Apropos of Nothing

It is the end of the year and I want to memorialize a few things I seem to think of more times than not.

I've  used the following at the beginning of a volume of my postings, but I think it's worth repeating:

"How bad can the year have been if you're alive at the end of it?"

Just something to think about as the calendar year changes.

----------------------------------------------------        

Another is one I just uttered to an elderly fellow at the cash register at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont where I was buying a Warren Kimble Calendar for the coming year.

As he was looking it over, flipping back and forth, I just said:

"How high do the numbers go?" He didn't pick up the reference at first, but then he realized I was asking how high will the year numbers go? We were already significantly past the year 2000 when I was buying the calendar.

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Ping-Pong and the YMCA

Marty Reisman

You might be forgiven if at this point you haven't fully heard about a new movie that's out starring Timothée Chalamet in "Marty Supreme" about a New York City, 1950s, Jewish ping-pong player who won several championships at the time and was considered the world's best.

The movie is based on what was the life of a larger than life player/hustler named Marty Reisman. The buzz is building and will soon sound like a short-circuiting power plant. 

Since the movie is based on a deceased Marty Reisman, I had to see what I was assuming would be a NYT obituary I was right. Marty passed away on December 7, 2012, and as soon as I read the obituary I remembered reading it. 

Marty was what would now be described as an old-fashioned player with a handshake grip and a hard paddle, not sponge rubber dimpled like what became in vogue in the 60s. The sponge, dimpled paddle allowed the player to exert spin on the ball that made it dance away from the table after landing in the opponent's end. If it was a pitched baseball, it would be a knuckleball.

Handshake grip and hard paddle is what I played with at the Flushing YMCA, playing the winner of the game in session at the only table there was, and holding onto playing at the table until someone came along and beat me. It happened.

I loved playing ping-pong. Eventually I bought a table and placed it in our basement in Flushing. There was just enough room, hard by the oil storage tank, washing machine, clothes dryer and slop sink that gave at least one player—not playing up against the oil tank—enough room to stand back from the table in order to return volleys. My uncle Vernon and I played nearly every night after dinner for months when he stayed with us. He was good. So was I.

I can still see the table I played on at the YMCA. The net was not of green mesh, but rather was medium gauge string—almost thin rope— strung through the metal side supports, creating a horizontal 5-string net. Think of a miniature clothes line, and you've got it.

Unfortunately, on moving to Nassau County and buying what is a Leavitt home (but not in Levittown proper), I have no basement. William Leavitt built 17,000 homes in Hempstead County after WW II with no cellars, but rather a concrete slab for the foundations.

He wanted all homes to have a 50'x100' plot, but the Town of Hempstead insisted that since it was giving him approval for slab foundations, and therefore saving construction costs, he needed to put homes on a somewhat larger 60'x100' plot. He agreed. And that my children is why no one ever made any money trying to sell ping-pong tables in Levittown. 

Timothée Chalamet is now perhaps the hottest male actor out there. He gained widespread exposure for playing Bob Dylan in an Oscar-nominated performance in "A Complete Unknown." When I started to watch early episodes of "Homeland" recently re-released on NetFlix, (I refuse to say "dropped.") I saw in the credits that Timothée Chalamet was playing the part of the Vice President's teenage son, and a boyfriend of Dana, Sergeant Nicholas Brady's teenage daughter. 

A alert reader pointed out to me, what I was already becoming aware of, that Timothée was going to star in what was expected to be an upcoming blockbuster about someone playing ping-pong! Well, the movie has been released, and it finished a strong second in this weekend's box office receipts, those loved to talk about, but basically meaningless numbers the entertainment reporters love to fill you with on a Monday,

As the buzz has been humming, the same alert reader linked me to a piece written by David Hirshey in March 1981 in The New York Daily News Sunday Magazine section on Marty Reisman, on whom the character Marty Mauser is based. It is beyond an entertaining piece. It is poetic. 

Mr. Hirshey relives his life encounters with Reisman from when he was the Fat Kid getting off the sleep-away camp bus to being an editor at the Daily News, but still with a racket in his hand. The alert reader informs me that David Hirshey was once their editor.

But the point of this posting is not going to end with the discussion of the movie, Timothée Chalamet, or Marty Reisman, but rather on how the New York Yankees hired a private eye to follow players around to see what they were up to in their lives off the ball field.

