Eric The Blue

Highlights of a wasted day

 

 

    I enjoyed this interview, between New York Times staffer Sopan Deb and Zach Zarba, a veteran NBA referee. Here's a teaser, the most interesting exchange of the interview to me (aside from an amusing story about the young Kobe Bryant):

Deb: Do superstars get more leeway?

Zarba: I would disagree and go the other way and I would say that the majority of superstar players in our league don't get all the calls and don't get as many whistles as they deserve.

I guess I would have expected an official either to acknowledge that conventional wisdom about a star system is true, thereby winning points for "candor," or else to defend the honor of his profession by insisting that refs treat star players the same as everyone else. The view that star players get the shaft from officials therefore struck me as actually candid. From my long-ago experience umpiring ball games, I have an idea how this could be true without impugning anyone's good faith. I felt like my judgment could be affected by what I expected to happen, and that it was practically impossible not to have these expectations. For example, a batter hits a sinking line drive into the outfield. I think it's a hit for one second, two seconds—I can't suppress the thought—then the racing outfielder dives and gloves the ball at turf level: Was it a trap or a good catch? Well, from the instant the ball was hit, I'd been thinking: "can't be caught." It seems to me entirely possible that your perception of what actually happened can be colored by what you thought was going to happen—or, to put it another way, by what you thought was possible. It's not hard to see how such a psychological process operating in a good-faith referee might work against an athlete capable of defying expectations.

On the other hand, in the NBA the same officials are working games with the same players over and over again. Zach Zarba knows who is a star, right? Maybe if I had known that the diving player was the Kobe Bryant of outfielders, my expectation about what was going to happen would have shifted and the result of the headlong dive would look more like a good catch. Only thing I'm sure of is that referees are human, a point that comes to the fore when you talk to them, if Deb's conversation with Zarba is representative. 

****

Ten seconds of every hour devoted to social media is worth the callous on the tip of my scrolling finger. I know I won't get 59 minutes and 50 seconds back but here's the harvest from the other ten ticks, my candidate for Tweet of the Day:

 

don’t even bother clicking - I checked, they don’t show you the sandwich. https://t.co/X0fxToheAg

— hend amry (@LibyaLiberty) September 23, 2020

Jim Gaffigan

Embarrassing confession: until he went on his anti-Trump Twitter tirade, I wasn't a fan of comedian Jim Gaffigan. 

When I say "fan," I mean fan of his comedy. I think I either confused him with that Smarter-Than-a-Fifth-Grader guy or else placed him in the same "school" and therefore decided I wasn't interested. But then he let Trump have it and I became Gaffigan-curious. Having now spent a fair part of the afternoon on his You Tube channel, I conclude that he's funny, funny, funny. Clean, too: not much bad language, unlike in his tirade against Trump.

Speaking of bad language, I'm watching the Twins game as I type this, and either they have to pump up the volume on the piped-in crowd sound or else turn off the mics that hang down near the playing field. Dick Bremer felt obliged to apologize once and took a pass on several other opportunities. Oh my god! Two out, nobody on, Cruz up, and they walk him intentionally. Worked, too, as Rosario strikes out on two pitches. 

Anyway, Gaffigan. I am not a comedy theorist or anything, but my impression is that stand-up, being a public act, can achieve a sort of easy effect just by violating ordinary boundaries: saying stuff that usually can't be said in a crowd. Back in the day before it was okay to say "fuck" in public, comedians would walk out on stage and say "fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking fuck" and the crowd would howl with laughter. But it's only funny, if it's funny, because "you can't say that"—nevertheless, he did. Even funnier if she said it because then it's more of a violation. Or was more of a violation. Now you have to ratchet it up a bit, talk about masturbation or your romantic partner's pubic hair or something as not even Dick Bremer is much affected by "fuck." 

That obviously is not Gaffigan's thing. I wonder if he owes something to it, though. He wouldn't seem so funny if in the background there weren't a million practitioners of this other "brand." And then you come to find out it can be his brand too, when the topic is Trump. Here is my favorite installment to his rant:

Fuck Lou Holtz. Biden is Catholic in name only? Compared to who? How many abortions did trump pay for? How many women has he raped? How many times did pull the shit he did in Ukraine. Wake up. He's a crook and a con man.

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

First runner-up:

I know you hate snobs and elites I get it but look at Ivana and that douche bag Jerod. Think they are on your side? Do you think they've ever done a real days work in their lives. Wake up

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) August 28, 2020

His refrain is "wake up." Not knowing how to spell the names of the douche bags is unconscious perfection. 

The clip above is a compilation of his religion jokes—Catholicism, his own faith, providing the biggest target. Below, on eating at McDonald's. 

