Sunday, September 25, 2005

Age and Actresses

There are lots of signs that you're getting a little bit older. Your sprained ankle takes two months to heal, instead of two weeks like when you sprained it when you were 19. Staying out 'til midnight seems like a big deal.

For guys at least, another sign is when you can put together a pretty good-sized list of Actresses Who Should Have Had Better Careers. It's the premises of the list that show your age. First, you have to have noticed these actresses some time ago. Ten years at least is necessary, I think. Second, you have to have actually been paying attention to movies and TV over a more or less continuous period of some amount of time. This is different than just noticing somebody in a movie once. This means noticing the newspaper or at least commercials and noticing that someone you've seen before is in something new and being willing to give it a shot. Say you need to do this over a 5-year period or so. Third, these actresses need to be somewhat passed the point where you would have expected them to get to be really big stars. We're not talking Julia Roberts right after Mystic Pizza here. As has been discussed at length in lots of other places, this point comes unfortunately early for actresses in Hollywood. It is a bitter truth, but that is the way things apparently work. The actresses on your list have to be more or less passed the point where they're going to get really big.

Every guy has a list like this, I think. I remember that my dad really liked Angie Dickinson, said that she never had the career she should have. I remember lots of reruns of Policewoman (which had these really groovy '70s credits where Ms. Dickinson's image froze and then like shadow effects spread out behind the image -- it was pretty awesome). Now Ms. Dickinson apparently hung out with Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack and maybe JFK in the '60s. Her working on Policewoman in the '70s thus would have been a sign that she was passed the point that she was going to be a big star. This just isn't my dad. One of my best friends from law school thought that Jenny Garth on 90210 was all right. Now Ms. Garth hasn't had herself a great big career. I'll bet my friend thinks that she should have been a much bigger star.

So I guess that I've gotten somewhat older 'cause I can put together a pretty decent list. They're all good-looking -- that's part of the point, I guess -- so I'm not going to comment much on that:

Janine Turner -- She was really good as the smart-mouthed pilot on Northern Exposure and she could pull off really short hair, which is unusual. Now Northern Exposure was one of maybe the five or so best TV shows of the '90s (X-Files, Homicide: Life on the Street, Seinfeld, Simpsons being others, in my opinion). She starred in one stupid, stupid mountain-climbing movie with Sylvester Stallone (Cliffhanger? I just remember John Lithgow being good and psychotic as the villian) and then she pretty much disappeared. She had a baby and dropped out of Hollywood at some point and now appears in eye-wetting commercials. When The Muse showed me a Web site that had pretty much incovertible photographic evidence that Ms. Turner had had some facial work done, I was pretty horrified.

Dana Delany -- How she never got really big, I will never know. She was really good on a really good late '80s show China Beach (with Marg Helgenberger of CSI fame), but she never seemed to get any decent movie parts or even TV leads. She was in Exit to Eden, a bad movie starring Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd in which they played cops of some kind investigating some sort of scam on like a pleasure island that Ms. Delany ran as the dominatrix. I watched about an hour of this a couple of months ago and, as always, Ms. Delany was good, but, God was this movie bad.

Elizabeth Shue -- Liked her when I saw Karate Kid, then she seemed to do nothing for a while, I knew she did Adventures in Babysitting, but I haven't ever managed the willpower to see that. Then she disappeared for more years while her brother Andrew got big as the marble-mouthed guy on Melrose Place. Then she reappeared and got nominated for an Oscar in Leaving Las Vegas. Somehow I never managed to work up the willpower to see that one either. The idea of watching Nicholas Cage drink himself to death seemed pretty depressing. So I think that the only thing that I have ever actually seen her in other than Karate Kid was about an hour of this Kevin Bacon vehicle Hollow Man. Pretty bad, but she was good. When will she get the starmaker she deserves?

Paula Marshall -- I have always liked her, despite the fact that she has never been a single successful TV show despite many attempts. (I believe that she basically acknowledges that she is the Queen of Failed TV Shows.) She did a show with Jason Bateman that was kind of funny (Chicago Sons, I think). She did a show (Cupid) with Jeremy Piven, who is now hot because of Entourage ("Let's hug it out, b---h!") and The Muse's current favorite. I noticed that she's on a new show this year, but it's gotten terrible reviews. Such an undeserved fate.

Elizabeth Perkins -- She was great in Big. That was a pretty tough role, being able to convincingly play someone who was into someone who behaved like a 13-year-old without making it be yucky. She hasn't been in much, or at least much that I have seen, since because she was taking care of her kids. I was almost interested in seeing in Moonlight & Valentino because of her, even though the guy in the movie was Jon Bon Jovi. (Didn't actually see it though and saved some self-respect.) She was in Dogs & Cats, playing the soccer mom wife of Jeff Goldblum and the mother of the kid whose secret-talking dog is the hero of the movie who defeats the meglomanical cat voiced by Sean Hayes from Will & Grace. (Don't ask.) I spent the whole movie thinking, "Oh my god is this a travesty." Now she apparently is on a pretty good Showtime show called Weeds in which she gets to chew a whole lot of scenery. It almost makes me want to spend the $10 a month to get Showtime. But that's what DVD's are made for.

Early Helen Hunt -- Now, I know what you're saying, how can she not have had the career that she deserved? She has an Oscar and 14 Emmys, for God's sake! Aw, yes, but this is the later Helen Hunt, who wears bizarre burlap-sack-like dresses with charcoal eyeliner to the Oscars and is way too thin. I'm talking about the Helen Hunt before Mad About You and during the first couple years of that show. She was basically my First Actress Who Should Have Had A Better Career. She did a lot of nondescript TV movies and a very good indie movie with Eric Stoltz and Wesley Snipes called The Waterdance. And she did the first couple of years of Mad About You. That show came on in my first year of law school, I think. I remember, after my law school graduation, when four or five of my (male) friends and I were sitting in some really boring bar prep class and someone suggested that we come up with our lists of our favorite actresses. Four of the five guys had Helen Hunt on their lists. The one woman in our group took it as a sign that we weren't total morons. It was an eye-opening moment. I thought it was my own weird thing, but, no, Ms. Hunt had a powerful effect.

But then Mad About You hung around about five years too long and curdled like unrefrigerated milk. Paul Reiser kept writing dumb storylines. Jamie (Ms. Hunt) and Paul had "problems." They decided to have a baby and behaved like no one had ever had a baby before. The final straw for me was the show where they were trying to get the baby to sleep through the night, so they were letting herself cry herself to sleep. As I recall, the whole show consisted of the two of them sitting outside of the baby's room while she cried, agonizing about whether to go in and pick her up. Awwww! It was awwwful!

After that, Ms. Hunt lost a bunch of weight she didn't need to lose, started winning Emmys that she didn't deserve (after Candace Bergen had won the Emmys that Ms. Hunt did deserve) and doing movies where she slept with Jack Nicholson, who was, say, 40 years older than her and playing the love interest of Woody Allen, who was, say, 50 years older than her.

So Early Helen Hunt is on my list, Later Helen Hunt not so much. Maybe she'll get her mojo back at some point. We can always hope.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Another Goofy Comedy

Listening to the radio yesterday, I realized that I had missed one of the really good Goofy Comedies. I was listening to the KNBR drivetime show and Tom Tolbert was on alone, which means the show was goofier (and probably better) than when Ralph Barberie is there, too. Anyway, they got going on a jag about Major League, the baseball movie. They had all of these callers calling in about Serrano, the big guy who was into some religion that centered on the god Jobu and said stuff like, "Hats for bats, keep bats warm, gracias."

