Eric The Blue

Kids talk

A month or maybe two ago, I was trying to help a 4th-grader with a math lesson. While we were at it, his classmates left their room to go to a "specialist"—art, or PE, or music, can't remember the details now. When we were done, I escorted him to the specialist, just to make sure he got there. As we walked along, he mentioned he was hungry and happy it was almost lunch time. I asked whether he ate the school lunch or brought one from home. He said he ate the school lunch, which he rated "just ok," and then, unprompted by me, added, I guess by way of explanation, that even though his mom had two jobs and was very busy, she'd probably make him a lunch if he asked. 

"So," he concluded, "that's why I don't ask."

Fourth grade!

Had almost forgotten that little incident from my life till yesterday it popped into my spotty memory while, for around the jillionth time, I was washing by hand those little plastic containers I use to put a little of this and a little of that into the lunches my kids eat every Monday through Friday because the hot one at school is "disgusting." Feeling crabby, I observed to the 6th-grader that it appeared she had eaten her PBJ and most everything else, including a mini Milky Way bar, but not, as far as I could tell, a single green grape. 

"Yes, dad," she said, "but the J stands for jelly, and there's fruit in jelly." 

In the mail

When you get a summons from the court, I suppose the news could be worse than jury duty. Is it unusual to get tapped three times over around 45 years of adulthood? First time the case I heard was not "ripped from the headlines": car accident, insurance company had declined to pay, blah, blah. I remember the guy next to me in the jury box took notes, and I could see he was on the side of the insurance company, 110 percent. I thought the woman who had crashed her car should get something, though not anything like what she probably hoped, and was sort of dreading having to deliberate with this fellow whose notes revealed a strong contrary opinion. Then he ended up being my ally because, of the six jurors, four wanted to spring for her new house on Park Place. Mr Hardass Notetaker and I tried talking them down to Baltic Avenue, and I honestly don't remember where we landed. Hoping for something equally portentous this time.

I store all official documents on my kitchen counter and drip pancake batter on them. 

Life hacks

What did I do today? Well, after washing a load of clothes, I watched this video on how to restring a hoodie:

 

My most available tool, the mechanical pencil, didn't work as it seems the holes in my daughter's garment are too small. While looking for a safety pin, my eye fell on one of those needles you use to pump up a basketball. That worked, maybe better than the YouTuber's assortment of pins: you can stick the thin part of the needle through a knot at the end of the string and then feed it through the track in the edge of the hood by repeatedly pinching the wide end that screws into the pump. Use your off hand to guide the advancing needle from below so that it doesn't fishtail in there and get its pointy end caught in the fabric on the sides of the track. Here is my finished product:

If you look closely, you can see that I damaged the hole to the right with my mechanical pencil fail. Make the pump needle your first option, unless you'd rather just throw away the string and say "the hell with it," which is what I would have done if it had been my hoodie. Alas and alack, it belongs to someone more particular, and with higher callings.

I know too that many of you have trouble folding a fitted sheet. My advice would be to watch this video

and then, having made a mental note of the complexities involved, wad the sucker up as if it were a giant piece of wastepaper before stuffing it into any open space your linen closet has to offer. 

Bookmark this blog for more life hacks augmented occasionally by hate speech and Shakespeare criticism. 

The freewheelin' ninth grader

I find myself listening, closely and disapprovingly, to the lyrics of current pop songs—I assume they're current pop songs—that my 9th-grader belts out, perhaps more loudly than she realizes on account of her ear buds. So, if you play one of those gambling games where you bet on who's going to die soon, you might want to consider drafting me, especially now that the last pope has croaked. Speaking of him, his view of these lyrics would likely be even more dim than mine. Hope he's enjoying the organ music that blares through all eternity at his new address. If he's lucky, popes get to listen to Bach, a Lutheran. 

Once today when the ear buds were out she told me they are going to be reading Romeo and Juliet in English class. She knows I'm interested in Shakespeare and so moans and groans while imparting this information and then sneeringly imitates the language. Her abilities in this regard extend no farther than overloading sentences with "thee" and "thou." I plan on telling her that the play is intended as a cautionary tale about what happens when people her age consider themselves to be "in love." 

I might be understating my chances of attaining an actuarial average as my own dad lived for about 50 years after first frowning on the music I played. Though I think he had to try not to smile upon overhearing, on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan:

Well, my telephone rang, it would not stop
It's President Kennedy callin' me up
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Bridgette Bardot". . . .

Ask me why I'm drunk all the time
It levels my head and eases my mind
I just walk along and stroll and sing
I see better days and I do better things:
Catch dinosaurs
Make love to Elizabeth Taylor
Catch hell from Richard Burton.

When not to make a free throw

Since yesterday evening was Thursday evening, I was at the Lowbrow with the kids after piano lessons, and on the TVs above the bar I could barely make out the end of the Gopher basketball game at Ohio State. It seems that with between 1 and 2 seconds left in the game we made 2 foul shots to go ahead by 3 points. In that scenario, shouldn't you miss the second free throw on purpose? You then deny the other team the chance to gain half the court or more with a long inbound pass after your made shot. Coach Eric would have told the shooter, Garcia, to bang one off the rim. Clock starts soon as someone touches the ball in bounds.

Poor Ben Johnson. His team gets a big upset win and some anonymous blogger guy says he had the wrong strategy in the last 1.5 seconds.

How big an upset? The win probability chart at espn.com indicates that, at the start of the game, Ohio State had a 97 percent chance of winning. When with 5:15 left the Gophers made a basket to go up by 64-53, the chart still gave Ohio State a 5 percent chance. Turns out that might have been low: the Gophers did not score another field goal, turned the ball over once, and missed 5 free throws (out of 9, not including the two Garcia made with 1.5 seconds left). 

Well, the Gophers are supposed to be the league door mat, so of course they're not going to blow out Ohio State in Columbus. Their last 3 games have been competitive and, before last night, entertainingly painful—lost narrowly at Wisconsin, lost in overtime at home against Nebraska, then beat Ohio State on the road. I seem to be trying to talk myself into another TV option for when it's too icy for senior citizens to walk the dog. 

On the way to piano, we were passed by an emergency vehicle, which caused the 6th-grader to recall the time, "long ago," when she had said it was quite a coincidence that a fire department vehicle should have the license plate FIRE. After a pause she added, "God, was I dumb." Almost told her that the thought 

I was stupid a few years ago but now I'm not

was apt to recur to her at regular intervals till she's at least 64. 

Notes on senescence

It seems there are few things like a significant snow event to bring into view signs of encroaching senescence.

1. I decided to do the snow removal in shifts, the better to preserve my energies. Heading out for my second go at it, I discovered that my neighbor had already finished the job. Probably viewed my efforts from the window and knew he never wanted to see anything that pathetic again. 

2. Then the plow went by and filled in the end of my driveway with approximately 3 tons of frozen crustiness. I was out hacking away at it this lunchtime when my daughter got dropped off by her friend's dad. We exchanged meteorological pleasantries, as Minnesotans will, and then, pulling away, he advised me to "be careful." 

3. A day or two before the storm, I'm stopped at a red light in south Minneapolis and a young woman, out for a run, crosses in front of me. I follow her with my eyes, naturally. As she approaches the opposite curb, she takes a short stride in order to land at the front edge of a puddle, then springs over it with her next long stride. I used to be able to do that!

4. Last time I was in an uber I was somewhat younger than I am now. Still, I guess I was old enough so that, taking my seat, I observed the driver checking me out in the rear-view mirror before changing the radio from a hip-hop station to MPR. Probably should be thankful it wasn't right-wing talk! 

5. Since I've strayed from the original theme of winter's memento mori, I might as well mention what I take to be the best bit of commentary on the recently concluded clown show in the US Capitol—someone, taking note of Kevin McCarthy's craven concessions to the certifiable lunatics in his caucus, tweeted that, in exchange for the votes needed to be elected Speaker, he had promised to use the gavel only for the purpose of pounding himself in the crotch. 

 

True confessions &c

 

True confession: I record Jeopardy shows, and sometimes I'll watch the same contest back-to-back, just to experience the sensation of burying the actual TV contestants with my trove of knowledge. I don't know what it is about me, no doubt something bad, but I find that my enjoyment is only mitigated, not erased, by the knowledge that I'm, you know, CHEATING.

Another idiosyncrasy: when reading a newspaper or magazine article, or even the work of a famous author, the last few days Mark Twain, I will copy edit as I go along, noting to myself that a sentence, in my opinion, might be better if this word or that phrase were eliminated, or the sentence split in two, or recast entirely so as not to be structured exactly like the one two before it, etc., etc. You can imagine my pleasure when I come across a mistake that is obvious and sort of funny, the kind of thing that human intelligence but not spell check would catch. For example, the other night I was reading about the band Green Day in Wikipedia, and there was a sentence in which the context clearly required the word "causal," but it was spelled "casual"—by chance, an error making a different word that changed the meaning of the sentence to something not intended. I've gone looking for it now but I can't find it, mainly because I can't remember what article it was in—could have been the one on Green Day, or the one on Billie Joe Armstrong, or the one on American Idiot, or the one on Mike Dirnt, or maybe one I can't even now think of . . . I just don't know. 

