50th Post for the Observatory

So, this is the Fiftieth Post for this blog, my second regular blog, and one that was started because I had too much to write about and wanted a different venue. That was when I had tried to keep my original blog to solely literary pieces, even though its Fiftieth Post is all about Tuxedo.

So, once January was over, both blogs tend towards the same thing, and I put stuff up everywhere hap-hazardly. Oh well. The majority of posts here, I believe, are about our Central American trip, which was pretty sweet if I remember correctly.

Thanks for reading this tripe, if you are. Here's another picture of Tux, just because that's what we do on 50th posts:

Sports Correspondence

I was messaged by a close friend recently about sports, and my answer, while long winded, probably showed how I feel about the topic at hand in the most nuanced way I could:

"Just wanted to get your take on the added wildcard game for the MLB playoffs. Personally, I think it is pretty stupid to do just one game. If you are going to add a team, make it a 3 game series at least..."

My response:

"Part of me agrees, but another part of me thinks play-in games are essentially Game 7s, which are the craziest and most a-typical thing in baseball, but exciting. Scary if you're team's is in it (I remember watching the BoSox crush the Yanks at McCarthy's in 2004 against the pinstriped-turd Kevin Brown) but are otherwise objectively awesome. A 3 game series might be what it evolves into, but maybe not. It helps that something like last year happened, with both the AL and NL playoffs decided in the last 20 minutes of the season, and everybody came to grips with how exciting it could be. Another factor that keeps this going is again how the AL is shaping up. If the A's, with their new Cubano slugger, unearth some crazy pitching talent, they might be involved. Otherwise, if we concede the Central to the Tigers (is anyone else good enough there? Indians, maybe?), that leaves the Rangers, Angels, Yanks, Rays and Red Sox as all pretty damn good teams, and one won't even make the play-in game. The play-in game is, obviously, against the normal procedure for deciding baseball talent, but not totally unheard of. Changing the structure of a sport's post-season just for publicity and creating buzz and excitement is artificial and a bit hollow, and will undoubtedly wreak havoc at some point. Still...I guess I'm becoming less of a purist/cynic. I mean, I recognize the obvious stupidity and hollowness, the overall affront to the game, but I'm leaning to caring less and just trying to enjoy the excitement. Also, if it takes some steam away from the NFL, I'm down."

See, I'm just trying to enjoy the game...stupid blood pressure...

New Reads

I've been trying toget back into a few books recently. I remember in the first few months of the other blog, caliboyinbrooklyn, I was constantly reading and typing about what it was that I read. Mostly I was devouring Thomas Pynchon's complete library, but sometimes, like that link above, there were other books.

Now I'm back at it, though I'm working on three different things.

The oldest work I'm reading is Candide, by Voltaire, and if I had a long enough patch of free time I could probably finish it in a sitting. As it is, I read a short chapter and then get to my own projects. (They ate one of the Old Lady's ass cheeks? Crazy Frenchmen...)

As well as that classic I'm starting Murakami's 1Q84, a Decemberween gift I'm finally getting after. In the first handful of pages you can get a sense of the pacing that Haruki'll be using, as well as a sense of the weirdness and fantastical that is a characteristic of his work.

About the name: I'm pronouncing it--in my head and to Corrie when I talk about it--as "Q-teen-84". It takes place in the year 1984, and the 'Q' is supposed to signify the questions and quandaries the year was inspiring, so I just replaced the letter/syllable 'Q' for the syllable/word 'nine'. So, like 1984, "1Q84" becomes "Q-teen-eighty-four".

The third book I'm reading is Ken Dryden's The Game, supposedly one of the best sports books ever written, if not the best, and easily the best hockey book ever written. Ken Dryden was a Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, the Yankees of the NHL (as in able to build dominant dynasties in different eras) for a special time in their history, when one of their teams, the 1976-77 team, has been labeled "Best Team Ever".

