Month: September 2006

I discovered that in the past week or two, I’ve been mentioned in blogs by Greg (fearing my chastisement over his affection for Led Zeppelin – I don’t dislike them, I just got aggravated by their uncredited ripoffs of old blues artists), Chris Black (making insignia – his looks better than mine), Chris Brown – no relation (citing my blood donation piece AND dissing my musical taste in the same post), and Jaquandor (quoting from my September 11 piece). Also, I make Eddie happy – that’s just the kind of guy I am – even as I confound him. And let me say here what I posted on Greg’s blog: “Album is a perfectly fine word for a group of things under one cover (photo album, e.g.) The CD, the LP, the cassette is the format; the collection is the album. Or so I say. Again.”

Chris Brown, a/k/a Lefty, (like the Hall & Oates cover, guy, and especially the song after that) also was inspired by me. Speaking of inspirational, I’m enjoying summer songs from Mrs. Lefty.
***
I had a letter to the editor published on Saturday. It’s here, and if that becomes inaccessible, it’s been copied here. My racquetball mates got annoyed that I didn’t mention it to them.
***
If you’re a blogger, please consider adding this guy. Although Hurricane Dymowski is named for him, he’s generally a sensitive fellow. A Pisces, I believe.
***
I’m mildly pleased that the Mets finally clinched the NL East pennant, as is Fred (Sept. 19).
***
Oh, and the Toby Keith reference came from watching CBS Sunday Morning on September 10, where he revealed, among other things, that he’s a Democrat. I actually own one Keith album that I got for free at a conference in Nashville a few years ago, and it includes the song “Let’s Talk About Me”.

It’s TODAY, and I almost missed it, but didn’t, thanks to Lefty.

“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.”

“I am convinced that God wanted me to be a baseball player. I was born to play baseball.”

“I am more valuable to my team hitting .330 than swinging for home runs.”

“I dedicated the hit (his 3,000th) to the Pittsburgh fans and to the people in Puerto Rico and to one man (Roberto Marin) in particular. The one man who carried me around for weeks looking for a scout to sign me.”

“I felt kind of bashful (when the fans went crazy). I’m a very quiet, shy person, although you writers might not believe because I shout sometimes.”

“If I could sleep. I could hit .400.”

“I tell you, (Steve) Blass, you pitch me inside, they never, never find that ball.”

“I want to be remembered as a ballplayer who gave all he had to give.”

“I will hit .450 if you give me Ralph Garr’s legs, Johnny Bench’s age and cut the travel schedule.”

“Nobody does anything better than me in baseball (said before the 1971 World Series).”

“There’s no difference between me and you (Manny Sanguillen). You need something, a glove, a place to live, you let me know.”

“When I put on my uniform, I feel I am the proudest man on earth.”

“Why does everyone talk about the past? All that counts is tomorrow’s game.”

RC

Tosy claims the new season officially started yesterday. Couldn’t tell by me. It’s not just because my TV Guide subscription lapsed months ago. It’s that Prison Break and any number of other shows started in August, a few started last week, some won’t start until October.

Guess I should figure out what to watch.

Mondays
10-11
Studio 60
The single most hyped new series. The Ad Age critics, who have a pretty good track record, are mixed about the success of this show. I liked Sports Night, liked West Wing until Sorkin left, then I came back for the last season. (Studio 60 aired on Sunday in Toronto. And I recorded it last night but have not watched it; I was in BED by 10 pm.

Tuesdays
8-9
Gilmore Girls
How WILL they handle last year’s stunning season-ender? I have no idea.
10-11
Boston Legal. It’s trash. I like it anyway.

Wednesdays
8-8:30
30 Rock. The OTHER SNL-inspired show.
10-11
I’ve avoided Lost, not because it’s not good, but because I have only a limited tolerance for such convoluted fare. The Nine looks a little like Lost to me (ABC must have paired them for a reason), yet the commercials have compelled me to at least give it a try.

Thursday
8-9
Earl and Office. Tosy said, “The most solid comedy hour in a long while.” Agreed.
9-10
I’m a latecomer to Grey’s Anatomy. Saw quite a bit of it during summer reruns, enough to at least try it again.

Friday
9-10
Saw the first Men in Trees. Very Northern Exposure, with Alaska, a bar, and a pilot. I happened to have watched Anne Heche on Another World and liked her. I’ll try it again.
10-11
Once upon a time, I used to actually watch Law & Order, but not since Jerry Orbach left. If I’m absolutely desperate…

Saturday
There really is nothing on network TV on Saturday if you don’t like football.

Sunday
7-8 (probably more like 7:30-8:30)
60 Minutes. Katie Couric’s first piece on the damaged lungs after 9/11 was strong, more interesting, actually, than her daily broadcast.
8-8:30
The Simpsons.
10-11
Brothers and Sisters. (No, Tosy, I didn’t remember that Skerritt and Fields played matriarch and patriarch of a family in Steel Magnolias, and I actually saw the movie.)

