The Gospel According to John

Our younger daughter Susan had a baby boy last Saturday, her first, and our third grandchild and first male grandchild. At 74, I don't know when I'll be able to tell him a few things of the ways of the world. I can write them down for posterity, because if I orally tell him now his comprehension might not be what it's going to be. As such:

Dear Matthew:

The actuarial tables on mortality give you the best chance of anyone on Earth today of living long enough to see the Mets win another World Series. That's probably also true for the Rangers winning another Stanley Cup, since they seem to do that in 54 year intervals and they're already 29 years into the next interval. Hang on. I'm trying as well.

Unfortunately no one on Earth today is going to live long enough to see the Jets even get into the Super Bowl, let alone win one.. It's just a fact of life. Do not become a Jets fan unless you want a glimpse of Taylor Swift.

Joe Biden is your first president. For grandpa and grandma, he is the 14th president so far in their lifetimes. We always live in interesting times.

Do not be discouraged by who is president. Basically, half the people in the United States did not vote for any president who gets into office. If you're annoyed at who is in office, hang out with the other half.

Forget who the vice president is. Vice presidents are only important in banking.

Your first car will likely be an electric vehicle handed down from your parents. Your fossil grandparents will still be driving a fossil-fueled vehicle. Whether they will be able to get gas for this vehicle will be in doubt, but your grandfather is a resourceful guy. There may be a dangerous supply of gasoline stored in the backyard shed. He careful.

You will probably live your whole life in the United States. That's the good news. The other news is that if you work on the books you will pay taxes. LOTS of taxes.

Geographically, the United States has good neighbors. To the north is Canada, a quiet country that exports oil and hockey players. Canada is never going to start lobbing missiles at the United States, nor we to them.

To the south is Mexico, a bit of a problem. Their food makes for great take-out places and we seem to love their beer, but their border proximity to the United States to the north and the rest of Central and South American to the south makes the country a great place to enter the country illegally. Mexico exports huge amounts of illegal drugs into this country. When you become my age, all these things will still be going on.

And as for the rest of the world, there will always be worries. Conflict will always be the one word to sum up the affairs of the world. First off, Israel is never happy. Your grandfather looked up the front page of the New York Times for the day he was born in 1949, and there was a story of how unhappy they were with something. This pattern will continue.

Russia, the former Soviet Union will always be a problem. along with China over playing nice in the global sandbox. Do not expect this to change. Read the news, but filter out the noise. The world is always a noisy place.

By the time you graduate college, Elon Musk will be living on Mars, and there will be those who will be happy about this, including Elon, but particularly his ex-wives..

There will not be a single day in your life that someone will not utter the two words "global warming." Since you were born last Saturday we have had lots of rain, a tremendous amount of rain that is being blamed on global warming. There are those who are going to tell you we have to keep this from ever happening again. Pay no attention to anyone who says "we have to keep this from happening again." About anything. Everything happens again.

The New York Times in today's online front page paints the gloomy picture that storms are getting worse because of global warming. We got 8" of rain yesterday, which is a lot of rain. But the power stayed on, and no one died. 

The record we nearly broke was set in 1882 when there was a then record of 16.85" of rain in the month of September. This September we've logged 13.95". Things must have been pretty hot in 1882. Once upon a time the Earth was covered in ice. It's melted over the millions of years of its existence.

Be careful of reading the NYT. It always paints a gloomy picture. It's not a bad paper, but you've got to have a filter when you're reading it.

Do not take any preposterous bets in a bar if someone bets you that they can make something seemingly impossible happen. As the advice goes in Guys and Dolls, if someone tells you they can make cider squirt out of a deck of cards, DO NOT take this man's bet, because that man will surely make cider squirt out of a deck of cards.

Your parents are very much into the recreational sports of running, swimming, biking and paddle boarding. A triathlon is in your future. Your mother already did one, along with several marathons and  open ocean water swims. Your father has competed in bike races and auto races. Be prepared to sweat. They love you very much. We all do.

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Subway Emojis

At this point in the 21st century anyone with a cell phone is familiar with emojis, those tiny icons that convey a message and replace words. I don't know if there an official issuing agency, somewhat like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that creates and approves new ones, but I do know that someone is probably going to write an entire book using emojis, if they haven't already.

I always thought it was somewhat of a generational thing on who uses emojis, until someone I know who is past 60 used a jaunty thumbs up —nothing else—to reply to one of my emails. I was stunned. It is safe to say I don't use them, but then again I barely text. And when I do I use words, not pictures. It's enough that I have to change the cell phone screen to get an apostrophe in when I'm using a contraction than to have to go and find an emoji to add to the text.

Emojis remind of those children's puzzle books that every so often replaced words with pictures to see if the formative brain could get the message. How cute.

