Ernest Borgnine Memories

I was always a fan of the Connecticut born Ermes Effron Borgnino. He was always one of those guys, those big-galoot, gap-toothed teddy bears. I didn't grow up with Ernest Borgnine-the-heavy, the brute, the bully.

To help with the inspiration while I write this, I've put on The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah's epic western starring Bill Holden and Ernie, this post's namesake. The disc is very old, uses both sides, and is covered in blue-plastic dust, meaning I haven't opened it since we moved from San Luis to New York. Weird.

The earliest memory I have of Ernest Borgnine is of the movie Poseidon Adventure, starring Gene Hackman, Borgnine, Shelly Winters, Grandpa Joe, and Roddy McDowell, as they try to survive a luxury liner capsizing. Borginine's character is a former cop, and in the beginning, he's trying to convince his new bride that nobody will recognize her. See, she's a former working-girl who he busted many a time, until he fell for her. While on the surface, Borginine's gruff and blustery cop is really a romantic, who, showing his true colors, tells his wife that who cares if someone recognizes you, I love you and you're with me.

He's one of the few survivors. His battles with Gene Hackman paint him as the tough-guy cynic, but in the end, after Hackman sacrifices himself, he becomes the believing leader.

I'm pretty sure the next thing I saw with Ernest Borgnine was his guest spot on The Simpsons, when he plays a guest dad for the father-son Jr. Campers rafting excursion. His first appearance comes as he's leaving a bathroom, introducing himself like Troy McClure saying, "You kids may remember me as Sgt. Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity." During his reading, he stopped and told the producers who were there with him that he didn't think the kids would know about the 1953 film. The producer kinda laughed, and told him that was kind of the joke.

During high school, when I started going out and renting all of the "classics" from the '60s and '70s, Taxi Driver, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and, of course, The Wild Bunch. The honor between thieves as they struggle to fit in to a modernizing world is captured well, and the final scene is the controversial but cathartic bloodbath. You can feel it coming on--these cowboys just can't coexist, and Angel's desecration and eventual death gives them their reason.

Besides his stint on Jonathan Silverman's The Single Guy as the doorman, my only real television memories of Borgnine was his voice acting as Mermaid Man in Spongebob Squarepants, in which his animated character bears a striking resemblance to his actual visage:

The patron saint of big, funny looking guys, he'll be missed.

And as I finish this post I looked towards my television:

Modular Equivalencies

Modularity is a term from math, but everybody in the world has a simple working understanding of modularity. In math, the first few lessons in Number Theory are the initial lesson in modular math. Modular math starts with a base, and the "answers" are basically the remainders when the base is divided out. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but here's a quick example. We'll use 3 as a base. So, pretty much, there's a universe where the only members are 0, 1, and 2. The expression 14 mod 3 is a request for simplification, so, 14 = 3 (4) + 2, where the number in parentheses doesn't matter...it's like dropping out multiples of of the base. In a base 3 world, 20 = 17 = 14 = 11 = 8 = 5 = 2, and 2 is the member. Notice that all multiples of 3 are equal to 0.

For people savvy with computers, binary is a modular mathematical system, with a base of 2. In this system, the set is {0, 1}, which eludes to on/off, yes/no, even/odd, the most basic this-or-that type of system.

Another type of modular system even more people are rather familiar has a long set that includes February 10th and March 30th and April 13th and May 18th and September 21st. This is the modular equivalency we call "Friday" in the year 2012.

Any repeating cycle can be seen as a modular equivalency. Normal analog clocks, and our non-military-time system is another easy example.

Since I'm a math guy, I have a very close and intimate understanding of modularity in general, and have been seeing it in living nicely in the larger surrounding world.

The first case of this was when we were living in Bed-Stuy, in the apartment on Halsey. Halsey was a two-way street, rare for those streets in that neighborhood. That meant, though, that it was a little more main, and would have a bus line running on it. Oh how I remember the buses. Our apartment was between Patchen and Malcolm X, which were two of the more 'avenue' like streets. In this case, Patchen was one of the many residential avenues, and Malcolm X was one of the few commercial north-south thoroughfares. That meant that Malcolm X Blvd also had a bus line.

