And then I wrote

... that I have noted here before that I am not a big fan of professional football, but I did my best Sunday to watch the pro championship game. Not for the football, but for the heavily hyped commercials, and a possible opportunity to see a little of the Jacksonville, Florida area.
They lost me at halftime.
The commercials did not impress me, and the halftime entertainment was going to be provided by an aging Beatle who I did not appreciate the first time around. And about the only thing I saw of Jacksonville was the cruise ships brought in to provide additional rooms.
I spent a very enjoyable two and a half months in Jacksonville one summer attending the Navy's aviation officer school. My best friends there, one from Virginia and one from New Jersey, said that area of north Florida is really more like Georgia than Florida. There was frost the first morning I got there, in May, but it was very hot and humid the rest of the time.
The Virginia officer's parents had money, and they bought him a huge 1956 yellow Buick convertible with red leather upholstery. This was in 1957, so the car created lots of interest. Those two were old friends, having attended William & Mary College together, worked in Colonial Williamsburg one summer and at a posh Miami hotel another summer, and they took this somewhat naive Iowa guy as a project. The New Jersey officer was a food and wine "snob" who said his dad was a hit man for the mob. Other people laughed when he said that, but he did not, so I don't know.
We had weekends off and took trips to St. Augustine and Daytona Beach and Jacksonville Beach and Mayport and Summer (not winter) Haven, and elsewhere. There was a pool at the officer's club, and a maintenance man there one morning encapsulated Florida for me. He was skimming bugs off the water with a net. He said it was part of Florida's plan: Frogs ate the bugs, snakes ate the frogs, and the alligators ate the snakes. But the actual appearance of an alligator in the St. John's River was rare enough the newspaper ran a picture of it.
I watched more golf than football Sunday, since I wanted to see how Zach Johnson of Cedar Rapids was doing in the FBR event. He did well. But I was reminded right away how much I despise that event in the desert, and why last year I referred to it as the PBR open, for Pabst Blue Ribbon. Drunken college students gravitate to the event, and to the 16th hole par three in particular, where they scream and yell and boo or cheer the golfers. It appears the tour and the tournament encourage that sort of boorish frat party behavior, because it seemed to me they have built additional seating to accommodate more drunks. And the TV network and its announcers are also enablers by concentrating on the juveniles making asses of themselves.

Still speaking of sports, I noted where former German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling died recently at the age of 99. He and Joe Louis had a couple of memorable bouts in the days around World War II, sort of a mini U.S. vs. Germany thing. When so many later aging boxers seem to have lost physical or mental capacities as a result of ring hits, i.e., Louis and Ali, that would seem to be an unusually long life span for someone in the profession.
By the way, an alert reader called to inform me that I offered the wrong last name of that black boxer in a recent column. I apparently wrote Jackson. It was Johnson.
In modern terms, I think I was suffering from SAD ... seasonal affective disorder, until I took a short drive on one of those recent nice days. I'm pretty sure that's the same thing we used to call cabin fever, when people were inside more than they wanted to be because of winter weather conditions. I saw eagles. I saw a flock of pheasants, in Allamakee County! And a trio of hen turkeys. They apparently were after grit on the road shoulders, and I was thinking, how nice. Until it also occurred to me the grit might include harmful treated sand.
We never used to worry about those things. Or other things. For example, we mixed up some Tom & Jerry mix over the holidays, a family tradition that's at least 100 years old. We "young" folks had some disagreement about the order of ingredients, but turned out a good batch. A few days later, I read a discussion in the newspaper about avoiding that, not because of the little bit of booze, but because of the danger posed by the raw eggs!
I hate modern thinking!