The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Plow the Ponies

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SMU (11-2) vs. Penn State (11-2)

Frigid temperatures and a dusting of snow will greet the Mustangs from warmer climes on Saturday for a noon showdown with the Nittany Lions at Beaver Stadium in a first-round CFP matchup. To prepare, the SMU players were directed to put ice cubes in their compression undies (which I’m told replace the jock straps familiar to us baby boomers). Freezing their balls is an apt prelude to a mid-December game in Beaver Stadium. State College for Christmas is a vacation destination only an Eskimo could love.

But what about the game, Turkey? Jeez, you get lost in those digressions and you talk to yourself so much that you even write to yourself! Come on, get with it!

OK, I will. Both teams slid in the back door of the playoffs. Penn State got there after a loss to Oregon, while SMU gained its entry with a loss to Clemson. I must say that the CFP committee has done some creative things thing year, and they pissed off lots of people by leaving Alabama out. One of the sports media whiners, Joel Klatt, thinks Penn State’s path was contrived to be the easiest way to the semi-finals, with SMU in the first round, and Boise State ahead if they dispatch SMU. Wild horses, in this case Mustangs and Broncos, cannot bring down a Lion, right?

Bad News/Good News

Well, all bullshit aside, some of the big news going into this game is that Penn State will be without its primary backup quarterback and creative play option, Beau Pribula, who has opted to evacuate State College via the Obnoxious NCAA Tran$fer Portal (ONTP). The NCAA had its collective head up its ass when it decided on the deadlines for the ONTP, such that players on playoff teams who want to find jobs on other teams must miss the damn playoff games. What a piece of shit! The NCAA, I mean, not Pribula. He had little choice to use his additional year of eligibility, which he couldn’t use at Penn State. He is graduating in December.

But the good news is that concomitant with Pribula’s announcement, Drew Allar made a mitigating announcement of his own. He intends to play for Penn State in 2025. Who will be his backup is unclear at this point.

So Long, Beau. We will miss you.

Pribula brought some unique talents to the squad, which Offensive Coordinator Andy Kotelnicki used extensively in his creative offense. Pribula also was an unflappable backup, who could run the offense when needed. We will miss him. (Here, I could have said, “He will be missed.” I would never say that. What is that bullshit all about? It is typically found in vacuous eulogies or reactions to someone’s departure from an organization. Couching in the passive voice tacitly says, “While I don’t give a flying fuck about this guy, some of the rest of you might miss him.” Look, clowns, stop writing, “He will be missed.” If you miss him, say so; if you don’t, then shut your pie hole, OK? But I digress.).

Hey, by the way, where is BOWLing for Dollars this year, Todd? Have you retired from that annual delight? I miss it. (It will be missed, but I digress).

I Can’t Even…

Meanwhile, back at the game, I typically look at NCAA stats for the season to get a gauge on PSU’s opponents’ capabilities versus Penn State’s. Well, those pieces of shit at the NCAA threw me a curve this week by dumping out the season’s statistics and displaying only the post-season. Maybe I’m too stupid to find where they might have hidden the 2024 regular season, and I’m definitely too lazy to continue looking for it. The same people who designed the timetable for the ONTP apparently designed the web interface to the stats pages. Fuck ’em.

So, I’ll pull my prediction right out of my ass, like I usually do, only without any pretenses of statistical mastery of the contest or intimate knowledge of the opponents. This is what hack sports media wonks call “breaking down” SMU, or whoever they’re “breaking down”. In horse racing, “breaking down” has a different meaning, and it ain’t good. In the race chart of this game, we’ll just hope that the Mustangs break down.

Why is this a noon game?

Typically, noon games are for shit teams that won’t draw much of an audience. However, in this case, this game was one of the crumbs thrown to TNT, who is doing CFP coverage for the very first time. ABC/ESPN/Disney and CBS sure as hell weren’t going to give them Ohio State vs. Tennessee, Texas vs. Clemson, or Notre Dame vs. Indiana. So, SMU vs. Penn State got the booby prize. Yay us!

Da Wedda — WTF?

Yeah, well, you wouldn’t even need to look at a forecast to know what we’re dealing with here. And the numbers won’t do your frozen ass any good if you show up for the game. But in the interest of accurate reporting, we’ll say that the forecast we have seen here at The Turkey is a high of 29 and a low of 15. The north wind blows free (how much do you charge?), at the rate of 15 mph, so it will feel like a ball-chilling 17 degrees out there. Precipitation probability is 65%, so there will be snow showers as the pitifully impotent sun ducks into and out of cloud cover. Yea, verily, this will be a balmy December Central Pennsylvania day.

So, advantage to the Nittany Lions, who put up with that bullshit lots more than the ponies from Big D.

Da Uninformed Bottom Line

Here we come to what could be, but we hope isn’t, the last Official Turkey Poop Prognostication of the season. We know that anything emanating from the pen of this foul old fowl this week is laden with sarcasm but lacking in substance. Yet you’re still reading, so I must be doing something entertaining. That’s all I purport to be here — light on information, but heavy on the jokes. I never take myself seriously, and any resemblance between this blog and a reliable information source is purely imaginary. That leads us into my prediction for the game.

I believe the Mustangs have a potent offense, but I believe scoring will be low on both sides due to frozen balls, both of human and pigskin varieties. See, here I sit in Florida, where it is 76 currently, so I can give you a warmed over prediction. Look, at this point, the spread is PSU –8.5. The over/under is 54.5. So, applying bettor’s calculus, we’re looking at a break-even pure numbers outcome without consideration of money lines, with a score resembling 31-24 in favor of Penn State. I’m thinking cold hands, cold balls, and cold hearts will knock a field goal off each total, resulting in my prediction of Penn State 27, SMU 20. Franklin doesn’t cover the spread, but wins the game. I’m taking the under.

I’ll be back after the Glacier Bowl with some sparkling commentary from the warm and fuzzy Turkey living on that penile peninsula known as Florida.

Mounjaro Update: Week 28

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Bet Your Bottom Dollar

Although the title for this series of blog posts relates to my experience with Mounjaro pharmacotherapy, I cover the broader subject of my comprehensive approach to type two diabetes management. I’ll tell you what I have been doing to improve my situation after a recap of how I got here and at what cost.

One day this past spring, I woke up and told myself that I was doing things all wrong. Ignoring the well known fact that I’m carbohydrate sensitive and insulin resistant, my diet was crappy and I settled into a sedentary lifestyle. I was out of control. I knew what I was doing to myself, but I kept on doing it.

Out of Control

At age 77, I was looking at fasting glucose measurements of 150-160 mg/dL (8.3 – 8.9 mmol/L) each morning and my HbA1c was at 7.6% (60 mmol/mol). I needed major changes to avert a life-ending train wreck. Although my philosophy has always been to avoid drugs as much as possible, I researched GLP-1 and SGLT-1 drugs, which are all the modern rage, thanks to Big Pharma’s profuse marketing campaigns. I read several papers in medical journals, which convinced me to narrow down my choice to Mounjaro. With the concurrence of my doctor, I initiated Mounjaro therapy in June 2024.

My results have been excellent. The drug is a crutch, alright, but I would prefer to consider it a jump start. My diet/exercise battery was dead, so I needed something that would get my metabolic engine running again. Eventually, I want to disconnect the jumper cables and run this thing on my own. Mounjaro has enabled me to make significant progress on glucose control while I remodel my diet and ramp up my exercise program. I exercise daily and eat a low-carb diet, the combination of which has enabled me to shed over fifty pounds (>23 kg) along the way.

At What Cost?

