by the Night Writer
Does anyone else remember seeing Luca Brasi at the wedding last May?
I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your home on the wedding day of your daughter. And may their first child be a masculine child.
So be it. The grandparents-to-be, parents-to-be and Auntie Ninja squeezed into the ultrasound room yesterday for the first glimpse at the next generation: Benjamin West Worley.
Boy. Oh boy. And quite a looker, too. He gets that from his grandpa.
by the Night Writer
The official plein air artist of The Night Writer blog, Sharell at Zumbro Falls Impressionist, came across a curious operation while seeking inspiration for a painting (the painting and full story here):
One November Saturday I came down the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary path to find 4 mini-vans parked in a circle and about 20 ardent people dressed in fluorescent orange vests, safety glasses, hard hats and rubber gloves. They were moving through this grassy area in the painting and stroking the grasses with their gloved hands. My curiosity was piqued and I found the only friendly person in the group to ask what they were doing. “Collecting seed,” was her curt answer. Then I asked about the gear and she retorted, “For safety purposes [idiot].” With that I backed away and left for a quiet corner of the sanctuary.
Okay, there isn’t a clear indication that this was our tax dollars at work as Sharell didn’t say whether there were state emblems on the sides of the mini-vans, but the protective gear and prickly attitude have the tell-tale ear-marks of a Minnesota Department of Something-or-other. Orange vests? In case of heavy traffic. Safety glasses? Sure, laugh if you want; it’s all funny until someone gets a seed in the eye, buddy. Hard hats? Nature sanctuaries are notorious for having all kinds of birds flying overhead.
And let’s not forget, they were harvesting wild seed. Seed Collection Officer down! Seed Collection Officer down!
by the Night Writer
Can it really be five years since I cracked the code and put up my first blog post? Yes, indeed, it can be and has.
It feels as if the time has gone by so quickly. As I look back over the archives I’m surprised to see comments from “new” friends that first appeared three, even four, years ago. It’s amazing what has taken place over some 1,589 posts and 4,250 comments (about 85% of which went to my daughters’ posts). Meanwhile my daughters have grown up, posting here and bringing their own verve and attitude and even another contributor! Thanks to blogging, one daughter found herself a husband and we hosted the first (that I know of) live-blog wedding this last May!
I can’t claim anything so dramatic, but I have made a number of dear friends over the years here, some of whom I have yet to meet in person! It would be hard for my family and I to think of what our lives would be like right now if it wasn’t for this wonderful community. I don’t want to get too mushy here, though, because that can start to sound like a foreshadowing for an announcement of quitting. No such plans (or luck, depending on your perspective). While I have cut back a little of late due to other commitments and to putting time into helping Tiger Lilly with her books and writing one of my own, I do miss it on days when I don’t write here. There are no plans, then, to pull the plug here, though there is always a possibility for this blog to change form or focus.
I never set out to be anything in particular with this blog. From the beginning I just wanted to write about things that interested me. The thought of being strictly a political blogger, or a “religious” one, or a “daddy”-blogger would put me off the whole thing entirely, I think. I like to get up in the morning not knowing what I’ll write about that day (if anything), or, for that matter, who I might meet. It’s kind of like not knowing what I’m going to see when I visit my friends’ blogs each day…the variety, with just the right amount of familiarity, keeps it fresh.
Most of all, thank you for reading. People often refer to the “solitary” blogger, but that concept doesn’t work for me. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do this if it was just going out into the ether to bounce of Jupiter but not touch anyone else. The feedback and the relationships have been the best parts of all of this. They’ve meant a lot to me, and I hope that on occasion something here has meant something to each of you.
Ever since I reformatted this blog last spring I’ve been trying to tweak some things here. It will likely always be a work in progress, but one of the things I’ve accomplished over the weekend was to create a new page in the header entitled “Nights to Remember”. This has given me the opportunity to go back through the hundreds of posts and select the ones that I thought have been my best, or that generated the most interesting comments, or perhaps gave me a foothold to push off into something deeper. The page is still a work in progress, but there’s a double-handful of posts from 2008-09 there if you’re feeling nostalgic.