The bus that ran on Halsey was the B26, and the bus that ran on Malcolm X was the B46. I always felt like writing a letter back to Kent Morrison and the Poly math department joking that I lived at the confluence of the modularly equivalent bus lines, the 26 and 46.

This always cracked me up, but I'm a weirdo. How are the modular equivalencies? Well, they're both the same mod 20, 6, which is probably the largest base you'l be able to find with those two integers.

That concept, modular equivalencies, was something I'd wanted to make a blog post about, but never felt like I could 1) explain it well enough to make it interesting; or 2) connect it with any other examples from the real world. The juries still out on number 1, but I always felt that without another weird example, the post would be just me talking math and making observations.

Well, that's actually the same, so...

We moved to Austin and I kept the idea on the shelf, but had an eye out for similar equivalencies. We moved to Long Beach and the idea was still safely tucked away on the shelf, behind bicycles and cameras and beaches and pelicans foggy streets. It was tucked away despite my realization that the other example, the one I always felt I needed for the post, was apparent and there for the exposure. It just took me a while to get to this post, to get to a place comfortable enough to hammer it out. More than a year, anyway.

The other example? Area codes. Specifically, the first three numbers on a phone number, the regional exchange numbers, for two places, specifically the last two places we lived (er, still live?), Austin and Long Beach.

The area code for Austin is 512. I've seen tattoos of "512", head shops using the number in their title, and other things you get in hipster enclaves with easily identified self-references.

The area code for Long Beach is 562, and I've seen it similarly used in the names of places and on tattoos. Seriously.

Brooklyn has many area codes (714, 917, even 346 sometimes), and LA as a region has a bunch, but everything in Long Beach (and maybe a little of Carson and Downey) use the 562 exchange.

Modular equivalencies of, eh, I guess the largest base you could use here would be 50, giving them an equivalency of 12.

Patterns of numbers...for guys like me I see this kind of thing even when I'm not thinking about it.

Three Somehow Related Topics

Maybe they're only related for me, inside my head. I've been thinking about these three things, together anyway for only a few weeks, but as I tried to develop blog posts about them, they seemed best served all being together, which made sense for two of the three. The third one, though, fit unorthodoxly because of the metaphor.

The first topic entered my brain before the freak accident. I had ridden over to the Dollar Bookstore to look around, but mainly to get out of the house. That was a place I would ride to spend some time, look for my authors, look for random other oddities (sometimes you could find them), and eventually leave. They do have a comic book section, and I would usually check out the titles. On this day, a cover caught my attention, and I was drawn to it.

At some point I'll be posting a long post about my relationship with comics, how it's evolved over the years, and bits about the artists I always liked and would follow independently of the company or title. That's a short list with names like Frank Miller, Tim Truman, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and possibly my favorite superhero artist, Joe Quesada. Quesada now runs Marvel Entertainment, and has been a force with their recent developments: dropping the Comic Code and pushing for high-end movie productions. He started out as an artist doing the pencilling of fringe comic books. For fans of his work, his style stands out, catches the eye anyway. I liken it to art experts who can look at two similar pieces and declare confidently oh, this one is so-and-so, and this other one, who cares.

Now, the comic above is an issue of Solar: Man of the Atom, #23 to be exact. It was published by Valiant Comics, a company that was a biggie when I was at the height of my collecting, and their logo looked like this one, before the dark time and it was changed. Just seeing the logo brought back memories. At the time I was collecting, Solar, not a character I cared for, was maybe a year past this issue, probably in the mid 30s. Solar was one of the elder Valiant statesmen, having been created in the '60s and, like Magnus: Robot Fighter, another '60s-era hero, were property bought by Valiant and relaunched in the early '90s to kick-ff their new company.

