June 2004 Archives

It's summertime, and a young (ahem) man's fancy often turns to thoughts of rock and roll. Or maybe it's just that I've been showing the family how to burn CDs on our new computer.

I'm a longtime maker of mix tapes, which probably makes me an evildoer in the eyes of many record companies, but considering I own over 500 CDs and about as many albums, I think they're fooling themselves if they think my taping habits have hindered my purchasing habits. The vast majority of the tapes I've made were made so I could listen to my music collection in the car (where no CD or LP technology was really available until recently), while others were made primarily to test my own DJing skills, which I don't get to use on WXYC anymore. Thus, I might make a tape of great dance songs, or songs in the key of D major, or cover songs.

But yes, I've made mix tapes for friends, and I don't feel terribly guilty about that. After all, when I asked my friends to tape songs for me, they did so--and the record companies were the beneficiaries of that action, let me tell you. Back in high school, my friend Flyboy gave me what I'd consider my first primer of classic rock and roll: Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven," Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," ELP's "Hoedown," Pink Floyd's "Eclipse," all sorts of things a kid coming of age in 1979 needed. (OK, I got him to put Molly Hatchet's cover of the Allman Brothers' "Dreams" on it, too--I was young and foolish.) But my point is that I bought every single album containing those songs soon after, which sort of puts a bullet in the brain of the "home taping is killing music" idea, to my mind.

But now we've got burnable CDs and a computer that can do the job, and we're all getting into the act. In fact, I duplicated one of my favorite mix tapes: "Top Five Hits in Utopia." Originally, it was 90 minutes of songs with huge hooks and unrealized commercial potential--tunes that would have given a happy to any pop music fan, if only the fan could ever have heard them. (Actual top-five hit songs were ineligible, though some minor commercial successes made the list.) What was on it?

The Church/Just for You
XTC/Earn Enough for Us
Robyn Hitchcock/Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)
The Balancing Act/Red Umbrella
Squeeze/Vicky Verky
The Kinks/Victoria
Poi Dog Pondering/Living with the Dreaming Body
The Smithereens/Time and Time Again
Graham Parker/Local Girls
Joe Jackson/Geraldine and John
Big Star/Feel
Elvis Costello & the Attractions/From a Whisper to a Scream
The Pressure Boys/Dial Tone
Richard Thompson/Tear-Stained Letter
Billy Bragg/Greetings to the New Brunette
Split Enz/History Never Repeats
The Housemartins/Happy Hour
Julian Cope/Trampolene
They Might Be Giants/Ana Ng

I made the tape in roughly 1989, but in the last decade-plus, I've come to realize that other songs are deserving of inclusion. Hence, they've been piled into the playlist for the two-and-a-half-hour two-CD version. The additions include:

Steely Dan/Here at the Western World
Pete Townshend/Let My Love Open the Door (E. Cola mix)
Lloyd Cole & the Commotions/Mr. Malcontent
The English Beat/Save It for Later
Echo & the Bunnymen/Seven Seas
Tom Waits/Downtown Train
John Hiatt/Tennessee Plates
John Gorka/I Saw a Stranger with Your Hair
Lloyd Cole/Ice Cream Girl
World Party/Way Down Now
Brian Eno & John Cale/Been There, Done That
Kirsty MacColl/All I Ever Wanted
dada/Mary Sunshine Rain
The Jayhawks/Blue
Barenaked Ladies/It's All Been Done
Radiohead/Nice Dream
Cracker/I'm a Little Rocket Ship
Everclear/Santa Monica
Foo Fighters/Monkey Wrench
Matthew Sweet/Sick of Myself
Shawn Colvin/Sunny Came Home
Fountains of Wayne/Red Dragon Tattoo

Don't know 'em all? Swing by the used CD store and pick 'em up--it's perfectly legal--or hey, just get a friend to make you a tape...


6:51 PM

Saturday mornings just aren't as much fun.

