Looking at photos tonight with my new roommate. There’s discussion of the things we have in common. I am just looking at all of this history, mostly blurry just like my experience of it is now, lots of you. You don’t look like his soon-to-be ex-wife, but it rings a bell. He says you look happy. Like you and me and we were happy once. It reminds him of what he fell in love with with his wife; something now that has become just a dream; she’s changed so much. I try to tell him that I think it is different with me and you, that you really haven’t changed that much from what I fell for, and that what I fell for was really you. I feel foolish. As if I know? He says you’re beautiful in those old photographs. I say that I...
10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by one form of worry wart or another. It’s very entertaining most of the time, but when it boils down to being told what vessels to drink my water out of, and where I should carry my iPhone, it is going too far. I have planned many times to do hours of scientific research to debunk the worries of my wartish friends, but like so many things (like taking out the trash and washing all of my dirty clothes) I just can’t find the time or energy. Lo! Today I see this article on NYTimes.com. A lot of my legwork has been done for me, and in a very few, short paragraphs too. Now I don’t have to worry about compiling this list anymore. My favorite quote (and this one is for my old boss): Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers. Now I need to go refill my bottle that I keep on my desk, that I will never take...
One last pitch for Tim Drew I heard this piece on NPR this morning and sought it out when I got to work. It made me shed a manly tear that nearly caused me to blow through a traffic light. This page has an audio link to Frank Deford’s audio story as well as a transcript of the same...
For a little over a week now, at JT’s encouragement, I have been reading this blog that is ostensibly a critique of how the press covers baseball. It being a critique of baseball journalism, I didn’t think of posting it here as I imagined it would be of little interest to the average BPC reader, but, lo!, today I spy a piece that we can all get a chuckle out of. It’s a pretty funny sideswipe at ESPN commentators doing their best Siskel & Ebert on the new Batman movie....
My uncle Willy died last Friday. He was 78. While alive, he was the wiry, hairy-chested type of old man of which the world does not make any more these days. He’s the first of my dad’s siblings to die and I believe that it has affected my dad in ways that even his mother’s death over ten years ago has not. When I got the message I was sitting in a park listening to indie rock music in Chicago. I couldn’t help from imagining how strange Willy would have thought the whole scene to be, and in imagining that I thought of how far I have come from my family: that thing I grew up with, and as, that I spent much of my adolescence trying to outdistance, and have spent much of late 20s and 30s trying to figure out how to get back to. What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond,...
Beware the ides of July, the day before you leave for Chicago and the day where every minute will be twice as long as they were yesterday. And the day after… before the airport, every minute thrice as long as even today. Logarhythmic expansion. And at work there’s too much to be done. Self-imposed deadlines the I am trying to shirk. Trying to just cruise into it all, to not have an all-nighter like I seem to always have when getting ready to depart for a few days. The weekend was long, even with not leaving the house all day on Sunday. Bad Buckhead cover bands on Friday. In fact, just bad Buckhead; cover bands are what they are, better and worse. Then to the restaurant run by the TV chef, a visit to the table by said newfound celebrity. This following a day of drinking, talking, smoking with my just-starting-to-rebound friend. Sunday indeed was a day of rest. I haven’t seen Leroy in a few days so I am expecting a request for a full twenty with the next knock on the door. I think the last “loan,” because he is always asking to “borrow,” was for $3, and a soda that I had but didn’t give because it was my last one and I had to wake up the next morning somehow. By the time of my return from Chicago, I will have the first of my two new employees. Hopefully that will mean relief from the overload and the increasingly grueling schedule. A couple of weeks after, my second will be here. Maybe by the end...