Okay. Off the rails for a second, but the history is the context. That above issue of Solar was a title I didn't read, and from a time that was before I was even getting into it, so it was a cover I'd never seen before. But, from across the tiny comic book section at this Dollar Bookstore, I could tell it had a Joe Quesada cover. I thought, Wha...? When did he do covers for Solar? I came over and found a few other ones, and later I went to look up some of his early gigs in the industry. To fans of Joey the Q, that cover is unmistakable. When I went to find that picture, the one above, the website had other covers, and there was another one I'd never seen before, but I could pick it out of even the smallest of icons. Here's that one, also obvious for longtime fans:

That whole day was weird at the Dollar Bookstore's comic section. There were a whole lot of titles that during the early '90s would have been worth between ten and fifty bucks, and very hard to come by. That was before the collapse, a topic I'll be covering in my piece on me and comics. But to see all these early Valiant and Image books, books so hard to get and coveted in my time, sitting here on the shelf for a buck cracked me up. And to think, I was only interested in the Joe Quesada covers.

Seeing them inspired me to find some of his earliest comic book non-cover work. It turns out I have most of it, save for two little known series for DC Comics, two little known series I'm currently in the process of obtaining. They look really nice, at least from the little I can see.

One of the "my authors", one of the guys I check out at all book stores, is Haruki Murakami. I'm a very big fan, was turned onto him by my dad, and have since turned both Corrie and Norm onto him. One of his books I've read is Dance Dance Dance. It's fun and exciting and out there, like so much of his work. I learned, though, that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel of sorts to another, earlier Murakami novel called A Wild Sheep Chase, a book I'm reading now on loan from Norm.

Sheep Chase is noticeably a young Murakami voice, but it's obviously him, and it's a blast.

Norm discovered that A Wild Sheep Chase is the last of a trilogy, known as the Rat trilogy (a character is called the Rat), and that the first two books of the trilogy were translated into English, but weren't ever sold stateside.

Wha...? How awesome. You're telling me that there are English versions of the earliest Murakami novels, that they represent two pieces of a trilogy that itself got an addition edition? Yes indeedy.

The first is called Hear the Wind Sing, and the second is called Pinball, 1973. Hear the Wind Sing was the first full manuscript Murakami wrote for a contest, which he won. Pinball, 1973, from what I've read, has one of the characters from the earlier story searching for a pinball machine, among the other usual Murakami adventures.

They were translated by Alfred Birnbaum, whom I believe is the main Murakami English translator.

I was able to find the books, both on Amazon and  Ebay, with various prices. Here's a picture used by a seller:

So far the theme looks to be old works by well known, or maybe "well known" artists. Blasts from the pasts. Anyway, a looking back, or a hearkening back to an older time seemed to connect the three things in my head, and the last thing here was the last part of the puzzle that I couldn't divorce from the Quesada/Murakami Connection.

I'm talking about the steeping of wormwood in high percentage alcohol; the creation of thujone. Oh yes, I'm talking about our old friend absinthe.

Nothing hearkens back like tales of the green fairy.

I watched a documentary on Absinthe, while most of it was in French, the history lesson was interesting. A lady nurse in Switzerland concocted a tincture that utilized some of the well-known or highly-popular curative herbs, mostly wormwood, and the common liquid used for tinctures, high-powered booze. The drink became popular among the tiny villages near the Swiss-French border, and it took the invasion of Algeria, and the practice of sending absinthe along with the French soldiers, to bring it back to Paris and turn it into a phenomena.

In the years after the Algerian campaign, absinthe in Paris became the most popular drink around. Everybody drank it everyday. That's barely an exaggeration. It was a serious phenomena. In a small village, a guy slashed and slaughtered his whole family, and he'd been drinking absinthe. The small anti-absinthe crowd used this incident as a rallying cry, and eventually got absinthe banned. It wasn't much discussed that the family killer had drank two bottles of wine and half a bottle of brandy along with his 3 ounces of absinthe.

So, after a few years, absinthe was banned throughout the western world, including even America, who barely knew anything about the drink. It was being brewed in New Orleans, but that was about the extent of the green fairy's reach.

