• Why couldn’t I have just played racquetball or something?

    Find the nearest, most convenient cement slab in your backyard. Place a basketball pole and goal at one end, a table in the middle, and a basketball at the other end. Pick up the basketball and take a shot. When you miss, practice following your shot (with your body, not just with your eyes). The table in the middle serves as an obstacle, much like other people do when you are actually playing ball.

    Unless you’re looking to throw a little cash towards a cash strapped orthopedist you know, read no further. Or better yet, just write the guy (or gal) a check.

    Medical training or not, we are all familiar with the intended use of certain joints. The ankle, for example, is no more intended for lateral movement than the side of your foot is made for bearing weight. With this in mind, imagine that the side of your foot was unexpectedly called on to not only bear your weight, but to halt its acceleration (at a rate of 9.8 meters per second-squared)? Now imagine that in addition to bearing your weight and ceasing your body’s downward acceleration (at a rate of 9.8 meters per second-squared), the rest of your leg was engaged in the process of applying sufficient force to launch your body back into the air. Try and try as you might, you won’t find this one in the owner’s manual.

    Why would an ankle find itself in this situation in the first place? Take yourself back to the cement slab and table. Picture yourself running around the table. You see that the ball is about to come your way, having bounced off of the rim like a red brick bouncing off of a light post. In one graceful movement you attempt a running stop off of one foot, intending to re-launch yourself into the air towards the ball, but your foot unexpectedly finds the leading edge of the cement slab. Unfortunately for your ankle, foot and lower leg, the edge of the slab finds the wrong side of a pivot point, and your foot rolls over the edge. Now picture your ankle swelling to three times its normal size. Imagine finding bruising on your foot, leg and toes. Not merely mortal bruising, mind you; but angry, purple bruising.

    I sit here at work, my foot elevated, awaiting x-ray results.

  • Snow job

    On the second day of our week’s end, we carefully crafted a day with a special event as its centerpiece. An area mall was to have snow, and we planned to travel twenty miles to see it.

    In the grand tradition of Saint Walt (the patron saint of tourism based economies) we Floridians manufacture what Mother Nature does not provide. As is often the case in December, the elements have denied us our Halmark given right to a winter wonderland. So, like many other places in the south, the mall was going to make some for us.

    Only they didn’t.

    Imagine my surprise when I walked down the path at the outdoor festival shopping plaza, saw the white flurries swirling in the air not thirty feet in front of me, saw the crowd enthusiastically taking advantage of this rarest of Florida events, then noticed upon close inspection that these white flurries were the product of air blown across soapy water.

    There we were, on a cool Florida evening, standing with a hundred or so of our fellow Floridians, subjecting ourselves to flurries of foam.

    I felt so used, but the disappointment quickly faded. The sight was so preposterous that I doubled over in uncontrollable laughter. I looked around and noticed my father and my wife. They were laughing too.

    So there we were, surrounded by a hundred or so of our fellow Floridians, doubled over in uncontrollable laughter. It was like we were the only ones that got the joke, and the joke was on all of us.

    Hey, if you can’t laugh at yourself,

  • The Urban league

    If ESPN sources can be believed, the Urban era at the University of Florida has begun. Where were you when you first heard the news?

    I was sitting in court. I got a voice mail message from one of my coworkers on my cell phone while I was sitting in a hearing. Thinking it was an important call, I stepped outside to retrieve the message.

    As it turned out, it was an important call.

    Now the inevitable questions begin. What kind of a name is “Urban” anyway? Can anyone without a folksy nickname lead the Gators to SEC glory? When was the last time the phrases “runs the option,” and “emerging offensive genius,” appeared in the same paragraph?