Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Thievery Corporation is performing tonight in Seattle.  Mrs. Perils and I have been enjoying their music for a couple of years, and she mentioned last night that they were in town.  We discussed going, but she had a bad night’s sleep last night and was dragging her ass around the kitchen like it was an Airstream about 6, so I figured there was no way. 

She just came into the den and switched on KEXP’s Wo’Pop show, a world music show that lights up our Tuesday nights, and suddenly remembered about the Thievery Corporation show and said, “we should go!”  So, we’re outta here, on a school night yet!  Film at 11 (or 12, or 1).

If you’d been in a coma for ten years and awoke last night to the broadcast of the Mariners-Yankees game, the call in the fourth inning would have had a familiar ring:

• Tino Martinez belts a tremendous shot over the right field wall, driving in Alex Rodriguez from second for a two-run homer and giving Randy Johnson a 3 - 1 lead.

Unreality, and perhaps the vegetative state, would soon set in when our patient deduced that the aforementioned players were wearing pinstripes instead of Mariner…whatever they wear.  Should he remain conscious, he’d learn how the Mariners squeezed the city and state for a lavish new stadium, then unloaded all of their high-priced talent in a carefully crafted descent to mediocrity.  (Lou Piniella almost screwed it up, but they ran him off, too).

Meanwhile, the SuperSonics got blown out of their first playoff game with the Spurs, and lost two of their starters to severe ankle sprains.  That makes it all the more likely that they’ll lose the second game at San Antonio tonight.  As Art Thiel in the Seattle PI said, they’ll have to work hard simply to “ prevent the Spurs from the biggest 2-0 lead since Dolly Parton over Olive Oyl”.  I don’t really care that much about the Sonic, but I had to find a way to use that quote.

This is a test post, more than anything.  My laptop’s hard drive went south over the weekend - more on that in a minute.  I just wanna see if I can post.  I’ve had the box checked in Radio where I want nightly backups upstreamed to the server, and it appears that everything has been restored from the server after some finagling.

I returned to Seattle last night from an (obviously) uninspiring week in Milwaukee. Today, Saturday, we just chilled, and finally got out for our favorite walk down to Gasworks Park and over to Fremont.

At Gasworks, we happened onto a whacked out tribe of croquet players assaying a truly evil layout that must have covered about an acre and involved playing up a pretty steep hill to the final wicket.

Kathy at Freshman 44 has been waiting patiently for me to respond to her meme invitations, most recently the Huffington one which asks us to discuss five people, dead or alive, whose blogs we would have read.  I could respond that I’m quite happy, thank you, with the blogs I read already, and that’s mostly true.  My responses below are not intended to portray myself as finding the rest of you wanting.  One possible faux pas in listing someone here is that the person has actually published extensive memoirs, and I’m too ignorant and/or lazy to find them.  Also, cleaving to the theory of one of my book club mates that authors cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their work, I’m not gonna list any.  They’re writers, dammit, and if a writer won’t write, what’re you going to do?

Okay, here goes:

• Rosemary Woods, Richard Nixon’s personal secretary, who died a month or two ago.  Who can forget (aw, shit, who actually remembers?) her demonstration, impersonating a rubber-jointed Russian gymnast, of just how she might have accidentally depressed the “erase” button with her foot while transcribing the infamous White House Tapes, thus causing the 19-minute gap?  Considering what was on the tapes, just think of all the stuff we didn’t hear.
  

  

  
  
• Roger Maris - during the tortuous 1961 season as he and Mickey Mantle chased Ruth’s 61-homer record.  He was vilified (as Hank Aaron later would be) for presuming to chase the Babe’s laurels, hated the publicity and told of having clumps of his hair fall out as the season burgeoned.  After that season, he continued to play good baseball but never approached the glory of that year.  He died of cancer at age 51.


• Chief Seattle - who as a child in 1792 saw the first Englishmen (the Vancouver expedition) anchor in Puget Sound and, as an adult, guided his people’s interactions with the founders of the city of Seattle.  It would be fascinating to know what life was like before white settlers came to this region I love, and the native’s perspective on the transition.


• My Dad - a lot of family lore died with him last fall, despite both his stated intention at one point of getting his grandmother to tell stories to a tape recorder, and my own urge to get him to do the same.  He was an only child, so he was the end point of several possible lines of inquiry.


• Warren Buffett for obvious reasons.  However, I believe I’ve read that Buffett is even a little shaky using email, so getting him flowing mellifluously with Radio Userland might take some doing.