It might have been after the famous melee with Yankee players at the Copacabana nightclub and a heckler saying crude things about Sammy Davis Jr., but owners Dan Topping and Del Webb were interested in keeping a clean player image for the fans.

As such, one P.I. set out to follow Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek after a game. Now this P.I. obviously didn't know anything about the personalities of Kubek and Richardson. It was like following two Pat Boones. How much trouble did the gumshoe think the pair were going to get into?

Surveillance put the pair of ballplayers playing ping-pong. At a YMCA. 

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Missing the Subway Token

The articles are starting about the soon-to-be disappearance of the MetroCard, that thin piece of plastic that most times—if loaded with enough money—got you a ride on a NYC subway or bus. Of course this happened when you put it the right way and it didn't ask you to do it again because you "swiped" too fast/too slow. Those card readers could be temperamental.

I will forever miss the subway token. Mixed in with my at my change, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies used to be subway tokens. Looking at this mass of metal, I could always tell how many rides I had left by seeing how many tokens there were. Looking at a MetroCard could never tell you what's left on the card. You needed to be near a reader that worked. And of course put the card in the right way.

Or, of course you could get that very much unwanted surprise if you didn't have enough money on the card and got that dreaded message, "Insufficient Funds" as the turnstile then wouldn't spin. There you'd be, stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire as the rest of humanity sailed through the turnstiles, most of the time paying with their adequately loaded cards, or sometimes leaping over or ducking under the turnstile bar. Free works too. Where there's a will there's a way. 

Once upon a time there weren't even subway tokens. The fare from 1904 to 1948 was 5¢, and inserting a nickel into the turnstile box or bus fare box got you your ride.

On July 1, 1948 the fare went to 10¢, and you can well image the outcry then. 100% increase! I'm sure the many newspapers screamed. A dime in the turnstile or the fare box got you your ride.

And then 1953 came. The 10¢ fare was dead and it was now going to cost you 15¢. But the turnstiles were not going to work with a dime and a nickel, or three nickels. The bus fare box might accept two or three coins, and they did. The buses didn't take tokens.

So, how were you going to pay 15¢ to a turnstile that wouldn't take two coins, a dime and a nickel? A token was the answer. The turnstiles were calibrated to accept the newly introduced 15¢ token. You bought the tokens for cash at a token booth, sometimes singularly, or in small bulk quantities if you had enough money to lay out in advance of the current ride. Sometimes banks offered rolls of maybe 10 tokens for sale. 

All fare increases wee accomplished by just charging more for the token, or even introducing new sizes. Eventually, the MetroCard came along and introduced more flexible ways of paying, as well as eliminating the reliance on the chore of handling so much weighty money.

When the system relied on pure cash, the turnstiles had to be drained of the coins, and eventually the tokens. This was labor intensive and accomplished with guards at night. There was such a thing  as late night "bank trains" that ran and stopped at stations and transported the money from the token booths to the counting center in Brooklyn.

Sales of the gradually introduced MetroCards were done at token booths. I'm not sure anyone ever called then MetroCard booths. As MetroCards gained in usage, mostly reliable vending machines could swallow your bills of probably up to a $20 denomination and add money/credit to your MetroCard. I was always impressed when this worked.

MetroCards were initially free in that you got the card for no fee and then added money for the fares. But like anything that was viewed as disposable when empty of money, they were discarded as litter that became  unsightly, as well as another labor intensive job to pick up. Eventually you needed to make a $1 deposit to get a MetroCard that you could add money to. Litter stopped being a problem as people stopped discarding their empty MetroCards and reloaded them for continued use. 

I could tell you I miss the tokens. I do in that I can't see my balance by looking at a MetroCard or my new OMNY (One Metro New York) Tap and Go cards that are fast replacing the MetroCards.

What I miss most were the ancient turnstiles that were at the 15th street entrance to the 14th Street Station BMT line for what is now the N and R trains. (The NEVER and the RARELY.) The 15th Street entrance is almost at 16th street, so it's almost like cheating when you use it in that you're already a block ahead of where you're going.

The entrance of course is still there, but the turnstiles seemed to evade replacing for the longest time. They must have fallen off an inventory list. Because for the longest time as turnstiles modernized everywhere, these behemoths still took your token at eye level with a mighty THUNK of acceptance that then let you turn the turnstile spindle that was one of three MASSIVE smooth blocks of thick, well-worn wood (you could never get a splinter from them) that you spun for entry. Turning that spindle could have been like raising an anchor on a sailing ship. If it wasn't going to cost you more money, you almost wanted to do it again.

