Are my eyes really blue?

The last time Kentucky beat Vandy at home, I wasn’t married. Since I put a ring on it, Vandy has not lost at home to the Blue Mist and has won 6 of the last 8. To have scoreboard on one of the 6 biggest programs in college basketball? PRICELESS. I let Kanye take this one: “Now I, I go for mine, I got to shine, now throw your hands up in the sky…You prolly think you could, but, but I don’t think you should…”
CHEW TOBACCO CHEW TOBACCO SPIT SPIT SPIT, IF YOU AIN’T A COMMODORE…you know 😉

Rain, gray overcast sky but not utterly leaden, varying from a mild sprinkle to a soft steady rain that’s too much for just a ballcap. Another month of so of that and we might be spared water rationing this year, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. The farmer’s market as sparse as you would expect on a rainy February morning – the die-hards with less seasonal goods, like honey or bakery products or coffee, are still there, but there are so many empty spaces normally taken up with vending fruits and vegetables that you can cut across the market in half a dozen extra places. Even the Peruvian coffee has taken a hit from the weather – it’s warm, not hot, out of the big thermos dispenser, and the dark earthy notes are there in the French roast, no milk or sugar needed here to bring out the flavor.

Seems like the usual rainbow panoply of white-people performance outerwear and university sweatshirts has been replaced with almost entirely black rain shells and hoods. Not that the crowd is huge – maybe the least I’ve ever seen, a few people picking up the weekly greengrocery or just shuffling through the rain because this is where you go and what you do on a Sunday morning. Coffee, maybe a cheese pastry, describing a slow circle around what’s normally the Caltrain taxi parking – this is the Silicon Valley version of the yuppie Mass.

The guy with the Tupperware full of cut-up Asian pears doesn’t really have his heart in it but offers the free samples to passerby anyway. Under the awning of the coffee booth, a woman with a first-generation iPhone touts its superiority to her companion’s Blackberry 7100 by showing the vendor the weather in Indianapolis. After a few moments, you notice that there’s no musician this week. In fact, it’s so sparse that one of the booth tents has nothing under it but plastic chairs and table, ideal for ducking out of the rain. Except that they’re all soaking wet.

This week is a short run, barely over ten minutes. In the height of the long California summer, this is a half hour easily, wandering around, grazing off a dozen different farms, picking up fresh cheese and maple-sweet-potato sausage and very tasty limeade that costs more than the equivalent size bottle of wine. But the brief Mediterranean winter of the Bay Area is hanging on, trying to assert itself despite the fact that spring effectively started a couple of weeks ago, and so we’re all getting rained on, and mostly without complain, because we know in August when everything is brown and you can’t shower for more than three minutes a day, we’ll wish we’d had more.

Back on the light rail. Today was so quick that you could be back on your couch with your coffee before it’s gone cold.

I can’t believe it’s twenty years today since we gave a girl a cactus with a black ribbon around it for Valentine’s Day.

I remember it like it was yesterday… “What is THIS?” “We just wanted to share our true feelings about Valentine’s Day with you.” “This is a CACTUS!” “Nothing gets by you, does it?”

I’m pretty sure I got slapped…

The older I get, the better I was. If things hadn’t gone differently, I would have Rahm’s job, and with ten full fingers to boot. Nevertheless, I’m going to say what I would have said given the opportunity, so listen up, Prez…

Continue reading “Look, this isn’t hard to figure out”

So I’m sitting at O’Flaherty’s tonight, which I sort of intended to make a regular first-Sunday-of-the-month stop. I even had my routine planned: bring the Economist to read, try a different single-malt Scotch for my single-malt diary (yes, keeping one now), have something different for dinner until I find what I like and settle on it, listen to Irish music of the instrumental type with fiddles and hammer dulcimers and pipes and things…

Then tonight, they rang a bell behind the bar and one of the waitresses sang something I don’t remember ever hearing before. Then she passed out songsheets for “There’s No One As Irish As Barack O’Bama” (you have to love the Irish, they’d claim the Maccabees if they could throw an apostrophe in there and prove one drop of Irish blood). And I was all set to settle up and catch the light rail….

