I'm Curious: Should Howie Long Continue Rocking The Flat Top? VOTE!

In case you haven't noticed, another round of Chevy Truck commercials featuring Howie Long just hit the airwaves. In one of the commercials, Howie pokes fun at another driver who used a "man-step" to climb down from his Ford truck. The driver gets all sheepish and embarrassed that NFL legend Howie Long called him out. Howie, the hell? Should you really be making fun of others when you've been sporting the same haircut for the last twenty years? (Which, I might add, is the same haircut my brother and all his friends had in junior high. The timeline for that? Roughly twenty years ago.)

Howie, you're a handsome man. I'm fairly confident you could pull off almost any new look. Caesar cut? Check. Side-part comb over? Absolutely. The Troy Polamalu? Why not? You might even try one of those "man-steps" while you're at it. With all those years in the NFL, you're probably going to need it.

SN readers, what do you think? Take my poll to the right!

Aunt Marvine

Ever wonder what's in a nickname? I do, and frankly, it fascinates me. My own personal nickname is Mo, which is short for Maureen, and for as long as I can remember that's what people have called me. My family, teachers, coaches, even my high school principal. When I left for college, the nickname stuck even though none of my high school classmates went to the same school. And finally, at almost 30, most of my coworkers call me Mo.

I'm cool with it. I've grown into it and I like it. Occasionally though, I thought it was a bit unusual and it made me self-conscious. However, this was all long before I met my husband, who is apparently surrounded by people who consider nicknaming a sport. Chew on this list:

• Buzz
• Sparky
• Punk
• Stumpy
• Coondog
• Skeeter
• Schoolboy
• Fuzzy
• Popper
• Snuffy
• Bartley
• Hambone
• T-bone
• Railroad (you know who you are)
• Roscoe
• Double D
• Buck
• Fatty
• Tree
• Big Cheese
• Peg Leg

Now I've been informed by P that some of these are CB handles from way back that stuck. But most of them are nicknames that others simply made up. For example, "Fatty" is a nickname that was given by friends and is used regularly in lieu of his real name. I think they even shorten it to just "Fats" from time to time, but I would need Railroad to confirm this.

Walking into P's community of friends and family, I was known as only Maureen. It didn't take long though and I was given a new nickname. It all started when an uncle of P's mistakenly thought my name was Marvine. It was one of those situations where I had let it go too many times to turn around and correct him. So I just let him call me Marvine and hoped he would hear someone else call me by my real name. Enter another one of P's uncles, who was visiting from Florida. He heard the first uncle, his brother, call me Marvine and made a big show of how "her name is MOOORRREEEENNN, not Marvine." I was mortified and instantly became Marvine to a small circle of P's family in on the mixup. P's younger brother shortened it and now just calls me Marv.

So today while grocery shopping, I found myself stuck behind two women with two carts taking up a large section of the aisle. It was clear that the younger woman was helping the older lady with her shopping:

"How about some chicken noodle soup? You like that."

"Let's wait on the cocoa powder. We're going up to Amish country next week and you can get it cheaper there."

"You normally don't like pickles."

"The flour is right down this aisle, AUNT MARVINE."

Aunt Marvine! It's a real name! I laughed out loud and then quickly pretended that one of the coupons in my hand was hilarious. Odd as it sounds, it was somewhat comforting. It means that I have people in my life who would have laughed along with me had they been there. People I wouldn't know if I didn't marry P. And perhaps in my old age, I'll be able to count on one of these people to take me to the grocery store and remind me that I like chicken noodle soup.

If You've Already Seen This, Watch It Again--Part Two

I know this has been making its way around for quite awhile, but it's so inspiring I had to post it for those of you who haven't seen it yet. Truly awesome. It's nice to have a reminder that one of the most important things in this life is to love and be loved. Read the story and watch the video at the end. Break out the tissues. You'll need 'em:

Strongest Dad in the World [From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day. Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'' Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution.''

But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way,'' Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain.''

"Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!'' And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that.''

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker'' who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks.''

That day changed Rick's life. "Dad,'' he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!''

And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way,'' Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?''

How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way,'' he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling'' he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

"No question about it,'' Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century.''

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago.''

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

"The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.''

Monessen, PA

Driving home from a weekend trip yesterday, I noticed an exit sign for Monessen, PA. As we got closer, the exit looked familiar. And it hit me. So I hit P. I grabbed his arm and said (probably verbatim):

"Holy crap! Monessen, PA!"

As he often does when he doesn't understand what I'm talking about, P shook his head back and forth with his mouth turned down, eyebrows raised and shoulders shrugged.

"You know. Monessen, PA. Where I got my first job offer out of school."

"Oh," he said, completely uninterested.

Maybe it's because I'm a woman, maybe it's because I'm me. But stuff like this completely fascinates me. I tried to explain.

"If I would have taken that job, our lives would be completely different!"

"Maybe," he said.

"What do you mean 'maybe'? You weren't out of school yet, so you probably would have followed me out here and gotten a job. Our lives would have started here instead of in Toledo and Detroit. We would be in a completely different place right now. I certainly wouldn't be at my job and you wouldn't be in yours. We'd have different jobs, different co-workers, different friends, different hobbies, different everything!"

"But we'd still be together, so it wouldn't be that different," he said.

I guess we just see things differently. Me, I marvel at how one decision could have completely changed my/our life path. I think about the people I work with everyday who I never would have met. What about my house, my neighborhood, the relationships we've built with the friends and family who now live so close to us? And how would life in Monessen, PA have treated us? Would we still be the "us" that we are now?

It's just crazy, I tell you. Almost too much to think about. But I will say this. Driving past the Monessen exit, I looked out at the town and thought: it would have been tough here starting out, just the two of us. I know we would have made it though. Maybe that's what P was trying to explain in his one-sentence way. That he'll love me and be my husband wherever our life path takes us.

Thanks for the reminder, Monessen, PA.