These are slow times. This is something akin to a Twitter Q&A:

It hasn’t. This might disappoint some people, but on most workdays I bring a sandwich from home. It’s a good way to save money and not die. Today my wife made it for me. It was pepper ham and turkey with provolone cheese and Boar’s Head Pepperhouse Gourmaise on whole-wheat bread. Not bad.

But the blizzard in late December did prevent me from eating many good sandwiches. I was all set for a short jaunt to New Orleans — our nation’s premier sandwich destination — but the snow came and canceled my flight. That sucked, but it’s sort of awesome that every once in a while Mother Nature comes around to remind everyone who’s in charge here. “Oh, you think you’re going to fly 1000 miles in a few hours? I disagree. Enjoy shoveling, sucker.”

And, honestly at this point, f@#$ snow. So hard. I can hardly remember the times I used to think snow was fun and cool and beautiful. I do remember one time during a snowstorm in Brooklyn, I was walking back to Prospect Heights from Park Slope at night and I decided to cut through the park. The reflection of the moon off the snow combined with the lights along the path to make the whole park glow, and the snow was as-yet unadulterated by footprints. It was Thomas Kincade idyllic.

But when you live in the suburbs and it snows you have a car you need to shovel out and you don’t have a super, so snow is just a huge pain in the ass. And it just keeps snowing. Shoveling is part of my morning routine now. It’s terrible. Is it snowing now? I haven’t been outside since 9 a.m.

This is beyond the scope of my lack of expertise, but here’s the thing: Keeping him off the mound in 2011 in no way assures he’ll be healthy in 2012. Shoulder injuries are bad news, worse than elbow injuries. See Chien-Ming Wang and Mark Prior and Brandon Webb and Kelvim Escobar for details. I don’t know the extent of Santana’s injury and surgery and I’m obviously not a doctor, but it sounded like what he was having done was a pretty big procedure.

I hate to be doom-and-gloom about this one, but I’d be pleasantly surprised if Santana is actually back in the Mets’ rotation by the All-Star Break. I know that’s the target and I don’t think anyone is lying, but it just seems like the road back from major shoulder injury is a long and often rocky one. And, to Patrick’s question, I’m not even sure that giving Santana a year to rest and recover would be the best way to ensure his success in 2012. To get back to full strength, he’s going to need to pitch at some point. If and when he’s healthy, I’m not sure there’s any good reason to hold him back.

Seriously! I don’t see what was wrong with plain old white Formica. I have a faux-granite countertop at home now, and to me it always makes it seem like the counters are dirty, even when they’re clean. In past apartments, before I lived with a woman, if there were lots of little specks on my counter it meant it was time to straighten up. Now, it’s just like that, even when it’s clean.

One time the lead singer of our old band booked a show through Craigslist. The gig was at 1 a.m. in a bar in North Bellmore called Jesse’s and we were playing after a band called Defective Skrew. Earlier in the day I drove around the area and couldn’t find the place. I became concerned that this other band just wanted to take us into a dark alley and steal our instruments and clothes and maybe our innocence. I thought maybe that’s what the “Defective Skrew” was.

It turned out the bar was for real, though, and a total dive. This is almost counterintuitive, but you know a place is really, really sketchy if it’s extremely well lit. This place had like middle-school style overhead fluorescent lights that stayed on the whole night, and we didn’t play until around 2. It was actually a decent-sized crowd, and a small fight broke out during our set, perhaps because North Bellmore was just rocked way too hard for its own good.

After the show, while we were loading up our cars, one of the guys from the fight who had been kicked out started talking to us, and someone made the mistake of asking him about the fight. He started demonstrating exactly how it all went down, using us as stand-ins for the people he fought, but he was so drunk that it wasn’t clear if he could distinguish us from the dudes he was actually angry at. At some point he broke and brandished a beer bottle, Outsiders-style. It was terrifying.

All my other Craigslist interactions have been relatively mild. Usually they have been to buy tickets to concerts, or to sell or exchange them if I have tickets to a concert I can’t attend.

Also, though the story is tragic and awful, it’s funny to me that the press associates the recent serial killer activity on Long Island with Craigslist. The guy killed prostitutes, as serial killers often do. Prostitutes advertise on the Internet. He’s not an Internet villain, he’s a straight-up villain. The Internet is just, at this point, the easiest place for a psychopath to find victims.

The pound or number sign — # — is also called the “Octothorpe” in phone-industry insider talk. There are many different claims as to the word’s origin but at least one says it was named for Jim Thorpe. It would also make a sweet band name.