Emojis are not emoticons, which are defined in the OED as being that series of keystrokes that show a facial expression. e.g. :o). Another cute useless touch.

In fact, my edition of the OED is so old that the word "emoji" cannot be found. Google tells me it is a pictogram used in electronic messages to replace emotions that words cannot convey. Oh boy. Origin of the word is not given, but apparently it made its acceptance into the OED in 2015. I must have missed that story.

This whole posting that started with a discussion of emojis stared with reading a book review in the Wall Street Journal, Astor, by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe. Moira Hodgson wrote the review in yesterday's edition, and I felt the need to correct a misrepresentation made in the review.

Anderson Cooper, who some people might know is a CNN journalist who is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt who was a daughter of Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, a family that probably didn't take back the empties for the 5¢ deposit. Vanderbilt connotates wealth.

Reggie was the grandson of the family scion, Cornelius, famous for making a fortune with steamboats and railroads. Cornelius did not come from Europe, but was born in Staten Island in 1794. He was nicknamed The Commodore because of his shipping interests. 

As you approach Grand Central Terminal from the elevated roadway that is Park Avenue there is a statue of Cornelius. The Commodore Hotel occupied a spot right next to Grand Central Terminal. In the '70s a youthful real estate developer took over the Commodore and redid it with a glass facade and renamed it The Hyatt. The developer's name was Donald Trump. It was he first project that more or less put him on the map.

There was a Vanderbilt Hotel on Park Avenue at 33rd Street, with a famous Crypt Bar where my uncle Andy bartended for years. The ceiling was a beautiful setting of arches and mosaics that now houses a restaurant named Wolfgang's, a high-end steak house in the tradition of Peter Luger's, started by a pair of Luger's waiters. The rest of building was converted into apartments or condos decades ago. There are a lot of gargoyles on the setbacks of that building. I used to work right next door at 2 Park Avenue.

I mention all this because Ms. Moira Hodgson gives us a bit of background on John Jacob Astor and the co-author Anderson Cooper.

John Jacob Aster, another rich son-of-a gun before income taxes, made his money by selling beaver pelts from trapped beavers in Canada, New York City real estate, and selling opium in China. He was born in  Germany in 1763 and became the richest man in America. His great-great grandson John Jacob Astor IV died when the Titanic went down in 1912. 

The Vanderbilts and the Astors bought a lot of real estate in New York. Moira Hodgson makes mention of how the Astors were "old" money and the Vanderbilts "new" money. The Vanderbilts were shunned until there was an invitation to one of their galas.

The cohort "The Four Hundred" got its name because that was supposedly the number that could get an invitation to an Astor gala with 400 the number the ballroom could hold, There were some really big chateau mansions on Fifth Avenue at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Julian Fellowes in his miniseries The Gilded Age tried to do with an American setting what he did with Downton Abbey. There will be a second season, but I know for myself I lost interest in it early on in the first season. Rich people in turn-of-the-century New York just didn't seem appealing. He doesn't use the names Astor and Vanderbilt, but he depicts the invitation story mentioned in the book Astor and the book review that help defrost the feelings between the two families.

So, what does the book's reviewer misrepresent? Ms. Hodgson tells us the subway mosaic found on the wall of the No. 6 Train at Astor Place that depicts a beaver is "in tribute to John Jacob Astor" and his fur trade business.

Almost right. It is not a tribute, but rather a practice they did when they built these subway stops at the start of the 20th century to put a pictorial depiction (a mosaic emoji) that could be understood by the millions of non-speaking immigrants who were pouring into New York City. The beaver was a reference to Astor, and thus the stop Astor Place, but not placed there in tribute.

There are other subway mosaics that can still be found, but a lot of them have been lost. The locomotive for 42nd Street Grand Central Terminal on the same line was supposed to help tell those who might be able to yet read English that they were at the train terminal stop.

Likewise, the steamboat at Fulton Street was meant to tell those that they were at stop named to depict of the inventor of the steamboat, Robert Fulton. There is a link to a website that describes these extant mosaics.

The practice of installing mosaics has taken off in more modern times as subway infrastructure gets remodeled. The New York City subways don't yet look like Moscow's with Hermitage-type artwork, but the surroundings have been made more entertaining and pleasing to look at.

One of my favorites is what they did with the 28th street stop on the N and R line. I was often at this  stop in the single-bulb-dim lighting era in the '60s when I went to the wholesale flower district for the family's flower shop.

Never has a stop now looked so good.

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Pandas

The Wall Street Journal's A-Hed pieces are usually full of puns, from their headlines, sub-headlines to the text in the story.

Yesterday's A-Hed piece deals with the Washington Zoo's need to ship all its resident pandas back to China. It seems China has dibs on all pandas in the world, even those born outside of China. This means the United States is deporting U.S. panda citizens without an uproar, leaving the zoo without one of it main attractions.