Yes, I realize that a big reason for that is the fact that I work Saturday mornings, but I have a feeling it'd be true even if I weren't at a school where Saturday classes are part of the routine. It's the routine itself that's changed.

Saturday Morning Routine (circa 1970) used to be a pretty straightforward affair: wake up, rush to kitchen, fill bowl with sugary cereal (preferably Quisp, Quake, Orange Quangaroos, Cap'n Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Krispies, Freakies, or Kaboom!), watch milk turn dangerous, unnatural colors (esp. re: Kaboom!), slurp sugary multihued residue from bottom of bowl, and feel vibration in eyeballs.

Then it's time to turn on the TV for The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Hour and hope fervently for "The Rabbit of Seville" or "Duck Amuck" to be showing (though most often I have to settle for lots of Tweety & Sylvester.) I pay proper obeisance to Chuck Jones and Mel Blanc, and usually get another bowl of cereal during commercials.

From the sublime to the mundane: we leave Warner Bros. and settle in for long haul of 'toons from Hanna-Barbera and even lesser studios. The voices of Casey Kasem, Paul Winchell, and June Foray appear in seemingly every H-B show, and gradually worm their way into my dreams. Adventure 'toons include The Herculoids, Birdman, Samson and Goliath, Space Ghost, Shazzan, The Superman-Aquaman Adventure Hour, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Jonny Quest, Hot Wheels, and Skyhawks.

Goofier shows include Archie, Josie and the Pussycats, Wacky Races (and its spin-offs: Dick Dastardly and His Flying Machines and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop), Frankenstein Jr., It's the Wolf!, Bailey's Comets, and of course, the grandaddy of them all, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, the only remotely tolerable version of the show.

(It got bad when it became Scooby-Doo Movie of the Week or whatever it was called, co-starring the stars of various other CBS cartoons--Batman & Robin, or the Three Stooges--or worse, the lesser lights of CBS's prime-time schedule; Sonny & Cher and Sandy Duncan guest-starred, I kid you not. It got even worse when Scrappy-Doo was introduced, but by then I'd given up on Saturday morning TV, except of course for Bugs Bunny.)

The morning provides a brief respite of sanity as Tom and Jerry comes on.

But trouble brews: live-action shows. The Banana Splits has a certain goofy appeal at one point in my childhood, as does The Monkees, but before long the Spawn of Krofft appears: H.R. Pufnstuf, and within moments, we're looking at seemingly talentless former sitcom kids cavorting with foam-rubber grotesqueries: Butch Patrick in Lidsville, Johnny Whittaker in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters or even (god help us all!) Martha Raye in The Bugaloos! Eventually ABC seemingly hands over its entire network to the Kroffts, resulting in horrors as varied and multifarious as Kaptain Kool and the Kongs, Dr. Shrinker, The Lost Saucer, Bigfoot and Wildboy, and the astonishingly awful Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl.

And then it's real trouble: Don Cornelius and Dick Clark, gearing up Soul Train and American Bandstand. Time to go out and play.

Considering how much crap I had to wade through, it's sort of surprising that I look back on it all so fondly. I suppose the basic issue is that at some point in your life, Don Cornelius comes on and you go out to play.

And you can never come back in.

3:14 PM

Well, tomorrow I go off into a Brave New World.

Actually, it's not exactly a new world. I think it's more like a new neighborhood. I've been to similar areas in similar places in similar parts of this world, but I haven't been to this particular place. Yet.

All this is a tortured metaphor for what I'm doing tomorrow. Yes, I've taught before--taught just this morning, matter of fact. Yes, I've used Power Point before. And yes, I've talked about birds before, as you may have discovered somewhere or other around here... But never before have I used Power Point to teach a class about birds.

I threw this little digital slide show together a while back, figuring I might someday have call to take some people around Woodberry's campus in search of birds. As it happens, I figured well. My cousin and colleague Indira is teaching a field biology course this summer, and she asked me if I'd lead her students on a birding trip around campus Friday morning. I said sure, but I wondered if it might not be a good idea to give the class a little advance prep. I mentioned that I'd put together this slide show, and wham, I was committed to a Wednesday morning presentation.

