Double your pleasure; double your fun!

The Red Sox have won. That doubles the number of their championships in the twenty-first century, and rates a double Li'l Macduff.

As an update to my last post, Twiff (Li'l Macduff's dad) rises to the bait I plunked in front of him and says the only good thing about pitchers batting is getting to see them run with their jackets on. I agree, it's amusing. But I've stated one aesthetic reason for hating the DH rule. I'll now advance another: symmetry. Every player should contribute to both offense and defense.

Li'l Macduff keeps smiling.

OK, daddy Twiff. Tell me you still think it's stupid for pitchers to bat. Dice-K proves that even AL hurlers can get that oh-so-important hit.

Ellsbury and Pedroia continue to amaze.

Please, don't anybody mention the 2004 ALCS as precedent for a comeback from an 0-3 deficit.

Farewell to BCS dreams.

USF Bulls out of it with two losses, today's to Connecticut. Probably out of the picture for Big East title. How could things go so bad so fast? Yeah, I know, Cinderella teams ...

Florida loses to ur-rival Georgia for the first time in some years. Urban Meyer may not yet be scanning Monster.com, but his tailor may get some business.

Just about everything else is depressing, especially Ohio State over the Nittany Lions.

Could I learn to love the Jayhawks?

Jeez, Louise,

... here we thought OTBKB was a family-friendly blog.

That being said, Risa Mickenberg, of this group, has to be the most delightfully salacious female vocalist since Sippie Wallace. Having listened to one of their songs (guess which), I may never be able to cross from the Hutch to the Merritt with a straight face again.

This baby's frown muscles may atrophy.

Sox take Game 2, this time a 2-1 squeaker. Probably good for their karma. Schilling, Okajima and Papelbon take care of business on the mound, while Lowell and Varitek provide the only needed RBIs. Off to mile-high land with a 2-0 lead.

Sox win Game One.

It's a 13-1 blowout. My wife will consider this a bad omen, given her oft-expressed belief that the Sox only do well when they start badly. To which I offer the counter-example of their having won game one of the ALCS, then lost the next three before rebounding. In any event, Twiff's and Seph's li'l MacDuff is happy.

Moon over Brooklyn Bridge

Some thoughts on order and normalcy.

Proof that college football teams are not elements of a well-ordered set:

October 6, 2007: LSU 28 - Florida 24
October 13, 2007: Kentucky 43 - LSU 37
October 20, 2007: Florida 45 - Kentucky 37

Pete Thamel, in the New York Times, has some interesting observations about "normalcy," which he sees as returning after a weekend in which only three top ten teams were upset (my beloved South Florida by Rutgers, Spurrier's South Carolina by lowly Vandy, and Kentucky by Florida, which would have been an easy favorite three weeks ago - see above). Perhaps the most dispiriting comment in his piece, for me, is this: "But nothing could signal a return to normalcy more than Ohio State and Michigan on a collision course to play for the Big Ten title." Spare us.

Thamel also reflects a bit on polls. I predicted South Florida would fall from the top ten after losing to Rutgers, despite other teams having kept top ten rankings after a single loss. Indeed, the Bulls fell to eleventh in the AP and twelfth in the USA Today poll; however, they are fifth in the aggregate of computer polls used by the BCS. Thamel points out that two of USF's victories (over Auburn and West Virginia) are more impressive than any of Southern Cal's, while the Bulls' loss on the road to Rutgers is less embarrassing than the Trojans' drubbing at home by Stanford. Nevertheless, USC is now ahead of USF in the "human" polls, while the reverse obtains in the computer rankings. That human voters are biased toward the familiar is Thamel's unsurprising conclusion.

Garden Charade

Without words, how could we tell?
With gestures we led, were led,
down the path, while our eyes spoke
in phrases fleeting as firefly flashes.
We did not dare to touch,
so could not grasp the answer.
No matter: there was no Sphinx
there by the gate.
Some riddles best remain unanswered.

The Sox win the pennant!

A spectacular comeback, sparked in game seven by the unlikely heroes Dustin Pedroia and Jacoby Ellsbury. The Sox also caught two pieces of good luck: Lofton called out in a close play at second after a great throw by Manny Ramirez, and the Indians' third base coach holding Lofton at third on a hit that caromed off the fence and which Manny could not have thrown in time for a play at home.

