Eggs

I didn’t actually do it, but I’ll bet I could have.

Yesterday in Los Angeles the temperature was a record-setting 113 degrees, and I was sorely tempted to break and fry an egg on the sidewalk out in front of the house. But I didn’t. The egg that was saved from indignity appears below.

With a couple of dozen eggs in the refrigerator, being less one probably would not have mattered. Then too, it was a rather slow day; on the news we were being advised to keep vigorous outdoor exercise to a minimum, so I readily complied. But more than that, I was a little confused as to how to actually do it . I seem to recall making an attempt any number of years ago with virtually no success, doubtless as a kid in the northeast where three-digit temperatures did not happen.

Yesterday it must have been hot enough, but a porous cement sidewalk didn’t  seem like a viable cooking surface. I could just see the bottom portion of the egg seeping into a thousand nooks and crannies, and then defying my efforts to pry it out and onto a plate. Plus, there would have been the choices of sunnyside up, over easy or over well. But I suppose the main concern was what neighbors peering out their windows might have thought about the guy across the street with a spatula in one hand and a plate in the other dicking away at the sidewalk. A thin column of smoke would have been altogether too much, with phone calls to follow.

If, on the other hand, I had decided to go ahead with the nutso project, you can be sure I would not, under any circumstances, taken a bite of the results. Oh no. Add that to the vision that might have been unfolding to the neighborhood.

So I thought better of it all and saved one egg. Notwithstanding, it turns out that I may have inadvertently resolved one of life’s grand mysteries: The egg was there in the first place, definitely followed by me — the chicken — in declining to move to the sidewalk, let alone cross to the other side of the road.

Make that two issues resolved.

Grand slams

I’m hardly the first person to note the commonalities of baseball and politics, but as the current seasons of both grind to a close and resolutions — oh, winners and losers, dashed hopes, that sort of thing — come into view, you can find yourself feeling similar emotions. Strongest among them: For God’s sake, get it over with!

Admittedly, I’m an analysis junkie. If you’ve got an opinion, I’m ready to hear it. Likewise, I follow at least a dozen newspaper columnists and an equal number of television pundits who suggest their considerations of why Pitcher A hung a curveball in the middle of the plate for a guy who can — and did — deposit same in stands 450 feet away, or why Politician B whispered to a colleague that his great uncle was a commie sympathizer, only to be caught doing so on a cellphone camera. It’s not that I’m so interested in the actual act, it’s what people think of the act. I like to hear what they have to say.

And I’m not alone in this. If you follow, say, Paul Krugman in the New York Times, you know that his column is always the subject of comment by as many as 150 readers who email their reactions, which run from the thoughtful to decidedly moronic. To a degree, it’s akin to a town hall meeting where the attendees get — and use — a chance to sound off.

My addiction — you might say– to this comes from a grandfather who thought reader commentary in the form of letters to the editor was the primary reason for opening up a newspaper. At least that was his counsel to his son and grandsons.

Now were you there for the games or political events, you’d probably make up your own mind regarding perceived actions and impact. Years ago I was at a Yankees game in New York, and the loud discussion between innings in, yep, the men’s room, was whether or not a pitch that was missed by the catcher was a wild pitch or a “passed bawl.” The writer for the game in the next day’s Times had his own view and analysis.

And so it goes for candidates and ball players alike, with, I swear, hotter feelings in sporting venues, remembering that “fan” is short for fanatic. You rarely hear about shoving matches outside the polling booth, but there have been times following a close game between rivals where guys have been shot. And that’s why the tone of Tea Party gatherings has been so striking. The emotional content is often close to that of stadium parking lots (where people are wielding cars, a “deadly weapon”).

So the fan in either case is well-advised to keep in mind that’s all a game. In the political game, whoever gains the upper hand in government moves slowly, with change an incremental thing; i.e., wins one year are typically countered the next by a new cast of characters. In sports, there are always new seasons and fans who simply forget (Quick: Who won the 2008 World Series?).

The fun, it turns out, is in the story. Last year’s ogre who left office with his tail between his legs is now playing the senior statesman at the world disaster of your choice, and the quarterback who threw what might have been the game-winning pass into the hands of the opposition has moved on to another team with new hopes and acceptance. What remains is what people have to say about it all, via commentator or around the water cooler. What you get is a new telling of events, and this time, always with a laugh.

Twits

Hot stuff: I read recently that singer John Mayer has dropped his Twitter account, and so far, more than 1400 people have registered their opinions…via Twitter, of course. So does anyone care — outside of the 1400?

Well, we can be relatively comfortable that little sleep will be lost and that Mr. Mayer’s career will continue onward. But what is striking is the impact of a communications tool that was introduced less than five years ago. According to Mayer’s own reckoning, more than three million fans monitored his every move, provided, doubtless in vivid detail, by one Tweet after another. Rockin’ Robin, indeed!