I've got about sixty photos of the more common birds on campus, some with sound files of their calls. (Thanks to Kelly for that last suggestion.) I've got them divided into four main habitat groups: Forest, Fields, Water, and Yards, plus a few other categories organized by lifestyle (Birds of Prey) or origin (Invasive Species) or distribution (Rarities). I don't know whether the students will learn the field marks well enough to be on top of things Friday morning, but I figure the odds are a lot better if I've told them the difference between an American Crow and a Turkey Vulture.

It's a bit unusual to be the birding expert, honestly. Most of my audiences are comprised of birding groups or readers interested in birds; in the former case, the odds are good that some of the listeners are more knowledgeable than I, and in the latter case, there's a good chance that some of the listeners are birders, so we're right back where we started. Tomorrow, though, I'm probably the only person in the room who'll know a Carolina Wren's call (TEAkettle TEAkettle TEAkettle) from a Tufted Titmouse's (PEter PEter PEter). When we go into the field Friday, I'll be able to get away with just about anything.

I must confess, I am strongly tempted to stare soberly through my binoculars and claim I'm looking at a pair of Passenger Pigeons...

1:49 AM

Summer school is gearing up for its first day, and it'll be a big event for the Cashwell/Dalton clan. I'm teaching a three-week creative writing course for rising 7th and 8th graders, as I've done several times before, but this year, my son Ian is also jumping into the fray, taking a computer course and a math course. He'll be living on dorm, following the WFS school rules, and doing all the things the other summer school students do, including obeying the WFS dress code. (We're hoping we've obtained enough collared shirts to get him through the session.)

I'm hacking and slashing my way through the course I've devised, which involves a lot of thinking about place. We'll visit some places off campus, and we'll also spend some time playing Civilization--not the Sid Meier computer game of that name, or even the board game based on the Sid Meier computer game, but the original Avalon Hill "bookcase game" that inspired Meier in the first place. I've had students play Civ before, but as I was traveling in Italy last spring, I had some ideas about how to combine its gameplay (which is detailed and fascinating) with the writing of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. I just hope all the pieces are intact.

So with all that's going on, what am I fixated on? Spam.

My website has started getting spam like nobody's business. Perhaps it's just that my work email has such high-powered filters in place, but I never realized how much spam was whizzing through the ether until recently. PC dot com is getting a dozen pieces a day, easy, and if I should happen to be out of town for a few days (as I was this past weekend), the mailbox fills with all sorts of crap, all of it using very odd rhetorical strategies in hopes of producing a response. Some of it insults me ("You have a very small one"), some of it hopes I don't understand how higher education works ("You have been nominated for a Ph.D."), some of it throws random names of random drugs together with random punctuation in hopes that I'll excitedly click on it ("Vi@gr@ Lev1tr@ C1@l1$"), and, most puzzling of all, some of it--perhaps 33% of the most recent wave--is typed in Cyrillic characters.

Folks, I've taken four years of French, a year of Latin, and a year of Welsh, but I have no working knowledge of any language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet. If it comes in Cyrillic, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, or kanji, it stands not one chance of getting anything but a quick deletion. But there's someone out there for whom it makes economic sense to send me messages. And if I'm getting them, there must be thousands of others also receiving them--and how many of them read Russian, I wonder? This spammer (or spammers) must be casting a net of huge proportions, and hoping desperately that some sucker will become entrapped in it.

Ever read about the gigantic monofilament nets the fishing industry used to set in the ocean? They would catch everything that passed into them, regardless of species, food value, or rarity--if the victims weren't small enough to wriggle through the gaps in the net, they were dead.

And worse, every so often, one of these nets would be torn from its moorings, drifting aimlessly with the currents, wrapped around corpses, sailing slowly, inexorably, from sea to sea. Uncontrollable, unlocatable, inescapable--a gigantic blade mowing down all animal life in its path. The name for such a killer--"ghost net"--is beautifully, poetically eerie, and perfect.