Twiffer's baby continues to smile.

Red Sox tie ALCS.

Schilling comes through in the clutch, and Drew sparks an offense that produced twelve runs. It's do or die for both teams tomorrow.

And it's at Fenway. Twiffer's baby is still smiling!

The curse of Exit Nine: USF falls to Rutgers.

Or is it just the curse of being ranked second?

I really thought it would be Cincy that did them in. Oh, well. A BCS appearance is still very much in reach.

Sox live!

Viva Beckett! Viva Youkilis! They've done it before; they can do it again. Schilling and Dice-K await their turns for glory.

Don't make me a liar, lads.

Update: Twiffer, as expected, comes up with the most eloquent case for Red Sox victory.

For classical piano fans.

A couple of days ago, I got a comment on an earlier post from Nadya, a classical pianist in Rio de Janeiro. She has a blog, Nadya, Musica e Outras Artes, which features superb videos of various pianists performing works by Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Scarlatti and others. The text is in Portuguese, but you don't need to read it (you could try your hand at Babel Fish) to enjoy the music.

Obrigado, Nadya!

Update: Here's Nadya's own composition, "Obsessao". played on two pianos (one presumably played by Nadya):



this is from Nadya's own YouTube channel, nadyarteira.

Sox are slipping.

Since the Mets crashed and burned, and I declared my fealty to Red Sox Nation, at least for the duration of this post-season, the lads from Beantown made short work of Los Angeles de Anaheim, but now seem to have hit a speed bump in Cleveland.

My sweetie, a lifelong Fenway fanatic, was actually pleased by their loss on Saturday. She says that it's always better for them to lose early in a season or series; if they start too strong, they inevitably fade at the end. Last night she was less complacent. Tonight, I'm praying for an early Sox lead, followed by a swarm of gnats.

Update: Rats! No gnats. No early score by Sox (but plenty by Tribe). All I can do is force myself to think, "Remember the 2004 ALCS, down 0-3 ... ."

Holy cow! Bulls are ranked second in AP.

Two more huge upsets - Kentucky over LSU and the Beavers over the Dirty Golden Bear - cleared the way. South Florida's shellacking of eighty-miles-up-Interstate-4 rivals Central Florida (a little voice in my head suggests that running the score to 64-12 is bad for the Bulls' karma), along with Boston College's less calamitous victory over floundering Notre Dame (I never anticipated using those words together), convinced the sportswriters that USF should advance to the penultimate position (eleven of them voted the Bulls number one). The coaches who vote in the USA Today poll were, perhaps understandably, less impressed, making the Eagles second and the Bulls third.

The Fighting Illini fell to Iowa and from the top 25 in both polls, so ex-Gator coach Ron Zook goes from cheers to catcalls in Champaign.

For you poll hounds, they're here.

Mark Crawford: a conversation with the artist.

All images on this post are © 2007 by Mark Crawford and are posted here with his permission.


“I’m not an angry person,” Mark Crawford said, his pleasantly modulated voice revealing his Midwestern origin. He was responding to my observation that the untitled painting shown above seemed to me a visual expression of ire. Looking at that painting again, I saw that my eye had first been caught by the slashes of red and their contrast with the dark ground on which they are arranged, but had not focused on the broad swaths of white that overlay them, some with descending rivulets that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”*

Complex, and energetic; we could agree on that. Energy also suffused a smaller painting, called Game Machine, that hung on the wall of Mark's studio to the left of the untitled painting (see image below).


With an eruption of light shading to dark green spreading across a red ground, and with traces of white, it brought to my mind the Dylan Thomas poem, "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower."

The painting that hung below Game Machine, titled Success in College (see below), has a quieter dynamism, expressed through subtle variations of tone and texture.


Garden Charade, seen below, is, as its name suggests, playful, but its ground of magenta shading into deep purple suggests an undertow of romantic passion.