When I use that entrance—and it's not often these days—I will forever see those turnstiles and hear that THUNK.

A OMNY Tap and Go will never do that for me.

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Precise Punctuation

Forget about writing about the correct placement of apostrophes. Everybody does that. I'm sure if I plug a find command in the search box with the word "apostrophe" into my body of postings, I'll get a return of more than one posting. Everybody writes about apostrophes.

But what about quotation marks? I think they can be more bedeviling than apostrophes. It's just that the complex examples of them don't come up that often. But when they do, the punctuation is a work of precision placement by the writer or copywriter. In its own way, it is art.

Let's start with the simple quote, one sentence or many, it's the same. Anthony Geary, an actor principally known for his role as Luke on the daytime soap opera "General Hospital" is quoted as saying of his character: 

"He was a grab bag of emotions and directions, a minor icon of anti-heroism in the '80s and in many ways represented a lot of what was bad with the decade."

I learned how to punctuate that kind of simple quote before the 5th grade at P.S. 22 in Flushing.

I didn't learn about the double, imbedded quote until sometime in high school, when I realized what I was seeing in the newspaper.

Let's say that in part of the obituary we have the writer who tells us what someone said of Mr. Geary. It would go something like this. 

Mr. Geary's longtime co-star on "General Hospital", Genie Francis tells us: "Anthony was a cerebral  actor who would tell you his character Luke, 'was a grab bag of emotions and directions, a minor icon of anti-heroism in the '80s and in many ways represented a lot of what was bad with the decade.'"   

Look carefully. The double stroke quote marks encapsulate the entire narrative, which is Genie Francis telling us a description of Anthony and then adding what Anthony Geary himself said of his character Luke. Mr. Geary's remarks are enclosed in single stroke quotes, and since his quote closes the narrative, the single stroke mark is before the closing double stroke mark. That's fairly advanced stuff, but not too hard to understand.

What is confounding is the triple quote, a need to embed a quote within a quote,  I don't think I was aware of how to punctuate that one until my mid-60s.

The New York Times obit writer, Sopan Deb, navigates these rapids flawlessly when he tells us what Mr. Geary said of a disappointment in not getting a desired film role:

"It was hurtful at the time, but I understand that if you're doing a big film, for the five seconds or less that someone goes, 'Isn't that that guy on "General Hospital"?'—they're out of the movie."

Notice that "General Hospital" in within double stroke quotes, and ends with the necessary question mark that is then followed by the single stroke quote to denote what Mr. Geary is imagining what an audience member might be saying upon seeing him in a big time movie. He didn't get the part because he was too closely identified with "General Hospital" and that he would be considered a distraction in the movie.

Write about Presidents' Day all you want. You're nobody until you master triple quote punctuation.

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Precision Springs

I don't think I ever read an obituary where the subject did as many things as Arthur L. Carter. I'm not sure why "polymath" didn't work it's way into the obituary, but maybe that noun is not appropriate for someone who starts as many businesses as Mr. Carter.

Living till 93 and apparently still possessing all your marbles, does give you lots of time to keep going with your ideas, and Mr. Carter's ideas were varied.

Mr. Carter started out like all of us: he was born. And what better place to be born than Manhattan, with deep Jewish parental roots. The New York Times obit writer, Sam Roberts, will always tell us of Jewish immigrant roots if they're there. In Mr. Carter' case, the roots were from Hungary.

After high school, Mr. Carter briefly attended Julliard and studied with Rudolf Serkin, with the goal of becoming a concert pianist.

Perhaps it was the rather low pay of concert pianists, but Mr. Carter joined the Coast Guard and served two years commanding a patrol boat in New York harbor.

Trying to become a concert pianist gave way on his discharge from the Coast Guard to joining his next-door Woodmere, Long Island neighbor, Sanford I. Weil at Lehman Brothers. (Yes, that Sanford Weil, Sandy.) From there, he started his first business with Mr. Weil and Mr. Berlind in a struggling, but ultimately hugely successful banking and brokerage firm.

Cashing out of that firm is when all the fun really begins. The New York Times obituary headline tells us Mr. Carter was "the Founder of a Cheeky Newspaper."

That "cheeky Newspaper" was The Observer, printed on a salmon-hued paper that gave it a very distinctive look.  But before that, Mr. Carter's media obsession had him starting The Litchfield County Times, a weekly newspaper covering northwest Connecticut where he owned a 1,400-acre dairy farm. (The number of cows is not disclosed.)