 

 

 

 

John Boorman's adventures

John Boorman is the English movie director best known, at least to me, for Deliverance. Reading up on him, I see that one of his other movies, Point Blank (1967), has like Deliverance been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry on account of being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." I know nothing about Point Blank beyond what I just read in Wikipedia: a crime thriller starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Carroll O'Connor (who would soon become famous as Archie Bunker), it was ignored on its release but later gained a cultish following.

Boorman also is the author of a memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy. If the following passage concerning one of his misadventures with Lee Marvin is representative, it must be a rollicking good read:

We had arrived together in Lee's Chrysler station wagon. He was staggering, drunk. I begged him to let me drive. "Fuck you." He drew back a fist. He had a whole repertoire of violent gestures, many of them cribbed from his hero, Toshiro Mifune. I tried to grab the keys, but he slashed me with his imaginary samurai sword. These were movie blows an inch short of your neck or chin. 

I snatched the keys and got into the driver's seat, the women in back. "Get in Lee." Another battle of wills. How could he meekly submit, this warrior, this conqueror? We pleaded with him. He stalked and staggered around the car, raining blows on it. Finally he found a way of saving face. He climbed up and crouched on the roof rack. Despite our entreaties, he would not come down. I decided to drive slowly down the length of the pier, hoping that the cool ocean air might sober him up. I stopped as we got to the public road. I got out. He snarled at me, would not get down. I was at my wits' end. The streets were deserted. I drove slowly down the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. Flashing lights in my rearview mirror—sirens. I pulled over. The patrolman approached the car, warily loosening his revolver holster. He looked up, then at me. "Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?"

The punchline is so good I almost forgot my amazement upon learning that Lee Marvin drove a Chrysler grocery–getter with a roof rack.

H/t Scott Shapiro, who retweeted John Frankensteiner's tweeted excerpt.

Hell's leading citizen

After seeing this picture somewhere, I took a few minutes to work up a composite of Hell's leading citizen: an outspoken bisexual Catholic lady who's devoted to her vibrator and drinks Chablis directly from the box.

His t-shirt says that coronavirus is God's judgment so maybe he should have added "old people with co-morbidities" to his list of degenerates.

Free advertising

Got out of my car and took a picture of this sign just so I could snottily observe that 35W and 1st Avenue are a block apart and parallel with each other. But now you know they're open (and their longitude). I also love how  the phone number was a faint after thought.

Since I'm having fun with their advertising campaign, here's some free publicity connecting with jillions of devoted readers: Hibachi Buffet is on Lake Street a block west of 35W. The sign was at 42nd Street & Bloomington Avenue, which is about three miles from there. I wonder how many of these signs they've stuck in the ground? 

I've never eaten at Hibachi Buffet but can vouch for the rice noodle soup at Pho Tau Bay, just on the other side of the KMart site. Once, as my daughter Claire prepared to salt her rice, the server grabbed the shaker right out of her hand and told her in Vietnamese to use soy sauce. So shocked that she reverted to her native tongue. Then, laughing at herself, but still somewhat agitated by what she'd almost witnessed, she set the soy sauce bottle in front of Claire and repeated herself, this time in English. Claire by now was sitting far back in the booth, bug-eyed. It was the first time anyone had objected to her ruining her rice.

She also puts chocolate syrup on orange sherbet. 

Laurie Kilmartin live tweets her mom's "facetime hospice"

 

Laurie Kilmartin is a comedian. The above is a specimen of her standup. She is also a writer for Conan and the author of two books, Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us and Dead People Suck. Regarding Sh*tty Mom, I assume it's autobiographical and that the title describes the contents. A year or two ago I happened to be in Magers and Quinn bookstore one afternoon when she was there to read from Dead People Suck. It's about her dad's final illness and the hospice experience she went through with him and the rest of her family as he was dying. I don't know how funny it is, but, judging from the selections she read that day, it's for sure funnier than it sounds, in a dark sort of way that appeals anyway to me. 

As her Twitter followers know, Kilmartin has for the last couple of weeks been conducting an encore performance as her mother lies dying of Covid-19 in a hospital. The efforts of her and her sister to persuade the hospital to let them visit their mom at the ICU have been the subject of news reports in the LA area. For the most part, however, she monitors her mom over Facetime while live tweeting her last days. Does that sound inhuman? It's the opposite. Too tedious to paste in  tweets so I'll just type a few of them:

Busy watching the Season 82 finale of "Mom"

Glad I only had two parents, I can't do this again

so. mom's heart rate is 30. that seems low!

My sister and I are both heartbroken that mom's last words to us were complaints about the nursing home and not about our appearance.

