Chicken Wallbanger?

It wouldn't shock anyone to learn that San Francisco recently passed a resolution to make Mondays "VegDays." Everyone in the city will be encouraged to eat vegetarian meals and to avoid eating meat every Monday. It sounds like the kind of thing that could easily happen in Santa Monica next. Don't worry. There will be no Vegetarian Police, clad in green outfits, barging into people's homes to make sure that they aren't having lamb chops on Monday night. This is not just a movement by people who want their fellow citizens to eat less meat to be healthier. The people behind this resolution point out, "If everyone in San Francisco eats a plant-based diet just one day a week for a year, we would save over 378,600,768 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. That is the equivalent of taking 123,822 cars off the streets of San Francisco." I wonder how many of those 123,822 cars are on their way to pick up a Big Mac.

Vegetarianism has, of course, increased over recent years. So it came as a big surprise to me to learn that some people are clinging onto meat. The weirdest way that they are consuming meat products is in their cocktails. They've given a whole new meaning to Beefeater gin.

Some hip,"in" bars are serving drinks like "Bring Home the Bacon." That's a concoction that contains beef bullion, vodka and a garnish of deep-fried bacon and a prosciutto-stuffed olive. Beef bullion doesn't sound all that over the top. However, would you want to drink a cocktail containing elk bullion? There is an elk based drink called, "Big Eye Bloody Bull." Sounds really appetizing, doesn't it? Where do you even buy elk bullion? I've never seen it on a grocery store shelf, have you? And I guess a sometimes Governor/sometimes candidate from Alaska might be drinking moose-tinis.

This infusion of meat into people's lives during the vegetarian revolution doesn't stop at the corner bar. According to "Time" magazine, more and more people are butchering their own meat. I'm not kidding. People are butchering their own meat in their kitchens, right next to that beautiful white tile that they spent all that money on. Now, I would never suggest that all this home butchering would save the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as VegDay. However, in one way this meat movement is "green." That's the color I'd turn if anyone ever did any butchering in my kitchen.

The last time I heard about a cleaver being in a home kitchen, she was named June. However, the author of "Julie and Julia," Julie Powell, has published a new book called, "Cleaving" about home butchering. I can hardly wait to see the movie in which Meryl Streep prepares a romantic dinner by chopping off a pig's snout.

So what's this culinary counterrevolution all about? Why are people bringing dead animals into their kitchens? Why are they excited about a dinner of braised hoof? I have a theory. In these difficult economic times, people want to hold onto something that they've always felt was special. Meat has traditionally been a symbol of wealth and good times. When people want to celebrate something, they have often celebrated with the most expensive meat they can find, not with an avocado and sprouts sandwich. So maybe the attitude is, "You can take away my raise. You can take away my fancy car, you can even take away the house I bought with ridiculous credit three years ago. But keep your hands off my meat."

Evidently, to some people, meat is an economic comfort food. Maybe when their finances are back up where they want them to be, they will look back and laugh at the time they moved yesterday's mail, the laptop, and their kid's relief map of South America off the kitchen counter so they could make oxtail soup from scratch.

So is it possible to reconcile these polar opposites of vegetarianism and meat-ism? I think it is. I think both sides can be happy. All the people who serve that elk bullion cocktail have to do is make sure that the menu states that the bullion is made from free range elk.

Just A Game?

If it had been a movie, Butler's Gordon Hayward's last shot would have gone in.

But it wasn't a movie, it was real life.

It was the NCAA Championship game and real life spoiled things for an amazing Butler team, for about 60,000 (out of the 70,000) people in the arena, and for millions of people the country who were rooting for the little school that almost could.

The score was close the whole game, and Duke’s winning 61-59 probably made the defeat all the more painful for Butler.

It was an excitingly emotional game. Up and down, tied, up and down some more. It was the kind of game you didn't want to end. Butler University, a school only a few miles from the arena, a school with about 4,000 students, was considered the underdog this season no matter whom they played and no matter how high their ranking soared in the national polls. People love an underdog. In sports and in life. We get much more excited to hear a success story about someone who started with nothing rather than one about a kid who was born rich and then succeeded.

The non-sports fans always seem to ask why people who are seemingly mature in other ways will get so involved in a game. They don't understand that getting so involved in sports, getting so wrapped up in watching a game, is a great break from the realities of life. In those last few minutes of the Championship game, I guarantee you nobody there was thinking about the economy, foreign policy, or whether their kid had married the right person. They were either rooting for a team they had cheered on for years or for a team they felt symbolized the optimistic mantra of "Anything's possible." And maybe then they felt that anything's possible for them. Maybe they can solve those problems in the "real world," maybe they can get a job or a promotion, maybe they can get that person at work to smile at them.

It was fitting that Butler's Hayward took that final half-court shot. Butler has often been compared to the school in the movie "Hoosiers." If so, then Gordon Hayward was "Jimmy," the kid who could do almost anything with the basketball, a kid who looked so very Middle American in this sport that had its origin in Middle America.

After the game, I felt a little depressed as reality was slowly creeping into my mind. "I have to pack, would I make my plane connections tomorrow? (I didn't), I have a lot of work to do when I get home," etc.

Reality can be an annoying thing. It disturbs our dreams. It often spoils our good times. But for reality to join fantasy -- like during an "unreal" basketball game -- is a wonderful gift for those who are lucky enough to be present for it.

I was at that championship game in Indianapolis, and sitting behind me was a very tall man who looked like he had definitely played basketball. He turned out to be the Olathe, Kansas girls high school basketball coach (and science teacher) Joel Branstrom. A couple of months before this game, he had been in the news because of something that happened at a pep rally at his school. Some kids blindfolded him, then told him that if he could make a half-court shot, he'd win tickets to the Final Four. Branstrom, a former basketball walk-on for the University of Kansas, made the half-court shot blindfolded. The kids were shocked, and then admitted that they didn't have any tickets for him. It was just a prank. There was that annoying reality again.

But somehow, the NCAA got wind of this whole thing and sent Branstrom tickets for the championship weekend. So there he was, sitting behind me with his family, a big smile on his face, watching one of the most exciting games in history. For him, reality had joined fantasy.

If it worked for him, if one of his dreams could come true, maybe it can work for the rest of us, too. Let's face it: making a half-court shot blindfolded sounds impossible. It is impossible in the world of reality, but not in the world of sports.

By the way, when Gordon Hayward missed that long shot at the buzzer, I wonder if Branstrom was thinking, "How could he have missed that? He wasn't even blindfolded.