Major League was a very good Goofy Movie. I'll give a Movie+.

When it came out, the Indians hadn't moved to Jacobs Field yet and they were bad, really bad, year after year. They got a little hope when Joe Charbonneau was AL Rookie of the Year in about 1980 (he opened beer bottles with his eye socket!), but he flamed out. Len Barker threw a perfect game for them in 1981 (against Toronto, I think), but he didn't come to much either. I don't think that they had had a winning season in at least 10 years. They were so desperate that in about 1974, they had 10 cent beer night and ended up forfeiting the game because the fans got so drunk by the ninth inning that they were running around on the field, some of them naked and attacking the players. The Muse and I saw a little piece about this on HBO recently and it was freakin' hilarious.

Major League got that vibe and then juiced it with the idea of an owner who wanted the Indians to lose. (So she could move them to Miami, which turned into a bitter coincidence in 1997, when the Florida Marlins beat the Indians in Miami in Game 7 of the World Series after the Indians had been within two outs of their first ring since 1948. I don't know that I have ever rooted harder FOR a baseball team other than the Dodgers than I did for the Indians during the playoffs and World Series that year. I have rooted very hard AGAINST many teams (e.g., the Braves many times, the Yankees damn near every year, really enjoyed last year when they totally choked), but rarely FOR a team other than the Dodgers as hard as for the Indians in 1997. Bugs me greatly that the Marlins, who have only been around since 1993 and whose fans only support them when they win, have won two World Series while teams like the Indians and Cubs haven't won in forever.) There's just all kinds of good, goofy stuff in the movie. Some examples:

"Juuuust a bit outside." "One hit, we got one goddamn hit?!? You can't say that on the radio. Aw, who cares, no one's listening anyway." "Too high, it's too high. What you mean it's too high? I don't know, it just looked like it was too high." "What league were you in last year? California Penal." Spoken by an Asian groundskeeper with subtitles: "Who are these f----n guys?" "Jesus, I like him very much, but he doesn't help me hit a curveball. Are you saying Jesus can't hit a curveball?!?" "I don't know Rexy, I don't think that one has the distance." "Wanna trade? Nah, I'm not into Song of Hiawatha." And, of course, in what I believe what The Muse's favorite moment, the manager peeing on Corbin Bernsen's contract.

The thing that kept Major League out of the pantheon of truly great Goofy Movies -- again, the Holy Trilogy is Animal House, Airplane! and There's Something About Mary -- is that the filmmakers' resolve, their commitment to truly over-the-top Goofiness, failed. There's that whole bad storyline about Tom Berenger and Rene Russo. (Rene Russo's performance may be the first known example of what has come to be known as the Liv Tyler Law of Diminishing Returns, namely that, with certain actresses in certain movies, your interest wanes in direct proportion to the amount of time that they are on screen, as with Ms. Tyler in the Lord of the Rings movies. I have consciously avoided Chris O'Donnell, but I bet the Law applies to him too, so it isn't gender-specific.) And, perhaps most egregiously, with Tom Berenger doing the Babe Ruth thing and calling a shot at the end in a supposed one-game playoff against the Yankees. NO ONE WOULD EVER, EVER DO THAT. EVER. No self-respecting city league softball player would ever to do that. Any professional baseball player ever pulled something like that, he might be attacked by his own teammates. If Babe Ruth did it (there is much dispute), it's because he was Babe Ruth and was the one guy who could do stuff like that.

So that's Major League. Watch it, know it. Soak up its goofiness with a beer (except you, Intenseus and Guitar Guy).

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Useless Technology

It is a total cliche that "new and improved" things are always new, but often not improved. It's New Coke Syndrome. I don't what that stuff was, but it wasn't Coke and it stunk. (Of course, there is the whole theory that New Coke was a corporate conspiracy to get lots of free publicity. If that is what they intended to do, hats off to them.) This "new and improved" stuff can be pretty irritating. As I'm sure you know, computer software gets updated constantly. Now many attorneys -- like me -- use their word processing software probably 1/2 the time every day, so we get to know and love particular versions of that software. We get to know what keystrokes work for the functions we use all the time. We get to know exactly what to click to make stuff work. Do the software companies ever consider this when they update their software? Hell, no. Everything changes in each new version, so you have to relearn the software. (I, in particular, am a major devotee of WordPerfect. The legal profession seems to be the only sector of the world that has resisted the Borg-like advance of Microsoft Word. It therefore drives me nuts that when Corel makes changes to WordPerfect that force us to relearn stuff. What better way to drive people to the Dark Side? I know one attorney who still almost weeps at the loss of WordPerfect 6.)

Useless technology pops up all over.

Don't get me wrong, I really like a lot of technology-related stuff. Don't know what I'd do without the Internet. For example, late West Coast baseball games end late enough so that their results often don't make the next day's paper. Before SportsCenter, if you didn't catch the late news, you sometimes didn't know how a game turned out until two days later. Now, with the Internet, you can follow every pitch of every game as it's happening. Plus you can Google anything and get good search results pretty much effortlessly.

But I have had some useless technology in my life lately and it's kind of irritating.

Specifically, because my car is in the body shop after The Thump, I have a rental. My insurance company covers the cost of the rental. Needless to say, they pay for a cheap rental. The rental, though, has little extras. It has the one-push all-the-way-down power windows. It has the stereo controls that are attached to the steering wheel.

And it has a stereo that adjusts the volume up or down depending on how fast you're going.

This adjusting volume thing is really irritating because it isn't really sensitive enough. When you're at a light, the volume gets really low and you have to bump the volume up. You leave it alone and, when you get to the freeway and start going 75, excuse me, 65, now it's blasting your ears and you need to bump down a whole bunch. It's really great when you're in stop-and-go traffic and it's adjusting itself up and down every 30 seconds.

Why, why, is this necessary? Why did Ford think this was a good thing? I have never really had a problem regulating the stereo volume. You pretty much set it where you like it and go. Different CD's or different radio stations have different volumes, so you adjust it. I never noticed that I needed to adjust it depending on how fast I was going. Actually, I don't think that I need to do that at all. It's useless, pointless technology

You know some serious money went into the technology that is necessary to make the automatic stereo volume adjuster work. There has to be some software that conveys how fast the car is going to the stereo. There has to be some software that decides the relationship between the car speed and the stereo volume. Someone had to do some work to make this work. Let's take that money and send some more Kevlar vests to the soldiers in Iraq.

And yet it's useless and irritating. Hopefully, it at least was standard equipment on the car so that no one had to pay extra money for it.

Friday, September 16, 2005

A Little Karma

I'm not particularly religious, not too religious at all actually. However, like a lot of other Gen X'ers, I think, I do believe in karma, that you should treat others as you would like to be treated, whatever package you want to put that in. My aunt The Spunky Nurse told me one time that she believes strongly that what goes around, comes around, and I guess I believe that as well. This kind of stuff goes back at least as far as the Greeks. Agamemnon got his after agreeing to sacrifice his daughter to get favorable winds to get the Greek fleet out to Troy, and then ignoring Cassandra, when his wife Clytemnestra did him in as soon as he got back from Troy. That's some serious karma for you.