But, since I tried to find it, I think I could now make some money on a Green Day category in Jeopardy. The band name, for example, comes from Bay Area slang—Armstrong and Dirnt are from there—for a day devoted wholly to smoking pot. Armstrong's dad, a trucker and a musician, died in the September that Armstrong was 10, a traumatic event: the song "Wake Me Up When September Ends," from American Idiot, is a memorial. Dirnt isn't Dirnt's birth name, but he would go around elementary school playing chords on air guitar, accompanying the theatrical striking of imagined strings with the sound "dirnt," "dirnt," "dirnt." So the name he acquired is an onomatopoeia. Armstrong's wife of 28 years is from Minneapolis and her brother is a famous skateboarder. He (Armstrong, not the skateboarder) made a record, Foreverly, with Norah Jones—it's a reinterpretation of the Everly Brothers 1958 album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. You can listen to Foreverly on YouTube, here. I did not expect ever to see Billie Joe Armstrong, Norah Jones, and the Everly Brothers within one Wikipedia sentence. Reminds me, however, of my favorite odd couple of musical collaborators: Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin fame, and blue grass vocalist and fiddle player Alison Krauss. Here they are performing "Killing the Blues." If you click on it, pretty good chance it's the most beautiful thing you hear until 2023. Happy New Year!

 

 

 

 

 

I try to answer questions

Somewhat relieved that the World Cup is over as I can now get back to having answers for my kids' sports questions. It's one of my unambiguous strengths as a parent but for a couple weeks there it was all, like, "Offsides in soccer? I dunno, google it."

Math homework getting dicey, too. Sixth grade I'm still fairly proficient but when the ninth grader seeks a consultation my reaction, on seeing the problem, is often along the line of, "Yeah, um, let me think about that for a minute." Then I take around a half hour at the dining room table to figure it out, sometimes with an assist from the Internet, and when I return to her room to present my solution she breezily informs me that her classmate CeCe just showed her how to do it over Facetime.

I hope CeCe doesn't tell her about how the Eskimos supposedly set their elders out to sea on a raft. 

 

Passing my goal

I can usually make my daily step goal (8500) with miscellaneous moving around plus two outings with the family dog. To fly past it like this requires something unusual, like October golf. We ride in carts, but when you hit the ball off line and have to find it so you can hit it off line again, there's nothing to do but walk back and forth in the leaf litter. The chance of spotting the ball and stepping on it are approximately equal. They clear the leaves off the fairways but that ain't where I hit 'em.  

Get quite a lot more exercise my way. Let the other fellas go for a low score.

If today turns out to be my last round of the year, I finished the season with a bogey 5. Fairly representative. Drove it a decent distance but—surprise!—off line into the right rough. There was a tree in my way but I could aim at the left edge of the green. I hit it quite a bit left of that. Then I pitched it all the way across the green and off the other side. Then I made a half decent putt from the fringe before holing around a 3-footer. Apparently my playing partners cannot concede a putt while shivering. 

He's just a kid who's 4!

 

I mentioned, here, Jennifer Senior—mostly her journalistic accounts of the social science relating to human happiness. She's also the author of a book about parenting called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting. She took the title from a chance conversation she had at a playground with a new dad who, when she asked how he found fatherhood, replied that it was "all joy and no fun at all." Well do I remember wanting—yearning—to be left alone on the playground bench while the kids played, but of course someone's unhappy every other minute, and then they want to be pushed on the tire swing, and then someone falls and gets hurt, and then, and then . . . no fun at all. I think the "all joy" was mainly the guy's way of acknowledging how he knew he was supposed to feel.

But the playground was no match for the peculiar, numbing torture of children's TV programming. The worst show ever was Caillou, about this Charlie-Brown looking boy and his perfect little kids' world, the loving parents, the doting grandparents, the friendly townspeople, and, above all, the grating jingle:

I'm just a kid who's 4,
Each day I grow some more,
I like exploring on Caillou!
So many things to do,
Each day is something new,
I'll share them with you on Caillou!
My world is turning, changing each day,
With mommy and daddy and finding my way!

In the typical climactic scene, Caillou visits, say, the fire station, where the firefighters invite him to climb aboard their biggest truck and toot the horn while working the steering wheel. They tell him he'll be a great firefighter one day, if he wants. They give him a fire helmet and everyone beams and laughs. After he's climbed down, his proud parents embrace the little egghead as the theme song kicks in. He's just a kid who's 4, each day he grows some more, Caillou!

I suffered this vivid flashback while watching political news on TV. It seems that Herschel Walker, the Republican US Senate candidate from Georgia, has gone on some field trips to police stations and the nice cops gave him "badges" that he now displays to anyone who'll listen to a potential senator's version of show-and-tell. Well, it's probably better for him and his campaign that people are talking about his toy badges rather than his secret children, the women he's beat up, and the abortions for which he's either advocated or paid. His official position on abortion is evidently that he's pro-life except in those cases where he's the one who knocked her up. Our country has a population of 330 million, a hundred of whom are members of the Senate, and there's about a 50-50 chance that he'll be one of them. Feeling small for having been nauseated by Caillou.

My WASPy kids in the diverse Minneapolis public schools

I'm no parenting expert, but I know you have to feed them, and I feel intuitively that it's probably good to have conversations with them, too. Thus at our house such supper-hour repartee as:

"How was school?"

"Fine."

"Have you been advised by an attorney to keep your answers brief?"

"You always say that. It's not funny."

Sometimes she—the middle-schooler—does better. Minneapolis public schools were closed this past Wednesday.

"Why no school on Wednesday?" she asked.

"It's Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday." (I have all the answers.)

"I love the Jews," she says.

I then launch into an explanation of why Sandy Koufax did not pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series, Dodgers versus Twins.

"Dad, dad, I don't care!"

I talk to her older sister, too. 

"How's school?"

"Fine. But I don't know what to write an essay about."

"What class?"

"Social Studies. It's called 'Race and Identity.'"

"Well, do you have to choose among options, or is it completely your choice?"

"My choice. Problem is, I'm a Basic White Girl with she/her pronouns." She gestures toward the heavens and whines, "I got nothin'!"

She ended up getting a 98 for an essay about her 50% Norwegian heritage. I read it before she turned it in. Fairly solid effort, though the part about making lefse with her aunt was a fabrication. She's been invited to help make lefse. Only thing she's ever done is eat it. Delivery system for butter and sugar. I suggested a paragraph concerning how, back when "our people" came to America, immigrants were so despised that the federal government gave them 160 acres of rich farmland. She said her paper was already long enough (2 pages, double spaced). 

Lunching out

I usually work, without taking a lunch, till about 1 o'clock, and notwithstanding the morning oatmeal am famished when walking out of school. Luckily the most direct route home takes me past some favorite eateries that I haven't visited since pre-pandemic times. Today it was Kramarczuk's, where I had the cabbage roll pictured above, with rye bread and the side of cucumber, tomato, and onions in a vinegar dressing. If I remember right, it was about $12 for everything. Regarding the bread: delicious, but back in the day you just served yourself from the plastic bags left open by the napkins and stuff, and they'd bring out new loaves when either the rye or pumpernickel was depleted. Now if you want bread they give you three slices from the loaf they keep on their side of the cafeteria line. Probably shouldn't complain since my own habits may have played a part in the development of the new policy. 

After spending the morning around 4th- and 5th-graders and their mostly 30ish teachers, it was nice to dine surrounded by mature Slavs—maybe I'm not next in line for extinction, after all. I'm sort of curious about where they come from, however. They used to live in the neighborhood, which is now specked with high rises that are presumably home to the young professionals who may be seen walking their designer dogs while on a work break from the home office. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s no longer possible to buy a case of High Life at Surdyk's, the neighborhood liquor store that now includes a cheese shoppe. For gazillions of my out-of-town readers, Kramarczuk's is in "lower northeast" Minneapolis, just across the Hennepin Avenue bridge from downtown. It used to be inhabited by people with names like, well, Kramarczuk, who would have had no use for local businesses such as "Base Camp Fitness."

I like how, if you click on "salads" at Kramarczuk's online menu, the first listing is for "American Potato" and the second is for "German Potato." You can have kale but you'll have to scroll. 

One day last week I lunched at Emily's Lebanese Deli, about a mile up University Avenue, almost to Broadway, where nordeast still looks like nordeast. I had some kind of a combo platter and was reminded that, though famous for liking everything, the stuffed grape leaf isn't among my all-time favorites. I'll go back, but maybe not before I've had the Bar Burger at the bar in Jax. Seventeen dollars, but what the hell, I used to get by without a part-time job. Might have a beer with it. 

Among schoolchildren

I got a part-time job working around 20 hours per week, and I find that if I give up watching Twins games on TV, a sacrifice like swearing off the picking of scabs, I have as much time as before to read, sleep, walk the dog, and do my best to help with 6th- and 9th-grade math homework in the evenings. Lots of math, actually, since my gig is working as a math tutor at an elementary school in Columbia Heights, the suburb I grew up in.

First impression: lots more Spanish spoken than when I was growing up—I guess it's the first language, and the one still spoken at home, for around half the kids in the school, which is called Valley View. It's not the one I went to more than 50 years ago, but the building footprint is identical to the one I did attend less than a mile away, and the experience of being in there is the flip side to what I felt recently when stopping at an exurban Target with the same layout as the one by my house: it all seems familiar, but it's weird that everyone in the store is white.

Today at Valley View I helped a girl take a math assessment on a laptop. She's black, wore a head covering, and, though I noticed on a form that the language spoken in her home is supposedly Somali, her English was fluent and unaccented. Very fluent. Perhaps another Norwegian would call her an over-sharer, one of these kids who, every time the teacher asks a question, has her hand in the air: "Oh, oh, me, call on me!" For her math assessment, she sat with one leg crossed over the other, neither one reaching the floor and the foot of her top leg vibrating rapidly as she gave her attention to each problem. After every answer, a new problem would flash up on the screen, and I'd hear her whisper to herself, "Oh my God!" Once, when she said it with particular vehemence, I peered over her shoulder to get a look at the problem: adding not two, not three, but four numbers together, and requiring (it soon developed) a fair amount of what is now called "regrouping." 