Mr. Carter than acquired a majority stake in The Nation in 1985, a magazine that he hoped would advance his liberal leanings. Mr. Carter lost significant money with The Nation and sold it in 1995 to its editor Victor Navasky.

Concurrently with producing The Nation, Mr. Carter founded The New York Observer, an upscale Manhattan Weekly newspaper that Mr. Carter delighted in using to skewer his friends and foes alike.

In 2016 with models of his sculptures

In his 60s, Mr. Carter used his childhood interest in geometry and sketching to create sculptures using bronze, stainless steel and copper, putting the welding skills he learned in the Coast Guard to work. Pieces were exhibited in various spots in Manhattan.

Mr. Roberts tells us in the obit, "through his private-equity holding company, Utilities & Industries Corporation, Mr. Carter had stakes in scores of companies involved in printing, shipping, water utilities, shopping centers, real estate, banking, meat packing, music publishing and precision springs." (If there was an appearance on Shark Tank, it goes unmentioned.)

The obit had me at precision springs. Anyone who did all that and had a hand in producing precision springs, deserves the send off Mr. Roberts gave them. Not many people did as many things as Mr. Carter.

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Iain Douglas-Hamilton, 83, Who Studied and Saved Elephants, Dies

Iain got what I'll call an 18-gun salute from The New York Times in Wednesday's December 10, 2025  print edition.

It is not a 19-gun salute, (A 21-gun salute is front page, above the fold, like the recent one for Frank Gehry.) because although his obit is featured on the front page below the fold, the text of the obit does not start there. The full text jumps to B11. The caption under a sizable color photo of Mr. Douglas-Hamilton and a very friendly elephant, tells us to go to page B11 for the obituary. No problem.

Once at B11, 6 columns with three photos and the full obit by Jeffrey Gettleman is available. Live to be 83 and there is no doubt you've had some close calls. In Mr. Gettleman's third paragraph we learn what events Mr. Douglas-Hamilton escaped from.

He was..."charged at by elephants, shot at by poachers, and nearly killed by a swarm of bees. Throughout, he retained a twinkle of amusement in his eyes and an awareness that he was leading a charmed life and accomplishing work he deeply believed in."

That's as close to my reference to Scaramouche by Rossini on my blog's profile page that "he was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad" that I've ever read.

Being attacked by a swarm of bees had a lasting effect. Mr. Douglas-Hamilton and his wife, Oria Rocco, were strolling on their property one evening in Naivasha, Kenya when a swarm of bees attacked them. Mr. Douglas-Hamilton shielded his wife with his body, but was stung many times and went into anaphylactic shock and nearly died. He was forever weak after that.

Imagine hanging out and petting huge elephants, the largest land mammal on the planet, and nearly getting done in by a tiny bee. (Although it seems a lot of them.)

A charmed life indeed.

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Rage Bait and Open Compound Words

Open compound words. WTF! are they?

I had a decent NYC public elementary school education in the 50s. I learned to read. I learned to write. I learned to spell. I even learned how to diagram sentences, which gave me a feel for writing. But "open compound words?" WTF! (I learned to curse later in life.)

Reading in The New York Times, (where else?) I recently came across a Page 1, Arts section story that 'rage bait' is named the word of the year 2025. Since 2025 is still not over, I suspect the lead is so big there is no chance of absentee ballots changing the results.: Word of 2025, Rage bait.

This is not some honorific bestowed by some radio station. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) people are behind identifying "rage bait" as No. 1, beating out "biohack," and "aura farming."

To the simple minded, "rage bait" seems to be two words, written or spoken together to indicate "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive." Something like saying the New York Jets are the best football team without a Super Bowl appearance  and victory since Richard Nixon was in his first term.

The linguists classify "rage bait" as an "open-compound" word. Looks like two words to me. Is "open-compound itself two words? No. It is a hyphenated word. Here's a wall to go climb up.

The now long departed Russell Baker would be glad to see a word still hyphenated, "open-compound," but would likely strain under a definition that "rage bait" is a single word and not just some expression, like "fuck you."

But the people at the OED track word usage, and have come away with the decision to award "rage bait" as the Word of 2025.

The NYT reporter, Jennifer Schuessler tells us the OED tracked its appearance from 2002, "when it appeared in a post on a Usenet discussion group to describe a kind of driver reaction to being flashed by another seeking to pass. Since then it has become an increasingly common slang for an attention-seeking form of online behavior."

