Pierre Natzler

Can you live to be 103, serve your country during WW II, if not heroically, at least with some distinction, pass away and have your London Times obituary center on the fact you never learned to ride a bike, or that your rifle marksmanship was honed at an amusement park? You sure can.

Another British centenarian, with a rich war background, has passed away at 103. We learn a great deal of Mr. Natzler's life, but most notably we get the sense that without the screw-ups of his SOE service, we might not have heard about his passing at all. He might just have been another very senior gent to finally faded away.

The SOE was the wartime British spy agency, Special Operations Executive. They were responsible for a good bit of derring-do in gathering information about the Germans, and in fooling the Germans. There are innumerable books about those in the SOE. And the British, still loving to never forget the war, are always eager to turn out SOE stories and mini-series.

For a guy who rarely talked about his wartime experience, "we honestly don't know exactly what happened," his son said, there is a great deal of detail in his obituary about those wartime experience, not all flattering.

Did the obituarist get a British version of Freedom of Information Act and get into the SOE records for Pierre? It would seem so.

The obituarist blends in biographical narrative, and a wartime narrative that shows Mr. Natzler was certainly not the Spy Who came in from the Cold, but rather the spy who seemed to get lost.

Obviously, Mr. Natzler, born in Vienna,, moving to France and then England, was proficient in several languages, thus making him a great candidate for spy school. And he was drafted into that branch of the service.

He was parachuted behind enemy lines in France with the assignment of finding a safe route through France to neutral Spain. The jump worked fine, but the Resistance left him with a bike at the drop spot, and Mr Natzler had never learned to ride a bike. Growing up affluently in Vienna he learned to ride horses, but not a bike.

That's the first of the troubles he encountered on landing. His identify card was dated 1940, not 1943. Okay, whose fault was that? Maybe he should have spotted it before pulling the ripcord, but there has to be some responsibility to lay at the feet of the person who conceived of the mission.

If that dumb cluck had asked if Pierre could ride a bike, and instead had a horse waiting for him, then Pierre could have been a WW II version of Paul Revere and heroically found the route. Instead, he set out, wobbled on the bike without a map (another cock-up by the mission planner?) and instead of heading for Spain, made his way to a safe house in Paris where he had to sleep in the same bed with another agent because there was only one bed. Why someone didn't get the floor is not disclosed.

Taken on a hunting trip for food by members of the spy school at Loch Morar, Pierre's city boy roots were evident when his only familiarity with a rifle was gained "at the Prater fun-fair in Vienna." Pierre rooted for the stag to make his escape. Hunting was too much like work.

Then there was the time on a train coming back into England when his suitcase popped open and contraband oranges spilled out, oranges he intended to sell on the black market. Another intelligence officer described the hapless Pierre as "undisciplined," while another felt he was more "of a fool than a knave." Is that from Shakespeare? No. The OED tells us it's F. Donaldson: "He is far more fool than knave." Hand it to the British.

Not all his wartime activities could be mad fun of. In 1941 in Casablanca he sent regular reports back to the Free French military intelligence while also helping British former POWs return home. For his business activities after the war, he was appointed chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite by the French government for his service to industry. At points in his life he was Austrian, then a French citizen, and then eventually a British citizen.

Despite being considered a bumbling spy, he was still allowed into the Special Forces Club in England. And we know how the British love their clubs. I'm sure he yukked it up with Beefeaters and Schweppes, swapping war stories with his chaps on padded, leather upholstery.

So, Pierre enters the pantheon of those who are remembered for one thing in their life: Wrong Way Corrigan; Bill Buckner; Steve Bartman. The list goes on.

The obit's final kicker:  "He never did learn how to ride a bike."

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Pooping Pigs in a Poke

Would you buy a pig in a poke?
I'm sweating like a pig.
You're a filthy pig.
You're a sloppy pig.
You live in a pigsty.

These are all expressions using a pig as a reference. But would you say "I poop like a pig?" Would Jack Palance have told Billy Crystal at he Oscars one year that a pig poops bigger than Billy? Well, you might once you finish reading an A-Head piece in the Wall Street Journal about how farmers raise pigs.

Sanitizing is big these day with trying to stop the spread of coronavirus. But the extent the pig farmers go to sanitizing a pig's environment is nothing new. I always heard pigs are not "filthy animals." After reading the piece, I can see why.

The reporter Jacob Bunge tells us that after showering and putting on fresh clothes, Brad Greenway checked out his pig farm, "We've always tried to practice good biosecurity." His farm produces 13,000 pigs a year, all very squeaky clean.

Mr. Greenway explains, "you don't want to bring anything back and forth" between the breeding and the hog operation. The pig farms are hyper-hygienic.

Kevin Turner, a manager of Michigan State University's swine teaching and research farm near Lansing, Michigan, has taken as many 12 showers a day going back and forth from the classroom to the farm.

Mr. Turner further explains, "right now, I feel safer health-wise if I'm in and around my pigs than if I go to the grocery store."

With as many animals as these folks have, you have to expect there is animal waste—poop. Ryan Hageman a co-owner of NEIA Pumping Service Inc., a Calmar, Iowa-based manure hauling business, minces no words about why he tries to keep clean with constant hand washing. "You're going to get dirty, you're dealing with shit."

And there it is. A four-letter word that made it into a major newspaper without ** between the first and last letters. Shit.

Okay, shit is not fuck, where you're still going to see **, but it's use has long been foretold, even by Cole Porter, who so long ago wrote the lyrics to "Anything Goes."

Good authors too who once knew better words

Now only use 

Four-letter words.

Anything goes.

And how much poop can there be on a pig farm? Apparently A LOT. There doesn't seem to anything that cannot be measured. Mr Bunge writes:

"Even stringent methods run up against natural limits. One is found in the pits beneath Mr. Turner's Michigan State research farm, which gather the roughly 1.3 gallons of manure each hog produces a day. 'It's clean, but it still smells," Mr. Turner tells us. "Pigs poop a lot."

And there we have it. If you think you exceed 1.3 gallons a day—nearly 5 liters!—you are entitled to say, "I poop like a pig."

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Billions, Family Style

A two-part recap starts off with the second episode, heavy on the examination of the psyche, principally Chuck's, who is now seeing a therapist to help him become the man he thinks he wants to be.

As usual, the word "fuck" is bandied about from all mouths. If that word had been under copyright by the early Anglo-Saxons, the producers of Billions would go broke paying royalty fees.

Episode 2 really lets the women shine. It shows Wendy and the duo at Mase Cap, Sarah and Lauren, show they can run the place while Axe is off upstate at a billionaires conference at the Mohonk House.

When an Asian ball-busting woman representing a major pension fund stakeholder comes to Axe Capital to kick the tires while the alpha males are upstate, Wendy gets Lauren, the PR princess of Mase Cap to handle the investor relations end of the business with aplomb. Lauren has tabloid gossip journalism credits—Page Six— and knows how to spin things so effectively that you don't even notice they are being spun.

She and Wendy are a great psyche team that can get anyone to do anything they want them to do while the subject thinks they're making the choice. If this show was in Washington, Lauren would be the president of a K Street lobbying firm.

Sarah, the buttoned-up other major domo female on the Mase Cap team is a retired Naval officer who reminds anyone who will listen of her Naval Academy background.

Episode 2 mostly centers on Bobby and the new nemesis Mike Prince, jousting for pissing rights in front of the assembled at the conference. Axe is allowed to be seen leaving the evening's meal with a stunning eye-candy beauty and a bottle of extremely old scotch, no doubt to go over her portfolio in a room upstairs. The eye-candy beauty actually gets to say a few words before she and Axe make their obvious exit. A speaking part pays more than a simple walk-on. A star is born.

Axe and Mike Prince are using the conference to try and corner the market on an emerging psychotropic drug Ayahuasca, which Axe and Wags used on themselves in an Alaskan wigwam with the lead shaman. Why the FDA would seemingly license a drug that seems to resemble LSD is beyond me, but there you have it.

The simple Google definition tells us it "is a brew with powerful hallucinogenic properties claimed to open your mind and heal past traumas." It doesn't say if it introduces new traumas. Will President Trump endorse it and take it himself? It sounds like dangerous stuff, and is so far illegal in the U.S. It is derived from plants.