Granted, the limits of posts on Twitter do cater to short attention spans, but who would have the time, let alone the inclination, to keep tabs on a man’s less pertinent functions day after day, month after month? Recall the three million. To be sure, brevity can be a virtue, and the best writers you’ve ever read have understood this, but to be a purveyor of the sound-bite would seem to me to exhibit almost no imagination or depth. Like so many, I lament the slow fade of newspapers with stories that  provide detail and color that can require two, three, and even four jump-pages. Twitter, by contrast, has virtually given up on substantive exchanges of views, and encourages only lower-case phrases, and wildly punctuated at that. Can simple hand signals and grunting be far behind?

Well, nuts. Call this my major bitch about what passes for communication in our new age that purports to prize connectivity even while it degrades it. You can’t love and admire a well-constructed sentence and not be appalled. It’s true that every generation or so feels compelled to fashion a few clichés — for mine it was expressions like “man,” “cool” and it’s not really counterpart, “hot” — but now we’re seeing a retreat from any useful language at all. And this is considered modern, current.

So does it matter? As the exchange of ideas and feelings and notions is systematically dumbed down, is the overall quality of life reduced? Is our world made less? There are those who would argue that as long as we keep talking to each other we progress, never mind the sophistication, never mind the craft.

As a practical matter, wrong.

I’ve already railed about the cluttered language of kids and new adults and the reliance on inflection, but this is somehow worse. Unless the writer is good, really good, there is almost no room for detail or substance. What you’re stuck with is attitude and point of view, long on opinion while short on any reason for it. Basically, one side of a shouting match. It’s a lot like a guy roaring up beside you in his car, rolling down the window, and yelling, “I jumped your sister last night and she was lousy…and so was her cousin…your left front is going flat!” And then he lights out in a cloud of dust, while you try to retrieve your jaw.

Never mind that “two,” “too,” and “to” are all represented by the number 2, and that the variations of “you” have been limited to the letter “u,” the entire usable lexicon on Twitter has been reduced to perhaps a couple of hundred words, run over and over and over without the slightest nod to phonetics.

It’s amazing, when you think about it — and obviously I have. In the time I’ve taken to bang out this note, tens of thousands of messages have been penned and sent in Twit-glish to eager recipients, who have doubtless responded in kind. What will be lacking, of course, what probably has been lacking, is real precision, an essential in effective communication.

Man. Kids, right? And in 2 many cases, like, u know, adults talking like kids.

Foamers

Engine No. 3751 at Fullerton, Calif. station

Now isn’t that gorgeous? You’re looking at Engine No. 3751 (right there on the top, Ace), a working 4-8-4 type that makes its home in Vernon, California, and is loved and supported by the San Bernardino Railroad Historical Society.

As part of what made our summer of 2010 special, we were standing trackside when 3751 pulled into Fullerton, CA station on its way to San Diego on a commercial run.

Some guys have all the luck.

Too true. Amtrak fired up this beauty and pulled several hundred paying passengers from Los Angeles Union Station down to SD, and then returned those lucky people to LA three days later.

Number 3751 has been at this since its construction in 1927, though less now than in its first decades when it pulled freights and passenger trains up and down the state. The 4-8-4 designation means four sets of wheels — before and after — eight sets of drive wheels. By reputation, they could power the huge engine to speeds approaching 120 mph. Imagine waiting a crossing gate when this bad boy roared by.

There were probably 400 to 500 foamers (“foamers” is a name given to guys like me who go a little nuts in the presence of working steam engines) who greeted 3751 when she rolled up to the station, and shed a tear 20 minutes later when she passed out of sight to the south.

Yeah, right. If Kris and I had been on our game, we’d have ponied up for tickets about three months earlier so we could have climbed on board.

E-matching – why it works…well, seemingly

There was a time when I would not have admitted this on a Friday night in confession, but yes, I have done the E-matching thing, which I alluded to several months ago. In fact, I’ve been on and off line for a number of years. And like hundreds of thousands of horny people out there, I can say that it really does work, certainly in my case, and I’m confident that Kris would say the same — given that we met courtesy of a computer screen.

This kind of service — and I guess that’s the right word — has been around since the late 1990s and until most recent times you kept pretty quiet about personal involvement. Somehow, acknowledgement — in your own mind — branded you as desperate and a failure through traditional means of connecting with the opposite gender. Bars, clubs, mixers and even referrals simply weren’t working. So you were left to announcing your availability out there in the ether, while telling friends that the “new girl” was introduced through other friends.  

My own “coming out” — and we’re talking about e-matching here — was finally prompted by a long-time colleague who noted that I always seemed to be using this “introduced by a friend” ploy and why was that? Arrgghhh! I fessed up. And, of course, she said, “Oh, I do that a lot, too.” Free at last. The flood gates opened. I was among jillions.

