Day: May 7, 2008

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Mini Driver

I worked at home today, dear readers, in anticipation of a visit from James Maloney & Son Tree Service. In addition to getting The Raccoon Lodge removed, we contracted a whole lot of other work with them, removing some smaller trees from the front yard, getting a couple of hazardous ones removed from the side of the house, cutting too-low limbs from the big trees to get some sunlight onto the yard, and sawing down some stumps so we can begin the nefarious second phase of Operation: Livable Back Yard.

Since I’d be at home, I took Amy to the bus stop today. It’s a quirky logic, but we’re a quirky couple. Anyway, about 10 minutes before the tree guys were to arrive, I thought, “Hmm. Amy’s Mini is sitting right in the driveway, and I bet they’re going to need to get past that in order to take care of a lot of this work.”

Unfortunately, her car’s a stick-shift, and I’ve never actually driven a stick-shift, outside of the one time she tried to teach me in the bus-stop parking lot. Oh, and the time when I was 16 and my pals Jon-Eric & Todd tried to teach me, before we headed to the Kinnelon Cinema to see The Running Man.

I dug deep into that 1987 version of me and tried to recreate the experience of zooming around the parking lot of my high school, but it was to no avail.

Then I looked again into that geeky high school soul and discovered inspiration from another artifact of that era: the Miller/Mazzucchelli 7-issue run of Daredevil! In particular, I recalled this set of panels from the final installment, in which our blind superhero must get behind the wheel of a car:

Emboldened, I went out to Amy’s Mini, took off the emergency brake, put it in neutral, let it roll down to the bottom of the driveway, tried several times to get it to start, tried several times to get it in gear, and eventually made my way up into the garage!

(Where I, um, stalled out and had to push it in the rest of the way so I could close the garage door…)

(Oh, and, before-and-after pix of the yard are pending…)

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Khoi Vinh gon’ be piiiiiiiissed. . .

In this week’s NY Magazine (which you really should check out regularly), there’s a short item about Gay Talese’s work on a documentary about . . . well, let me just run it here in its entirety:

Erstwhile Timesman Gay Talese, whose 1969 The Kingdom and the Power is a classic study of the paper, is back on the beat, working with fellow Times alum Arthur Gelb on a documentary about the paper’s struggles in the digital age. “It’s about why the Times is having difficulty attracting readers when in my opinion it’s still a very good paper, and about the difficulty of convincing young people to read it,” Talese said at the PEN gala April 28.

Is it because young people are reading the paper online? “We’re not interested in their Website,” he said. “We’re interested in our insights as veterans of old-fashioned journalism.” But does he read the Times site occasionally? “Never, and I never will,” he said. “I don’t even have a cell phone. I don’t deal with the technology. I don’t even know how to go into the Web. Maybe Gelb will do it. I insist on being with the people I’m writing about.”

Now, I can understand an old coot of a writer not dealing with the internet, but I’m not sure how many of them decide to make a documentary that’s intrinsically about the internet and refuse to even engage it. How self-important do you have to be to go down that path?