Sometimes I worry that parts of the internet have become ghost nets. Someone cast the messages into the water, and they continue to reap their grisly harvests uselessly and eternally.

What's this got to do with summer school? I'm hoping my son will use what he learns to create some way to make the waters safe again.

Study hard, kid. We're depending on you.


7:33 PM

LBJs

*We're back from our trip to the Poconos, relaxed and (in my case) several species better off than at departure. We were staying at our cousins' place at Pocono Lake, which sits in the midst of a former timbering ground; the trees there are huge now--hundred-year-old hemlocks and spruces with occasional firs and maples and beeches interspersed among them--and they shade the ground so much that there's practically no undergrowth except ferns. The mountains attract a lot of migrating species that follow the high ground northward, and the presence of water attracts a few more, but the forest is unquestionably the reason that the place is Warbler Central. I was there for not quite three days and took only one real birding session, but over the weekend I saw a Magnolia Warbler (my first) and five other warbler species (Blackburnian Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Ovenbird, and Yellow-Breasted Chat), plus two vireos (Red-eyed and Blue-headed), which are closely allied. I also logged my first Red-Breasted Nuthatch, leaving me at 306 life species. Good weekend.

*One thing I love about vacationing where there's not a TV or a computer is that I read. I polished off three books in Pennsylvania: Doug Stanton's history of the USS Indianapolis disaster, In Harm's Way, and the last two of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Hand of Oberon and The Courts of Chaos. I've read the Zelazny many times before, having read the first Amber book back in high school, but I always enjoy the experience; it's not Zelazny's deepest work, and I often skim the long hellride sequences, and on this past reading it seemed like someone had to walk the Pattern every fifty pages or so, but it's loads of fun, and Corwin's snappy but world-weary dialogue works beautifully. Stanton's book, by contrast, fleshes out a story I've known about even longer, an episode I (like many) first heard about in Jaws: the Indy, after delivering the components of the first A-bomb to the Enola Gay's task force in July 1945, set out across the Phillippine Sea for its next assignment and was sunk by two torpedoes from a Japanese sub. The crew members who survived the sinking were left in lifeboats or floating in life preservers in massed groups, without food, water, or other supplies, and without any means of protection from the sun, the salt water, or the hundreds of sharks that grew bolder and bolder in seeking prey. The ship sank early on a Sunday morning, but due to several bureaucratic foul-ups, its absence wasn't noted for several days, so the survivors weren't even located until Thursday, and some weren't rescued until Friday. Of the 1196 men on board, about 900 went into the water, and only 317 came out alive. The experience, needless to say, was horrific, and the tales of the survivors that Stanton interviewed are gripping and astonishing. Well work a look.

*I returned home, cleaned out the bird feeder, refilled it, and decided it's time to own up: my Yankee Flipper bird feeder is Da Shit. It's a rather pricey Droll Yankee product, but I've now had it for six months, and it hasn't yet allowed a squirrel a mouthful of seed. Oh, they've climbed on it--the top is scored with their little claw makrs--but they can't actually reach the seed ports, and when they try to grab the rail beside the ports, they're flung off. I have yet to see a single squirrel actually get flung, alas, but Kelly has; I've just seen them stretching down from the feeder's top, thinking carefully, and retreating to the trees. Smart squirrels.

