Today is the day college football fans have been waiting for, for what seems like months. Yes, it’s the day the National Championship gets decided at Reliant Stadium in Houston. OK, well, maybe not the NC exactly, but it’s the day when the mediocre 8-4 Minnesota Golden Gophers take on the even more mediocre (mediocre-er?) 6-6 Syracuse Orangemen. You can tell this is an important game because they put it on Friday at 6:00 Eastern Time, hoping that the all-important Happy Hour crowd will accidentally catch part of the game (maybe you folks out west can see the fourth quarter if you’ve got nothing better going on).

There are a lot of bragging rights at stake for me, as my stepdaughter and her husband are both UM grads and two more of the kids live in Minnesota. And I’m sure if any of them were actually aware that this game was taking place today, they might care. Maybe.

I’m not sure if I’ll live to see the game, unfortunately. I was feeling pretty good earlier this morning, but now that I found out I’ve been OD’ing on baking soda, I’m not doing so well. At first I thought it was no big deal except for some extra sodium, but when I jokingly mentioned it to my wife she said “oh my god, do you feel OK? Nobody takes that much of something like that!” So now I’m feeling kinda “funny” and am not sure how ling I’ve got. Even starting to get heart palpitations. I wish I’d read Sue’s comment before I took my morning dose.

You hear that Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to join ya, honey! (Those of you under age 50 will have to ask your parents what that means.)

I only hope that my demise will teach the world two valuable lessons. First, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. And second, reading comprehension is very important (I swear I thought it said tablespoon, damnit). If only they’d taught to the test when I was in school.

In my defense, I have to ask the question: what kind of stupid measurements are teaspoons and tablespoons, anyway? I mean, come on – does that sound scientific to anybody? Why not just go with a dash, pinch or smidgen, fer chrissakes?

Speaking of something completely different, I get this e-mail every week from something called Quora. I have no idea how I got on this list are even really what it is, but it has something to do with stupid people (for instance, those who don’t know the difference between a tsp and a tbs) asking questions and smart people answering them. One today was “why is water transparent?”

I was expecting some kind of scientific explanation about how water doesn’t absorb too much electromagnetic radiation of the type where the wavelength is in the range of visible light (Roy G Biv), so most of it passes through (at least if it’s not too deep). And there is an answer or two along those lines, but the #1 answer (and most interesting to me) was from a Theoretical Biologist at MIT.

His answer was that water is transparent to us because life evolved in water. So some blind little critter out there mutated and developed receptors that could detect differences in that “visible” radiation, and therefore had a survival advantage over the other blind critters (and either ate them, or avoided being eaten by them) and passed those gene mutations along. Had live evolved in, say, mercury, then we’d be able to see through mercury right about now. I thought this was interesting, not because of the explanation (which is relatively simple), but in the way the guy who answered it defined the word “why.”

Of course, it’s a totally un-Christian response involving evolution, so I categorically dismiss it.

Oh well, on the odd chance I don’t keel over from baking soda poisoning, I guess I’d better get back to work.