And if "rage bait" is a word, where will you find it in the OED? My hardcover edition of the OED is two volumes, now several years old, comprehensive, but still called the "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary."

When I arrive at "rage" I get a notation that there is a "road rage" as well as "air rage." Will "rage bait" appear in the latest edition? I asked ChatGPT.

"The short answer is: we cannot know, and the OED has not yet publicly scheduled or announced an entry for rage bait."

ChatGPT then poses a question I was going to ask.

Where would if appear if the OED adds it?"

"If added, it would appear alphabetically as its own lemma:
rage-bait, n. & v."

Ah, jeeez, what's a lemma? The OED tells me: "the form of a word or phrase chosen to represent all inflectional and spellings variants in a dictionary entry, etc."

They're saying it's going in hyphenated, not as an "open compound" word.

Alert the media.

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Homeland Redux

It seems even reruns can be monetized in this streaming universe. And way not? We live in a world of entertainment, and we all apparently will pay for it.

Carrie Mathison, the lead character in the long-running Showtime series Homeland, is a CIA analyst played by Claire Danes, who has the hots for Sgt. Nicholas Brody, the U.S. Marine sniper held hostage by al-Qaeda for 8 years and turned against the United States. Well, half-turned.

Ms. Danes won a fistful of Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG awards that would cover a mantlepiece. Carrie's initial lust for Brody turns into deep love by the end of Season 2. Well, they are the two stars of the show.

The producers craft dramatic, drop dead, page-turning endings for the episodes and generate massive interest into what's next. Homeland, started in 2011, carried 12 episodes for 8 seasons. It's almost a relic of how a miniseries was put together. Lots of episodes in a season. 

My telephone bill tops $200. That's a lot you might think just to be able to call for pizza. And that's just the landline. There is a family cell phone bill that I have a number for, but is handled financially by other family members. We believe in shared responsibilities.

Amongst things that didn't get thrown away, I came across a circa 1950s New York Telephone company bill for our home in Flushing. I don't think it exceeded $5.

Message units. Do you remember message units, those tiny 7¢ charges that landed on your bill when you used more than the 30 they gave you at the outset of the billing cycle? If you do, you're as old, or older than I am. If you are my age, or older, and claim you do not know what a message unit was, you've been lying about your age to people.

If you made calls outside your zone, or the series of first three numbers in a phone number, you incurred message unit charges faster. Of course it wasn't three digits that started a number, it was an exchange and a number. Ours Was FL-9 for Flushing. Get it.

Of course, the alpha notation gave way to just numbers. Our number once was 358-. The 3 and 5 correspond to an F and an L on the phone keypad, which really hasn't changed since phones allowed direct dial calling.

My father was a notorious non-payer of bills. We once had our electricity turned off by Con Edison. It takes a big arrears before Con Ed comes to block your electricity. We lost phone service many tines; our number was always getting changed when the service was restored. My father was a baffling man.

He was a college-educated engineer who was never unemployed. He was a career naval engineer in the Design Division at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It just seems he could never get it in his head that bills needed to be paid on time. Fuel oil delivery for the home was very erratic. We wore sweaters quite a bit, not that my father did. He was always at the family flower shop and barely spent anytime at home. He never seemed to be cold. It must have been his scotch intake.

My $200+ phone bills always gets paid on time, and includes fast Internet service, and a cable bill package that gives me way more than I'm sure I need. I get access to a lot of hockey teams that I really don't care about anymore. Things need to change.

But, the streaming channel of Showtime was always worth it. I got Homeland, and then Billions, shows I watched religiously and wrote about often. I've looked back and am surprised how often I summarized the episodes.

Then there was The Americans. I forget who carried that, but that was another show I enjoyed. All that does not even include the streaming subscription services like Amazon Prime, Acorn, BritBox, PBS Masterpiece, and MHz. I'm a sucker for foreign police procedurals. I don't mind the subtitles. However, I do not watch shows that are dubbed. The disconnect between the speech and the mouth is too distracting.

When Homeland ended on Showtime I missed it. But then Billions took over, and the entertainment continued. And of course the Brit Damian Lewis found continued work on Billions that no longer put his life in danger.

Does anyone think like I do that Lewis's puss/grimace reminds you of Steve McQueen? It's the face you make when you suck on a lemon. You'd be forgiven for thinking Damian and Steve came from the same set of parents, which of course they didn't.

