500,000 songs on an iPod? Just. Bring. It.
Have fun storming the castle!
Sitting in White Castle for lunch today, I thought of starting an “Overheard in White Castle” category for this blog, but realized that every entry would be a variant of what I had heard on line:
Customer 1: You never ate White Castle before?
Customer 2: Not sober, no.
Unrequired Reading: Apr. 11, 2008
I’ll milk this joke for all it’s worth
In the month that he’s lived with us, we’ve come up with several nicknames for Rufus. His ruthlessness with his plush friends has made him “The Toya Destroya,” while his ability to pee for 10 minutes at a time earned him the sobriquet of “Austin Powers.”
I just discovered his second tick in three days — it’s currently taking a dip in Lake Isopropyl — so I’ve decided that Rufus, following in Prince Harry’s footsteps, will now be known as the “Ginger Tick Magnet.”
Tick #1 was enough of a signal for me to buy a 3-pack of Frontline Plus for Dogs. Reading over the labeling, I discovered that the product “can also be used for the treatment and control of flea, tick and chewing lice infestations on breeding, pregnant and lactating bitches.”
And in a happy coincidence, Shoot ‘Em Up is our next Netflix DVD!
* * *
Bonus dog cuteness!
“I didn’t do it!”
Mental Health Day
I don’t really believe in the term, “Mental Health Day,” but this qualifies. It’s a gorgeous day, so I decided to take a vacation day, run some errands, hang out with Rufus, and otherwise not do any job-related stuff.
One of the errand-class activities was upgrading this site to WordPress 2.5. The new administrator interface is different enough that it made me averse to writing anything this morning, but I figure I oughtta post something on it before the dog & I head out to Ringwood Manor for a little meander (with cameras, of course).
Here’s a little double-whammy I’ve been waiting to post. I’m not getting anywhere in my ruminations on them, so I offer them up to you, dear readers. I hope they coalesce into a little something that you can share with me.
First, Ron Rosenbaum offers up some ruminations on Hiroshima in the 21st century. (Of course, Ron being Ron, it’s “what we talk about when we talk about Hiroshima.”)
Then, Steven Heller examines the history of the CND symbol, and how it may stretch back a lot further than its official 50 years.
I’m gonna head out with my dog; don’t work too hard.
Learning to learn
In my previous post, I decried some lame-ass attempts at infusing “literaryness” into an article that chronicled the decline of the New York Knicks. My complaint was that the writer’s story is compelling enough that it doesn’t require the trappings of middlebrowness-trying-to-prove-its-smartypantsness in order to please hip urban crowd.
But just because I lambasted the editor involved in those decisions, I wouldn’t want you to think I’m dropping my own high-brow snobbishness. In fact, Amy & I receive a whole spectrum of viewpoints, on line and in print. It ranges from. . . well —
— Hegel to Heigl!
The mag on the left is the official magazine of St. John’s College in Annapolis & Santa Fe. I attended graduate school for 2 years in Annapolis and, as I’ve written on numerous occasions (most recently/ramblingly here), it was the most important period of my life. What I learned there — including how to learn — informs every day of my life.
So I was overjoyed (I’m an easy mark, I know) to open the current issue and see an article from Laurence Berns, the first tutor I had in my first semester in the program, chronicling the process of putting together the graduate curriculum 40 years ago. The best part of “Why Didn’t We Know About These Books?” (a question from one of the early grad students), is Mr. Berns’ discussion of choosing which books to include in the program and when to get to them. There’s a funny passage about one tutor’s enthusiasm for the Theaetetus
Michael Ossorgin, tutor, ordained Russian Orthodox priest, Dostoyevsky expert, and musician, was perhaps the most sweetly intelligent man I have ever known. Some days after I had shown him my Literature selections, he called to invite me to lunch. He had developed a better idea for that sequence, but he would never say that.
As soon as we were seated for lunch he turned to me and said, “Larry, I think all of human life can be understood in terms of the Iliad
and the Odyssey
.” And then for about two hours he led me in a wonderful discussion about how the Iliad and the Odyssey clarified the foundations of human life, at the end of which I asked him if he would redraw the literature sequence to extend the time for the Iliad and the Odyssey.
He did. Of course, that’s the first section that I studied under Mr. Berns when I arrived in Annapolis.
(You can download a PDF of the Winter 2008 magazine over at the St. John’s publications page or directly from my site. It’s about 1.3mb, and Mr. Berns’ piece starts on page 26 of the PDF. There’s also a neat piece on Hegel (of course) by Peter Kalkavage, another tutor who had a profound influence on me. I’ll write more about that topic later, since it involves re-typing a 15-page essay of his. You should go buy his new book, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
STOP TRYING TO BE LITERARY!
