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August 29, 2003

FINAL APPEARANCES OF THE SEASON:

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m.: Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

Oboyoboyoboy.

Fantasy football season is upon us.

I admit it, I've become addicted to this little pastime over the past three years, and this fall I've let the addiction become worse by participating in not one but two FF leagues, both run by friends from my Chapel Hill days. My original league, the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen, organized by Dan Sipp, enters its third year of existence with all the participants grown more savvy. We all gathered online for our live draft on Tuesday night, and predicting who'll be the big winners this season is just about impossible. I drafted eighth of the ten owners, which isn't necessarily bad, because that meant I drafted third in Rounds 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. (Last year I drafted tenth, but got to go first in the even-numbered rounds, and I put together the regular season's best team.)

The short version: I got the running back I'd targeted with my first pick, Stephen Davis. I believe he's in for a big year now that he's with the Panthers, who for years have wanted a powerful back to hammer into their opponents, chewing up the clock and letting their talented young defense (which I also drafted) rest. The roster for The Fighting Coelocanths 2003:
*Quarterback: Brett Favre,
*Running Back: Stephen Davis, Tiki Barber
*Wide Receiver: Eric Moulds, Amani Toomer
*Tight End: Doug Jolley
*Kicker: Jeff Reed
*Defense: Carolina Panthers
*Bench: QB Drew Bledsoe; RBs Charlie Garner & Michael Pittman; WRs Rod Smith, Robert Ferguson & Kevin Johnson; TE Christian Fauria; DT Baltimore Ravens

It's a veteran squad, not terribly flashy, but the players are tough and talented, and I feel good about my picks. We'll see how they work out in a league where the Screaming Boiled Lobsters and the Peace Corps have some scary guys in their lineups.

I feel even better, however, about the automatic draft that the Yahoo computer ran for me in my second league, J. Michael Beard's own Number Crushers. This is a crazed league in which each team fields no fewer than twenty players every week--more guys than I have on my entire FLOGG roster. To draft his team, each owner must rank players 1-200, and is then automatically assigned players one at a time by the computer. I picked fourth of eight owners, but of course had no way of knowing who I was drafting until it was all over; conceivably, I might have ended up with eight kickers on my squad.

What I got, however, was a promising team with a defense that is simply--dare I say it?--superb. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Scrub Jays 2003 roster:
*Quarterbacks: Tommy Maddox, Kerry Collins
*Running Backs: Priest Holmes, Ahman Green, Stephen Davis
*Wide Receivers: Hines Ward, Plaxico Burress, Joe Horn
*Tight End: Alge Crumpler
*Slash: Amani Toomer, Rod Smith, Jerry Rice (Note: the three slash positions may be any combination of one TE, two RBs, and three WRs)
*Kickers: Matt Stover, Olindo Mare
*Defensive Line (inc. linebackers): Zach Thomas, Takeo Spikes
*Defensive Back: Ronde Barber, John Lynch
*Defense (any): Derrick Brooks, Warren Sapp
*Bench: WRs Ashley Lelie, Santana Moss, & Kevin Johnson; DL Greg Ellis; DB Champ Bailey

Yes, the defense is heavy on Buccaneers--with good reason, as they were the dominant defense in the league last year--which means I'll have to do some juggling when they have their bye week. It'll be worth it, though, to put a defense of that power on the field every week but one. The quarterbacks are perhaps a bit iffy, but both have excellent receivers and had magnificent passing stats last year. The Jays' power, however, rests elsewhere. Not only do I have a good D, I don't think any other team can match my trio of starting running backs, and my wide receivers are so good that for the moment Jerry Rice is #6 on the depth chart, for god's sake.

Since more than half the NCers also play in FLOGG, I'm sure I'm going to be hearing all sorts of comments from both groups for the next few months. And if Stephen Davis and Amani Toomer get hurt, you'll be able to hear me crying about it from across the state line.

Meanwhile, I'm packing up to go south for these last two readings; I'll be back on Wednesday for the WFS opening faculty party, and we'll be jumping into our first faculty meeting on Thursday morning. I don't know if I'm ready for that, but I'm definitely ready for some football.

1:00 PM

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August 26, 2003

FINAL APPEARANCES OF THE SEASON:

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m.: Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

So, about that tree frog...

Tree frogs make up a biiiiiig portion of the biomass in South Carolina. On any given night, there may be up to a dozen of the little guys clinging to the windows surrounding my parents' front door. If there's a light, the bugs come, and if there are bugs, the frogs come. Actually, the bugs come even if there's not a light, so the frogs come pretty much everywhere.