Kids crack me up. After an elementary career spent scoffing at school, my new middle-schooler now walks with friends to the neighborhood Caribou, where they do their homework together. At least that's what they tell me they're doing. They bring their backpacks and money for smoothies, so it's either largely true or a somewhat elaborate ruse. She has called me a "school nerd" but, honestly, I did my homework alone, in my room and at the last minute, if at all. 

Kids follow the news

I remember sometimes getting annoyed at people who would regale me with stories about their charming children. It's not necessarily your turn now, because there's still time to click the back button.

I have a 6th-grader and a 9th-grader, both girls. On Thursdays, the 6th-grader has a piano lesson at 6:30. I don't like trying to fit supper into the window before music, and even less do I enjoy thinking about what to make for supper while driving home from the lesson after 7:00. So it occurred that last night about 7:30 we were taking our usual Thursday night seats at the Lowbrow when the 9th-grader's phone dinged. Because she's socially ambitious and admires all her sister's friends, the 6th-grader immediately demanded to know who the text was from. Without looking up from her phone, the 9th-grader adopted a practiced tone of jaded indifference and answered:

"What if I tell you who it isn't from? It isn't from the Queen of England."

'Twas the night before

It's the night before the first day of school—potentially fraught and maybe more than usual at our house as younger daughter is starting middle school tomorrow and older one is starting high school. Right now they are fighting about who will shower first, because the one who goes second has to wipe it down. I don't think this issue has arisen before. In the past, the argument has always ended with someone saying, "Ok, I just won't take one then." The response to that has sometimes been, "Ok, I won't either." You know it's a big night when strength of inclination to shower tops the aversion factor associated with performing a 3-minute chore. The old tactic has been retired and the fight has moved to new ground. 

I have to say that the coping mechanisms employed to mitigate stress are kind of charming. The older one told me today that she and her friend discovered that they have their first- and second-hour classes together. "So," she explained, beaming, "if we get lost going from English to Science, we'll be tardy together, and it will be a lot less awkward." Younger one almost always adopts an attitude of aloof indifference when being lectured by older sister, but this evening, at supper, she listened attentively to every bit of advice that a recent grad could offer. Any port in a storm. 

I have to do laundry. Final decisions haven't been made and all options must be available.

UPDATE: As I was saying good night to them, the high schooler got a text from an old elementary school friend. They've lost touch with each other to a degree: the friend was home schooled after having a difficult transition to middle school, so for a few years has been removed somewhat from the social mix. But now she's going back to high school. Her text, which came in about 11:15, said: "Want to eat lunch with me tomorrow?" Apparently "orientation night" was a disorganized disaster but here's hoping that in around twelve hours these two can find the lunchroom and each other. 

#tardytogether
#bekind

College boy

Have been recalling lately how I paid for college. Items in the news, you know. Basically, my parents bankrolled my college education. I recall having a campus job washing dishes in the cafeteria a couple times per month. That was good for a trivial amount of pocket money. I also took out a loan for the relatively small portion of the big bill my parents didn't cover. I think maybe they thought it was important I have "skin in the game." Anyway, it was the kind of loan where you get the money, and you don't start paying it back till you're done with school and working. Then, you pay like on a mortgage, and interest accrues on the unpaid principle. When that day came, my dad gave me the money to pay off the loan, and he stepped into the shoes of my creditor—nice for me, as his interest rate was zero. Even nicer: after I'd been paying him awhile, he told me one day to forget about it, which until now I mostly did. 

My parents weren't rich—middle class tending toward affluent, at best. I think they were able to save a tidy sum for my college (and my sister's) because, one, they placed a high value on education—just as something good in itself, without reference to any goal of "getting ahead"—and, two, by inclination and upbringing they preferred to live modestly. Also, college didn't cost as much in the 1970s. I think I remember that in my sophomore year the cost of tuition, room and board at my college was $4050. The year before it had been under $4000, and it never reached $5000 while I was there. Today, it's $63,110. 

Probably you can see where I'm going with this. All things considered, I probably shouldn't be the one to bitch my guts out about the federal government forgiving $10,000 of student loan debt for people who lacked the advantages described above. It's true that loan forgiveness does not address the underlying problem of high college costs. But I wonder whether this argument doesn't turn against the people making it. Especially at public colleges and universities, a leading factor in rising costs is that they are not funded as generously by taxpayers as they were 40 years ago. The schools therefore cut programs and pass along costs to students, who take out loans and fall into debt at 20. The people who complain bitterly about loan forgiveness are the same ones vehemently opposed to what they regard as "lavish spending" on higher education. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what they're actually against is people of modest means attaining a college education.

Unless, of course, they're good at sportzing. No one complains about taxpayers footing the college bill for good sportzers. You can read here about how the government allows affluent people to save for college while simultaneously reducing their tax bill. No one seems bitter about that, either.

 

Biden owes Americans an explanation on why a truck driver who didn't go to college is now responsible for the student loans of a rich lawyer.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) August 24, 2022

And it does not tend to diminish my support for a policy initiative when I notice that those in opposition, including US senators, have no better tactic than to lie about it. Since "rich lawyers" earn more than $125k/year, they are barred from having their loans forgiven under the plan. 

Dressing up

 

Family wedding tomorrow. Daughters have been planning for weeks what to wear. Today they asked, I thought a little worriedly, if I knew what I was wearing, so I looked in the closet, put something on, and modeled it for them. They studied me impassively. I think the younger one thought the verdict could go either way, because I saw her look at the older one, as if willing to take a cue. Older one finally pronounced me "okay," at which time younger one elaborated, "Passable, barely."

It's good I passed inspection because it seems my options on these occasions are limited: I found in the pocket of the blue blazer I had on the church bulletin for the funeral service of a friend's mom. It's dated June 18, 2021. I'm thinking that if I can maintain roughly the same weight, at the rate of one use per year this blue blazer should get me to the finish line. 

On the other side of the gen gap

More and more, I have that experience of speaking earnestly, or with enthusiasm, to my kids about something and then watching as the curtain draws slowly shut across their face. For example, I was explaining recently about the concept of a "record album," a collection of songs recorded for play in a certain order that people used to listen to over and over again, with the result that to this day, if I hear "Thunder Road" somewhere, soon as it's over I hear in my head the first notes of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and am genuinely startled when the next sound is anything else. Bizarre-o! 

I assure them that I am familiar with the concept of a "playlist," but do not partake as it prevents you from being exposed to new things, with the result that you sink into fuddyduddism. It is highly amusing to them that I should declare myself "open" to "new things" on the same day that I complain about young teen fashion. Have they noticed that with "new" jeans you pay a lot extra for big rips across the thigh?

They wouldn't be interested, but the other day I listened to the Emmylou Harris station on Pandora while pedaling my stationary bike in the basement. Within about 45 minutes, I heard all the following, all great (or at least enjoyable), and all I believe unknown to me five years ago.

• Emmylou Harris, "Red Dirt Girl"
• Emmylou Harris and John Prine, "Angel from Montgomery"
• Alison Krauss, "When You Say Nothing At All"
• Emmylou Harris (with Willie Nelson), "Gulf Coast Highway"
• John Prine and Nanci Griffith, "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness"
• Emmylou Harris, covering Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" 
• Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried" 

If I made them listen to any of these, they'd laugh me into the 2020's. 

 

Table talk

What It’s Like to Vacation With Me:

husband: want to try bungee jumping? They have a catapult we could both go in? Or luge? Skiing?

me: did you know there’s a LIBRARY in Queenstown?

— Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) August 3, 2022

I've found my soul mate, but it appears she's married to one of these ambitious adventurer types. "Life is short, therefore I will leap from high places and ski down the sides of sheer cliffs!"

Just had the following breakfast table conversation with older daughter.

Her: Whatcha reading?

Me: An article arguing that, to date, the results of the primary elections show Trump still has an iron grip on the Republican party.

Her: You are such a nerd.

Me: Nerds rule, cool kids drool.

Her: Only a nerd would say that.

Me: Perhaps if you were a nerd, you'd comprehend that I have already copped to being one, and as a consequence do not regard it as an insult to be accused in this manner.

Her: [Stands up from table, walks away snickering.]

Good bye dog, hello horse

The younger girl left today for horse camp after saying quite an elaborate good-bye to our dog. Just a flip "See ya" for dad.

Does anyone understand very well the connection between kids and animals? I feel like my kids aren't the only ones who, when there were around a hundred words in their vocabulary, knew the names of all the common pets, farm animals, and several more for good measure too: dog, cat, horse, pig, cow, bird, frog, snake, fox, donkey, bug, zebra, monkey, butterfly, wildebeest—the last is the only one I'm kidding about. It's like they're all born zoologists.

Animals have a featured role in ten million kids' books, and if it's going to be a chicken-or-egg question, my answer is that the authors are catering to, not creating, the interests of kids.  Regarding dogs, in particular: why is it practically impossible to catch even very young children making a category mistake? Dobermans, St. Bernards, German Shepherds, boxers, collies, French poodles, cocker spaniels, bulldogs, labs, pit bulls, Irish setters, beagles, Rottweilers, huskies, Golden Retrievers, Jack Russells, Dachshunds—without instruction, kids effortlessly identify all these as dogs, and never call a non-dog a dog. (Maybe they'd be tricked by coyotes or wolves, but still.) In other areas, they make mistakes, and you can detect a learning process. They talk about the toes on their foots, because with language they first learn rules and, later, the exceptions. But soon as they know the word "dog," they apply it correctly to all the different breeds and varieties of friendly mutts, though to an adult eye many of these look no more alike than a tabby and a red fox (which is another mistake they'd never make). 

It seems they should be confused, but they aren't. Maybe I'm way off course about this. If not, I have no idea what accounts for it. If you google, say, "kids and animals," you end up reading about how it's good for kids to have pets, but nothing that explains the natural affinity between them and the animals that hog all the space in their earliest working vocabulary.  