She is barely breathing but it would be great if she could awaken from all this and tell me to wash my robe.

GAH I tried to put my head on mom's heart and hit all the keys on the keyboard

Getting in our last 300 "I love yous"

When her mom died this morning, Kilmartin tweeted—

She died not at home, surrounded by people she'd never met #COVID

—and followed it up, a few minutes later, with:

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you throw hot coffee in the face of anyone not wearing a mask. 

Type "Laurie Kilmartin twitter" into Google if you want at least a hundred more "chapters" in this 21st-century art form.

Minnesota Lutheran lady speaks out from beyond

My mom has checked out of the hereafter in order to join the protests here on Earth.

Reading recommendations

People who know I like to read sometimes ask whether I have any book recommendations. Just two:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read them aloud to my kids on the night before the big standardized tests, which I'm pretty sure is why they're both among the top 93%. 

Philippa Foot; George Clooney

This is too obscure to help in the event you one day go on Jeopardy, but I put it forward as an example of the (arguably) fun facts you can learn whiling away your life on social media.  Today someone posed on Twitter a question about a philosopher who deserves more renown. I suppose they know that a lot of their followers are philosophy professors or something. I'd at least heard of all the candidates mentioned in the replies, except for one: Philippa Foot. Now I've looked her up and it turns out she's the English philosopher who invented the Trolley Problem. You may have heard about it recently, in the context of discussions about the ethical distribution of scarce medical resources. In the Trolley Problem, Foot described a trolley heading down a track to which five people are tied. By throwing a switch, you can send the trolley down a different track where it will kill only one person. Foot was interested in why it seems you ought to throw the switch, thereby saving four lives, though at the same time almost all of us (I think) agree that you cannot kill someone in order to harvest organs that would save the lives of four desperately ill people. 

But that's not the fun fact. Philippa Foot was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Her mother, Esther, was Cleveland's daughter, and was actually born in the White House on September 9, 1893, early in her dad's second term. Esther married some British military hotshot and their philosopher daughter was born in 1920. 

But maybe you are more interested in George Clooney. This is highly entertaining.

 

 

 

 

"A Jew Walks Into a Bar"

I think this short film—less than a half hour—is funny and oddly affecting. Watch it if you have 25 minutes of shelter-in-place time to spare.

The main character's opening joke, about maybe being in the wrong place, reminds me of a small incident from my life as an occasional fan of standup comedy. The VFW in Minneapolis's LynLake neighborhood used to have one standup night per month before all the craziness started. Once, arriving alone and early for the show, I took a seat at the back of the room—in case audience participation was a part of someone's act. After the room had begun to fill, this strikingly obese fellow took a seat by himself at the table adjoining mine. Our chairs were next to each other, and I was about to make small talk with him when he pulled out a notebook and began studying it: one of the performers? Sure enough, the show starts, and he's about the third comedian to take the stage. There's no "green room"; the comedians just walk up the aisle and mount the stage after being introduced. Most of them charge right up there, jump onto the stage, and shout something like "Good evening Minneapolis!" All energetic and fun. This guy is way too big for that. He lumbers down the aisle from his seat in the back, next to me. It seems to take him forever. Of course every eye is on him and it's easy to imagine what everyone is thinking: "My God! This guy is huge!" He finally gets to the stage and ascends with difficulty. Now he's finally at the microphone. The room has gone silent. Everyone is waiting for him to speak. He pauses, maybe for effect, like David Finklestein in "A Jew Walks Into a Bar," but it's also possible he's winded and has to catch his breath. And then he speaks.

He says, "No one ever asks me if they need a jacket."

How I pass the time in quarantine

You tell me now?

Culinary

 

This is funny—Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat from Virginia, posted to Instagram a tutorial on how to make a tuna melt. Although people who know me probably think I'm in no position to laugh. Jan Witkowski, for example, who commented recently on my post about the somewhat amusing activities of my neighbors. Jan was a Hennepin County colleague of mine for many years. Like my other mom, Jan thought I was "too thin" and would frequently slip me easy recipes for hearty meals she thought even I could make. I remember one of them was for "tuna casserole." You prepare a box of macaroni and cheese according to the directions on the back panel. We're not talking soul food mac and cheese: Kraft, with the orange dust. Then you add to it a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of tuna (Sen. Warner would not drain the tuna but I knew to do that). When it's all mixed together, you bake it in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes. Pretty easy, so one night I made it, but it wasn't very good. I remember hoping she'd never ask whether I'd tried it. She did, however, so I told her it was "okay" but "seemed a little dry." Jan thought for around a half a second and then, squinting at me, said: "Did you remember the soup?"