The front page story in Saturday’s local newspaper was “E. coli threat grows in area”. The subhead notes that “stores, eateries remove spinach.” Guess what I had for lunch on Friday? A spinach salad. I gather I’m OK, but it is a bit disconcerting, to say the least.
***
My wife got a video called The Wheels on the Bus for Lydia to watch. It’s a live action plus puppetry production. It was OK for that type of thing. My favorite song was when the dragon bus driver sang “Fill It Up”, a bluesy/R&B-type tune. I happen to catch the credits and diascovered that while the dragon was operated by an actor, the voice of the dragon was provided by Roger Daltry, the lead singer for the Who. He even appears on the “making of” segment. BTW, the Who – is it still a band with two members? – will have a new album out next month, their first in 23 years.
***
I went to Larkfest on Saturday. Sorry, now that it’s celebrating its 25th year, it’s now LARKfest. So, THAT’S what Everclear sounds like. I’d heard them before, but must admit that I wouldn’t have been able to pick out one of their songs. At the event, I saw a girl of about 10 point out to her father some buttons that she wanted to buy. He seemed inclined until he realized they were (GAY) PRIDE buttons. He hemmed and hawed, but I don’t know howe the story ended. A real Harold Pinter moment.
***
I was reading GP as usual last week. He wrote about national leaders and others who might need some lovin’. Somehow, when I read “Lucy van Pelt”, I practically did a spit take, mostly because it’s SO true. Go read it.
***
As a regular viewer of Gilmore Girls, I was interested to see if Luke Danes’ predictition of a much poorer season for outfielder Johnny Damon, when he went from being a hirsute Red Sox to a clean-shaven Yankee, because he’d lose the fear factor. Well, he’s hitting for about 20 points less, but is showing far more power, with 22 HRs to date vs. 10 last season, so I think it’s a wash.
***
Only 13% of the registered Democrats voted in the primary that re-nominated Hillary Clinton to run for U.S. Senate, but only 5.5% of all Republicans voted in the primary to pick the Republican, an all-time low for a major party primary in NYS. Add to that the fact that the winner, John Spencer, the former mayor of Yonkers, had had an affair with his secretary, and this compelled Jay Leno to note that this is the first time a Clinton is the “family-values candidate.”
***
Isn’t it peculiar that the big issue in the second term of the Clinton administration was “What is sex?”, whereas with the second term of the current administration, the issue is “What is torture?” I’m inclined to believe Colin Powell, et al. on this one. An interesting thing Sam Donalson said on ABC’s This Week was that National Security Asdvisor Stephen Hadley, who was on the show yesterday, made a rational-sounding argument for the administration’s position, but that the President, in attacking Powell and others, seemed a bit crazed. Now that he mentions it, yes, the President did seem a little out of control.
***
Did anyone out there actually watch that controversial ABC-TV movie, “The Path to 9/11”? I’ve recorded it. My favorite riff on it comes from here.
***
The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 original version of the movie with Frank Sinatra, is on TCM Saturday night. I will have to record this to watch later. I saw the remake a couple years ago with Denzel Washington, but every critic I’ve read said it does hold a candle to the older film.
***
I had a “Eureka!” moment about my wife and me this weekend. When she said to me, “Did I tell you I have a workshop Tuuesday and Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:30?” , I thought that I was annoyed because I would have to take off precious vacation time to pick up Lydia. (I generally drop Lydia off during the school year, and Carol picks her up.) In fact, that was only a minor part of it. It was that she never actually said, or preferably led with, “I need you to pick up Lydia,” but instead spoke with indirectness. She MEANS, “I can’t pick up Lydia. You need to pick up Lydia,” but did not actually SAY that. I told her I would prefer, “I need you to pick up Lydia Tuesday and Wednesday, because I have a workshop those days from 3:30 until 5:30.” If she’s making the request, I don’t want to do the heavy lifting of discerning what the request is. On the other hand, I DO like to pick up Lydia every once in a while, because she gets so excited to see me.
I note this so that, in the future, you’ll know that I like the direct message a LOT more than the “What dioes he/she mean by that?” message.

I like math – well, arithmetic, geometry, algebra. Calculus I didn’t quite get. I was reading about the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), specifically, the average mathematics scale scores of eighth-grade students, by country: 2003, where U.S. kids finished 15th of about 44 nations. This has led to a new found popularity of something called Singapore Math; Singapore was one of those countries that whipped our butts in this category. Don’t pretend that I fully understand it any better than the way I learned it.

Anyway, Lefty asked recently when was the last time we used algebra. On Wednesday, I was eating my Cheerios with bran flakes, which meets my cereal blending criteria, and I was looking at my 2% milk. (Normally, I use 1%, but all of it at the store had short expiration dates.) On the container, it read “38% less milkfat than whole milk”. So, it got me to wondering: how much milkfat does whole milk have? And can I figure it out algebraically?
So my ratios are 62 (100-38) is to 100 as 2 is to what? 62/100=2/x. 62x=200. x=3.226. Then, I had to check it here, where I found out that the milkfat content of whole milk must be a minimum of 3.25%. 3.226, 3.25. Pretty close, yes.

Math is fun. Seriously fun. Keeps the mind sharp.

Oh, and I was listening to the soundtrack of the musical Rent recently, where I first discovered that there are 525,600 minutes in a year. But what about leap years? Well, that’s 527,040 minutes, but I expect the scantion of that lyric wouldn’t really fly.
***
On Friday, gas was $2.839 at the Mobil station I pass daily. Two years ago, people would have screamed the lines from another musical I was listening to recently, Oklahoma: It’s a scandal! It’s a outrage! Now, it’s just a relief.
***
Right now there’s a vote to determine what design we’ll get for our Christmas card at work. As of yesterday, the vote was 4 for design A, 4 for design B, and 1 (me) for design C, with at least 4 more to vote. If it remains tied, then choice C will be thrown out, and I’ll get to decide. Yet another (if imperfect) example of Instant-runoff voting (IRV).
***
The population clock at the Census Bureau website will hit 300,000,000 Americans next month.
***
Speaking of numbers, both Brooklyn Dodger great Duke Snider and James Lipton, my favorite sycophant from Inside the Actors Studio, both turn 80 tomorrow, coincidentally the age my father would have turned later this month. Hall of Famer Snider was immortalized in the Terry Cashman song, Talkin’ Baseball, well, at least a few versions thereof. Recently, I saw Lipton’s interview with Dustin Hoffman, which reminded me why I used to actually watch that show before Lipton started picking people such as J Lo: an actor talking passionately about the craft of acting.