Good Old Fashioned Manual Labor

One of the reasons we went to visit Josh and Elizabeth in Beacon, an hour or so north of the City, was so I could set some tile for them, and show them the ropes, so they could do it for themselves later.

They had sheet-rocked a small area with some water hookups, with the intent to create a laundry room. They had bought and borrowed all of the necessary tools and materials; 12x12 tiles, 2x2 tiles, thin-set mortar, trowels, a sealant type os material I'd never used, a wet saw, and Mastic, an adhesive agent that I never used before but knew about.

I set about putting the sealant down (start with a layer of thin-set on the ground, then the sealant paper-like fabric, then thin-set on top of it and go from there with the tile), then showed Josh how to make the cuts with the wet saw. Then I got to work. I tiled the floor, which, for being so small, sure kicked my ass. No knee-pads left my kneecaps feeling like they were bruised, while the up and down played havoc on my knee muscles and lower back. You know, just a day of manual labor/construction aches and pains.

Then we used the Mastic coming up the walls, putting the ceramic up with the glue. After getting the wall set up with the protruding corner, with the grout lines lining up, I was assed out and cashed in simultaneously. I was done and useless for the rest of the day, and Josh and Elizabeth finished up the wall, which was still plenty of work. Here are some pictures; I'm putting the sealant down, some more working, and the newly finished work, without grout, which they'll do today or tomorrow.

It was nice to feel useful again.

Finally Went to the "White House"

Here I mean to use the quoted "White House" as the translation for the Casablanca, a neighborhood bar Corrie and I have passed thousands of times in the three years living here, and this past Friday ventured inside for the first time.

This establishment seems to keep strange hours...it's a bar that's more likely to be open on Wednesday morning than a Friday night, so planning a trip over there is difficult. But since it's closer to us than our closest subway, it's the kind of a place you needn't plan to go to. It is directly down Malcolm X Blvd, before the halfway point to the A-train.

We finally saw it looked open when we had some time and some cash money with us, and checked in. The door was locked and bolted. A small elder lady came up (I could see her from behind a small rhombus window), opened the metal gate, then unbolted the door, to see what the commotion was. I asked if it was okay for us to come in and get a cocktail. She eyed Corrie and I closely, and eventually let us in. She was the only person in the entire place.

I never caught her name, but she was about five feet tall, and shrinking, looked in her sixties, but moved like she was in her eighties. She could sure pour a drink, though, and at a reasonable price even. The interior reminded me of the Goodfellas scene when the kill Billy Bats; the lighting and the decor looked just like something out of the early seventies, and the great soul-music she put on fit right in. We would've stayed longer, but I had the market the next day. Corrie was sad to leave her alone again; she(Corrie) even offered to wash our cocktail glasses. The bar elder told us she'd owned the place for forty years, and that she lives on our street, up on Halsey.

We will be returning.

That trip prompted me to want to visit inside a simply titled Brooklynite Gallery, just a block south of the New Casablanca. This gallery has been here for a few months, but, also due to strange hours, Corrie and I haven't been able to get there, besides passing it everyday. Usually, the problem is we have groceries coming home that need to be put away, or are on our way out of town...the hours are like 7 pm to 10 pm Thursday through Saturday, maybe one of the days it opens at 3...

There is this cool thing over the facade, though.

(If you clicked on the link, there is a pause button on the left-side that stops that music. My bad.)

After Three-and-a-Half Years, Leafing!

Sort of!

Corrie and I finally got to see some of the famed foliage during the autumn months, before everything fully comes down. Usually we'd be upstate before the colors changed, then back up after the leaves fell but before it'd snow. So finally, after three-and-a-half years, we got up in time to see some of the real thing.

It was almost a-hundred percent a-flame with deep oranges and reds, dense yellows flowing over ridges like silent and chilly fire, smokeless and beautiful. It was magnificent.

This picture was of a hill directly across from the parking lot of probably the most picturesque Home Depot in America.

So, really, we didn't go on an hours long joy ride through New England marveling at the science that turns the leaves the brilliant "fall" colors, but we did get to see it pretty much up close.

The most beautiful part I remember came this morning, actually, riding the train down to the City from Beacon. That train ride is along the Hudson River, right up along the water for long stretches. This morning, around 8 am, the sun was at that golden angle bringing pure sharp light along the Palisades across the river, the sky was crisp and deep blue, and the riverbanks were fully red and orange, deep and warm looking, snapshots of flames from a distance, a small smattering of yellow that was nearly hushed by the dominant darker tones, mixing smugly with the rusty colored rock.

Feeling Safe?

Back on my mom's birthday, September 10th, there was a shooting in our neighborhood. It was of the drive-by persuasion, which is rare for Bed-Stuy. Young black men shooting each other is sadly less rare out here, as this 'hood has New York's highest homicide rate. That evening Corrie exited the subway to walk the few blocks back to our apartment, and was blocked by police cars and yellow tape, and was forced to take a circuitous way home. Earlier in the day I'd noticed helicopters hovering loudly for a solid ninety minutes, rattling the entire neighborhood. The next day there was this story in the paper. It highlights the grim and tragic tale in whatever details were made available to the cops by normally uncooperative witnesses.

A few days later, this made it's second appearance in our area, just away from the subway. It first appeared here a while ago, and was packed up soon after. I took this picture today, more than a month later.

Feel any safer?

Also, strangely in the same issue of the paper, I saw a photograph that looked familiar, that of a broken fire-hydrant that had been leaking for weeks, and that I was about to call 311 (our all-around helper line) to fix. I thought the article was about the broken and wasteful hydrant. It wasn't. It was about an apartment building across the street that hadn't had water for two months, and the hydrant had been broken by these residents so they could get some water for their daily needs. Another sad story, this one about a landlord dying before making repairs, about no heirs to rescue the building, about no electricity and water, and about another ghetto story of how it really works can be found here.