Axe and Wags are lobbying the soon-to-be named head of the FDA for the right to buy his stock portfolio just before he is confirmed. It seems anyone who comes up for a job in Washington has to first shed the pesky conflicts of interest there would be unless they divested.

And how prescient can the screenwriters be? The NYT reports today that industry ties pose a possible conflict of interest for the scientist leading the coronavirus vaccine team. According to the Times, Moncef Slaoui has spent the last several days trying to disentangle pieces of his stock portfolio and his intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests.

Chuck and Kate are called to governor's office, complete with a huge portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on a wall behind the governor, and taken to the woodshed over Chuck's lowering the charges against the upstate techies who caused a massive power outage trying to create a  massive Bitcoin mining operation.

Since Bobby Axe was connected to the scheme, and Chuck and Bobby are supposed to be buddies, Chuck lowers the level of the charges from criminal to civil. After all, Bobby has returned the Churchill books.

The sit down with the governor occurs in New York City, naturally, since Albany will never be recreated by the producers.  The governor wheels in the Manhattan DA, a seasoned looking woman who is dressed quite professionally, who also tells Chuck she doesn't give a "fuck" about the responsibility Chuck feels in lowering the level of the case.

The governor is cutting off Chuck's pursuit of these type of cases, and now has to work with the Manhattan DA's office. It is a blow.

As a further blow to Chuck's autonomy, the settlements collected from the civil law suits he pursues are under the control of the governor's oversight. He gets to apply them to whatever lines in the budget he likes.

But, Kate Sacker, being the legal genius that she is, reads that it is possible for Chuck's power over the settlement money to kick in if it goes to something philanthropic. Yale Law, your ship has docked.

So, all that dough that Eliot Spitzer collected when he was Attorney General probably never made it in the form of restitution for the general taxpayer. No taxes were lowered; no rebates wee made. I would have recognized the government giving me some money.

Chuck is correct in assuming that Bobby Axelrod has gotten to the Manhattan DA and ratted on Chuck's lowering the charges. That meeting is in a prior scene and amazes anyone who really thinks about it that a man with Axe's reputation for financial shenanigans can get a meeting with the sitting Manhattan DA. But hey, this is showbiz.

Episode 3 is titled "Beg, Bribe, Bully." It could also be called Billions, Family Style. The theme is set with Cat Stevens's 'Father and Son,' a beautiful song that is still one of my favorites, being played at the episode's opening. The theme is the friction between fathers and sons, and when the song came out in Cat Stevens's 'Tea for the Tillerman album, a friend of fine told me he could only think of myself and my father, since our relationship was contentious at best.

Quite a few years ago in Flushing, my neighbor told us his brother Joseph had passed away. Showing respect for our neighbor, we went to the wake one evening. There at the wake were Joseph's family, three adult sons if I remember correctly.

Apparently Joe was quite a son-of-a-bitch to his sons and they grew up with a good deal of resentment toward the father. We were at the wake on the last evening and I was surprised that their resentment lead them to bring a cassette player, hit he play button, and have the Cat Stevens song 'Father and Son' play.

Wakes of course these days are video affairs, with lots of still photos. There was none of that then, just an audio remembrance of the contentiousness the sons had with the father. Wow.

Axe's son Gordie goes to a very exclusive prep school, likely in one of those still quaint New England towns in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont. Wherever it is, it far enough away from New York that Axe takes the private jet to smooth over the trouble his son Gordie has gotten himself into when he rigged enough cable to start a Bitcoin data mine, only to create a blackout like the upstate techies did in Episode 1.

Gordie is obviously highly adventurous, a clone of his dad, but in deep, deep do-do from the headmaster who is expelling him the for misuse of resources.

Of course Axe is proud and mad at his son at the same time. Gordie is chastised for not seeing the possibility of failure and its consequences. Gordie and a nerdy girl who wears those glasses that automatically stereotype her as a nerd, were millionaires for a brief moment, but then they blew the little village's power out. I still don't understand why Bitcoin's value only exists if the power is on, but that's for another discussion.

Anyway, the headmaster will not succumb to Axe's offers of generosity in the form of a bribe disguised as a hefty donation. Moolah, and plenty of it. The headmaster wears a bow tie and looks like he should be judging dog shows. He is of such high moral rectitude that when Axe and Wags start to see where his Achilles heel lies they get nowhere.

That is of course until they get lucky and get PI photos of the Syrian refugees that the headmaster is sponsoring with diverted donated money to the sports program. The diversion is not in itself enough to ding the headmaster, since it is a noble cause, but making the Syrians do yard work around his house, uncompensated, is what brings him down. Or at least makes him vulnerable to Axe's demands.

Again, the screenwriters are ahead of the curve. Did thy anticipate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's brouhaha with directing staff for errands? Did they remember that the long-time head of the New York Racing Association,(NYRA) Christopher Kay who was bounced for having stable help rake the leaves at his Saratoga property uncompensated? Come on. Grab a rake and do it yourself. It's good exercise.

Didn't this headmaster live through all the nominees at the start of Clinton's first term that took a nosedive when it was discovered that hired help was not on the payroll for Social Security deductions? Nannygate sunk several nominees.

Before the headmaster take-down, Axe engages in conversation with Wendy as what to do. Wendy responds with some typical fence riding psycho babble about letting the chips play out and have young Gordie suffer expulsion and going to a less prestigious school, thereby softening his chances of Harvard, and leading him to drink at 28, or, do what Axe usually does, and buy his way to a solution.

Either way, whatever Axe does, it seems young Gordie is headed for AA at 28 is he's lucky. Sometimes you just can;t win.

Armed with the photos, Axe has the headmaster by the cojones and ladles on the requirement that he get to address the student body. A chastened headmaster can only agree.

Axe therefore gets to address the school, wearing his trademark zip flannel jacket and jeans, use the word "fuck" here and there, and tell the assembled how wonderful the real world of capitalism is. It's Gordon Gecko's "greed is good" speech from the movie "Wall Street", and meets with thunderous applause.

The headmaster looks like he's going to puke. Axe delivers the financial facts of life, similar to Sonny telling C in "A Bronx Tale" that Mickey Mantle doesn't give a fuck about you. Jesus, what an eye-opener.

Gordie of course gets to stay in the august confines of Skinner Preparatory Academy, and Wags, so touched by the father and son bonding over a crisis sets out to get in touch with his far-flung offspring.

For Wags, this doesn't mean just giving them a call, since they don't live with him, it means finding them. Talk about estranged. Wags employs the Axe Capital gumshoe, Hall, to track down the products of his loins.

Only one of them seems accommodating enough to meet Wags, a young adult male Jesus freak wearing a wooden cross prominently around his neck. If this character stays in the script, it's a cinch Wags is not going to be able to take him to the gentleman's club for a session of father and son bonding over pole and lap dancing with $10 tips stuffed in G-strings.

Axe also gets an emerging abstract artist to cave in on his artistic independent principles and over Bruno's famous slices of pizza, convinces the artist to be sponsored by Axe, like Michelangelo has the Medici's at his back. Money may not completely corrupt, but it does buy some nice things.

Meanwhile, Chuck, ever eager to become a different person, shows up at his law school Alma Mater—Yale, of course—and offers to teach a course for a semester. The black, female dean of the law school is gushy over having a sitting attorney general giving lectures. To a point.

Academia, no matter how well endowed with riches, is always after more riches. The dean reminds Chuck that Chuck Sr. has never made good on his pledge of $100,000 annually. Seems pops went there as well. No surprise there.

"Well, how many years has old dad missed?"
 "All of them."
"I'll see what I can do."

This sets in motion the chain reaction of quid pro quo that Chuck is used to. Dad won't budge on making good his pledge—and therefore throwing a wrench into Chucks professorial dreams—until Chuck Jr's family accepts dad's new Native American bride and their papoose. Chuck Sr. is following Roxanne's orders that the Rhoades family needs to become one family.

Chuck needs Wendy to get on board with this. Chuck become the old Chuck by telling Wendy he'll lift the financial restraining order if Wendy will agree to a family get together, with the kids and her, to meet the latest members of the Rhoades family.