This repatriation is happening in the still of the night. No news media crush like when Elián González was sent back to Cuba from Miami to live with his father. No armed intrusions. In a country that is quick to take

offense to everything, the U.S. is letting this one go. Where are the  protesters? Not even one "Hell no, they won't go." Sad.

The WSJ took the road to start their piece with a pun: "It's Panda-monium..." Cute, but a piss poor headline.

Years ago Lynne Truss, a British grammarian scored a bestseller on grammar and punctuation with a book titled Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The book's title was a clever take on how the absence of a comma can alter the meaning of a sentence. Punctuation counts.

The cover of the book showed a panda climbing a ladder painting over the comma in the title. There is another panda on the ground walking away from the ladder holding a smoking handgun. Thus, a title without the comma could be descriptive of the animal's proclivity of eating bamboo shoots and having satisfied their hunger, paddling away from the site of their meal, in short leaving, to a sentence with a comma that might appear on a police report of an upright panda gunman who after downing bamboo stalks in a gastro-pub, pulls out a weapon, fires and departs.

The WSJ completely missed telling us that the "Washington Zoo pandas, who eat shoots, would be leaving via FedEx to China." Guys, you blew it: "Washington Zoo Pandas Eat Shoots and Leave."

As glaring as this missed opportunity is, the rest of the text is filled with the usual tongue-in-cheek puns.

We start with the headline of course. That sets the light-hearted tone. Not all that long ago Rupert baby wanted to do away with the A-Hed feature. I don't know why. It's what helps define the paper, like the "Pepper...and Salt" cartoon. I heard the staff and readers reacted strongly against the elimination action, and the A-Hed piece continues. There's even a book of a collection of the pieces, "Floating Above the Page." (I have it.)

D.C. IS in Panda-monium
As China Takes Back Beloved Bears

The U.S. capital grapples with the coming
departure of the giant Beltway insiders.

Up to standards. President Nixon's wife Pat commented that when the pandas arrived in Washington in the '70s that it was "pandamonium" "Beltway insiders" plays on their captivity.

The piece's writer Andrew Duehren tells us: "The breakdown in the U.S.-China relations is bamboozling many in the city." Bamboozle and the food of choice for pandas, bamboo, get it? Sure you do.

There apparently has been a nine-day "Panda-Palooza" to attract attention to their departure. Someone flew in from California to say good-bye. A ten-year-old boy from Brooklyn was there with his parents to say au revoir to what he's been watching daily on the "Panda-Cam" before he heads off to school.

"Pandas first arrived at the National Zoo during a fuzzier period in the great power relations." Andrew has captured the spirit of the A-Hed piece.

"At LiLLiES, a restaurant a few blocks away that panders to panda fans..." A double play, on a panda 's name and the verb to pander. Andrew is writing on all cylinders at this point.. 

"As the U.S. and China relationship has grown more tense, panda politics have also become more black and white." Andy, you're killing it now.

A congresswoman Nancy Mace (R. S.C.) has legislation to keep U,S. born panda cubs in America. The pandas are a money maker for the zoo, driving attendance and the sale of souvenirs. Plans are underway to gain replacements. They've been paying China $1 million a year to since 2000 "rent' the pandas. I'm sure the American public has not been aware of that till now.

A Twitter page photo of Andrew Duehren (@aduehren) shows a very youthful looking reporter who may not have ever heard of Elián González or Lynne Truss's book.

He's forgiven.

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New York, New York

New York, New York.."It's a wonderful town...The Bronx is up and the Battery is down..."

So go the lyrics to a musical about some sailors who hit the island of Manhattan on one day of shore leave. Gene Kelley, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin run off a ship docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard  and see the sights in a 1949 movie On the Town. There are of course females in the movie. Sailors without females wouldn't go. Ann Miller, Betty Garrett and Alice Pearce round out the principal cast members and dates.

(And there you have it. New York City is five boroughs, or counties, and Bronx is  the only one with the definite article in front of it. You do not add 'the' to Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island. Bronx without The in front of is naked.

My wife was born in the Bronx; she is from the Bronx, but her address before marrying me was Bronx, New York. Her birth certificate says Bronx, New York..

You can't say Bronx without inserting the 'the' in front of it. I've always heard it as The Bronx, but never saw it as The Bronx until I saw a company's address on the side of a truck delivering goods to the Cherry Wood Shopping center here in Wantagh.

I always read the names on trucks, and note license plates. And here, clear as day, was some produce company's name, street address, and location painted on the cab door...The Bronx, New York 104--. Someone deliberately painted the sign how they always heard things. That's how powerful The is when it comes to the Bronx.)

Decades ago John Steinbeck wrote a novel titled The Winter of Our Discontent. It wasn't a sports book, but the title might imply what is in store for New York sport fans as the days dwindle down to a precious few.