What a waste

Embarrassing but true: I look like Nixon when someone is explaining to me about fishing. Did you know that you have to set your beer down if you catch one? And then hold its scaly body while trying to yank the hook out of its throat. Just the worst. Only makes sense as a subsistence activity in a primitive economy.

Spent some time chatting on the couch with my girls tonight. The younger one is starting middle school in the fall. The older one, a middle school grad, was therefore providing an overview of the teachers, their strengths and weaknesses, which ones are to be avoided at all costs, etc. Regarding a certain Spanish teacher, her entire summation was, "I love how real she is, she even swears at us."

I felt a twinge. All the effort of suppressing my impulses—wasted. 

At a music recital

Found out today that I'm the kind of person who, at a kids' music recital, will hope in my soul that some of them will screw up so that my kid won't feel too bad about it when she does, too. I've heard her practice, and I know she gets nervous. Then in the event she does well enough and I feel morally responsible for the tribulations of those who had a worse time. One boy stopped playing and studied his music for several silent seconds before he turned to the audience and, smiling broadly, announced: "I got lost." Apparently I took it harder than he did. 

My daughter's virtuoso performance begins at about 47:55 in the above video. Wish I could direct you to the fellow who confessed to being lost. I think maybe the comic relief was edited out.

Here's what the violin students may aspire to:

 

 

Twins out west

I've loved Twins games on weekday nights on the west coast for around 55 years now. It's at least 54, because I know I was listening, transistor radio under the pillow, on Wednesday night, May 8, 1968, when the A's Catfish Hunter pitched a perfect game against the Twins in Oakland. The box score for that game is here. Back then, the standard starting time for night games was 8:00, and I see that the game was played in 2:28, so it would have been about half past midnight in the central time zone when Rich Reese, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, fanned for the last out. Reese worked the count full, 3-2, then fouled five consecutive pitches before whiffing on the eleventh pitch of the at-bat. You don't fall asleep five minutes after that, and I wonder whether next day I was noticeably groggy in Miss Sime's fourth grade class at Highland Elementary. 

Last night's game against the A's started at 8:40 local time. My kids didn't go to bed till the seventh inning. You know you're old when you think every change seems calculated to remove the charm from life. At least I was able to cut the grass between supper and the start of the game. Also, the Twins won, which is rare: in the last ten years, their record in road games against the A's is 6-23. They've done better everywhere else, including at Yankee Stadium. It can't be the rabid fans urging on the home team. The A's have been a bad draw forever. The attendance last night was 3138. Hunter's perfect game was witnessed by 6298. A lot of the same in the intervening 54 years. Games in their stadium have a weird feel, even on TV. Not enough people to make the low hum of a baseball crowd, and there is so much foul territory that the few who are there, invariably bundled up against the cold, could as well be watching on TV themselves. 

My older daughter is reading for school A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I read again myself in order to talk about it with her. Hot take: Shakespeare's comedies are skillful and amusing but they leave no imprint, and I can't fault an 8th-grader's cold response to fairies in the woods squeezing magic juice on the eyelids of the wrong sleeping lover, etc. Were I in charge of the curriculum and determined to make 8th graders read a Shakespeare play, it'd be Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Macbeth, brutal but brief. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that the plot of "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby," the play put on by the ridiculous rustics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, resembles closely that of Romeo and Juliet, which was also written in the mid-1590s. It's amusing to think of Shakespeare not taking himself that seriously, and imagining his tragedy played as a farce. 

As a reward for subjecting myself to A Midsummer Night's Dream, last night in bed after the ballgame I started reading Unknown Man No. 89, almost the only Elmore Leonard crime novel that had somehow escaped my attention. The main character is a Detroit process server who, according to the following Chapter 1 description, is a good fit for his occupation:

He decided he liked process serving because he was his own boss. He could work two hours a day or twenty-four; and because he liked it, he usually put in at least twelve. He didn't mind being in the car most of the day. He liked to drive around and listen to music or, about a hundred days a year, a Detroit Tigers baseball game. It didn't matter what place they were in. 

Someone called Leonard "the Dickens of Detroit" but—assuming there’s autobiography in this chacterization—to me he's just my doppelgänger. By the way, though it doesn't matter, the Twins are in first.

Mesmerized by Rich Strike

 

I'm not ordinarily a fan of "the sport of kings" but I've watched this video, which keeps an arrow on Rich Strike through the second half of the Kentucky Derby, maybe forty times now. Just mesmerizing. And you keep noticing new things. At first, I was obsessed with the ground made up: if a movie showed an 80-to-1 underdog coming on like this to win, I'd say, probably with everyone else, "Hollywood!"

And then there's the call. I think the guy was maybe looking through binoculars? He never mentions Rich Strike till he's screamed out that Epicenter and Zandon, "these two," are "coming to the wire!" He plainly thought only one of them could win, last time he'd checked no other horse was within range, but then with around 100 yards to go Rich Strike suddenly invaded his binoculared field of vision. That's a theory, anyway. I give him credit for immediately recognizing that it was the longest shot in the race who had come out of nowhere, seemingly, though the video shows that he came from somewhere—far back, before weaving through most of the field in the last quarter mile to win. 

When the video starts, Rich Strike is in 17th place in the 20-horse field. When the leading horse comes out of the last turn, there's just less than a quarter mile to go, and Rich Strike appears to have moved up to 13th place. When the lead horse Epicenter has one furlong to go, Rich Strike has moved up to sixth. He passes them all in the last 200 yards. 

Is it weird that this horse race reminds me of nothing so much as the 800 meter final in the 1972 Olympics? But Dave Wottle wasn't 80-to-1.

 

 

Local resident does well but dies young

Prince died on this day in 2016. A few weeks ago, footage of him being interviewed during a 1970 Minneapolis schools teacher strike made a social media sensation after it was discovered by a music fan who, in his job for the local CBS affiliate, was alert enough while reviewing old tape to recognize an unnamed interviewee, age 11, who said he was on the teachers' side "because they work, they be working extra hours for us and all that stuff." 

The above picture, of the 1971-72 basketball team at Bryant Junior High in south Minneapolis, has also been widely disseminated on social media. Prince, wearing #3, is kneeling at one end of the front row. Discussions of Prince as a basketball player inevitably quote his junior high coach, Richard Robinson, who said he was an excellent player but couldn't crack the starting lineup because he was undersized and there were so many other talented guys on the team. The Current has, here, "an oral history of Prince's love of basketball" that includes Robinson's reminiscences. He wasn't blowing smoke about having some good athletes on his junior high basketball team. I'm reasonably sure that #20 is Greg Boone, who a few years later was runner-up to Kevin McHale for Minnesota's Mr. Basketball Award. And #21 standing in the back row is Duane Nelson, who was good enough to play college basketball at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—he was widely regarded during his life (he died in 2011) as Prince's half-brother, though the picture got murky after the musician died without living parents, offspring, or a will, and a probate court started hearing evidence from diverse claimants. I believe the kid wearing #4 and kneeling at the opposite end of the front row from Prince is Russell Gary, who played college football at Nebraska and was later an all-pro defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Big #31, Calvin Anderson, went to Nebraska with Gary and played in the offensive line for the Cornhuskers. It's kind of humorous to read about Coach Robinson remembering how the wispy Prince, who in his maturity attained the height of 5' 2", repeatedly complained to him about being only the sixth or seventh man with this group. He quit playing basketball after his sophomore year at Minneapolis Central High School. Friends say he had other interests. 

I have a bit of a biographical connection to this photograph. I graduated high school the same year as Prince and his teammates, and I think my junior high basketball team might have played against Bryant in a tournament—it's also possible that they were only in the same tournament and that, though we didn't play them, their Afros made an impression on me. What I know for sure is that, a few years later, several of the kids in this picture were seniors on the basketball team at Central High, which went through the regular season undefeated. They were joined by a junior, Andra Griffin, who, after a college career at the University of Washington, was selected in the fifth round of the 1981 NBA draft by the Seattle Supersonics. I was on the team at Columbia Heights. Our team was pretty good—co-champions of a competitive league—but, to give you some idea, we beat Minnetonka in a close game early in the season, and when Central played Minnetonka in a holiday tournament they slipped past them by the score of 88-48. A 40-point win was not uncommon for them; like I say, Minnetonka was no weakling. Central was in the same region as us, so all season we knew that they stood in the way of us qualifying for the state tournament. We ended up being the #2 seed in the region tournament, and, had it gone according to Hoyle, would have played Central in the championship game. But we lost in the semifinal to North High School, and a couple nights later North, in a huge upset, toppled Central. The two teams had played twice during the regular season and Central had won by 66-54 and 79-65. I don't have a scrapbook; I'm pulling this information from the 1976 Central High yearbook. 

Back to Prince, my fellow class of '76er. Here he is (below) performing "When You Were Mine" at First Avenue on August 3, 1983, by chance my 25th birthday. I was probably playing in a softball game, like an idiot. Information about the show, including the setlist, is here: I guess that night was the first time he ever did "Purple Rain" live. The show was a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theatre, which sheds some light on the following tidbit from the Wikipedia article on Prince:

While attending Bryant, he was trained in classical ballet at the Minnesota Dance Theatre through the Urban Arts Program of Minneapolis Public Schools. He grew to become an advocate for dancers, and would later use his wealth to save the ailing Joffrey Ballet in Chicago during the 1990s.

If you know "When You Were Mine" from the record "Dirty Mind," it's fun to hear him sing it that evening in his (surprisingly low) natural voice. For the recorded version, he also made some changes to the lyrics, perhaps anticipating the sensibilities of people like Tipper Gore. I've always loved Prince, partly for his music but also because he was a worldwide superstar who never left the city of his birth, Minneapolis. When in 2015 the Minnesota Lynx won the WNBA championship, he had the team over to Paisley Park and played a private concert for them that began in the wee hours of the morning after they had won the final game, which he attended. When his death was announced six years ago, Lindsay Whalen recalled that night, here. Quit the team but always loved basketball!