*I learned this morning that Ralph Wiley died, at the age of 52, on Sunday. Most people know Wiley as a sportswriter; he worked for Sports Illustrated and most recently for ESPN.com's Page 2, where he was one of the bright lights of the website. I learned of him through his other work, however: his books of essays. The first one I encountered was an accident; I picked up Dark Witness in the student bookstore. I still have no idea who ordered it or why, but it was on the shelf amongst the Latin texts and algebra books, and I pulled it off for a look. In it was Wiley's no-hold-barred case for Mark Twain's canonization as America's Greatest Writer. At the time, I thought it a bold and unusual position for a black writer to take (I've since learned that Wiley was hardly alone), and the passion and wit with which Wiley stated his position immediately engaged me. I put the book on the shelf, but I later found copies of his first two essay collections, Why Black People Tend to Shout and What Black People Should Do Now, both of which I loved--and Dark Witness went almost immediately out of print. (I'm still looking for a copy, so if you see one...) I had long believed Wiley would be a wonderful person to have at Woodberry--a man whose love of sports would be clear to our similarly obsessed students, but whose fierce devotion to other matters, whether of literature, politics, or history, might open their eyes. His death is something that saddens me on my own behalf, but also on behalf of my students. I hope they'll get to know his work, but I wish they--and I--could have come to know the man.

6:15 PM

I am nothing if not responsive to peer pressure, so if every blogger in the country is reminiscing about Ronald Reagan, who am I to be unconventional?

I heard the news about RR's death while driving back from Charlottesville with my younger son. Some talking head or other was talking about how Reagan "always put forward his own ideas without criticizing those of others," and I cried out something like "Oh, come ON!" as I recalled such gems as "There you go again!" and the creation of the phrase "evil empire."

Naturally, providing context for this outburst required a lot of explanation for the ten-year-old in the back seat.

I'm a child of Watergate, so Nixon is certainly the first president who really had a direct effect on my life, even if it was only pre-empting most of my favorite TV shows in favor of the Senate hearings on the scandal. Reagan, though, was the president when I came of age. I turned 18 four months too late to vote in the 1980 election, but I'd have voted against him if I could.

The next four years under RR's administration only deepened my resolve. In 1984, I cast my first presidential ballot--a disastrous election day for me. My picks for President, Senator, Governor, and Congressman all went down in flames (to Reagan, Jesse Helms, Jim Edwards, and Bill Cobey, as I recall.) The next day, I came to my Senior Writing Seminar wearing a dark suit jacket with black armband in place. (Also in mourning, with black nail polish to set off her wardrobe, was one Ms. Kelly Dalton; at that moment, I suppose we should have realized we were meant for each other, but I digress...)

I'm now in my fourth decade of political awareness, and I've had nearly two decades to consider the Reagan legacy. What do I think?

Well, for one thing, I'm always amazed that "winning the Cold War" is touted as a Reagan accomplishment. Under Reagan, I don't know of especially noteworthy changes in American policy toward the Soviets, at least not any initiated by the U.S. Sure, he worked with Gorbachev on some arms limitation issues, but did Reagan really do anything that hadn't been done by, say, Nixon? (Other than threaten to begin bombing them in five minutes, I mean.)

In the USSR, by contrast, the sudden Brezhnev-to-Andropov-to-Chernenko transition seemed to destabilize things a bit, allowing Gorbachev to step in and offer some profound changes in Soviet policy. Without Reagan, I don't see the story changing much; without Gorby, I'm not sure it changes at all.

Moreover, if we're really looking for non-Soviet people to credit with bringing down the Iron Curtain, wouldn't Lech Walensa deserve more credit than Reagan?

I'd rank Reagan as better than either Nixon or the current White House occupant, but his record appalls me in so many areas: support for South Africa's apartheid system, for the Contras, and for El Salvador's death squads; failure to so much as mention AIDS for his entire first term and most of his second; cynically appointing Jim Watt to protect our land and resources; giving positions of power to the corrupt and the misguided (Ray Donovan and Ed Meese, say); approving the mining of Nicaraguan harbors--an action for which the U.S. was convicted and condemend by the International Criminal Court; and the still-astonishing decision to sell arms to one group of terrorists (hostage-takers in Iran, that is), then use the money to fund another group of terrorists who were trying to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua.

And of course, let's not forget the sale of weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein.

In many ways, the worst thing about Reagan's presidency is that he laid the groundwork for so many of the worst excesses of the current Bush presidency. And after all, one can argue that RR gave us the Bush presidency in the person of Supreme Court vote number five--Reagan nominee Sandra Day O'Connor.