I'll give you a really minor example of karma. Last week, before one of my team's softball games, I was talking to The Muse about how my most basic goal in playing softball is to not strike out. I mean, in slow-pitch softball, I feel like I should be able to hit the damn ball, even if it just rolls out to the pitcher. Then I said the magic words: "and I haven't struck out yet." So that night, we're getting killed, but, in the last inning, we get a couple of hits and a couple of walks and the bases are loaded when I come up. I had two hits in the game and was feeling a little cocky. Man, I was going to get a hit and at least two RBI's. So I get one strike, which is no big deal, just didn't like the pitch. So I've got one strike left (to speed up the games, you start every at-bat with one ball and one strike). The next pitch comes in, it looks good, I try to swing for the 25-run home run that we need to win the game and just miss it by a mile, I think. So, there you go, there's my first strikeout, the same damn night that I was talking about how I had never struck out before. You just don't tempt the fates like that.

There have been two much more prominent examples of karma lately.

Rafael Palmeiro, of course, is one. I believe that this guy started racking up some karma debt a few years ago when he was doing advertising for Viagra and presumably making serious bucks doing so, but somehow got it out in public (at least as I recall) that he didn't really need the stuff. Anyway, that was just a prelude to wagging his finger at Congress and telling them that he had never done steroids. Well, he did them somehow, knowingly or unknowingly, 'cause he got caught. Now it looks like his career, and probably his chances at the Hall of Fame, are cooked.

It is important in karmic terms to compare Mr. Palmeiro's performance to that of Mark McGuire. Mr. McGuire was roundly ridiculed when he kept answering questions about whether he had done steroids by saying that he didn't want to talk about the past. Was that lame? No doubt. What it wasn't, though, was a big display of chutzpah and hubris like wagging his finger at Congress and saying he never took them. McGuire didn't dig himself a karma hole.

The other big display of karma lately has been in relation to our president. I'm not saying that he personally has done a good job or a bad job with Katrina. Here's what I'm saying. In the 2000 campaign, his campaign made a big deal about how, during the first presidential debate, Al Gore said that he had gone to Texas with the FEMA director after some disaster when he actually hadn't. This was said to be an example of Gore stretching the truth in a manner similar to him saying that he had invented the Internet. (Remember the great Snickers commercial that year with the elephant saying "These are my dad's pants" and the donkey saying "I invented pants"?) This episode ended up hurting Gore pretty significantly. So Bush gets elected, does what he does and then Katrina comes along. What federal agency completely and totally screws up and makes Bush look worse than just about anything else in his presidency (I think this point is pretty well undisputed)? FEMA, of course.

To paraphrase the Doors, there's some mojo rising there.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Ridiculous Spikes of Self-Esteem

Do you ever get a self-esteem boost off of something you know is totally ridiculous? My classic example is the time that I was walking down to get a sandwich for lunch and a homeless guy asked me for money. I gave him my minimal headshake of recognition, to which he responded, "Cool old school Ray-Bans, though." OK, first, why should I get a kick out of getting complimented about my sunglasses? They're a consumer product after all, even if they are cool. Second, this is a homeless guy talking. I'm sure he was nice guy, but he wasn't any particular style guru, that's for sure. Nonetheless, I got a kick out of it. Gave the guy a dollar on my way back from getting lunch.

I had two of these ridiculous spikes of self-esteem this week.

First, on Monday, I had to go out of town on business. It was close enough to drive, so I did, in El Machino (on the day before it went into the shop to get the after-effects of The Big Thump fixed). My route between the location of my work engagement and the freeway took me past the high school in that town. I happened to leave my engagement at about 3 p.m., so I was driving past the high school right when it let out. So I'm driving El Machino (a small, red sports car) past the high school right when hordes of teenage boys are walking down the street. I swear to God, every last one of them stopped to look at the car. This felt good. It also felt ridiculous. Again, we're talking about a consumer product, not anything that I did personally, though I have wanted a sports car since I was rather young, maybe since I watched my first Indy 500 in 1979, when Rick Mears of Bakersfield won for the first time. (In those days, Indy car racing was way more popular than NASCAR. Nonetheless, for some reason that escapes me, the race was not broadcast on TV live. Instead, it was tape-delayed and shown beginning at like 9 p.m., so I would have to stay up late to watch it. I thought it was pretty cool, maybe mostly because I was getting to stay up late. Used to build Indy cars with my Lego's.)

Second, our softball team actually won a game. We have been a team for about two years, have played around 30 games or so and have now won three. Despite our record, we're not terrible (we tell ourselves). During the summer league, we didn't win any games, but five of our seven losses were by a total of seven runs. That sucked. Last night, we played our archrivals, a team from a local Asian food market. We play just death match games against these guys. The first time we played, we had them down by eight runs in the last inning and they then proceeded to score ten. The second time we played them, we had about a ten-run lead and they came roaring back, but we won, getting the last out with their tying run on second and their winning run on first. The third time we played them, they had a two-run lead going into the last inning and we loaded the bases, but couldn't score. Last night, we had a real seesaw game that we ended up winning by two when we scored four runs in the bottom of the last inning.

Man, that felt good. Plus, I got two hits (in four at-bats), including one hard line drive over the shortstop. One of my outs was a fly ball that I think was about as deep a ball as I have ever hit. Plus, I finally got back to playing in the field after the big ankle sprain, which was about seven weeks ago. So this was a very good experience.

My question, though, is why does stuff like teenagers liking your car and winning a meaningless city league softball game give you a jolt of self-esteem? The Muse has these same kinds of experiences (e.g., a neighborhood teenager telling her she has a cool book collection) and can't figure it out either. I mean, we have two great kids, a house, a stinky little dog who loves us (or at least The Muse) and many of the other basic things that make for decent adulthood, but we both get these involuntary kicks out of 15-year-olds' reactions to things we do or have. City league softball, my friends and I play for fun of course, but, man, we were all pretty damn happy to win (and we hadn't even had any beer!). Why do these little things give us a boost? Is it because they're frills and not necessary to day-to-day existence, so, when they're good, they're extra good? (Like having really low expectations for a movie, but having it be quite good? This was my experience with Elf.)

Help me out here. Tell me I'm not crazy. Tell me that at least some of you with unwebbed toes have this same experience.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Riding Giants

Never surfed in my life. We used to go to the beach, the same beach, several times a year and there would always be at least a few surfers. None of them ever impressed me as fabulous surfers and it always looked a little futile, trying to get up on a wave, falling at least half the time, riding it for about 5 seconds, then falling down. There were always guys changing in and out of wetsuits out on the street. It looked kind of uncivilized. Plus I never got to know any surfers. I think this related to me being an indoor kid and, maybe, to needing to wear corrective lenses from the age of 11. I preferred watching the Dodgers on cable TV (we didn't get cable or Dodgers games at home) and reading magazines with the sliding door open to the ocean air. My sister The Force of Nature was an outdoor kid and, while I don't think she ever surfed, she got to know guys at the surf shop anyway. I appreciated the athletic aspect of surfing from watching surfing competitions on Wide World of Sports (4:30-6 Saturdays when I was a kid, from April to November, it was the capper of Saturdays that began with watching cartoons, the last of which was what I remember now as 2 hours of Looney Tunes, followed by either NBC's baseball Game of the Week or whatever college football game ABC was showing, there then would be like an hour break before Wide World of Sports, sometimes I watched bowling to pass the time. Man, that Earl Anthony was a hell of a bowler! Yes, I was pretty geeky as a kid.)