I'm not a default, constant subscriber to NetFlix. I go in and out of so called membership. Lately however, I restarted my NetFlix membership in order to resume watching The Diplomat starring Kerri Russell and Rufus Sewell. I enjoyed the first two seasons, after which I sent the access into hibernation, and awaited the third season, which I have not enjoyed so much.

Maybe it was always there, but there is too much palaver and blather in the show. I'm not expecting gunfire or chase scenes, but the rhetoric is fatiguing.  But, I'm slowly making my way through what I think are 8 episodes. Definitely not binging. Then cancellation will loom again.

The home page of NetFlix attracted me to the access of what I'm guessing will be all 96 of Homeland's episodes, over the show's 8 seasons from 2011 to 2020. So my plans to quickly watch The Diplomat and drop NetFlix has been delayed. I've already paid for my second month of NetFlix access in order to enjoy Homeland again.

When first shown, I missed some of the very first episodes of Homeland, so the NetFlix access was a great opportunity to see what I missed. Apparently, not a lot, because it may have only been 2 or 3 episodes I missed when the show first aired.

The whole saga has come back to me; missing however are some of th brushstrokes that get you there. So, I've committed myself to watching up to the birth of Franny, the child Carrie Mathison had after her fairly constant lovemaking with Sgt. Brody. 

Carrie always seems to exhibit a bit of a runaway libido. It becomes evident with Brody out of the picture for now walking across the Canadian border in order to try and disappear, when Carrie brings home a good looking customer from the liquor store and together they test the strength of her carpeted staircase.

Right now I've just watched through the first episode of Season 3. The Senate committees are all over the C.I.A., but we know where that's going.

There are always new things you notice when you look at something for a second time. The episodes open with a series of shots of different places and people speaking sound bites. There is a view from a vehicle of the sign on the way into Langley: George Bush Center for Intelligence. I get that,. But what does FHWA in large letters below it mean?

Well, I'll tell you. Amongst what I'm sure are several buildings lies the Federal Highway Administration. FHWA. It seems like an unlikely pairing of government agencies, but, as they say these days: it is what it is.

I always try and read the credits, wither at the beginning or at the end. Somewhere in Season 2 an actor named Timothée Chalamet appears. Timothée plays Vice President William Walden's teenage son, Finn, who becomes attracted to Sgt. Brody's teenage daughter Dana, who together get into a good bit of trouble while Finn is driving, hitting a pedestrian while speeding and evading his Secret Service detail that was trying to keep up, and leaving the scene. A hit and run. The woman who was hit later dies in the hospital from her injuries. The coverup starts.

Chalamet is well casted, and of course goes onto greater roles, notably playing Bob Dylan in the movie A Complete Unknown and earning an Oscar nomination.

It used to be when someone got famous you could look back, or were told to look back, and see them selling Volkswagens once upon a time. Now they get famous, and then appear in commercials.

I chose the cheapest tier of NetFlix membership. As such, I'm exposed to commercials every now and then during the show. One commercial, which I will admit I fail to understand, but no doubt that's because I'm 76, was for $CashApp. Guess who I recognized in it? Yep. Timothée himself. I'm assuming his appearance is after the notoriety he earned playing Bob Dylan and singing in A Complete Unknown. 

I love acknowledging a piece of dialog that I forgot I once heard, but now that I've head it again, I find it worth memorializing. Saul and Carrie go way back, and he tells her he knew her from when he could "piss straight."

Thank you Saul, who plays a senior C.I.A. operative who is considered old. At this point in my advanced age I too find it hard to piss straight, no matter how hard I concentrate on it. I'm forever wiping the floor up with toilet paper. I just can't seem to get the nozzle to aim straight and not spray an annoying multi-directional mist. TMI? Too bad.

Also along the way, fairly early in the first season, there is a scene which I now will never forget. Saul is interrogating a member of al-Qaeda who has been extracted from a hovel in Pakistan.

The guy is hardly happy to be in the room, shackled and probably naked, having to listen to this bearded mass of a man, Saul Berenson, sit down and open a folder that has his picture and background information.

Saul picks up the folder, opens it and calls the subject a terrorist. Saul then tells the subject he also  appears to be religious. Saul skips a beat and then says in his theatrical baritone, "so you're religious and a terrorist...what are you, Catholic?" So far, there is no answer.

I nearly fell off my chair.

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