We'll start with the football team the Jets, who haven't won a Super Bowl since Joe Willie's famous upset of the Baltimore Colts in 1969. Do you know how long ago 1969 is? It's prehistoric. There were no cell phones or computers.

Why there are still Jets fans who go to games is beyond my comprehension. It just shows you how many people want to get out of the house and eat bratwurst and drink Budweiser in a parking lot.

My theory is it's the color of the uniforms and the name that keeps them from winning. Jets. Think about it seriously as a team name. It's stupid.

Of course, once upon a time the A.F.L. franchise in New York was named The Titans and they played in the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. My father, who was hardly a football fan took me to a Titans game for some reason. I think they played at home on Friday nights.

I don't know what the admission price was, but I remember my father didn't seem to have enough money on him (no surprise there) to buy two tickets. I remember it took a lot of time before we got in with tickets.  I don't know what deal was swung at the box office. There certainly weren't many people at the game.

The Polo Grounds of course was once home to the New York Giants baseball team, one of the three teams that played within New York City. The other two of course were the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees, playing in Brooklyn and the Bronx respectively,

By today's standards the Polo Grounds was a dump. At 155th Street in Manhattan it was dark and cavernous and was 480' to centerfield. It was a steel-girder, obstructed view venue, but it was where Bobby Thomson hit The Shot Heard Round the World and where a lot of people felt an affinity towards. My father probably one of them.

Hit a ball and if it didn't clear the fence it was probably going to be an inside-the-park-homer. When the Mets began their presence in New York they started playing at the Polo Grounds since of course The Giants and the Dodgers had moved to California after the 1957 season, creating what for anyone who remembers that a re-enactment of Original Sin.

The Polo Grounds also served duty as the home for the New York Mets before its disappearance under the wrecking ball to become a housing project.

We used to go to Met games at the Polo Grounds in those early years. If my father was any kind of sports fan he probably owed his allegiance to the baseball New York Giants. He grew up in Manhattan, so it was his home team.

Titans is a great name for a football team, but it's too late for the Jets to change their name to that. Tennessee has the Titans—but no Super Bowl, with only one appearance. I can't really think of a good replacement name. Maybe the New York Knights, the baseball team in Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural. 

How the Jets came to called the Jets is not known to  me. When they were christened with that name New York had the Mets, the Jets, the Sets (professional tennis) and the Nets. Eventually, in the early '70s there was the New York Bets, not a sports team but Off-Track Betting for horse racing wagers. Someone must have thought the "ets" sound was good to hear and loved rhymes.

The Titans became the Jets and started playing in Shea Stadium in the early '60s, as did the Mets. The Jets were of course an A.F.L. team then, playing second fiddle to the N.F.L. As such, they too played their home games on Friday nights at Shea.

I remember going to some of those games. Half-time was often a Black drum and bugle corps from Brooklyn, marching and twirling rifles. There was one memorable half-time where several women raced up and down on rubber matting and tried to succeed in emptying out refrigerator before their competition. You won't see that these days.

Green uniforms. The Jets nickname can be Gang Green. Now how good is that? Your nickname is a disease that leads to amputations; gangrene.

Of course all Jet frustrations were going to be solved by the arrival of Aaron Rodgers as their starting quarterback. All preseason, the media was drooling over Rodgers coming to New York. The contract signing was protracted, but was finally finalized, and became BIG news. The Jets were headed to this year's Super Bowl. Start spreading the news and printing the tickets.

Funny thing about that. You have to have a decent record over 17 games to get to the playoffs and a  thicket of pairings before you get to the Promised Land. No worries, the Jets have Rodgers.

I'm not a great football fan but I recognized pending irony when I sensed Rodgers was going to get hurt and the Jets were once again going to disappoint.

Football, played on any surface, grass or artificial grass is not kind to the body. But here was Rodgers on 9/11 racing out from the tunnel carrying the American flag, much like the cavalry is all those westerns I saw as a kid. He was going to save the Jets.

Who knew that my sense of impending irony would take place after four plays when a Buffalo Bills player sacked Rodgers, and as he went down he sustained a torn Achilles tendon and was likely to miss the rest of the season. The season was leaving on a Jet plane.

But the Jets won the game, in overtime, with who was before the Rodgers injury, their backup quarterback, Zach Wilson, last year's starter. An exciting game. Not many games are won on long yardage runs, but this one was, a punt return to made it to the house. Their second game against the Dallas Cowboys didn't go so well, and Zach was blitzed and intercepted to death in defeat.

Rodgers going down like that reminded me of a horse The Music Man years ago. The owners, an old-time Broadway couple the Vances, who once raced Lemon Drop Kid who won a Belmont Stakes, had bought a yearling in a sale for somewhere near $900,000 and being Broadway people named him The Music Man. Even the name Lemon Drop Kid was a nod to a Damon Runyon story and a Bob Hope movie.