There is a yin as well as a yang to Mark’s art. Much of his work, including the paintings shown above, is within the abstract expressionist canon, although these works also seem suffused with the introspective quality of a Vuillard or Bonnard. However, in my visit to his studio, I saw other works that exemplified a different, more formal non-representational tradition. The most prominent of these was a large canvas on which was a lattice of green tendrils intertwined with yellow, on a field of white (see below), titled Living Uneasily. I said this reminded me of Islamic art. He said he had spent some time in the Middle East, where he traveled in Turkey and Egypt, and wouldn’t be surprised if that had affected his work.


A native of Chicago, Mark studied at that city’s renowned Art Institute, from which he received a Bachelor in Fine Arts. He later did graduate study at Yale, leading to an M.F.A., and after that moved to New York City. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Brooklyn Heights.

Update: You can find images of Mark's recent works on his blog here.

*The Merchant of Venice, IV, i.

Upset-o-rama continues.

Oh, it's beer, beer, beer,
That makes you wanna cheer,
On the Farm, on the Farm!
Oh it's beer, beer, beer,
that makes you wanna cheer,
On the Leland Stanford Junior Farm.

No doubt many a keg was tapped in Palo Alto this past Saturday night. The last time I can recall Stanford beating USC was in the fall of 1970 (they must have won at least one during the Elway era, but I can't remember). I was visiting a friend in San Francisco, and on Saturday afternoon we were doing a winery tour of Napa. On the road from one tasting to the next, we were listening to the game on the car radio, and Bruce was, to my surprise, rooting for his law school alma mater, Stanford, instead of his undergrad school, Southern Cal. By the time the final score was announced, we'd hit four or five wineries, and had enough of a buzz on to each let out a good yelp. Of course, that year Stanford had a QB named Jim Plunkett, and may even have been favored going into the game. This year, however, the Cardinal were a 41 point underdog, so this goes down as the big upset no one expected.

Other upsets included South Carolina over Kentucky, though beating the Wildcats is old hat for Spurrier, and Tennessee over Georgia, with the twice beaten Vols having fallen from the ranking and the twelfth ranked Dawgs having lost only one. but the other big surprise upset has to be once beaten but unranked Illinois over Wisconsin, previously unbeaten and ranked fifth. Thus have the Fighting Illini vaulted to eighteenth in the AP poll, one ahead of the Badgers, and ex-Gator coach Ron Zook has gone from groans in Gainesville to cheers in Champaign.

Then there was the big upset that didn't happen, the Gators' loss to LSU in the Swamp. In this crazy season, it's still possible to imagine a twice defeated Florida repeating as national champs, especially if they beat LSU on their second try in an SEC championship game.

The other big upset that almost happened involved my alma mater, South Florida. They nearly got toppled from their unprecedented number six ranking by unheralded Florida Atlantic. Despite their unimpressive showing, and with help from the losses by USC and Wisco, the Bulls advanced from sixth to fifth. Inconceivable!.

Aurora, the Goddess of Sparkle

This installation by the artist NATSU was part of Project Glow, in turn part of the Art Under the Bridge festival in DUMBO. As such, she was lit at night, her many prisms producing a multicolored display. But even catching the rays of the early morning sun she was sparkly and enticing (click on the image to enlarge and get the full effect).

Do I have a split personality?

Here's one reason why I like Paul Krugman.

Here's one reason why I like David Brooks.

QE 2 back in New York.

I thought my eyes deceived me when I looked across from Pier 17 at South Street Seaport to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal this afternoon, but Tom Turner of NYCMaritime confirms that it really was Queen Elizabeth 2.

Update: On my morning run on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, I saw QE 2 still at her berth. I got this photo of her, along with the masts of the German naval training barque Gorch Fock, through the fog.

A missing link found.

This one, Cerasinops hodgskissi, is between American and Asian dinosaurs.

This blog takes a detour.

As I predicted two days ago (yeah, Maine's great pitching and the offensive explosion yesterday had me hoping I might get a chance to eat my words), the Mets are goners. So, for reasons I've alluded to before, this blog is now, for the duration of their survival in the playoffs, joining Red Sox Nation.

Sorry, Rundeep , sweetie-pie though you are. If I weren't married to a Bay Stater, I'd be backing the Phils. After all, I'm a Pennsylvania native, and they play in the Real Baseball League.