So--he may have been a nice guy personally and I feel bad for his family; I may not like Nancy R. personally, but no one should have to watch a loved one drift away into Alzheimer's over a decade or more. (If anything good comes of this, it may be Nancy's recent public statements opposing Bush's restrictions on stem cell research.)

In the end, though, these natural human emotions do not change my feelings about the man's political legacy. I think the United States would have been a better nation, and our standing in the world today would not be in such dire straits, if Ronald Reagan had not been president.

If there's one thing I learned from my political experiences with Reagan, though, it's this: never take your vote for granted. I started my voting career on the losing side of the biggest landslide in recent American history, and that might have driven me to believe my vote didn't matter. Instead, I realized how closely our own actions are linked to the actions of our leaders. I resolved when I put on that black armband that no deserving candidate would ever lose because I failed to vote, and that no undeserving winner could ever take my acquiescence for granted. I've been in the voting booth for every election day since.

This November I'll cast my sixth presidential ballot. Join me if you like, or try to cancel my vote if you prefer. But if you value the right to criticize our leaders--the most fundamental right this nation has--be in that booth. Reagan would have wanted it that way--and so would every man or woman who voted against him.

5:19 PM

My online life began in late 1996, when I happened upon the official Doonesbury website and started posting in the "Hot Buttons" chat rooms there (not under my own name, if you're wondering). It was a completely open discussion, with no registration required; anybody who surfed by was welcome to contribute. I became a regular there, one of a few dozen folks who shared both a fondness for Garry Trudeau's brainchild and a desire for intelligent discussion of political issues.

There were all kinds of people there: RML, a libertarian expatriate American securities trader now living in Amsterdam; Bob, a Canadian leftist with a wicked sense of humor; Defender of Kristjanity, a young Danish student of computer science and SF fan; Croesus, a shy but brilliantly intelligent classicist; SteveB, a calm and witty left-leaning librarian from NYC; BB9, a conservative federal employee with family members who'd been through every notable event in human history; Zonk-Ra, an alternately hilarious and obnoxious left-winger from somewhere on the west coast; Geneva Mike, an American working on international scientific study in Switzerland; Reece, a comics afficianado from Tennessee; Tom from Massachusetts, Fred from Florida, Lunatic Fringe from Ohio... guys from all over the political spectrum and all over the world.

And of course there were the Goddesses. (That's how they styled themselves, and we weren't going to argue with them.) TC (short for Too Cynical), a single mom from Miami with a biting wit; Hat, an Englishwoman now living in the California; Isis, a student of witchcraft from the DC area; Shoe, a Virginian just out of the Navy... the Goddesses gave as good as they got in the political discussions, and they kept the joint from smelling too much like a men's locker room to boot. They were also instrumental in arranging several face-to-face gatherings, which is how I was able to meet most (but not all) of the above.

The site self-destructed about five years back, alas, during a period of particularly partisan nastiness in Washington--the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. The site wasn't a much nicer place to be. The management's hands-off approach allowed for totally free discussion, but of course that meant the rules of civil discourse could be easily violated; some of the arguments disintegrated into name-calling and threats, and some of the online friction led to real-life consequences. One poster (not the only one) often contributed to the site during work hours; another poster who didn't like her much anonymously reported her to her supervisor. She received an official reprimand and could have lost her job.

With that sort of thing going on, it shouldn't have been surprising that one poster (whom I'll not dignify with an identification) pushed the envelope too far, attacking everyone in the hall and the management to boot on a regular basis. The management decided, not unreasonably, that it had better things to do than give official sponsorship to an ongoing flame war; seemingly overnight, the site was closed for retooling and Hot Buttons was no more.

Refugees from Doonesbury.com, like those from Troy, scattered all over the seven seas of cyberspace, forming new communities wherever several of them could make landfall together. None have the same qualities as the original, of course, but I'd like to think that Readerville.com is sort of the Rome of this particular Aeneid. Certainly there have been quite a few DB veterans who've fetched up on Readerville's shores, but there are quite a few of the old DB crowd with whom I've lost touch entirely.