Why does it work? To a degree, the Law of Infinite Monkeys applies, that being if an infinite number of monkeys went to work on an infinite number of typewriters (you can see that this has been around for a while), they could eventually re-create all of the world’s great literature. Thus, given the tens of thousands of participants in Match.com or E-harmony and others, it’s essential to believe that Miss or Mr. Right is out there, and connection, if not consummation, lies in wait. Just keep, well, playing. Patience is a requirement, along with some ruthlessness. And above all, ya gotta have hope and a sense of humor. Plus, the resolve, the willingness to kiss any number of frogs is a big help.

Disappointment is part of the game, but to a large part, at least for me, it can be fun. Still, I quickly learned that photographs are almost always misleading and that people have either too much imagination or not nearly enough. Honesty, unhappily, is a scarce commodity.

I think one of the major problems is that people have a nearly inherent inability to see themselves in their best light and tend to fall prey to the cliché. A fondness for “candle-light dinners,” “walks along the beach,” and a guy who is “financially secure and has a great sense of humor” would seem to be the aspiration of half the women in the world. (I can’t tell you what guys prefer because I wasn’t looking there, but women have told me that their interests seem to be more self-directed, akin to “look at me.”) In sharp contrast, Kris expressed interest for a man who could do a two-step and listed one of her five essential items in life as a curling iron. We have a winner!

What makes it work — when it does — is the ease of contact. There’s just a low monthly fee, you don’t have to take a shower beforehand, and at the outset you’re the equal of George Clooney, plus it’s nearly instant. Go on line, look at pictures, read profiles and bang out e-mails.

Am I an advocate? Sure. Now. After all, look how it turned out for me. Couldn’t be more pleased. For the rest of mankind it makes sense as a part of this staying connected business. The difference, of course, is that meeting people this way goes a major extra step, in that you actually hope to experience them in real life.

Sure beats running up a bar bill.

Nasty water

Lewis Black does a very convincing routine on the farce of bottled water. Funny stuff, but I have to admit I’ve become an addict. I know: Who ever thought we’d actually pay cash-money to substitute drinking water out of a plastic bottle when it’s always been waiting right there at the tap? Non-addicts think the whole concept is ridiculous in the extreme. And more, at a recent taste test at the L. A. County Fair, good old city water was consumer-judged to be the best.

I was not, however, one of the contestants.

You know how it goes. People now even go so far as to insist on particular brands of bottled water, still with never a thought of going to the kitchen sink, and it’s hard to figure out how it all got started, any more than countless other crazes. Who was the first guy to try out a hula hoop? Who thought you could make a hamburger out of produce? And here I am, a one-time country kid who used to drink directly from a faucet, even one that emerged from the back porch. For me it was altogether natural, and in a sense, completely social. You play sandlot football in an adjoining property and it was easy to grab a quick slug of water from the handiest source, which was that outside tap. No problem.

Tell you what that community water was like. In the late spring, the village supply came from a reservoir, which was fed by local streams, which in turn was fed by rivulets that seeped from freshly fertilized pasture-land. That meant that the water — which we drank from said faucet — carried a light brown tinge. We drank it and we liked it. Oh mama! I cannot recall ever being cautioned to move over to bottled water (that was for emergency use only). Shoot, we even bathed in the stuff; doubtless we decided it (the water) would clear by mid-summer.

(Several months ago, my doctor talked about developing nasty bacterial stomach disorders from well water that one might contract from a misspent youth. To date, I haven’t noticed anything.)

Recalling that childhood experience, that one-time means of hydration, with the onset of the recent fad, I jumped onto the bandwagon (you might simplify that to just “wagon”). So now just think about it: You’re in a not-so-classy restaurant and you get the tab. One of the items is a glass of water with a charge of $2.85. You’d go nuts and demand to see the manager, post-haste. On the other hand, you request a bottle of water and you grudgingly accept an $8.00 fee. Ah, but it’s a name brand, one that you recognize. Never mind that the restauranteur could have just as easily filled said bottle with city water. It’s that assumption of value, of public conditioning. You drink it and you pay for it.

The times we live in. And there’s so much more, as you know.

With bottled water, I’m a recent convert, not to say sucker. A bottle of Fiji goes right on the bedstand.

So to finally prove the point, here’s what Kris did…She filled up three glasses, two from tap water from the kitchen sink, and one from a new Fiji bottle — without informing me of the scheme — and then asked me to do a taste test. You will not be surprised to learn that I considered the tap water the best.

But like a true addict, I continue to imbibe the bottled stuff. There’s really no hope.

Crackers

Left to my own preferences, I can’t imagine how I would ever have broken through the borders of North Carolina. More than once, NC and any number of states that claimed to be a part of the Confederacy have threatened to secede from the Union, and I have been more than  willing to offer whatever aid I could provide to help them do it. I’ve never been aware of any value that group has added to states above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Things, however, become a lot different when it becomes personal, when family is involved. There is a major change in perspective.