So, it’s been a slice…and I expect to take a few more whacks at the apple. Thanks for being along for the ride.
by the Night Writer
In case Tiger Lilly’s previous post wasn’t enough to lighten up your Thursday, you might want to consider the Strib’s laughable expose from earlier this week, What’s Killing Minnesota’s Moose? Then go over to Powerline’s devastating rebuttal, which perhaps ought to have been entitled “What’s Killing the Star Tribune’s Credibility?”
Personally, I give moose a lot of credit. Nobody, however, gives them more credit than Monty Python:
Continue reading
by the Night Writer
We once had a little baby that would wake up in the morning, or from a nap, and instead of crying she’d let us know she was awake by giggling. I’d go in to get her and she’d look at me with bright eyes and smile as if to say, “It’s you!” Even then she was no doubt amusing herself with her own stories inside her head.
Seems like that was only a few weeks ago, but here we are and it’s time for singing “16 Candles”, or perhaps in this case, “16 Ninjas”. Our little Tiger Lilly has grrrrrown up and she’s still telling stories — only now they’re in a form where other people can understand them; well, read them anyway. Last week she sent off the manuscript from her first novel to a national contest for as-yet-undiscovered writers. We should know how that works out in the next 30 days or so. Should the judges be so thick-headed as to not rush contracts and cash advances in this direction we’ll look at serializing the story here or somewhere on-line.
As for today, something nearly as exciting: birthday dinner at Tiger Lilly’s favorite restaurant, Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis tonight! Happy birthday, sweetie. I can’t wait to see what you’ll dream up next!
by the Night Writer
According to Gregg Easterbrook in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column at ESPN, the New York Times has had its hands full just in fact-checking itself.
In the past six months, the Times has, according to its own corrections page, said Arizona borders Wisconsin; confused 12.7-millimeter rifle ammunition with 12.7 caliber (the latter would be a sizeable naval cannon); said a pot of ratatouille should contain 25 cloves of garlic (two tablespoons will do nicely); on at least five occasions, confused a million with a billion (note to the reporters responsible — there are jobs waiting for you at the House Ways and Means Committee); understated the national debt by $4.2 trillion (note to the reporter responsible — there’s a job waiting for you at the Office of Management and Budget); confused $1 billion with $1 trillion (note to the reporter responsible — would you like to be CEO of AIG?); admitted numerical flaws in a story “about the ability of nonsense to sharpen the mind;” used “idiomatic deficiency” as an engineering term (correct was “adiabatic efficiency”); said Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride occurred in 1776 (it was in 1775 — by 1776, everybody knew the British were coming); “misstated the status of the United States in 1783 — it was a country, not a collection of colonies” (dear Times, please Google “Declaration of Independence”).
The Times also “misidentified the song Pink was singing while suspended on a sling-like trapeze;” confused the past 130 years with the entire 4.5 billion-year history of Earth (see appended correction here); misused statistics in the course of an article complaining that public school standards aren’t high enough (see appended correction here); said Citigroup handed its executives $11 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses, when the actual amount was $1.1 billion (in the Citigroup executive suite, being off by a mere two zeroes would be considered incredible financial acumen); said a column lauding actress Terri White “overstated her professional achievements, based on information provided by Ms. White;” identified a woman as a man (it’s so hard to tell these days); reported men landed on Mars in the 1970s (“there was in fact no Mars mission,” the Times primly corrected).