In 2007, the US government lifted the ban on the drink, as other countries across Europe loosened their grip, and all the countries have decided to put certain limits on the thujone levels. America has some of the strictest guidelines, at about a 10mg concentration. Is that enough to feel to feel the thujone? Who knows.

In Europe, the guidelines are a little different. Some of the Swiss makes kept making it secretly, and once they lifted the ban, and once the guidelines were set, some of those makers just went back to regular production. That's because in Switzerland, the acceptable high level of thujone is a 35mg concentration.

When we in Europe seven years ago, once I learned that the absinthe over there was just a shell of it's former self, I was disappointed, and didn't really look to buy any of it to bring home. I was under the impression that the thujone levels had been neutered, making the drink just high-octane bitterness, instead of the high-octane stony bitterness that was famous back in the day.

I'm not sure when the laws changed, but a concentration of 35mg is pretty much exactly how strong the thujone content was back in the 1850s. Check out the last few lines of this data sheet:

Just look at the second column for the different brands or regions throughout history.

Go Swiss Absinthe! Here's a link to a catalog of sorts for strong absinthe. It looks pretty cool, and at some point I'll be adding some of the good stuff to my collection of  "good stuffs".

Rear-view mirror looks; artists and muses; newly revealed revelations...this is the thread of these three topics. That I couldn't separate them shows the strength my brain gave that thread.

Boson? Pretty sure. Higgs'? We'll see...

Two separate entities both working at the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva have reported that they've finally recorded the existence of a boson, and that it could be, in all likelihood, the Higgs boson. It's a little comical to read newspaper articles about particle physics, because the authors don't know what the hell's going on, and they know that they don't know, and they also know that the readers won't know either.

So I'll do my best to break it down for my few readers in a way that lets them explain it to others in a laymen terms as possible. We'll start with a quick etymology note. Peter Higgs was a physicist who, while working with a team of guys who's names didn't make it to the labels of things, theorized the existence of another quantum field such that interaction with this field would assign mass to elementary particles.

Sounds weird, right? Mass seems pretty damn straight forward. "Mass" is usually seen as the amount of matter of a thing--a measure of how much stuff is in a thing. When you get really, really small, how you get mass is explained through the interaction of these quantum particles with this field Higgs theorized, now called the Higgs field. This interaction of particles with the field--and thus obtain mass--is called the Higgs mechanics.

In today's world mass and weight are used almost interchangeably. This is not fully accurate. Let's say I weigh 80 kilograms. This is not a fully accurate statement. I actually have a mass of 80 kilograms. My weight has to do with the acceleration due to gravity, and my 80 kilograms translates to 176 pounds on Earth. Of course, standard mass measurements are taken with Earth's gravity as a universal, but with it means is, my 80 kilograms on earth is still 80 kilograms on the moon, while my 176 pounds on Earth is a little more than 29 pounds on the moon.

A little off track there.

In quantum physics, the elementary units are not particles, like you might think. The smallest most elementary units are fields, and oscillations in these fields are what get called particles. An oscillation in the magnetic field is called a "photon", otherwise known as the basic unit of light.

There are three "generations of matter" for these elementary oscillation/particles. Quarks are one category, and there are 6 different states of spin associated with quarks. Gauge bosons are a second category, the most famous of which is the photon. And the third are the leptons, the most famous of which is the electron.

A boson is just a particle with integer spin than has the property that there is no limit to how many can occupy the same quantum state.

I don't fully follow it either, but just know that this Higgs boson is the boson created from an oscillation in the Higgs field. The idea that such a thing existed has been around since '67, when the paper was published, but it was pretty much impossible to test for such a particle. By the '80s they had the idea for how they could test for it, and by then the acceptance of the Higgs mechanism as true--that particles obtained mass from interaction with a specific field, now called the Higgs field--the only thing left to discover was whether or  not  that mechanism was the result of a boson from the Higgs field. Bosons are force carriers, and the idea is that that's how they may be able to give these bits of matter mass.

So the real thing was how to test for this Higgs boson. Well, they figured out that they could create it by slamming particles into one another, and since, as a particle, it would be very large and decay almost instantly, they would have to have very sensitive data recorders, able to tell from the decay that what they created had been the elusive Higgs boson.

