Category Archives: Uncategorized

What an incredulous Game 1!

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I suppose we should have sympathy for sports writers, forced to come up with copy against a tough deadline. But surely Christopher Gasper of the Boston Globe can do better when he says that the umpire, incredulously, called Pedroia out after the Cardinal shortstop clearly dropped the ball. America was incredulous; the call was incredible.

I wonder if people misuse the word because it sounds like a tonier version of “incredible” — like restive and restless. In any case, it shouldn’t be that hard to get it right, if that’s what you’re paid for. Harrumph.

Other than that, a Red Sox fan had little to complain about in the wake of Game 1.

Why can’t my little town have better graffiti?

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My affluent little town has a street hockey rink near us, and today I noticed that someone had spray-painted this on the boards near the red line:

plural

 

Plural??  That’s the best our testosterone-addled street-hockey-playing youth can come up with?

Clearly I’m missing something here. At the very least they could spray-paint “Romanus eunt domus.”  Oh wait, Romanus needs to be, what, vocative plural…?

Maybe what this town needs is a chapter of the Judaean People’s Front.  Oh wait, maybe it needs the People’s Front of Judaea . . . .

Two songs for Labor Day

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First, Bob Dylan’s “Workingman’s Blues #2” from the astonishing Modern Times album:

Here is the first verse, which is either deeply profound or just simply hilarious.  Or both. Typical Dylan.

There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad.

And let’s raise a glass to those hard-working people, the Rolling Stones and Guns ‘n’ Roses, performing “Salt of the Earth” live.

Where are all the gay bars in Jordan, and other mysteries of the Middle East

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My little post yesterday explaining the Middle East got a lot of views.  Which is odd, because I know nothing about the Middle East.  Like most Americans, my time is spent worrying about Tom Brady’s left knee and Clay Buchholz’s right arm.  Also how to sell my many fine novels.

If you really want to learn about the Middle East, you should get my son to restart the blog he had last year.  Or start a new one where the photos don’t disappear.

Here is the sort of thing I don’t know, and he does:

Son: “The best clubs in Amman are on Rainbow Street.”

Me, making a tiny little joke: “I suppose that’s where the gay bars are.”

Son: “As a matter of fact, that’s right.  They’re not called gay bars, but everyone knows what they are.”

So there you have it.  The gay bars in Jordan are on Rainbow Street in Amman.  Who knew?  Everyone in Amman, apparently.  Here’s a photo of the street.

My son can also tell you about what happens to liquor stores during Ramadan, and the etiquette of letting cab drivers stop for coffee, how people behave when it snows in Amman, and many other interesting facts that you and I don’t know anything about. We just have to get him writing again.

The best explanation of the Middle East ever

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My son has headed back to the Middle East for a year (at least), so I have more than the usual interest in what’s going on over there.  He sent me to this Buzzfeed image of a letter to the Financial Times, which finally made everything clear to me.

This makes me feel so much better about the whole thing.  What could possibly go wrong?

Summer images

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We haven’t taken a photo break lately.

Here is a photo of a waterfall in the Berkshires taken by my friend Tom Whelan:

And here is a simple daisy, looking beautiful:

Here’s where I spent a couple days of my vacation last week, looking at the ocean instead of working on my novel:

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That’s Duxbury Beach on Boston’s South Shore.

Now back to work.

Another Fourth of July in my little town

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Even better than this one!

Two thousand-plus people got up at the crack of dawn to run four and a half miles down Main Street in the blistering heat.  Here are four of them:

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Here’s one of them being congratulated at the finish line:

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Then we all take a shower and go to the parade.  Uncle Sam starts things off:

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We have bands:

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And muskets:

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And cute hockey players (did you know there was such a thing as cute hockey players?):

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And a guy on stilts:

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And a reminder to never forget:

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And cute spectators staying hydrated:

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And of course our world-famous marching kazoo band:

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Don’t you wish you had a world-famous marching kazoo band?

Afterwards it’s time for cute kids to get cool in the back yard before the cookout:

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A thought about parenthood, with an illustration from the life of DeSean Jackson

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Kid number 1 has graduated from college, and kid number 2 has turned 21.  So the question naturally arises: Are we done yet?

We would really like to answer yes — this stuff is hard!  We want to relax and watch HGTV reruns!  But that’s absurd.  And whenever we’re tempted to do a victory lap, we recall the scene from the movie Parenthood where Jason Robards has just had to deal with his ne’er-do-well 20-something son, played by Tom Hulce.  Talking about it with his other son (Steve Martin), he says something like: “Parenthood isn’t football.  You never get into the end zone.  You never get to spike the ball.”

This seems like deep wisdom to me.  And nowadays we have an illustration of that wisdom.  As we all know from the movie Silver Linings Playbook, DeSean Jackson is the man:

But DeSean Jackson is not without his flaws.  And here is one of them, on display for all Monday Night Football viewers to see:

Even in football, where you can spike the ball (at least in the pros), you can’t spike it too soon, or you’ll be held up to the ridicule of two million YouTube viewers.  (Technically, I suppose what Jackson did was not a spike; Jackson is too cool to just spike the ball.  But you get my point.)  So we parents have to learn from his mistake.  Life is long (we hope) and filled with milestones, happy and sad.  We get to celebrate the happy ones, but we always have to be prepared for the next one, whatever it may be.  Because that’s the way the game is played.