The picture from the paper was almost the same one that follows (but closer up), but the website has a picture of the building.

Forty and Counting

I may have turned thirty this year, but my Yankees have advanced to the World Series for the first time since 2003...around here that's a drought, but try telling the Cubbies that.

Corrie and I spent the weekend out in Beacon at Cousin Josh's (I showed them how to set tile...more on that later), and they were gracious to let me watch Game 6 against the Angels on their large television. I thought it was pretty nice of them since they don't care for baseball, and Elizabeth, being from Massachusetts, has a special dislike of the Yankees (and Jeter specifically, which isn't rare among Yankee haters out there).

It didn't help that sporadically I was screaming and cursing at the screen as Corrie tried to calm me and get my blood-pressure back to safe levels. I posted here a while back about watching the screen at MLB.com and itchily awaiting the colored circles to show up...I was notified by my good friend Ryan about specific websites that stream games like that for free. I found one and settled in last Thursday at my lappy screen to watch Game 5 on a live stream for ex-pats living in France.

I was a few minutes late and missed the Yankees starting pitcher give up four runs in his first thirteen pitches. He settled in, and I came and went from watching the game, getting aggravated that the Angels kept being successful throwing so much off-speed cheese (I swear I've never seen so many off-speed pitches in a series before). One time I came back and the Yankees had scored six runs in an inning, and were a few outs from advancing to the World Series. Burnett, the starter for the Yanks, came out when he shouldn't have, gave up a hit and a walk, then they brought in Damaso Marte, and I almost had a heart attack...the papers here love this lefty Marte, but in all the times I've seen him pitch in bars during this season, I don't think I've ever seen him get a single person out. Of course he gives up a run, and they bring in the struggling youngster Hughes, who coughs up the lead, and the game, and they had to travel back to the Bronx for last night's game, while I was ready to drink a bottle of whiskey, which probably wouldn't have helped my blood-pressure.

So I watched last night with Corrie and Josh and Elizabeth, who thanked me for being cool with there constant stream of trash talking, bad-Yankee-voodoo, and joking remarks. In between hilarious comments I tried to enlighten them on the strategy, the rules, the way to effectively pitch to certain batters, what happens when there's an error (Kazmir tossing it away? Yikes, these guys just couldn't get out of their own way)...I don't think they're fans now, but it was fun to watch with people you care about. Even Corrie got to give some lessons on things, having learned from the lessons I gave her.

But, the "Forty" in the title of this post alludes to this being the fortieth pennant for the Yankees--their fortieth trip to the World Series, more than twice as many as the next team, the Dodgers, who have eighteen World Series appearances.

Some Portuguese Literature

While deciding what to read next, I settled during the interim to read Jose Saramago's Death With Interruptions. I'd read about this book in the New Yorker months ago, and it sounded interesting...then later, I'd read about the other of Portugal's two most well-known contemporary authors, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and thought I should find some stuff by him. Lobo Antunes always has an eye cast backwards to the historical time of Portuguese conquests in Africa, South America, and their foothold in India...one novel has Magellan showing up, five-hundred-years late, sailing into Lisbon towing the nation of Brazil behind his ship...

But here I'm reading Death With Interruptions. Saramago's concept is that death, specifically with the small "d", even though it's a person, has taken a vacation, and at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day no one dies. Horrific car accidents caused by alcoholic consumption end with mutilated bodies that refuse to turn into corpses. Elders on the cusp of death remain so indefinitely. At first this scenario, to the people living it, is like a utopian dream: we've conquered death. But, of course, the church is very upset (with no death there's no resurrection, with no resurrection there's no christianity) as well as the insurance industry and the undertaker industry. A black-market racket develops taking those on the cusp of death over the national lines, into one of the neighboring countries where death is still at work.

This is all very interesting, but sixty pages into the short book there are a two things that strike me. First, so far, there are no named characters at all, just titled voices like "the prime minister" and "the grandfather" of the poor country family we watch for a few pages. I don't think it's necessary to have characters to become emotionally involved with for a novel to work, but, I could be wrong, and I only say that characters may not be necessary because what I want to think can work for literature is that the obliteration of normal rules won't necessarily obliterate the art. I could be jumping to conclusions, but here it seems precarious, like the concept is the star, and we, as readers, should simply marvel in the quaint scenes that follow.

The second thing that struck me, something that leads this book to read more like a college student's transcript of a sci-fi movie treatment he's working on, is that the dialogue is not written in a conventional western way. As a reader, one gets used to seeing quotation marks breaking up dialogue, paragraph spacing being used, and the non-verbal action being housed outside of the quotes and commas. Here, Saramago crams entire conversations into super-duper run-on sentences, taking up entire pages sometimes, the actual spoken dialogue and non-verbal action all separated by commas, and capital letters being employed to signify that a voice has changed. So, on one hand, this looks like college-student summary, and on the other, it looks brilliant and poetic. Doing the dialogue this way lets him show characters and scenes that have emotion without needing the reader, or expecting the reader, to come away with any attachment to said characters. That's what really makes the concept the star.

I guess I did find something to read, not just for the interim.

A Note on Baseball: A Comparison That is Favorable to the Yankees

I am a Yankee fan. I freely admit this, and have for a long enough time, even since before they had Jeter and Big Mo and were winning World Series' in the late 90s.

