Steven Tyler

My girlfriend and I were walking down the street in Chicago near the corner of Oak and Michigan last Saturday night when we saw Steven Tyler, the lead singer from Aerosmith, hanging out in front of one of those bars they probably wouldn't let us in because we're not cool enough. He was just standing there in a leather jacket and jeans, talking to Julie. I know her name is Julie because she said, "Hi, I'm Julie!" to him as we walked past.

This was the first time I had ever seen a really famous person out on the street. When I was 11, I ran into the wrestler Brett "The Hitman" Hart in the Detroit airport. He autographed my boarding pass, the part they keep when you get onto the plane. Sigh. I had always wondered how I would react if I saw someone else famous on the street. I would like to think that I would just leave them alone, or at most say hello, because I feel that they deserve their privacy as much as I do.

We discussed what we would say to him if we felt like going up and introducing ourselves. I thought I could tell him that he hasn't made a good album since Pump. Rebecca thought she would say that she went to the same high school as his daughter Liv, although not at the same time. But we walked past without saying anything.

I Love Harold Bloom

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/
dumbing_down_american_readers/

Legendary stuffed shirt Harold Bloom, who is constantly running around saying that the sky is falling because people read African American literature and Harry Potter, weeps openly because the National Book Foundation gave its distinguished contribution award to novelist Stephen King.

I ordinarily just laugh at people like him, who bemoan the sorry state of literature when the greats like Alexandre Dumas, Shakespeare, or Charles Dickens are forgotten. What he forgets, or perhaps never stopped to consider, is that many of his "great authors" were little more than the pulp novelists that he accuses Stephen King of being. What was Shakespeare writing that wasn't just popular entertainment that appealed to commoners and educated people alike? I'm not saying that King is on par with Shakespeare, but dismissing him as a writer of "penny dreadfuls" is completely missing the point. Think of all the great "penny dreadfuls" history has given us... The Fall of the House of Usher, Frankenstein, etc.

I like what the critic Leslie Fielder said: "Look, let's be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King."

Vacillating on Wesley Clark

At this point, I would accept any Democratic candidate who seems to have a shot at beating Bush. I would even vote for Lieberman or Gephardt, although I wouldn't like it. After reading Michael Moore's impassioned appeal to General Wesley Clark to run for president, I immediately seized on him as yet another possibility to get Resident Bush out of the White House in 2004. I like Howard Dean, mostly, and now I like Wesley Clark, mostly. However, there have been some allegations made about him that make me wonder if he's the right guy for the job. Anybody but Bush, of course, but it would be nice to not have to settle for just a lesser evil.

Specifically, the allegations revolve around his handling of a certain situation that occurred during the NATO operations in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. Apparently, Clark, who was the head of the NATO operation there, ordered British troops to block Russian troops from landing at Kosovo's Pristina Airport, a move that, in the words of the British commander who refused the order, might have started World War III. Here are some links that mention this story:

http://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000202.html
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/967823.asp?0sl=-22
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3110020.stm

I don't know if this means Clark is a two-faced liar. I doubt it, actually. But it should serve as a word of caution, especially with Clark's much-publicized criticism of Bush's eagerness to use force to settle all international disputes. I'd like to hear more from Clark on the subject. I'm assuming that a long campaign will give him ample opportunities to explain this.

Banned Books Week

http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Our_Association/Offices/Intellectual_Freedom3/
Banned_Books_Week/Banned_Books_Week.htm

It's Banned Books Week from September 20 to the 27th. I guess I'm a little late on the draw here, since it's the 26th and I haven't read a banned book all week.

Looking at their list of the 100 most challenged books of the 1990s, I see that I have read 31 of them. Not bad. Many of them were assignments in high school or college. Heck, I was even present for the attempted banning of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye by a school board member who had never read it.

I'm a big fan of lists of books, which I take as challenges. I am on a quest to read more of the MLA's list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century. I've read 22 of those. Anyway, go read a banned book. Hell, just read a book.

Grammar Lesson

homophone. noun. One of two or more words, such as night and knight, that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, origin, and sometimes spelling.