That's exactly what the two separate teams working in Switzerland have claimed to have proof of: a large momentary boson that seems to have all the characteristics of the Higgs boson.

Exactly why this news has scientists weeping into their champagne might be the real question. This would be a landmark discovery, one of those generational moments, and a big push of support for the Standard Model in quantum mechanics.

To recap: the Higgs mechanism states interaction with the Higgs field is how particles gets mass, and they think this interaction happens by way of the Higgs boson, since now they think they've found it.

Frustration and Cynicism

Starring in today's little discussion as Frustration is my lovely lady, Corrie; while yours truly will be playing the part of Cynicism. Go figure, right?

Part of Corrie's day to day work at the architectural and interior design firm where she works is a thing called plan-check revision. The plans (construction documents) go out to the various city's inspection units, get checked, and then are sent back marked with what revisions need to be done. One of her jobs is to go over the revisions and coordinate their getting fixed.

On one job recently the "revision" was actually them asking for missing data; the inspector wanted the flame-spread rating. Material from Europe that was generally meant for flooring had been used on walls and ceilings, and by affixing it there using adhesives, the property of the material no longer matched the slim data they take in Italy.

Following? Corrie needed a spec number, a snippet of information, about how fast this particular material, if on fire, would spread up a wall and across a ceiling. She called the sales representative they have on file for technical information, the tech rep.

She asked for the flame-spread rating. The rep, sounding confused, said he didn't know what the assembly rating is, but that he can get that information if she wanted it. No, Corrie said, I don't need the partition assembly rating, I need the flame-spread. Well, the rep reiterated, the assembly rating will be available in due time.

If you've ever dealt with this kind of sad American--the sales rep in over their head--then you know that they can be more of a pain in the ass than, well, actual pains in the ass. Here's Corrie in the role of frustration. 

"Assembly ratings" deal with wall or door assemblies, combinations of wood, plaster, steel, sheetrock, paint, that kind of stuff, material used to make the partitions--the walls--separating different spaces. Fire ratings for assemblies deal with how long it takes fire to burn through the door. Those shitty wooden closet doors in cheap housing? Likely a small rating, as in fire would overtake it quick. The steel and glass door in the back of  dormitories? Likely a big rating, as in plenty of time warding off an encroaching fire.

This, though, was not the information she wanted. She wanted flame-spread, how long it would take the fire to move about the walls once lit, not how long it would take fire to burst through the closed door and wall. But this sales rep, when the words "fire" and "rating" were used in a sentence, his brain went right to the only thing he associated with them. This is what sales-reps-in-over-their-heads do: they repeat the same tired wrong info because they don't know any better.

When Corrie, embodiment of frustration, relayed this anecdote to me, this tiny facet of her day, I asked if she had talked to the regular rep or the tech rep. She said that it was the only guy they have on file for technical questions. She said she left a message explaining that the information is pretty standard in America, and that the Italian company would be better off disseminating it; that it could be easier for her firm in the future to just spec a different product from a different company. How could this jerk-ass be the one tech rep for this company, she asked me.

Taking the role of the cynic, a smart-alec grin came over my lips and I said, well, of course since he worked as a sales associate at Best Buy, he must have embellished his resume to get the cushy tech-rep job. Yup, lied to get ahead, and now he makes other people's lives more complicated by way of ineptitude, either direct or accidental.

I guess that makes me the asshole. I mean, here's Corrie, doing a good job working on frustrating scenarios, dealing with this kind of thing on a daily basis for years, and all I do is make jokes about the guy making her day shitty. It's easy to do that, to be negative.

I guess after hearing the same daily complications for long enough, and giving all the support there is, and after a lifetime of meeting and getting to know sales reps personally, I've come to recognize certain patterns in the behaviors of those that, from secondary sources, you can tell are in way over their head. That being said, that's the kind of thing that breeds cynicism in guys like me. The continued success of these types, you know the ones I mean, leave types like me with little sympathy for them when they flail.