As I have gotten older, I've come to appreciate outdoor stuff and stuff that used to seem pointless like surfing more. Surfing in particular really intrigues me. You get to be out on the beach, apparently there's a serious rush from riding a wave. That sounds good. Plus the whole disconnected from the "real world" thing is appealing. It was probably nothing that I was ever going to do. Somehow my brain got wired to care a lot about stuff like grades early on and that has worked out pretty well, so I'll probably be giving The Muse material for giving me a bad time about external validation for a long time.

Now, though, I can see the appeal of hanging out at the beach and surfing much more than I could when I was a kid. So I've started reading some surfing stuff (the book Caught Inside is pretty good). Most relevant to this post, I decided that I needed to see Riding Giants when it was in theaters. I just watched it again on DVD. I may buy it. Film minus.

I knew a little bit about big wave riding from reading the SF Chronicle over the years and reading about when the big waves (like 25-40 feet high) start breaking at Mavericks, a surf break off the coast near Half Moon Bay. In particular, when I was in law school, one of my friends was a surfer (and he loved tax law, which struck me as a strange combination, partly because, to me, anyone who likes tax law has to be a little strange). In early 1994, a storm out in the Pacific caused Mavericks to start breaking and there was a big surf competition. One of the big stars, Mark Few, drowned during the competition. It was very big news, I think it was on the Chronicle's front page. My friend explained just how this could happen with those big waves. Mavericks has stayed fresh in my mind because there are pictures of it in the burrito place where I go way too often for lunch, along with a story about a 16-year-old kid who was surfing in the 1994 competition, tried to catch a 40-foot wave, wiped out spectacularly and lived to tell the tale.

Anyway, Riding Giants is about big wave riding's evolution, beginning essentially in the mid-50's when a bunch of Californians going over to Hawaii to live on Oahu and surf. They eventually moved over to Oahu's North Shore, which is the much less developed side of the island and the nirvana of big wave surfing.

If nothing else, the movie has just spectacular imagery. The waves that these guys ride are just unbelievable. In particular, the story of how these guys decided to try to ride waves at Waimea, which had the biggest waves on the North Shore and was considered unrideable for a long time, is really good. One of the movie's real strengths is that the guys who did these things -- particularly, Roger Noll -- tell the stories in their own words. They were seriously crazy, with Noll paddling out into huge 50-foot-type surf in the middle of basically a hurricane in 1969 (I think) to ride the biggest waves anyone had ever seen.

The movie also has a very good passage about Mavericks, which was discovered by a surfer Jeff Clark in the mid-70s. He rode out there alone for 15 years. Once he convinced some friends to go ride it too, its reputation took off. The movie describes how you have to paddle out about a 1/2-mile offshore to get to break and, once you catch the wave, you might end up in a bunch of rocks just offshore. This is with Northern California's mid-50-degree ocean water, too. (As The Muse's mom says, "They should really do something about that.") The guys who go out there are seriously committed, or should be. The movie describes how the 1994 Mavericks competition was a real watershed event, when the Hawaiian big-wave riders first came to California and validated their big waves and how horrible it was when Mark Few died.

Finally, the movie talks about how they are now able to ride even bigger waves even further offshore by having the surfer pulled into the wave on a towrope behind a jetski. The waves that they ride this way are even more unbelievable. The filmmakers developed this new technique for displaying stills in 3D that really gives you a flavor for how big the waves are. (It's a little like what Ken Burns did with stills in The Civil War series, except those were presented as flat. The ones in Riding Giants look like someone had a small camera inside a kid's pop-up book and pulled it out slowly.)

The movie isn't perfect. It suffers from Telling Disease in places. Telling Disease is where a story, a movie, whatever, tells you how special, wonderful, horrible, extreme, etc., something is without giving you the objective evidence or details to make you believe it. The Muse has always told me that this is a major flaw of a lot of writing. ESPN's SportsCentury series, while being something I like a lot, frequently suffers from this disease. For example, in a show about Kirk Gibson's home run, one of ESPN's baseball geeks talks about how "Eck just threw Gibson a slider because he just wanted to do something different [after Gibson fouled off eight fastballs]. Really? Dennis Eckersley said you, baseball geek, can call him Eck and that he got bored throwing fastballs. How about if Eck tells us that himself? The most egregious offender in Riding Giants is the editor of, I think, Surfer Magazine, who pops up every 10 minutes or so to tell us things like "It was just so historic what those guys did going over to the North Shore, it was a really special time in history" and "That wave that Laird [Hamilton, apparently the king of tow-in surfing] caught may have been the most important ride in the history of surfing." OOOO-KKKK.

Overall, though, the movie rocks. It's just hard to wrap your mind around those guys riding the waves that they are showing on the screen. I think I'm going to have to buy on DVD so I can watch it every couple of months. Once I get that LASIK, maybe, I'll try surfing, although on really small waves and hopefully in nice, warm water.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Goofy Comedies

Goofy comedies are one of the truly great movie genres. You just don't see really goofy humor in other entertainment media much.

I can only really think of one TV show that has pulled off goofy humor very well consistently and the Simpsons is pretty brilliant, an American classic, so that shows how tough it is on TV. (Seinfeld could be pretty goofy, but, to me at least, the brilliance of that show was in how all these loose ends would get started and get tied back together in one episode, not that the humor was goofy, although the time that George ran out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles yelling "Vandeley Industries!" was awfully goofy.)

Music isn't goofy very often. Weird Al Yankovic, of course, but how many geniuses like that are there? Barenaked Ladies' first song was good and goofy (Hot like wasabi when I bust rhymes/I'm like Leann Rhimes 'cause I'm all about value . . . Like Harrison Ford, I'm feeling frantic/Like Sting, I'm tantric/Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy . . . Like Kirosawa, I make mad films/OK, I don't make films/But, if I did, they'd have a samurai), but the rest of their songs, while decent, haven't been good and goofy. So it's really movies that can pull off goofy. I guess it's just easier to put together two goofy hours one time than to put together little bits of silly for years.

Books seems to have a hard time being really goofy. I may not be looking hard enough, but I don't think that I have ever read a really good goofy book. I read an attempt at such a book in the last several months, Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalpyse, and it was OK, but I found large swathes of it to be kind of irritating. It may be that, to be really good, a goofy story needs a visual component. Maybe it is difficult to get past your natural disbelief of the incredible unless you are seeing actual people (or representations of people in the Simpsons' case) doing things that you otherwise wouldn't believe.

And The Muse and I have seen two good and goofy movies lately, specifically The 40-Year Virgin and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Neither of them quite match up to the holy trilogy of Goofy Movies -- Animal House, Airplane! and There's Something About Mary -- although The 40-Year Virgin comes awfully close. (It had just a little too much sappy stuff to get to the very top rank, at least to me.)

The crucial thing about making a goofy movie is the commitment. To make a good one, the people involved have to be willing to commit that the characters are doing to do crazy, stupid things and the actors have to commit to behaving like the stuff they're doing is totally reasonable. No winking at the audience is allowed. This is why Ben Stiller is great for these types of movies. The man commits. The script calls for him to get parts stuck in a zipper? He shows you the pain. The script calls for him to howl like a kid who got exactly what he wanted on Christmas and then had it taken away? He'll howl. Will Ferrell similarly commits (see Zoolander and Elf), but I haven't seen him in a really great goofy comedy yet. Old School didn't cut it. The story about saving the house and the pathos of whichever Wilson brother was in that one kind of screwed up the goofiness. (I haven't seen Anchorman, but the previews with Ferrell yelling "Let's make a baby" aren't encouraging.)

