Blog

Posted on

Will Rogaine put Cal Ripken on its packaging?

When a theme crops up for the third time on this blog, it’s time for me to create a new category for it. In that spirit, I now offer up “Adventures in Wheaties,” which is a perfect compliment to my “Adventures in Gin” category. I’ll use this category to chronicle my love/hate relationship with America’s favorite breakfast cereal.

So what could possibly have driven me to write about Wheaties yet again? After all, I’ve already discussed my A-Rod boycott and my aversion to buying a WNBA-branded box of the stuff. Now I’m convinced that the boys at General Mills are just messing with me.

After all, how do you follow up this box:

Skinny runner Hunter Kemper

with this one?

Fat baseball player Tony Gwynn

With all due respect to Tony Gwynn, a class act and a legendary ballplayer, I don’t think Wheaties is doing itself any favors when it displays one of the guys whom people cite when they make their “baseball players aren’t athletes like football and basketball players” argument. I understand the Hall of Fame reasoning in putting him on the box, and it’s not like they’re putting Sidney Ponson on, too, but it’s still not exactly hyping a fit lifestyle.

In the writeup about him on the back of the box, we find that Gwynn

was truly a thinking man’s ballplayer, a perfect blend of art and science. Known best for his artistry with a bat, he also pioneered the extensive use of videotape analysis studying his own game relentlessly, never resting on his success. His work ethic was legendary as he spent countless hours refining his stroke in the batting cage and at the hitting tee.

The writeup goes on to mention that a Wheaties breakfast “can help jumpstart metabolism.” Note that this doesn’t say, “will help jumpstart metabolism,” considering it’s juxtaposed with another picture that doesn’t even employ the slimming effects of a pinstripe uniform.

If I was Hunter Kemper, I’d give up and start eating Krispy Kremes.

Posted on

But Michael Vick can’t catch a break

Great article in the NYTimes today about Pakistan’s supreme court ruling on Nawaz Sharif’s right to return to the country and campaign for high office. Now I’m not praising the article because it shows how the weakening of Musharraf’s support has led to an independent-minded judiciary. Nor am I praising it because of its deft depiction of the intricacies of power relations among Musharraf, Sharif and Benazir Bhutto.

No, I’m praising it because it included one very specific detail:

On Thursday, Mr. Chaudhry, leading a bench of seven judges, declared to a packed courtroom that the Sharifs had an “inalienable right to enter and remain in country, as citizens of Pakistan.”

Mr. Sharif’s supporters hugged each other and poured out of the white marble building onto the main avenue, where they slaughtered four goats in celebration. As blood spilled on the asphalt, Mr. Sharif’s backers shouted: “Farewell, farewell, Musharraf, farewell.”

Posted on

Still Ill

Michael Blowhard offers up a lovely meditation on age and the relationship of body and mind (okay, soul). This musing is occasioned by MB’s participation in beach volleyball during a long weekend. At 53 and surviving cancer, he explores a number of metaphors for the relationship “we” have with our bodies, and how those relationships evolve as we age. It sorta culminates in this:

The best comparison I’ve been able to come up with is to owning a car. When your car is brand new, you roar around in it, relishing the speed, the nimbleness, and the responsiveness. It isn’t just that your car is an extension of you. You’re a team, merging into one fabulous, even better organism.

By the time your car is 10 years old, though, you have a different relationship with it. Your car has developed intractable quirks and failings. Things often go wrong for no apparent reason whatsoever. And when a reason is apparent, there’s often nothing that can be done about it anyway. In order to keep this car running, you have to take its weaknesses into account. You need to be prepared for surprises, as well as for the fact that few of them will be good ones. You and your car aren’t roaring around together any longer, celebrating the power that together you represent. You’re now your car’s caretaker. You’re clearly in charge, you’re definitely responsible, and fate will do what fate’s gonna do anyway.

I started doing a variety of yoga last October, and found it to be enormously beneficial. I had a small surgical procedure that forced me to stop for a few weeks last May, and then I let inertia / laziness take over, leading to three months without a real workout. I started again last week, and am kicking myself for falling out practice just at the time of year when my job grows most stressful (the added flexibility helps when you need to kick yourself).

Now that I’m going into a heavy-duty mode to finish an unexpectedly large September issue, put on our annual conference and make its 40-page attendee guide, assemble the big October issue, and promote our year-end gigantic directory (400+ pages), I’m making a point of getting a workout in every other day. But that’s neither here nor there, unless you have to work or live with me.

Anyway, his post has some interesting ruminations on age. It’s a subject I’ve been pondering as I deal with the inevitability of the fact that I just don’t fit in with the 20- and early 30-somethings here in my office. Oh, and that there are college basketball players who were born the year I entered college. Here’s another excerpt:

One thing that some younger people often don’t understand about aging is that age isn’t merely the failure to be young. Age is its own thing. Younger people sometimes look at older people and see people who just aren’t trying hard enough. The aches, the protectiveness, the irritability . . . If only the graybeards would try harder, none of that would be a problem.

