Uncategorized

We’re Not Going to Blow This, Are We?

Unfrozen Caveman Law Writer
Manchester United, Sports, Uncategorized
May 8, 2023
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After back-to-back 1-0 league losses, Manchester United’s Top Four aspirations are hanging by a thread. United need three wins in their last four matches to be certain of clinching a spot in next year’s Champions League.

It’s certainly doable. United have three matches left at home, where they’re the Globetrotters, as opposed to the road, where they become the Washington Generals. Their matches at home are all pretty winnable, with Wolves, Fulham, and a shambolic Chelsea set to visit in the coming weeks. Their road match, on paper, is also winnable, as they’ll get 14th place Bournemouth.

Then again, they’ve looked so toothless and impotent in their last two matches that nothing looks like a gimme at this point.

Against Brighton, United couldn’t convert their chances ultimately got held scoreless by a team that has flummoxed them all year. In fact, the last time United managed to score against them was in August, when Alexis Mac Allister put it in his own net in Erik ten Hag’s first match in charge.

On Thursday, a late Luke Shaw hand-ball doomed United, allowing Brighton to beat David de Gea from the spot with nearly the last kick of the match (surely, a bit of revenge for Wembley — also an eerie parallel to what happened in 2020, when United were awarded a penalty after the final whistle blew and Bruno Fernandes converted it for an unlikely 2-1 win).

Then, on Sunday, United, once again, failed to convert their chances and were doomed by a David de Gea a howler. De Gea, who has committed a league-leading four errors this season that have led to goals, seems determined to lose out on his contract extension, but it’s not all his fault. Anthony Martial, Jadon Sancho, Antony and Wout Weghorst have been erratic all season, and Marcus Rashford hasn’t been the same since his groin injury. You can’t even blame the defense, which is being held together with duct tape and Krazy glue right now.

So here’s hoping fifth-place Liverpool can do us a favor and drop some points down the stretch. Let’s see, they play Leicester and Southampton on the road and Aston Villa at home. Dammit. Guess we’ll have to see what our guys are made of.

Things I Wish I Had Known About IVF

I really thought it was going to be easy.

Sure, natural conception hadn’t worked out for us, but I figured IVF would be a piece of cake. After all, lots of people have babies that way, right? All I’d have to do is show up to the fertility doctor’s office and use their porn room to produce a semen sample (Hollywood has taught me that every office has a porn room). They’d mix it with my wife’s eggs, freeze them, and then we’d show up one day and they would simply implant one or two in my wife’s uterus. Nine months later, we’d be parents.

Boy, was I naive.

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The Finger of Destiny

What will you do when the finger of Destiny points at you?

For us, we decided to adopt her. Maybe it was destiny (pun intended) that she came to us. She arrived in Chicago the same week that Bernie passed. And she joined us right as we were about to embark on a particularly difficult period without him and helped us through it.

Plus, she’s been such a sweetheart that we just couldn’t let her go. She took to us from the moment she arrived home, and we definitely fell for her. Looks like we’ve failed as foster parents.

However, we just couldn’t abide by her name. So from henceforth, she will be known as Dessie Lisa Vito. First of her name. Queen of all she surveys. Barker at other dogs. Killer of rodents. Conquerer of bed space.

Welcome to the family, Dessie. Thank you for helping heal our broken hearts. Now if you’d only stop trying to kill all those possums.

Sweet Nectar of the Gods!

Yeah, I love Crystal Pepsi. And I was thrilled when Pepsi announced they would bring it back on a limited basis. Don’t judge me.

Thank You — Ten Years Too Late.

Google can be a real downer.

Sometimes, I like to search for people from my past that I’ve long lost touch with to see how they’re doing. Usually, it’s to satisfy some momentary burst of curiosity inspired by one of the many mental tangents my brain seems to go on. I’ll pass by a piano and wonder what became of my old piano teacher and the music school I used to go to on Saturdays. I’ll write about some lawsuit and wonder whatever happened to some of my law school classmates or former work colleagues. I’ll watch Lebron James throw down a monster dunk and think about some of the guys I used to play basketball with and how we’d feel when one of us would do something like that – on video games we’d play after we were done laying bricks on the basketball court.

Today, I thought of Georgeann Rettberg. I was thinking about why I became a writer in the first place, and she was the first person that I thought of. She was in charge of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project’s Young Writers Institute in Pittsburgh. The program, which is still around today, looks to teach and develop writing skills in schoolchildren from grades 4 through 12. I attended the summer program, which ran five days-a-week for about six weeks, on two occasions. I don’t remember the dates (the second time was in 1991) but suffice to say I was pretty young at the time and would have rather been out having fun instead of using my brain. My parents, however, thought it was a good way for me improve my verbal skills (my dad had the math part covered) so that I could do well on the SAT and get into a good college.