Paradoxically, it's goofy movies' commitment that seem to cause critics and others to not give them enough credit. Yes, there are jokes involving disabled people in There's Something About Mary, but they aren't making fun of the disabled people. Instead, they're tools to show how idiotic and ridiculous the character Matt Dillon (speaking of commitment to the part) is. Yes, a lot of the humor in The 40-Year Virgin is real crude, but that could happen if a 40-year virgin's younger, kind of dumb guy friends decided that they had to help him out. (Now I can't believe anyone would behave like the characters did at the end, but, hey, they commited to that dancing and it was seriously funny.) Harold and Kumar is really a goofy fable about living your life and those guys committed to showing you what that meant for those guys. There's a certain resistance to appreciating a movie's ability to go to the extreme of goofiness, but that is what takes to make a great goofy movie.

Go see a good goofy movie. It will take your mind what's bugging you and make you laugh a lot.

Just as an aside, here are the grades that I'd give some goofy movies:

Animal House -- Film. Pretty much genius, starting no later than when Belushi smashes the folk singer's guitar and then sheepishly says "Sorry." Could've done without the storyline about Karen Allen and her boyfriend who no one ever heard from again.

Airplane! -- Film. If nothing else, Mrs. Cleaver's interpreting jive talking put it in the stratosphere of funny. One of the greatest moviegoing experiences of my life involved going to a double feature at the Kings County drive-in where we saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and Airplane! back to back. That was sweeeet when I was 11. For good or ill, Airplane! may have affected my sense of humor generally and certainly presaged my taste for Weird Al Yankovic.

There's Something About Mary -- Film, close to a Film Plus. There is so much great stuff in this movie. Beans and franks. Both scenes with the dog, the one where Matt Dillon gives the dog an electric shock and the one where the dog flies out the window. Matt Dillon's teeth. The scene where Ben Stiller confronts Matt Dillon in his apartment. The scene where Ben Stiller is walking down the street howling. Ben Stiller can't pronounce Brett Favre's name. Even the sappier stuff is good. In a pretty extraordinary step for the movies, they used an actual disabled actor to play Mary's brother. The little bit at the end where Ben Stiller lifts his ear muff to talk to him and nothing happens is very effective. My only complaint is that I could have done without Chris Elliot's dermatological problems. It is a mark of this movie's brilliance that it was able to make Chris Elliot worth watching at all.

The 40-Year Virgin -- Film minus. Really good stuff.

The Jerk -- Film minus. Hilarious stuff like "I was born the son of a poor black sharecropper" and "It's the cans! He hates cans!" I realize that the story wasn't the point, but, still, it was really dumb. I have a friend who claims that this movie is the source of all modern movie humor.

Caddyshack -- Film minus. Some truly classic stuff, especially from Bill Murray. I heard the part that he adlibbed about winning the Masters on the radio the other day -- "This Cinderella story about to win the Masters, former greenskeeper, the shot's up, oh my God, it's in the hole! It's in the hole!" -- and still laughed out loud. Plus, this movie gave us the eternal chant for someone to choke, "Noonan! Nooo-nan!" But, man, there's way too much Chevy Chase acting snarky.

Elf -- Movie plus. The stuff about being an elf is really good, especially any portion of it that involves Bob Newhart. The family stuff is actually done pretty well, but it's a drag on the goofiness.

Fletch -- Movie plus. Yeah, I know, I just ripped on Caddyshack for having too much Chevy Chase and this movie is all Chevy Chase, but it's really funny and Chevy Chase commits to all of those goofy costumes and pseudonyms. The key here is that he doesn't act like a smart ass jerk the whole movie. Plus it has Dana Nicholson, who I thought was something when I first saw this movie in 1985 or so.

Harold and Kumar -- Movie plus. Very funny, if you're not bothered by drug humor. Neil Patrick Harris continues his good work in playing off of his Doogie Howser persona. It had a strange mix of reality and unreality, though, that didn't exactly work sometimes. It also played on the Studious Asian and Studious Indian stereotypes too much for my tastes.

Old School -- Movie. Like I said, too much stuff about saving the house and the Wilson brother finding himself and Frank the Tank's relationship problems, blah, blah. Vince Vaughn was really funny, though.

Top Secret -- Movie. The Airplane! model not done that well.

Hot Shots -- Movie Minus. Again, the Airplane! model not done very well. The thing that I remember most about this movie is that I saw it with my roommates at the time and one of them, Allen, had seen Charlie Sheen in what he said was this terrible movie with Clint Eastwood called The Rookie and he kept talking about how there was a scene where Charlie Sheen got shot and the other cops were taunting him, saying "The rooookie! Got shot in the back!" It was funny and spared me from ever considering renting The Rookie.

Finally, before you ask, no, I haven't seen Wedding Crashers.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Crosswalk Update

I saw another wonderful example of bad driving behavior associated with crosswalks today. I was standing at the crosswalk nearest my office that crosses the busy street. There was a woman waiting there next to me. No one was stopping. While they weren't stopping, the woman stepped out a little to look around a parked car. As she was doing this, a man pulled his car up in the right lane. He wanted to make a right turn, so he honked his horn at the woman so she would get out of the way. Let's get this straight: the guy in the car honked at the pedestrian so she would get out of the way! If it hadn't been for Mr. Convertible Jag the other night, I'd say Mr. Hornhonker was just about the rudest driver I've ever seen.

Assembling California

Feeling an earthquake may be the most California thing. There really aren't that many things that, say, Lemoore and Venice Beach have in common. Or, say, Blythe and Berkeley. People who have moved to California from other states have told me that there are ways to identify Californians. A college professor from Louisiana told me that native Californians are the only people who say "you guys" in referring to groups of mixed genders. (I was once at a meeting on the Central Coast with a bunch of other attorneys. The host kept referring to the gathering as "you all" until, at about 2 p.m., someone said, "Why are you talking like a Texan today?" The host sheepishly said, "My wife is trying to get me to stop saying 'you guys,' she says it's sexist.") An attorney from Minnesota told me that you can tell a native Californian because they always put their sunglasses on as soon as they walk outside. These things do seem pretty universal to Californians, but I'm guessing that earthquakes are more Californian. That is certainly how people from the rest of country think of California.

People who move to California seem to want to feel an earthquake or at least they feel like they've really done something if they have felt one.

There was a guy on my city league softball team who was finishing his post-doc at UCD. He's a Chicago guy originally, I think. He had been here for 7 years, 6 working on his Ph.D. and 1 on a post-doc. (He's a recovering attorney, so the man has attended a lot of school.) Before his last game with our team (he moved back East to write LSAT questions), the rest of us on the team were asking him about moving out of here. I asked him if he had felt an earthquake while he was here. He said, in a kind of sad voice, "No and I'm kind of bummed about it."

On the other hand, The Muse and I have some friends who moved to the Bay Area from Texas. They only ended up staying about a year, but, during that year, The Muse and I were up late one Friday night and felt an earthquake that felt small to us. It turned out to be about a 5.5 with a Napa epicenter. The Muse and I were wondering if our Texas friends felt it. The Muse looked at her e-mail early the next morning and the subject of The Muse's friend's e-mail was "EARTHQUAKE!!!"

