Month: April 2012

Tulips and hyacinths and stomach pumps

Great Easter dinner — I roasted a lamb, grilled some asparagus, etc.  and wound up eating about 20 deviled eggs which was the beginning of a deep-end slide off the Paleo wagon into a total caloric orgy of cupcakes, lemon meringue pie, cake, grilled Greek halloumi cheese, dolma, Irish/French(?) coffee made with armagnac (which made me start shouting at the television in the latter hapless innings of the Red Sox-Tigers game) and then a post-prandial food coma with a couple more cupcakes just to seal the deal.

I saw the doctor this morning for a routine checkup and my blood pressure was 100 over 70 which earned me a big attaboy in addition to praise for shedding a lot of weight since the last visit. Today is a day of penance and carrots with a trip to Crossfit Cape Cod coming to further flagellate myself for the 10K calorie day on Sunday.

Oh, and I have tulips.

Lit’ry life: April 9, 2012

I missed last week, so a little catching up to do.

New Yorker, April 2 issue: Robert Caro’s account of the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson on Airforce One following JFK’s assassination is a strange, almost non sequituresque reminder of a day in history I remember vividly from my very impressionable five year-old’s memory bank. I grew up in Texas, outside of Houston, and recall being strangely ashamed of the state I had come to consider my own, despite the best efforts of the neighborhood kids to pummel me in the sandbox for being a Yankee.

Economist:  the special section on the future of Cuba was fascinated.  I figured it was time to get ready and smart about some big changes after the Castro brothers fade away and Venezula’s Chavez ends his paternal support of the island in the vacuum left by the Soviet decline. This section is a good solid primer. The most recent issue takes a look at the rise of China’s military.

Newsweek: the commemorative issue on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles was …. meh.  I have the usual baby boomer’s sentimental investment in the Fab Four but am not what would consider a rabid fan.

Sunday New York Times: April 8. The front page piece on the friendship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and would-be GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney was pretty profound on an unspoken level in terms of expatiating the unique role that business education and the management consulting culture is having on global politics and leadership. Where the military or law were once the most common crucible for a politician’s career (see John McCain and President Obama/Clinton),  the rise of the technocrat in the age of the Davos Man is becoming more and more inescapable a trend.

Books On the Kindle:  I finally finished Fermor’s Roumeli, a great travelogue of northern Greece from one of the best Hellenicophiles since Lord Byron and have indulged myself with another baseball book from Padre’s pitcher Dirk Hayhurst (The Bullpen Gospels) — Out of My League.  It’s a slow starter, but I will abide.

Longform.org: I discovered a chilling 2000 New Yorker piece by Alec Wilkinson about Hadden Clark, the cross-dressing-cannibalistic-serial killer who used to call Wellfleet his home. For some reason the outer Cape’s unsolved murders really creep me out. From Tony Costa, the 1907s In His Garden lady-killer whom Norman Mailer drew from in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, to the Christa Worthington murder in Truro in 2002 — the Outer Cape, in all its scrub pine remoteness, has one other big unsolved mystery: the case of the Lady in the Dunes. Clark copped to that murder, but it was never conclusively pinned on him. Now the current theory is she may have been done in by Whitey Bulger.  Wilkinson delivers a great piece of crime writing which reminds me to buy his book about his year on the Wellfleet police force.

Shock and Oar

The Boat Race, the oldest collegiate athletic competition in the world, delivered a first today in its 157 years of racing down the Thames Tideway when an swimmer popped up in the middle of the course between the Oxford and Cambridge crews and brought the race to a confusing halt.

Keep in mind this is a quintessential eccentric English sporting event, part of the holy circle that includes Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley — televised live on the BBC, bet fervently on, and followed with excruciating detail in the months leading up the way Americans might obsess about the Superbowl.

Broadcast live on BBC America, the Boat Race is finally accessible to American rowing fans — fitting given about 50% of the rowers are American ex-pats sitting in ringers’ seats.