Wendy of course knows Chuck wants something as soon as he enters her office, but is willing to agree to the get together, not for any wellspring of family emotion, but I'm sure for the ability to get the next to-die-for apartment with no monetary worries.

And not to be left out of the script is the Taylor Mason sub-plot that shows off a software program that supposedly can reveal the hidden meaning beneath someone's words. Thus, when a university president says he will not divest the fossil fuel companies in the school's portfolio as demanded by the green-leaning student body, he is actually looking for a way to do so without losing face.

The pitch to divest meets with acceptance by the president after some baloney double talk with Taylor, but meets with a solid wall of resistance from the president of the trustees, a retired four-star admiral who is a James Earl Jones lookalike and soundalike.

The Naval Academy Sarah enters to sweet talk the admiral, or what really happens, drink with the admiral toe-to-toe and get him to lower his resistance. It seems buying the divested shares can make Mase Cap some money if they can run the transaction through the main house, Axe Capital.

When Taylor balks at using Axe Cap, Sarah quits in frustration. Best I can tell from the actress Samantha Mathis's IMDb, Sarah's gone after this episode. Anchors away my boys.

What are left with? Another object lesson in what money and power can achieve. Chuck is not anywhere near the man he tells the shrink he'd like to be, and Axe, well, he wants to be a bank. That's right. He's a wannabe Sandy Weill.

Axe always aims high.

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The Unassembled

Batteries not included, and some assembly required.

The Assembled, the four stalwart members of a rag tag group that meets at the races several times a year, is in danger of not knowing what they each look like, especially, assuming without haircuts, due to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown.

In Johnny D's case, he was able to cadge a haircut at his wife and daughter's hairdresser, a young woman working out of her finished basement in an undisclosed location.

Aside from not handicapping and betting the horses, Bobby G's lockdown has also deprived him of his weekly poker game, a continuously held event with a core and revolving roster of players that have been gathering at various locations for over 35 years. It might be the Oldest Established Permanent Floating Card Game in New York.

The median age of this group registers at 79, and is composed of those breathing who are well enough not to be placed in nursing homes by concerned family members. The game can't be held due to social distancing concerns. If that group ever sneezed on one another, the whole game might be wiped out and placed on ventilators.

Bobby G. is the major-domo there, and has now probably gone the longest period of his life without  a deck of cards in his hands since high school. And considering Bobby G. is the oldest of The Assembled, clocking in as an octogenarian, that's A LOT of years without a shuffle. Good to hear that the absence of the smooth, waxy surface of playing cards on his skin hasn't led to any skin conditions. And being a medical man, he's in the best position of anyone to self-diagnose.

Bobby G. being a retired surgeon who still reads medical journals, has predicted Dr. Bell at Oxford, England, will be the first to break through with a Covid-19 vaccine. As for myself, I'd be willing to take Bobby's prediction and place a wager at Vegas odds if they were taking action on this. Are they? Alert readers, please let me know. Because it seems that without a vaccine, The Assembled are going to remain Unassembled at a race track.

The other members, Johnny M. and Jose are doing fine. Johnny M. is taking daily walks around Bowne Park in Flushing, and Jose. the only member young enough to still be employed, is safe working from home.

Johnny D. is thinking of downloading some pps from Santa Anita or Gulfstream or Churchill just to keep his handicapping skills from turning to rust. Racing is still running and being televised from a select few venues, without attendance of course, but with everything else the same. An exacta pays the same with or without people in the stands.

Joe Drape, sports reporter for the NYT, has a story of how Fonner Park in Grand Island, Nebraska has become a bit of an epicenter for action.

It's a great story in today's NYT, with some nice color photos, that look really good online. It's a track my guess is that Mr. Drape has attended in his migratory phase of growing up, he being from Missouri.

The story tells us the second leading jockey is a 32-year-old Jake Olesiak whose full-time job is working at an ethanol processing plant, a two-hour drive east of Fronner. On a usual Saturday and Sunday the place boasts an on-track attendance of 6,500, which would be the envy of the New York Racing Association.

There is one great picture, not of the horses and the track, but of patrons who are gathered outside the chain-link fence, handicapping their picks on folding chairs unloaded from the back of their SUV. I think is was last year when I was cutting through the Belmont parking lot making my way in from Hempstead Turnpike, that I passed a similar cluster of guys who I imagined were trying to figure out their Pick-Six ticket. The Pick-Six that day. flush with carryover money.

There was no reason to be in the parking lot, since last year you could go into Belmont, but I imagined the parking lot, void of cars, was like being in the library—you could do your work without distractions. If J. Seward Johnson needed a model to sculpt horseplayers, this would be the perfect pose. Socially distant, but connected by handicapping.

Next week I'm going to treat myself to a downloaded set of pps from either Gulfstream, Santa Anita, or Churchill, and play the card. The races will be on TVG, so I'll get to watch my cross-country bets.

And who knows, my form might return and my exactas will run 1-3, with a 68-1 shot breaking up my ticket by gaining second.

I can't wait.

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Villefranche

If you somehow see a sign on the road that you're entering Villefranche, in France, then just keep going. There is no good reason to stop there for anything.

Of course if you're a French prosecutor and your car breaks down and you're stung and allergic to bees, you have to stay in Villefranhce awaiting repairs, because now you're stuck. But in this case, it's up to prosecutor Franck Siriani to stay put and check things out in Villefranche.

It's not exactly A Bad Day at Black Rock, it's more like Never A Good Day in Villefranche.  Sunshine doesn't seem to break through, the homicide rate is so high that no one seems to live a natural life span. Actuarially, it's a very bad risk to write life insurance policies in the place. Their homicide rate clocks in at six times the French average. The prosecutor says every time you open a door in Villefranche there's a body behind it. The place is a French Bermuda triangle.

Add to this a four-person constabulary lead by a distracted young woman, and you have the #MeTooMovement advancing females who wear their gun outside their pants for all the honest world to see. But unlike in Spiral, the police here carry their weapons low on the leg, gunslinger style. Even the probationary officer. Camille. gets a weapon. In fact, the whole town is armed to the teeth, and they're all crack shots with a rifle, especially the women whose windows open.

Villefranche reminds me of the  series Fortitude, without the ice. Add trees. Lots of trees. When you get to the start of Season 2 there's a flashback to 57 B.C. Folks have been dying mysteriously in this place ever since the Romans set foot in the forest and tried to build a road. The place was supposedly a sacred burial ground for the Celts.

The series is called Dark Spot in English, Zone Blanche in French. There is no church in Villefranche, and the cell phone reception is spotty at best. There is a roadhouse called EL DORADO, with the first O not lit. Something like HOT L.

The dialog is dubbed in English, but still best watched with subtitles. For some reason, Laurène's rank comes out as major, despite being called captain. Laurèn's played by Suliane Brahim, a 40-something French actress who looks younger when she's not looking worried, which is most of the time. The captain has a young adult daughter, Cora, from either a marriage, or a relationship, but the father is not in the story. The tale doesn't go there.

Laurèn is missing the fourth and fifth fingers from her left hand. She tells the prosecutor Siriani that it was a hunting accident. This of course is not believed, and eventually revealed to have resulted from her being kidnapped in the woods 20 years by someone, or something, unknown.

The rest of the police force is rounded out by someone whose nickname translates as Teddy Bear, from the French Balou, who is a bear of a man, fully bearded. Then there's Hermann, the oldest of the unit, who loves fishing and smoking very thin cigarettes.

The mayor of Villefranche, Bertrand Steiner, is a hunk who has a past with the captain. And a bit of a now. No one seems to be happily married in Villefranche. The mayor and the police force are housed in the same building.

The Steiner family is the prototypical wealthy family that seems to run the town. Their machinations play heavily into the story-line. For such an apparently small place, the town has a full-size Olympic swimming pool and a hospital that seems quite large and up-to-date.

The Steiners, led by the patriarch Gerald and former mayor—Bertrand's father—are clearly up to no good. Their machinations become the subject of Season 2.

