Wherein I try to teach life lessons

The girls and I listen to Mike and Mike almost every day as we drive into school. Despite the fact that the girls think that the two are amusing, it is also my desperate attempt to get them interested in sports. I keep telling them that “boys like girls who are interested in sports.” It hasn’t worked yet, as boys still have germs at their age, but the worm may be turning soon.

Since the girls have both played soccer, have only seen football on television, and have been to a limited number of baseball games, the beautiful game seems at present to be the sport that they will talk about. 

Daughter #1 asked me this morning if I thought Thierry Henry was a cheat for his blatant handball against Ireland. I told her that, no, he did what he did in the heat of the game, and the referee was at fault for not calling it. The only reason the match was that close was that France had played lazily, and that, had the match gone to penalty kicks, Ireland most likely would have lost. The players are professionals. I wasn’t condoning his behavior, and was attempting to get across that whining and saying “It’s not fair” was equally bad. Life isn’t fair sometimes.

And all of the limited Irish blood in me was boiling, and all of the rational, fatalistic Eastern European blood in me was eddying.

Wherein I replace one abstruse metaphor with another

From BikeSnobNYC

If one were sitting on the toilet while perusing the artwork of Mike Giant only to find oneself out of toilet paper, one would not sit there shouting helplessly until a friend came to one’s aid with a roll of arcal and a 3wrencho; instead, one would simply do the logical thing and clean up after oneself using the Mike Giant art. I’ve found myself in a similar predicament many times while reading The New Yorker, and in each instance I was tremendously grateful for the work of Sasha Frere-Jones. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say that while Frere-Jones’s writing may not be that engrossing from a literary standpoint, it is tremendously absorbing when it comes to personal hygiene. Sure, it’s kinda scratchy, but that’s nowhere near as irritating as actually trying to read it.

I feel the same way about Peter Schjeldahl. The difference is that reading SFJ is sitting at the Council of Elrond: there’s a lot of references to the old times that you don’t get, but the conversation eventually gets around to Isildur –> Déagol –> Sméagol –> Bilbo. Reading Schjeldahl is like being airdropped into the middle of The Silmarillion.

Wherein I turn cultural critic for a second

Catching up on Carrie Brownstein’s Monitor Mix blog at NPR Music, I came across the ubiquitous “10 worst songs” post that any self-hatingrespecting music blogger has to post. One of the songs she mentioned is the one-hit wonder Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue.” Now, I hadn’t heard that song in ages, but when I clicked the YouTube play button, it brought a smile to my face. Obviously, I don’t think it’s one of the worst/most annoying songs ever.

It does bring to mind George Carlin’s quip in his Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television: “No bad words. Bad thoughts, bad intentions. And words.”  I happen to hate Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, but I know there are some people who don’t consider a wedding reception complete without it. It’s not a bad song if it’s the song you’re looking for at that moment. Fans of three-person Genesis can’t make it through “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” (the song or the album), and fans of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis think “I Can’t Dance” is an abomination.

However, for it to be a bad song, you cannot be able to relate it to a bad event in your life, or else this statement would be OK, “Sgt. Pepper’s stinks because I heard it when my fiancée and I were breaking up.” Whether a song is bad is not related to whether I like the song. I can’t listen to Wagner, I’m much more a Brahms-ite, but I realize that in the pantheon of great music, Wagner beats Brahms hands down.

Wherein I see that art and life commingle

The commute to school takes us past Conseco Fieldhouse (east side on the way to, west side on the way back). An illuminated sign on the east side promotes upcoming events. At this time of year, it is primarily Pacers games that go up on the board, with the occasional concert or inspirational speaker.  An additional bonus is that coaches are usually staged there the morning of the event for the load in, and the rigs will temporarily block traffic as they back in to the ramp leading underground. This will give me a chance to see who’s “playin’ the Fieldhouse.”