This article in New York on the grotesquerie that is the New York Knicks is pretty entertaining. It’s got some great stories about the paranoia and dysfunctional environment of a team I used to follow. Unfortunately, I almost missed the good stuff because I was tempted to throw the magazine across the room several times in the first page or two.
I’m going to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, and hope that his editor was the one who inserted these bits, in hopes of making the article “literary,” and not just a compelling feature about the decline of a New York City institution.
Now, it’s one thing to refer to Isiah Thomas as a “$6 million coach [who] counts the days like a guest at Guantánamo”; I’m willing to let that incomprehensibility slide. I mean, you’re writing for an Upper West Bank audience, you need to put some sort of Bush reference in your lede. No, it was the second paragraph that infuriated me:
As Tolstoy might have observed: All winning teams are alike, but each losing team is wretched in its own special way.
What an impossibly wrong cliche to use! All it takes is one look at the league standings to realize that the winning teams in the league aren’t alike at all. Moreover, most crappy teams are characterized by their near-facelessness and lack of identity.
As near as I can tell, this idiotic statement was meant to show that one can make references to classic literature even when discussing something as stupid as sports! Imagine! Stop trying to be literary!
I seethed, but stuck with the article. And then the team was compared to — well, I’m just gonna give you the sentence first:
If Thomas inherited an aging, overpaid roster, he parlayed it into a younger, faster disaster flick, a Kurtzian horror of bloated contracts and hyped ne’er-do-wells.
So the Knicks, by being overpaid and surly, are somehow comparable to . . . The Heart of Darkness? Stop trying to be literary!
The article gets very good after that, bringing in all sorts of good (anonymous) sources, explaining the differences between Isiah (as a player) and Stephon Marbury, the guard he hung all his hopes on. But still, it’s as if the editor can’t resist trying to turn this amazing scene into — well, I have no goddamn idea, after this passage:
An hour before tip-off, Yao Ming sat in the visitors’ locker room, all seven foot six of him, massive chin in massive hand: the Thinker. As he fielded queries in two languages, his eyes never wavered from the 36-inch Panasonic that replayed the last Knicks-Rockets game. Yao watched Yao attack New York’s big men, get slammed, make two perfect foul shots. The art of war.
I’m down with the Rodin image for Yao. I guess I’m okay with the bizarre “look! he’s watching himself!” language of “Yao watched Yao.”
But getting fouled by crappy bigs and sinking a couple of free throws is “the art of war”? WTF? If the Tolstoy reference was literary hackery and the Conrad reference was sorta racist, what on earth is this Sun Tzu reference supposed to mean? “Yao’s a chink, so his literary basketball reference needs to be Chinese!”? Stop trying to be . . . whatever the f*** you’re trying to be! Let the story breathe!
Fortunately, the article hits high gear immediately after this passage, including episodes where the writer finds the opposing team’s scouting report on the Knicks, where he’s convinced that the team’s management is actually bugging the locker rooms, where a beat writer is described as covering the Knicks “out of spite,” and where an opposing center explains how to tell when lard-assed Eddy Curry is tired (“When you run down court and he’s 30, 40 feet behind you.”).
All of which is to say, this is a really entertaining and informative piece of sports writing by Jeff Coplon. It’s a pity someone damaged it by trying to make a good story “literary.”
Now with melatonin!
Gatorade has decided to launch a new brand of its hydrationalizer, Gatorade Tiger. Formulated for, um, power-lifting golfers with hot Swedish wives, it’s available in 3 flavors: Red Drive, Cool Fusion and Quiet Storm. But after seeing this banner ad —
— I’m convinced that Warm Milk is probably “WHAT’S NEXT?” for Tiger. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a month.
Too much embodiment of mental strength, physical power and technical perfection. Must rest . . .
What it is: 4/7/08
What I’m reading: Wrong for All the Right Reasons
What I’m listening to: Veneer
What I’m watching: Miss Guided. I have a crush on Judy Greer. There, I’ve said it. Oh, and Amazing Grace, starring the guy who played both Mister Fantastic and Mister Miracle. (For the record, it was structured poorly, starting in 1797 and using extensive flashbacks to 1782 to show Wilberforce’s early battles to get slavery abolished in the British territories. Near as I can tell, the only reason to assemble the story that way was so they could introduce the hot wife-to-be early on in the movie. The story would’ve been far more effective if it had been told linearly, with a “15 years later” title coming up after Wilberforce’s initial failure in Parliament. Oh, and Albert Finney should’ve had more screen time. On the plus side, the guy who plays William Pitt is named Benedict Cumberbatch.)