I'm not the first to recommend books written by athletes, or about athletes, but this is no ordinary book, and Dryden, a former Canadian Parliamentarian and holder of a BS in History from Cornell, is no ordinary jock. Here's a sentence from the first page of the introduction, about the scraps of paper that he'd written things on after games, after interviews, on the buses and airplanes...the shoe-boxes full of scraps:

"Like most midnight thoughts, what I found in the morning looked disturbingly thin and incomplete, often contradictory, not at all the story that had seemed to me so different and untold."

Even working with Tom Verducci, Joe Torre never came up ideas even like that. (The Yankee Years, 2009)

Better luck finding that kind of thing in George Plimpton's One for the Record, his account of Hank Aaron's Babe Ruth-eclipsing homer. It's a good, quick, lyrical read, one that will boost whatever thoughts you had about one of the game's all time greats: the Hammer. It even inspired me to get this hat:



(Also I like blue.)

Somehow I forgot "200 Hotels"

Frank Zappa was way ahead of his time. When the Beatles were recording Abbey Road EP they were using an 8-track mixer, maing it possible to record eight tracks simultaneously, Frank was suing a 16-track mixer. His arrangements and compositions hearken back to a time when composers ruled over Europe's popular music scene, a period that produced what's known today as "classical" music.

One of Frank's projects was a film to accompany an album of the same name, 200 Hotels. Both are about how life on the road can drive a band crazy.

It was one of the films I put on the other night when I couldn't sleep and was perusing Netflix's offerings of sci-fi. I watched only a few minutes before realizing I wasn't in the mood for the 1969 Zappa piece.

Some other time.

Insomnia and Science Fiction

I think I might use that as a title for a piece later on, but now, it only describes last night. Not being able sleep, I felt an urge to check out what lied deep in the bowels of my streaming Netflix Sci-Fi category. I was up for something a little weird, offbeat, and something otherwise not viewed by me.

My first choice was the 1984 "classic" The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension. When I had been a kid, my brother Dan and I saw the opening minutes, where the souped up jet-engine powered Ford pick-up blasts through a mountain into the 8th dimension. I remember thinking that that was so cool, but that we (or maybe just I) didn't finish the movie.

That was because it sucked. Or not, but last night I couldn't get through it. Sometimes I can sit through a ridiculous film for a clinical type reason, usually with either Corrie or Dan or Norm or my mom, but when I want to watch something for myself, for pleasure, I guess I get a little picky.

So, after investing forty whole minutes in the Buckaroo Banzai movie, I turned it off and went looking for something else.

Conan the Destroyer was among the choices, because, apparently, Netflix lumps science fiction with fantasy films, and I thought, if nothing else, I could compare the movie with an essay I read about Robert Howard (it's inescapable--I'm a filthy nerd).

Next to the Conan movie was Krull. Here we go, I thought, I've heard of this one. Reading about it online, I learned that the score was robust and surprisingly excellent. You can see how the movie affected me, if I was busy looking up information on it while it played.

I stopped it after only a twenty minutes or so.

Thinking the evening was a waste full of no-sleep, I came across one more film, one to hold my attention for the rest of the now late night. It was older, short, "classic", and satirical, and I hadn't seen it yet: Death Race 2000.

Fast paced, fast cars, some bare chests, and one David Carradine at the height of his popularity (1975) show off this glorious love letter to America's love of violence. It is campy and looks low budget, but it's also fun.

I always think it's funny how the the 1970s feel about the "future", the 90s and early 'aughts.

Populated Highways

I'd been thinking during our drive and move from Austin to LA about the possibility of Interstate 10, the freeway my mother-in-law and I traveled, being the most populated Interstate in the country.



It has the LA metropolitan area, the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario (known around here as the Inland Empire) area, Phoenix, Tuscon, El Paso, San Antonio, the massive Houston area, New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Tallahassee, and Jacksonville.

It seemed like it could win out. I was starting to imagine the numbers when I realized that I shouldn't forget another Interstate away from which I grew up less than a mile: I-80.