I suppose, then, we shouldn't have been surprised on Wednesday afternoon when Dad announced that he'd heard one in Mom's Suburban. It was cowering down beside a plastic milk crate in the back, and since we were parked to let my grandmother out of the car, I took a moment to extract the little amphibian, who promptly leaped out of my hands and onto my shirt--and then my arm, my pants leg, the ground, the Suburban's rear tire, and finally the ground, at which point he hopped off out of reach underneath the car.

I've had tree frogs land on me before. When my family and I were camping on Ocracoke Island in 1970 or so, we had one invade our tent. He wasn't doing anything awful, just making too much noise, so we did our best to chase him out. He jumped from the tent pole into my mom's hair, and from there squarely onto the bridge of my nose.

I think he was more surprised than I was, honestly. It can't feel good to realize that what you presumed was a safe, solid, perch is in fact merely a small, fleshy protuberance right above the gigantic maw of a carnivorous creature that does not want you on its body. I had just enough time to note the surprising warmth of a frog's belly against my nose before he jumped off, bounding onto my brother's leg in the process, and was finally chased out of the tent for good.

Alas, none of this experience did any good that night. Mom was driving us home from the Savannah Sand Gnats' 11-8 loss to the South Georgia Waves and I was in the shotgun seat. We were roughly ten miles outside of the city when Dad, who was in the back seat, loudly announced, "There's another one in here!" We didn't know that there was a whole lot we could do about it in the pitch dark at 55 miles an hour in the middle of the Jasper County marshes, so the six of us gave a mutual shrug and turned our thoughts elsewhere, watching the spanish moss swaying gently in the headlights, listening to the hum of the air conditioner, slipping toward sleep...

It was at about that moment that something cold, slimy, wiggly, and invisible landed on my bare thigh.

I am occasionally reminded of what Kassandra knew all too well, that foreknowledge doesn't do a hell of a lot of good. I may have known that there was a tree frog loose in the car, but that knowledge didn't make it any easier to welcome the sudden sensation from just below the hem of my shorts. Perhaps because of the air-conditioned environment, as opposed to the warmth of a sun-baked tent, the cold-blooded creature felt to me like an ice cube against my skin, and my nerve impulses decided to act without bothering to inform my brain first. I jumped as high as my seat belt would allow and cried out, "Frog!" or "Jesus!" or some heretical combination of the two, and everyone in the back seat (Dad, the kids, Kelly) had a good laugh at my expense. Mom was too busy driving to get many giggles out of it, but she did suggest I try to catch the frog.

I would have cussed disgustedly and told Mom there was no way in hell I could do that in the pitch dark at 55 miles an hour in the etc., etc., but I realized that the frog had jumped off my thigh and landed on the passenger side window. I cupped my hand over him with minimal fuss and called for someone to hand me a cup. Dad handed one forward, a plastic Sand Gnats cup that had been full of beer until very recently, and I slid it over the frog as smoothly as possible.

Now, of course, I had the cup pinned against the window, with no way to know what the frog was clinging to, window or cup. The only way to get him out for sure would be to lower the window; he'd have to cling to the cup if the glass started moving under him, right? Unfortunately, Mom was continuing to barrel along toward Beaufort, and I couldn't in good conscience send a frog flying into the night at a speed higher than he'd ever reached in his life. She didn't want to pull over because there were cars behind her. I pointed out that a) I couldn't hold this cup against the window forever, and b) if we pulled over, the cars could go around us. Eventually, either my logic or the fear of the frog jumping on her thigh was persuasive, and she pulled off into the verge. I lowered the window, reached as far out as I could, and shook the cup vigorously, dislodging both the frog and the beer backwash in which he'd been quietly soaking for some minutes.

We made it home without further incident. I'm hoping the frog is OK, though I'm sure he's having a weird time getting used to his new environment, and I have to wonder what the frogs there think of him. After all, he appeared out of nowhere, stinking of booze, spinning an impossible tale of giant creatures, bizarre captivity, and strange electronic transport devices. He'd be on the cover of the amphibian equivalent of the Weekly World News right now if only we'd given him an anal probe, or maybe introduced him to Bat Boy.

6:05 PM

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August 21, 2003

Upcoming appearances:

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m.: Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

I'm on the road, but that's no excuse not to fill my journal with

LBJs:

*Summer's leaving us, but I got to experience one more ritual of the season tonight: minor league baseball. My parents took Kelly, the boys and me to a Savannah Sand Gnats game in historic-but-muggy Grayson Stadium, where we watched the Gnats fall to the South Georgia Waves by a score of 11-8. It was a lively game, and the Gnats had a shot, but in the bottom of the eighth they wasted a grand scoring opportunity due to a base-running error: with men on first and second and one out, the tying run came to the plate. With the count 3-2, both runners took off as soon as the pitcher wound up. The batter took a swing at a third strike, and the catcher threw to second. He was too late to catch the runner. Unfortunately, the runner who had been on second had gone toward third, seen the catcher jump up, and tried to slide headfirst back into second. It was quite easy to tag him, and the inning was over. Hey, that's why it's Class A ball.