I was at Saratoga when the horse was entered for the first time in a 2-year-old maiden race. I went to the rail and trained my binocs on him the whole way around. I wanted to be close to what $900,000 was going to buy the owners. I think John Velasquez was on him. They hit the top of the stretch and Music Man look the rail and looked like he had a path to a first out victory That is until his leg snapped, and there went $900,000. 

And if you think there could have been no one on earth who knew nothing of Aaron Rodgers coming to the Jets, you never met my wife. When he went down I sent into the other room where she was watching some show on MeTV (she's living in the '60s and '70s now, but that's another story) and told her Aaron Rodgers of the Jets got hurt on the fourth play of the game.

And from a woman who so well wall off sports, who turns television off as soon as the weather is finished and before a word about sports can be uttered, looks up, and says, "Who's Aaron Rodgers?" Fame is fleeting.

The New York Giants by getting shutout in their season opener to Dallas 44-0 and then not scoring for the first half against the Phoenix Cardinals, have probably caused more heart attacks than anything. But, they did recover in the second half of the Cardinals game, at Phoenix and won 31-28.

Games like that do not happen often. The last time they came back from such a shitty deficit was 1949, so this was hardly anything to get overly excited about. Their schedule is tough since they made the playoff last year. Football can be like steeplechase racing. After you win, you get to carry more weight. The great equalizer.

Has anyone absorbed where the Yankees and the Mets are in he standings these days? Well, certainly not if you were dependent on seeing standings in that other New York paper, the NYT. They've thrown their sports department overboard. Not that it wasn't already suffering from neglect and apathy. If you want to read about sports in New York get the New York Post. I am. If you want to know how they're playing soccer in Samoa, stay with the NYT.

Well, in case you do not know the standings, the Yankees are in 5th place in their division with a barely winning records, 18½ games out of first place. They're fighting the Red Sox of all teams for the cellar. Baseball should follow European soccer and shed the bad teams and put them in purgatory. When you don't measure up, you're out of the Premier League. 

And the Mets? The Metropolitans. A great name, but doing worse than the Yankees. They are 27 games out of first place, with decimated relief pitching and the disposal of ace pitcher (not so ace this year) Justin Verlander who was another ballyhooed signing that was going to bring the Mets to the World Series. Along with pitcher Max Scherzer the Mets were headed for a 100+ game winning reason and a Subway Series with the Yankees. Right? The sports media was wet with speculation. Max was sent packing as well.

Now the Mets are 70-81. Verlander and his wife Kate Upton didn't even last long enough to be at the Christmas party. The press photographers are disappointed there. What couldn't have been better to photograph Kate at a party?

Rangers, Devils and Islanders? New season is nearly underway. The Rangers of course won the first two games against the Devils at the start of last season's playoffs, beating them at home, then quickly folding like a cheap suit, lost the next four and saw the Stanley Cup go elsewhere—again. 1940 and 1994 the are the last two Stanley Cup championships. A 54 year interval is only 25 years away now. We're more than half way there. It's like a journey to Mars. Nets and Knicks? Please.

New York is even losing its marquee Triple Crown race for a few seasons. Belmont race track is being torn down and rebuilt, going from 1.25 million square feet to 250,000 square feet. They are building a tunnel to allow infield viewing of the Belmont Stakes, which is expected to return to its namesake venue in 2025, or 2026. They are also adding an all-weather mile track inside the inner turf course. The place is expected to be winterized.

When Belmont reopened in 1968 after a fire it was built to accommodate what then would be sizable crowds to view racing. 30,000+ on average weekends; up to 90,000 for the Belmont Stakes. I was there for some of those HUGE crowds.

Live attendance at racing venues is nowhere near what it was over 50 years ago. My first day at the races was seeing the Belmont Stakes in 1968 when Stage Door Johnny kept Forward Pass from gaining Triple Crown recognition, which would have been with an asterisk.

The Kentucky Derby was won by Dancer's Image, but later disqualified for having Bute in their system, then prohibited. Forward Pass was awarded first place and the first place prize money. Lawsuits dragged on for years, but eventually, Forward Pass was considered he official winner. Forward Pass won the Preakness, so the 1968 Belmont Stakes presented a chance for an asterisk-type Triple Crown if Forward Pass could win the Belmont Stakes.

I went to the track with the Piermont brothers, Dave (later known as Fourstar Dave) and Dennis. We left from Penn Station on the Belmont Special in the company of their family barber, an Irish-American barber named James Kelly, a confirmed gambler.