I settled in with a cup of coffee — kicking my wife off of the couch and her usual morning diet of Real Housewives and Ru Paul Drag Racing — and watched with some sense of dreadful nervous empathy as the two crews lined up in the starting blocks and prepared for four miles of hell. The typical collegiate rowing race is 2,000 meters and is over in about six minutes; hence those races are called sprints. Oxford/Cambridge and Harvard/Yale fight it out, boat to boat, over 4 miles in 20 minutes — basically three and a half 2,000 meter sprints in one long grueling go, with the boat-to-boat pressure incredible for the rowers as they are constantly aware of whether they are leading or losing every hard stroke along the way.

For the non-rower, a rowing race is beyond dull. The sport is about consistency and impeccable timing, and after ten strokes of eight big men in a little boat you’ve about seen it all you need to see. Not today. This race suddenly erupted in a flash of spray and clashing oars as some “twat” (as the twitter hashtag “#boatrace” instantly dubbed him) popped up under Oxford’s port-side oars, just missing decapitation by a carbon fiber Concept2 hatchet blade.

The referee called a halt. Ten confused minutes later, with the streaking/swimmer in custody on a police boat, the two crews were lined up below the island and given a running start with about 7 minutes to row to the finish. For the rowers, flooded with lactic acid and already in agony, the wait in the cold wind must have be nasty, but off they went, in a hard charging re-start.

One minute later, while the referee was constantly warning Oxford to stay away from Cambridge, the two boats clashed and Oxford snapped an oar. Disaster number two and pretty much Race Over. Cambridge pulled ahead, Oxford limped along, the bladeless rower sadly going back and forth with nothing but an impotent handle in his hand. Chuffed, I switched off the telly.

The race ended up with Cambridge winning by five lengths, no official time was taken, no presentation made, and in general the whole affair ended sadly and with a whimper despite being dubbed the most dramatic in Race history.

That’s about as amazing as it gets in rowing. Soccer has its World Cut head butts. NASCAR its crashes. Rowing got a swimmer today. I can’t wait to see what Fleet Street does to the swimming idiot once he gets identified. Update: the douchenozzle is named Trenton Oldfield and here is his feeble manifesto.

Artsy Movie of the Week: Tatsumi

The Museum of Modern Art’s film society presented the US premier of Tatsumi last night as part of its ContemporAsian film series. This is an animated biography/animation of the life and word of Japanese “cartoonist” and manga pioneer, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who led the movement in the late 1950s to move Japanese manga out of the realm of children’s comics to the art form now recognized as long form graphic novels.

I was into comics about as much as the next kid, but never really geeked out over them and have never been drawn to Japanese manga or anime. Speed Racer was about as much as I could take.

The film, directed by Singapore director Eric Khoo, intersperses a animated biography of Tasumi (based on Tatsumi’s autobiography, A Drifting Life) from his childhood during World War II through his life in the post-war 50s and the economic explosion of the 70s with animated versions of his “novels”, a form he invented and dubbed gekiga,  or “dramatic pictures.” There were five stories retold in the film. The first was a very heavy story about a young photographer who snaps a picture of a shadow of a son comforting his mother at the instant the bomb went off over Hiroshima, baking their silhouette into a wrecked wall. There was a terrible tale of a factory worker who lives alone with a pet monkey, loses his arm in a machine accident, and decides to free the monkey by dropping it into the monkey cage at the zoo, only to watch in horror as the zoo monkeys tear it to shreds. A story of a post-war whore who takes up with a GI and performs drunken incest with her father. A failed manga artist who decides to move from children’s stories to porn and is caught drawing lewd grafitti on the wall of a public toilet (lots of vomit and poo in that one). A retiree who hates his wife and wants to go out with a bang by having one last love affair but winds up being impotent when he gets his chance …..

This was heavy stuff. Some of the audience would get up and walk out towards the end when things got particularly heavy. But most of the audience was composed of Japanese ex-pats, and my sense was Tatsumi is a very good story teller with a penchant for getting into the complex post-war Japanese zeitgeist in a way an American can never really understand. Good film. Glad I went. Made me uncomfortable, choked me up, and I loved the blend of biography and fiction.

Having been to Japan a grand total of two times, I can barely claim to understand the culture, but Tatsumi seemed to confirm, in a bleak way, my darkest projections of what life must have been in that fascinating society in the days following the nuclear explosions through the astonishing rebirth as a world power; all told across the span of one man’s life.