 

 

The thin blue line

There was no doubt that the NYPD was going to get their man. Frank Robert James arrested for shooting 10 people aboard a Brooklyn “N” train on Tuesday. #CopsCountPoliceMatter pic.twitter.com/y6g4Wl7p7K

— Bill Bratton (@CommissBratton) April 13, 2022

Not sure that the congratulatory tone of the above tweet, from former New York police commissioner Bill Bratton, squares very well with the details of the suspect's activity as reported by diverse outlets, including ABC News:

After the mass shooting during Tuesday morning's rush hour, James switched subway trains, from the N to the R, and got off the train at the 25th Street Station around 8:35 a.m., sources said. He then took the B67 bus to Park Slope, where he bought a new mask and entered the 7th Avenue subway station at 9:18 a.m.

James made it into Manhattan and, sometime Tuesday night, checked into the Chelsea International Hostel on West 20th Street, sources said. He emerged sometime Wednesday morning and began wandering the streets of Lower Manhattan, hiding in plain sight, sources said. 

Multiple sightings began at around 10:30 a.m., when he was spotted sitting outside Dimes, a restaurant in Chinatown, sources said. Witnesses took pictures of him sitting, apparently using a Link NYC hub to charge his phone, and posted to social media, tagging police, sources said. 

A few hours later, James was spotted getting lunch at Katz's on the Lower East Side, sources said. 

Just after 1 p.m. Wednesday, James called Crime Stoppers on himself, saying he was in the East Village at a McDonald's at East 6th Street and First Avenue, according to sources. James reportedly said: "I think you're looking for me. I'm seeing my picture all over the news and I'll be around this McDonald's."

By the time police arrived, James had already left the McDonald's. But a good Samaritan spotted James nearby on St. Mark's Place and First Avenue and flagged down police, sources said.

Yes, the NYPD always gets their man! All that's required is that people post to social media pictures of him chilling in Lower Manhattan, tagging the police, and then, when that doesn't get their attention, the suspect himself calls the cops' own tip line to tell them what McDonald's he's at. But they can't get there before he wanders off, so a citizen has to flag them down to indicate what square yard of space he is currently taking up. 

As a meek and usually law-abiding citizen, I have few interactions with cops, but the subway shooter's troubles getting himself arrested reminded me, vaguely, of the last time I exchanged words with one of Minneapolis's finest. My then-wife woke me at around 3 one morning because it sounded like someone was alternately trying to jimmy the lock of our front door and force it open with shoulder butts. Our bedroom was upstairs, directly above the entry, and our outside light was on, but there was a decorative roof over the door so that when I looked down through the bedroom window I could see the guy's shadow but not him. I called 9-1-1 to report that someone was trying to break into my house. They keep you on the line so that you can report any new developments while the cops are en route. Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting: the house was in the middle of south Minneapolis, a block off 35W, a block off Nicollet Avenue, and a block off 46th Street, all major thoroughfares and it was the middle of the night, no traffic. Eventually the guy straggled away. Soon as he emerged from beneath that little roof my concerns evaporated. He was so drunk he could barely walk. He might have thought he was at his own house. As he staggered off, I told the nice 9-1-1 operator to forget it, the guy had given up and I could see he was just a confused drunk. No, no, the police are now only three minutes away, she said. Probably had to settle up with the counter help at the all-night donut shop before swinging into action. Sure enough, a few minutes later a cop was knocking at my door, and when I answered he reported, buttons bursting, that he and his partner had caught the would-be intruder.

Outstanding work! Had he fallen down, or did you have to outrun him?  Wish I remembered what the cop looked like. Maybe it was Derek Chauvin. They always say there's just one or two bad ones.

We watch the opener, etc.

This was the view out our front window this morning, which was also the morning of the Twins' home opener:

Temperature inside at game time: 70, temperate enough for her Buxton tee, but he, like the team, didn't do much. Another game tomorrow, and I understand it's going to hit 50 degrees!

She was recently so hepped up for the middle school musical (Beauty and the Beast) that, foreseeing a possible cancellation, maybe on account of Covid or maybe on account of a teacher strike, I worked up in my head a fortifying parental presentation. Happily the live performances occurred, and I didn't tell her, until yesterday, about having seen during High Covid a social media post by the actress Laura Benanti in which she had encouraged kids disappointed by their musical being cancelled to reply to her with a clip of them singing: she wanted to be their audience. I'd tracked the post down and we watched, including the reply that, of the ones I'd seen, seemed the very best. Here it is:

 

I attend Union High School and we are doing Once On This Island. As of now our show is postponed but we don’t know how long. This is a little snipbit of Waiting For Life pic.twitter.com/isdwSj17ho

— Khadija Sankoh (@khadija_sankoh) March 13, 2020

More than 22,000 likes! We googled Khadija, to see how she's doing, not that you can tell how people are doing from their social media posts, and it turns out that she has a YouTube channel. Not all her videos are musical—for example, she has one about how to peel an avocado, but here's another exuberant performance, this time accompanied by family members. "Hope you like it," as her little brother (I assume) says.

 

 

Playing solitaire while consuming news

Don't want to brag, but I went out twice at Solitaire today. My strategy is to get the aces and kings out early, if fortune permits. Not sure how many games I played; suffice it to say that, with the chance of nuclear war spiking, I'm more determined than ever to live life all the way up. We get an alert on our phones when someone steals a car with a little kid in it, so I'm guessing that's how we'll know?

Multiple missiles crossing polar regions. Two-thirds of Americans have less than five minutes to live.

If that's what it says, I'll spend four minutes wondering whether fewer isn't called for here. Fewer gallons, less water, so fewer minutes? Not really sure. Could definitely while away some time thinking about whether a concept like a "minute" is analogous to things that can be stacked and counted.

At least the kids are happy about the teacher strike here in Minneapolis. They have the same advice for both sides: Don't cave, or even give an inch! 

It seems almost in bad taste to enjoy, from a safe distance, stories about the moxy of Ukrainians, but I like this graf from a New York Times story about the seething hatred with which they regard Putin:

Olha Kolba, a psychologist in Kyiv, said that "anger and hate in this situation is a normal reaction and important to validate." But it is important to channel it into something useful, she said, such as making incendiary bombs out of empty bottles.

I imagine an editor instructing the reporter to round out their story with the opinion of a psychologist on mental health aspects of an entire population being consumed with hate. The reporter dutifully finds one, who says, basically: we need more homemade bombs. 

Moving days

William Pritchard, describing the fiction of John Updike, writes:

. . . he is arguably the most significant transcriber, or creator rather, of "middleness" in American writing since William Dean Howells. Falling in love in high school, meeting a college roommate, going to the eye-doctor or dentist, eating supper on Sunday night, visiting your mother with your wife and son—these activities are made to yield up their possibilities to a writer as responsively curious in imagination and delicately precise in his literary expression as Updike has shown himself to be.

Yes, or maybe, but, so far as I know, moving one's geriatric father from his assisted living apartment to a memory care unit is not anything that, anywhere in the Updikean oeuvre, is made to yield up its possibilities. I'm here to report that in dementia cases it does sometimes happen that the brain's inhibition centers short circuit. Despite innumerable instances where he had just cause, it took my dad more than 63 years to swear at me for the first time, but this last week, when I've actually been trying to do right by him, he's been making up for lost chances. I assumed he knew all those words but I'd never heard them on his lips before. We had some really tender father-son moments—so tender that I just started ignoring his outbursts while I moved his stuff into heaps meant for different destinations and then carried them out the door. Once, when he hadn't said anything for awhile, I looked over and saw that he was crying. I put my arm around him, told him I loved him, that we'd get through this, that everything would be ok. 

"Oh, go to hell," he replied.

I went back to work as he expressed the opinion that my optimism was "a line of shit." He's intermittently lucid and always unpredictable. When I visit him in the new place, I never know whether I'll be greeted like the prodigal son or with a scornful, "Now what?" I don't tell him I'm coming because he forgets before I get there. Everything is a surprise.

Well, if I asked him to play catch with me ten million times, a decent approximation, he said Yes ten million times. Never even, "In a few minutes." Just dropped whatever he was doing and got his glove. Very good at high school algebra, too. 

Updike would not overlook the way in which the memory care unit is an image of what I've heard called "rising America": uniformly white residents, near their end, being cared for in their infirmity by patient, cheerful, young immigrants of color who speak accented English. In the evening, they all watch cheesy TV shows together in the communal room and laugh, probably for different reasons. 

Domestic issues

 

Making my valentines a roast with onion, potatoes, and carrots for supper—originally planned for the Super Bowl but the day got away from us, I mean from me. The house is full of the good smell and news of troop movements on the Ukrainian frontier. Then 11-year-old arrives home from school.

Her: What's that smell?

Me: The roast we didn't have last night. It's in the oven.

[Silence]

Me: Smells good, huh?

Her: It smells like something, I'll give you that.

She gets her protein from peanut butter. Also on the domestic front, I googled today, for the obvious reason, "Minneapolis recycling peanut butter containers," and was soon reading, here:

Food containers, like those for yogurt, peanut butter or spaghetti sauce should be pretty well cleaned out, but it doesn't have to be perfect (95 percent is good, Kish said). (This is mostly because humans have to do some of the sorting and that food gets gross.)

I'm afraid this is like an Escher sentence in the respect that it has the form of a precise and meaningful speech act without being particularly helpful. Does "95 percent" refer to the part of interior surface area that is clear of food residue? It's weird, in that case, that peanut butter containers are grouped with those for yogurt and spaghetti sauce, which with a rinse and a swish easily meet the standard. A peanut butter jar is in a different category. You can devote to them a lot of time and material without getting to 95 percent, a circumstance that must detract from the marginal utility of recycling them. Is it ecologically sound to use a quart of water and your least serviceable sponge to get the Jif jar in the neighborhood of 95 percent?