Young people often seem to explain age to themselves as a failure of will, in other words. What they miss is that it isn’t only the body that changes as you age. Your values, your abilities, and your desires change too. Excitement becomes less important, for example — something often to actively avoid, because it’s just too damn rattling. Besides, been there done that. Calm and peace become more important. Youthful willpower — aka push — evaporates, to be replaced by a determination to enjoy life as it is. Dissatisfaction and the lust to achieve is replaced by gratitude for what is. It’s not just that the ability to will things into being vanishes, it’s that the desire to do so also goes. Energy and inspiration can no longer be ordered up and bossed into performing. Instead, maybe they come, maybe they go . . . They do what they do on their own schedule. Life’s good either way.

I’m gonna go be crochetty now. Goddamn kids . . .

Posted on

Tremendous Upside Potential

Mitch Lawrence, NBA columnist for the NY Daily News, hates the New Jersey Nets. I didn’t realize this until the Nets became good after an off-season overhaul by general manager Rod Thorn before the 2001-02 season.

The key move of that period was the trade of Stephon Marbury for Jason Kidd. Kidd’s arrival catalyzed the team and helped them reach back-to-back NBA finals. Since the Nets had barely sniffed the playoffs in years, this was an unprecedented level of success.

Despite this incredible run, Lawrence contended that the Nets would end up the losers in the deal, because Kidd was considering leaving as a free agent to sign with the Spurs. Kidd re-signed with the Nets, while Marbury had one decent season for the Phoenix Suns before being traded to the New York Knicks, where he has reached the playoffs just once (and was swept 4-0 by . . . Jason Kidd’s Nets). The Suns, after Marbury’s departure, became the most exciting team in the league.

Besides the trade for Kidd, GM Thorn made one other major move before the season. The Nets, who stunk up the joint the previous year, had the #7 pick in the draft. They chose Seton Hall forward Eddie Griffin, who was leaving for the pros after a tumultuous freshman year. It seems Eddie had gotten into a locker-room fight with a teammate, repeating the behavior that got him thrown out of high school. Still, he was 6’10”, could block shots, run the floor and even shoot a little.

Weighing the talent against the potential headaches, Thorn elected to trade Griffin to the Houston Rockets for three other first-round draft picks: Richard Jefferson, Jason Collins, and Brandon Armstrong.

Armstrong washed out of the league, but Collins has been an (inexplicably) effective defensive center who also passed well enough to fit into the Princeton offense the Nets implemented with the arrival of Kidd. The key to the deal was #15 pick Jefferson, who became a “do-everything” linchpin for the team, even running the team as a “point-forward” when Kidd was rehabbing from knee surgery several seasons ago.

Griffin? Well, it looks like Thorn was right to be scared off. He battled alcoholism and generally idiotic, compulsive, loser-ish behavior. He got cut by Houston and the Nets actually signed him on the cheap. But he got into trouble while crashing a wedding at a NJ hotel and left the team before he ever played a game for them. He wound up in Minnesota, got busted for allegedly, um, taking care of himself with an adult movie while driving.

That turned out to be his last chance. Cut by the T-Wolves — but paid off for his contract — Griffin died Friday night in Houston after driving through a railroad barrier in his SUV and getting pasted by a train. Considering it took days to identify his body from the flaming wreck, I doubt we’ll find out whether his choice of “on-board entertainment” had anything to do with the crash.

What does this have to do with Mitch Lawrence? Well, my favorite “Nets-hater” moment from Lawrence occurred during an ESPN-radio appearance he made before that fateful 2001-02 season. Discussing the draft, he announced, “The Nets made a serious mistake trading Eddie Griffin. Five years from now, he’s going to be the best player to come out of that draft.”

Today? Lawrence writes, “His career will be remembered most for his numerous off-court problems.” Eddie was 25 years old.

Posted on

Darin’ Aaron Magoo

So sorry for the lack of updates, dear readers, but my buddy Aaron (a.k.a. Fink) came to visit this weekend, and we spent much time . . . um, hanging out, watching movies, and eating very NJ food.

Speaking of which, Fink may never eat solid food again, after back-to-back days at Hackensack’s finest: White Manna and Brooklyn’s Brick Oven Pizzeria. I’ve never seen someone use Jameson as a digestif, but it seemed to have the right acid content for him.

It was a good time, intestinal woes notwithstanding. We got Fink up to speed on the most entertaining movie ever, as well as a couple of movies with hot women in their 40s: Catherine Keener and Kelly Preston.

And . . . we meandered around Ringwood Manor on Saturday, where Amy & I took a ton of pix! (Fink also took pix on his iPhone, but we didn’t check those out.) It was a wonderful day — mid-70’s, dry, breezy and clear — so we spent a bunch of time just strolling around the grounds. Well, Fink & I did. Amy was pretty dedicated to working out her new camera. I was just happy to have some success with the macro function on mine.

Anyway, it was a weekend of fun conversation, fun movies, and heavy-duty dining choices. Oh, and we swapped our iTunes libraries, so I may stumble across even more obscure and bizarre music than ever.

Fink on the bridge

(This post’s title comes from this morning’s installment of Achewood.) 

Posted on

It also fixes your schwerve

Sure, I get plenty of headaches at work, but there’s also fun to be had. You just have to know where to look. For instance, while checking out news releases this morning, I stumbled across a clinical-stage drug that’s described as a “minor groove binder.”