I still converse with Hat pretty regularly, however, so when I got an email from her a few days ago, I wasn't surprised. The message, however, did catch me off-guard. It was a forward from Columbia, SC's newspaper, The State, reporting the death of Randall Chastain, age 59. In the Hot Buttons halls, he was known as GRC, an avuncular soul with a grounding in the law and a lot to say on a wide variety of subjects. We'd exchanged a few emails over the years, but we'd never met, and I'd had no idea that he'd even been ill.

The news sent me rushing back to our time at DB.com, reminiscing and wishing I'd done more to stay in touch with the old gang. Would it have comforted GRC (even now I can't think of him as Randy) to know that I still recalled him fondly? Did he ever wonder where I'd gotten to? Did he know or care where the diaspora had taken many of his friends? Did I have the right to consider him a friend, though he was not a friend, at least not in the way we traditionally think of them? GRC is the second such online friend I've lost, after Imre died in late 2002, and I'm still unsure how to cope with grief in this new silicon environment.

Or maybe it's not so hard. Along with the news Hat forwarded me, there was a link to a photograph posted online. I clicked on the photo and saw GRC's face for the first time. I wasn't surprised by his appearance, though he didn't look anything like I'd expected him to look. What surprised me was the rest of the photograph, because that I knew like the back of my hand.

GRC was standing on the waterfront in Beaufort, SC, with the old bridge across the river behind him.

Beaufort is my mother's hometown, the place where I visited my grandparents as a child and still visit my parents today. I have crossed that bridge across the Beaufort River scores of times and walked that waterfront with my own children every year since they were born. I could no more fail to recognize that place than I could fail to recognize my own bed. And there he was, a person I didn't know, but who stood exactly where I'd stood myself.

So maybe we're all strangers here, with faces unseen and unguessed-at, in our separate houses on opposite sides of the stream. But there are bridges everywhere, and when we cross them, we see that the people on the other side aren't really that different.

Thanks for the fellowship, GRC. Cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.

5:55 PM

REPORT FROM BOSTON

The Catholic Forensic League's Grand National Tournament was held in Beantown this past weekend, which resulted in a trip for me, volunteer judge-cum-baseball consultant Greg, and two of my students, Jacob (Va. state champ in Student Congress) and Palmer (Va. state champ in Lincoln-Douglas Debate). I hadn't been to Boston since the summer of 1977 or so, but I was more than happy to head back, especially if I had students competing for a shot at the national title.

We didn't get a title, but we got a lot of other stuff. On Friday night, we took the T out to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox host the Mariners. I'm more of a National League fan (though I'm not nearly so fanatical about it as Greg, whose fantasy baseball league is NL-only), but it's hard to complain about a game where you get to see Johnny Damon, Pokey Reese, and Edgar Martinez on the field--and where you get to see Pedro Martinez on the mound. Pedro wasn't at his best, giving up two shots into the left-center seats, but he got crucial support from designated hitter David Ortiz; with the Sox trailing 4-2 in the bottom of the fifth, Ortiz cracked a bases-loaded shot right toward the Seattle bullpen in right field. We were seated down the right-field line, just beyond the foul pole and just barely in fair territory, so we got a good look as Ichiro Suzuki tried to run it down. He launched himself up and over the wall of the bullpen, but the ball fell just beyond his reach. It's the first time I've ever seen a major-league grand slam in person.

After that, naturally, I had to buy a Red Sox cap. And the next day, when we were wandering the city, my cap allowed us to participate in the region's ritual greeting. As I exited a 7-11 near Boston Common, a handful of locals, all wearing faded Sox caps, were entering. One looked at me and said, "Go Sox!" I of course knew the proper response, but it took me a moment to realize he was addressing me.

"Yankees suck!" I stammered at last, and we were off.