What I’m happy about: Getting to see my friends for brunch on Sunday.
What I’m sad about: Dog toys made with such shoddy workmanship that Rufus tears them to pieces within minutes. Last night, we had to stop him from chewing on the plastic squeak-insert in his toy bunny, which he’d received 4 hours earlier. And don’t ask what happened to his toy crawfish.
What I’m pondering: Whether to cobble together a new design for this blog.
The Raccoon Whisperer
Last week, I wrote about the raccoon who took up residence in a tree stump in my backyard. I came up with several theories to explain its presence there. He may have been:
- rabid,
- the reincarnation of Abin Sur,
- a MOVE-like squatter, or
- the victim of a Nigerian time-share scam.
The animal’s sluggishness and lack of response to having a rock tossed into its nest left me to conclude that it was dying. However, as one of my coworkers pointed out, the raccoon probably took up residence because it needed somewhere to birth its babies. It’s that time of year for them. I guess there’s some sort of symbolism in my seeing decay and death while other people see life, but maybe that’s just my zombie-fixation showing.
So on Monday evening I called the local animal hospital to find out the protocol for dealing with this guy, and that led me on the merry chase of calling the police’s non-emergency line, then the animal control facility in a nearby town, and ultimately The Wildlife Rehabilitator.
TWR, who lives in my town, confirmed the likelihood of my coworker’s prognosis on Tuesday morning: Raccquel Raccoon was likely getting ready to spawn little raccoon kids. “So, um, what do we do about that? Because I’m really not ready to start a family. I mean, I just got a dog!”
She told me that her daughter, who handles varmint-evictions, would call and check out the scene in the stump. She said, “She used to handle animal control in the town, until the other party took over after the election. They fired her after 8 years. And she’d done a great job. She was even working with the Mine People [a.k.a. the Jackson-Whites] on a spay/neuter program!”
“She was gonna spay and neuter the Jackson-Whites? That is AWESOME!”
“. . . Anyway, the fee to remove a raccoon is $175. But if she has babies, then it’s $225, because we have to house them together while they’re rehabilitated.”
“House them? Seriously? I was figuring I’d have to pay you for a burlap sack, some bricks and a length of twine.”
“Sir?”
“Well, it’s not like raccoons are an endangered species or something. . .”
“We take our job very seriously! These animals need to be rehabilitated before we let them out in the wild.”
Great: now I was stuck envisioning this raccoon in a group session at a rehab clinic with Britney, Lindsay and Amy Winehouse. I thought about sparing Raccquel that fate by borrowing one of dad’s rifles and drilling her. Then I thought about the possibility of a ricocheting bullet catching me in the throat and killing me, and how people would laugh because I was too cheap to call in The Wildlife Rehabilitator and her daughter, The Raccoon Whisperer, to take care of things. [Note: Of course, when I told Dad about this situation, he volunteered to come over and shoot Raccquel. I still would’ve ended up getting hit by a ricochet.]
I told her to go ahead and set it up. She didn’t call back for the rest of the week, so I started thinking of what amount of Kevlar I’d need to wear to feel safe. Then I thought about calling in a stump-grinder to take care of Raccquel’s home, without telling him that the raccoon was living there. Then I thought about the premise of Bosom Buddies and feared that Raccquel would take up residence in my attic or boiler room, dressed in drag.
With enough other stuff going on at work, I was able to put off thinking too much about the situation. Friday morning, TWR called to say that she and TRW were in my neighborhood, and would check out the situation with Raccquel. I was convinced that they took a few extra days in hopes that she’d have given birth, earning themselves an extra $50. It was to no avail. They called, live from the stump, to tell me that Raccquel was there, alone, and that they’d get her out that morning.
“I forgot to mention; watch out for the dog-crap. That’s how Rufus & I discovered this whole thing, after all.”
When I got home that night, there was no sign of my tenant in the tree stump, nor any struggle and zombified animal control staff, so I figure that things went smoothly, and Raccquel was safely in rehab, learning that opening people’s trash cans is just a cry for help.
Au revoir, raton laveur!
* * *
Coda: Friday evening, I took Rufus out for his bathroom break, and noticed a policeman walking in the woods behind my neighbor’s house (and mine).
“What’s going on, officer?” I called out.
He looked up, saw me, and said, “Get your dog inside! There’s a bear somewhere down the hill!”