Timeouts During Last Two Minutes Are A Health Hazard

Sometimes Sam and I can’t make sense of things. Tuesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal carried the following: a story about couples fighting because they had different memories of the same conversation; a story about men over 50 being a new osteoporosis “group;” a story about the maddening last two minutes of basketball games; and a story about angry outbursts hurting your health.

So, let’s see if we can concoct some kind of interesting blog out of all that.

Here’s a scenario: A guy comes home late from a basketball game. His wife says, “When you called me on your cellphone you said you’d be home in two minutes.”

“No dear, I said I’d be home in a couple of minutes, as soon as the teams ran out of timeouts and the game was over.”

“That was thirty minutes ago!”

“And I’ve come home two minutes from the time the game was over."

This poor guy was late getting home because as the WSJ reported, the last two minutes of 52 tournament games thus far this year actually averaged 9:09 minutes to complete. The WSJ reported that one game stretched out the last two minutes for 16 minutes and 22 seconds because of 8 foul calls, which resulted in 15 free throws, four timeouts and one jump ball. All those timeouts during the last two minutes of ball games, especially football games, drive Sam and me crazy. We know game sponsors like to get as much bang for their bucks as they can and like timeouts a lot, but good grief!

So anyway, the wife blows her top. “That’s such a flimsy excuse for being late,” she says. “You stopped somewhere to have a beer with your buddies!”

“No I didn’t honey! I swear it. You know our doctor warned me that drinking beer instead of milk could aggravate my osteoporosis.”

“So you stopped at a bar to have a glass of milk? That is such BS!”

The wife raises her broom to whack her husband (I’ve seen this sort of thing happen).

“Wait a minute!” the husband cries out. “My bones may be brittle, you could break something.”

“I intend to break something!” the wife screeches, raising her broom now in total fury.

“Honey!” the husband shouts. “Don’t you realize you’re increasing my risk of heart attack more than eightfold?”

“What?”

“Yeah, the Wall Street Journal reports that Redford Williams, director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Duke University Medical Center said, “Anger is bad for just about everything we have going on physically.”

“Oooo, I could just kill you!”

“Well I’m about to have a heart attack ‘cause your hostility is causing my body to release too much adrenaline and cortisol into my bloodstream, thus raising my heart rate, blood pressure and sugar metabolism. I need to relax. Is there anymore beer in the fridge?”