I'd always felt that while, yes, the ownership style of Boss Steinbrenner was weakening at best, or destroying at worst, the financial fabric of the game, that he was acting in a way--spending the most money--that was in the interest of the fans of the New York Yankees: trying to put a perennial winner out on the field. Yes, the Yankees spend the most, and yes, they make the most money through licensing a brand that has come to signify more than a baseball team. But they pour it back into the team, trying to create a winner.

Other teams have created winners with less resources; this is obviously true since the last eight champions have not been the Yankees. One can see how that works in Tom Verducci and Joe Torre's book, about exploiting inefficiencies in the market, about learning the lessons from Billy Beane's MoneyBall, and about how the Yankees failed miserably at that science during the times from 2004 to 2008.

One highlight from that book is the Central Fund. The Central Fund is a trough of money that is filled by joint business ventures like MLB.com, and doled out in equal proportions to the teams. Teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, and Cubs still (and probably always will) have a competitive advantage in terms of resources from television deals and licensing, but they each receive the same proportion of money from the Central Fund that smaller-market teams get. But, for the smaller-market teams, the money from the Central Fund helps them lock up their younger players to contracts, avoiding arbitration-eligible years and the start of free-agency, making it harder for teams like the Yankees or Cubs to just go out and buy the best young players. Each team, before a television or radio deal is signed, before they sell a single ticket or beer at their stadium, starts off a season with a nut of something like $35 million from the Central Fund. For the Yankees and Red Sox, this probably helps put nice cushions on their expensive seats; for the Rays and Indians (before this past season), this helped them lock up their good young rookies...then you have the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Pirates have one of the oldest and most storied franchises in baseball. They've won World Series', fielded teams that included Honus Wagner, Bill Madlock, Willie Stargell, the Waner brothers, and of course the first Latino Hall of Famer, Roberto Clemente. Now? At least ten years of losing ball and the appearance of selling off their good young players just as they reach a point of being able to command a decent (by baseball standards) pay. They built a new stadium, hosted the All Star Game, drummed up some recognition for Pittsburgh as a new center for tech-commerce and industry, all the while still selling off their best players and staffing the team like a JV squad, and just hoping for fifty victories a year...and pocketing the Central Fund money. They don't lock up their good young talent, even though you never have to pay as much as you would later when they're a free agent, they don't pour that money into winning baseball...they pour it into their pockets. That's what it looks like anyway. The old cliche phrase 'Wait 'til next year' in Pittsburgh is now 'Wait 'til the Steelers' season starts'...

On the one hand, you've got a team that spends the most money, even while expecting things no team in any sport should be allowed to expect, and on the other, a team ownership that to whom baseball is a business and nothing else, lining their accounts, and selling off their best players once they get good enough to be worth something.

A Note on The Simpsons

I came across (or, more accurately, was sent)(thanks, mom) an unauthorized and unofficial history of The Simpsons, written in a snippet, oral tradition style.

Some of the way through it, I can definitely say I've learned things. It starts out with some background on Matt Groening, about his schooling, his college years, about moving to LA and starting Life in Hell, the comic strip that got the attention of Jim Brooks. The book describes the early stressful days at Fox, about their attempt to become a fourth network. It talks about Tracey Ullman, and the little bumper spots of animation, and about how there had been two different casts of characters, by two separate animation creators and groups (one was obviously dropped after a short while). About these things I knew some, but not in the details given here.

Then I read things of which I had no idea: that The Simpsons, as a satirical and heartwarming animation program, as a groundbreaking prime-time series, as an entity that continues to affect all realms of comedy in this country to this day was really the brainchild of Sam Simon, one of the three names on the television at the end of the opening credits under the "Developed by" credit (along with Jim Brooks and Matt Groening). It seems like from this book, if you like The Simpsons, then you're a fan of Sam Simon's work.

Whether a gruff dad, bratty kids, and a doting mom who filled time and let the audience of a sketch show know the sketch was over could become a viable series on their own was very much in question. Matt Groening had provided the template; Jim Brooks would float in occasionally and add minor touches to scenes that would reinforce the families lovingness and reality (not a small contribution); but Sam Simon hand-picked the entire writing staff. He flushed out the town of Springfield. He gave the characters their now-known characterizations. An accomplished television writer, producer, brilliantly hilarious and quite caustic, Simon was also an excellent cartoonist, and the smoothing out of the characters from the first season into what we, as fans, understand as their final look was done by him.

Matt Groening was more involved in the licensing of the various products that made him incredibly wealthy than he was with the day-to-day operations of the show. Besides, his history working in television was zero, and the skills he brought to the table as a cartoonist were ill-suited for the rigors of 22-minute television-script writing. Sam Simon turned an idea--How about a series about that animated family from Tracey--into the institution it became, and is, today, through one brilliant classic episode after another, full of true emotion, sight gags, subversive wit, and real life situations.

Sam Simon left the show after the fourth season, the relationship between he and Groening fluctuated between non-talking to yelling and screaming, mainly due (it appears) to Groening happily taking all the credit for making the show a success, and Simon being basically ignored. Simon also seemed to feel he got shafted from the financial end of the merchandising. In the end, when he left, he took no severance package and instead settled on future points...it seems he makes about $20 to $30 million a year--still--even while it's been fifteen years since he was running the show.

Simon had been a genius who'd worked on Taxi and Cheers, and Groening was a starving artist riding the bus and searching the shag carpet in his hovel for change to get a burger...which story would you guess would be the one picked up by the major media outlets once the show hit the big-time? Industry Insider makes Good Show a Success, or Starving Cartoonist Hits Jackpot and is King of TV? (That's a paraphrase from the book itself, as someone was trying to console a furious Sam Simon.)