So feeling an earthquake is a definite California thing. It can be really frightening and plants itself in the back of your mind. My law school was located about half a block from a major fault. Every time I went down to the lowest level of the library stacks (for some reason, all of the land use, water and environmental law books that I wanted were on the bottom floor), I always thought, man, I hope I'm not down here if that fault goes. Smaller earthquakes, though, are just an interesting experience and maybe just the smallest bit entertaining.

So, during my most recent used-book-buy-a-thon, I picked up a book called Assembling California by John McPhee. The book describes how California was created through plate tectonic motion. The main geologist who guides the author around California (and other places like Cyprus) also is a UCD professor who lives here in Carmel-by-the-Causeway, so that's cool. According to this professor, California basically was created by various pieces of other plates crashing into the North American plate over the course of hundreds of millions of years. As described, there isn't just the San Andreas, the one big fault everyone thinks of (the one that Fred Sanford used to talk about when started yelling to Lamont about the "big one"). There aren't just the smaller, but still big, faults are located near the San Andreas, the ones like the Hayward and the Calaveras. There aren't just the ones along the San Andreas that no one knows about until they go off, like the one that set off the Coalinga quake in 1983 (the biggest one that I personally have felt) and the San Simeon quake a couple of years ago.

Because California was created by lots of tectonic detritus smashing together, there are literally faults everywhere in California. There's a big fault on the east side of the Sierra apparently. There are some serious faults in the Gold Country that run under places like where Auburn Dam was supposed to be built. So most Californians feel an earthquake at some point because most Californians live near a fault of one kind or another. This was an eye-opener to me. Apparently, there are even little faults buried under the Central Valley, which I always thought didn't have any.

The reason that there are faults under the Central Valley, or the Sacramento Valley at least, is that a big piece of tectonic plate called the Smartville Block about 100 miles square that crashed into the North American plate with the center of its eastern edge someplace in Yuba County. Apparently, this thing smashed into the North American plate and the eastern edge started getting tilted up by molten magma rising up to form the Sierras. The western edge is tipped down below the Central Valley

This collison not only caused some faults under the Central Valley, but also is the reason that there is gold in California. Apparently, when the Smartville Block hit the North American plate, water got down into the fissures and, way down below the surface with heat applied, the water caused chemical reactions that formed gold. When the molten magma pushed up the Smartville Block, it pushed the gold up and it eventually reached the surface through millions of years of erosion. The magma also pushed up the beds of ancient rivers that ran where the Sierras are before the Sierras were formed. These things had gold all over them and were where the miners were getting at with the hydraulic mining hoses that washed so much sediment down Sierra rivers that, for example, the Yuba River's bed shifted about a mile north and rose something like 75 feet.

The book also explains that the Coast Range is a very recent (in geologic time) addition that was formed by another plate crashing into what had been added to the North American plate at about the same time as the Smartville Block and scraped up a bunch of miscellaneous stuff into mountains. So the Sierra and the Coast Ranges are totally different geologic formations. The book also says that the Central Valley is also totally different from each of them. In fact, it was put in place before the Coast Range, so that the dirt in the Central Valley is, for the most part, totally different from either the Sierra or the Coast Range. There are alluvial fans from the Coast Ranges and the Sierras in the Valley, but they're just the top layer of a whole lot of other stuff.

There's a lot of good stuff like this in Assembling California. The book has some downsides. It's a little like Fever Pitch in that about 30%-35% of the words in the book are pretty indecipherable to people like me who don't know much about the subject. The words that you really need to get, though, are "terrane" and"ophiolite." A terrane is a big piece of tectonic plate after it crashes into another plate. An ophiolite is the margin where a geologic piece of ocean floor has crashed into a plate and then been lifted up into the open air. It sounds like it's something like a rock onion, with a whole bunch of layers (you know, like an ogre like Shrek). Now I need to go see one of these things. Luckily, they sound like they're in places that I go for work sometimes.

I've got more than a little geek in me, so that may be why I enjoyed the book a lot. If you want to read a good collection of books about California and the West (try also The King of California, Cadillac Desert, among others), then Assembling California would be a good one.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Crosswalks and The Decline of Western Civilization

When I started this thing, I had two ideas for posts: (1) that Attractiveness Constant thing I posted a while ago; and (2) a post about crosswalks. Well, it's time for the crosswalks one, it being brought on by one of the rudest and most dangerous things that I have ever seen.

There are two crosswalks that play a pretty big role in my life. One's near our house and the one's near my office. The one near our house is located at the outlet at the corner of our circle (yes, that's right, our circle has corners, really). You have to use it to cross the street to walk to the kids' school. You have to use it to get to the nearest park. You have to use it to walk to the nearest shopping center. The one near my office crosses one of the busiest streets in Sacramento. You have to cross that street to get to a bunch of the places where I like to get lunch. You have to cross that street to get to the nearest gun shop, the nearest bridal salon, the nearest body shop and the title company where I totally went off one day when our refi lender called us and told us that we had to close the deal THAT DAY and then left us sitting in the title company office with two very bored children for an hour while they drove our closing papers all the way across metropolitan Sacramento. I managed not to use profanities, but it was one of my more psychotic moments. We used to have a lesbian bookstore and a coffin store on this street, too, but they were on our side of the street and they closed. We do still have the Hawaiian deli on our side of the street, though.

The thing that set this post off happened a couple of nights ago. The Muse and I walked down the street to the kids' school for The Mermaid's back-to-school night. It had gotten kind of dark before we started walking back. As we were walking back, a guy in an electric wheelchair came up behind us. We let him by and he said, "Don't worry, I only run over skateboarders." He is wearing a flashing red light on his chest and a solid red light on his back so that he doesn't get hit by a car. He gets down to the crosswalk near our house and starts to cross the street in the crosswalk. He gets halfway out and is waiting to cross the opposite lane. Here comes Mr. Convertible Jag in the lane that the guy in the wheelchair still needs to cross. Does Mr. Convertible Jag stop and let the guy in the wheelchair cross? HELL, NO!!! Mr. Convertible Jag just flies right on by, going at least 35 in a 25 zone. The Muse and I see this happen and start yelling at Mr. Convertible Jag, who, of course, keeps on going in his elevated tax bracket.

While particularly egregious, Mr. Convertible Jag's behavior was not unusual. I was in the crosswalk near the office the other day and had made it to the middle lane of the three-lane street. Nonetheless, this guy in a Subaru station wagon talking on a cell phone just flies on by in the last lane I needed to cross. I raise my hands up in the universal symbol for WTF and he gives me this wussy "what am I supposed to do" kind of wave. I'll tell you what you're supposed to do: YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO STOP! This sort of rudeness cuts across all political persuasions. I recently saw someone in a Toyota hybrid refuse to stop for a crosswalk. Good lord, who's next? The people with "The Goddess Is Alive And Magic Is Afoot" or "Visualize Peace" bumper stickers?

Did people used to stop at crosswalks? I imagine that they must have at some point or else they wouldn't exist. I believe that there are laws that say you are supposed to stop for them when people are waiting to cross. My impression is that the last ten years or so have seen a serious decline in the willingness of people to stop at crosswalks. People talking on cell phones while driving definitely don't stop at crosswalks. Did this start happening with the dot com people just figuring that they didn't have time to stop for regular people? Is it that people in big SUV's can't see pedestrians very well? I don't know, but it bugs me.

