Beantown Showdown

27
Years since I first followed pro basketball, beginning in the 1980-81 season.

13
Years since the Boston Celtics moved into the New Garden.

0
Times I'd seen the Celtics, my favorite NBA team, play at home prior to last night.

4
Events I saw at the old Boston Garden, none of them a Celtics or Bruins game. I saw a couple of wrestling matches there during the first heyday of the WWF in the mid-'80s. The main event for one of them was Randy "Macho Man" Savage against the Honky Tonk Man, with HTM manager Jimi Hart incarcerated in a steel cage that hung above the ring. The idea was to keep Jimi Hart from interfering with the match, but if memory serves, he managed to toss a foreign object to the Honky Tonk Man anyway -- Hart was clever that way.
I also saw a Cars concert at the Old Garden in 1987 -- it turned out to be their final tour, as they broke up less than a year later -- and I rocked in the '90s with an Aerosmith concert on New Year's Eve '89.

2
Arenas (the old Philly Spectrum and the new arena in D.C.) where I've seen the Celtics play on the road. Through the mid-'90s, it was a whole lot easier to get tickets for Celtics road games than it was to get them in Boston. It was also fun (if a little dangerous sometimes) to cheer for your team in enemy territory.

1 and 2
Last night's game pitted the NBA's No. 1 team (Boston, 47-12) against the team with the No. 2 record (Detroit, 44-17). It was the regular-season game of the year for both teams, so if it was going to take me 27 years to see the Celts play at home, this was a good game for the first.

90-78
Kevin Garnett scored a season-high 31 points and the Celtics won 90-78. Boston went 2-1 against the Pistons this year, and hopefully, the teams will meet for a best-of-seven in the playoffs this spring.

Coffee Meth Myth?

9,935
Methamphetamine labs seized in the United States in 2004, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center's National Methamphetamine Threat Assessment 2008.

2,107
Methamphetamine labs seized in the United States in 2007.

From 2004 through 2006, domestic law enforcement agencies reported that meth as the greatest drug threat they faced. In 2007, cocaine reclaimed first place -- 40.1 percent of law enforcement agencies said cocaine was the greatest drug threat they faced in 2007; 35.0 percent said meth.

Which drug poses the greatest threat to generally law-abiding coffee drinkers? Last year, at least two TV stations ran news stories saying that mini-coffee pots in hotel rooms were sometimes being used to cook crystal meth. It reeked of an urban myth to me, so I decided to do some investigating and interviewing. I was surprised with what I learned. This is the subject of my INeedCoffee article this month, Coffee Meth Myth?