The Times also gave compass coordinates that placed Manhattan in the South Pacific Ocean near the coastline of Chile (see appended correction here); said you need eight ladies dancing to enact the famous Christmas song when nine are needed; said Iraq is majority Sunni, though the majority there is Shiite (hey, we invaded Iraq without the CIA knowing this kind of thing); got the wrong name for a dog that lives near President Obama’s house (“An article about the sale of a house next door to President Obama’s home in Chicago misstated the name of a dog that lives there. She is Rosie, not Roxy” — did Rosie’s agent complain?); elaborately apologized in an “editor’s note,” a higher-level confession than a standard correction, for printing “outdated” information about the health of a wealthy woman’s Lhasa apso; incorrectly described an intelligence report about whether the North Korean military is using Twitter; called Tandil, Argentina, home of Juan MartÃn del Potro, a “tiny village” (its population is 110,000); inflicted upon unsuspecting readers a web of imprecision about the Frisians, the Hapsburg Empire, the geographic extent of terps, and whether Friesland was “autonomous and proud” throughout the Middle Ages or merely until 1500; inexactly characterized a nuance of a position taken by the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (philosophy majors must have marched in the streets of Paris over this); confused coal with methane (don’t make that mistake in a mine shaft!); on at least three occasions, published a correction of a correction; “misstated the year of the Plymouth Barracuda on which a model dressed as a mermaid was posed;” “mischaracterized the date when New York City first hired a bicycle consultant” and “misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx.”
by the Night Writer
And now, as the man said, time for something completely different.
There were those weekends in my college days when my work and social schedule resulted in me essentially being up all night and trying to sleep all day. Those days are what I thought of when I first heard anyone talk about the band Vampire Weekend a couple of years ago; I figured they were a college band with a schedule like mine. Otherwise I didn’t pay much attention to them or hear any of their music since I don’t listen to pop radio much anymore. I was somewhat aware of them as the trendy flavor of the month with some people but my curiousity wasn’t really piqued.
A few weeks ago, however, I read a review of their new album, Contra, and the reviewer described their interesting rhythms and sound as somewhat reminiscent of Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” or work by Peter Gabriel and Afro-Celt Sound System. Since those are all favorites of mine I decided to sample the album via iTunes and was a bit surprised to find out I liked what I heard. Yes, there are Gabriel/Afro-Celt sounds on the album but the music is brighter and more upbeat and with a Martha’s Vineyard kind of vibe. It’s preppy and poppy almost to the point of being dismissed, but then some new rhythm line comes blowing in to bounce the mullygrubs out of you.
Most of the songs are pretty short, about three minutes as in the old days of pop radio, and the lyrics are pretty spare. I think the words from a typical song would fit into a tweet with characters left over, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be beguiling or just off-the-wall enough to make you do an aural double-take. The first song I listened to, in fact, started out with the two lines “In December, drinking horchata, I look psychotic in my balaclava.” I mean, don’t you just have to know what comes after that? The other songs I sampled were also appealing so I took the somewhat impulsive step of blowing the $25 iTunes gift certificate I got for Christmas on Vampire Weekend’s self-titled first album and Contra. I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, whatever disappointment you might be feeling in your life right now, VM may likely cure it with their rhythm and verve. (Wait a minute, make that “Rhythm & Verve” and I’ve coined a new music term – move over Alan Freed!)
So, anyway, I’m not going to try and analyze their music or message, or go song-by-song through their collection opining on contrapuntal constructions and sugar-coated schadenfreude or the socio-artistic relevance of their oeuvre. This is purely happy stuff, and you can take a free listen for yourself here. Just take your shoes off before you do, or at least loosen them. I guarantee your toes are going to want to tap.
The band also bears the Tiger Lilly stamp of approval. Perhaps she’ll add her own thoughts here as well.
by the Night Writer
It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but there is considerable brouhaha in the PGA where one pro, Scott McCarron, has essentially accused other pros, most prominently Phil Mickelson, of cheating by using illegal clubs.
The issue stems from the PGA’s new rule this year outlawing clubs (especially wedges) with deep, square grooves. These grooves are what help an accomplished golfer (not myself) put greater spin on a ball so that it’s easier to keep the ball on the green. Due to a long-ago lawsuit the PGA settled with club manufacturer Ping, however, the PGA is not allowed to outlaw a particular older model of Ping wedge which features these grooves. Mickelson and some others continue to use this “legal” club, and it is this that McCarron is criticizing.