It isn't difficult to stop for someone who is waiting to cross in a crosswalk. You just stop and let them go. They usually give you a nice wave, sometimes even a smile. It's good for both of you. More basically, it's just common decency. You're in a car, you could kill that pedestrian if you screw up very badly. They are at your mercy, be nice. Why can't people do that? It really seems to me that people's refusal to stop for others at crosswalks reflects something bad in the culture.

What's worse is that people seem to be getting used to it. When I started noticing how infrequently people stop at crosswalks -- I can have both kids (who aren't little anymore, really, but are still noticeably kids), waiting to cross the street by our house, and ten cars will drive by without stopping -- I started trying really hard to remember to stop. Like I said, most people are very nice and smile and wave. A substantial minority now, however, look kind of irritated and just wave you by. It's like they're thinking, "What the hell, just keep going, idiot." Have we come to this? Have we come to the point where pedestrians just expect to be treated this rudely?

This is bad. This must stop. Introduce a little decency into the world and let the guy in the wheelchair with the flashing red light cross the damn street.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Shadows on TV

One of the things that bug me happened yesterday. It's obviously a very minor quibble in light of what is happening in New Orleans. (How is it possible that CNN can be showing people stuck on rooftops and highway overpasses for days? Why can't help get to places that CNN can? How is it possible that the FEMA director didn't know about people stuck at the Superdome after they had been stuck there for four days? Why wasn't there some organized way for people without cars to evacuate? It's painful to see, I can't imagine what it would be like to be there.) Nonetheless, it bugs me.

I was watching the first couple innings of the A's-Yankees game on ESPN last night. ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball game always starts at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. This obviously is done for ratings reasons, so that the game is in prime time in the East and at least ends up in prime time in the West. For as long as I have been watching televised baseball, this has been the schedule that the networks have tried to use for playoff games. ESPN just plagarized it when they started showing baseball on Sunday nights.

The inevitable result of this scheduling is that, when the game is on the West Coast, the first several innings are played at dusk, which creates The Shadows. Professional baseball games normally start at either 1 p.m. or 7 p.m. These start times create no Shadow Issues. One p.m. games start and end in daylight. Seven p.m. games start and end in darkness under the lights. Five p.m. games, however, have Shadows. Specifically, because the sun is going down during a 5 p.m. game, the stands behind the plate cast shadows on the field. For several innings, what you get is a situation where the plate is in A Shadow and the mound is in the sun. As the game progresses, The Shadow covers more of the field, so that the plate and the mound are in The Shadow, but the outfield is not. Eventually, the whole field is in darkness.

What happens during these 5 p.m. games is that the commentators inevitably blather incessantly about the effect of The Shadow on the players. Most commonly, the commentators talk about how difficult it is for the batter to pick up the ball, and the spin on the ball, when the pitcher throws in the light and the batter is in The Shadow. I mean, some of them will literally talk about this after every pitch. As the game progresses, the commentators will talk about how the outfielders have a hard time seeing the ball as the hitter hits it in The Shadow and it then flies into the sun.

Here is my problem with The Shadow Issues: THEY ARE COMPLETELY TV-CREATED. There would be no Shadow Issues if TV didn't demand that games start at a time when they can be in prime time on both the East and West Coasts. The TV commentators thus spend untoward amounts of time and energy telling us TV viewers what a bad effect TV's demands are having on the actual game. If it's so bad for the game, then stop having 5 p.m. games. If it's not so bad that the extra money that is made can justify it, then shut up about it. We don't need TV commenting on TV when what we want to do is watch baseball.

This kind of echo chamber of TV commentary happens a lot in sports and it is totally annoying every single time it happens.

When NBC still had the NBA's TV contract, the commentators often would tell us about how brilliant coaches were to sit their starters at the end of one quarter and the beginning of the next. The brilliance of this maneuver, according to the commentators, lay in the fact that the starters were able to get much more rest than the amount of game time that they missed. NBC even started running graphics comparing the actual amount of time that the starters were resting against the amount of game time that they missed. (In many games, this graphic was accompanied by a shot of Michael Jordan wiping his face with a towel and drinking Gatorade, so the implied message was something like, "Don't worry, viewers who don't really care about the game, but only want to see Michael Jordan, he won't be out of the game much longer. He just needs a little rest. See, we even have him on a clock.")

What was never explained was that the coaches knew that there would be a massive block of commercials during the quarter, so that they knew that their starters would get a whole bunch of rest while we were watching Michael Jordan shill for underwear. In fact, in all televised NBA games, there are mandatory TV timeouts at certain points in quarters. Coaches obviously know this and can plan for them to get their players extended breaks without missing a lot of game time. The commentators never mention this stuff, but instead behave like the coaches are geniuses of Einsteinian capacity.

There are other examples of this kind of BS. Because there are so many games during the first couple of rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, some of them have to start at 9 a.m. local time in order for them to be available to show on TV. Do we ever hear this from commentators? No. Are the commentators ever honest enough to say, "Well, we've dragged Southwestern Eastern Oregon here to Charlotte to get slaughtered by North Carolina in front of a North Carolina crowd and have made it harder for them by scheduling this game at 9 a.m. three time zones away from their homes?" No. What they say is, "This unusual starting time may be difficult for the players to adjust to, but at least it's the same for both teams." The PGA this year ended Monday morning because CBS and the PGA decided not to move up the Sunday tee times in order to maximize TV ratings and then got caught with their pants down when there were two weather delays. Did we hear from the CBS crew that this problem was mainly CBS's fault? Ha, ha, ha.

Don't get me wrong. I love TV sports. I also love the fact that damn near every game is on now, where, when I was a kid, there was basically one baseball game dependably on every week (NBC's Game of The Week on Saturday at about noon). It just drives me nuts, though, that we have to hear about all of the competitive issues that TV coverage causes without anyone ever fessing up that TV caused them. If they aren't bad enough to make TV stop causing them, then just stop bugging us about them.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

This Summer

As Green Day puts it, "Summer has come and passed." Monday is Labor Day, the official end of summer. (Put your white shoes away, people. No seersucker either.) The kids went back to school last Monday, so that's the end of summer around here. I don't remember exactly when school started starting in August, but I do remember that it was sometime when I was in grade school. That blew. I used to like how you would watch parts of the Jerry Lewis telethon and listen to the news talk about how the raisin growers were worried about their raisins getting rained on (did it rain every year around Labor Day when we were growing up? I don't -- I just remember hearing every damn year how the drying raisins might get rained on) and then we would go to school. I remember specifically that, the year I was starting third grade, my mom bought my sister The Force of Nature a dress for the first day of school, which was her first day of kindergarten, and then it rained and my sister couldn't wear it. Turned out rain on the first day of school was an omen for how school would go that year, but that's a different story.

This story is about The Mermaid and Enthusio. They had what seemed like a very good summer.

The Mermaid seemed to find Her Thing. (Don't even start on the phraseology.) I don't know if you ever watched the cartoon show Little Bill. Little Bill was a Cosby production that came out in the late '90s. It was about this African-American family and mostly about the baby of the family, Little Bill. It was pretty cute. It wasn't great in the sense that Chuck Jones animation is great -- Duck Season! Rabbit Season! -- but it was about 6,000 light-years better than, say, Barney. Anyway, there was a episode about how everyone has His or Her Thing and Little Bill needed to find his. Little Bill's dad's Thing was jazz (No way! In a Cosby show! People liking jazz! What a shock!). His mom had her Thing and Alice The Great (-grandmother) had her Thing. Anyway, Little Bill eventually found his.

