Amias, Spam, and Manny Ramirez

I am trying to get back to basics and in doing so, we will have to do some time travel.

First, we shall discuss Amias, of The Magic of Integrated Circuits fame. For those relatively new, Amias is a writer of many kinds of prose and poetry. She draws much of her material from the events in her life. She also presents a challenge to the reader with her blogging. Amias latest post is an acrostic dedicated to all mothers as it's a "Happy Mother's Day" theme. Give Amias a visit as she's good at exercising your mind.

I first made Amias part of my blogging family about a year and a half ago, though we had crossed paths for months before that. Our common bond was that we were both close to Suzanne aka Liquid. We both find ourselves catching up on each other's blogs.

Now you are probably asking why Spam? And why are we traveling in time for this? And why did this come to mind?

Today at lunchtime, Charlie, the maintenance supervisor at my shop and also the occupant of the office next to mine asked if I was ready for lunch. I knew something was up, so I asked what we were eating. Charlie then opened a can of Spam, brought out some hot dog buns and shared it with me. I told him all we needed was a frying pan. We were also discussing other ways to serve Spam, as it's the ultimate in mystery meat. My suggestion was to place it on it's side, cut wide patties, fry it up, serve it with sauteed onions and mushrooms and a baked potato. there you go, poor man's steak.

Now anyone who has Gmail, gets links to spam recipes when we go to our spam folder.

We need to travel back 10 years for this one. We were all getting ready for Y2K. Some folks were stocking up on bottled water, canned foods, including spam, and generators. I wonder how many folks had spam to spare on January 2, 2000?

We now discuss Manny Ramirez, currently baseball's version of Spam. My question, if I could ask one to Manny is this: If you make so much money, why can't you get a doctor who knows what prescriptions are on baseball's banned substance list?

For those not aware, Manny first come into the major leagues as a member of the Cleveland Indians. He was on the team for the tribe's appearances in the 1995 and 1997 World Series. We now travel to the summer of 1995. The Indians had won quite a few games in the last at bat that year. One game that comes to mind right now was a game against the Oakland Athletics. I think it had gone into extra innings with Oakland coming to bat at the top of the tenth and going ahead. The bottom of the tenth the A's brought out their closer, Dennis Eckersley. The Tribe promptly put one on base and up comes Manny. Ramirez crushed the ball over the fence, and during the replay, Eckersley was shown amazed and saying "Wow!" We remember our top sports moments in these parts as they are few and far between.

We now arrive back in 2009. Thank you for flying WIXY's Gone Bananas!