The competition on Saturday was long and exhausting. I served as a Parliamentarian in one chamber of Student Congress, which basically meant I was timing speeches, running elections, or trying to decide which speakers to nominate for honors for just under twelve hours; we started the first election at 8:00 a.m. and wrapped up at 7:15 p.m., with a 75-minute lunch break and a half-hour recess in the afternoon. Three sessions of over three hours each. Gack. Even when Congress is done well, nine hours in one day is too much. And if the kids at Nationals don't know that the Constitution never mentions "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," who the hell does
know?

On Sunday, we were free from judging and competing requirements, which allowed three of us to make a trip to Cambridge so that Jacob, a junior, could scope out the Harvard campus. We strolled all over town, most notably in the Garage, a mini-mall where I dropped seventy-five bucks and could easily have dropped more. Hey, it had a Starbucks, a Ben & Jerry's, a comics-and-used-CDs shop, a science fiction bookshop, a taqueria, a Vietnamese restaurant... I grabbed the concluding volume of Warren Ellis & Darick Robertson's brilliant Transmetropolitan series, another (possibly my last) volume of Grant Morrison's increasingly confusing New X-Men series, a new paperback of John Varley's Red Thunder, and four CDs priced to move at under ten bucks apiece: a new copy of Al Green's Greatest Hits at $9.99, a used copy of Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians' Live at the Cambridge Folk Festival (a disc I'd never even seen before), and used copies of XTC's Homespun and Homegrown two collections of demo versions released especially for fans and fans only; it's hard enough to find them new for $18.99. As I said, a dangerous, dangerous place.

I persuaded Greg & Jacob to accompany me to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where I inhaled deeply, hoping to catch the scent of greatness--Stephen Jay Gould, my literary-science hero, used to run the place. We examined Harvard's enormous collection of bizarre mineral specimens, then ducked into the wings where the animals are kept. Skins and bones of all sorts are mounted for viewing: one of the world's few dodo skeletons (a composite of bones from multiple individuals), a coelacanth floating in preservative, case after case of birds (arranged by family, their plumage often faded with age), and in the gallery at the back, just as I remembered them, three enormous skeletons that stretch the length of the room. Fifty feet, easy. Two of them with what appears to be dark brown hair at one end.

If you've read The Verb, you may recall the section that discusses my first encounter with these particular skeletons, so I hope I'm not spoiling anyone's fun by revealing that the skeletons are those of whales--a right whale, a fin whale, and a sperm whale--and that the "hair" on the former two is really the baleen attached to the inside of their jaws. Actually, according to one docent, only the fin whale still has its original baleen, which is looking a mite old and ragged; the right whale's mouth is full of substitute dentition, and in this case, it's made of horse hair.

Greg was mightily impressed with the simplicity of the museum--"No flashing lights," as he put it. Just exhibits, which are intriguing in themselves, if you know what they're all about. And let's face it, a life-size Bengal tiger makes an impression, though in some ways I think the most impressive stuffed animal was the flying fox that hung in one case, wings fully extended to their span of around four and a half feet.

We ate like kings the whole time--scrod (fresh but bland) on Friday night, superb lemon pepper shrimp/moo shu pork/beef chow fun on Saturday (we ate family style), delicious crusty bagels (buzzsawed in half right before our eyes!) for Sunday brunch, and Thai "drunken noodles" with chicken for Sunday dinner. And a little Coffee Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz as a treat for Sunday dessert. Yum!

The guys didn't win any trophies or titles, alas--Jacob was nominated by the judges in every session, but couldn't garner enough votes to make the semifinal session, and though Palmer went 3-2, he was eliminated by one of the eventual final 32 debaters. But still, they did me proud. It's safe to say that each is among the top 100 speakers in his event, and it's my privilege to have worked with them. And better still, Jacob will be back at WFS next year, trying to arrange another trip to finals for us. Next year they're in Milwaukee. I wonder who the Brewers are playing...

5:17 AM