…and then they rang the bell again and she started singing the Fields.

You know. The Anthem. The fight song of Celtic FC, Muenster rugby and the EUS. And I sang along, full voice, didn’t miss a note and threw in a surprisingly loud “HEY BABY LET YOUR FREEBIRDS FLY” where appropriate.

Afterwards, an old fella at the bar wanted to know if I was actually from “the Holy Land,” as he said. Turns out he was Mr. Ray O’Flaherty, the proprietor of said establishment. And that the music is much more rambunctious of a Tuesday night and I should come out.

Early birthday present?

How can anyone possibly think otherwise?

Before I was a computer nursemaid, I was a scholar. And for the scholar, the indispensable sidearm is the pen. I think it was around third grade that we were first expected to start writing in pen, maybe a bit later – but significantly, my elementary school years were in the salad days of the “eraseable” pen, which was in every meaningful way not “eraseable” so much as “smearable.” And the ink stank to high heaven…

Anyway, by the time I started in on actual indelible adult pens, it was roughly 1984-85, and I gravitated quickly to the Faber-Castell Uni-Ball Micro, which was a 0.2mm rollerball disposable. The finer the point, the better, as far as I was concerned – any mechanical pencil over 0.5mm lead was hopelessly thick, and when I finally drifted away from the Uni-Ball Micro, it took something special. The problem I had with the Uni-Ball is that it was a bit too fine – and tended to do more scratching than writing on the sorts of paper I was using.

The other significant thing in seventh grade was the problem of carrying the pen. Like most kids my age, I didn’t really have anything I had to have with me, although I did carry a wallet full of a whole bunch of nothing (least of all cash). For some reason, though, the boys at Bragg Jr. High carried pens in the right hip pocket next to the wallet. So I did too…and twenty-five years on, I haven’t stopped. This will be important later on. But it’s from that era that you can date one of my personal quirks: I would sooner go out without pants and drawers than without a pen and a watch.

My first year of high school, an acquaintance who was in college already (and who would eventually become a fraternity brother, but that’s another story) gave me a Pilot Precise V5, which wrote smooth and clean on almost any paper I touched it to. It took careful handling, because of the little straight metal tip (easily bent), but the Precise V5 carried me through the Great Years and all the way into college. At some point, I discovered the Pilot VBall Extra Fine – another 0.5mm rollerball, but with a tip more like the Uni-Ball. And that became THE indispensable pen – shorter than the Precise or the Uni-Ball, the perfect length and balance and ink-flow. It was my go-to pen for over a decade, even when I had to skulk through multiple college bookstores and office supply retailers to find it.

I tried other things, off and on. The Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen was something I came back to every couple of years, tried, and rejected almost as quickly. I bought a nice refillable Waterman when I got to Vandy, which could take roller or ballpoint refills, but lost it before I left. Around 2000, I found the Cross ION, which was a one-handed retractable pen with fancy gel ink – but it was too short and thick and didn’t carry at all in the hip pocket. Eventually I always fell back on the VBall.

When I got to California, though, I found that the bulk of my writing – especially at work – called for writing on cardboard boxes and FedEx labels and such, in ways that a rollerball pen simply couldn’t handle. The ultimate solution was a Fisher Retractable Space Pen – pressurized thixotropic ink, write on anything at any angle. Sure, the ink was a little goopy and it was nowhere as smooth or fluid as a rollerball, but it could be opened and closed in one hand. This was an advantage over the space pen I bought at NGS – which was laser-engraved and very nice to look at but not that great as a daily sidearm. But the Fisher worked nicely for the first couple of years. It’s not that great if you have to write on a daily basis, though, and when I went to driving a desk full-time in mid-2006, I needed something else. And I cast about for over a year.