Not owning any seasons earlier than the fifth, I really had no idea that Sam's contribution was as great as it was.

Something Weird

I've made an effort to not ever relay any of my dreams on this blog...by dreams I mean that literally, the nocturnal holographic shows people's brains produce. I decided that early on, mainly because it seems too self-indulgent, and besides, nobody really cares what other people dream, unless it's wild and crazy, or if it shows a drastic personality disorder that other people recognize in a person, and they like to silently feel superior to the dream-teller. That, and my dreams tend to be so bizarre that most people probably wouldn't believe that I dreamed some of those scenarios, but rather made them up out of whole cloth...which, if you read some of the dreams I've written down, I'd be most happy with being thought creative enough to invent them myself, without the aid of my REM sleep.

I'm breaking that trend here, and will relay a weird occurrence I had during sleep the other day, since it was the first time anything like it has happened to me, and it relates to current (sporting) events.

Saturday night, I was very tired and ready for bed, watching the Yankees-Angels game, game 2 of the ALCS, on my computer screen, watching the little blips pop up on the screen as colored circles indicating balls and strikes, green-circles for a ball, red-circles for a strike, and blue-circles for a ball in play. This is how one "watches" the game for free on a computer...a rectangle on the screen to signify the strike-zone, a batter silhouette to represent the batter, and colored circles to show the approximate location of the pitches. Not the most exciting thing.

In any case, it was the top of the eleventh inning, the score was tied 2-2, an Angel was on second base, and I watched the little colored circles showing up for Chone (pronounced "Shawn") Figgins...red (foul), green (ball), green (ball) and a few more innocuous combinations, then a blue-circle, next to it saying "ball in play, runs", whereas what I wanted to see was the word "outs" instead of "runs", since it signified that Figgins had driven in the runner at second, putting the Angels ahead in the 11th inning.

I cursed the screen, turned off my Internet, shut-down the computer, and went to bed. My dream was, again, long and bizarre, the complete details of which I don't exactly remember, but there was a game occurring in it that I was passionate about, a football game I believe, that ended. I saw a line-score with two teams I couldn't read (you can't read in dreams I've read while doing some personal research), but the home team, the team shown on the bottom of line-scores, had won the game by the score of 4-3. I do remember the numbers pretty vividly. I thought, strange for a football score, like two safeties beating a field-goal, then I thought that maybe it wasn't football, and maybe something else was going on.

After I woke up, I remembered my dream, and smiled about the football thoughts, and thought how cool it would be if the Yankees had comeback and actually won that game, pretty sure in the fact that they'd be going out west with the series tied at one game a piece. I went to get some flour at the bodega to make waffles and saw the newspaper...the Yankees had comeback, and had won the game, by the score of 4-3.

My dreams are generally vivid, colorful, completely of the wall, but I'd never say that I ever really dreamed of prognostications, and this was more likely a representation of what I wanted to happen...but when I told Corrie all about it, she said, half-joking, "Wow, you must have some psychic connection to your team, or something," to which my general sentiment is "phooey"...I don't outrightly deny that that kind of phenomena is impossible, but I'm not about to start claiming I dreamed the future.

But it was a pretty cool moment when I saw the newspaper yesterday morning.

Hand Signals Through the Window

Corrie and I just left the bar where we were watching the Yankees-Angels game, the first game of the ALCS, and a funny thing happened during the first few innings.

We were sitting at a table next to the glass doors that during the summer are opened but during the winter (autumn?) are definitely shut. The Yankees had just scored another run, pushing their lead at the time from 2-1 to 3-1. Everyone in the bar was screaming and clapping and jumping up and down, and in the moments afterward we took our seats, and I heard a knock at the glass.

Outside, in the windy cold, a passerby was trying to get our attention. When I looked over to him, he signaled with his fingers "2-1", two fingers on one hand, one on the other. I shook my head vehemently, and his eyes got large, looking likely to well at the prospect of the Yankees relinquishing the lead.

I held up three fingers on one hand and one on the other, telling him the score was now 3-1, and he almost collapsed in relief, storming off with heavy steps.

The international ice-breaker of sports in action again.

The score as of now, with the game still in progress is 4-1, Yankees up.

Medical Issues Facing the NFL

I read an article today about football and dogfighting. Anyone who subscribes to the specific magazine will know which article I mean. Anyway, it starts with an anecdote from a retired offensive lineman who keeled over in a Nashville establishment, woke up moments later on the floor, was helped out to his car and proceeded to vomit all over the place. He'd been experiencing spells of lightheadedness and nausea, bouts of forgetfulness and vertigo, during the last of his playing days and the last two years since he retired in 2007.

Next the article details a Vet hospital in Mass. that has a dementia section for patients afflicted with Alzheimer's. When patients in that ward die, an autopsy is usually performed for research purposes. For a seventy-two-year-old patient, a brain-scan performed during the autopsy showed an unusual pattern. The two proteins that show up like a buck-shot pattern in the stain-scan of patients with Alzheimer's--amyloid and tau--were in this patient relegated to the outer reaches of the brain, the outside of it basically, and amyloid was basically absent; this gentlemen's outer-layer was riddled with tau. Tau is a protein that builds up in brain-cells, eventually shutting them down and killing them. This patient had, it turns out, C.T.E. (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), a progressive neurological disorder caused by brain trauma.

C.T.E. afflicted patients will exhibit the same symptoms as Alzheimer's patients, and be housed in the same wards, and eventually pass on, and nobody would know unless an autopsy is performed. It turns out that the 72 year-old with the tau-only stain-scan spent a block of time as a boxer.