The doctor for the town is a woman, Leila, who is portrayed as a bit of a party girl, but not one we see partying. Leila makes house calls, and does the autopsies. And like any pathologist, she knows everything once she's examined the corpse. And sometimes the corpse is quite old.

The main story-line during the first season revolves around the mayor's missing daughter, Marion. She's been gone now for eight months. The mayor's marriage is rocky, and no one in the town ever seems too happy. There are closet homosexuals to round out the demographics. In this era, you've got to have them too.

Each episode in the first season is a complete sub-story in itself. And my God, the things that happen in this little place in the neck of the woods, somewhere near the Belgium border.

Episodes 7 and 8 finally get to Marion and what happened to her. Episode 8 ends violently, with quite the surprise. But you know the lead character, Laurèn not going to die, is she? Season 2 of course opens with her in it, but how she recovered is murky. Very murky.

Is there really a horned woodsman in the woods?

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Obit from Across the Pond

It is no secret that the British style of obituary writing is a style unto itself. A decade ago Marilyn Johnson wrote about this in her book on obituaries, "The Dead Beat." And long before that there was an  A-Head piece in the WSJ  by Kyle Pope telling us about the obscure deceased in England who in death have achieved more fame at their passing than they did when they were breathing.

Never forget. And the Brits will never forget WW II when Hitler nearly came ashore, but couldn't, so he bombed the crap out of them instead, hoping they'd give up.

My daughter, son-in-law, and the two grandchildren went to England this past February, just before all the virus outbreak took hold. I asked her to bring me back a hardcopy of a newspaper, but she forgot. On her return she did however become an online subscriber to The Times, and The Sunday Times from London.

Sharing her logon, I've been given a front row access to daily obits, British style. Checking out the paper on Friday I watched a montage of the figures observing two minutes of silence celebrating V-E Day, 75 years from May 7, 1945.

There was a flyover streaming plumes of red, white and blue exhaust; Prime Minister Boris Johnson standing in place at 10 Downing Street; Prince Charles in a kilt laying a wrath at a memorial while a single bagpiper played. As Charles placed the wreath you caught just a glimpse of his watch, jutting out from his French cuffs. Certainly an expensive watch, with lots of buttons and complications. Brand unknown. Camilla also placed a wreath.

Poor Charles. He looks so old. His mother is living forever, so his reign is deferred until her demise. And that will be some obit.

The British will never stop reliving WW II. Just check out a PBS Masterpiece series, and invariably it will be a story about the war, or the hardship of shortages after the war. Other than the British incursion in 1812, The United States has never been invaded. You have to consider the planes from 9/11 to be a bombing to get a feel for what the British endured on a daily basis for years.

When I was resting at home on the morning of  9/12, after miles of walking after making my way out of Tower One and the 29th floor on 9/11, my wife brought the papers in. And there was the NYT headline, top line, U.S. ATTACKED.  Of course I saved the paper, but I've never been able to really accept the headline.

I'm sure the senior editors probably debated vigorously what it would be, and came up with that. And on 9/11, there was no guarantee that there wouldn't be a repeat on 9/12. Except that all the planes had been grounded, and there really was no invading force, even as inept as the recent one that tried to overthrow the government in Venezuela. In my head I've never been able to wrap my head around the terrorist actions being described as being invaded. But, as they say now, it is what it is.

The Times obits are not bylined. They don't necessarily favor eccentrics, but when an 8th Earl of somewhere passes away, you can bet there are aspects of their life which we Yanks would consider eccentric,

Retired colonels and veteran's of all stripes are favored, so who better to honor with a full-Monty obit on Friday, May 8th, a day after the 75th anniversary of V-E Day than William 'Terry' Clark, 101 years old and a highly decorated RAF veteran. Mr. Clark passed away on V-E Day.

A read of the obit makes you realize how many types of war aircraft there were. It is hardly all Spitfires. I count no less than three aircraft that Clark served in as a navigator, gunner and radio specialist; a Blenheim, Bristol Beaufighter and a Turbinlite Havoc.

One oddity served up in the obit is that Clark first wanted to enlist in the British Navy, but they required vaccinations in anticipation of service abroad. It seems odd that service in a plane that could possible be shot down or crash landed in enemy territory would waive vaccinations for the crew members. He was deathly afraid of needles, so he opted to be with the RAF.

I remember in the '60s before I was declared 4-F, I wanted to enlist in the Navy. However, I worried that my dog-paddle swimming would keep me from training for the Navy. Once the 4-F draft code was assigned it became a moot point as to whether I'd pass their physical.

My father wanted to enlist in the Navy during WW II. His older brother was a career officer, so I would have imagined it would have been a slam dunk for his enlistment. He probably did as well. I did come across a letter turning him down. He might have wanted to go in an officer and they said no. I don't really know the reason, and as usual, we never ask our parents enough questions before it is impossible to get the answer. So, it was the Corps of Engineers in the Army, since he had an engineering degree.

The British obit leaves nothing worth mentioning out. Thus, in the narrative for Mr. Clark we learn he tried "to  rejoin the RAF after being dismobbed, but was turned down because he had become deaf in one ear as a result of fracturing his skull when he fell off a bar stool."

How ignominious to learn that Clark fell off a bar stool when he swiveled to catch a look at "a particularly attractive member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force who had just walked past him and he lost his balance."

Survive being shot at at 10,000 feet by the Germans but felled by a woman looking good in a uniform. No matter. He did make it to 101 years old.

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Spiral/Engranage

There is a foreign miniseries on Amazon Prime which should be good enough to binge on through any shelter in place lockdown. Or otherwise.

I see the NYT weekly seems to recommend series on streaming services. I don't remember if I heard of this one through something they wrote or I just stumbled on it by browsing, but it's a French police/judicial procedural that follows a squad of Judicial Paris police through a multitude of major cases. Usually several cases per season, of which there are six available for free through Amazon Prime. There is a Season 7 and 8, but they don't seem to be available yet.

There are a generous 12 episodes per season, so bingeing is almost required if you're just starting out. The squad is headed by a woman, about 35 years old, no kids, no ex's, just a pure cop, without the wiseguy, hard edge of what's portrayed in the States.

Caroline Proust is Cap-e-tan Laure Berthaud, an attractive thing if you can see under the mess she usually looks like, who is an unmade bed like the guys, but obviously without facial growth. She has a bit of a reputation for liking to sleep around, always ignoring her menstrual cycles, which of course after a few seasons catches up with her and gives her a you-know-what, and of course more plot lines.

The series in in French, with unobtrusive English subtitles. Being in French is actually a good thing, since you hear the characters as the French have hearing them since 2006, in this wildly popular series. Even if you're more than half-a-century removed from taking French in school, many words will sound familiar, and the subtitles confirm that maybe you didn't forget everything.

The Judicial police seems to be their version of the FBI, although the police/cops hardly look buttoned down. They pretty much look like unmade beds with no razors in sight. I don't know how they get the male actors to always appear with the same about of stubble from scene to scene, day to day. They obviously can't do all this filming in one day, so how do these guys just partially shave?

Judicial policing differs greatly from ours. There is an investigative judge who is assigned the case and who works with a rotation of the squads. There are squads all over the country, but Spiral seems contained in Paris and the suburbs, and it's not always the tourist part of Paris that is shown.

In fact, it is rarely the touristy part. The outskirts are full of Council housing, housing refugees from the former French colonies, thus a good number of Senegalese, Congolese. and Muslims from Algeria. It's a wild grab bag of cultures.

There are weapons, but nowhere anywhere near the number seen in American police procedurals. The plainclothes police almost quaintly approach trouble by popping orange armbands on their arms that say POLICE. There are bulletproof vests, but no vinyl windbreakers with yellow block lettering.

What confuses me a bit is that the armbands and police building are identified by the word POLICE. I guess that branch of the police might really have an English spelling. I was expecting to see something that said " endarmarie." Certainly the street scenes, cars and everything about the series is French through and through.

The investigative judge listens to the squad leader explain the case. The judge will issue warrants if they decide to do so. The judge they most deal with in 'Spiral' is François Roban, an Ichabod Crane-older looking man who is topped by a Mont Blanc head of unruly hair: The French version of a Boris Johnson hairstyle.