I hit the Daily Double cold, having handicapped from The Morning Telegraph the night before in the Piermont apartment on 55th Street. The Daily Double then was the only exotic bet offered, and you had to make the bet by 10 minutes before the first race. The computers were much slower then. I got $22 back for my $2 and fell in love with handicapping, as much as I knew about handicapping from my first time looking at The Morning Telegraph, then 75¢. 

Over the years the Belmont infrastructure became very dated. There were no luxury boxes, or sports bars. The Breeders' Cup was last there in 2005 or so. The plan is now to hold the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga during a three day festival in June, running the race at a 1¼ miles rather than Belmont's 1½ miles. During the Covid era the Belmont was run before the Derby at a mile and an eighth at Aqueduct.

The town of Saratoga Springs is salivating over the Belmont Stakes coming to town for a special three-day meet in June. Hotels have already posted $500 a night stays. I won't be there.

We used to go to every Belmont Stakes, but stopped in 1999. They couldn't handle the crowd and getting out of the parking lot was a nightmare. NYRA didn't protect its marquee event. 

Hopefully the new Belmont will be built with better sightlines. Aqueduct's are far superior. At Belmont, when the horses hit the top of the stretch you can't see the race unless you stand up. It's as bad as having a front row seat at Carnegie Hall. 

Now at 74 years old I hope to still be around when Belmont reopens. I never thought I might live long enough to see two Belmont race tracks.

And I never thought it would be a woman's professional basketball team that would hold up the honor of New York sports, but the Lady Liberties in the W.N.B.A. are advancing to the second round of the playoffs.

Let's go ladies. You've got a lot of weight on your shoulders.

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Septembers (11 and 16)

The dates on the stones let you measure the time
Of the lives that lived in between.
The bracketed years reveal to the current
The joys and the troubles they've seen.

On any given day a person is born
You can record the date of their birth.
And on any given day a person can die
And you can record that they've left this earth.

And the morning we made our dusty descent,
An accomplishment undiminished,
We learned of the others and their bracketed date,
And our own, that remained unfinished.

So it is incredible to believe the end can be met
At the hands of someone we knew.
He put an end to life, he put an end to himself,
But he didn't put an end to you.
______________________________________________

September 16, 2002

Twenty-one years is not a so-called milestone anniversary, but no less memorable.

No one ever dies
Who lives in hearts
Left behind.

https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2023/01/september-16-2002.html

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Canadian Bilingual

You have to appreciate Keith Spicer, 89, who just passed away. In many official capacities for Canada he was a backer of two Canadian tongues who, as the obit headline tells us, rarely held his own, especially when he explained, "bilingualism and biculturalism works best through biology. The best place to learn French is in bed."  (That's nearly as good as when in 1973 Dick Schapp, a sports reporter and broadcaster, declared that the recent Triple Crown winner Secretariat and his stablemate Riva Ridge were the most famous stablemates since Joseph and Mary. Jesus, did he get in trouble.)

(Note: I'm not sure, but it's rather rare to read a NYT obit headline that is a bit of a play on words. I like to think the headline writer got one past the obit editor William McDonald, who might have been at the tennis matches in Flushing. It's just a guess.)

Whether he said this with his tongue in his cheek is not in the NYT obit by Sam Roberts. Certainly if your bed partner is French and you're not, you can learn a thing or two. You can probably learn another language even if they're Hungarian and you're not. The language of love knows no borders.

Mr. Spicer was not a professional comedian. The obit tells us he was, "an irreverent official who urged his nation to reconcile its English and French heritage."

Certainly not an easy task when the Quebecers were blowing up mail boxes, spray painting over STOP signs and writing ARRÊT on them, and otherwise lobbying strenuously for not being part of the rest of Canada that was predominately English speaking.

But Mr. Spicer was both an academic and a bureaucrat, having advanced degrees in modern languages and literature (French and Spanish), earning a doctorate in 1962 from the University of Toronto. He was twice appointed to government posts on language by two different prime ministers.

In 1970 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau made him Canada's first Commissioner of official languages, charging him with enforcing the Official Languages Act which gave both English and French official status. 

In 1990 after the collapse of a constitutional compromise that would have declared Quebec a "distinct society," Prime Minister Brian Mulroney tapped Mr. Spicer to lead the Citizens Forum on Canada's Future.

Mr. Spicer was also a founding director of the Institute for Media. Peace and Security at the University for Peace in Costa Rica, serving in that capacity from 2000 to 2007. He was a busy guy.

Mr. Spicer was a Protestant born in Toronto, raised by anti-Catholic, anti-French parents, but not a stance he followed.

He says he was besotted by the French when in 10th grade he was a pen pal with a French girl who sent him a photograph of herself. (No Internet, then.) He claims to have become a confirmed Francophile ever since then. And why not? Their wines are pretty good, and he might have liked duck, frog legs and snails.