If I knew this Kish guy, I think I'd give him an ultimatum: just 50 percent for peanut butter, or it's going in the trash. 

Memento mori

Toured a Memory Care Unit this morning, I wish just for the hell of it, and the experience may have operated on me like a subliminal memento mori as I just realized that, upon returning home, I served my kids the traditional Lutheran funeral lunch: ham sandwiches on little buttered buns (the kind that taste slightly sweet with a dusting of flour on top), in this case an unrealistically constrained selection of pickles and olives and other relishes, jello "salad," and a cookie—they're not old enough yet for coffee, no matter how weak it is. 

Sorry girls, no marshmallow topping on the "salad," this was merely a simulation inspired, additionally or alternately, by the news that Louie Anderson died today. I'll be in need of the Memory Care Unit myself when I forget his TV debut with Johnny Carson. He walks out on the stage, allows everyone to take in the sight of him, begins, "Sorry I can't stay long, I'm between meals." 

"I went to McDonald's so all the statistics have changed." 

Academic criticism

One thing that has been so consistent throughout this pandemic is that I've never been able to count on our institutions for much, whereas friends, neighbors, and family have helped me when I needed it the most.

— Jennifer A. Frey (@jennfrey) January 16, 2022

The tweeter is a philosophy professor. Going back to college days, I've had trouble comprehending the members of her profession. I love my friends and neighbors, but none of them developed the vaccines. As for extended family, if I listened to them I'd probably have injected myself with horse dewormer and drunk my piss as a booster. 

Friendly family competition

 

In Scattegories, the letter was "f" and for "reasons to be late" younger daughter writes, "Fat, so couldn't run fast." Another category in the same round was "ways to say yes." Older daughter writes, "F yeah!" I check to make sure she didn't spell it out, then deny her a point on the ground that "F" is spelled "eff." Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.

She hits back when the category is "TV shows from before you were born," chortling that "Dad has no options!" They laugh uproariously. The two of them collude to vote down some of my sketchier answers and the older daughter wins the game. F.

Walking

About the time we got a dog who likes to go for walks, I downloaded a pedometer on my phone. I was curious about how far different routes we take might be and I also wondered how many steps I take that aren't related to dog-walking. I can now tell you, for example, that playing 18 holes of golf, with a cart, seems to require around 4500 steps. If the dog and I walk north on 1st Avenue, east on 47th Street, south on Stevens, west on 49th, north on Garfield, and back home via 48th, that's about 3200 steps. 

The app asks you to enter a per-day step goal. I entered 8500, only because I've heard that  devoted walkers often shoot for 10,000 and I thought, well, 85 percent of "a lot" might be good for me. And it turns out to have been magically appropriate: not too much that I can't make it, not so little that I automatically get there every day. I usually check to see where I'm at while climbing the stairs to bed, and almost unfailingly it says something like 7,922 or 8,240. I'm Type A enough so that I'm not inclined to turn in when 8500 is that close, so I end up walking a kind of modified figure-8 around my bedroom till the bar turns green and lights flash. As I stroll about without going anywhere, in slavish devotion to achieving my wholly artificial "goal," the dog lays on the bed, like a normal creature, and considers the sights with what looks to me a lot like puzzlement, or maybe it's disdain. 

Good riddance to 2021

This is pretty funny, but I think the apostrophe is misplaced. The inability to turn off one's inner copy editor must be a source of the psychological condition called anhedonia. 

It's funny because of two different senses of the word "sentence." Get it? Can't turn off my inner pedant, either.

Since it's the last day of the year, traditionally a time for a reflective backwards gaze, I should say that this was the year I learned it's not a penalty to tackle a guy by jerking him to the ground by the wad of hair hanging out the back of his helmet.

I have to thank my first dog for everything else I learned this year. When it's below about 15 degrees F., everyone else outside is also accompanied by a dog. Relatedly, I've lived in south Minneapolis for 40 years and it was in Year No. 40 that I fixed in my mind the fact that Pillsbury Avenue is parallel with and one block east of Pleasant Avenue, not the other way around. 

Why are the Rutgers Scarlet Knights playing in a bowl game on the day before New Year's? Since they were 5-7, 2-7 in the Big Ten, it must be on account of their unblemished record in nonconference games. Yes, I see now that they beat perennial powers Temple and Delaware as well as Syracuse, another 5-7 team, which apparently gave them the tie breaker for a Gator Bowl invitation over the Orangemen. 

I'm walking the dog while it's still above zero and the first national semifinal hasn't started. Happy New Year!

Watching TV on Christmas Eve

Arriving back home last night from my family's Christmas Eve gathering, I turned on the TV, mainly just to see what's on when no one's watching, and after clicking past "It's a Wonderful Life" (predictable) I came to "The Godfather" on a cable channel, POP, I had never heard of. It was the scene in which Vito Corleone gets shot multiple times while making a purchase from a fruit vendor. I thought I'd stay up till Michael commits his first and second homicides, at Louis' Italian American Restaurant in the Bronx, but of course by the time that happened I'd settled in and I watched to the end.

The Christmas Eve airing had me debating with myself which scene in the movie is the most "Christmassy." There are several contenders, but I think I vote for the one in which Carlo beats his wife, Connie, who moves through the house, breaking dishes, brandishing a knife, and trying to get away from him as the camera trails behind. Finally she retreats into the master bedroom, and then into the bathroom off the master. Now there is nowhere else to go and when Carlo follows her in there the camera stays back in the bedroom. You can hear, but not see, what's happening in the bathroom while the camera dwells for one or two seconds on the perfectly made bed and, propped up on the pillows, a smiling stuffed animal. 

The movie had begun with the wedding of Connie and Carlo. Probably a sly announcement of genre since it's said that comedies end with weddings and tragedies begin with them.

Day in the life

Sitting here in a neighborhood coffeeshop nursing a latte and my COVID fatigue. I'll alter my habits when Omicron starts sending the vaccinated and boosted to the hospital. 

Played golf yesterday in the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities. The above picture is of a water hazard on the seventh hole, which was iced over—a potential stroke saver. I think it was 42 degrees when we teed off and fairly comfortable until it became overcast and windy on the back 9. For the record, I made a double bogey on what will be my last hole of the "season": good drive within a few steps of the 150-yard marker planted in the middle of the fairway; clunked a 6-iron about four-fifths of the way to the green; chipped it on; blew my first putt around 4 feet past the hole; missed it coming back.

Q: How'd you make a 6 on that easy hole?

A: Missed my putt for a 5.

Had a coffee, two tummy ticklers and some good cheer on the 19th hole before driving home. I've driven home from golf courses in the dark before but this might be the first time that it was also rush hour. 

Younger daughter had a half-hour piano lesson at 6:30 and a 7:15 appointment for her second COVID shot at Mall of America, which is a bad place to be in a hurry. I try to watch my tongue around her and she was delighted when, on the way out, I let down my guard enough to refer to the Mall as "a hellhole" to which I would never return. We stopped by the house to pick up two other kids before going out for hamburgers at our favorite neighborhood spot (the LowBrow). The unexpected upside to the early evening activities is that the clock turned to Happy Hour while we were there. Half-price nachos! Two dollars off rail drinks! A fully vaccinated 11-year-old! Compensations for being "shorter of breath and one day closer to death." 

Hung over Greeks

I'm reading Plato's Symposium and am sorry to say that it looks as if the high point is going to occur near the very beginning. This is the dialog in which Socrates, out walking, stumbles upon an acquaintance, Aristodemus, who's on his way to a dinner party. Aristodemus invites Socrates to come along. As they approach the host's house, Socrates falls behind Aristodemus and, at the door, has gone altogether missing. Aristodemus reports to the host that he was just here! A servant, sent to reconnoiter, reports that Socrates has been located, "in a fit of abstraction," on the neighbor's portico. This is apparently fairly typical behavior and the decision is made to just leave him be: eventually he'll snap out of it and let himself in. Supper is served and Socrates indeed does appear when it's about half over. Then comes the passage I love:

Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanius said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday's potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: how can the drinking be made easiest?

I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.

I think that you are right, said Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus; but I should like to hear one other person speak: Is Agathon able to drink hard? 

I am not equal to it, said Agathon.

Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or abstain, and will not mind, whichever we do.) Well, as none of the company seem inclined to drink much, I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday's carouse.

I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the same. 

It was agreed that drinking was not to be the order of the day . . . .

I feel I've been in these conversations, like on the second day of out-of-town weekend softball tournaments, only the talk was not so elevated: similar subject matter, dissimilar word choice. ("I am not equal to it," confesses Agathon, who, we may conclude, "feels severely the effect of yesterday's potations.") Is it a stilted translation or is this the way the ancient Greeks talked about their hangovers?  Maybe they were trying to supply Monty Python with material 20-some centuries hence. It could just be a case of projection, but it seems to me the point of the otherwise pointlessly elaborated passage is to show that no one wants to drink and also that no one is eager to reveal to masculine friends that they are set against drinking.  I say "a case of projection" because I remember adopting a secret strategy of lying low on Night 1 so that I might then have a chance of keeping up on Night 2. Youth is wasted on the young.

Also like the parenthetic observation on Socrates's habitual willingness to go with the flow. If you want to know what Socrates was like, you come up against the problem that the source for  information is Plato's dialogs, and, especially on philosophical matter, it seems likely that there's a lot of Plato in Plato's characterization of Socrates. The incidental droppings might well be the more trustworthy biographical bits, so it's fun to see that, when the question at hand was whether or not to "drink deeply,"  Socrates's friends assumed he would if they would. 