None of this is cheap. Although Mounjaro is covered by my Medicare Part D drug coverage, my insurer places it in a cost-sharing tier, so if I remain on Mounjaro during the entire year 2025, it’s going to cost me $2,000. Other lifestyle adjustments are less expensive. Despite my bad back, I joined the wellness program at a local rehab and signed up for some personal training with the exercise physiologist. I do three days per week at the gym. I have purchased a decent collection of exercise and resistance training equipment for home use as well, for the non-gym days. Finally, eating real food is more expensive and time consuming than eating crap. Instead of getting all my calories for a day from a submarine sandwich and a bag of potato chips, I now cook all my meals from scratch.

If Mounjaro and all the lifestyle adjustments do what I want it them to do for me, they are well worth the money. I’m getting close to my HbA1c target 0f 5.2% (33 mmol/mol). If I can maintain that level for a decent period (six months to a year) I will need to get together with Dr. DeLorean (not his real name) to figure out an exit plan from Mounjaro that will avert the oft-reported “rebound effect”. Meanwhile, I hope I can stay in the diet and exercise groove, which I want to continue until I take the proverbial eternal celestial dirt nap.

Do I Truly Need Mounjaro?

Could I have accomplished this objective without Mounjaro? Perhaps, because I have lost weight and got my HbA1c down to 5.3% (34 mmol/mol) in the past. Unfortunately, I did not stick with the program. I could blame Covid-19 lockdowns, but I live in Florida. Besides, I had nothing better to do during the Covid time than to lose weight. I lost seventy pounds (32 kg) in 2020 and 2021, then slowly gained much of it back from 2022 to 2024. Yo-yo cycles have long defined my life. I figured that this would be my last chance so, to use a well-worn poker metaphor, I went all in.

While Big Pharma has convinced the ever-expanding weight-loss community that GLP-1 drugs such as Zepbound and Wegovy are magical, pharmacological cures for their invented “disease” of obesity, their object is to create lifelong reliance on their highly profitable products. The marketeers of Eli Lilly & Company and Novo Nordisk A/S, aided by doctors, medical journals, and medical societies they have “sponsored”, have convinced the children of Hamlin to follow them into the mountains, knowing that magic sells. Most fat people wouldn’t be fat unless they were defective in their approach to diet and exercise, so Big Pharma’s marketing plays into their inability to shed pounds the old-fashioned way. I want to do better, and I want to ultimately escape their iron grasp, replacing perceived magic with hard work.

Budweiser or Miller High Life?

It is time for me to wrap up this stream of consciousness with a personal anecdote. In the vacuous social media weight-loss milieu, an acronym, “NSV”, describes observed intangible benefits of one’s progress toward the deporking goals. NSV stands for “Non-Scale Victory”. Tonight, I experienced an NSV. My wife noted that due to my diet and exercise programs I am developing defined abdominal muscles. She said, “Soon, you’ll have a six-pack!” My response was, “Developing a six-pack? Hell, I’ve got the whole keg!” I have always been hard on myself. Although I have made good progress, I’m not seeing what she’s seeing!

My Week on Mounjaro

The past week was quite stable. Morning glucose was 92.4 mg/dL (5.13 mmol/L) and overall average glucose was 100 mg/dL (5.56 mmol/L). I had a spike to about 160 mg/dL (8.89 mmol/L) after lunch on Thursday, when I diverged from the plan to eat some bread.

I have noted that not eating after Eight PM tends to keep my morning “fasting” glucose lower, so I’ll be more diligent in observing that self-imposed policy going forward. No midnight snacks for this fatso!

My weight remained flat for the week, like the belly Jenny thinks I have. This is a reasonable weight to maintain for a while. In prior columns, I have mentioned the deleterious effects of losing too much weight too fast, and I’ve already done that. I would like to lose about thirty more pounds, but not at the expense of my further compromising dwindling, senior muscle mass. Weight loss has always been a secondary or tertiary goal, which I am not pushing. I certainly do not wish to chase ever-increasing doses of Mounjaro to accomplish it.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

That’s all for this week. This coming week I’ll have the EMG and nerve conduction study to determine the cause of my left thigh numbness and pain. Despite the pain, I’ll hit the gym for an hour-and-a-half Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I’ll do my daily home resistance training and stretching. I tend to get obsessed with these things, you know.