‘Cats Gator Bowl Win, Potato Salad, NFL Wild Card Playoff Picks

No choice but to put that image up there. I was so shocked that Northwestern won a bowl game after 64 years that I didn’t even know how to celebrate, so I tweeted some stuff, had a beer, and that was that.

• Thursday at lunch time there was a bowl of potato salad sitting in the work cafe, clearly left over from a catered lunch somewhere else in the office but looking delightfully creamy and delicious. At one o’clock I had just eaten my lunch and thought better of it. At two o’clock I told myself I had an apple and some smoked almonds that would make a healthier snack. By five o’clock the potato salad was still there looking creamy as ever and I could bear it no more: I greedily stepped to the counter, reached out my hand, and grabbed a Diet Coke can to save myself the food poisoning from five-hour-old mayonnaise.The point is, time is a pitiless gatekeeper that closes off an infinite number of our untaken paths to joy with each passing millisecond. The almonds were good, though.
• NFL playoff time: My regular season against-the-spread record was 125-126, a disappointing one game under .500, but the playoffs count too. My predictions:At Houston -4.5 Cincinnati
  At Green Bay -7.5 Minnesota
  At Baltimore -6.5 Indianapolis
  Seattle -3 at Washington

  So just one upset, which as I write this isn’t looking immediately obvious, but it’s still the first quarter. My $100 entry fee isn’t completely lost yet – time to get that scrilla.