Happy Halloween

My youngest with her trick-or-treat running mate from next door. The older one spurned Halloween in order to lie on the couch, clicking between the World Series and the Vikings. Loving her is like loving myself.

St. Augustine's views on the depravity of children have been frequently denounced but then comes Halloween and one of his critics who can't be home in the evening leaves a pail of candy on the front step along with written instructions to "take just one." I watched and listened as a little boy, escorted by his dad, walked  up to the pail, peered in, with disappointment declared it to be empty. His dad suggested it would be "really cool" if he dropped in a few of his candies, so that it wouldn't be empty for the next trick-or-treater.

"No," said the little boy, "I don't want to do that."

Football weather

The kind of October Saturday—bright sunshine and just warm enough to make you wonder whether "crisp" might be inapt—that seems intended for college football. I haven't had a Gopher ticket since the Mason era, in the Metrodome, which was peculiarly depressing, and not just on account of the atmospherics: of the half dozen or so excruciating losses that I was sober enough to remember, the one that stands out was the time Michigan scored 31 points in the fourth quarter to beat us, 38-35. I think I remember reading it's the only known game in D-1 football history in which a team rushed for more than 400 yards and lost. Ah, yes, I see now, thanks to this new thing called The Internet, that the game I'm remembering was contested on October 10, 2003, and that the Gophers rushed for 424 yards to Michigan's 94. Lost anyway.

It was on a morning walk with the dog that I fell in love with the weather, and I considered going to an MIAC game, but I've noticed how one-sided not just some but most of the games seem to be. Last week, for example, there were five conference games, and here were the scores of three of them: 49-7 (Bethel over Hamline), 50-0 (St. John's over Augsburg), and 72-7 (Gustavus over St. Scholastica). Athletic competition? Or assault and battery? Either way, I don't want to be a witness.

So I opened the windows and watched the second half of the Gopher game on TV. Luckily, PJ Fleck was making the in-game decisions and not me. Around half way through the last quarter, the Gophers, leading by 5, had the ball between the 40s. After three straight runs, it was 4th-and-1. I groaned in my soul when the punting team took the field, but then we called time out, and I thought maybe we were reconsidering. No, we punted, Nebraska fair caught it on their own 10, and then on the first play we scored a safety when their quarterback, under pressure, was called for intentional grounding in his own end zone. Good call to punt, Coach! We get two points and the ball. "Please don't be too conservative," my Left Soul whispers to the Right One. But we run on first down and lose 3 yards. Earlier in the game, we had completed something like 16 passes in a row! On second down, we run again, nevertheless, and gain 9. Now it's 3rd-and-4. We run off tackle and gain 5 for the first down. Two plays later, we bust a run for about 55 yards and a game-clinching touchdown. 

When they think you're going to pass, run; and when they think you're going to run, run anyway. It  can work, especially if you're ahead by a little late in the game and your offensive line, which may or may not fit within the Grand Canyon, has been leaning on the other team for 3.5 quarters.

I downloaded a pedometer on my phone and set a goal of 8500 steps per day. With weather like this, I've been almost making it. Dog gives me a cockeyed look when I have the leash in my hand again, as if to say, "Damn, man, we got back from the last one only about an hour ago." 

Embarrassing confessions

I once harbored impure thoughts toward a co-member of a church youth group. Indeed, but for her I almost certainly would have resisted my mom's suggestion that I join.

Once in a high-school baseball game I was on-deck with two out in the last inning and I hoped that my teammate would make the last out, causing our team to lose, just to save myself the humiliation of batting again against the pitcher, who had a very good curveball. He did make the last out, we lost, and I then reproached myself for having made him make an out by cheering against him in my soul. Then I reproached myself further for irrationality. 

Once, filling out a performance review at work for a "pretty good" employee, I sped down column 4, labeled "exceeds expectations," checking every box without reading a word, just to save time. Then I thought that looked suspicious so I changed a few of them to 5. Don't actually feel too bad about that one. 

Sometimes I get pissy with my kids for asking too many questions.  I notice this only happens when I don't know the answers. 

Thinking about making this a series but it took about 50 years just to collect those four. 

Mom reads Plato

Being of their offspring the bigger poindexter, I've inherited my parents' books, and last night I spent some time with a hardback volume—paperbacks, unlike atomic bombs, belonging to the future—of some Platonic dialogues that had obviously been required for a college philosophy class my mom took in the mid-1950s. Maybe she would have been able to resell it if not for her copious underlining and highlighting. Jesus, mom, why not just paint the pages with a brush? Her marginalia is also interesting and put me in mind of the opening to chapter 6 of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (not his most notorious book but, I think, the most enjoyable one):

The 1954 Fall Term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermilion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as "Description of nature" or "Irony"; and in a pretty edition of Mallarme's poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and had scrawled above it "birds."

In her defense, mom's glosses were not inscribed in the margins of library books—rather, in volumes purchased with grandpa's money and then, after a brief period of active duty, hermetically sealed for more than 60 years till scanned by me last night. 

It was fun to have a window cracked on my mom's mind about five years before I made her acquaintance. I'd have to read the words of Socrates, as set down by Plato and highlighted by her, to try and guess at the import she had discerned, or to make a connection between the text and her marginal notes. Before long I got at least as interested in the text as in mom's notes. The question of what students should study in school is part of the current culture war but I wonder whether the promoters of ancient Greek philosophy might be a little put off by the views of Socrates.

In the dialogue called Euthyphro, for example, the title character is one of these moral preeners who is sure the gods take his side of an ethical dispute. Socrates, occasionally exhibiting a touch of tart impatience, leads him to the question of whether the gods love things that are holy, or whether things are holy because they are loved by the gods. They agree that it must be the former. But in that case, says Socrates, you are supplying me with a mere attribute of piety (that it's loved by the gods) and not its essence (the reason the gods love it). By this point, Euthyphro has become less chatty and self-assured. He soon slinks off, and the dialogue ends without any neat resolution, but it seems an objection to the claim that morality depends upon religion has gone unanswered. For the implication is that "God commands X" doesn't answer the question "Why is X good?"

If the Platonic dialogues are accepted as a biography of Socrates, then it was within a couple of weeks of having advanced this argument that he was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. That is the subject matter of the dialogue called Apology. Socrates has a reputation for something resembling modesty, as he famously admitted that he might be the wisest of all men only because at least he knew he knew nothing, but in the Apology, after he's been convicted and it's time to plead for his life, he says a just sentence would be, not death, not exile, but a state pension under the terms of which he would be maintained for life in the Prytaneum, "the public hall in which were entertained ambassadors, victorious generals, winners at the Olympic games, and other illustrious citizens." The picture above is of that page in the Apology from mom's book.  The information about the Prytaneum that I've quoted is from the footnote at the bottom of the page.

Still hittin it hard

Last night around 9 o’clock I made myself a cup of instant coffee and while stirring in a splash of milk thought to myself, “It’s 8 in the morning somewhere, damnit.” If you’ve ever wondered whether I’m the same hard-charging bad boy you may have known 30 or more years ago, I think you have your answer.

Just looking

Spent much of the afternoon at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Have long had an inkling, now confirmed, that I’m under appreciative of the kitchenware from the T’ang Dynasty. Same holds for most religious art. Regarding the above Madonna & Child, painted by the Italian Segna di Bonaventura in about 1325, the explanatory note visible at the lower right of my photo (click to fix the orientation) directs attention to how the artist indicates the humanity of the Christ child by having him play with his mother’s fingers—and, I thought, by how his head resembles that of the 40ish alcoholic who lived across the via from Segna.

It’s not a universal rule, but generally my interest rises as we approach current times. The below painting, which by pacing off its width I estimate to be 18 x 15 feet, is sharp and visually striking: you can’t make it out in my photo, but VICEROY is printed with photographic realism on the white paper of the cigarette extending farthest out from the pack. The museum’s explanatory placard in this case reads:

Jesse Trevino
American born, 1946

Mi Vida, 1971-73
Acrylic on drywall, mounted on aluminum

Jesse Trevino was drafted out of art school in 1966 and deployed to Vietnam as an infantryman. A few months later, he was seriously injured while on patrol, and doctors eventually amputated his right arm—the one he had used to paint. He painstakingly created Mi Vida with his left hand, marking his rebirth as an artist. It portrays his postwar life, from his new prosthetic to his daily coffee and pan dulce. Trevino painted Mi Vida in private, on the wall of his bedroom, when he was still struggling with chronic pain and the transition to civilian life. Before his rehabilitation, he had made art for assignments and had not painted from his life. With this ambitious work, he found a new direction for his art, rooted in his experiences and perspective as a Chicano. He went on to become a major public artist in Texas, making large-scale murals and mosaics for civic spaces. 

 

Readings

When humans first went to the moon, and walked on it, the New York Times collected the thoughts of some Big Minds on the import of the event. The above illuminated snippet is the contribution of the artist, Pablo Picasso. I got a kick out of it because I remember distinctly what I was doing that day and my reaction was similar. I was almost 11, and my dad had taken me golfing that afternoon. But he was interested in the moon walk, play was slow, and, to get home on time, we walked off the course after around 14 holes, which really frosted me. Later, watching the shadowy figures at our neighbor's house, because they had a color TV that was also bigger than our black and white, I thought to myself: This is why we quit golfing? And for how long did that astronaut rehearse his precious speech about one small step for a man? Bullshit, all bullshit.

Well, in another 45 years it made for a good Mad Men episode.

For some of you who know me pretty well, and may be wondering why if my dad was taking me golfing in my pre-teen years I'm not somewhat better at it today, I have one thing to say: Do not suppose I haven't wondered the same thing.

As one who reads a lot, and sometimes tries to write good sentences myself, I often come across things that arouse my jealousy. Here is today's example, the opening to a piece in The New Yorker by Philip Gourevitch:

 

Man, I wish I could do that. Haven't ever even  hitchhiked!