I am an editor. One of the things that really pisses me off in everyday life is the misuse of homophones. Here are the ones that really get me steamed:

you're: contraction of "you are." "I hear that you're an editor."
your: possessive, means belonging to you. "Take your bad grammar and leave me alone!"

they're: contraction of "they are." "Mom said they're going to repossess the trailer."
their: possessive, meaning belonging to them. "They can take their stupid trailer if they want it."
there: adverb, meaning at a certain location. "They left the trailer over there by the gas station."

site: a location, like a Web site. "Did you visit The Rock's new fan site?"
cite: to quote or mention a source. "The Rock cites John Keats as a major influence."
sight: the ability to see. "His sight was a lot worse after the incident with the broom."

Ice Capades

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2003/writers/darren_eliot/09/23/rules/index.html

Former goalie and current brilliant hockey analyst Darren Eliot examines NHL rule changes that would actually benefit the game.

Every year, fans and sportswriters bemoan the current state of the NHL. Scoring is down, attendance is down, TV ratings are down. Every year, the NHL runs around telling us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, because everything is actually fine. Despite this, they fiddle around with rules in an attempt to increase scoring.

Every year, they say "This year, officials will be cracking down on obstruction, and this time we really mean it!" Every December, things are back to normal, with the neutral zone resembling an NFL line of scrimmage more than a hockey game. This year, they have limited the size of goaltenders' equipment; this is not likely to do any good, since even the goalies with the largest pads (Jean-Sebastian Guigere's monstrosities spring to mind like bloated whales surfacing) claim that they're within the new limits.

In Eliot's article, he takes on five current NHL rules that he thinks could use revision, and I agree with all but his suggestion that players stay in the box on minor penalties. One that I've been complaining about since they changed it is the old "tag up" offsides rule, where a player who doesn't have the puck used to be able to step out of the offensive zone and then rejoin the play. Sure, it makes things harder on the linesmen, but that's their job. Would it increase scoring? I don't know, but it would help the flow of the game and limit the number of times that a player has to hang around the blue line waiting for his teammate to sprint back.

There's no cure for the real problem, which is the over-expansion of the league in the early 1990s. Thirty teams is just too many. There are too many mediocre players out there who clutch and grab because they don't have the skill to do anything else. But there's no way to reduce the number of teams, so the league has to work with what it has. We're still waiting, Mr. Bettman...

Thanks to Shane H. for the link.

A Bittersweet Farewell

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (1997)

In what is probably his final novel, Kurt Vonnegut bids a sad farewell to writing, family members, and his alter ego, Kilgore Trout. Calling it a novel isn't quite accurate, but it's not entirely nonfiction either.

The current "Timequake" book is a result of Vonnegut's failed attempt to write another book called "Timequake," in which a temporal rift causes everything in the universe to jump back ten years, and everybody has to relive the 1990s already knowing what is going to happen but unable to do anything different. Vonnegut tells us in his conversational narration that he was unable to finish it; instead, he worked the remnants into the current book, along with ruminations about life and death, the great changes he's seen in his long life, and whether or not he would curse certain people to come back from Heaven to live on Earth again.

The result is a profoundly sad book, in which Vonnegut describes the lives and deaths of many people close to him, including his mentors, his first wife, and his beloved brother. It's an intensely personal work, and there are times in the narrative when I felt uncomfortable, like I was eavesdropping on a grieving man who would rather be left alone. It must be incredibly lonely to be the only person left out of a vibrant circle of friends and family.

The other half of the book, interspersed with Vonnegut's autobiographical tale, is the story of the aftermath of the timequake that was to have been the subject of the book. The forgotten sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, who pops up in most of Vonneguts previous novels, is living in a homeless shelter when the timequake ends. He is the only person around who realizes that free will has kicked in, and he takes it upon himself to run around and try to wake people from the shock of having to make decisions for themselves again. Meanwhile, civilization nearly topples as billions of people wake up from their stupor to the shock of having to do things like control the cars and buses and trains and airplanes they are piloting.

This is an interesting view of the 1990s, which I'm guessing Vonnegut didn't enjoy all that much. But who could blame him? As he says in the epilogue, "I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anyone to show off for anymore."

