Derek Dooley's two post-game losses

Former practicing attorney and current first-year head Tennessee Volunteers coach Derek Dooley becomes the first coach in history to lose two games after the game clock expires in the same season.

And he did it in only his FIRST year as a head coach.

This is an amazing beginning. I predict he will lose four games after the clock expires next year.

What's the snow-rain-tears deal?

It's New Year's Eve. Thirty-five years and one week ago , Dan's mom sent him out for some cream for Irish Coffee. Jill's mom sent her out for something, I forget what, but the only place either of them could find open was a convenience store in Peoria at the corner of something and something else now known as "Fogelberg Parkway" or something similar. They were 24 years old or so. She was married. He was not. They had dated each other some in high school. After he saw her in the frozen foods, he touched her on the sleeve, she spilled her purse, she didn't recognize him (he had a beard now), they laughed til they cried. They wound up buying a six-pack and drank it in her car, making toasts to innocence and time.

Eventually, as the song tells us, their "tongues were tired". She gave him a kiss as he got out, probably a peck somewhere if it was administered as he was exiting the car, and he watched her drive away. Now comes the curious part.

Having listened to the song for almost thirty years now, and knowing that it is based on a true story, with at least two examples of artistic license (Jill tells us that her eyes were green, not blue, and that she was married to a PE teacher, not an architect), I have always been able to imagine and feel what Dan may have experienced until it comes to this:

"Just for a moment, I was back in school, and felt that old familiar pain."

Try as I might, I cannot identify with what pain there might be. Minor heartbreak? Loneliness, from being with a person he had not seen in six years? Stone aches? Did he love her and not act on it? Or did she not feel the same for him? When I hear or sing the song, I try to feel the pain, but it's not there. Did they break up? Were they that close? I just don't get any real feeling there.

Another, more confusing lyric, not from the same song ("Same Old Lang Syne") but from the same album The Innocent Age, the song "Hard to Say" begins -

Lucky at Love, well maybe so,
There's still a lot of things you'll never know
Like why each time the sky begins to snow
You cry

What's that about? Two things on the same album about crying and snow.

Titan

Here I am in a little town (50,000 people, so maybe it's a medium-size town) 30 miles North of Nashville. I thought I'd come South for the winter to avoid ice and snow. Guess what? They've had more snow here this winter than in Isle au Haut! It's really amusing to see how they close schools if a single snow flurry is detected, but I suppose since they have no snow removal equipment here, they must do this to protect the little school kiddies. They're amazing down here. The children are able to build good-looking snow people with only 1/2" of snow! And they expend so much effort for something that's going to melt by noon.

The Tennessee Titans are big sports news in this area, having gone to the Super Bowl in their first year as the Titans instead of the Oilers, so when a friend called and told me the History Channel was having a special on the Titans, I tuned in. Turns out, it wasn't football. It was Titan, one of Saturn's moons. I had no idea that there was a body in this solar system that resembled the earth so much. Apparently, it's the only body which has geography like we do - continents, lakes, oceans - the satellite photos could have been of earth. And Titan is the only other body in the solar system that has mainly Nitrogen for its atmosphere. Well, Pluto does for about 50 years of its 248-year trip around the sun; the rest of the time, it's so cold that the atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground.

Anyway, Titan doesn't have water as its liquid. It has natural gas. Propane lakes, neo-propane/methane rain which would freeze a human solid as a rock when it hits. Wow.

Bet school is out a lot on Titan. But when the sun goes supernova and it gets hot enough, humans may be able to live there for a few seconds til it burns up.

I'm going back to Isle au Haut, where the living is easy and slow and life makes sense.