 

Opening Day

Lester on the mound vs. Verlander in Detroit at 1 pm today. I’ll be in the car doing my best to drown the polar bears by driving the way-too-familiar 250 miles from NYC to Cape Cod. As a card carrying member of the BLOHARDS (Benevolent Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Red Sox Diehard Sufferers of New York) offer this listening tip for any fellow Bay State commuters who carry the ring into Mordor every week on Route 95.

The first solution is to drive a contemporary vehicle with SiriusXM and listen to the game via satellite. That isn’t in my cards, nor is bluetoothing the MLB app on my Android phone into the car’s speakers. That’s way too hipster and just … weird. So, for your old school listening pleasure, here is the roster of radio stations to code into the pre-sets listed in order of a return from the land of Darkness back to the Promised Land. There really isn’t anything to compare with listening to Joe Castiglione and Dave O’Brien call a game through the 1950s-tinny crackle of an AM radio.

  1. Manhattan to Bridgeport — 1490 AM WGCH in Greenwich
  2. Bridgeport to New London — 1080 AM WTIC Hartford (best signal in Connecticut)
  3. New London to Warwick — 1440 AM WILI Willimantic (unneccesary if you switch to from WTIC to the station below around Mystic)
  4. Warwick to Fall River — 103.7 FM WEEI Providence
  5. Cape Cod — 96.3 FM WEII Cape Cod

The full list of stations in the Red Sox Radio Network is here.

Now, with everything possible before us and no real numbers on the board (sorry, but the Mariners vs. the A’s kicking things off last week in Japan does not constitute a real Opening Day in my book) the slate is clean, everyone is without sin and hope springs as eternal as …. Spring. My prediction for the 2012 season: the Tigers win the World Series. Ok? Got that? The Beloved Red Sox duke it out with the Blue Jays to finish above Baltimore at the bottom of the AL East, arguably the most difficult and competitive division in any pro sport.  The Sox just don’t have the pitching this year in the fourth and fifth slots in the rotation to have any hope. Dice-K might  be resurrected like some apparition rising from the ashes, and pigs might fly, but there just isn’t any there there when it comes to the starting pitchers. So, let’s celebrate Fenway’s 100th birthday and get all mushy about the lyric little bandbox,  put d’affaire de poulet et biere behind us, give Bobby V. his honeymoon season and hope the Money Men do well with their hedge funds and can afford some new arms next winter, because they didn’t spend diddly this year.

Oh, and one last thing. I already miss Tim Wakefield, my favorite Red Sox since Bill Lee. The man was a hero to all men of a certain age and I once rode an elevator with him at the Mass Eye and Ear Clinic. So I have that going for me.

And another last thing, since every purple-prosed baseball poet has to end the season with that weepy Bart Giamatti quote about baseball seasons ending and breaking our hearts, every cliched Opening Day post must embed this classic sonorous James Earl Jones panegyric to the pastime from Field of Dreams:

 

 

Big data visualization beauty

I marvel at the art of visually representing quantitative data. There have been some excellent examples over the time. I used to be particularly obsessed with Smartmoney’s heat map of the stock market which blew a lot of minds in the late 1990s, and went out of my way to try to recruit the genius who came up with it into Forbes.com (with no success). Today it seems so static and Web 1.0, but still, cavemen used to be freaked out by fire, imagine what they would do with a Bic lighter?

Uncle Fester, the collector of all that is interesting, sent me a link to a very cool wind map.  Meteorological maps are generally fairly dull and impenetrable, with their own symbolic language of isobars, beaufort scales, and occluded fronts. Indeed, weather has long been considered one of the greatest data challenges. Consider that for decades the standard was something like this:

 Not very friendly to the layman, more the sort of thing a pilot or professional could read and derive some sense of the future from. Wind is personally the single most interesting element of a weather forecast. As a former sailboat racer, I’d obsess over the probability of a wind shift occurring during a race, or, plan ahead on whether or not to take a crew to help hold the boat down if the breeze increased in velocity. Too much weight and I’d lose. Too little weight and I’d be screwed trying to keep the boat flat in the gusts.

Here’s what wind maps used to look like:

And here is what they look like today. This is beautiful and very addictive to play with. I highly recommend clicking through to see this in all of its animated glory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And sorry, but I can’t forget this classic: