Ed. Note #1: For those of you who are reading the blog for the first time, welcome. As an introduction to the basic ground rules of the site, you may want to read the initial welcome post here. I do hope you'll stick around (and comment! This whole blogging thing is much more fun for me that way).
Ed. Note #2: One may argue that if I'm going to restart this endeavor after nearly five months away, especially at this particular juncture, I'm doing my readers a disservice by not using the first post back to talk about what is almost certainly the most significant social movement in this country in some time, namely, Occupy Wall Street (or, if you prefer, #OccupyWallStreet). To which I say: you're probably right, and trust me, plenty will be written on that topic here. But just as one doesn't reintroduce a starving man to food by serving him a five-course meal, one doesn't start off an out-of-practice blogger with a topic on which he could probably write 50,000 words.
Ed. Note #3: If I'm going to keep this blog going (and I really, really do want to), I need help from you, dear reader. I'm simply not creative or insightful enough to feel confident in selecting a topic and writing (well) about it day after day after day. So I'm asking all of you to e-mail me if you have topics you'd like to see discussed here (don't be afraid to use the comments, either). My e-mail address is in the sidebar.
Now, then . . .
For those of you who are unaware (though, if you're my Facebook friend, you almost certainly are aware), I am a huge Northwestern Wildcats football fan. This may explain my persistent bad mood over the last several weeks, but in any case, on your average fall Saturday, I can be found in front of a television, cheering on a bunch of guys wearing purple and hoping that Dan Persa's Achilles tendon decides it doesn't hate him, and me, anymore. This past Saturday's opponent: the Hawkeyes of the University of Iowa.
If you don't follow the Big Ten Conference that closely, you may not know that Northwestern/Iowa has, in the last few years, become a rather intriguing rivalry (though don't say that to an Iowa fan, as he/she will promptly inform you that his/her Hawks have no rivalry with a school as inconsequential as Northwestern). This has a lot to do with the fact that, prior to last Saturday's 41-31 loss, my Wildcats had beaten Iowa in five out of the teams' six previous meetings, including three straight times
at Iowa, despite Iowa usually being, on paper, the better team. Various theories have been put forward for why, to be stereotypical, a bunch of rich Chardonnay-sipping pencilnecks have recently had the number of a bunch of strapping corn-fed young lads, from the usual revenge hypotheses (Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald is avenging a broken leg he suffered as a player in Northwestern's 1995 game against Iowa that kept him out of the Rose Bowl) to the truly bizarre (something about evil magic and baked potatoes, and if you're a college sports fan and you don't read SBNation's absolutely spectacular Iowa Hawkeyes blog
Black Heart Gold Pants, shame on you).
(I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.)