In short, this guy was a man for all seasons and all Canadians. When he was finally confined to an Ottawa hospital bed shortly before he passed on, his son reminded him of his role in getting the country to accept both languages. His son told him his medical chart in the hospital was in French and English.

In a hospital bed, he already knew French.

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Mohamed al-Fayed

There is a six column, half-page NYT obit for Mohamed al-Fayed 94, Tycoon Whose Son Died With Diana, in Saturday's edition.

Such is life. All the way to your own demise you are forever linked with your son Dodi being in the same car with former Princess Diana when Dodi's inebriated chauffeur lost control of the vehicle as they were being chased by paparazzi in cars and on motor bikes, causing the chauffeur to lose control of the vehicle and smash into an unforgiving, concrete column, killing all three occupants in the summer of 1997.

Princess Diana had recently been divorced from then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, when she was starting to be squired around by Dodi, Mohamed al-Fayed's playboy son. Love is in the air, and they're in the back seat of limo being driven by Dodi's chauffeur just after they had a meal at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, owned at the time by Dodi's dad.

Dodi's father was a multi-billionaire, but only pegged by Forbes this year at two times over $1 billion, a $2 billion ranking that put him in a pedestrian 1,516th place of the richest people in the world. 

Mohamad al-Fayed was born in Egypt and despite having vast holdings in the U.K. that included Harrod's department store, and a Premier League football club Fulham, he could never really be accepted by the upper crust, tight-lipped Brits. As hard as he tried, they would never grant him citizenship and a  British passport.

He really hardly needed one, because he had homes everywhere, in London, Geneva, Paris, New York, St Tropez and other locations. No doubt, that kind of ownership offers a lot of bathrooms to put your toothbrushes in.

Mr. McFadden tells us Mohamed started out selling sewing machines and later joined his two brothers in a shipping business. Mohamed's first wife was Samira, the sister of Adnan Khashoggi, the flamboyant Saudi businessman and arms dealer. Dodi was the only child from the union with his first wife.

Perhaps it was the in-law relationship with a man as notorious as Khashoggi that kept the imperious Brits at arms-length from Mohamad, but the relationship certainly didn't seem to hurt Mohamed. 

Mr McFadden tells us the Fayed shipping business flourished and profited handsomely from an oil boom in the Persian Gulf and ferrying construction material to Dubai. 

Owning a British crown jewel like Harrod's and a soccer club could not buy Mohamed respect. He was a bit like Aristotle Onassis who married a former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, but who could never be seen by the Kennedy family as something other than an oily Greek.

Here, the Egyptian's son squires a royal princess around but sees it do nothing for the father's acceptance by the elite Brits. An Egyptian is just as oily as a Greek.

Somewhat like the Germans who sport "von" in front of their surname to connote aristocracy, Mohamed added the prefix "al" to Fayed to denote aristocratic origins, of which there really were none.

Aside from the snub, McFadden tells us al-Fayed by all accounts prospered, "paid millions in taxes, employed thousands of people and through his enterprises contributed mightily to the economy."

There is something to be said for living until you're 94. Despite the efforts of the legendary New York Times obituary writer, Robert McFadden, and what I'm sure are the vast resources of the New York Times, the best they can come up with about Mohamed al-Fayed's early years is: "Details about his early life are murky." 

Live an extremely long life, and there is no one around who can tell anyone what you were like as a kid and a young lad.

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A Met Game

We went to a Met game on Saturday. More specifically, a Saturday night Met game. My wife was given four tickets to decent seats from work and found myself, my two son-in-laws and my Saratoga buddy willing and anxious to go to the game. One daughter attached to one of the sons-in-law is pregnant and due next month and understandably bowed out.

Susan is the big Met fan. She and Greg were going to hire Mr. Met to appear at their wedding but there was a day game on that date, and the destination  of Montauk was outside his radius for appearances anyway. Greg took lots of video of Mr. Met and sent them to Susan while we were at the game. Susan is disdainful of Mrs. Met and thinks she's not good enough for him. My feelings toward the pair are very much neutral.

At the game you're very much aware that you're not seeing commercials for cell phones, trucks, or beer. You do however see ads for "moderna" repeated  to infinity on the auxiliary scoreboards that line the rims of the seating levels. I forgot what Moderna was. I had to ask my son-in-law. I thought it was the beer that has knocked Budweiser off its perch.

But those are just like ads in the subway. They don't count. The real action is BLASTING from the Jumbotron scoreboard.  

The resolution is fantastic on this giant of all TV screens. The required national anthem is accompanied by colorful fireworks shooting out of the scoreboard when they lyrics reach "rockets red glare." It's startling. You almost think you're seeing the evening news from the Ukraine.

