bats and struck out once:
Between the two they stranded five of Auburn’s eight base runners as Alabama won 6-2.
In the major sports – football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball – Auburn is now 9-43 against the SEC since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. I’m keeping count because someone has to.
In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.
[…]
As far as the federal government is concerned, you’re disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it’s a judgment call made in doctors’ offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment — back pain, mental illness — are among the fastest growing causes of disability.
[…]
In Hale County, there was one guy whose name was mentioned in almost every story about becoming disabled: Dr. Perry Timberlake. I began to wonder if he was the reason so many people in Hale County are on disability. Maybe he was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program.
After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. Timberlake. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about him. He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him they are in pain.
“We talk about the pain and what it’s like,” he says. “I always ask them, ‘What grade did you finish?'”
What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren’t going to be able to get a sit-down job.
The post that starts the week with leftover pictures from last week. The post that fills up the space with colorful extra things for no other reason than that the space, and the pictures, are here. And here they are.
A container grown purple and white cabbage. Don’t you want something leafy and delicious now?
Blackberries from a cheesecake dish at Ted’s Montana Grill. I had a caesar salad:
Things are blooming in Opelika …
Hard to believe the picture above and the picture below were taken on the same afternoon. Rain in Atlanta:
And after a week of cold, cloudy, overcast, drizzly, downpourish conditions we finally got a bit of spring. And the ugliest power pole in town. These things should be built along boorish aesthetic guidelines:
Riding up the road behind Grand National:
I think I rubbed my computer halfway through the ride, so this would be the pollen collected over the last 14 or so miles. Lots of pollen:
Today was, I think, the first time we saw the sun since Tuesday. The sun was beaming into the bookshelves during the late afternoon today:
“It is tough,” she said, “to be that enthusiastic at that this time of day.”
She meant the morning, trying to wake up for breakfast, which is something to be excited about. And it was delicious:
And then it was cloudy and cold. Well, there was that part of the afternoon were it rained. That really changed things up. All week long. That’s pretty much been the way of it this week.
Today we learned that Harvey Updyke could be back on the street by May. I’m over the guy. He has so many probation conditions I’m sure he’ll get picked up again before too long.
More importantly something collapsed at the newly renovated terminal at the Birmingham airport. A family was hurt. Turned out they were standing under one of those large flight info screens when it fell off the wall. I was listening to the fire department scanner chatter. Three rescue units were there. And then a fourth and fifth were dispatched.
Meanwhile they were answering calls to an elderly person with trouble breathing, a teen who couldn’t see and a car crashing into a power pole. Listening to a scanner is addictive.
Late in the evening we learned a 10-year-old died in the airport accident. The people that picked up the info screen off the family said it weighed between 300 and 400 pounds. The mother had some serious leg injuries. Her younger children were also taken to the hospital. They were on vacation, returning home, and just passing through the Birmingham airport.
In a happier story, the US played Costa Rica in a World Cup qualifier and someone thought booking this in a Colorado venue in March would be a good idea. Craziest non-soccer game I’ve ever watched at the international level:
Welcome back YouTube Cover Theater, where we celebrate the talent of regular people who are playing on their sofas, at their bars and on their decks, in front of a camera and, now, the world. We do this by choosing a feature act and showing off covers of their original work. This week’s inspiration is Old Crow Medicine Show:
James River Blues:
There have been some 5,200 views of that one. I can’t believe this one of Caroline has less than 2,000:
This one just looks older because of the sepia:
Every other Old Crow Medicine Show cover is of Wagon Wheel. So we’ll just go to Mumford and Sons:
Hope you have a great weekend, and that it is a little warmer and a little drier where you are.
At the baseball stadium last night, before it turned cold again, Auburn hosted Alabama State. The hecklers were giving ASU’s third baseman a good-natured hard time. He had the misfortune to execute a poor slide in the early innings and then the good humor to laugh about it with the crowd later.
Late in the game, with ASU in the field, their short stop shifted far to his right. Someone pointed out how close the guy at short was to the third baseman. And then there was a weak ball up the line to third and the two guys ran into one another. Here is a dramatic reenactment:
Thereafter the Alabama State short stop was everyone’s hero, and he could do everything. Those guys were such great sports. The ASU third base coach offered free tickets to the Auburn students for their series this weekend. Auburn won 10-2.
We had dinner at Mellow Mushroom, which meant leftovers for lunch today.
It turned cold about that time. I debated turning on the electric blanket. No, I thought, spring is here. The windows were open earlier.
And then this morning it felt even colder somehow, which is to say the low 50s. We’ve been in the upper 70s, so there is a bit of chill again when you hit 54 at the high point of the day. Particularly when the sun is playing shy behind three or four layers of cloud cover.
Never could get warm today. I stayed curled up under a blanket with the space heater on. Spring is here, after all.
Sometime in the late afternoon, though, the sun finally came out. It was nice and bright and warmer, though the space heater stayed on all day, into the evening and night.
But we did get sunlight at the right time, my favorite time of day in our house, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before:
Those 25 minutes or so just feel magical. Anything is possible. The most ludicrous movie plots could become reality for those few moments. You revel in them, you wonder how they manage to escape so suddenly. And you reaffirm an incontrovertible truth; every house should have clear sight lines and plenty of windows facing west.
Tonight The Yankee made chicken tikka masala and naan, which is a new dish at home. It was good. Now, we’ve decided, we just want authentic Indian food.
Things to read: Usually videos like this are news simply because there is video. And usually it is some bad news, or something that barely qualifies as news. This, however, is awesome:
In an amazing rescue in Perth, Australia, a man administered CPR on a young girl who stopped breathing as her panicked and thankful father looked on.
Voyager is leaving the heliosphere, or may be leaving the heliosphere. It might be coming back, because it thinks it left the stove eye on. Or it could already be Vger. Whichever. Humanity is now interstellar:
What’s not in dispute among any of the scientists is that the spacecraft is now, undeniably, in a new and unexplored region—pushing the reach of humanity farther than it’s ever gone before. What we call that place is, in many respects, less important than the fact that we’re there at all.
According to new scientific findings set for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Voyager I has pushed into the great unknown.
NASA, however, remains skeptical about these new conclusions. “Consensus of the mission team is that NASA’s Voyager spacecraft has not left the solar system,” a NASA social media specialist told TIME via e-mail. “Statement soon from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”
For years, scientists have speculated as to when Voyager would finally leave all traces of our sun behind — officially exiting the heliosphere, and entering the great undiscovered country beyond.
Every suspect is entitled to his day in court, but for accused Auburn shooting suspect Desmonte Leonard, Wednesday’s hearing had to be postponed because no one thought to bring him.
[…]
(H)e was never transported the 50 or so miles from Montgomery to the Lee County Detention Facility.
Your brain can’t remember pain. Of that I am glad. I don’t miss the pain. I’ll tell you what I miss though, I miss the weather.
Did I ever tell you about when I used to train in Italy in the winter? In the mountains the snow would fall for days, and the hillsides would be covered in thick blankets of white, their peaks looking like the hunched shoulders of giant beasts, faces bowed in shame. Those giant mounds of rock were too scared to face me and too cold to move, and so I rode up them, and made heat of my own. I would catch fire; burning in my layers of clothes, cutting through the cold like an electric heater. Sweat would drip from my nose onto the white road, snow tingling as it melted on my exposed skin. The world was frozen, but I was roaring in flames, as if I was driving an open-top-car with the heater on full blast. I was my own nature. I was defiance.
That piece, about bicycle racing, just gets better and better. Penance for complaining about the cold this morning.