The judge's office a spare looking room located in the judicial ministry building, reached through a warren of staircases and narrow hallways. The place looks as old as it is, with some French provincial touches. There is a single clerk in the office accompanying the judge, monsieur jooge, "your honour in French."

The clerk is like a court reporter, taking down the conversations held between the judge and the lawyers, defendants, and whoever comes seated in front of the judge. Prisoners are interviewed, without handcuffs, while court officers stand against the wall.

It would seem the French system doesn't use a Grand Jury, but rather relies on the investigative judge to close, or refer the case to the prosecutor for trial. The judge may accompany the police during their work; they may reconstruct the narrative of the crime using life-size dummies. It is a very different pursuit of justice than ours.

One of the assistant prosecutors is Pierre Clément, played by Grégory Fitoussi, certainly a French heartthrob who has the good looks and bearing of Gregory Peck in 'To Kill A Mocking Bird.' He's a charmer.

The prosecutors and  defense attorneys appear in court robed and wearing a while silk scarf draped over their front, like a very wide tie. There are no wigs like in the British courts, but the judges are also draped in robes, and there may be more than one judge sitting in on the bench.

One of the defense attorneys is Joséphine Karlsson, a knockout, flaming red redhead played by Audrey Fleurot, who I suspect is also quite popular in French acting circles. She's a pit bull, the French version of any famous defense attorney who takes lost causes and argues successfully. And she is not above skating toward ethical lines.

Cap-e-tan Laure's lieutenants are Gilou, played by Thierry Godard, another French actor that you'll see in other productions. Both he and Audrey Fleurot are in the miniseries 'A French Village,' another streamed offering.

Gilou is never seen clean shaven, and with the French filming technique of taking lots of closeups, has an annoying mole just the the left of his mouth. New Wave or not, the series is shot with lots of handheld camera work, and lots and lots of closeups.

Gilou has an expressive, large face that's as big as an Easter ham. He is always in trouble with drugs and women, and at one point stealing evidence, but Laure always seems to back him. The core squad is rounded out by Tintin,  played by Fred Bianconi, another stubble-faced, jean-wearing cop who seems to at least have a stable home life. He's got kids and a wife. At least in the beginning. He and Gilou don't always get along. They fight a bit like brothers in the bedroom.

These cops wear their guns outside their pants for all the honest world to see. But when back in the office, they all make a point of emptying the chamber and storing the weapon in an unlocked desk drawer. Laure fails to do so once, and it has consequences.

There are six season available on Amazon Prime, and there are two more seasons that have been released in France, but not here. Thus, when you complete Season 6, you can peek at the summary on the Internet for Season 7. You should watch the season in order.

Maybe the series will last as 'Law and Order' here and be a French franchise. I'm sure the actors like the work.

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I Was Sure This Was Going to Happen

I was sure this was going to happen eventually. Read enough obituaries and soon enough you're going to read one about someone you knew directly. And today's obituary in the NYT for Heyward Dotson, 71, a star Columbia basketball player and Rhodes Scholar might be the first one I've read of, someone I can actually see in my mind.

I remember a Bill Gallo cartoon once in the Daily News that noted the 1985 passing of a boxer, Tony Janiro, a pretty boy middleweight who got destroyed by Jake LaMotta in a June 6, 1947 10-round bout at Madison Square Garden. It was a unanimous 10-round decision. The title of Bill's tribute obit was, "They're Calling My Class."

The phrase has always stuck in my mind. And now it's true. Before Columbia and Oxford, Heyward went to the same high school I did. He was my gym "squad" leader, which meant nothing other than he was first in the column of boys seated on the gym floor who got to look special wearing a red Stuyvesant t-shirt.

There were no special duties of this "squad" leader other than to wear the red shirt and count how many of us were in the column for attendance. It was purely a do nothing appointment.

I cringe every time I hear of my high school described as an "elite school, "one of the city's elite public schools." In the '60s, Stuyvesant was never referred to as "elite." It was, and still is, just a school whose middle class students took a test to get into and passed. It's one of the several selective high schools in the city. It was as predominately Jewish then as it is Asian now. "Elite" my ass.

I don't remember which of my three years at the school I had Heyward as my red shirt. The obit for Heyward tells us he was 6'4". He must have continued growing, because he never struck me as being that tall when the rest of us weren't.

In that mid-'60s era, Lew Alcindor was the dominant NYC high school player, coming out of the Catholic high school Power Memorial on the West Side. The school is no long there, and Lew Alcindor of course became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and made college and pro history.

I remember one kid in the gym class who was crowing that he had stolen a pair of Lew Alcindor's sneakers somehow. I was never one for basketball, but I don't think the PSAL public schools played the Catholic schools in anything other perhaps a city championship. And I'm not sure of that.

Long after graduation I heard of Heyward becoming a Rhodes Scholar, but the rest of his life's summary I knew nothing of.

I didn't know he tried for the NBA,was even with the Knicks, but his basketball career didn't advance. He became a lawyer, then ran staffs for politicians, and even made some attempts to run himself, but didn't advance there either.

I know the next alumni newsletter will probably have a story about his passing. As an "elite" high school in the city, there have been quite a few distinguished graduates. Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder graduated from there.

If I live long enough, there will probably be a few more alumni I'll read about in these tribute obituaries. As for myself, there's nothing I've done in life that will ever get me a tribute notice. I've achieved no advanced educational, or notable career milestones.

I do however seem to be able to count myself as a graduate of an "elite" high school, even if I bristle at the word "elite."

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BBB

No, not the Better Business Bureau. It's Billions is Back Baby!

What a great segue. We go from the final episode of Homecoming, to the opening salvo of Billions. Thank you Showtime! You are providing the shut-in world with adult programming.

The season opener wastes no time in starting the meter on how many times the word "fuck" can be uttered. By both genders. I can't remember if the non-binary gets to utter it as well.

The screenwriters LOVE this word, and can waste no time in getting it into the dialogue. And anything Yiddish will do just as well. As when the nearly stag table is seated at Chuck's father's wedding (more on that later) and the horny males are starting to size up the female crowd, we hear Ira utter some sage advice that the statute of limitations on desiring ex's is when your schwantz rusts and falls off. Thank God for the New Yorkers in the writers' room.

The very beginning is somewhat a Native American theme. Chuck Sr. is making an honest woman of Roxanne, the Native American he's had a love child with while pursuing of the upstate casino business. Dad's there with a turquoise bolo tie and grinning from ear-to-ear. He's obviously decided to give the papoose a father figure to look up to, at least as long as he has years left and money to stuff into a trust fund.

Quick jump to the Alaska Coast Highway where Bobby and Wags are in a wigwam of sorts, ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms and being guided to spiritual awareness by some sort of shaman. Wags missed Woodstock, Powder Ridge, and hanging out with Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson, but nevertheless always seems to manage to give you the appearance of someone who's spent his prior evening using recreational pharmaceutical drugs in the company of escorts. On his return he tells Wendy he's met the Creator. Wendy's eyes roll.

Obviously, Axe has felt the need to see things on a different level. Just making money now bores him. He's joine the Deca club, someone who has over ten billions dollars of net worth. He desperately needs meaning.  So he and Wags leave the Indian seminar on their Harleys (or their Indians) and contemplate the trip home.

Again, as in Homeland, cell phone reception is without peer. Wags checks his phone at a stop in Alaska with only a lake in view and asks Bobby if he's interested in a Vanity Fair cover story. He, Axe being the cover story. Bobby waffles, but very quickly they must have chucked the Harleys and bought plane tickets, or gotten a private jet, and are back in good old New York. Where the action is.

Chuck Jr. is still the Attorney General for New York, despite never being seen anywhere near the Empire State Plaza or the Al Smith office building in Albany, The producers obviously have enough locales to choose from downstate.

Chuck has Kate Sacker on his AG staff, and together they get the goods on a take-down of electric power hogs running bitcoin servers, consuming so much electricity in an upstate hamlet that the chart he and Sacker show the two "clickers"—as Bobby Axe calls them—of their outlier energy use, shows  the extra power that had to be purchased by the town to prevent blackouts, therefore raising property taxes, and committing utility theft. They and the Town Supervisor are going down.