Then there's the teams' lineups displayed. Helpful, but followed with a new metric set of numbers, OPS, I guess. No one it seems brags about a batting average anymore, and as for the Mets that's just as good since no one other than a recently called up rookie from Syracuse, second baseman Ronny Mauricio, has an average over .300.

The Jumbotron NEVER stops. It is the most kinetic of all things in the ball park, and the nosiest. Shots of the crowd mugging for the camera when they realize they've been highlighted on the big screen. It's nice to see people of all stripes at the game, but he best one was the young woman, who on realizing she was caught on camera, opened her shirt and proudly displayed a top that said: BASEBALLBRA. I wonder how many games she's worn that top to and never been on camera. She made the big time this time. It had the homemade look. She should market it.

Then there's the constant entertainment between innings. You have young ladies and gents interviewing fans with trivia questions, awarding  some swag it seems even if they bomb the answers. Then there are the young boys who are timed to try and steal a base on the third base foul line with a few seconds. They have to run toward the bag, pick it up, and run back in under whatever number of seconds.

Then there's the guy who is challenged to pull a truck, I'm sure in neutral, a certain number of feet with a heavy duty lanyard toward a goal line in a certain amount of time. I'm not sure what the prize is if he succeeds, but I don't think he's playing for the truck, but rather something cheesy from the souvenir stand.

There's the old standby of a baseball under one of three swirling Met hats: the shell game. There's 8th inning karaoke with some ditty the fans have selected from one of three artists and songs to play and sing along to. I think the choices were something from Taylor Swift, the Killers and Miley Cyrus. The Killers won, and the lyrics to something that made absolutely no sense to me appeared and were sung along to by an amped up crowd.

The guy in front of rightly complained that the choice of a Jimmy Buffet number should have been an option, since Jimmy just passed away. The Met organization missed an opportunity to pay homage.

There's the walkup music for the batters, and there is Harry Belafonte sometimes singing "Day O." Just "Day O," no more to it. That's a ballpark staple. I would like to challenge anyone under 70 if they know that's the opening lyrics to 'The Banana Boat' song and was sung by the stevedores who were unloading bananas in the tropics at night, to avoid the sweltering daytime heat. "Day O" is their plea for sunlight and the end of the shift. "...Daylight come and I won to go home..." Now you know. Belafonte made the song famous in the '50s, I believe.

With all this going on, they actually do manage to play a game. And despite the Mets losing 8-7, it was a great game to watch. The Met runs were almost entirely achieved through home runs. The Mariners blasted a few as well. There's a countdown clock to tell you how long it will be before the scoreboard entertainment will end and the game will resume. At home you aren't aware of all the sideshow stuff that goes on while the game is being played.

The Mets went through 5 relief pitchers, but could never get ahead in the game, evening it up twice. The game took 3:10 minutes to play in front of 31,000 fans, perhaps drawn by the corduroy METS hat give away that we weren't aware of until we entered, and perhaps by the Saturday night schedule. Only in New York can you have two big league events playing simultaneously within a stones throw of one another, with the tennis U.S. Open being played right next door in the Billie Jean King Tennis Center.

It's a testament to the appeal of baseball that 31,000 fans will show up to watch a team that has fallen far below the pre-season predictions of playoffs and World Series. The Mets are struggling to stay out of last place in a 5! team division. But they can still be entertaining. Meet the Mets.

With a 7:10 start, and a three-hour plus game, heading for the exits didn't happen until after 10:00, pretty much after I would have headed upstairs to read and sleep.

But being at the game, makes you watch the game. And in the bottom of the 9th inning with Mets behind by a run, the DH Daniel Vogelbach smacks a line drive into the gap and sees it roll toward the wall. 

Now anyone who has tuned into a Mets game knows the size of Vogelbach, and one look at a sturdy bouncer's build tells you he can't run fast. But, when you're a DH and you hit something that's not a homer, you got to hustle the bases. Within reason.

Seeing the ball roll to the wall Daniel thinks double. Uh-oh. Please tell us you're not headed to second. He rounds first with no intention of stopping to draw the throw. There are little clouds of dirt puffing in his wake as the locomotive heads to second, with all intention of being safe. But you know what's going to happen, and it isn't going to be pretty.

And it isn't.  A relay throw from the outfield nails Daniel sliding head first into second that even from the seats without a closeup replay, you know he's out. And he is. If only the second baseman had dropped the ball, Not to be.

Still, all agree the game is highly entertaining, despite the disappoint of no walk-off 9th inning. On leaving the game I've got a splitting headache. At 74 I can't boogey in my seat, can't stand up for key pitches, can't sing along to songs I don't know, and would rather just watch the game. How old fashioned of me.

But as I said, being there makes you watch the game. If I was tuning in at home I would have been on Midsomer Murders when the Mets fell behind, looking like sure losers.

I was knackered, but pleased. If the seats are free again next year, I'll surely go.

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