In Space, NASA Can See You Scream

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_030922.html

Space.com clears up the misconception that sound doesn't travel in space. It does: we just can't hear it because sound needs a medium to travel through, and there's not enough of a medium in space for the sound to reach our ears (even if we could take those pesky helmets off and give a listen). But there is a medium nonetheless, and it can carry sound.

To be technical about it, NASA didn't hear the B-flat emanating from a black hole; they saw it, or its effects, with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. It was pointed out to me that the sound was at an octave much too low for human ears to hear anyway, so it's good we have things like Chandra floating around doing the work for us.

I edit astrophysics papers all day, but the only interesting astronomy things I read I find on the Internet.

Sigh. I wanted to find a classical music piece in B-flat so I could make some smart comment about, I don't know, Mozart listening to the universe or something, but I couldn't find anything I knew.

Who You Calling Trivial?

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0332/edwinter.php

Somebody buy me this book! Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott sounds like a Trivial Pursuit addict's dream. From charts of cattle brands to Euclidian axioms to Scottish war cries (that sounds especially useful), this seems guaranteed to provide me with hours of enjoyable reading and years of being an annoying dilettant.

"A lot of people don't know that the British government levied a tax on hats around the turn of the 19th century... hey, where are you going?"

Fat Football Players

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088644/

Is it PC to laugh at fat football players? I hope so, because they're funny. One of my favorite parts of watching football (a sport I rarely watch) is seeing a 300-plus man running down the field with his gut flopping out of his jersey. This is an entertaining article about that very phenomenon. Any article that drops Voltron as a cultural reference ("like a fat Voltron") is OK in my book.

I'm a hockey-centric snob, so I can't help but mention that you rarely see a fat hockey player, although there have been a couple of fat goalies.

Under the Sand

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1018588,00.html

This is a Guardian (UK) interview with Charlotte Rampling, the star of two of Francois Ozon's latest films, 2001's mysterious Under the Sand and the recent Swimming Pool, which I have not seen.

It is not often that interviews have the urgency of a good suspense film. In this one, Rampling reveals some pretty amazing secrets about her life that she's kept for over 30 years. This interview casts an entirely new light on Under the Sand, and now I want to watch it again with this new knowledge of how close the film is to Rampling's life.

Reading the Dictionary

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088405/
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary

I am a big nerd, and so are those of you who would find this post interesting. You know who you are.

The first link is to an article about a new edition of Samuel Johnson's (that's Dr. Johnson to you) 1755 opus A Dictionary of the English Language, which I really want to read. Yes, I want to read this dictionary. It's not much good as far as anything one would ordinarily seek in a dictionary. It's not very scientific, and some of the definitions are simply wrong. It is, however, a work of art, and that's why a nerd like myself might be interested in it.

One of the high points of Johnson's dictionary is its use of quotes from classic writers of English to illustrate the use of each word. Another high point is Johnson's own style, which is by turns self-deprecating, whimsical, and highly opinionated (the author of this article points out his definition of "sonnet" as including "It is not very suitable to the English language").

You ask, "If you haven't read the thing, how do you know what you're talking about?" Well, my knowledge comes from The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Combining the research of a classicist with the storytelling skills of a novelist, Winchester describes the strange but true history of the OED. He devotes considerable space to discussions of what previous dictionaries were like, and Johnson's seems to be one of his favorites.

Only a few people in the entire world would be interested in reading Johnson's dictionary, despite the fact that the new version includes just a sampling (3100 instead of the original 42,000) of Johnson's definitions. A lot more people would enjoy Winchester's book.

Maybe Just a Few Children Left Behind

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5374-2003Aug30.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0338/schanberg.php

Bush's No Child Left Behind program was one of the keystones of his campaign. He pointed to the miraculous recovery of Texas schools (Houston being the area cited as the model for the Federal program) while he was governor and said that he would do the same for the US. Well, after some digging, the truth seems to be coming out: it was a big hoax. The 30–40% dropout rates that existed before Texas implemented its program disappeared not because the students starting coming to class and passing their mandated exams, but because the districts simply stopped reporting them as dropouts. Voila! The poorest schools in the city reported dropout rates under 1%, and Bush gets to crow about being the king of education.