*I just finished reading David Quammen's The Boilerplate Rhino, my first exposure to his work, and I'm cursing myself for having missed him all these years. He started writing his "Natural Acts" column for Outside Magazine back in 1981, so I could have been enjoying him for over two decades now, but no, I had to be late to the party. He's alternately hilarious, informative, poignant, snarky, and literary--sometimes all five at once. I find myself wishing I'd known about him so he could have been an influence on me. As it is, I'm just going to have to throw myself in the briar patch of his past work. Darn.

*Dangerous. I may actually be running three fantasy football teams this fall. I'm still running The Fighting Coelocanths [sic] for FLOGG, my original league, but I'm also jumping into a statistically complex league called the Number Crushers, which is run by one of my fellow FLOGGers, and I may end up in a league with some other Woodberry folk. The hard part is naming the teams. I like names that have some sort of absurdity, but aren't completely out of the question for a team; hey, in a world where the Fighting Blue Hens of Delaware play every week, that's a big category, and coelacanths fit right in. For the Number Crushers, I decided on an avian theme, but a bird that hadn't been tapped for use by anyone just yet: the Scrub Jays. They're smart birds, attractive in a non-showy way, and they're smart to boot; I also like using the word "scrub" as the name of a football team. For the WFS league, however, I had to swipe from the geniuses at my favorite online cartoon, Homestar Runner, and call my team the Burninators. (Click on the link above, go to "Strong Bad E-mails," and check out the one called "Dragon." Trust me, you'll be glad you did.)

*I must be on vacation; I've finished nearly a book a day since we left home: Stephen Jay Gould's The Lying Stones of Marrakech, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Orson Scott Card's Shadow Puppets, the aforementioned Quammen book, and two "graphic novels" that in my day would have been called "bound copies of a half-dozen or so comic books printed on reeeeally nice paper": Ultimate X-Men 4: Hellfire & Brimstone by Mark Millar & Adam Kubert, and JLA: World War III by Grant Morrison & Howard Porter. Now I've got to figure out what I'm going to read for the next four days of travel. Luckily, my parents own books.

*Last night Mom served us a fish and shrimp dish I once had at my cousin Tommy's. It's basically grouper (or tilapia), shrimp, sour cream, paprika, and lemon juice, baked until succulent. Tommy, I'm telling you, you're a genius...

*After I get back, remind me to tell you about the tree frog in the car. It's worth writing about, but not just yet.

6:19 AM

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August 15, 2003

Upcoming appearances:

Sunday, August 17th, 3:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC, with Cynthia Fox from Chapel Hill's Wild Bird Center

Friday, August 29th, 7:00 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA

Tuesday, September 2nd, 3:30 p.m.: Bull's Head Bookshop, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

Ahem.

FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED!

Thanks for your attention. Why, you may ask, is PC going all fair and balanced on us?

I'm glad you asked. As you may know, author/actor Al Franken is currently being sued by Fox News for titling his upcoming book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The issue involves Fox's trademark on the phrase "Fair and Balanced," and its claim that consumers may see the phrase on Franken's book and mistakenly purchase it in the belief that it is in some way approved by Fox, thus robbing it of its hard-earned dollars.

We'll ignore the question of whether Fox News is fair and balanced; I've never watched it, though I hear tell that their ideal ("We report. You decide.") goes consistently unachieved. We'll also ignore the rather telling fact that Fox is claiming that its usual product might be confused with something called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which says a little something about their usual product, to my way of thinking.

Let's simply consider two things: first, the trademark applies only to the product Fox News makes--television news. They do not publish books, so far as I know. This makes the claim of potential confusion a bit disingenuous. Coca-Cola may have trademarked "The Real Thing" as it applies to beverages, but Tom Stoppard was still able to title a play The Real Thing because there was little danger that the public might assume that the soft drink giant was branching out into intellectual comedies about popular music and modern marriage--it might be a logical step, but it wasn't their strategy for creating a brand at the time.