Three ingredients and I used only two of them! But I've never microwaved mayonnaise. Jan is to Eric as Sen. Harris is to Sen. Warner.

 

Mark—we need to talk. Call. Please. Your friend KDH.pic.twitter.com/IPGsT6cnjE

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 22, 2020

Normies

Since I've recently regaled my legions of readers with miniature disquisitions on Montaigne and Milton, here are some more ordinary pastimes, opinions, and observations.

A good dinner may be secured at McDonald's, brought home, and washed down with two cans of Miller Lite.

Around 11 on Sunday morning is a good time to have two fried eggs, toast with butter and jelly, two strips of bacon, lots of greasy hashbrowns, and several cups of black coffee, though with sugar and cream in the last one, for dessert.

If you go to a "nice" place for brunch, and order a Bloody Mary, it is apt to come with way more than you need or even want. I just want the vodka, the tomato juice, ice, spices, and something to stir it with, like a pickle. Everything else is unnecessary and distracting.

I think I maybe developed my opinions about Bloody Marys at the Poodle Club, a bar on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis. It has since burned down, but in the early-80s, when I first moved into the neighborhood, it had a weekend breakfast special: two eggs any style, two toast, and your choice of a Bloody Mary or a screwdriver—$1.99. This was almost forty years ago, but still, as you'd predict, the Bloody was not accessorized. The first fifty I ever had were at the Poodle. I had them at the bar with the eggs and  toast. On Saturday morning, the cigarette haze from Friday night had not lifted and was augmented by the smell of spilled beer on the floor. I'm not sure all the customers had been home. I remember once hearing the guy on the next stool tell the bartender he wanted "the special, with a screwdriver, hold the eggs, hold the toast, and keep them coming." The Poodle Club ambience got imprinted on my brain and associated with the idea of a Bloody Mary. When I finally had one somewhere else, and it came in a curvy glass with pepperoni and a radish. . . seemed sort of ridiculous.

It's odd that I have such strong opinions about food and drink but am not at all particular. Truest sentence my mom ever spoke was, "He's easy to cook for." 

Pretty good chance that history will adjudge Trump to have been a subpar president.

The best game is baseball.

A lot of people who vote reliably for the Democrats have an unduly dismissive attitude toward country music. Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings: every one of them, beyond merely terrific. Probably others too, more current, but I don't know about them. I do like Nikki Lane.

When I talk to young people who like me prefer the Democrats, and there are a million of them around where I live, I find that their reasons aren't my reasons. With me, it's got nothing to do with yoga or the horrors of genetically modified plants in agriculture. Have they noticed, though, that the other side is depraved and completely whacko?  Nixon was a crook, Reagan an avuncular dunce, and George Shrub . . . wasn't avuncular. But look at their team now! Holy shit!

I think I've been channeling (subliminally till just this instant) a Twitter thread I saw in which people were challenged to confess their most "normie" opinion. So someone said they thought the Beatles were a good band. Someone else said with almost any band their best songs are the ones they did after their real fans accused  them of having sold out. Someone said they liked the Eagles, to which someone replied: "That's a bridge too far." Or maybe Cold Play was a bridge too far, I can't remember for sure. Some of the responses were pleasingly layered, such as (paraphrasing on all these that are inside quotes): "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a great work of classical music, although people who don't appreciate classical music agree." Naturally, I remember the food ones, like: "The parking lot at Olive Garden is usually packed as the unlimited garden salad is quite good." Another contribution: "Melted cheese elevates many dishes." I got into the thread because someone I follow, Jennifer Frey, offered, "Potato salad, lots of it." My opinion about potato salad is that, as with the Bloody Mary, it's too often too busy. You have to let the potatoes speak for themselves, like the vodka. Within reason though. At Stand Up Frank's, a bar in north Minneapolis, if you ordered a Bloody for yourself and a screwdriver for your friend, the bartender would put a straw in one drink and two straws in the other, so that you'd know which was which, not that it mattered. My normie about that was, if you must have two, have three, so that you won't even be able to find your car in the lot and therefore won't try to drive it. 

Home school schedule

I've gotten together with some of the other neighborhood parents and worked up an academic schedule for our kids while school is out. None of us is a professional educator, but we are doing our best in these strange times. Feel free to use it yourself, if you have kids who need to keep learning!

It's ambitious, but so far I've found that, once past Tuesday, I'm able to execute the plan. 

#LaughterTheBestMedicine

The caption for this pic, posted on social media, was something like, "While working from home it's important to preserve as much of the daily routine as possible."

In the same spirit, someone said he had built a gym in his basement, then joined, then never went.