A few more brain stain-scans performed there revealed the same pattern, and each time the person had been either a boxer or a football player. Through another source studying the same thing, they found families of ex-NFL players willing to let the team study the brains of their recently deceased loved ones, and the pattern was always the same.

The football player who was highlighted in the beginning had other anecdotes about getting hit so hard that he saw bright white spots; that usually near the end of long continuous drives he felt like he was about to black out and faint; about how once he was knocked unconscious, woke up a minute later, sat on the bench trying to figure out where he was, and ended up missing the rest of the game in what to him seemed like a few minutes of catching his breath. He played the next week after that out-knocking.

That's pretty much the essence of the connection to dogfighting. Dogmen, the trainers of fighting dogs, basically exploit their animal's desire to be praised and perform well for their master, usually circling the ring during a match so the dog will be seeing his/her owner cheering them along. They put themselves at risk for their owners, for the love of their owners, just as football players put themselves at risk for their teams, for the love of their team.

NASCAR in the early 2000s lost a handful drivers--none more famous than Dale Earnhardt--to horrific crashes. They beefed up safety requirements in the cars, added a new type of outer wall that absorbed collisions better than concrete, and haven't lost a racer since. Can football be more like NASCAR than dogfighting?

Well...A research team at North Carolina had sensors put into the helmets of their football team to record the pressure of the collisions during both practice and full-on games. It turned out, that even in light contact practices, a player could have anywhere from 25 g to 100 g collisions (the g relates to gravitational forces, g-forces, like fighter jets and roller-coasters). A car-crash at 25 mph is about 100 g. So one lineman during the first practice had a 98 g hit and a 80 g hit, and it wasn't even lunch. He'd basically been in two car accidents. It seems like the drastic hits, however horrific they look, aren't as bad as the repetitive little hits sustained over a course of a career.

How is this solved? Switching to flag-football or touch-football? Outlawing the sport outright? In 1905 a collection of college administrators was one vote shy of outlawing the sport of football, one professor calling it a "boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport." The didn't outlaw it, just changed the rules; allowing the forward pass and extending the amount of yards needed for a first down from 5 to 10.

Could rule changes help? Vicious hits are policed, effectively so...

This is the six-billion dollar question...how to confront and deal with the ugly underbelly of being a pro-player...

Finally (Part 2)

I still haven't really decided what to tackle next, as a read, but in the meantime, I picked up Pynchon's collection of early short-stories called Slow Learner. It has, in the twenty page introduction, what's usually assumed to be the only autobiographical sketch anyone'll ever get from the reclusive Pynchon. The stories are okay, some less so, some more. Unmistakably from the same voice that fans love, but less developed and less awesome.

Then I started reading reviews online...some people were talking trash--about the stories, about the writer, but mostly about themselves...about how they were "frighteningly intimidated" by Pynchon's works.

It looks like Norm and I entered the world of Pynchon fanaticism through the most unlikely door--having read his longest work, Against the Day, first. The next work Norm read was Pynchon's first novel, V., whereas the second one I read was Gravity's Rainbow. It seems like anyone trying to get readers to take on Pynchon suggests they start with The Crying of Lot 49, then move on to V. or Vineland (...Lot 49 is only 150+ pages). I still agree wit Norm; start with Vineland, move on to ...Lot 49...

In any case, in Slow Learner, there's a story that takes place split between a Libyan desert-beach town and Cairo, in 1898, and involves characters Porpentine, the Wrens (Sir Alastair, Victoria and Mildred), and both Goodfellow and Bongo-Shatfsbury. These names mean nothing to anyone who didn't read V., and the story is re-tooled to fit in that novel, down to the character names, relationship triangles, and basic action. In fact, it almost clears up some of the mysteriousness from that specific section in V.

I'll shutup now...

Farmer's Gathering

This past Sunday Corrie and I were invited, along with Marc and Linda, to a party and pig-roast at Windfall Farms, in upstate New York, in the near vicinity of where our car and trailer nearly died on the drive to Joshua's (we had to leave it for a few nights at a truck-stop bar).

We are acquainted with Windfall Farms through working the markets for Ronnybrook Dairy, and were told to come and enjoy the sights and food, and stay for the burlesque-style show put on by a trio of farmhands supplied musically by a trio of musicians (one dude played a mean accordion).

We got there pretty early, maybe earlier than most party people thought necessary, but they didn't mind, and after we volunteered to help (we were eventually turned down--they had it pretty much under control), they showed us around the grounds. They have thirteen acres on one side of the street, and I think about 130 acres on the other side. We walked around the smaller plot and looked at ground-cherries (goose-berries) and the like, and explored on our own across the street. I finally retrieved my camera after we were basically done across the street, but I noticed Corrie, Marc, and Linda talking to Morris, the owner of the farm, and heading back across the street to the larger lot.

I caught up with them, armed with my camera this time, and got the scoop; the weather-people were saying there was a good chance for a frost that evening, which would destroy what was left of the raspberries, turning the prickly bushes into sherbet-berry collections. They'd been sent to fill up on the remaining raspberries. There were plenty. I'm not a big fan myself--the flavor I enjoy, but the seeds get all up in my teeth, and I found the best way to deal with them is to avoid.

We got back to the farmhouse and party-grounds when I realized that my camera case had fallen out of my pocket, and went back across the street to the raspberries to retrace my steps and find it. Along the way I met up with some of the farm-folks I recognize from Saturdays and Wednesdays who were out to show some other people the beaver dam and apartment complex. I didn't want to miss a beaver-dam and hut, so I joined (after locating my case).

Apparently the muddy road in view would run for miles back into the trees to the site of year's past bonfires, but with the beavers coming in and damming up a small creek, and creating a nice pond in the process, the road necessitates a four-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate. Behind the dam one can spot a dead tree...it may be hard to tell from theses pictures, but the beavers have it almost all the way chewed through. Their hut is in the middle of the pond.

The last picture is directly accessible from the walk, and highlights their craftsmanship. There were too many people, and it was too bright, otherwise I was told that we'd be able to hear their warning tail-slap call--a thundering slap, warning intruders to stay away.

The food was good, the pig was succulent, the melodrama/burlesque show was funny and entertaining, but not too racy (there were little-ones all over)...overall it was good time. Marc let me drive there, and I appreciated the chance, and he drove home while I strained to hear the AM station playing the end of the Yankees/Twins game.

Nobel Perspective

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. I had just met Corrie for lunch during her break at jury duty, and the restaurant we were attending had televisions tuned to news channels. The main channel was watching a car chase outside of Dallas, and the crowd at the establishment (more of a pub than a fine-cuisine place) was cheering loudly each time the police came close to bumping the driver off the road, booing loudly when the cop would miss, and booing louder for every commercial break. Corrie had left, and I was reading a magazine article about pi, the economy, and some rich dude serving time for (allegedly) defrauding Japanese investors.

I glanced up every so often when the cheering or booing reached certain crescendo levels. On one glance, the scroll ticker on the bottom announced that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I thought it was some kind of joke, or error, but no...it was wholly accurate.

The Nobel committee said that Bam's outspoken attempt to tackle climate change, stop nuclear proliferation, and ease tensions in the Muslim world were the reasons they gave it to him. Later that evening, Corrie and I talked about it, and she said, "What, did they give it to him because he's a cool guy?" It seems like the answer to that was "Yup, pretty much."

It seems like Dubya really chafed the world with his invasions, his attempts to conquer two countries...his successor wins a Nobel Peace Prize in just nine-months on the job.

As only kids can, Obama's daughter Malia, referring to their dog Bo, put everything in perspective and tops this entire discussion: Obama learned at 6 am that he'd won, remembering later in the day, "After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, 'Daddy, you won the Nobel peace Prize, and it's Bo's birthday.'"

Whatta world...an inexperienced President can win a Nobel Peace Prize while his subjects are getting drunk while cheering and booing police car chases during lunch.

Hold up there...

I was reading over the weekend that some republicans are angry and calling for civility on the floor of congress...wait, I think I just hurt my brain...republicans calling for civility on the floor of congress?

That's right. It appears that Ike Skelton, a democrat representative from Missouri muttered to fellow Mo. republican rep, "Stick it up your ass," and, according to Skelton's aides, was made in the heat of debate over whether or not to extend hate crime laws to cover homosexuals.

So now the GOP is angry. The same GOP that sports the Carolinan representative that heckles Obama with "You lie!" during a speech earlier this year...the same GOP with apparently short memories that had, only a few years ago, the president of the senate (you know, the country's Vice President) have an outburst at Senator Leahy, a dem, of "Go fuck yourself!"

Finally...

I finally finished my quest to have read every Thomas Pynchon novel he's written by the end of the year (kind of an arbitrary date I guess) this past Tuesday when I finished Mason & Dixon. I'm sure most of the few people who check this site out don't really care one-way or the other...but the labors paid off.

Now I'm not sure what to read...

Jury Service in Kings County

Corrie has been selected to serve on a jury in Kings County this past week, and I felt like this would be a good time to relate my own jury duty--er, service--experience.

Like most things in relation to Murphy's Law, jury service seems to happen when you can most ill-afford for it to happen, and for me that was right about the time when I was switching jobs back in April of 2008, when we needed all the money we could possibly earn to fund our wedding. My third day back working with Chef Matt Weingarten I had to tell him I was being called in for jury duty. He was upset, but not at me, and shook his drooped head, "You gotta do what you gotta do...try not to get put on any jury," he finished with a laugh, knowing that there wasn't any real thing I could do short of not showing up.

When I got there, and through the metal-detector, I entered a large room with a few hundred seats and a few flat-screen monitors all set to news channels and muted. This was the waiting hall at the New York State's Supreme Court courthouse, this specimen situated in Kings County, in downtown Brooklyn. I had a seat, looked around at the walls in this giant room and tried to take note of the collection of historic photographs from Brooklyn's past adorning them. Then I started to read.

About a half-hour after sitting, and mildly perking my ears every ten minutes when they called another set of twenty names to proceed into another room, my name was called. I shuffled with everyone else into a much smaller processing room, stood in line with a few others, and then were led into an even smaller off-shoot from the processing room. This smallest room reminded me of a classroom; there was a rectangular desk at the front, and a few rows of densely packed chairs. Everyone took a seat, and two lady lawyers came in.

The first lady, the younger of the two, dressed in a smart business jacket and matching skirt, with blond hair that may have been a blessing in years past (though now was almost scraggly) began to talk about how this works in Brooklyn, or at least in this type of civil case in New York State: first we'd hear arguments to see if a plaintiff was unduly wronged by a defendant, and if we felt the case had been made well enough, and found fault of wrongdoing established in the defendant, then we'd move on to phase two, which was awarding financial considerations to the plaintiff.

She then began to ask if anyone of us prospective jurors had ever been a cab-driver. It turned out that one gentleman of Pakistani origin had been a cabbie, and the lawyer lady asked the same question in a number of ways, a number of ways that turned out to be mostly not understood by the Pakistani gentleman. The question was something to the effect of, "Would having been a cabbie make you more likely to side with a cabbie, or affect in some way your ability to render objective judgement?" Finally she gave up and the other lady started talking, much more confidently and calmly, and let us know that this trial might take a little longer since they'd be needing a Tibetan translator.

Tibetan! Sweet, I thought, if I got a chance to speak, I could talk about my unwavering support for the Tibetan people in their quest to regain their homeland from the PRC and all that...it never got there, of course. I listened to their cagy talks skirting the actual bits of the trial and lawsuit, paying close attention and making eye-contact. I realized that I would probably make a pretty good jurist no matter how this turned out.

By paying attention and making eye-contact, I was placed on the jury without getting to say a word. I, and three other folks from my group were sent to stand in another line to pick up our Juror Cards, things that we needed to show when we entered the actual courtroom, when it came to that. We adjourned to the deliberation room we'd be using to deliberate the case when the time came, and chatted with one another as the other jurors filtered in. Eventually they gave us some instructions about the following Monday, when we'd all be back to hear the start of the case, but the instructions came only after the rest of our jury had been selected; ten people total, eight jurors and two alternates, both of whom had to go about every motion as if they were a full juror.

On Monday we all waited in the deliberation room for longer than previously warned it would take, and close to eleven in the morning, we lined up and entered the courtroom. This courtroom was much closer to those I'd imagine when I was a kid, with wood finishes and the like, different from the modern flourishes that adorn the Sacramento and San Luis Obispo courtrooms I'd seen in the past.

The judge explained some more things to us, about the role of alternates, about the roles of juries, about how it is important to go by the book (as a juror), else lots of money will be wasted, yada yada yada...Then the opening statements were made. The plaintiff's lawyer, the younger blond lady went deeper into the facts of the case; a cabbie had injured the plaintiff's hand while whipping around a turn on Park Ave, and we were here to determine both the extent of the fault on the part of the driver, and to judge how much money should be awarded because of the injuries.

The defendant's lawyer, the calmer, more confident one, spoke about words like "whipping" and the connotations that represents, told about her client's side of things, that the lady was running across the street, that he hit his brakes and still struck her, albeit at a much lower speed, and that her medical expenses had already been taken care of. She made a few more statements, finished, and the judge broke for recess, for lunch. We were to be back in exactly forty-five minutes. I fought the urge to go grab a beer.

We made it back to our d-room, were lined up again, and entered the courtroom. The judge thanked us for participating and almost seemed like he felt bad for wasting our time. Then he told us that while we were at lunch recess, the parties had settled, and that the case was no more, and that in Kings County the eight of us who were jurors were now exempt for the next seven years, while the alternates would have to go back out to the waiting room and wait for their name again. That sounded like a tough break for the alternates, but what could I do?

The eight of us got letters upon leaving that stated we were done for seven years, not that I planned on living in Kings County in seven years, but it seemed pretty cool. Two days...a settlement after lunch.

Now, was reading this as boring as writing it?

Mayor Mike Gains a Tough Opponent

I'm sure outside of New York City the mayoral campaign is making for steamy news, right? Mayor Mike Bloomberg, afraid to be too far away from the action, altered the city laws to make it possible for him to run for a third term. In the weeks after 9/11, Rudy Giuliani tried the same thing and was turned back. Look who's joining the fray:

This is an apparent joke, but the idea seems to be hitting home that the people who opposed changing the term limits are finally gaining a voice for their frustrations. Most of the city council were in approval of the altering of the term limits. Once they were changed to allow Mayor Mike another try, most of the prospective candidates didn't want anything to do running, since Bloomberg is a billionaire and has actually done a decent job of running the City.

Well, his first term was spectacular by most accounts, and his second term was rather lazy in that not nearly as much got done. It almost sprang him into contention for the Presidency, and I've read that having ditched his republican party affiliation early last year was seen as a move to possibly run as an Independent (he was originally a democrat, years ago), and once he was passed over by his pal John McCain for the VP pick for some wacky anti-woman woman, he immediately went about trying to drum up support for altering the mayoral term-limit laws.

Everybody need their action, I guess. Click here for the "official" website.

Roller Derby Gets Its Day

Corrie and I rarely end up at the movies, mainly because of our schedules and the costs, and the lack of awesome looking films coming out...Well, I did want to see Inglorious Basterds, Up, and Ponyo among other flicks, but still, there are other adventurous things to do around here that cost far less than the movies and are far more visceral.

But last weekend we went to see Drew Barrymore's directorial debut Whip It, a coming-of-age film starring Ellen Page and Juliette Lewis and the sport of Roller Derby. The reasons for seeing the movie come in a few styles; we hadn't been to a movie in a while, Ellen Page is fun to watch doing the acting thing, there's a dearth of girlie-kick-ass movies being made, and we've been outspoken proponents of getting to Roller Derby matches since we first went to a bout two years ago.

The first match we made it to, here in New York, was a tilt between the Queens of Pain and the Brooklyn Bombshells, and we didn't know the rules or really just what the hell was going on. The girls would skate in a circle, around and around, and at some unknown (to us) point the crowd would erupt in cheers, yelling and screaming the girls on, like the wild ravenous sports-fans New Yorkers are. This would make sense at Yankee Stadium, or the Garden, but this was far uptown, at CCNY at 140th St, and these fans were of the hipster and lesbian breed...maybe being a fanatical wacko about your team, some team, is part of the New Yorker stereotype.

Eventually we figured out the rules, and began to cheer on the Brooklyn team with our fellow Brooklynites, and eventually we won. Or, the girls won, and we, as fans the world over have since spectator team sports originated, shared in the victory.

The next bout we saw that season was the championships, between the Queens team and the Bronx Gridlock. When we arrived at the venue, a line stretched far and wide, a few hundred deep down the street. This was very exciting for us, because we wouldn't shut-up about it, trying to tell the people we knew that they should check out the meets. Now, we wouldv'e preferred to have the Bombshells in the game, and we couldn't really root for the Queens girls, so we rooted hard for the Bronx delegate, who eventually won the championship. The halftime act during this match was the Hungry Marching Band, which I posted about a while back.

So, however we felt about Drew Barrymore, we were excited to see this film, just for bringing to the mainstream a joy we've been enjoying for a while now.

In the film, the girls race on a banked-track, like they use for NASCAR and Indy-Car racing, while out here it's a flat-track organization. Corrie and I believe that's probably because of the space limitations in the City...a flat-track is easy enough to set up in different college auditoriums. Upon doing some research, it appears that Austin, Texas was the home of the re-emerging popularity of Roller Derby, after the television shows in the early '80s were cancelled. In Austin, both the banked-track and a flat-track shoot-offs were spawned and spread, each going to various cities where it could be cultivated by the desires and restraints afforded to it.

The film is satisfying, enjoyable, conventional but not too cliche, with pretty good performances all around. I would say it's definitely a successful directorial debut for Barrymore, but given the topic and the actors, it would have to really suck to not be considered a success for a new director.

Quick Literary Note

I've been writing here, in minor updates along with my other posts, about trudging through Mason & Dixon, Pynchon's classic from 1996 that he spent twenty years writing. I'm not quite done with it, but I just made it to the last section, around page 715, with about sixty to go.

I wrote here last week or the week before about Vauscanson's duck, which was a bizarre digression, and for those who are familiar with Pynchon's work, bizarre digressions are a staple of his "style."

Two more quick digressions I wanted to mention: one scene has a wood chopping contest between Stig, a non-Swede who's been masquerading as a Swede (the name of his actual homeland is never really mentioned) and a guy named Zepho. BFD, you'd be correct in saying, except that Zepho is a werebeaver...that's right, werewolves don't exist in Pynchon's 1760s America, rather, at the full moon guys stricken with kastoranthropy will grow furry with large paddle tails and scurry off into the forrest to chew trees. The contest, like most things in Pynchon's universe, doesn't work out like you'd guess.

The second digression is about a garden Mason and Dixon find, tended by what appear to be elves, of vegetables so large that one could build a home inside it...potatoes and beets the size of small mountains, a hemp plant (the real prize Dixon is after) so large it takes days to climb up, has limbs large enough to build villages upon, and the progress of climbers higher up gets bogged down when a village camp-fire gets a little too smoky...

I really just wanted to end this minor entry with a quote, one of Pynchon's sentences, just to let anyone reading this blog who's unfamiliar with the writing of TP know about it...

Mason and Dixon had just been arguing, and the head of the axmen crew calms them down, causing great merriment by asking which of the two is the husband...(the following reference to "Corn" here is about corn whiskey (the quotes are his, not mine))

"This is taken as high Hilarity, and the "Corn" continues to pass 'round, which Mason is oblig'd to drink,--the unglaz'd Rim unwipably wet from the loose-lipp'd Embraces of Mouths that may recently have been anywhere, not excluding,--from the look of the Company,--live elements of the Animal Kingdom."(page 642)

This sentence has most of Pynchon's staples from this novel; the punctuation, capitalization, and spelling anachronisms he uses, along with half joking comments about bizarre sexuality.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Today's my pops' birthday, and I'm going to celebrate it with an anecdote about our visit to the new Yankee Stadium this past June.

The last time we saw a game together was in 1998, in Denver, when the Rockies took on the Padres, in the year that the Padres eventually went on to be swept by the Yankees in the World Series. There was a funny moment at that game; while the Padres were taking batting practice a little boy was heckling a San Diego batter, number 33, "Hey number 33, I see you! Number 33!" and the like. My dad and I shared a laugh, because we knew that number 33 was in reality Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn. About this time, journey-man slugger Greg Vaughn (originally from Sacramento) made a fake attempt to run up into the stands and "get" the little heckler, who ran away in terror. Also, in that game, the Rockies' third baseman, Vinnie Castillo, one of Mexico's biggest MLB heroes (nobody's bigger than Fernando, of course) hit two home-runs.

But, watching a game at Yankee Stadium with my dad always ranked pretty high on my lifetime list of things to do, and we got the chance earlier this year when he came out to visit the City on business.

Our seats were nice and close, and the opponent was the lowly Washington Nationals of the National League, during one of MLB's bouts with inter-league play. Big CC Sabathia was pitching, and held the Nats to basically nothing, until giving up a two-run lead by serving up a three-run homer. The Yanks came back to win, and CC pitched long-enough to earn the victory, and we got to see Mariano pick up another of his 500+ saves.

After the home-run by the Nats' player, we took off for other parts of the stadium, checking out the view from each of the levels and watching a smattering of half-innings. We were on the mid-level and mostly missed a spectacular catch in right-field by Nick Swisher. We made it all the way up to the upper-ist point in the upper-deck behind home-plate, nearby where the seats that Corrie and I were to watch the game the next month, and had a laugh as the crowd booed A-Rod for popping out and ending the inning with the tie run on third base.

In the upper-deck I glimpsed the kind of Yankee fan my dad is, and I was impressed. My dad and I are of the not-so-obnoxious Yankee fan specie out here, more cerebral and less the "We win da most, so we 'de greatest" fight-picking type. But, as I noticed, something I don't do that he does is start Yankee chants...foot-stomping, high-decibel hollering, loud clapping type chants. It was beautiful and obnoxious at the same time. I guess I don't have the balls for that.

Love you dad! Happy birthday, and enjoy one for the Yankees return to the Post-Season!