Accordingly, I took a quick trip to the area last weekend to lend a small amount of support to my dad, who continues to work the necessary evils of age, which recalls the caution – I believe, of Bette Davis — “Growing old is not for sissies.” In this case, that support took me to North Carolina on the occasion of yet another session in a hospital for a man who has already gone past 96. For those not aware, Dad shipped off to North Carolina about a year and a half ago and moved into an assisted care facility, which he thinks is marvelous. My brothers and I tend to agree.

Then again, it is North Carolina, home to mosquitoes the size of sparrows. In particular, we’re thinking about the town of Lumberton, which does not, I’m told, make reference to a town that was once awash in trees, long since prey to various saws and axes. It has to do, it turns out, to the name of the river that flows through it, the Lumber, which derives from the name of an Indian tribe that still inhabits the area.

Equally important if you’re movie buff, Lumberton was the scene from a film from a number of years ago entitled “Blue Velvet,” which starred Dennis Hopper in one of the most lethal roles I’ve ever  seen. But there it was in the opening scene, a pastoral shot from the Lumber River that gave no indication of the mayhem to follow.

Basically, Lumberton and environs are not entirely my style, given that I’ve lived in massive Los Angeles for more than four decades. There’s really something to be said for being able to get a quart of milk in the middle of the night, as well as access to really good restaurants less than a dozen blocks from the front door. (Different story, of course, if you’re obliged to share the freeways five days a week with tens of thousands of other cars that are driven by homicidal maniacs, so you do have to find means of avoiding that.)

Still, my older brother lives in Lumberton, and that’s a good thing, plus my kid brother is a couple of hours down the road in Charlotte, and that also is a positive, both providing family which Dad did not have in the later years back in California.

And there really is more to redeem a town of maybe 20,000.

Yes, fine dining is expressed by dinner out at the local Cracker Barrel, a southern-based chain where the menu is starch and more  starch. But once you get back from the Interstate that severs the town, and drive down Chestnut Street in the middle of town, you begin to see what the locals treasure: lush trees and borderless properties that surround brick houses, most of which were probably built 60 and 70 years ago.

And, unless I missed it, stress is nearly non-existent, with the whining of truck tires on the Interstate the sole reminder of an outside world.

More than that, it seems to be just what the doctors ordered for a man moving toward a full century on the planet.

Them

I told friends that I would not get into political comment with this humble site, arguing, logically, that the last thing we need is yet another raucous voice bitching about the state of the nation, the people charged with running things or your view versus mine. See, so often it turns out that you can get it wrong, or in the middle of the night you have an epiphany and you leap out of bed screaming, “I said that? I must have been nuts!” And you spend the next morning hoping no one calls.

To date, that’s been a good choice, and it will remain the way of things as we move along.

Still, I must register — at the very least — my dismay at the tenor of this year’s public discourse as it surrounds the long, hard shout toward the November elections.

To the point, when in our lifetimes have we ever seen such bitterness and flat-out hatred? The only thing missing as the right attacks the left are overt threats of bodily harm; for that matter, the Secret Service reports that threats on the life of this president have already been two to three times those against his predecessors. When have we ever seen public meetings — such as the ones that were offered to explain the national health plan — deliberately saturated with obnoxious people who were coached in methods to disrupt the proceedings so that interested attendees could not even ask civil questions?

The word “nasty” is altogether too weak to apply.

It’s hard to know what to make of it, but here’s a thought that I’ve had. You look down through American history and you find that social change — let’s float the word  “improvement” — has typically been a wrenching experience.

Recall the travesty of the Red scare that we lived through in the 1950s. Recall the civil rights movement that unleashed violent resentment in the south that took us all be surprise (I hope). Witness the ongoing gay rights battles, with no real end in sight. It’s always been one step forward, two steps back, with a constant undercurrent of fear. Let’s simply say no and there will be no cost.

Crazy. The status quo. Forever the status quo. And that’s what “they” seem to want. Hence, they say they want to take back America.

“Take back America.” To what? To and for whom? What would it look like? Do we get huge Buicks with fins and roller-skating car hops? I’d pay cold, hard cash if one of those Tea Baggers would simply have the courage to forego the safe political slogans and share the vision that he has in complete and colorful terms. Just imagine seeing women in aprons again.

And the irony is that they’ll never get it, so long as they insist on being allowed to venture out of the den. One step onto a city street and for better or worse, the 21st century, with its plethora of toys and irresistible culture will smack them in the face. There’s an enormous current, a flow that’s unstoppable, no matter one’s longing for 1957, with everyone in their proper place.

My concern is whether or not “they” are a minority or a majority. How likely is it that we could turn the pages backward?