‘Corn-Fed’ White Boys

Saturday was an interesting day for me. First, after the humiliating losses my OSU Buckeyes football team suffered at the hands of the Oklahoma Sooners early in the season (thank you very much PT!) and then to the Iowa Hawkeyes on the previous Saturday, I received no small amount of pleasure watching the Buckeyes exact a much needed pound of flesh from the Michigan State Spartans. Not exactly “that team up north,” but satisfying nonetheless. And then I watched, with renewed pleasure, as Iowa fell flat on their face while attempting to repeat their Buckeye beat-down on the undefeated Wisconsin Badgers. Hah! My Buckeyes, who started the season ranked #2, managed to move back up to #8 in the polls, but both the Sooners and the Badgers are in the top five. Iowa is no longer ranked…

I don’t know about you, but I have a habit of drifting off into weird thoughts when I’m having a good time. And it was while watching the the Badgers beat up on the Hawkeyes that I drifted into particularly weird thoughts that included a conversation I had years ago about Midwest football with my then brother-in-law. You see, he didn’t have a very good opinion of teams that featured what he referred to as “fat and slow ‘corn-fed’ white boys.” I think even he was surprised at how hard I laughed at that. To explain, I had to remind him of my two years living on the Nebraska-Iowa border where those fat and slow ‘corn-fed’ white boys were all the rage.

Now if that memory wasn’t enough to increase the smile I already had on my face, the thoughts (questions, really) that came after practically had me laughing out loud in my otherwise empty apartment. Now you know I have this diabetes thing I’m dealing with, right? And you should know that corn, along with the endless variety of food products derived from corn, are pretty high up on the diabetic dietary no-no list. Well, with that in mind, and within the context of the game I was watching, the following questions popped into my crazy brain:

Do ‘corn-fed’ cattle suffer from high blood glucose problems? Do dairy cows that are ‘corn-fed’ produce sweeter milk? Does that have anything to do with my having been warned off of milk as well, causing me to have to take Vitamin D supplements now? And finally, if milk produced by ‘corn-fed’ Iowa cows really is sweeter, then how does that effect the taste of Wisconsin cheese made from that milk? Yeah, I’m not supposed to eat cheese either, dammit! Have you ever eaten a pizza without cheese? My son does it all the time and I absolutely refuse to! Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!!!

Now you may be wondering why I didn’t publish this post on Saturday, or Sunday maybe. Well here’s why. You see, my new cable provider, Spectrum (formerly known as Time-Warner Cable), sold me on a package that was supposed to include 60Mbps Internet. Which was all well and good. And then, much to my surprise, they sent my a notice that they were upping, at no extra charge mind you, my 60Mbps Internet to a whopping 100Mbps. Wow! Unfortunately, what actually happened was that my Internet speeds dropped – dramatically. And not only did they drop, they started to vary wildly between roughly half the 60Mbps they originally promised all the way down to something approaching the speed of an old dial-up connection!

Their “specialist” is scheduled to arrive sometime tomorrow…

I want ice water.

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