Starting in the Bay Area in California, we start smaller than LA. Reno and Salt Lake City are also smaller than Phoenix by magnitudes. Then there's not much through Wyoming and Nebraska. Des Moines' probably comparable to San Antonio, but then we get the big guns along 80. While Houston, along 10, is large, it's smaller than the Chicago metropolitan area. New Orleans isn't as big as it was pre-Katrina, but it's still the biggest city along the remaining stretch of I-10, and it's smaller than Cleveland on I-80.

Anchoring Interstate 80 is New York.

I haven't starting punching numbers, and I really don't think it's necessary. Gotta be I-80.

Another Few Sports Notes

Who is the only baseball player to win MVP awards in both the AL and NL? The great Frank Robinson, of course. Like Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson doesn't get the kind of respect of acknowledgement toady as he should. People know Hank Aaron, certainly, but only for the home runs, not for the all-around hitter he was. Only two players ever got more than 4000 hits; Hank Aaron has the most besides those two with 4000. When Frank Robinson retired he had the fourth most home runs in a career. Now he's ranked 9th all time.

This little post is more about another strange fact about Frank Robinson. Besides being the only player to win those MVPs in both leagues ('61 Reds and '66 Orioles), he was the first black manager in all of baseball, with the Cleveland Indians, in the American League.

Any guesses on the first black manager in the National League? Frank Robinson, with the Giants. Wild.

Luis Tiant, Cubano pitching hero with the Red Sox in the '70s, wore number 23 on the Yankees two seasons before Donnie Baseball arrived. Actually, Donnie started out as number 46, but was given his final playing number the next year, after he became a regular, and the other guy wearing 23, catcher Barry Foote, washed out.

So much information, and I barely even care.

Some Sports Ideas

I was thinking about a list of the top five tennis players ever, for some reason. I decided to look up a list of the subject, and found that their numbers 3-5 were the same as mine, only in a different order.

It seems that 1 and 2 are as close to a consensus as can be at this point in sports history.

1) Federer;
2) Sampras.

I feel lucky to have been able to watch both during their times of dominance.

The other three on my list are in whatever order you want to put them: Bjorn Borg, Rod Laver, and Nadal. I thought those five would be pretty safe; Raj, Rafa, Rod, Pete and the bear.

Bjorn Borg has a pretty cool name--literally "bear fortress".

Finding such consensus on in any kind of list like this is always an elusive thing. Take baseball. Let's say name the five best non-pitchers in the game:

1) Ruth;
2) Mays;
3) Aaron;
4) Ted Williams;
5) Oscar Charleston.

Really? The Hammer? Oscar, the center-fielder from the Negro leagues? What the hell kind of list can you have with no Honus Wagner or Ty Cobb? No Mickey Mantle or Joe D?

Consensus is tougher there. It helps that the game is a team sport, and has been more popular than tennis for a longer time. The amount of players around to populate lists is vast and colorful.

Honus Wagner dominated the game in a more drastic fashion than Ted Williams ever did, but the difference in the game the two played can't be ignored.

Babe Ruth and Willie Mays would probably show up on any list, and I personally think Hank Aaron is undervalued and under-appreciated.

What about Rickey Henderson?

Another pair of questions: Is Sammy Baugh the best NFL player ever? Do any current NFL players know who Sammy Baugh was?

"Slingin'" Sammy Baugh was the first quarterback to use the forward pass as an offensive weapon, set records for quarterbacks that still stand today, sixty years after they were set, set records for punting that still stand today, was the first defensive back to make four interceptions in a game, and single-handedly created the fanaticism associated with the fans of the Redskins.

I'd like to do a post on Sammy anyway...this guy is the only player in NFL history to have four touchdown passes in the same game as four interceptions.

4 TDs and 4 INTs in the same game. In 1943 he led the league in passing, punting, and interceptions. All from a guy who'd much rather have been on his ranch in Texas than playing anything.

Basketball? Is Peja a Hall of Famer?

Stream of sports consciousness...

Cavani, the key player on Napoli (my new favorite European soccer team), is from Uruguay, like one of my other soccer guys (now with Inter Milan) Diego Forlan. I learned just today that Juventus is from Piedmont (the location of my family's Italian heritage).

Random bits...rambling random bits...