These articles detail the would-be scandal (it would be a scandal if the media were really interested in getting at the truth). The first one talks about punishments being meted out to school officials who underreported the dropout rates. The second deals with the scandal more generally, and talks about the problems that plague Bush's national education program.

The End Is Not the End

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=filmNews&storyID=3457577

"Codas" are the short scenes that some movies include after all of the credits roll. I can't decide if the fact that they are appearing in more and more movies is a good thing or a bad thing. I like to be rewarded for staying until the end of the credits out of respect for the filmmakers. However, I hate it when I'm sitting there patiently, watching the key grips and assistant catering consultants roll past, and all of a sudden a scene pops up and the people filing out stop dead in their tracks, right in my line of sight.

There have been great codas, such as the one from Ferris Bueller's Day Off mentioned in the article. My personal favorite is from I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, when Kung Fu Joe drags himself onto the set after everyone has gone home.

However, I predict that codas will become as ubiquitous and as useless as the so-called hidden tracks that seemingly every CD that came out in the 1990s had to have. You know them: they were either extra-long tracks with twelve minutes of blank space leading up to the lead guitarist breaking his guitar, or dozens of three-second-long blank tracks leading up to, well, to the lead guitarist breaking his guitar.

Johnny Cash (1932-2003)

http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2003/09/12/cash_obit/

Salon.com writer Stephanie Zacharek, who my friend Shawn and I call some variation of "Stephanie Zach-I-Hate-All-Movies," eulogizes the Man in Black.

I am a latecomer to the Johnny Cash bandwagon. I didn't listen to him, or even really think about him, until his song "Delia's Gone" showed up on MTV just after high school. Then came his brilliant cover of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage," where he made the angry anthem his own. But it wasn't until the last year or so, when I started playing pool with friends at the Gold Star, a bar in Wicker Park, that I truly came to appreciate him. There was something about his songs echoing through the dim bar, accompanied by the clack of pool balls and the murmur of the regulars holding the bar up, that made them hit home.

New Way to Endure Bad Movies

http://ericdsnider.com/view.php?srkey=384

Eric Snider is a movie reviewer whose reviews I was just recently made aware of. He's smart and funny, and he has the best suggestion yet about how to make it through terrible movies without falling asleep: wish for the characters to be eaten by sharks. When I read this article, I nearly hurt myself laughing.

Worst Jobs in Science

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,484153-1,00.html

If I had some of these jobs, I think I'd kill myself. Or at least I'd be stuck in an existential funk from which I could never escape.

My favorite one is #17, the Planetary Protection Officer: "Should the life he can't detect escape and wreak a plague upon humanity, we'll blame him."

What I want to know is why astronomy journals editor was left off the list. There just might be more job satisfaction in smelling farts or advocating the metric system.

Ice Time

Ice Time by Jay Atkinson (2002)

In this enjoyable read, writer Jay Atkinson, an avid hockey player, goes back to his high school to volunteer as a coach and write about his alma mater's quest for the state championship. Along the way, he presents the story of his beloved hometown, Methuen (Me-too-un), Massachusetts; his relationship with his 5-year-old son Liam, who is just beginning to learn to love the game; and his own lifelong obsession with ice hockey, from his worship of Bobby Orr as a child to his unwillingness to give up late-night scrimmages against other aging players despite years of injuries, distractions, and disappointments.

Atkinson was given the run of the school. Along with his coaching duties, he attends art classes, works out with the gym class, and intervenes on behalf of troubled players with their teachers and the principal. He becomes a de facto parent to some kids, and a locker room buddy to others. Like any teenagers, the players are at first suspicious of him, but they seem to see something in him — the father figure, the likeable coach, whatever — that makes them open up to him.

Much of the focus of the book is on the exploits of a handful of students. There's Chris Cagliuso, the flashy winger whose unrequited love for a girl named Emily reminds Atkinson of his high school years. There's Dan Bonfiglio (Good Son), the talented goalie whose new pacemaker made him lose the confidence that allowed him to excel the year before. There's Ryan Fontaine, the great skater who lacks discipline, reminding Atkinson of the way his junior coaches rode him mercilessly.