There are several things I don't understand about Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Why do the amounts have to be preserved on servers to run 24/7? And what the hell is blockchain? As much as I read about it, there is little I truly understand, but hey, I'll go with the plot.

The bitcoin farm is of course tied to Bobby Axelrod—but not directly. He and Chuck come to an agreement that the charges won't go away, but they'll descend from the criminal level to a civil level, and cost Axe some moolah in fines, of which he has plenty.

The the spirit if this transparent friendship,, which is really only adhering to the axiom of keeping your enemies close, Bobby has returned the Winston Churchill WW II first editions he scooped up when Chuck put them on the market when he needed money. Do not be fooled. These rutting antagonists are still going after each other.

The theme of the season seems to be how hard Axe and Chuck are going to transform their personalities and become different men. Good luck with that.

Chuck and Wendy are headed for Splitsville. Reconciliation is not in the picture. Wendy's holed up in Axe's spare apartment in NYC, a palatial suite filled with artwork from the Masters. Look close and you'll spot Gustave Caillebotte's Floor Scrappers. Coming attractions seem to indicate that art will play a part in future episodes. Did Axe acquire Nazi stolen art? We know we can't put it past him.

Wendy is definitely going to be written into more episodes. Her role is clearly expanding. The #MeToo movement is going to propel more females in this show, just like last year.

And Maggie Siff, as Wendy, is coiffed and gowned in the latest when she's seated at Chuck's father's wedding with Chuck Sr's. ex, the woman thrown overboard for Pocahontas, and it's not Elizabeth Warren. Roxanne is the full-blooded real deal.

A merger is always tough to handle. The lawyers, accountants and HR people get it done on paper, but the humans cling to their respective sides tenaciously. Axe Capital and Mascap is a federation of separate entities, and the players are not going along with ir. It's the Quants vs. the Analysts.

There's a team building meeting with Wendy, looking positively svelte in her all black outfit. The warring clans, Axe and Mason employees are grouped on opposite sides. It's the musical West Side Story's Jets vs. the Sharks all over again.

How the producers missed the chance to play that soundtrack is true negligence. "When you're a Jet  you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day."

Never mind the omission. Wendy has concocted how to make the place fun again. So in comes The Man, the red-haired Irish wrestler Becky Lynch who storms the reception desk and comes gunning for Wendy.

I'm not up on wrestling, but The Man has appeal. She and Wendy go at it, pulling punches and kicks, but not pulling the throw down Wendy gives Becky that sends her crashing into office furniture. That had to hurt, no?

No. Becky bounces up from being flattened and hugs Wendy as they explain the philosophy of life— wrestling style. You look good, if you make your opponent look good. It's entertainment and an object lesson for the group to start to meld together better.

Becky is the real deal. She is considered a WWE champion female wrestler who apparently has been in the game since 2002. She's 33, from Limerick, and steals the show with her Irish accent and flaming red hair. Keep your eye out for her.

The Vanity Fair photo shoot introduces us to Michael Prince, a Jeff Bezos lookalike to me, who will be Bobby's financial antagonist. Two Alpha males loose on Wall Street.

The image of Mike Prince being Bezos will be greatly enhanced if they introduce a female alongside him who is an Argentine firecracker, just like the one Jeff has apparently thrown his wife overboard for. If they cast the Colombian bombshell Sophia Vergara from the now concluded series Modern Family, the image will be complete.

Wendy is a woman scorned. Taylor Mason is hoping that Chuck and Axe kill each other in a financial duel, and he emerges the with the spoils.

Will Chuck ever visit Albany? Will we meet the Governor? Will coronavirus crawl into later episodes? Will Chuck and Axe become redeemed men?

Fuck yeah! We will of course keep watching.

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My Girlfriend Maureen

Maureen Dowd, the columnist I love to take to the woodshed for her sporadic work ethic, has this past Sunday written a good one. She apparently stopped binging on Netflix and Amazon Prime long enough to turn in a column that put the Trump bashing Louisville Slugger away long enough to have some cogent thoughts on women accusing men of bad behavior, of all degrees.

Maureen comes down on both sides, and is not finished before she delivers one of her signature phrases or words that send me to the OED: droit du seigneur.

Maureen was obviously given a dictionary at a very early age. Do they ask you foreign phrases in spelling bees?

Maureen, use droit du seigneur in a sentence. Gladly. "So I could have not been more thrilled when #MeToo ripped away the curtain on the murky transgressions and diminishments that women endured in the droit du seigneur era."

Maureen recounts her 'Mad Men' experience of applying for a job at a Midtown Manhattan magazine and being asked by the future boss to come up to his hotel room.

She tells us the interviewee became the boss, so she got the job. Does that mean that after worrying that the job was gone unless x happened that Maureen did x? It's left unsaid, but maybe implied. Or, the possible future boss reconsidered his leering offer and gave her the job anyway after a sharp retort from Maureen? Perhaps.

So what does droit du seigneur mean anyway? The OED tells us: an alleged custom by which a medieval lord might have sexual intercourse with a vassal's bride on the wedding night.

Does the vassal at least get to consummate the marriage before the lord comes a calling? Probably not. Nasty custom, but not inconceivable.

I know I'm nearly ten years older than Maureen, male, and have my own Mad Men stories to tell of the office pecking order at work in the '60s.

My start was in 1967 at an insurance company, and not very high up the food chain either. Above mail room, but pretty much entry level. There were enough females who seemed to get promotions that seemed to depend on how they crossed their legs. Or maybe uncrossed them. Looking back, I can remember several promotions that went to candidates that seemed to go the Leah Martins who didn't say much, but did look good.

The test I took to get into the EAM/EDP department saw a few candidates get accepted, but all I remember is that Leah did too. By the way, the computer department was called EAM and stood for electronic adding machine. It got a little more refined when it was later referred as EDP, electronic data processing. Several bosses where known as "whoremasters." Did these women, young women, "put-out" as the saying would go amongst the guys?

I can distinctly remember in the company magazine a picture of the men assembled to judge who would be Miss Blue Shield, and who would be Miss Blue Cross, to be crowned at the annual dinner dance at the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street. My collection of company magazines went down with the Trade Center, but the memory is not erased.

You don't need Mad Men episodes to get a flavor of sexual politics. Just listen to the lyrics from the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

The clever Frank Loesser lyrics try and tell the guys that they need to be cool about things. "A secretary is not a toy, no my boy. Her pad is to write in, not spend the night in."

There is a great Kim Kovak, Fredric March movie, 1959, 'Middle of the Night' that viewed with today's eyes would be revealing about what the secretary/receptionist at a Garment District company had to put up with. Okay, the boss is widowed, but he always has to endure his uncle's behavior, who never stops talking about the "tootsies."

I often think about my uncle George who commanded destroyers in the Pacific during WW II. His active duty ended in 1959, having retired as a Rear Admiral. I imagine my uncle being whisked through a time machine and plopped down on the bridge of a naval ship in the late 20th century and being asked to handle a crew of male and female sailors. And female officers, no doubt. There wouldn't be enough expletives in the English and Greek languages to describe what he'd have to say about that.

My uncle was born in 1909 and passed away in 1968, but if he were whisked to that distant time without being exposed to the gradations of change that have come along the way, ever since he was ducking kamikazes, he would, I'm strongly convinced, agree that death is not so bad.

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The First Saturday in May

This past Saturday was the first Saturday in May. Every year there is a first Saturday in May. And every year the Kentucky Derby is run on that first Saturday in May, a mile and quarter thoroughbred horse race for three-year-olds, run around the oval at Churchill Downs, Louisville, Kentucky. New Year's Day for the racetrack crowd, and those that spill over to become race fans, if even for a day. Just like St. Patrick's Day everyone is Irish, even if they're not.

But of course 2020 has been a year unlike any other year in recent memory. It's been disrupted by coronavirus, lockdowns, self-quarantining, and my favorite, social distancing.  All words no one was uttering at the start of the New Year. Some much for all those predictions.

No need to rehash the impact. It's huge, and as Yogi told us, it ain't over till it's over. There have been postponements, cancellations, and workarounds. The Kentucky Derby has been moved to the first Saturday in September. The Preakness and Belmont, run at tracks other than Churchill Downs, and at venues controlled by different states, have not really cemented their intentions.