This morning, the curb was decorated with four shiny coaches, and an 18-wheeler that was in the process of backing underground. No Pacers, I see. I start talking to the girls about what the coaches are for — the band members, their instruments et cetera. Daughter #2 says that the first two are for the band, and the second two are for the instruments. The truck leaves the street, and I accelerate past the intersection. The sign reads

Miley Cyrus/November 16/7pm

A real rock star, who plays a fake rock star, touring as a real rock star. Aha! We then get into the story of a classmate of Daughter #1’s who went to a Taylor Swift show, and brought a program in to school for a little bit of unofficial show and tell. It was a boy, which struck me as odd, because most girls still have teh cooties in fifth grade. There were the girls who squealed at the pictures, and the girls who didn’t. D#1 was in the former group, which disappointed me a little. Being the father of daughters, but growing up in a household of boys, I was sort of hoping for a little fangirlish behavior.

But no, we go back to the Number One Song in Our Household for the third straight week, Pomplamoose’s cover of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (to which I’ve linked before.) We’re such hipsters.

Wherein I imitate and flatter

pace Ken’s “Best Line of the Day, so far” and Eric Zorn’s “Fine Lines“

Speaking of “Memorial Stadiums” and their relationship to the First World War:

That is a concept easy to forget in a time when stadium names change with the expiration of a business deal. It used to be that they named a stadium to honor the dead. Now, they name a stadium to honor whoever shows up with the dead presidents. – Ivan Maisel

Wherein I return to the fold

Now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 for the iPhone, I might as well use it to post something.

Today was devoted to the leaves. We seem to have about twice as many trees in our backyard as anyone else in the neighorhood. Because I’m such a softy, and don’t require my daughters to help me with the raking and bagging, it falls to me alone to fill as many bags as I can as quickly as I can.

But first, it was time to get some lawn bags at the local Home Depot. I was a lot more focused on the task at hand than I usually am upon entering a home improvement store. It also helped that the front was filled with Christmas junk, which is the easiest thing in the world for me to avoid. However, it is not that way for everyone: I saw a family picking up a plastic tree. How do you countenance that whe it is seventy degrees outside, and not even the Fifteenth of November? I wish that I could report that the family seemed so full of Christmas cheer, that it was obvious why they were carting around a tree that won’t degrade for the next 150,000 years. But I cannot. The dad had a thousand-yard stare, and the boy was whining about not being able to help carry. Merry Christmas.

For those of us still living in the fall season, it was back to finding those elusive bags. Aha! There they are. Wait – those are the ones I want, but they’re clear. Who needs clear lawn bags? Are they for display purposes for your neighbors? To impress the trash pickup crew? To assure all and sundry that there are no body parts in that garbage can? Whatever. I will stick with the traditional opaque noir version with orange extendible handles.

Having blown the majority of the leaves into little russet continents a couple of days ago, what remained for me was to break out the leaf sucker. It being electric, it is not powerful enough to quickly pick up anything but the lightest of leaf-like objects. I ended up stopping after conquering North and South America, and wishing that I was a better Risk player.

Because our subdivision is full of rugged Libertarians, there is no street leaf sweeper. That would be too much like pinko-commie socialism. The residents with fewer trees would be constantly at my door, taking me to task like a welfare cheat. So, my replacement activity is stacking full leaf bags as high as my neighbors, so he doesn’t see me as a complete slacker. Fat chance.

It’s supposed to be generally dry this week, and 90% of the leaves are on the ground. I should be able to face the winter with confidence. Eek.

Wherein I traipse about the musical leaves

There’s been a great coincidence this week: the major leaf-fall in the backyard has coincided with what, apparently, is going to be a string of cool and sunny days. This means that I can get the leaves up before the final slide into the cold and wet of what passes for late Fall around these parts. And, like Angus Podgorny, I don’t have to do it all in one go.

I’ve had Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” in my head for most of the morning. Everyone has a song to which they think they know the lyrics, but upon further examination, it turns out that they are wrong. [the technical term for these are mondegreens.] I have the opposite thoughts about the chorus to this song. The actual words are

Hey, hey, hey,
Ba de ya, say do you remember,
Ba de ya, dancing in September?
Ba de ya, never was a cloudy day.

For years, I thought I was missing something in those first three syllables (“party on”?) I guess not, it could be a “reverse mondegreen.” BTW, I love Pomplamoose’s cover of the song. WARNING: Once you click on the link, you will be forced to listen to the song at least a hundred times, then seek out EWF’s original, with maybe a detour into Kool & the Gang. Or so the doctors tell me.