This summer seemed to confirm that swimming is The Mermaid's Thing. The child would swim all day if you let her. She participated in a swim team for the first time and would swim for a hour every day. During my vacation, I took her to the gym pool with me when I swam laps and she had herself a practice and then, later, she went to swim practice too. When you take her to pool, she goes through what seems like her own practice. She would do a certain number of laps of freestyle, of breaststroke, of backstroke, of butterfly. She would swim over-unders. At the meets, she would swim different races everytime. She would swim freestyle and kickboards with a million other kids. She would swim butterfly with four other kids. She didn't give a fig what other kids were doing. She was just doing what made her happy.

This is really good. We've always known that she liked to swim, maybe partly because it's an immersive experience that allows her to take a break from working to process all of the stuff that we all process every day, but that comes at her so differently because of her condition. This summer, we discovered just how much she LOVED it. And that is good. She's going to keep swimming during the school year.

Enthusio made some progress socially this summer. He has what he calls "big emotions." He gets very excited and he gets very upset and, kids being kids, some kids have a tough time with that. (I take full credit for contributing these genes. I was similar and still don't really have a cool bone in my body.) He seemed to make some progress in dealing with other kids at his day camp and he has realized that he doesn't have to put himself out to be friends with everyone. So he made that progress in dealing with social situations.

And then, a small miracle happened. In early August, a new family moved in across the street, they have two little boys right about Enthusio's age (one older, one younger) and the three of them get along like three peas in a pod. As soon as Enthusio sees the boys outside, he wants out. He plays hide-and-seek with them, they ride bikes together, he goes over to their house (they have very nice parents who think this is OK). They play GameBoy together (kids born after about 1985 are going to thumb muscles unlike anyone has ever seen due to these things and text messaging). It's just great. It's kind of a new experience for me to see, having grown up on a farm and being a little anti-social and having The Mermaid as our first child. The Muse says that the way the three boys and the other kids on our block have started playing every evening is like what her cul-de-sac was like growing up. It's great for Enthusio. You can almost see a glow coming off him after he gets done playing outside with the other kids.

So summer's come and passed. It was good, although, next year, I'm not getting a massive ankle sprain in the middle of my vacation.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Being A Sports Vulture

How 'bout them A's? They really are quite a team. Billy Beane is a genius! He trades away two of the best pitchers in baseball over the winter and gets some young pitchers and some other young guys. The team looks just awful for a while, but gets it together and goes on a tear. And they're doing it with no money! And they're really young, so they'll be together for years! What a great team!

OK, those of you who know me know that I'm not really an A's fan. I'm a Dodgers fan. Most years, I bleed for them. As one of my other posts described in probably what would seem to most people to be pretty ridiculous detail, Kirk Gibson's home run in the 1998 World Series (against the A's!) has been one of the better moments in my life. I have experienced lots of ups and downs with the Dodgers. Down: Ozzie Smith's home run in the 1985 NLCS. Up: Steve Finley's division-clinching home run against the Giants on the next-to-last day of the season last year (eat that, Bobby Thomson and Joe Morgan). Down: Bill Russell twice using old, decrepit Eddie Murray as a pinch-hitter with the bases loaded and one out in crucial situations in September 1997 and Murray twice hitting into soul-sucking double plays. Up: Rick Monday's home run in the top of the 9th of Game 5 of the 1981 NLCS to win the pennant, which Mr. Fraley let us watch in class in 6th grade. Down: Trevor Wilson shutting out the Dodgers at Candlestick on the next-to-last-day of the season in 1991, allowing the Braves to clinch the division after the Dodgers had a 9-game lead at the All-Star break, a situation made even worse by the fact that Wilson was on my Rotisserie team, so I was winning money as my Dodgers died. Up: the 1981 World Series, with the Dodgers finally beating the Yankees after 1977 and 1978.

As a kid, I totally bought into the whole Dodger Way thing. Of course, Steve Garvey was a model human being who was going to be a senator some day. Of course, no other organization would have had the foresight to have Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey start playing together in the minors. Of course, no other organizaton would have found Fernando Valenzuela pitching down there in Mexico. Of course, it was time for Dusty Baker to go after 1983, when he started slowing down. It made me proud -- still does, really -- that my team was the team that brought Jackie Robinson to the majors and integrated baseball. I like that Sandy Koufax -- the greatest left-handed pitcher ever, who stuck to his principles and didn't pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series on Yom Kippur -- pitched for my team.

Of course, a lot of the Dodger Way thing was always BS. As far as I know, the Dodgers were the only team whose players fessed up to snorting coke during games. Like almost all teams, the Dodgers have done a lot of stupid things in signing free agents (Dave Goltz, Don Stanhouse, Kevin Brown, Darryl Strawberry, Eric Davis, etc., etc. -- but see Kirk Gibson). The brain chemistry imprinted on me in my youth, however, remains and the Dodgers are my team.

That being said, the Dodgers stink this year. They had put together a pretty good and very entertaining team beginning in about 2002 that eventually won the division last year. It kind of started to look like their teams from the '80s. There were some home-grown guys (Adrian Beltre, Paul LoDuca). There were some guys that they got in trades (Cesar Izturis, Odalis Perez). There was a decent free agent (Shawn Green). And, of course, there was the guy that the Dodgers figured out how to use properly, Eric Gagne, and who kicked butt ('til he got hurt). And then, they tore it down, trying to get better with free agents. The result of all of this and some injuries is that the Dodgers this year not only stink, but are unrecognizable, so I haven't been into them all year. (I mean, they stunk in 1993, but that was Mike Piazza's rookie year and they knocked the Giants out of the playoffs. You have to have something to work from.) Maybe next year.

This unfortunate turn of events has turned me into a Sports Vulture. Basically, the A's jelled and got good with a young hustling team, so I'm following them, rooting for them. There's no special attachment there. It's just fun. Go A's!

The problem with this is that it is Unethical Sports Fan Behavior. You are not allowed to pick up with a new team and follow them just because they are winning. It isn't right. This is different than Playoff Rooting, where you root for a team other than yours after your team has been knocked out. You have to have a rooting interest in the playoffs, it's a demand of being a Sports Fan (even if you're just rooting for a Team That Is Not The Yankees or a Team That Is Not The Lakers). It is also different than being A Bandwagon Rider, a person who is more or less unattached to any team who picks up with a winning team and roots like crazy while they're winning big (e.g., most Yankees fans, people who started wearing Kobe Bryant jerseys in public when the Lakers were winning rings).

Being a Sport Vulture is lower behavior. You are a fan of a team and yet you abandon them in their hour of need to root for another -- someone else's team. For shame. It's the opposite of what Aragorn says as the Armies of Men arrive at the Black Gate in Return of the King. He says, "There may come a day when we forsake all bonds of loyalty. But it is not this day!" In being a Sport Vulture, you say, "Hey, today is the day to forsake the bonds of loyalty." You didn't earn the right to enjoy this new team's success. Someone else suffered for it. Someone else is much worthier. Hang your head, Sports Vulture.

There are real A's fans (our softball captain Dan for example) who suffered through the A's post-Eckersley, pre-Giambi lean years and who deserve to enjoy the fruits of the A's' success. But not me. It's a dirty kind of fun though. Maybe I'll get some A's playoff tickets. God knows that they have enough seats in Oakland.