But it sucks when they make my wife's day shitty, that's for damn sure.

Post 800: Ideas

I celebrated my 800th post between here and the Observatory a while back, and since these two spots are quite similar, it made a certain kind of sense. But now I've reached 800 alone on this site, and it's got me thinking.

Ideas.

Over the course of 800 posts there have been a lot of ideas discussed. There have been, of course, a handful of posts about "going away" or "been too busy" or "be back soon", and that topic has been addressed before. There's not much more to say about them. The best one I can remember in that vein, the time-waster/spot-filler was from the Fourth of July in 2010. I think I mentioned that before, too.

Repetition.

Over the course of 800 posts there have been a few repetitive discussions, but I really try to keep that to a minimum. The 3 worst are these centennial marks. Posts 300, 400, and 500 are mostly the same post, and that's the kind of garbage I really try to avoid. Even if it's a filler piece (labeled as such) about the uniforms the baseball players currently in Oakland wear, I try to keep it specifically different than anything that came before it.

Ideas. Repetition. Lots of ideas, trying to limit the repetition. I think I've done okay. Well, you might agree if you've read any of these posts, but maybe not if you've read my sports blog. Yeesh. That's why I try to report on so much college baseball and Olympic volleyball qualifying matches.

But, 800 posts is home to lots of ideas and possibly some knowledge, and many, many anecdotes. Maybe a story here and there, but mostly anecdotes. Anecdotes are just ideas, ideas of things that happened to me in some reality situation, I guess.

The nature of the topics of this blog is a little like my own brain: all over the place. There are very few of these posts that came solely out of researching. Don't get me wrong; I research plenty. But I have an idea for a post and then I research it. The vast majority of these posts are just random ideas I had or were prompted into by interactions with others. Of the ones that came from research alone, it was because of an idea that I did have that caused me to do research in the first place, and once that topic was worn out, something else tangentially associated with the research piqued me, and a new post was born.

But here, in this computer where I type, the idea is placed down onto electronic stone, and it shall be posted independently of this computer, able to be accessed and updated from any place on the planet with an internet connection. That's the interesting new paradigm, and one that doesn't fit with my fiction.

The only real embellishments I use in my anecdotal posts are attitudinal, and even then it's rare. People act a certain way around me, and I write about it for this forum--for me, really, right? Well, the anecdotes and stories here about what happens to me are true. The historical summations I give are as true to my understanding of my sources as possible. This is essentially all editorial or journalistic. I'm not making this up. It's non-fiction.

 I do have a few posts that use elements of how I present my fiction, like the "One Time" post about Norm or the "Meaning of Pop-Culture" post about Tony, but that's more stylistic than anything else. Maybe also "The Triumph of the Fan" about Dan, but less so. That one's more love and heart than deliberately stylish.

My fiction is a different enterprise. I definitely do not post it up on the interweb for all to read for free. Not that I charge anybody for it necessarily, but I don't hand that stuff out to strangers just yet. There needs to be some mystery left in the world. There needs to be some anticipation...something, I don't know. I take it more seriously because I'm an artist.

Those things--various writing tidbits and content--do exist embedded in very specific computers that are inaccessible to everyone but Corrie and me. Since she wouldn't know what my filing system is all about, or what to make of what she could find, it's really only a pair of spots for me.

And then there's the paper.

Recently I went through and adopted a much needed new filing system. I'd been planning this for years, and obtained the filing cabinet, folders, and hangy-deals while living at the Dwyce House in Austin. After Corrie went to bed the other night, I started to set up shop in the living room. For those writers out there, you can get the idea, right?

The Dali book in the lower left corner was used for pushing folded pages back to a regular flat position. Piles were things like: "College: Poly #1"; "High School"; "College: Sierra". There were story specific piles as well. After some beers and a few episodes of The X-Files to keep the sound going, I ended up with this beautiful bastard:

You'll be able to see story specific stuff, but the image of everything all collected up nice is too awesome for me to resist.