Then there is the other end of the spectrum:

Once I overheard my daughters fighting and the older one suddenly asked the younger one if she was "a popular girl at school." The younger one seemed puzzled by the sudden turn but answered that she was not popular. "I'm surprised," the older one said, "because you're definitely mean enough." That's what this makes me think of. What a flip, pompous dolt (to say nothing of being spectacularly wrong)! No wonder he's wildly successful, a best-selling author and syndicated columnist for The New York Times. 

At the old ball game

Daughters and I went to the Twins game last night. One, age 13, is a fan. The other, age 10, is not, and to accommodate her I bought tix for a particular section, to the side of the pavilion in dead center field, where last night your ticket came with a pass for all-you-can-eat "ballpark fare." My supper was two hot dogs, a bag of peanuts, two ice cream sandwiches, and two cokes. I spurned pop corn and the corn tortilla chips with "cheese" dip. The 10-year-old spurned all the free stuff. I bought her a $7 pretzel for supper. Oh, wait, she didn't spurn all the complimentary items: I think she drank around four cokes. I'm not saying I'm sorry I brought her. I had reserved a spot in a ramp beforehand, a move that necessitated scanning a QR code on my phone at the ramp entrance. She showed me how to do that when the line behind us grew to three cars. Before that, she was giggling. 

Luckily, there were some drunk 20-year-olds within sight and earshot to occupy her attention during the game. The group was composed of around half a dozen males and one female who, for the occasion, had donned shorty shorts and cowboy boots. Based on my observations, I'd guess there was an informal competition under the terms of which the young man who shouted the drunkest most witless obscenities at the Indians' centerfielder was to be rewarded by bedding Rodeo Girl later last night. I'm so old as to regard with distaste the mating rituals of the young, but 10-year-old was actually enjoying herself, for once. 

In the ballgame, the Twins, despite four fielding errors, won on a walk-off hit by Polanco in the bottom of the tenth: decent pitching throughout, especially four innings of shutout relief from Gant, Minaya, Colome, and Thielbar. It was the Twins' eighth win in their last eleven games—the first ten of which, 13-year-old observed on the walk to the car, had been against first-place teams. To get out of the ramp, I had to scan the QR code again, which this time I accomplished without incident. 

This 'n that

I took a picture of my window box on about Memorial Day and laughed at myself as the flowers were barely peaking out: not enough dirt, or short plants, or something. The above was taken this morning. Someone (Jan), encouraging me back in May, said that in a couple of months we wouldn't be able to see out the window. To the degree that's true, it's because of paw prints in dog drool on the glass, but the flowers are doing well enough. You can see them from the street now. Next year, maybe I'll go for more colors and the creeping, flowing, tumbling, luxurious effect. See if I can screw that up.

Regarding the dog, whose name is Cooper, affectionately Coopsie: he is the source of the following hilarity, played out once or twice a week:

13-year-old: Oh, no, Coopsie, I can't believe you did that!

10-year-old: What'd he do?

13-year-old: Come look!

[Sound of running feet]

10-year-old: Oh, God, gross. I can't believe he did that.

Me [from another room]: WHAT NOW? WHAT'D HE DO THIS TIME?

One Of Them: Nothing, he's sleeping on the porch. 

Both Of Them: [Gleeful laughter.]

Jeopardy! has been in the news. I don't have any opinion about the guest hosts, or the recently announced winner[s] of the audition, but the current champion, Matt Amodio, has caught my attention. He's been the champion for about three weeks now and has won more than a half million dollars, which I guess places him third on the all-time money list, behind only Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer. Jeopardy! groupies are put off by his tics, such as his way of using "What" in his answers, including when "Who" would be more appropriate. Whatever. I was a little annoyed by his penchant for ringing in, then pausing before answering, as if the correct response had slipped his mind but then always replying correctly just in time. It seemed like maybe the affectation of a drama prince, but my new theory is that for him being the first to buzz in is more of a challenge than knowing the answer—he knows practically everything—so lots of times he hasn't even entered the question into his mind when he presses his buzzer. He then has to think of the answer, the easy part for him. 

Shohei Ohtani is the Matt Amodio of baseball—an outlier of the outliers. I feel like in my youth I paid insufficient attention to the likes of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente and that now Ohtani is flying beneath my radar too. I mean, I know about him, but why am I not more amazed? In the Angels' game last night, he batted lead off and pitched. At the bat, he had a double, a walk, and scored a run. Ho-hum, since he leads the majors in home runs with 38 and has an OPS north of 1.000. He pitched six innings, allowing 3 hits and 2 runs. He fanned 6, got the win, and his ERA for the season actually rose a smidgen—to 2.93. He's such a unique player that, like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain in  basketball, he raises questions about the rules. Does the designated hitter have to bat in place of the pitcher? Or can you pitch Ohtani, put him in the batting order, and use the designated hitter for the weakest hitter among the other eight? I see that in last night's game the Angels went without a DH, and it looks like that's how it has to be if Ohtani is going to pitch and bat. And why wouldn't he bat when he pitches?  He's pretty near the best in baseball at both. 

Good boy!

 

 

We've had our dog for a few months now. First one ever for me. I've heard they're smart, but ours never tires of freaking himself out by looking at his reflection in the fireplace glass. See above. A few other notes:

The phrase that comes to mind when he realizes he's about to be fed: the joy of life. 

When he's done eating (about 5 seconds), he goes back and forth between the food storage area and his food dish. I think he's foggy about the cause and effect. Maybe just hopeful.

He throws up on most car trips.  It then becomes evident how he manages to eat so fast.

I used to think it would be the end of the world if a dog crapped inside the house. Actually, peeing is worse, unless it's diarrhea, and even that isn't the end of the world. I think dog ownership has taught me fortitude.

Taking him for a walk is a good way of meeting neighbors from a block or two away. They'd never say Hi to me alone, but now they want to talk. 

We all like to conduct arguably sadistic experiments in animal science. A few days ago, older daughter made a snack of pretzels and mustard. When she was done, she set her bowl on the floor to see what would happen when he licked mustard residue.  He howled and jumped backward before jogging off. Next sound she heard was the very distinctive one of him drinking from his water bowl in the next room. 

Hashtags

Pro tip: if you see me at Target, do NOT get in line behind me at checkout as I have an unerring sense of who is going to argue with the cashier, and then the cashier's boss, about the $5 gift card that you may or may not be entitled to when you purchase $20 worth of qualifying health & beauty products.

#watchingmyicecreammelt

While recently prosecuting another errand, it occurred to me that the fanatical opponents of vaccine passports make a strong case. If you have to prove you've been vaccinated in order to enter a bar or restaurant, then, next thing you know, everyone will need a license in order to operate a motor vehicle. You'll probably even have to renew it at regular intervals so that the government always has an updated photo of you in its files, along with your height, weight, eye color, and residential address.

#slipperyslope
#socialistdystopia

I talk to the nuts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above is from a court document prepared by one of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Pauline Bauer, who is representing herself. In my job, I used to come in contact occasionally with crackpots of this genus and it's sort of fun to recognize their calling cards without having to talk to them in person. For one thing, there is this distinction they like to make between, on the one hand, someone with their name who has legal problems and, on the other, this more exalted entity who is beyond the reach of whoever is pursuing them—in Pauline's case, "the United States of America, a private corporation." I'm sure she has ideas about what makes Uncle Sam a private corporation and why it therefore cannot prosecute her, I mean her "vessel," for any crime someone named Pauline Bauer, who owns a pizzeria in Pennsylvania, may have committed in the District of Columbia last January 6. 

I'm also sure that the smudge over the end of her signature is her fingerprint. She dabbed a digit, or maybe her thumb, in red ink, unless it's her own blood—a common practice—and then made an imprint over the document's signature line. Solemn rites for solemn matters! Their documents always made me think of children playing at being adults: the game is about a world beyond their comprehension, so it must be endowed with mysterious elements. It's the same with their cousins the militia members who dress up like soldiers and crawl around with guns in farm fields in preparation for . . . something BIG. Only they understand.

Should they be regarded with scorn or pity? The ones I met were usually having their mortgage foreclosed. The fellow who made the biggest impression on me wanted to record a document called "Revocation of Power of Attorney." Naturally, you have to identify the Power of Attorney being revoked, and, in that part of the document, he had cited a certain Mortgage—his mortgage that was being foreclosed, no doubt. Someone else had already tried to explain that he could record a revocation of a previously recorded Power of Attorney, but he'd have to identify that Power of Attorney, not a mortgage. I got to continue this conversation with him and, as we talked, it eventually dawned on me that he was confused by the similar phrases "power of attorney" and "power of sale": in a standard mortgage instrument, the latter always occurs in a section enumerating the lender's remedies in the event the borrower defaults on the loan. He was trying to revoke the bank's remedy for his failure to pay his mortgage. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all do that? Bad for the banks, however. Anyway, I wasn't able to satisfy him, and our colloquy came to a conclusion when he took a couple steps backward, removed from his man purse what looked like a large wooden coin, held it up by the side of his head, and recited what sounded like it was supposed to be a hex upon me. I remember it began, "I am the only sovereign upon this premises." ("Sovereignty" occupies considerable space in their imaginations.) I could look past him and see my colleagues peeking over the tops of their cubicles, prairie dogging it. The guy was desperate, losing his house, and I felt bad about that but he was also a nut and it's good he had to go through weapons-screening before he could talk to us.

If I knew all there was to know about Pauline and many of her co-insurrectionists, I might have some of the same vague, mixed feelings. Alas, they're just the type to be carrying, and usually they don't have to go through weapons-screening, which they regard as an abridgment of their sovereignty. It’s possible to be both dangerous and pathetic.