All posts tagged: Random DJB Thoughts

A Few (More) Observations from the Road

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Two years ago today, I was blogging during a tour of the American Southwest and made a few short observations from the road.  This year we’re touring New England and I have a few more observations to share. Observation #1:  Our family tends to gravitate to the food choices in the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die. I wrote a few days ago that we visited Pepe’s Pizza in New Haven.  Today we found Lickety Split ice cream store in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  I’m not sure how long our waist-lines can stand this focus of our travel.  Luckily, I’ve also found the fitness room every day along the way. Observation #2:  The Porches Inn in North Adams (pictured above and also listed in 1000 Places) is just about the coolest property of the 200+ hotels that are members of Historic Hotels of America (HHA).   The twins and I stayed here about 2 1/2 years ago, and we couldn’t wait to get back and show it to Candice.  As the marketing materials describe it, …

Two Years and There’s Still More to Come

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I began writing More to Come… two years ago as a way to keep friends and loved ones updated during a family trip out west.  As I wrote I found I enjoyed capturing not only experiences from travels, but also observations about books I was reading, music I was hearing, or simply life.  The feedback was also positive (probably helped by my admonition in the “About” section that if you didn’t like what I was writing you should “get your own blog”). Two years later I find myself on another vacation with the family and More to Come… has over 300 posts to date.  So look forward to some more vacation reports.  I should warn you that it is that type of vacation that hits families with teenagers:  the college visits.  We’re in the northeast for this trip, and while I won’t bore you (or embarrass my kids) with litanies of schools visited and reactions to the tours, I will post a few stories and photos  along the way of great architecture and interesting people …

After Pepe’s Pizza, Only 999 to Go!

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Some time ago Candice purchased the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die:  USA and Canada to spur us to find some interesting places to visit as we traveled.  So as we headed out to the northeast for vacation and college tours (not in that order), she picked it up and began to check what was on the list in the cities we planned to see. If the first day is any indication, we’re going to eat well.  As we pulled into New Haven, she read, You can appreciate the city’s self-anointed role as ‘Pizza Capital of the World’ by visiting Little Italy, specifically Wooster Street, where a few acclaimed pizza joints stand cheek by jowl, the most famous being Frank Pepe’s, which has been turning out incomparably delicious thin-crust pies since 1925. Never one to pass up “the most famous” of any restaurant, we went, stood in line for 45 minutes on a Monday evening, and then entered the no-frills dining room (we were in booth 17) where we feasted on two fabulous …

The Gospel Truth

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I love books that force you to turn page after page because you want to see what comes next. Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels, which was released this spring, is that type of book. Claire has to read a memoir for school this summer.  I’ve thought about recommending this book…and then I remember the foul language, the sophomoric pranks, and the detailed descriptions of every body part – male and female – known to man.  But seriously, she could do a lot worse than The Bullpen Gospels. Hayhurst is a relief pitcher who has played in the Padres and Blue Jays organizations.  On its face, The Bullpen Gospels is his recounting of the 2007 minor league season, where he played in Single-A and Double-AA ball.  You will laugh your ass off at the antics of ballplayers working to get to The Show.  (Sorry, it is hard to get the language of minor league players out of your mind after reading The Bullpen Gospels.)  Riding home on the train last evening, I laughed out loud twice …

Divisionals

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How hot can it be? Shortly after 8 a.m. this morning the sun topped the trees and began to bake our group of swim team parents who had camped out poolside  to cheer for the Gators in the annual Divisionals swim meet.  We were competing in Division E this year, which was a stretch for our ladies and gentlemen.  But the team gave it their best and ended up 4th out of the six-team division.  We had some amazing efforts by our swimmers, including a new pool record set by one of Claire’s best friends in 15-18 girls breaststroke.  And they did it with temperatures nearing 100 and the heat index going to 105 degrees and higher.  How hot can it be?  It was brutal. Andrew made divisionals this year in two races, the 15-18 boys 200 meter medley relay (swimming backstroke) and the 100 meter breaststroke.  The relay boys were up against some tough competition, but knocked time off their personal best. But it was in the breaststroke where Andrew had his best race …

Happy 60th, Helen and Tom

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Today – June 30, 2010 – is the 60th anniversary of the wedding of my mother and father:  Helen and Tom Brown. Mom passed away on January 1, 1998, but my father is getting ready to celebrate his 85th birthday next Monday, July 5th.  I spent a day with him last Sunday and was reminded again of how much Mom and Daddy (I am from the South) loved each other and how that has affected my view of the world. My Mom was generally considered to be a saint, and dying at a relatively young age from cancer only cemented that view in all our minds.  I wrote her birthday greetings on what would have been her 78th birthday a couple of years ago, and that pretty much sums up how we all feel about her. My father is a bit more complicated…which also makes him very interesting. Mother once described my father as having a mouth “always turned up in a perpetual smile” but apparently it wasn’t always so.  Several years ago Daddy sent …

Playing Favorites

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I picked up Top of the Order:  25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player during the Politics & Prose sale a couple of weeks ago.  Only a handful of the writers were familiar and the inclusion of Michael Jordan (yes, that MJ) and the fictional Crash Davis in the list of favorites indicated this anthology was going to take a different tack from the typical list of baseball’s greatest hits. Top of the Order is, at best, uneven.  I couldn’t wait to get through some of the self-indulgent essays (see Pat Jordan on Tom Seaver) which were more about the author than I cared to read.  At their best, some of the essays captured the special nature of fandom (see the obsessive Darin Strauss on Mariano Rivera) where you didn’t mind the intrusion of the writer.  Steve Almond leads off with a strong piece on Rickey Henderson that hooks the reader into this quirky collection.  Neal Pollack writes a terrific essay on Greg Maddux that demonstrates how dominant Mad Dog was through so many years …

An Act of Human Failing Followed by Colossal Grace

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The June 4, 2010 posting from Baseball Musings entitled An Umpire’s Perspective led to an article on umpire-turned-poet Herm Card. The full article is worth reading, but the ending is simply sublime: We live in a time, Card said, in which people want instant replays, “do-agains,” the quick fix. But baseball has never lent itself to painless answers. “You’ve got to step back,” Card said, “and appreciate the larger sense of what this was.” It was an act of human failing followed by colossal grace, which Card sees as proof enough of a perfect game. Perfect indeed. More to come… DJB

Economic meltdown, transitions, and roots music: Recent books on the nightstand

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My last post said More to Come… was going on sabbatical, but in cleaning up the  nightstand today I realized I’d been holding four recent books that I planned to review on the blog.  These represent my eclectic interests (which is what More to Come… is all about) as well as priorities in my life at the moment.  So in the hope that I can now hold to my promise to take the blog on sabbatical,  I’ll pass along thumbnail reviews of the four and put them in my mental “checked off” category. The first is Michael Lewis’ terrific (as in well-written) and sobering (as in scary) The Big Short:  Inside the Doomsday Machine. This is, by far, the best known of the four and much has been written about the story of three small hedge fund managers and a bond salesman who knew what was coming before the economic meltdown of 2008. I don’t need to elaborate because Steven Pearlstein said it all in a Washington Post review I highly recommend.  As Pearlstein  writes, …