The New York Racing Association, NYRA, ever an organization that marches to the tune of different drummers, has announced they will open Belmont on the regularly scheduled Belmont Day, June 6th. This of course would scramble the traditional order of the Triple Crown races. But any student of racetrack history will tell you that the Preakness was once run before the Derby, but that was a long time ago. There are strange things done under the racetrack sun, and scrambling the order would just add to the pile.

Live televised sports is dead. At least for now. I'm ready to look forward to curling matches, but they're probably called off as well. Is darts safe to play?

Networks, ever creative, have been showing rebroadcasts of football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and boxing matches. I toured the remote last night and Curt Gowdy was announcing The Ohio State/USC football game. Archie Griffith was doing well. Nice to hear Curt again. He's been dead since 2006.

Horse racing, impacted like all sports, has found a crack in the wall. Racing has crawled through with live racing from Oaklawn Park, Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay Downs, tracks in Arkansas and Florida respectively. Live racing, taking bets, but no one in the stands. No hardcore horseplayer ever needed to gaze at pretty women wearing floppy hats, holding over-priced drinks in order to make a bet. In fact, if you really bet, women are a distraction best avoided.

Two Guys Talking sports was a theme of many Bill Gallo sport cartoons in the Daily News. Put two guys from different generations in a bar, or some setting that serves alcohol, and conversations might come around to who "was better?" Mythical matchups. Joe Louis vs. Muhammad Ali? Ty Cobb and Pete Rose? That game has endless pairings across all sports, and horse racing is no exception.

Cleverly filling the void of a shifted Derby, Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas moved its Arkansas Derby to the first Saturday in May. Yesterday.

The Arkansas Derby has become a major prep race for the Kentucky Derby. Points from the running of the race go to the top tier finishes and count toward Kentucky Derby starting eligibility. And this year was no exception to that. Except as a prep race, it was being run months before the rescheduled Kentucky Derby.

The Arkansas Derby is Grade 1 race, and attracts to best of the three-year-olds hoping for a little immortality. In face, so many owners and trainers wanted in on the race that it needed to be run in two divisions, with the $1 million purse being split. Oaklawn couldn't handle the number of prospective starters with its smaller starting gate, so the race was split.

It must be nice to be Bob Baffert, because his entrants in each race race. Charlatan in the first division, and Nadal in the second won. Bob wasn't even there. He social distanced from his California home.

Charlatan's race was a front-running bore, and Nadal's race was a bit more exciting, as he came from second place to run down the leader in the stretch, Both horses were prohibitive favorites. Betting money was to be made in the multi-leg races, or the exotics, triple and superfecta. Honestly, I watched, but didn't back any dogs in the fight.

But there was a third Derby on the first Saturday in May, a computer simulated race conceived by NBC, matching all 13 Triple Crown winners against each other in a mythical 2020 Derby.

The ultimate bar room proof was programmed to settle all boasts of who's the best. Joe Drape of the Times reported on the concept, and even offered picks: a boxed exacta of Secretariat (1973), America Pharoah (2015) and Affirmed (1978). There was no betting on the race in this country, but I heard a rumor that the bookies in England, always eager to set a line on anything, were taking action. My own pick was just Secretariat to win. After all, his winning times in all three Triple Crown races were track records, and his Belmont win was a world record—and they all still stand, 47 years later.

As I write this, I can look up and see the framed, famous 16x20 black and white photo of Secretariat and Ron Turcotte winning the Belmont Stakes, with the rest of the field a nearly a sixteenth a mile behind. A sixteenth of a mile is 110 yards.

Turcotte's head is cranked to look at the tote board and absorb the ungodly fractions Secretariat was ripping through on his way to the first Triple Crown since Citation's 1948 victories.

I've written before about this. My friend Dave (Fourstardave) and I were there, screaming at the fractions as well. We had arrived at the track when it opened and raced to secure the few remaining seats left for the public who didn't buy reserved seat tickets. We did what we always did. We took pages from the Morning Telegraph that we didn't need, folded them neatly, and taped them to the three seats we staked out.

In that era, I carried a stub of pencil with me and had a few feet of  masking tape wrapped around it. We always had fresh tape, and our papers never blew away. I was rummaging around in a closet not too long  ago and came across that pencil, still with a supply of very dried out masking tape attached. Now in my museum.

Two of us, and three seats. Why? One was for Les, our handicapping mentor, probably about 25 years older than us, but who we hooked up with at the track through someone else, years before 1973.

Les was a Citation fan. And why wouldn't you be? The horse won 16 straight races. Won the Triple Crown in 1948, and was probably the best horse there was before Secretariat came around, probably even better than Kelso, who didn't win a Triple Crown.

Les was in love with Citation. We heard it often. We joked amongst ourselves that Les would have sex with Citation if he could.

On that historic day in 1973 we found Les and told him he had a seat for him. He wasn't interested. What? Here's a guy who came to the track with numbers on his Morning Telegraph for each horse. He taught us whatever we knew by them. Pace makes the race. We nicknamed Les Mr. Pace.

Les had Pass Catcher in the 1971 Belmont, that saw Cannonero II fail to win the Triple Crown. Pass Catcher paid a  box car price, and Les had a deuce on him. He had come to the track almost beside himself, bursting with Pass Catcher's chances, showing anyone who would turn around and look at the number Pass Catcher had achieved in his handicapping system, a system that played heavy toward assigned weights, since in that era, weight was a real handicapping factor. Andy Beyer's speed ratings were not yet conceived.

Les never came to the seats. He was depressed. Why? After appearing on the cover of three magazines (Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and Time) before the Belmont, Secretariat was considered the overwhelming favorite to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation's 1948 achievement. Les left the track early and never watched Secretariat win.

Les couldn't contemplate a world that was going to anoint Secretariat as being a great horse. Would Citation beat Secretariat in a race? Who knew? It would have to be a mythical matchup.

In a Brave New World of  live sports programming, NBC wisely came up with the idea of putting all 13 Triple crown winners into a mythical, computer generated virtual race to determine the greatest of all time. The GOAT as they say now.

They would run the race at the same time they would run the Derby: 5:46. They weren't going to have to worry about running over programming  time due to a jockey's objection and a disqualification after 22 minutes of painstaking review this year.

I have to admit, the simulation was very realistic. The race unfolded with Seattle Slew taking the lead and stubbornly holding it. There was even a little bumping coming into the stretch. (Oh no, don't tell me they're going to program an objection!) Fractions were posted.

Where's Secretariat? He's easy to spot, since the colors are easily recognized. He's back a bit, between horses. What the hell is Turcotte doing?

They get into the stretch, and Larry Colmus's call acknowledges that Citation is becoming prominently placed, coming up the rail. Eddie Arcaro has been saving ground the whole way.

Prior to the race the usual Derby broadcasters, Randy Moss, Mike Tirico and Jerry Bailey, all patched in from homes, offered their picks. Randy Moss made his points for Secretariat. Jerry Bailey, perhaps not so surprisingly, chose Citation. He offered his conclusion was reached not because he ever saw Citation run, but on being told by Eddie Arcaro that Citation was the greatest horse he ever rode. And Arcaro won two Triple Crowns; the only jockey to ever do so.

Arcaro was the greatest jockey of his generation. And before Money Mike, Mike Smith, there was Jerry Bailey, a rider who I always hoped was on the horse I bet who might now be in a tight finish to the wire. Jerry Bailey, to me, would win more tight finishes than anyone.

Jerry rode Cigar to 16 straight victories, tying Citation's record. Cigar couldn't get the 17th straight win.  But I did that exacta, and it paid handsomely.

God damn it! Where's Secretariat? This race is not going to end with him losing to Citation is it? Jesus Christ, if that happen someone is coming out of their grave, whipping off their binoculars and telling us who's the greatest now.

Well, as anyone who watched it, Secretariat did prevail in a tight finish that saw Citation finish second. A very believable outcome.

Guys at the track usually know little about the people they're surround by. For all the years we knew Les we never knew him in a setting other than the racetrack, and never with anyone he brought to the track.

