Twitter Q&A-type thing

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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.

Bill Gates’ “obsession with polio”

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Recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, the influential British medical journal, said via Twitter that “Bill Gates’s obsession with polio is distorting priorities in other critical BMGF areas. Global health does not depend on polio eradication.” (The initials are for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

And Arthur L. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s bioethics center, who himself spent nine months in a hospital with polio as a child, said in an interview, “We ought to admit that the best we can achieve is control.”

Those arguments infuriate Mr. Gates. “These cynics should do a real paper that says how many kids they’re really talking about,” he said in an interview. “If you don’t keep up the pressure on polio, you’re accepting 100,000 to 200,000 crippled or dead children a year.”

Right now, there are fewer than 2,000. The skeptics acknowledge that they are arguing for accepting more paralysis and death as the price of shifting that $1 billion to vaccines and other measures that prevent millions of deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, meningitis and malaria.

– Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times.

Pretty fascinating read from the Times on Bill Gates’ efforts to eradicate polio. The argument raised in the excerpt suggests that Gates is so focused on ridding the world of one disease that he’s missing opportunities to save many more children than might fall victim to polio.

Of course, Gates disputes those assertions, and it’s probably best to defer to Bill Gates when math is involved. To his credit, it seems reasonable that though eradicating the disease now may be extremely tedious and expensive, ending polio would ultimately save a lot more children for less money than palliative care of other illnesses now.

Also, it seems odd to me to insist that a man who’s donating billions of dollars to a worthwhile cause donate those billions of dollars to some other worthwhile cause. Perhaps Gates would really like to be remembered as the man responsible for ending polio. There are worse legacies.

Finally, allow a haphazard segue: On the Colbert Report last night, Dr. Paul Offit mentioned the 500,000 Americans who cannot be immunized for medical reasons and need to rely on “herd immunity.” I am among that 500,000. If you’re basing decisions on whether to immunize yourself and your family on something you read in a sports and sandwiches blog you’ve got other problems. But if you’re looking to put a face on the large group of people that stand a better chance of enjoying a happy and healthy life if you get all your shots, feel free to use this handsome one.

Some stuff about Ben Roethlisberger

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For the marquee attraction of media day is Ben Roethlisberger. The Steelers’ quarterback will again face questions about his four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s personal conduct policy resulting from an alleged sexual assault on a drunk, underage coed in the bathroom of a Georgia nightclub. This was his first step on his road back to Super Bowl glory. These questions and the way Roethlisberger answers them – or doesn’t – will be another part of the alleged redemption process. It’s not like Roethlisberger hasn’t had to answer questions on this subject before. The difference here is the interview is not being conducted in a police station or some locker room. Tuesday’s session will be held on the biggest of all stages inside Cowboys Stadium. And unlike situations where he’s strictly dealing with football media, the interlopers Golic dismissed will be asking questions about Roethlisberger’s controversial, sleazy past. “That’s why he needs to show regret, but determination as well,” said a public relations executive who counsels athletes and media honchos. “He has a chance to reach a wider audience. He needs to be humble and respectful.”

– Bob Raissman, N.Y. Daily News.

The thesis of Raissman’s column, I’m pretty sure, is: The way Ben Roethlisberger responds to media inquiries today about his alleged sexual assault of a 20-year-old girl in March will show whether he has learned a lesson from all the fallout from that event.

So begins an inevitable week-long what-the-f**k-athon, in which sports reporters everywhere feel obligated to mention Roethlisberger’s recent history, but carefully avoid coming right out and calling him a rapist since, as we know, he was ultimately not charged with anything besides violating the NFL’s nebulous personal-conduct policy.

It is hard to fault the columnists in this case. Roethlisberger is the quarterback on a Super Bowl-bound team. If they ignored the pesky detail of his sexual-assault charge wholesale, we’d accuse them of whitewashing their coverage, of ignorance, and maybe of some subtle racism too. But if they assume guilt where the courts and cops could not prove it, they sidle up toward libel, and that’s also bad.