The upcoming New Yorker cover and its consequent fallout is a shame. I would totally expect the reaction that the Obama campaign is having from a conservative candidate in his shoes. After all, they have done all that they can to discredit the “liberal media” (i.e. media not controlled by conservative owners and organizations) over the last decade or so, so much so that people are not sure what is real information and what is purely myth, as attested to by the purely-myth, conservative mass email that was forwarded to me today about all of the ways the Democratic party has screwed the American people over Social Security over the last few years. Whereas I may agree with bloggers like the one from the Guardian UK that the cover is not all that funny, that it indeed misses the mark by not being absurd enough – largely because the allegations it portrays are too absurd as it is, I do not agree that there needs to be the adverse reaction from both the McCain and Obama campaigns. In fact, there really needs to be very little reaction at all. As an Obama supporter, the cover does not bother me in the least as it has so many others. It may be in bad taste, but not because it is portraying Obama or issues that have surrounded the presidential race. It is in bad taste in the traditional sense. It’s not funny, which is what it ostensibly is supposed to be, and it does not cast any additional light or provide a new perspective about the absurd allegations that have...
Hollywood’s Hero Deficit — The American, A Magazine of Ideas The article’s basic gist is that “true” heroes have disappeared from American cinema in the last few decades, or when they do exist, they are relegated to “a world far, far way”:e.g. Star Wars, Superman etc. It downplays what it calls “victim heroes,” which it says characterizes all of the heroes from films in recent years: e.g. Erin Brockovich, Michael Clayton… The author states that Hollywood fails to give us such “true” heroes, even though audience obviously want such heroes, although the author fails to provide a source for this matter of fact. If you cannnot tell from tone here, I think this is a load of horseshit. So, tipped by the add for a Newt Gingrich book on the same page as the article, and remembering my college conservative news rag’s (The Duke Review) proclivity for printing photos of John Wayne, I decided to do a little research. From wikipedia.com: The American: A Magazine of Ideas, was founded in November 2006 … as a project of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. What’s it with conservatives and their longing for traditional, “true”, American, mostly white, heroes? What’s their problem with “victim heroes?” Why are the latter not as worthy as the former? Perhaps it’s because whistle-blowing heroes and the like generally cause damage to corporations, board rooms, and thus the wealthy. They expose exploitation that is going on at someone’s expense, for someone more powerful’s gain. Conservative think tanks don’t like those kind of heroes and certainly would rather Hollywood stop telling their stories, so as...
What is poetry? And does it pay? This story in Harper’s may call into question all of the most recent statements I made about poetry and its importance. The writer goes to an annual meeting of the “Famous Poets Society.” One which happens at the Gold Nugget in Reno, of all places. Top prize: $25,000. I laughed out loud several times while marveling at the author’s ability not to completely come unglued at certain of the goings...
I’m having the after lunch cigarette and reading my book about the 60s around-the-world sailing race, when he walked up, looking like he had taken a hammer rather than a toothbrush to his teeth. “What’s that book about?” I show him the cover, A Voyage for Madmen. “Ah… vo…age…for…madame… What’s it about?” “About these Europeans who raced each other in a solo non-stop sailing race around the world in the 1960s.” “Sailing?” “Yeah, with boats that have sails on them?” “Oh yeah, that reminds me of… what’s his name?… You know who I am talking about… What’s his name?” “I don’t know.” “You know!… What’s his name?…. It’s uh… It’s uh… Oh, that’s right… Columbus!” “Well he was an explorer and sailor. Not really in a race around the world. But I see what you are saying.” “Yeah, Columbus. Just like him. Have you ever raced an ostrich?” “An ostrich? No.” “What about an elephant?” “No not an elephant either.” “A horse?” “I’ve ridden horses before, but not in a race.” “I’ve raced all three.” “Really!?!?!?” “Yeah, that ostrich, you gotta hold on tight. It runs like 100 miles per hour and bounces while it does it. Grab hold around that neck and hold on.” “Elephants go faster tan you think too. You have to hold on tight. Grab hold to them big ears and hold on. Got hit by a tree limb while I was on that. See. There. That scar on the back of y head came from the tree limb and that elephant. Don’t want to fall of one. Hold on to them ears.” “I’m from...
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