In fact, it's not completely accurate to say that the book is about this year's team and their quest for the championship. It's about Jay Atkinson and his attempt to, if not relive his glory years, at least to instill in this group of kids his reverence for the glory years of high school hockey. He sees himself in these kids. They are pretty talented players who, nonetheless, will probably never play for a college team or the minor leagues or the NHL. He isn't trying to prepare them for that disappointment; he's trying to help them love the game enough that it will always be a part of their lives, regardless of the setting.

At times, it gets a little too Norman Rockwell. There is considerable space devoted to "how the game has changed," which is code for "things were more innocent and better in my day." Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I bet Atkinson's rosy memories of his childhood triumphs probably leave out a lot of detail. For the most part, though, it's a good examination of why people can come to love a game so much that they will endure injuries, 5:00 am practices, late nights, smelly locker rooms, and more disappointments than successes.

Atkinson sees hockey as a way to teach respect, camaraderie, and a strong work ethic, along with just about every other good old American value you hear bandied about in op-eds and on talk shows. While he might go a little far sometimes, in essence the book is about all the things he has made hockey mean to him.

(The user comments on Amazon.com [click on the title above] are especially enjoyable: some of them come from people mentioned in the book.)

My Bodyguard

http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/6752227.htm

Kid gets beaten up by schoolyard bullies; school district hires bodyguard.

I have never seen Tony Bill's 1980 directing debut My Bodyguard. Should I? It starred Chris Makepeace (ironic name, given the subject of the film) as the new kid, Matt Dillon as the thug extorting lunch money, and Adam Baldwin (no relation to the Famous Baldwins) as the titular bodyguard. Matt Dillon, for one, seems perfectly cast. He might still steal lunch money, for all we know.

Slow Walkers

I hate Slow Walkers. You know the people I mean. I'm walking down the sidewalk on the way to catch the train home. Ahead of me are the Slow Walkers. They walk two, maybe three abreast, and they are walking entirely too slowly.

Some people walk slowly because they have short legs or they had surgery recently or they are old. But not the Slow Walkers. They walk slowly out of some sense of entitlement, some feeling that they deserve to take up as much space as everybody else——but for a longer period of time.

They weave in front of me like football safetys. I try to get around them by making a dash around a parking meter, but they anticipate the move, and they're there when I attempt to merge back onto the sidewalk. I see an opening on the left side of the sidewalk where there's no oncoming foot traffic, but as soon as I speed up, the Slow Walkers spread out to fill up the space. Do they hear my footsteps? Do they have some Spidey sense that enables them to anticipate my every move? Can they manipulate time and space in order to seem like they're everywhere at once?

Would it be wrong to shoulder them out of the way?

But eventually I accept my fate. After all, it is only a half-block to the subway entrance, and they will continue on their sluggish, plodding way, leaving me to dash down the stairs in time to catch a train, in order that I don't have to wait three or four minutes until the next one. I am at peace.

Until they turn, agonizingly slowly, to walk down those same stairs. I cannot get around them because of the crowd of people recently disgorged from the last train. Time slows down. I extend my hand in an exaggerated attempt to fend off the inevitable. It is all I can do to keep from kicking them down the stairs.

Of course they walk two abreast down the stairs. Of course they reach the machine where you put money on your transit card before me, and of course they have trouble smoothing out the crumpled dollar bills so the machine accepts them. Of course they clog up the entire final staircase before the train platform. And of course the train doors slam in my face as I sprint the last few feet.

I know you, Slow Walkers. I know you feed on the chorus exhasperated sighs and groans emanating from the poor people stuck behind you on the moving walkway at the airport, where you've plunked your carry-on luggage (which is too big to fit in the overhead compartment anyway) in the middle so nobody can get past. I know your legs are fine; you could walk faster if you wanted to.

Is there a moral of this story? I can't think of one. If I hate the Slow Walkers so much, I could just drive to work. But there are so many Slow Drivers...