I hadn’t gone for gel pens in the past – they were too scratchy and never seemed to deposit ink in anything like an even manner. But after a little poking around and a lot of impressive comments on line, I went for the Pilot G2, the generally-acepted gold standard of retractable gel pens. The catch was that I ordered it online in the “ultra-fine” spec, the 0.38mm, leading to my remark, “We need to get down to HUNDREDTHS of a millimeter? We can get down to hundredths of a millimeter??” But amazingly, in this finest of points, the G2 wrote smoother and cleaner for me than any of the larger point sizes, and it became my go-to, despite being a retractable pen in my hip pocket. So far, however, I haven’t had an issue with sudden splotches of black in the 501s.

And that’s where we have it today. They actually have the 0.5mm in the supply closet at work, and I’ve tried it, but it just doesn’t work as well for me. Fortunately, the 0.38mm now shows up at Walgreens, so when my last one from that first box goes away, I can replenish my supply without the hassle and inconvenience of special orders from Japan or having an account at jetpens.com.

There you go – 900+ words on pens. Does that make me some kind of annoying hipster blogger?

…and a smoking gun.
New RNC chair Michael Steele: “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.”
Maybe this fool would like to explain where my paycheck was coming from for all of 2008? I don’t remember the cash fairy waving a wand over my checking account, and if the cash fairy WAS waving a wand over my checking account, why the hell was I driving down to base five days a week?
Memo to my old smoking buddies in DC: it’s looking like you just hired Matt Millen to run your party. I’d turn back if I were you.

…the new guy at 1600 has some quality zingers written for him…

“I am seriously glad to be here tonight at the annual Alfalfa dinner. I know that many you are aware that this dinner began almost one hundred years ago as a way to celebrate the birthday of General Robert E. Lee. If he were here with us tonight, the General would be 202 years old. And very confused.

“Now, this hasn’t been reported yet, but it was actually Rahm’s idea to do the swearing-in ceremony again. Of course, for Rahm, every day is a swearing-in ceremony.

“But don’t believe what you read. Rahm Emanuel is a real sweetheart. No, it’s true. Every week the guy takes a little time away to give back to the community. Just last week he was at a local school, teaching profanity to poor children.

“But these are the kind of negotiations you have to deal with as President. In just the first few weeks, I’ve had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my Blackberry. I finally agreed to limit the number of people who could email me. It’s a very exclusive list. How exclusive? Everyone look at the person sitting on your left’ Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my email address.”

So I have this cousin. Specifically, he is my double second cousin – our grandfathers were brothers who married two sisters. He disputes the notion that he is smarter than me, and I dispute his disputation, largely because:

* He was smart enough to leave our home state for college,

* He was smart enough to go to a Division I institution of fine academic repute, and

* He was clever enough to find and marry HIS lovely blond Catholic girl from far away before the age of 30.

However, he moved back to our home state, while I moved to the Bay Area, so maybe he is onto something.

In any event, he asked for my perspective on going through the “gifted experience,” so if you will indulge me, I’m going to speak about myself in a rather un-humble manner. Again. Sigh. Apologies in advance; content beyond the jump:

Continue reading “So I have this”

I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Super Bowl does for football what St Patricks Day does for Irish pub patrons: drags in a whole bunch of riffraff who only give a crap once a year. And this is speaking as somebody who detests the NFL apart from the Redskins in almost every particular…but then, this is precisely why: they take something that should be a signature contest (like, say, a really big bowl game in the pre-BCS era), something that should rightfully sell itself, and then tart it up with all kinds of fluff and bread and circuses. Not to take a cheap shot, but if you have Meredith Viera and Al Roker broadcasting from your game, the football has ceased to be the point. If you’re watching a sporting event for the advertising? Something has gone very, very wrong.
Here’s a hint: if you drink green beer and think “26,” “6” and “32” are something off Lost, stay home on the 17th. And if somebody has to explain to you what “1st and 10” means, you really shouldn’t be watching the Super Bowl.