So, there's a whole drawer full of ideas. I have the interweb. And I also have a series of notebooks. I've been keeping notebooks for many, many years. I used to have collections of spiral bound notes all over the place (thanks drawer), but I eventually got serious. I had many notes on a new direction in Newtonian kinematics I was exploring, but they were all over the place--literally, because of my poor basic organizational skills. I bought a notebook and collected them all, hoping to use it for my senior project in math. Yeah, I was, uh, creating a new physics and mathematical nomenclature system in my spare time.

I never tried to hide my true nerd calling.

That notebook is the first notebook below, in the first position on top row. The inscribed dates are from 2/22/2003 to 11/2/2004, Election Day. I remember writing the last note under where I taped my voter stub sitting at my desk in my office during grad school. The notebook is full of dreams, story tidbits, outlines, scenes, premises, math notes, glued-in movie stubs, cool pictures from the newspaper, random paper trinkets, and the occasional comic strip. The cover is of the smooth faux-leather variety.

The second notebook on the top row, the one with my carved initials has a more fabric-y texture for the front and back cover. I bought it right before we left for our European trip, and finished it after we got back from our Mexican wedding and honeymoon. It's thus dated 7/26/2005 to 7/13/2008. It covers Europe, then the last bit of the San Luis stuff, and then it got a little crazy in Brooklyn. There is so much stuff glued into this notebook it's almost embarrassing. It's easily doubled in size. If anyone ever comes over to our apartment and you want to look at some Brooklyn/NYC scrapbooking at its finest, feel free to check it out. There are whole articles about our Bed-Stuy neighborhood, other things about places I worked or people I worked for, other stuff about random shit I saw or thought of...it's pretty wild.

The third notebook up there has the number "3" carved into the cover...it's easier to see in person. That one is even thicker that the second, but that could be due to the pages themselves being thicker. This notebook is handmade from Tibet, and this includes the paper as well. It was cool to look at and touch, and I was trying something new, but it turns out to be a dirty bastard to write in. The first page has the word "test" written by about five different kinds of utensil, just to see what would could be read while not bleeding through to the other side. It was very complicated. This is the only book that has any Texas scraps. I bought it in New York, used it in Texas, used it Long Beach, and eventually forsake the last few pages for the notebook with the number "4" carved on it. I did return to fill out the last few pages, and so it is dated 3/16/2009 to 4/27/2012.

The last page notes that there are more pages of notes from Long Beach than there are from Austin, and that in general there aren't too many notes from that era in my other sources. Two jobs for the majority of the time living there probably explains it.

Notebook 4 I'm currently using, but am close to finishing. The cover is one of the smoother plastic/pleather deals. It's dated from 8/19/2011, but I didn't really start using it until a few weeks later in September.

The bottom row is split up between two important kinds of notebooks. The left two are Moleskins. The smaller is my OG Moleskine, dated 5/13/2007 to 7/6/2009, and the second, larger one is still in use, started 8/22/2009. These two notebooks collect story notes only. They are full of nothing but story ideas, outlines, snippets, and scenes. The two notebooks on the right are also very important, but in a different way: they hold plenty of scribbled blog notes. The red one has a "B" and a star carved onto it (I filled in the carving with ink), to signify it's status as a 'blogstar'. It was a gift from my mom at Decemberween. The last one up there was part of the package stuff from my promotion that got us back to California, and I used it plenty in Texas for blog ideas and interviews with the peeps who'll star in my third novel in the pipeline, the
"Texas Novel" as I refer to it (even though it has a name).

Blog notes and ideas show up everywhere. If a story idea comes a rushing out, and the Moleskine isn't around, I inscribe it in a numbered notebook (currently #4), and then later transcribe it in the Moleskine. Those little bastards are so full of ideas that it's a little nerve-wracking to take them too many places for fear of loss.

Ideas.

This post is me laid bare.

This post is me saying "bring it the fuck on".

This post is me canning fear.

I have a leg full of staples and a brain full of ideas, and one will definitely be relieved before the other.

Filler A's Uniform Post

My mom's comment yesterday had me thinking, and then searching and saving. This is post 799 on Caliboyinbrooklyn, and the first day of July, so I imagine this post will get buried pretty quick.