Second, and more important, Franken is a satirist. His chosen field of satire is politics, and he has written several other books on the subject, most notably Why Not Me? and the best-selling Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. (If nothing else, the title of this last should indicate that Franken knows some pretty successful lawyers.) His point in using "fair and balanced" in the subtitle of his book is, presumably, satirical. I expect that he's using it to poke fun both at himself and at the notion that Fox News is fair and balanced; because the rest of the title suggests that he's planning to espouse (I'm going out on a limb here, I admit) a left-wing viewpoint, "fair and balanced" takes on a somewhat ironic tone; and because Fox News is generally recognized as a right-wing organization, that irony also indicates a certain contradiction between its political stance and its chosen slogan. It's good irony--trust me, I'm an English teacher. I know these things.

The point is, however, that political criticism, satire, or even discussion involves using political language. "Compassionate conservative." "Just say no." "Weapons of mass destruction." In a democracy, we must be able to discuss these terms, even if someone has trademarked them in order to sell a product. (And somehow I feel sure they have.) Private property rights are secondary to the public good (see Amendment Five), but even if they weren't, no property rights are being denied here. Franken isn't pretending to be a Fox News operative, nor is he trying to profit from using Fox's ideas. Instead, he's a Fox News opponent, trying to profit from rejecting Fox's ideas. He's not stealing from Fox's cash register--he's a competitor, standing in front of Fox's store complaining loudly about the lousy service and the high prices. In America, that's not theft--that's just aggressive advertising.

So in support of Al, today I and many other bloggers on the web are taking this opportunity to use three little words, three little words that provide us no profit and do nothing to deny the legal rights of Fox News. And if Fox really wants to live up to its slogan, it'll drop this lawsuit before you can say FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED, FAIR AND BALANCED!

5:51 AM

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August 13, 2003

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August 7, 2003

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Friday, August 8th: Barnes & Noble, Lynchburg, VA, 7:00 p.m.

Sunday, August 17th: Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC, 3:00 p.m., with Cynthia Fox (owner of Chapel Hill's Wild Bird Center and fellow guest on WUNC's "The State of Things")

Well, I'm back. The boys and I spent the weekend zooming (in the word's loosest sense, as I foolishly attempted the I-95 corridor on Friday afternoon and could barely manage an amble or a mosey, let alone a zoom) all over the mid-Atlantic states and are now home for a week or so, except for my appearance in Lynchburg, VA, tomorrow night. It's been a busy time. Here's some of what I recall:

*Dining on my cousin Molly's delicious scrod, chili, and Thai noodles w/peanut sauce.

*Playing with my six-year-old cousin's ball python, Snacob, who impressed us all by constricting and consuming a white mouse in mere minutes.

*Finishing Mary Roach's surprisingly delightful Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which both made me laugh out loud regularly and taught me a lot about embalming, decomposition, organ donation, and dissection. Highly recommended for those of you with a cheerfully morbid streak, as evidenced by a fondness for the Addams Family or Edward Gorey's Ghashlycrumb Tinies.

*Spotting my first Northern Waterthrush on a branch over a pond in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

*Discovering that our luggage, along with my Discman and a friend's purse, had been stolen from my car in the Prospect Park parking lot.

*Meeting friends from Readerville.com at Prospect Park and later at Blue Ribbon (home of a really yummy grilled chicken sandwich with olive and garlic on focaccia). If only we hadn't been 90 minutes late because of our long chat with the boys from Precinct 78.

*Getting spanked in Risk by Ian and our young cousins; I should have known that trying to occupy both South America and Australia would spread me too thin.

*Meeting a friend from Readerville.com at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philly and getting to listen in on his chat with my publisher, Paul Dry. (Plato and Updike were among the subjects.)

*Getting a good look at a wild Eastern Box Turtle for the first time in many years while walking the SCEE nature trails.

*Eating Philly cheesesteaks with friends in Lansdale, PA.

*Completing Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men, which I'd been reading aloud to the boys for some weeks. Crivens, but it's hard tae think I'll nae be speakin' in the dialect o'the Feegles noo. Ach, waily waily waily!

*Spending several nights in the delightful company of our cousins in the Poconos.

*Finally getting a look at a male Blackburnian Warbler in his brilliant orange, black, and white summer plumage, rather than the drab brown-and-yellow fall plumage in which I'd seen one before.

*Taking a canoe trip into a shady cove full of fallen leaves with my cousin Juliana, and spying two wildly teetering Spotted Sandpipers on a rock near the shore.

*Watching Dixon handling himself pretty well in a kayak.

*Watching Iron Chef for the first time with our friends John & Elaine, barely unable to control our giggling at the bad dubbing and the outfit worn by the host (I think it was a matador's suit of lights, plus a cloak and black velvet gloves) as he presented the show's culinary theme: onions!

*Bringing Kelly a jar of wild blueberries, fresh-picked by Dixon, and a superball, bought by Ian.

*Getting invited back to the Poconos by Mother Marge.

4:22 PM

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