Technically, the Ping wedges aren’t illegal, but that’s because of the settlement, not their design. By the spirit of the new rules, however, the club is in violation and clearly gives those who use it an advantage. It’s not too dissimilar from the the days in Major League Baseball when the steroids weren’t officially banned. Golf is different from baseball, however, in many ways and one of the most essential is not just the premiium, but the mandate, the sport places on honesty and integrity. Golfers are expected to, and routinely do, call penalties on themselves or gamely accept their punishment if found to have inadvertently violated a rule, even when the infraction was for something picayune that barely created an advantage.
I’m not saying that all of those years when golfers could legally use the square-grooved wedges should be erased from the record books. These clubs were vetted and approved at the time. Now that the rules have changed, and are clear, Mickelson, et al, should honor the intent of the rule and the spirit of integrity the game calls for. If not, every dollar they earn this year should come with a big, fat asterisk beside it.
by the Night Writer
Last week Mitch had a discussion going about the best movies you’d use to teach someone from another country about America. It was a great discussion and quite an impressive list. One that I suggested that was largely overlooked by the others is Sergeant York, the 1941 Gary Cooper classic (he won an Oscar) about the Tennessee ruffian who had a profound religious conversion that changed his life and his outlook, and who then had to struggle with his faith and duty when drafted into the Army in World War I.
He didn’t believe it was right for him to kill others but after a day of seeking God’s will (prayer and fasting is implied in the film) he decided he should fight. He went on to become the most celebrated U.S. soldier of the war, single-handedly using his sharp-shooting skills to force more than 130 Germans to surrender to him and the decimated remains of his unit. True to his character, he turned down the glittering celebrity opportunities offered to him by the government and his fame. I’ve used Sergeant York as part of the Fundamentals in Film class that I’ve taught to teen-age boys, and the lessons from it are about faith, repentance, honor and humility.
Coincidentally, a couple of days after the on-line discussion I received an email from someone who wasn’t part of that forum, with an excerpt from York’s diary describing the events of the day that led to his Medal of Honor. Here’s the description in his own words from his diary and, I think, from a message he delivered:
by the Night Writer
How old do you feel?
How old would you feel if I told you it has been a little more than 14 years since the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (December 31, 1995) appeared? Well, before you fall out of your rocking chair you might want to check out this link to a new interview with the reclusive C&H creator Bill Watterson in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. You may also be please to know that the U.S. Postal Service will issue a Calvin and Hobbes stamp this summer in honor of this iconic comic strip.
It’s hard for me to believe that the strip has been so long, and hard not to think that our world is the poorer for it’s loss. Of course, it’s not really gone since the books are still readily available and Google turns up a multitude of (legally questionable) images. As Watterson notes in his interview, it’s probably better that the strip went away while it was still hitting its stride rather than limping on into irrelevancy or bloated, cynical repetition (Calvin and Garfield, anyone?). The strip was a perfect combination of art and entertainment with an inspired premise — a stuffed tiger that was alive only when alone with Calvin — and boundless creativity nearly as unconstrained as Calvin himself.
And, behind the chuckles, it was an often profound and poignant look into the mind of an active boy in an increasingly “Sit down!” world. Boys are naturally energetic and imaginative, quaities that are non-conducive to factory schools. In my day I was fortunate enough to have teachers who recognized this and found ways to constructively challenge and channel our exuberance and hyper synapses. From what I hear and read today, and the studies I’ve seen, it appears the current approach to boys is to dope them with drugs or stupefy them with routine, slowing the brains and deadening any love for learning.
It was fun to see Calvin wage hopeless war against well-meaning but hapless orthodoxy, and hope that there was a brilliant man inside him, waiting to come out. Today we no longer have Calvin the cartoon; I hope to God we have not lost the character.