10/1 update: Topazz has the same fatalistic view about the Phils that I had about the Mets, and predicts their collapse. She also reminisces about Lenny Dykstra, which brings to my mind the rueful thought: How could the Mets have traded him for Juan Samuel?

USA Today poll out: USF cracks top ten.

The just-released USA Today coaches' poll reflects the many upsets of top ten teams this weekend. Southern Cal, which survived a scare but proved that, this time at least, Trojans don't burst under pressure, stays at number one, and LSU remains ranked second. Florida once again succumbed to their nemesis, Auburn, and fell from third to seventh. Losing to Auburn wasn't fatal to the Gators' drive to the national championship last year, but this year's squad looks unlikely to repeat. An impressive win over Oregon vaults the Dirty Golden Bear to third and makes Cal look like a national title contender for the first time in many years. Formerly fourth ranked Oklahoma, trampled by the Buffs, sinks to tenth. West Virginia falls from fifth to twelfth after losing to South Florida, which vaults from eighteenth to ninth, marking the Bulls' maiden appearance in the top ten of a major poll. Ohio State and Wisconsin, both still unbeaten, rise from eighth and ninth to fourth and fifth, respectively. Boston College cracks the top ten, advancing from eleventh to sixth despite a relatively narrow win over lightweight U. Mass. Finally, Kentucky advances from fifteenth to eighth, making its first top ten showing perhaps since the days of Babe Parrilli (some Wildcat fan correct me if I'm wrong).

Update: The AP poll is out now, and LSU is rated number one, Southern Cal second. South Florida makes it to sixth, and the Gators drop to ninth. The B.C. Eagles come in seventh, and all else is the same as in the USA today poll.

DUMBO Saturday morning.

DUMBO is an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass." It's a section of Brooklyn lying next to the East River, from just north of the Brooklyn Bridge to just north of the Manhattan Bridge, both of which are elevated above it. It was primarily industrial, including some outstanding nineteenth and early twentieth century factory and warehouse buildings. Many of these have been converted to residential use and to artists' studios. This weekend, DUMBO is the site of the eleventh annual Art Under the Bridge Festival, which I've described here.

Almondine is reputed to make the best baguettes west of Brest. We love them, along with their delicious almond and chocolate croissants.

The bitter and the sweet: Mets are done; USF Bulls prevail.

Mets blow it. Stick a fork in 'em, they're done. For the remainder of this season, and post-season, I have my choice of rooting for the Red Sox (my wife's choice, but they had their longed for championship a few years ago), the Phillies (from my native state, and perennial losers, which always draws my sympathy), or the Cubs (who haven't won a championship since the administration of William Howard Taft).

So much for baseball. On the college football front, my alma mater, South Florida, continues to amaze everyone, including me. Their upset of fifth ranked West Virginia may get them into the top ten. As a confirmed pessimist in sporting matters, I look for something down the road to derail them. Sort-of archrival Central Florida comes up in a couple of weeks, then there's Rutgers in New Brunswick. Stay tuned.

9/29 baseball update: A bit of pillow talk this morning resolves the issue for me: I will root for the Sox as long as they're in it. Meanwhile, Archaeopteryx, a lifelong Cards fan, declares for the Cubs.

9/29 football update: The Gray Lady's sports scribes just have to rain on the Bulls' parade. The teaser on page one of today's sports section says: "In ugly game, South Florida topples No. 5, West Virginia." The article, by Ray Glier, on page six, nowhere uses the word "ugly." It does say USF committed four turnovers, and was on the short end of the total yardage and time of possession stats. It also points out that the Mountaineers coughed up the ball through fumbles or interceptions six times. So the game was "ugly" if you consider rock-em sock-em DEE-fense ugly, or, I suppose, if you're upset by seeing an unfamiliar team gate-crashing a gathering of college football's elite

I often disagree with Mike Celizic, ...

... but this time I want him to be right.

Visibility limited.

A few mornings ago, heavy fog covered the harbor as this Coast Guard buoy tender lay off the southern tip of Manhattan. The photo was taken from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Whither the South Florida Bulls?

