The Big Burn
Timothy Egan’s “The Big Burn” is another in his collection of smartly written books about important times in our history.
All posts tagged: Random DJB Thoughts
Divisionals
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
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
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
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
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, …
Twenty Dollars Per Gallon
The pace has picked up with my day job, so More to Come…the DJB Blog will go on sabbatical while I focus on other priorities. But before that happens, I want to share with you the work of Chris Steiner, an engineer-turned-journalist who has been writing about society’s relationship to energy. I had the opportunity to spend time with Chris recently while he was speaking at the National Main Streets Conference. A writer for Forbes and The Steiner Post, Chris is the author of a thoughtful book entitled $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. This 2009 work takes the “inevitable rise” in oil prices over time and imagines how each $2 increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline will change our lives. Perhaps counter-intuitively, he sees the change as largely positive. The rise is inevitable because oil is a finite resource and demand worldwide is escalating at an unsustainable pace. For instance if China – which now has 4 …
Lena Horne, RIP
One of my father’s favorite singers, Lena Horne, passed away yesterday at age 92. My father can’t carry a tune in a bucket and he can play only two songs on the piano – St. Louis Blues and Teddy Wilson’s Body and Soul – but my father had a great collection of 78s from the pre-war era and he knows his jazz singers. TB was so right about Lena Horne. As the web site The Music’s Over but the Songs Live On noted, Lena Horne was a popular and influential jazz vocalist and actress who broke many color barriers over a career that spanned nearly seven decades, and her 1943 recording of “Stormy Weather” is arguably the most recognized song of its era. Horne was not only a multi-Grammy award-winning singer, she was also an award-winning star of stage, screen and television. She was also an activist during the Civil Rights era, which is where I encountered her after the introduction by my father. The New York Times obituary recalled the difficulties she faced as …
Oklahoma City National Memorial: The power of remembrance
When in Oklahoma City last week, I made the time to visit the national memorial dedicated to the memory of those killed, wounded, or changed forever by the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. It was a powerful experience that would be moving at any time. In these days of bombing attempts in Times Square and daily cable television rants against government, the power of remembrance seemed all the more important. This place – forever altered in horrific ways 15 years ago by the act of an individual angry at the federal government’s actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge – is a somber counterpoint to the hysteria that counts as civic discourse in parts of America today. One enters the outdoor symbolic memorial through a gate marked 9:01 – the minute before the bombing – to represent the innocence of the city. At the other end of a reflecting pool, the west gate is marked 9:03, after everything changed. The best known feature of the memorial is the field of empty …
Muriel Anderson: Day Tripper
Muriel Anderson plays the wonderful and complex Beatles tune, all the while explaining her thought process. Amazing!