Les always found us sometime after the first race, after the Daily Double, then the only exotic bet. He didn't want to get caught up in too many double bets and get wiped out by the first race. He only ever brought so much money with him, sand left if he tapped out. He never asked to borrow money. He never seemed to make any large bets.

He was married, perhaps for the second time, had a son, worked for ARA food services at some point, had a Master's Degree in something, drove a Triumph sports car, lived somewhere on York Avenue, and had a TR, Trafalgar phone number that I had on a very worn index card in my wallet. I never had a reason to call him.

Once, in the dead of winter before there was an inner track at Aqueduct, Les us to Liberty Bell for some cold weather action. We ran into other New Yorkers, some of whom knew Les quite well. One was the comedian Joey Faye, who in that era was starring in Alka-seltzer commercials. We all were huddled in the glass-enclosed grandstand, shivering when the door was opened to go out and view the races.

At one point we learned Les owned a bar somewhere, sometime ago. We suspect he knew some wiseguys by their full name, but he always hung out with us.

Immediately after the simulated race my friend and I talked on the phone and the subject was Les. God, can imagine if Les were alive today how disappointed, morose, depressed, suicidal he'd be?

We last saw Les sometime shortly after 1975 in the paddock area of Belmont. I had just gotten married and introduced him to my wife. We hadn't been seeing Les lately, and he seemed somewhat distant. I think his was recovering from some serious burns on an arm suffered in a commercial kitchen fire. He didn't hang out with us, and I don't remember ever seeing him again.

Les Barrett could be alive, but he'd be in his mid 90s now. My friend and I are in our very early 70s.

After the simulated race, did the earth move somewhere just a bit? Did an urn shake a bit and inch its way toward the mantle's edge? Any horseplayer knows they usually all lose sometime.

Les, go back to what you were doing. It's been decided. RIP.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Look it Up

In the '60s when I was in high school and living in Manhattan with my grandmother, I frequented two libraries in the area, the Epiphany on 23rd Street, between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, and the Ottendorfer at 135 2nd Avenue, just north of 8th Street, in the St. Mark's neighborhood.

Of the two, the Ottendorfer was my favorite. It was fairly narrow, and had a book-lined mezzanine level that looked so inviting, but was then closed to the public because the flooring wasn't considered safe enough to have perhaps more than one person up there at a time. Very early social distancing.

I checked books out from both libraries, but I also loved to browse, especially at the Ottendorfer, whose history as a branch library dates back to 1884, when it was opened by German immigrants. Both libraries are still part of the NYPL system, and the Ottendorfer is a jewel that I've yet to go back to after so many decades. I think they've opened the mezzanine level at this point.

I will forever remember browsing at the Ottendorfer and finding a chemistry book in German. The library, as originally conceived, served a large German population in the area and had books in both languages. The book probably dated from the '20s or '30s, which when you think of it, was not so long ago when you're in high school in the '60s.

I couldn't get over that there was book, with vellum pages, written in German, filled with formulas for the ceramics industry. Since I was then exposed to high school chemistry, I already knew many of the chemistry books were in German. I still get a kick out of the fact that the periodic table symbol for tungsten is W, for wolfram, a German word. (Okay, I was a geek.)

I knew the St. Marks place area was where the family first settled when they arrived from Greece. My grandfather and his brother started a shoe shine parlor at St. Marks Place. Shoes shined and hats blocked. I don't think they did shoe repair.

What I didn't know at the time I was prowling around the Ottendorfer was that the family lived at 134 2nd Avenue, right above the shoe shine parlor, later flower shop, that would move uptown to 18th street and Irving Place, a cover for the Pete's Tavern Prohibition-era speakeasy in the back, owned by Peter Belles. The family floral business was on three different 18th Street corners until the mid '70s.

What spawned all these memories was the lively obituary written by Sam Roberts about Madeline Kripke, who has just passed away at 76, and was known for being a keeper of a collection of 20,000 dictionaries in her West Village apartment.

And as you'd expect of anyone whose got 20,000 of anything, there is a photo of Ms. Kripke surrounded by parts of her collection. She's an organized looking Collyer brother. There are no parts of cars in her apartment. She is seen holding a 16th century edition of a Latin dictionary, the oldest of her books.

Mr. Roberts, in his swift-moving lede paragraphs recites some examples of the books she accumulated, ending one paragraph with the news that her collection includes a 1980 Transit Authority dictionary guide to pickpocket slang. And that's what reminds me of the German chemistry book at the Ottendorfer library.

Imagine a volume produced for whose use I don't know, of pickpocket slang issued by a city agency. In those days, the Transit Authority had their own police force separate from NYPD, so maybe they needed a dictionary for interrogations, since subways and buses were favorite pickpocket venues. To me, 1980 is not that long ago. In fact, it's further removed from now than that German chemistry book I came across in the '60s.

I'd love to know the words accumulated between the covers of the 1980 edition of pickpocket slang. I can only think of dip, meaning the person doing the nimble-finger lifting. Since many pickpockets of that, and an earlier era, were Gypsies, my guess there is a lot of Romany-type words in there. Gadje, might another one, meaning a non-Gypsy.

Ms. Kripke's love of dictionaries is recalled to have started when she was in fifth grade and her parents gave her Webster's Collegiate dictionary. Growing up in our house we had a small bookcase of books. No family Bible, but a very well-thumbed, falling apart American Collegiate dictionary that was my mother's. It's long shorn of its dust jacket. In fact, I can never remember one. The only examples of her handwriting I have are nestled in notes between some of the pages.

I still have the dictionary, but have long left it alone in a bookcase and use Webster's II New Collegiate dictionary, or one of the two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English English dictionary I keep on my desk.

The shorter OED checks in with a two volume width of 5½ inches. I get the biggest kick of the fact that the two volumes are called Shorter, and that the full-Monty would be 20 volumes or so. Of course there is the online version, but that's cheating as far as I'm concerned. The mantra growing up was "look it up." The counter-intuitive advice was always, "you'll know how to spell if you look it up." "But what if I can't spell it? 'Look it up, you'll get close, then you'll know.'" It did work.

I forever remember being in maybe third or fourth grade and the teacher handed out dictionaries to all the pupils. Hard red covers. No dust jackets. That was some thirty-two books. She walked us through the parts of the dictionary. We looked up the word "candid." And yes, aardvark is the first animal named in the dictionary.

Not that long ago I sat in the main reading room of the NYPL Main Branch on 5th Avenue with my daughter Susan and we were quietly reviewing something she was writing for her Master's thesis. I was helping her with her wording. She has since advanced, through dad's influence or not, to write her Ph.D. dissertation with no input from me.

But in that NYPL-dad-moment I remember looking at the huge dictionaries that you'd find on their plinths, open and inviting someone to look something up. I remember, I want that as well. So, I built my own dictionary holder for my smaller Collegiate dictionary.

I also remember looking up at the main reading room's ceiling that is nearly the size of a football field and thought of Thomas Wolfe's words he once wrote about the old Pennsylvania Station..."Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time."

I still would rather look things up in a hard copy dictionary than Google it. I just used my smaller dictionary to make sure the spelling I used for "shorn" that didn't pass the hidden version of Spell Check that this text gets subjected to, was not misspelled. It wasn't.

There was a recent repeat episode of Endeavour, the prequel to the Morse murder mysteries on PBS, that was titled Pylon. The main story was about finding how a young girl was murdered and placed next to a high tension wire tower.

So why was the title Pylon? Well, the OED's fourth definition of the word of the five it gives tells us: A tall structure erected as support: spec. a lattice-work metal tower for overhead electricity. The  OED even adds an example of the word used in a text: "Scotland on Sunday. Cables underground can cost more than overhead pylons". So there.

Mr. Roberts reports there were no plans made by Ms. Kripke for who gets the collection. Her only survivor is a brother, who no doubt will work with those interested parties (they were will be many) who will find a home for the collection.

Libraries are currently closed, but I have every intention of trying to see what's in that 1980 Transit Authority guide to pickpocket slang. It's got to be more up-to-date than the 1811 Edition of: The Vulgar Tongue: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence: Unabridged from the Original 1811 Edition. The original edition I have no doubt is in Ms. Kripke's collection as well.

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