Joey Johnston says they're the real deal, but John Tamanaha plays it safe and predicts a West Virginia victory Friday night.

I've been messin' with the blog.

I decided a long time ago that the links on the right-hand column of the blog had gotten to be a problem. Some were links to outdated URLs, and there were others I had been meaning to add for some time but hadn't gotten around to. Also, they weren't categorized in any sensible way. So, I figured out (at last) how to use the new Blogger tools to create categories, which you'll see if you scroll down. I thought up cutesy names for most categories, but by the time I got to artists, architects and sports, the muse of cuteness had deserted me.

My one big addition is the music section, which I've expanded enormously (and put near the top, for you folks with short attention spans). I've scoured the web for the best links, mostly live performances on YouTube, of some of my favorite musicians and groups. Think of it as my free, electronic video jukebox. I'll warrant everything here terrific, but I'll mention a few that may be unfamiliar to many of you and that I think deserve attention.

The Be Good Tanyas are a three woman group from Vancouver that I fell in love with about a year ago when I got their album Blue Horse. The Littlest Birds is one of the best songs from that album; here it's given a video treatment that includes scenes from pre-Katrina New Orleans.

Black 47 is a traditional Irish hip hop band led by my old drinking buddy Larry Kirwan. I have a link to their official website, which gives you streaming audio of "Funky Ceili," their thrash metal "Danny Boy," and "Downtown Baghdad Blues," as well as news about forthcoming appearances, etc. I also have a link to their video of 40 Shades of Blue, featuring Larry in his pudding-bowl haircut.

I had the pleasure of hearing, and afterwards meeting, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown at Blues Harbor in Atlanta about fifteen years ago. Here he is doing Dollar Got the Blues in Hamburg, Germany in 1983. Gate was home in New Orleans and seriously ill when Katrina hit; she undoubtedly hastened his death. Here's a link to some scenes from his jazz funeral.

The East Village Opera Company does arrangements of operatic arias to rock instrumentation. People who are very invested in how this music should sound are duly offended; others, knowledgeable in the operatic canon, praise them for faithfulness to the composers' intent. Here's their rendition of La Donna e Mobile from Verdi's Rigoletto.

I've long been a fan of the British folk-rock group Fairport Convention, and have included two videos of them on my list. One of these, Time Will Show the Wiser, is a real 1960s period piece (it's from either '67 or '68, depending on whether you believe the caption on YouTube or the graphic on the video itself), and features the band's lineup for their first (eponymous) album, with Ian Macdonald and Judy Dyble on lead vocals (both had left the band before Fairport's second album, What We Did on Our Holiday, was made). The other Fairport video I've linked to is Now Be Thankful, from an outdoor performance in 1970. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good video of Fairport when the late Sandy Denny was their lead singer and pianist. However, I've included her doing a medley of three songs solo, starting with the awesome The North Star Grassman and the Ravens.

Newfoundland's Great Big Sea joined with Ireland's national treasure, the Chieftains, to produce a rousing performance of Lukey. Commentary on YouTube suggests that everyone involved in this video, with the possible exceptions of the schoolgirls and the guy driving the shooting brake, was several sheets to the wind when it was made. Maybe GBS brought a bottle or two of screech with them when they visited Ireland.

Mark Knopfler, best known as one of the founding members of Dire Straits, is a stone guitar genius. About a year ago, I saw something about his collaborating with country songbird Emmylou Harris, and thought this sounded intriguing. Here's a video of the two of them doing a song called This Is Us, in a concert in Brussels. I also have Knopfler jamming with another guitar legend, Eric Clapton, on Dire Straits' original hit, Sultans of Swing.

I wasn't able to find video of Marshall Chapman (see my earlier post on her here) in performance, but I've linked to her official website, Tallgirl.com. If you click on "To order CDs," you can play generous samples from some of her songs (no obligation to go on and buy, but I think you'll be strongly tempted).

Can I ever forgive Delbert McClinton for wearing a Yankee t-shirt (in Austin, no less)?

I'll close with an open-ended question: if Self-Absorbed Boomer was an open source blog, what would you change?