So we’re left with suggestions that the way Roethlisberger handles the media during Super Bowl week has any bearing at all on how he now feels about, or what he may have learned from his alleged misbehavior, even though it doesn’t. And implications that if he helps the Steelers win the Super Bowl, Roethlisberger will redeem himself to the city of Pittsburgh, even though no one ever claimed he raped Pittsburgh.

Unlike the standard NFL offseason marijuana-possession arrest, the crime for which Roethlisberger was detained and questioned had a real victim, a college student that — without recanting her accusation — asked the district attorney not to pursue charges against the quarterback out of concern for her own privacy.

And so it’s somewhere between puzzling and terrible that the same media types that have no trouble drumming up sanctimony over allegations of performance-enhancing drug use tread lightly around similar sentiments when covering a guy accused of sexual assault. I’m not one for sweeping value judgments, but I can say without hesitation that rape is worse than using steroids. Way, way, way worse.

Again, we don’t know what Roethlisberger did or didn’t do in Milledgeville, Georgia. We know there is a lot of evidence and a group of eyewitnesses that suggest he attempted to either intimidate or force a drunk girl into having sex with him. It is an act and a behavior that lies so far outside the boundaries of sport that it’s plain absurd to expect the outcome of a game — no matter how big — or the content of an interview to demonstrate anything meaningful about the perpetrator’s past and future conduct and lifestyle.

But I suppose that doesn’t make for a good story or a compelling column.

Things that are actually being debated in state legislatures: Whoopie pie

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On Monday, at a hearing before the Legislature’s State and Local Government Committee, Rep. Donald Pilon dismissed whoopies as “frosting delivery vehicles” and suggested that wild-blueberry pie deserves to be the state’s official dessert.

“At a time when 31.3 percent of Maine’s children are considered overweight or obese, do we want to glorify a dessert that lists lard as its primary ingredient?” asked Pilon, D-Saco.

Pro-pie forces countered with a nutritionist of their own. Katherine Musgrave, a retired professor from the University of Maine, said the whoopie pie’s chocolate has ingredients that serve as antioxidants that relax blood pressure.

– Tom Bell, Kennebec Journal.

This is hilarious. These are whoopie pies:

Millburn deli photo gallery pretty much depicts utopia

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So a lot of readers keep raving about the Millburn Deli in New Jersey, and since I’m going to be driving through the Garden State later this week I figured I should look the place up and see if a detour is feasible.

Anyway, I wound up at deli’s website, and it turns out they’ve got a photo gallery almost entirely dedicated to happy people enjoying delicious sandwiches. The world should be more like this. It’s like the J.C. Penney catalog if J.C. Penney sold only awesome sandwiches.

Lunchmeat superstar

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Prosciutto di parma and jamón ibérico might hog all the porkcentric attention, but what some chefs are really excited about these days is a bit more déclassé. Mystery meats like pork roll and Spam are making somewhat subversive inroads on inventive menus around town, spurred on by both the quest for novelty and a nostalgic embrace of regional-American roots.

– Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite, NYMag.com.

I’m all for more access to a larger variety of meat products, processed or otherwise, so I welcome the presence of these supposedly subversive options on fancy menus. But I will say that Taylor Ham’s inclusion here among mortadella, SPAM and bologna does not speak well for the Jersey favorite I have not yet tried.

SPAM is not my thing and I haven’t enjoyed bologna since I was 10 years old. And mortadella grossed me out more consistently than any product outside of head cheese and olive loaf at the deli. I just don’t get it at all. It’s like bologna, only with big chunks of visible fat and totally random-seeming pistachios throughout. What the hell are pistachios doing in my lunchmeat?

I should say that an egg and cheese sandwich with a slice of grilled mortadella and a little hot sauce isn’t completely terrible, but it’s the type of thing you’d only want to eat if someone ordered it at the deli where you worked and then never picked it up, which happened one time, which is how I know.

Still gotta try that Taylor ham. One of these days, Jersey. One of these days.