Like I said yesterday, I like kelly green and yellow more than brown and mustard, like the Padres sported back in the day, and yesterday's logo post wasn't about the ugmos of the uniform world. This post is also not about that, rather, it's just about the A's. I found some cool similarities out there and felt like sharing.

The team that currently plays in Oakland and calls themselves the Athletics, or A's for short, started play in Philadelphia many, many years ago. A team of ballplayers from Philly called themselves the Athletics started play around the Civil War era, and that was the name given to the team when the upstart American League started in 1901,

After a while, as baseball moved towards the modern age, the A's uniform in Philly coalesced around the "A":

That set is from 1950, and had been like that for maybe twenty years, the main changes having been the darkening of the blue trim to a navy, lightening to this royal color. In 1954 they switched for the first time to the upward lifting cursive "Athletics" word on the chest, a name play we still see today.

By 1960, the A's are in Kansas City and the jerseys haven't changed too much--now the caps sport a "KC" and the red on the chest may be a little more dominant, but it's still looks the same.

Now things begin to go a little haywire, only because of the proximity of the changes. This next kit is fromthe very next year, 1961, and we see a return of the big "A" on the chest, and the city's name on the road uni. The red seems to be gone. Overall, this particular kit is not a haywire representative...

...it just represents the dart of weird changes. By now Finley must be the owner, because the very next year they changed uniforms again, and below are the 1962 looks. Gone is the cursive upward lifting anything, and what we have is the familiar rainbow blocking of the '80s I remember, only the color scheme is wrong. I mean, I recognize the lettering, but from my youth, before the most recent change, but the colors here? Red, white and blue? Do you associate that with the A's?

Of course not, because Charlie Finley was a radical owner who even wanted to introduce an orange baseball (hitters didn't hate the idea, but purists did), and the very next year he finally got his way. By 1963 the A's had their "modern" color scheme of kelly green and gold set.

Wow, that was quick. 1960: we look mostly the same as ever. 1961: we look mostly like the years before looking mostly the same as ever. 1962: we're off on a blocky tangent. 1963: we've made it--blocks are set and eye-bleeding color scheme is set. Awesome.

Well, who's to say green and gold can't be a teams color scheme? Not me, since I'm a Mustang from Cal Poly, and our scheme is green and gold. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the nearly all-gold uniform, but what can you do?

By 1982 the A's are in Oakland, Rickey Henderson is on his way to a Hall of Fame career, and the A's uniforms have run almost off the track. Look below. They have five different unis? Seriously? Different socks? kay, well, at least they reclaimed the big "A", and here they retain the blocky rainbow script. These are the ones I remember, but only from being a littler kid than normal.

In 1987 they switched back to the upward lifting cursive lettering, and again we get "Athletics", and, for the first time since Kansas City, we get the upward lifting cursive city name on the road uni. These are specifically from 1989, the year they won it all over the Giants in the earthquake halted Battle of the Bay.

I didn't grab any more because they haven't changed it since. Mostly. They've added a solid black jersey as well as varying shades of green, but the lettering is the same. They have, though, adopted as an alternate a jersey that is basically the 2nd from the left in 1982 set, with the green piping and large "A's" letters, but it is a yellow base instead of a white based shirt.

Honestly, a while back I spent probably too much time looking for a throwback jersey of a specific player to buy. I was looking for the jersey on the far right from the 1982 set, the solid green with the big "A's", and wanted the name on the back to be Matsui, for my man Hideki. This was right after he hit his 500th professional homer and I had discretionary money to spend. No avail. They hoard those throwbacks like crazy, and when you can get players names for them, the're only players who played during that era, like Rick Honeycutt or Juaqin Andujar or Carney Lansford or Dwayne Murphy or Rickey.

I wasn't willing to spend silly amounts of money on it, but, since they let you pick a blank jersey and then pick any player, why can't they make the older "throwback" jerseys available for manipulation? What if I wanted a personalized Twins jersey from 1987?

Too bad.

Go A's.